Do I look sexy?

So, last week I went to the cinema no less than three times. As until recently, I could go whole years without seeing a film that didn’t contain furry creatures wearing dungarees in primary colours, this felt like Bacchanalian indulgence, albeit one containing pots of overpriced Ben and Jerry’s rather than rivers of wine and sexual shenanigans.

So of course I have to share.

Film one: Or The Film I Had Already Seen (in fact the film that half the entire western world’s female population has already seen), namely Bridesmaids. There’s not much to say about this film that hasn’t already been said (it’s got women in the lead roles! And it’s STILL FUNNY) but I will just add that this time I took my husband and he wept with laughter and not all of it was that slightly uncomfortable kind that men do when they suspect large groups of women might be laughing at them.

And – being less convulsed by appalled laughter this time round – I realised something. The early scene in the cafe is the first film I have ever seen which accurately portrays the way women I know talk to each other. Women are not allowed to be mates in films; they are rivals, bitches or terribly earnest about each other in an oestrogen-tinted sort of way. Yes, the TV series (NOT the film) of SATC scratched at the surface of how we actually talk (although there you felt the friendship was a plot device to best display the four female “types”). But Bridesmaids shows the complexity of female friendship; the fact that you can love your girlfriend, while being slightly envious of her, frustrated by her, and still want to talk to her while wearing chocolate on your teeth and asking goofily: “Am I sexy?”. Despite its (now legendary) grossout scenes, that alone makes other so called “chickflicks” (Bridezilla, anyone?) seem like the really obscene ones. Plus any film that manages to kill my Don Draper crush stone dead has got to be impressive.

No, I am not remotely attractive

I have to admit to a teeny personal interest in the second one: One Day. I used to share a publisher with its author, David Nicholls, and know him a little bit. We did the world’s worst promotional book tour together; it involved him, me, Louise Wener from Sleeper, lots of booksellers and several of the UK’s most unpleasant bowling alleys. I think we were 78% onion ring and 22% barely contained mortification by the time we finished.  He really is a Very Lovely Person. And, like everyone else, I really did like his book. But the film has had mixed reviews, and I knew that he knew I was in a group of friends going to see it, and the combination of those two things made me a bit nervous.

I needn’t have worried. Yes, Anne Hathaway’s accent meanders around from Coronation Street to It Shouldn’t Happen To A Vet, crash landing occasionally in Chelsea Harbour. Yes, the artificial construct of the book limits the narrative (when it was suddenly revealed, halfway through, that Dex and Emma had actually slept together I felt briefly cheated. It was like discovering your friends had had a one night stand behind your back). But, ultimately, I loved it. I was transported by it, I believed in both the leads, and I cried miserable snotty tears. Several times.

And the biggest revelation was Anne Hathaway. The word that kept springing into my mind as I watched was ‘lovely’. She had a vulnerability, a non-saccharine sweetness that reminded me of Hepburn. And despite not having liked her much in anything else I’ve seen her in (she was actually mooted for the part of Jennifer by a film company wanting to option Last Letter From Your Lover, and I went with another company partly for that reason. Good judgment, huh?), I loved her in this. Go see it, if you fancy a properly romantic film. And David? Good job, mate. I suspect you are safe from onion rings for ever after.

Do not try this at home

The third film you are much less likely to have seen than the other two, and I have to declare a personal interest: my uncle Grant McKee was its executive producer. But it gives an insight into a world I hadn’t even known existed. Jig is a documentary set in the world of competitive Irish dancing: think Riverdance but with littler people and more sequins. It follows a number of children and young people competing at the ‘worlds’; the World Championships, from a comedically miserabalist group of Russian girls to a Sri Lankan boy from Holland, leaping like a stag across the Glasgow stage.

I don’t want to tell you too much, but if you liked documentaries like Spelling Bee you will love this. Should you watch it, be prepared to have your heart broken by little John and by Brogan, whose grace under pressure belies her ten years. And prepare for what one newspaper called “the most tense last ten minutes of a film you will ever see”. It’s on BBC2 this Thursday at 9pm, if you’re in the UK.

Better than a view of the No47 bus.

Last year we went to Mauritius. This will come to no surprise to anyone who has ever had more than a fleeting acquaintance with me, as for six months beforehand and a good six months after, I shoehorned the phrases “we are going to Mauritius!” and “We went to Mauritius!” into conversations about buying plimsoles, repairing guttering, tax rebates and marital infidelity.

If you have spent most of your child-rearing years holidaying in a mobile home campsite in northern France, complete with wafer-thin mattresses, sporadic rain, and nightly, bad-tempered games of gin rummy, as we have, then you will understand why on the first day of the Mauritius holiday I actually wept with joy and waded into the sea with all my clothes on.

And why, like turning left when you get onto an aeroplane, I believe going to Mauritius actually ruins you for every holiday you will ever have in your life ever. Unsurprisingly, this year nobody wanted to return to the mobile home, and having been left a small family bequest (not enough for Mauritius. Believe me, we checked), we decided to spend it on a short cruise round the Med. It’s hard to satisfy 3 children with a wide age difference, and people I know who know about such things told me that their children loved it. That the food was incredible. That we would never want to do anything else.

Well, to a point, Lord Copper. Child#1, a teenager, refused point blank to join the teenagers club. I couldn’t blame her. The mere thought of being 13 and walking into a disco full of other teenage strangers makes my toes curl with fear. And I, as she keeps reminding me, am OLD.

Child#2 didn’t want to join the “Explorers”. What he really wanted was to play Nintendo. And on being told no, he spent half his time by the free frozen yoghurt machine, and the other peering over the shoulders of random foreign Nintendo DS players whose parents were obviously NOT INHUMANE TORTURERS, returning only to regale us with their Pokemon battle strategies.

Child#3 is just too little. His eyes actually brim with tears at the mere words: “kids’ club”. He doesn’t hear well either, so the thought of leaving him in some cacophany of careening offspring didn’t appeal. Which took away around 70 per cent of our reasons for being there.

Perhaps we are just not cruise people. The ship was astonishing, yes; a vast floating city of spotless pools and Titanic-style opulence. Our cabin was generous. But we live in the middle of nowhere in silence disturbed only by birdsong and the sound of my neighbour’s distant shriek when our dog steals into her kitchen, and being surrounded by so many people made me feel permanently vaguely panicky.

Plus we are holiday slobs, and my husband was visibly horrified when he discovered we were expected to dress for dinner. On ‘formal’ night, it is fair to say we were the only family where the head of the table sported flip flops and a checked shirt (this pretty much qualifies as formal for him. On the other formal day he wore his battered Converse).

Towel Monkey. Do not try this at home.

And then there was the waiter thing. I could cope with having our own steward, not least because he was a genius at bath-towel origami. And anyone who means I don’t have to pick up all the towels gets my vote. But there were no fewer than FOUR waiters to our dinner table. It became embarrassing.
Me: “Can I order a coke please?”
Waiter 1: “I am the head waiter, Madame. You will have to speak to your table waiter.”
Me, to Waiter 2: “Um, can I have a coke please?”
Waiter 2, smiling: “I am your table waiter, Ma’am. You need your bar waiter.”
Waiter 3 arrives with wine. Me (thirstily): “Can I have a coke please?”
Waiter: “I am Jose your wine waiter Ma’am. You need to speak to your bar waiter.”
Me: clutches tablecloth, makes dying-of-thirst noises, lowers bucket into sea and drinks seawater. They were all lovely, but really, a system where you can’t Just Order A Fecking Drink is not my idea of luxury.

And that opulent menu was a little wasted. Because just as they do every holiday, the boys gradually reduced their menu options to two food groups: Pizza and Chips. Plus Ice-cream, which, the youngest assured me several times, is actually a vegetable. I kept checking his legs to see whether it was possible to get rickets after six days at sea.

Still, it was amazing in bits. Waking up at sea is pretty marvellous, (even if one day I threw open the curtains in my undies to find a harnessed marine engineer on the other side of the porthole. I’m not sure who shrieked louder). My morning run round the top deck was idyllic. Watching a movie on an open air screen at night on a moving ship is also a new high on my pleasures list. If we do it again, we might even get the time right so that we arrive more than 15 minutes before the finish.

And I spent every evening staring out at the sea and saying dreamily: “I know it’s stupid, but I keep hoping to see a dolphin”, and, occasionally, playing an infantile family game where someone shouts: “Look, a dolphin/whale/waterskiing donkey!” and cackles with glee if anyone unwittingly turns to look.
But, as if by magic, on the last evening, I looked out and suddenly there were two dolphins, their bodies a pair of perfectly silhouetted arcs, diving into the water alongside the ship.
“Dolphin!” I shrieked, when I could speak.
“Yeah. Right,” said my children, not looking up from their ice cream.

“So what did you think of that, kids?” I said, when we finally disembarked in Barcelona (my new favourite city. But that is another story).
“It was good,” said Child#2, thinking for a moment. And then he turned back to his Nintendo. “But it wasn’t Mauritius.”

Parking Wardens Operate In This Area

I had always assumed that by the time I hit 40 I’d have the whole Put Together thing sorted. I would have a wardrobe of quirky, well-cut pieces in coordinating colours; matchy, firmly elasticated lingerie and properly-maintained hair; I’d carry an air of carefree yet detached wisdom with my Birkin bag. I’d be the human equivalent of Lovely T’s Parisian apartment.

Instead I still buy clothes with the eye of a wartime grandmother (“that will last me a few seasons and afterwards it should make a nice set of curtains for the back room”) and the flippertigibbet eye for colour of a butterfly with Tourettes. I also tend to assume I am the same size 8-10 that I was fifteen years ago, and have to remind myself periodically that no, leather biker jeans are not necessarily a look if you have control pants poking out the top of your waistband.

I finally realised that I will never be that person on Day 3 in Paris. It wasn’t walking through the streets of St Germain en Laye, while accompanied by two 13 year olds who possess the kind of perfect coltish figures that make you simultaneously wince and glow with pride. It wasn’t glancing at the Parisian women, who, as my daughter noted, manage to look like individuals and wear clothes that actually fit. It was when the doorbell rang.

For here is one of the things I learned in Paris. If you are staying in an apartment based around a courtyard, and the concierge tells you where to park, and you park there but at an angle that may be – ooh – 3-5 degrees off the one he suggested, the woman downstairs WILL come up to harangue you in rapid-fire French. And she WILL be terrifyingly abrasive.

And you WILL be wearing a mad coral top without sleeves that works for the two days a year that you have a tan (ie not that day), a pair of lurid pyjama trousers from Anthropologie that manage to be both eccentric and slightly see-through, black knickers that will, therefore, be clearly visible through said pyjama trousers, and the evening pumps that you just bought and were trying on in the apartment. And no make up. And your reading glasses.

I hurried downstairs to move my car the said 3-5 degrees, while she stood there watching in purse-lipped Gallic fashion, pausing only to fold her arms and announce, of my car: “But it’s too big!” (yeah, Lady, like I can really do much about that right now). I should add here that with everyone who lived there having vanished to Le Sud for Summer, there were only four cars in the whole place.

Anyway, after – ooh – 67 attempts I finally managed to move my car to her satisfaction, and it was then, as I climbed out, that I caught her look. It was the look only a Parisian woman can give an Engish woman. A sweaty English woman in eccentric clothes wearing evening shoes and reading glasses. And in that split second her face changed. What does this woman know of parking? the look said. She is plainly an imbecile judging by that outfit. And her demeanour changed. She was nice to me. Not warm, exactly, but pleasant. She even wished us Bon Voyage (this may, admittedly, have been wishful thinking). It goes without saying that her outfit was, of course, immaculately cut and beautifully put together.

So now I’m home. This morning I am throwing out clothes. Clothes that would not pass Parisian muster. Perhaps even the orange and blue dress that I just got from the Mango sale that doesn’t quite fit and doesn’t go with anything I own and makes my husband ask if I’m about to take Sunday School classes. I may even make some nice curtains out of it.

I am going to be chic if it kills me.

I have, however, parked right across my drive, at a really, really annoying angle.