It’s bad to whinge, isn’t it? I mean am I a bad person? We are living up here on the hill, we can walk our dog in the meadow and we have the shops beside us where all the staff are lovely and kind and most people, (apart from one prick my husband encountered on Friday,) adhere to the social distancing rules and don’t ram their trollies up your arse while you’re checking the dates on your M&S rotisserie style chicken.
But it’s me, and I am prone to a good old moan so off I’ll go, and don’t go judging me. I’m just f**ked off at this stage. Earlier I reached over LSB for my coffee and he said ‘Ouch! You just after knee-ing me there!’
‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘I didn’t mean to.’ ‘Or DID you? said the Older Child, her eyebrow raised knowingly. ‘I think perhaps you did.’
Perceptive wee article she is too because it wasn’t long after he’d cleaned the living room and said, ‘Now I don’t want to blow my own trumpet (well you may as well as I won’t be blowing it for you) but haven’t I done a great job in there? You may want to take a look.’
What is it with men? Every flipping day I do the dishes and the laundry and hang it out and take it in and cook the dinners and I don’t go around saying: ‘Oh, wasn’t that a great load of whites I just flung on there at 30 degrees?’ or ‘Check out these pots? Aren’t they positively gleaming after that good scrub with my responsibly sourced bamboo scrubber?’
I’ve started now, so I might as well tell you what else is annoying me.
I’m pissed off with people making sourdough and posting it on social media because its’s just rude when they can’t have me round and pour me a glass of Valpolicella Ripasso and serve it up to me with a hunk of manchego and homemade chilli jam. (Yes Louise, I’m talking about you, so I am.)
I’m fed up with the Zoom and Whatsapp calls that falter when the connection’s bad and you spend half your time saying ‘Oh No! You first! No, you go on sure! You first! Didn’t quite catch that!’ Then you get chatting about something interesting and in wanders the dog. ‘Oh and here’s the dog! Isn’t she lovely!’ ‘Oooh yes!’ ‘And here’s my child! And there’s your child!’ ‘Hello, Hello!’ Cue inane waving, when frankly, lovely as your children and your friend’s children may be, you want to have a proper, no holds-barred chat that is MOST definitely not for the tender age of the under eights.
I’m also fed up meeting people in the street or over the wall and saying a million time to the kids ‘2 metres! 2 metres! Keep well back there!’ which makes any class of normal conversation impossible.
I’m narked, that instead of sitting across from my mates, all tarted up and having a grand catch up over coconut margaritas in La Taqueria, that we are waving at each other across the street, wearing jogging bottoms and clutching small plastic bags of recently excreted shit, still warm from dog’s large intestines.
I’m agitated because I naively thought, that through all of this that I might get my house in order and do a spot of decluttering, but no, sure there’s no charity shops or recycling centres open so we’re still wading through mounds of shite and sure, by way of getting a dog we just brought at whole lot more truck in.
There’s no end to dog paraphernalia, I’m finding. Rugs and coats and leads and toys and food and treats. If you land yourself with a greyhound, you should know that they are prone to a chill, so we had to get a wee coat for Tilly. We ordered her pyjamas too, much to the Small Child’s delight, but they haven’t arrived yet, much to everyone’s disappointment.
And I’m really quite distraught, that Normal People is over on BBC 3. It was so heartrendingly, beautifully shot and so true- there’s a scene with Connell in episode 10 and if he doesn’t get Oscar nominated it’ll be a crime against acting. I enjoyed the book but I didn’t LOVE it- I got frustrated with the characters, I kept thinking, just fecking GET TOGETHER and be done with it. But in the series the fragility of the pair of them was so much more apparent and convincing to me. One could see how easy it was to be misunderstood, vulnerable and insecure as a young adult, perhaps with a distorted perception of self. I worry that with all the media hype surrounding the sex scenes (and perhaps I’m underestimating teenagers here) that the point may be a bit lost on them- but to me it summed up so much of what it is to be young and confused; feeling lost and listless at university, especially as an arts student. Navigating new friendships and articulating what it was you wanted when you didn’t know yourself: that was hard, wasn’t it? (I feel, for the benefit of The Mothership here that I have to add that there was never anything in the way of bondage in my student romances, least she splutters out her tea and scalds herself.)
LSB said he was bereft when it was over, (‘Normal People’ that is, not his time at Queen’s after which ended he felt nowt but relief) and I feel the same- I haven’t seen anything that has affected me quite so much in a while. There was just such incredible tenderness in it, and at the moment, when everything is so emotionally charged-it had me in bits.
So there you are- just something else to be raging about. And it’s Sunday night, so another week of home-schooling and cramming in your own work and housework and feeling rubbish at every last bit of it. At least the dog is happy, even without her wee pyjamas, so that’s something.
