Housekeeper's Diary

Well heavens to Betsy, as if another week hasn’t gone flying by without a child in the house washed or progress made in almost any department in this so called life beyond the bagging of much stuff I tell myself I will sell and then cart to the bin because yes indeed I might just sell it, but the executive function required thereafter to parcel it up and get it to the post office is probably more than I am capable right now. And a person who doesn’t parcel things up pronto is a person who ends up scoring badly on one of the many naughty people scales upon which we are now all beholden to.

For overwhelm has come a calling and hells bells she is, if you will pardon my French, something of a bitch. I am all at sixes and sevens and yesterday treated Ben to a mini meltdown, and then ate quite a few of his cherry bakewells in a glorious moment of leisurely self-flagellation over a pint mug full of tea, before ringing to apologise and serving up a second dose of the same drama because he wasn’t saying exactly what I wanted him to say and how very dare he have a spoon of overwhelm stirring in his own head too?

Anyway where where we? A few days ago I turned my son’s hand over and noticed for the first time in the almost twenty-one years of owning him that he has a Simean line across the palm of his right hand, and no other palm-lines to speak of. Which might explain why he is utterly unfathomable and wildly happy to live in utter chaos but woe betide if I leave a mug on the table for a moment after I have taken my last sip. Life had become rather fractious, such is my penchant for leaving mugs and glasses around so I think we both sighed something akin to relief when I delivered him to his third year uni-house ten minutes up the road on Monday, so that we can go back to loving each other in happy daily calls without having to go into constant battle about the kind of mess we both find abhorrent in each other.

While it doesn’t do to say you are happy about your baby moving out, I want to think of it as the natural order of things. That he is happy to have his own space because by hook or slightly mad crook, I have equipped him with independence and he is doing a mighty fine job of creative writing, and girling and barmanning and generally managing his beautiful self on a daily basis in a way I am learning everyday to trust.

What else? Well now, Ben and I went to see the PERFECT FLAT. It was beautiful and we wandered about smiling at ach other and admiring the old Victorian pile it was in, looking out on a tree filled garden and generally already arranging my furniture in our heads, and then the landlord decided to offer it to a family friend before we could get an application in and that my friends is the state of the real estate nation in a little town that calls itself a village with a cheese and wine shop I will be frequenting if I have to move heaven, earth and all my lars and pennets to make it happen.

My feeling on the procuring of a home is that what is for you will not pass you. That somewhere waiting in the wings is just the right four walls and that it is a matter of holding your nerve and refusing to compromise, till said home shows her face. But heck it’s dull is house-hunting. An endless round of haunting RightMove and considering calling the whole thing off and popping a roof over a fairy-lit skip and calling it home instead, because I am not a patient woman. Once I have decided to do something (and said decision can take YEARS) I want to do it NOW. And more than that, I am not a woman possessed with the werewithal to work out how a person gets from a to b, so a + b = frustration and frustration becomes overwhelm and that turns into binning valuable things because a person mustn’t add to her own chaos by creating more work she will feel too overwhelmed to attend to and if I have learned anything in this life it is that we must try our hardest to work with our idiosyncrasies instead of against them and shuffle our worlds accordingly so we aren’t actively creating our own challenges in a life standing by to chuck them at our heads by the bucketload.

But heckity-pie, when it comes to house-hunting I turn out to be a right fussy madam, because working with my idiosyncrasies essentially means that I am demented by rules I am barely aware I am beholden to. So I will contemplate a flat in a house built a hundred years ago, or an apartment in a block built yesterday. But show me a flat in a block built twenty years and up my nose will turn. I would prefer a ground floor flat because I fear that if you stick me in the air I will decide the rest of the world has ceased to exist and declare myself a hermit, and I really, really don’t want to have to manage anyone else’s furniture in a housing market that seems oddly stuffed with furnished flats, because I do believe there is furniture in this life that could make me clinically sad. It’s difficult. I am difficult. I make no bones about it, because home matters to me, but I am at a point in my life where I feel willing to exchange space, or at heavy push, aesthetics, for location, so proximity to said nice cheese shop might ultimately trump over having to make an ugly sofa work, or a flat on the second floor a reasonable compromise if it is within spitting distance of the tramline into Manchester where Ben might find himself mooring a narrowboat so the best of all worlds are available to us and we can go tootling off up the canal on a whim, because who will we be if not whimsters with a penchant for good food and impromptu moorings under the stars?

Speaking of good food, last week I made the most heavenly of cottage pies on a night Summer was trying Autumn on for size. Layers of minced beef, spring onions, button mushrooms and marmite topped with mustardy mash and Lancashire cheese in a heart shaped La Creuset casserole. It was bliss. And with candles lit in the conservatory and the rain battering the roof it was also the epitome of cosy, and a reminder of how very much all of me longs for the certainty of Autumn. When expectation of good weather is packed away with the bikinis I haven’t got and its perfectly fine to sprinkle everything with cinnamon and take long baths in spicy black pepper.

Autumn to me is almost always the start of a new chapter because I lose myself in Summer. Lose the thread of intention and find myself muddling through mountains of laundry and erratic mealtimes. Perhaps because twenty years of mothering a neurodivergent child who even now consumes my entire mind and attention when he is awake, means that Summer hasn’t been my own for a long time because I struggle really rather badly at playing more than one role at a time, so when I am mother I struggle to be Alison. Or to be a writer. Or even a very good friend. So his return to education in September always spells a return to order for me. A hush I need after six weeks of gorgeous gabble. A hush I feel so guilty about savouring. And it is in Autumn too that the ideas I nurture during hot days suddenly feel possible. In Autumn that I have always moved house. In Autumn when creatively I am at my best, when I have the space during the day to sit in complete silence and give ideas form. In Autumn when decent eating habits are picked up again and the gorgeous ritual that is lighting my candles as the sun sets in late afternoon, becomes a marker for taking the kind of rest lost to me in Summer when I am more social. More liable to be blowing my hair in the late afternoon and heading out the door to dilly-dally than I am to be curling up with the cat and streaming a cosy murder mystery.

Today then. More bin bags to haul down the stairs. More packing of the things Finley forgot to take with him ready to whizz up the A59 and check my baby is in one piece in a day or two. The joy of disinfecting the litter tray. A quiche to make with leftover cheese, onions and roasted tomatoes. to eat after a glass of wine in a seriously snuggly old pub with Ben later. A dress to iron (a dress!) for said adventure. Beds to strip. Landlords and estate agents to mither. Hair to blow into something better than a birds nest. All of it serenaded by my latest musical obsession – Lawrence – because their enthusiasm is infectious and I love music that has me stopping dead and singing at the top of my voice while my face breaks from smiling at sheer talent.

So yes. Autumn is on her way. And she will be beautiful. And I am ready for her now. Ready for change. My boy is safe and happy and this afternoon, but for the cat playing chasing a bobble around the kitchen floor, the house is quiet and I have made a hot chocolate and popped a face mask on skin looking a little parched and the sky is grey with what looks like thunder and my legs are restless and everything is the same and so very much is different and if I could stop worrying, I would tell you that it is already beautiful.

That our true selves emerge blinking and unsure, confident that we are insecure, but certain too, that when we jump, our lives really do appear.

Autumn is on her way. And she will be beautiful.