Monday
Maybe he IS my king after all … According to a royal expert (a posher, creepier version of David Attenborough comes to mind, tiptoeing from pot plant to pot plant down the palace corridors to chart the exotic creatures’ habits) it is Charles and Camilla’s custom to sleep in separate bedrooms every night.
The royal imprimatur can only help my campaign for this piece of life-affirming sanity to be imported into our own domestic arrangements. I find that married life requires too many compromises during the daytime for me to contemplate the prospect of more during the night – getting woken up by snoring and having to prod him on to his side to stop it, getting too hot because of the entire other body next to me, getting trapped under a flung-out deadweight leg etc, etc, etc.
The biggest difference between men and women is this: women can turn under a duvet without taking the whole thing with them. I don’t know why – maybe our socialisation runs so deep that we are able to self-efface even when unconscious,. But until it changes, I shall be citing Charles and ‘Mills as our bedroom gurus. Not a sentence I ever thought I would be writing but times, if not duvet practices, change, my friends.
Tuesday
More good news from our anointed leaders! Nigella has announced that she can no longer be arsed to throw fancy dinner parties. The domestic goddess obviously didn’t put it quite like that but that was definitely the gist. Now she’s all about Twiglets starters (well, just once, for Americans to whom she felt she had a duty to introduce to at least one national dish), and a big main course with everybody helping themselves, dressing how they like and just getting stuck in.
This is such good news. Not because I have ever had or will have a dinner party (no time, no inclination, no ability, no space, no friends) but because it lessens the guilt about not having them. I’ve reached a stage in life when a reduction in guilt about the things I am not doing is the very most I ask for. All bigger, better dreams and ambitions long ago foundered on the rocks of experience and have been smashed to smithereens by waves of … well, further experience really.
Now when I don’t say: “Come round for a meal!” I am only not saying: “Come round for some crisps and a big panful of stuff” instead of not asking them to turn up for a delicious five-course extravaganza with fine wines, candles’n’nice frocks and an effortlessly contrived air of easeful glamour. Much better.
Wednesday
OK, I have a question: how do people have time? Time for what? I hear you ask. Time for anything, I mean. And time for the everything they are all apparently doing, a non-comprehensive list of which includes: commuting; doing their jobs (usually including unpaid overtime); side hustles; charity work; maintaining diet; fitness; skincare and depilation regimes; watching and having opinions on all the latest big TV series from Love Island to Succession; and a choice handful of undiscovered gems such as listening to all the podcasts - every single one; curating Instagram accounts; taking care of children (plural, usually); pets and ailing parents; cooking (maybe even for dinner parties – see above); cleaning; gardening; seeing friends; going to the cinema; reading books. I do my job (which requires no commuting except between bed and desk), have the occasional shower, meet only the most basic needs of one single, amenable 12-year-old child, and fall unstoppably asleep on the sofa every night by 10. I haven’t shaved my legs since 2019. WHERE ARE THE SECRET HOURS EVERYONE ELSE FINDS? And could you send any spare ones to me, please? I – and anyone who has seen me from the knees down – am begging you.
Thursday
News reaches us – brace yourselves please – that Nadine Dorries has … is “written” the word? Maybe we’ll settle on “typed” … Anyway, she has produced a book called The Plot: The Political Assassination of Boris Johnson, which is to be published (and consider this a threat, warning or promise according to your affiliations) on 28 September, a few days before Tory conference. The former culture secretary promises it will reveal the “dark arts” behind Johnson’s departure from No 10. Yes, they are a mystery, aren’t they?
What has always been a true mystery is quite what drives Dorries in the matter of her unassailable loyalty to Johnson. Many theories have abounded but I would like to put forward my own: it’s the hair. His and hers. She thinks she’s the seventh Johnson (or eighth or ninth or tenth – however the whole thing eventually plays out on ancestry.com) and is operating out of family loyalty. I mean out of an abstract notion of family loyalty, not the Johnsonian version itself – that’s a rather threadbare thing – but still, of all the options this is the only one I can think of that makes even an iota of sense. If someone dyed her hair brunette while she slept one night, this whole thing could be over.
Friday
As a belated birthday present from my husband and child who apparently cannot follow emailed links to the Moleskine notebooks website, I am being given A Day Off. Truly, this is the world I dreamed of as a 19-year-old feminist clutching my Andrea Dworkin to my chest as I marched to Take Back the Night and sent my boyfriend to buy tampons at every available opportunity.
Still, never look a gift horse in the mouth, if one of its panniers is holding the gift of time, even if the other contains a job lot of unequal division of labour to be delivered to the patriarchy at Dobbin’s next stop. I am planning to take myself off to see Mission: Impossible: The Whole Thing Stands or Falls By Tom Cruise’s Hair and then to Indiana Jones and revel in the nostalgia while also weeping for the remorseless passing of the years. Happy belated birthday to me!
