too many holidays

This may sound like humbug. It is humbug. But the fact is that I didn’t want all the holidays thrown my way over the Christmas and New Year period. Christmas Day itself was nice, special even. Boxing Day was good too. But the week between Boxing Day and New Year seemed to go on and on until I had no idea what day it was. After which, because New Year’s Day fell on a Wednesday, most things in our city – department stores excepted – were closed till the following Monday.

 

Admittedly I don’t work full time in an office 40 weeks a year. If I did, I’d be only too happy to have a chunk of time off at the end of the year. I’d consider it my right. The other thing that makes me a bit of an exception is that my family lives interstate and I choose not to visit them over Christmas, finding it hot and stressy there at that time. Still, I figure I’m not the only one who loves their work and who feels that public holidays are thrust on them willy-nilly, whether it suits them or not. I can’t be the only one to find a dead quiet city at a festive time of year a little eery, especially when the period is overlaid with scary bushfires on the mainland. I can’t be the only one who, working creatively, misses the comfort of routine and feels disconcerted when it’s taken away with the unspoken mandate to ‘have a good time’ for 12 days straight.

 

Sandor Ferenczi, an Austrian psychoanalyst and colleague of Sigmund Freud, once wrote a paper called ‘Sunday Neurosis’ in which he described a surge in neurotic conflict in patients who didn’t know what to do with themselves on Sunday afternoons. Like those patients, my unconscious seems to go into overdrive when I’m forced to stop working in order to take an extended holiday without actually going anywhere. ‘Why don’t you go camping?’ says my daughter, rolling her eyes, as if not wanting to strike out into the wilderness with a tent is a sign of senility. But I don’t want to go camping. I do however go hell for leather emptying out cupboards on a couple of hot days, and feel pleasantly satisfied with my efforts.

 

People like to say that their family drives them nuts over the Christmas period. But what if, like me, you experience all the unconscious activity of the festive season bubbling up inside without an extended family to project it on to – to blame it on? Instead of sitting round eating mince pies and chalking up my achievements for the year, there were times during this period when I found myself mired in self-doubt and other unpleasant feelings. Even the yoga studio was closed, so there was no relief there either.

 

As it turned out, the dog beach was my salvation. Every morning I went along with my Labrador puppy. Often I’d hit the sand feeling a bit resentful at having to exercise my dog, knowing no-one else in my family would. Yet every day I left the beach thankful of it. The chance encounters with dog owners. The sheer beauty of the sea and sand, quietly stunning. Even the blessed routine of being there.

 

On New Years Day the smoke was thick when we arrived at the beach. The sky was smudged brown and red. The wind was angry and blustery. Ash was flying about, just in case the apocalyptic tinge escaped anyone. But a dog is a dog. And a dog knows nothing of public holidays or bushfires.

 

I never completely relax on the dog beach. I am ever alert to what my puppy might do. At any moment he may veer off in a circular sprint that takes in the sand hills. He may bite the collar of or, his favourite, the harness of another dog. He might even swallow another dog’s poo, my personal detestation. Generally he doesn’t do any of these things. Mostly he trots alongside, comes when I call, and then careers up the beach at the sight of the next interesting looking dog.

 

On New Year’s Day, a guy who has taken to building a cairn of stones on a rocky outcrop on the dog beach, did himself proud with an arc of stones. As soon as I saw it I read it as a sign of hope for a new decade, silently defying the smoky skies. Things are bad right now, said the stack of stones. But they’ll get better. Just you see.

 

By the time my dog and I left the beach that day, just as the stones had suggested, the wind changed and the smoke lifted. Life seemed possible again. Mankind hadn’t wrecked the planet, yet. There was still a window of clear skies in which to put things right. There is a still a window of clear skies in which to put things right. Let’s hope enough people are listening.

on having enough time

I thought I knew myself pretty well. But then, three months ago, my daughter went overseas and I discovered that I didn’t. Having spent 22 years being an active mother, I knew myself mainly in relation to family. Writing and teaching took me away from family. But never very far. As soon as the school phoned up, or one of my kids were sick, there I was, on call. There was a comfortable familiarity that went with this. I liked knowing that I was needed, that I was making a difference to the family I loved. I didn’t mind my day being structured around the needs of others. There were times when I moaned about this. But I liked the way it took me outside myself and into the world of others.

 

I’d known for a while that my daughter wanted to travel. I knew that she needed to prove her independence. I wanted this for her too. But until farewelling her at the airport, I didn’t believe that she could leave without a backward glance. My son had travelled for three years, so I understood what her absence would mean intellectually. My husband traveled regularly too, something I’d accepted as part of the order of things. But the absence of my daughter, with whom I’d spent way more time than I had my husband or son, was harder to absorb.

 

I thought I would hate the late afternoons, when my daughter and I normally walked the dog. But within a few days of her being gone, I realised that it was something else I felt. It was a kind of wonder. Now it was just my husband and dog who needed me. However their need for me felt less continuous than my daughter’s had felt. My husband and my dog weren’t emotionally present to me when they were elsewhere, as my daughter until that point had been. I didn’t feel beholden to them in the same way. Besides, my husband worked insanely hard and my dog was a puppy with needs I’d long known I couldn’t meet.

 

Feeling off the hook, as a mother, was another thing entirely. It took me a few weeks to register the difference. For the first time I could remember, there seemed enough hours in the day. I still ran out of time. I still had the feeling that I couldn’t fit everything in. Supper was inevitably late. However I had an increasing sense that things were, to a greater extent than before, up to me. I could now do things that just hadn’t been possible when family concerns had washed through my mind, like the extended drying cycle on the clothes drier.

 

I thought I’d feel adrift, lonely. Actually, at certain points I did feel lonely, achingly so. But I also felt moments of exhilarating freedom. The flip side of loneliness, I discovered, was freedom. And I could only access the freedom that I’d been longing for without knowing I’d been longing for it, by enduring some loneliness. This loneliness didn’t hurt. It wasn’t painful. But it did feel strange, to be on my own without a child to look after. It was almost unearthly, the way loneliness sprang on me when I least expected it, and left no mark.

 

Eventually I realised that loneliness had something to teach me. Either I could babysit myself, by filling up the windy spaces with podcasts, on-line news and trips to the cinema. Or I could flick shut my laptop and work out what I really wanted to do with the new bits of time that life had afforded me. If I so chose, I could pick up interests that were but faint memories, glowing embers. Initially this was uncomfortable. I’d sit at the piano and feel like a 7-year-old practicing my scales before dinner. I’d do a drawing and become self-critical of my efforts. I spend time in the garden, distracted by all the other things I should be doing.

 

After a few weeks I relaxed, realising that I had two and a half months of aloneness ahead of me. My daughter wasn’t gone for good, this time at least. Yet I knew that one day, any day, her absence would be permanent. On that day my daughter would move out of home and into her own orbit. These three months, then, were my trial run. A chance to be the centre of my own universe. What was I to do with it? Would it be an opportunity or a curse? Was it the beginning of the end, of everything-is-downhill-from-here? Or was it the beginning of something that as yet I had no words for, something that I’d been longing for without knowing it?

 

I tell you what I did. I went to the newsagent and bought an A2 sheet of cardboard and a packet of star stickers in five colours. On the cardboard I drew, in pencil without a ruler, a 6-week calendar – which I’d read somewhere is the length of time needed to create a new habit. In each square of the calendar, at the end of each day, I stuck a star for each time I did morning yoga, practised sight reading at the piano, and did a drawing after dinner. It sounds childish. It is childish. But mostly it worked. I needed an external marker for my efforts, to help me over the hump I had to overcome when faced with activities that I wanted to do, but didn’t have to do. Easing into a distraction was eternally easier than getting myself to play the piano, or to sew. Who would have thought that it could be so hard to sit down on a piano stool or to take out a pad of paper and pencils after dinner? Doing yoga, thankfully, was a little easier, perhaps because I’d been doing this for longer and so resisted it less.

 

My daughter has been back for five days now, and the squares on my star chart for these five days are empty. She, of course, laughs at my star chart. In the most natural way, she plonks her I-am-the-centre-of-the-universe way of being into the middle of my mind. I can no more ignore her presence than the surf wax, leg ropes, wet suits and shells that are strewn through my previously tidy house. Meanwhile my husband goes about his work, barely affected by her return. And the dog accepts her back as if she left the house the day before yesterday. I, meanwhile, am no longer lonely. But I’m not free either. Time I got back to putting some stars on that chart.

too much pleasure

The front door clicked shut. Standing in front of my laptop at the kitchen table, a new habit of mine, I sank into a piece of writing.

Ten minutes later, my phone rang.

‘Did you get cheese for tonight?’ Paul asked. To anyone else, this question would be innocent. Only Paul and I had been together for 30 years, and we left innocence behind long ago.

‘Actually’, I said, ‘I thought I’d serve dessert instead of cheese this time.’

‘Couldn’t we have both?’ Paul asked, with annoyance in his voice. ‘Or would that cause too much pleasure?’

For a few seconds neither of us spoke.

‘Tell me’, asked Paul, ‘what exactly is the problem with having cheese?’

‘Well’, I said, sounding defensive, ‘I was trying to keep the food simple. You know me.’ I waited for Paul to reply. When he didn’t, I tried again. ‘I wasn’t sure if we’d have enough plates and cutlery and would rather not have to wash up between courses. Besides I’ve already got dessert, won’t that be enough?’

The phone went dead.

I gazed out the kitchen window, shrugged inwardly, and tried to get back to my work.

 

*     *     *

 

‘I just want to make myself some lunch’, said Paul, coming into the kitchen 15 minutes later. ‘Of course’, I said, moving my papers off the kitchen table. But even in my study I couldn’t think straight, and went back into the kitchen.

‘I guess’, I said. ‘I guess I’d hoped that the counselling we’re doing might help us see tensions like these differently. Rather than fatal, perhaps they’re inevitable. I don’t know’, I said, waiting for a response, ‘they might even be interesting.’

‘You’ve got to be kidding’, said Paul, on the edge of shouting. ‘I have zero interest in conflicts like these. Look’, he said, exasperated. ‘It’s my birthday. I just want to have a nice day and get some work done before tonight.’

‘I know’, I said. ‘Of course. Except it’s on your birthday that this often comes up. Wouldn’t it be better to talk about it now, than risk it blowing up just before friends arrive tonight?’

‘I’m really not interested in discussing it’, said Paul, shouting now. ‘I feel like you’re setting me up to look bad. And it’s only with you that I’m like this.’

‘I’m sorry’, said, trying not to frown. ‘But we’re married and we just do impact on each other in ways we can’t fix’.

‘Oh, this is so boring!’ exploded Paul, peering into the saucepan to check if the water was boiling.

I left the room. Five minutes later I returned. Paul was eating large pockets of ravioli, smearing them with butter as he ate. I felt hungry. Had I come back, his glance asked, to spoil his lunch? I opened the door to go out and then closed it again.

‘Can’t we do better than this?’ I asked. ‘We only have one life and I don’t care if you hate me sometimes. I know I can be annoying. I know you think that I spoil your pleasure and make you feel complicated about yourself. But can’t we get beyond that? I know you think I don’t do indulgence very well. That I care too much about health. But so what? We already know this. Is this what really matters? Can’t it be something that we accept and move on from? I can’t make that part of myself go away, any more than you can make the pleasure loving part of yourself go away.’

There was a brief silence.

‘Maybe we’re not very well suited’, suggested Paul flatly.

‘But we already know that’, I said, impatient. ‘Of course it would be good to be better suited. But I don’t care that much that we’re not. Isn’t our life together more important than our differences? For me, our efforts to get on with each other are valuable because it’s so not easy’.

Paul put his plate in the sink.

‘Perhaps we’re both nervous’, I offered.

‘I’m not’, he said. ‘I’m excited about tonight. At least, I was until 30 minutes ago’.

‘Ok’, I said, looking at my watch, ‘good for you’, and grabbed my car keys and headed out the front door.

*     *     *

The dinner went well. None of the friends who came would have guessed that Paul and I had shouted at each other in the kitchen earlier that day. One friend arrived early to help in the kitchen, which meant that I could leave the pans on the hob and change my clothes, without burning the food. By the time I got the main course on the table, the food was a little cold, because I couldn’t think of a way of keeping the meal hot until we were ready to eat it, without turning off the oven. But no-one seemed to mind. John served a cheese course. A friend insisted on lighting candles with dessert and singing happy birthday. The conversation round the table broke up into groups and everyone seemed to have their say. I cleaned up in the kitchen as the dinner went along, with intermittent breaks in the kitchen with the dog, which meant I didn’t feel overwhelmed by mess when the front door closed for the last time. Paul drank too much but not too too much and was genuinely funny, in a way he loves to be, towards midnight. And this morning we got some genuinely appreciative texts from friends.

you can never get enough of something that’s not quite enough

Early evening, when I have nothing else on and have housekeeping to do, I’ll click on The Guardian and The New York Times websites. I’ll just read a few stories, I tell myself, before getting on with emails, housework and cooking – and whatever else I should be doing. I deserve a break, I tell myself. And I’m curious at what has happened outside my tiny bubble during the day. I might stop scrolling for a moment, to drain overcooked rice, or to feed the dog. But for up to an hour, most evenings, I’ll stand at the kitchen bench, clicking on news stories. It’s my new bad habit.

 

I know that it’s impossible to get enough of something that’s not quite enough. I know this because last night I read Tristan Harris’s talk about tech addiction. However, early evening, night after night, I act as if I don’t know this. My addiction isn’t a vice, I say to myself. It doesn’t harm any organ of my body. Unless, that is, my soul is an organ.

 

Initially, scrolling through news sites, I feel pure escape. What, I wonder, has the rest of the world been up to, while I’ve been writing and housekeeping and walking the dog? Within seconds, I’m immersed in stories about people I’ll never meet, in places I’m unlikely to visit. Yet this scrolling, reading, and scrolling some more, is oddly stressful. It’s not one bit relaxing. Last night, I oggled at the fleshy chins on Prince Andrew, pondering all that privilege gone wrong. I asked myself what the Hong Kong riots were really, deeply, about. I ached at climate events – at the description of a man who, facing a galloping bushfire, threw himself on the ground in the dirt until it passed.

 

After ten minutes, which feel like three, of reading in this way, I could feel myself wearying of a world that was so messed up that even the headlines made my stomach churn. However beautifully the NYTimes journalists wrote, ultimately they, and I, were part of the same problem. We were all part of the spider’s web that had me scrolling at the kitchen table, rather gardening or housekeeping or walking the dog. We were all part of a problem which appeals to a baseness in our nature. The websites were designed to encourage me to click on stories despite myself, and then come back for more, never quite satisfied. Stories that made me feel grubby, scratching me in ways that left me thinking less of myself for engaging with them.

 

But the real question was more confronting, more intimate. If I didn’t give away this hour, early evening, to engrossing journalism, what else might I do with it? With both of my kids away, I face a strange, new vacuum at the end of my day. After 22 years of juggling homework, activities and the prepping of food, now there’s a lull early evening.

 

I deserve this time, I tell myself. I’ve worked hard for it. I’ve longed for it. And there are nights when do I love it, relish it. But other nights it comes on me unawares, stalking me into darkness. It leaves me at a loose end. It feels all wrong. Where, I ask the dog, is everyone? Why is it so quiet?

 

Last night, by the time night fell, inky black staring through the windows where the garden had just been, I’d given up trying to make something of the hour before dinner. I may as well read a few more stories, I told myself, before walking the dog round the block. Just one more story, I said to myself. ‘Oh yeah’, I heard my soul reply.

 

As if under a spell, I leaned on the kitchen table, reading beautifully edited, often thoughtful news stories. As I read, the world around me expanded and shrank. I didn’t sit down. Because this would mean admitting an intention which I wouldn’t allow myself. For I knew that I had better – or just other – things to be doing. Just as I knew, deep in myself, that I could never get enough of something that wasn’t quite enough. But, then again, nor did I feel lonely.

 

The dog settled patiently on the rug, waiting, as he does every night, for my daughter’s return from Africa. Until, hearing him sigh, I clapped the laptop shut. I felt cross with myself at having thrown away an hour of my life to on-line what ifs. Poof! Gone, just like that. In 15 minutes’ time, my husband would come into the kitchen expecting dinner – thankfully I’d cooked the rice and prepped the meat. Still, I’d done it again.

 

The dog looked up, hopeful. He didn’t mind walking around the block in the dark, rather than taking a bush track at dusk. He knew no better. But I did. I knew that I wanted more than I ever got from reading news stories on-line. I knew that clicking and scrolling left me feeling dissatisfied, fed up with my will-lessness and powerlessness to change anything in the world a meaningful way.

 

Perhaps tonight will be different. Except I know myself well enough to know that hoping my tech problem will just go away won’t work. However, blocking The Guardian website from my desktop, just might.

 

 

 

 

 

housekeeping story

‘So’, asked a friend, ‘now that you’ve finished your project on domestic life, what have you found out about it?’

‘Well’, I said, ‘It doesn’t fit on the back of an envelope. But I’m getting closer. When I started thinking about domestic life, five years ago now, it was because I was in two minds about whether the time I spent looking after myself and my family was time well spent, or time wasted. I couldn’t work out if the benefits of a well-run home outweighed the effort of keeping it that way. And it was this uncertainty, this doubt, that drove me to asking other people how they felt about their housekeeping story’

‘What do you mean by their housekeeping story?’ asked Tina.

‘Oh’, I said, ‘that’s shorthand for everything we do to keep our home life ticking over so that we can thrive in the world. It’s everything from washing bedlinen to food shopping to celebrating a family birthday. It’s the big and little things we do to show ourselves, and the people we’re close to, that we’re worth looking after, that we belong on this patch of earth and are loved no matter what. This sounds completely obvious. Of course we’re worth looking after. But what I’ve discovered is that, in our unconscious, there’s a bit of confusion around this. It’s not that we secretly think we’re bad, and so undeserving of being well looked after. It’s more that even when we’re doing pretty well, day to day, our experience of life is of constant, just-beneath-the-surface struggle. And this is why we thrive on being given plenty of signs that we’re loved and wanted. We show this in the simplest of ways, by spicing up a pumpkin soup, or icing a cake for a friend. In our distracted and overfilled world, love is something that we do, and make time for, as much as something that we feel’.

‘And what else have you found out?’

‘I used to think that it was just me that got easily stressed at home. Other people, I thought, didn’t need to feel on top of their home life in order to feel good about opening their front door late afternoon. I was the only one who felt overwhelmed when I had no idea what to cook for dinner and hungry faces kept appearing at the kitchen door. Whereas, I now know lots of people feel this. We like to have some control over the day-to-day running of our homes. Given how much of our life is outside our control, we like to keep a hold over the bits that we can.

In the old days, housekeeping was about meeting social expectations, maintaining hygiene standards and observing nutritional guidelines. It was about satisfying the needs of a household’s inhabitants and keeping dust and roaches at bay. Housekeeping still involves these things. But nowadays it’s expanded to include our well-being. We’re less concerned about rodents in the flour sack, than in achieving peace of mind in the hour before sleep.

‘Why do you think people find domestic life stressful these days?’ asked Tina.

‘Hmmm’, I replied. ‘Five years ago I thought it was just me who avoided spending long periods at home, for fear of the demands that my home made on me when I did. But as it turns out, lots of us feel this. I think this is because until we sort out our housekeeping story – until we reconcile ourselves with how much of our life is given over to looking after ourselves – we’re likely to feel stressed at home. Everyone multitasks, of course. And everyone refuses to accept that household tasks take 50% more time than we think they will. And then there’s the puppy problem.’

‘What’s that?’ asked Tina.

‘We all loves puppies’, I said. ‘Yet every adult knows that giving in to the desire for a puppy puts in train a string of demands that the child in us shrinks from. And it’s the same with everything that comes through our front door, from a must-have household gadget to a new baby. We want to have it. Reality conspires and gives it to us. And before we know it, hey presto, we’re responsible for looking after it. This is the puppy problem. It explains why minimalism, living clutter free and not having children are all so appealing. Because choosing to live with less means there are fewer people and things in our life to demand our attention and make us do their bidding.

‘Yeah’, said Tina, ‘I get that. But I still don’t quite get the housekeeping story’.

‘Sure’, I said. ‘It took me ages to wrap my head around the idea that our thoughts shape our feelings – that thinking makes it so. It seems counter-intuitive that we create our world twice, first in thought and then in reality. But now I think that this is at the core of every housekeeping story. If we choose to act in a nurturing way, it’s because, given our understanding of the struggles of life, value looking after ourselves and others in loving ways. Believing in practical loving, nurture and creativity leads us to create a home life based on these values’.

‘Okay’, said my friend. ‘But are you at risk of being taken for granted by people close to you, if you look after them lovingly and they don’t reciprocate?’

‘I don’t think this is something that you can be right or wrong about’, I replied. ‘It’s like proving pacifism or vegetarianism. It’s stems from personal belief, not facts. It’s a decision that you arrive at from within, not without. Whether acting in a loving way adds or subtracts from your life can only be answered from within. For me, it’s worth the risk. Because even if I get taken advantage of – which is anyway a matter of interpretation – my life is richer for living it in line with a belief in practical loving.’

‘Oh’, said Tina. ‘I think I see’.

‘There’s one last bit to the housekeeping story. Which is that before we can tell it, before it can hang together as a story, we have to know who we’re housekeeping for. Am I looking after myself and others to please a Big Other – a partner, social convention or some nameless fear of sliding into chaos? Or am I looking after myself and others, as well as I can, in order to uphold a personal ideal, never quite attained, of a life that I feel good about living? When we’re housekeeping for ourselves, our acts of loving spring from a desire to live our best possible life. We’re inspired not by fear of a disapproving other, but by a desire for something closer to Keats’ ‘beauty, goodness and truth’. For me, today, there’s no question that the benefits of living in a well-run home outweigh the effort of keeping it that way. Having spoken to scores of people on this subject – and interviewed 50 – I know that many others think this too’.

‘Thanks’, said Tina. ‘Now I get it.’

laundry problem

 

Shortly after my family and I moved from London to Melbourne, my son started at a new Kinder. The staff at the Kinder were friendly. The atmosphere was warm. The other kids seemed friendly. But Alex wasn’t so sure. Actually, he was sure. He quickly decided that he hated going to Kinder. It was a very bad idea. Each morning he was due to go, it was a minor psychological battle to get him out of the car and through the Kinder gates.

 

I nearly always won this battle. Except that I never really won it. I just got him through the Kinder gates. Because Alex’s upset, at doing this strange new scary thing, was always going to be stronger than my reassurances, my ‘come on then, it’ll be fine’ cajoling. It soon became clear that Alex’s unconscious was frightened as Hell of going to Kinder. He was frightened of what felt like the scattershot demands that rained down on him the moment he arrived. He wasn’t one bit fobbed off with his father and me telling him of all the fun he was soon to have, or the nice things I’d put in his lunch box. From his point of view, once I’d dropped him at the classroom door, there was nothing to shield him from his fear. He felt naked. How was he to know that some of the kids in the sandpit, with their funny accents and brash confidence, who knew each other far better than he knew them, might one day be his friends? And so, day after agonising day, he hung back at the Kinder gates. Or he refused point blank to get out of the car. Meanwhile, safe at home, he regressed to soiling his underpants.

 

As I write this, Alex will be coming off a 6-hour watch on a 30-metre boat, somewhere in the ocean off Alaska, en route to Antarctica. He’ll be taking the wheel from a fellow sailor, who’ll be tired and cold and in need of a warm bunk. Perhaps Alex would clobber me for telling you this story about him regressing at Kinder, years ago now. But I tell it not to embarrass him, or anyone else. I tell it because I think it illustrates something important about parenthood, and especially motherhood. This story, and others like it, highlights something that gets lost when we generalise our experience of family life, or collapse our stories into anecdotes.

 

The laundry problem that I’m describing is more closely bound up with the experience of parenthood, than it is with childhood. Alex, for his part, has forgotten all about this episode. He forgot about it the minute he found his own way to grow up and separate from home and family. I, however, haven’t forgotten. The reason I haven’t forgotten is because I had to work hard emotionally to make sense of my son’s behaviour. I had to work hard to make peace with behaviour that, deep within, I found unacceptable.

 

By the time Alex was old enough for Kinder, I felt I knew him pretty well. This may, of course, have been part of the problem. I knew that he was frightened of change. I knew that he hated starting new things. I knew that he struggled to make new friends. And yet I also knew that he seemed happy in himself at home. And that he played the same, looked the same and acted the same as he always had. So why had he gone back to being a toddler and soiling his pants? Why now? And why me?

 

Perhaps, I thought, scratching my head and trying not to lose it, soiling his pants was Alex’s way of refusing to grow up. Perhaps he’d seen through the story of maturity that the grownups around him were telling him, the progress myth in which things always get better as you get bigger. Or perhaps he was expressing an unconscious instinct that got secret pleasure from flouting the rules. Was he saying, without using words, that he didn’t accept the law of cause and effect? Could soiling his underpants be his way of saying bugger off to the world? Was he flagging that he wanted to get off the bus, by pressing the button for the driver to let him off at the next stop? Was his behaviour a plea for mercy? Or a shout of protest?

 

One hot Sunday, we went for lunch with new friends (all our friends, at this stage, were new). He was a GP with a weekly radio program, and she was a psychologist working with children. Together this couple had three kids a few years older than Alex and Emma. They seemed like a groovy family, more groovy than I felt mine to be. During lunch, the psychologist mother told us about her son’s recent birthday party, during which the 8-year olds played a game in which they got to throw tomatoes at each other. After lunch, the five kids left the wooden table we were sitting at, to play in the sprinkler. Before long, the conversation round the table strayed into the issue that my husband and I were having with Alex starting Kinder, with a hint at his regressive behaviour. ‘Hah!’, said the GP father, waving his long hands in the air. ‘I wouldn’t worry about that. It will sort itself out in time. I wouldn’t make a fuss about it and make it into a thing. When you sit back and think about it, it’s really no more than a laundry problem’.

 

Sitting at the wooden table, cold barbecue mess in front of us, I laughed. So did Paul. But inside, I felt furious. What did the GP mean, that the issue with Alex that was driving me nuts, and pressing all my buttons, was nothing more than a laundry problem? Obviously, I fumed, he didn’t do the laundry himself. Because, if he did, he’d know that a kid who soils his pants isn’t easy to do laundry for. I felt powerless, wanting to answer the GP back, but not feeling that I could, even if I had the right words. Instead I sat at the table, smiling politely, feeling that what was a big problem for me had been made small by this medical man who knew better. I was, apparently, making a fuss about something that would go away by itself. At the end of the day, that hateful phrase, I was overreacting. The laundry problem was mine, more than it was my son’s.

 

Every parent has a story like this. You may be reading this now, and thinking about your own laundry problem. Problems like these are our war wounds, as parents, proof of combat. Eventually they do heal up. Yet a scar remains. This scar never completely fades because these problems pierce our unconscious. And this is why parenthood, and particularly motherhood, is such a powerful and lasting experience.

 

The emotions that are unleashed from the unconscious, by family life, are incredibly strong. Often they’re untamed. They’re only loosely attached to the words that communicate them. This is why our words rarely do them justice. Our words may stand about and snigger. But they exaggerate more than capture the experiences that drive us nuts as parents. They never really pin them down. I’ll never be able to describe the rage and powerlessness that my son’s laundry problem triggered in me. I may capture enough of it to gain your sympathy, as a fellow traveller. But it will always be the tip of the iceberg that I describe, not the ice below. And yet – and here’s the thing – it’s the ice below the surface that unites us, as parents, even as we struggle to describe our helplessness before it, from our separate boats.

 

The usual story, the conscious story, the happy-ever-after, things-will-get-better story, is the tip of the iceberg that we so want to believe in. When our child is six months, five years, 12 years or 20, when their dependent ties are cast off and we are free again – these are the hopes that get us up in the morning and keep us going. And they’re sort of true. They true enough to keep us going until next school holidays, next Christmas, next school year. But it’s only ever half the story that we tell. Possibly not even that. Because the rest of the story, the under the surface of the ocean story, doesn’t give a damn about progress or linear development. Or any of that stuff. And it’s this unconscious story that tests us, challenges us, and at times dements us.

 

When our buttons are pushed by our kids’ outrageous behaviour, by whatever they do that we find unacceptable, we know it quicker than anyone. Our reaction to our kid’s unacceptable behaviour may even frighten us. The howl of rage we feel, when our buttons are pushed, is enough to blow the roof off the three little pigs’ house. Except, of course, we’re grownups. And grownups don’t blow the roof off the house, not least because this would mean organising and paying for the repairs. Likewise, because we’re grownups, we do the laundry without a fuss.

 

It seems important to add that I did my best not to get cross with Alex when he soiled his underpants, however much I sometimes wanted to. Not because I was a self-effacing martyr. But because I knew that his behaviour was a phase, and that he didn’t do it to drive me crazy. Except I didn’t always feel this. At certain points I felt complete despair, no matter how reassuring my thoughts. I also felt lonely. And it was at these points that I reached out for support. To buoy me up when things felt grim. I reached out to close friends, during the day. Late at night, when I should have been asleep but wasn’t, books and websites about parenting reassured me that I wasn’t going mad. They told me that my despair at my laundry problem was real, but that it would pass. They whispered that I wasn’t on my own. That other people had been there too. And that one day, maybe not yet, but one day, I would look back, smile, and see Alex’s button-pressing behaviour as nothing more than a laundry problem.

 

One night, a year later, I had a dream. On waking from it, I had a vivid memory in which I soiled my pyjamas as a girl. In my memory I took my pyjamas down to the laundry, around dawn, and tried to wash them clean in the sink. So that my mother, who I felt sure would be angry with me, would never know. Perhaps I was five years old at the time, possibly older. Old enough to know that soiling my pyjamas wasn’t a good thing to do, was a shameful and embarrassing thing. And it was the morning when I awoke and remembered soiling my pyjamas, that I understood why Alex’s laundry problem had upset me so much. The GP, damn it, had been right. Alex’s problem was a problem because once it had been mine too.

 

Parenting, and especially mothering, is difficult, because it means holding two contrary things in mind. Our immediate response to our kids’ behaviour. And our more considered, heartfelt response. Keeping both these responses alive, not giving in to knee-jerk reactions when our buttons are pushed, requires nerves of steel. We don’t always win. Sometimes we slip up and say more than we should. Sometimes our kids’ unconscious receives the punishment that it has been compelled to seek. But mostly we hang on in there, waiting for the phase to pass, doing our best to be interested in a problem that tests us, challenges us, and brings out our best and our worst. Until one day, and I can say this with conviction, our kids will find a way to thank us for surviving their outrageous behaviour. For not taking it personally, however personal it felt at the time. They’ll thank us for taking the longer view, and for staying on for the ride.

 

 

 

basement

The place of lost dreams, is the way a friend described his basement to me last month. ‘Don’t be silly’, I said, thinking that he was being overly dramatic. But the more I thought about it, the more our damp basement, and the things stashed in it, felt just like that. Lost dreams that weighed on me. Which didn’t spark joy. More a vague dread.

 

When I realised that I’d be alone in the house this week, I called my handyman and booked a time for him to come. ‘I don’t really need you to do anything while I’m sorting’, I said to Rob. ‘I just need you to be around for moral support. And, when I’m done, I need you to take the stuff to the tip and charity shop’.

 

When we first moved into our house, ten years ago now, my husband insisted that the basement wasn’t damp. When he eventually admitted that it was, after his favourite books were ruined, we agreed to an expensive damp coursing treatment which promised salvation. The contractor was near messianic in his predictions. My husband would be able to work in the basement on the hottest of summer days, it would be so temperate down there.

 

My kids weren’t so easily sold. When he left for overseas, my son refused to let us store his bike in the basement, insisting that it stayed in his bedroom. ‘But that’s what basements are for!’ spouted my husband, who’d paid for the damp coursing.

 

When I realised that my son was a bit right, about the basement being damp, I bought a humidifier and tried to remember to turn it on regularly, amazed that a machine could suck moisture from the air and turn it into two litres of water, just like that.

 

But then life got busy and I stopped caring about the basement. The humidifier sat idle. Instead I avoided entering the basement. And the longer I avoided entering it, the easier avoiding entering it became.

 

When Rob arrived yesterday, I told him that he was to instruct me to stay in the basement until I’d finished sorting. ‘I know it sounds crazy’, I said. ‘But I so don’t want to do this. I think I’d rather a trip to the dentist’. He smiled and set to work, shaving the side off a door that my daughter had hung and that now wouldn’t shut.

 

I went down into the basement. It was as bad as I’d thought it would be. Worse, perhaps. White mould and disintegrating wood greeted me. That dank smell. Was this all my fault? I stood still, arms hanging by my sides. Pulling myself together, I decided not to go that way. Instead, I would stick with the practical task of taking things up into the courtyard, one by one, and sorting them out there.

 

I found an extra lamp and plugged it in. Immediately the basement looked less dingy. I grabbed some bin bags, cloths, broom and Damp Rid, which I hoped would do what it said on the spray bottle. A mouldy pet carrier was the first to go. An orange backpack which caused my daughter’s back to welt on The Overland Track (a six-day hike) went next. Three framed pastels by my father-in-law, that he’d weep to see stashed in a damp corner, I wiped and stacked on the table in the courtyard. Mounted black and white photos of Venice, from our old kitchen, joined them. Then it was two black bags of lint from the laundromat, which I used to use to make firelighters with (don’t try it!).

 

Time was also up on an old green felt card table that I once admired the design of, but had never used. Then it was mouldy pictures frames, a kneeling back chair that I’d grown to hate, complete with two dodgy wheels, the first chair my son made at school, beautifully made but too low and concave to actually sit on comfortably, two lampshades which when my husband bought them I wondered why, and a Conran lamp from our London flat that I still liked but didn’t have a use for. And yet more pictures that I’d rather found a home on someone else’s wall, rather than a corner in our basement.

 

Then it was the paint and garden cupboard’s turn. A bottle of Round Up and an only slightly less evil weed killer. A can of Rust Rid and past-expiry-date rat poison sachets. A citronella coil that we rarely if ever used. A worm farm I hadn’t fed in months and that, despite my neglect, had skinny worms crawling to the surface of. Various tins of hardened paint.

 

Even in a good life, not everything works out. Even when you love your home, as I do, there are things that you’d rather be rid of, be free of guilt about. Perhaps the whole concept of clutter was invented to liberate us from getting out from under the pile of things in our attics, garages and basements.

 

Now and then Rob came down to the basement, asked if I needed a hand, and disappeared again. Time passed and the courtyard filled. The next time Rob came down to the basement, he glanced at his watch, signalling to me that he was keen to finish up. Rather than saying anything, he started taking the things in the courtyard out to his truck. I loved that he said nothing as he did this. He didn’t tell me to put a new battery into the tap timer that was missing its lid, and to use it in the garden this summer. He just did his job and I did mine until, by dusk, the basement looked like a basement that could be swept out, which I promptly did.

 

During all this time I managed not to get pulled into byways of memory. I didn’t undo the plastic bags full kids’ toys to handle the matchbox cars. I didn’t wonder about the Christmas decorations, or how damned quickly the festive season came round. I just sprayed Damp Rid on the top of the trunks containing these things, checked the plastic bags and boxes were secure, and lowered the lids.

 

Over the years, our basement came to symbolise a wordless rebuke that my kids directed my husband and me, at their irresponsible parents who let perfectly good furniture and other items rot in a damp basement. There was, I felt, no point in making a rejoinder to them about this. Besides, there was a part of me that agreed with them. I had let perfectly good chairs, and other things too, grow mouldy in the basement. Shame on me. ‘But hang on’, I wanted to say to my kids, ‘just wait until it happens to you – life, that is. Just wait until you have so many balls in the air that you drop one or two of them. And then get up the next morning and drop the same balls again. Just wait until the day you stray into your basement, garage, or attic, and find it full of things you neither want in your home nor can bear to get rid of. Just wait until you resort to calling a handyman to give you moral support as you sort through what to keep, throw and donate. This won’t feel natural. It won’t even feel voluntary. But there will come a point – as it has to me – when it becomes necessary.’

 

Eventually I cleared a space in the middle of the floor of the basement, by stacking furniture round the walls, and started to feel free of the stuff around me. It was as if, by taking items out of the basement and into the courtyard, and subjecting them to the light of day, I’d cut the strings that tied me to them. What, till yesterday afternoon, was a basement of stuff that preyed on me in a dull persistent way, like some domestic gum disease, had turned into things to be dealt with.

 

From one afternoon to the next, the basement had ceased to feel like a dungeon, a place of lost dreams. Instead it was a place to store the carpet cleaner, Christmas decorations and a fold-up frame of a guest bed.

 

Perhaps the best result, in this crazy-making yet ordinary afternoon, was that the door the handyman fixed, while I was sorting out the basement, had a lock in it. So that when, yesterday evening, I walked the dog before supper, and for the first time in my life forgot the key and had to break my son’s bedroom window with a pair of secateurs – in the rain and dark – to get back in, I was able to lock his bedroom door behind me and feel safe sleeping alone in the house last night. What would I do without my handyman?

 

visiting the library

I have to be in a certain mood to visit the library. I can go if I’m in a rush. Because I’m usually in a rush in town. But not if I’m in a hurry. Because when I’m hurrying, I never find what I’m looking for.

 

For years I’ve made time to visit the library, for two reasons. I go to borrow magazines which I leave on the kitchen table and bathroom windowsill for whomever is around, including myself, but especially for my daughter who claims she hates reading. But I also visit the library to borrow a certain kind of book that I read before bed, plus an audiobook for the car. Both of these feel kind of necessary.

 

Throughout my kids’ childhood, magazines and books from the library washed in and out of the house, like high and low tides. Now that they’ve left school, and one has left home, I still make near fortnightly trips to the library. I think I go because I never know what I’ll find there. How will I know what I am looking for, until I pick it up in the library? Rarely do I use the computer catalogue. Sometimes I’ll cheat and glance through the Reserved Books shelf, where more assiduous members get rewarded for alerting librarians to interesting new titles. Or I’ll look through the Recent Returns at the end of each bay. Or I might head straight to Psychology, Food or Travel, and see what jumps out at me.

 

Yesterday, after sliding a stack of returns one by one down the Returns chute, I passed through the automatic doors. A rush of overly warm air hit me, a combination of heating, computers and windows that never open. My first pick up, from a stand of new books by the doors, was a book with a bright pink cover and black shiny sunglasses, The Confidence Kit. My daughter is about to travel overseas, and I thought the book might help her with feeling fear and doing it anyway. Then I picked up a sailing magazine and a couple of travel magazines – for the same reason. The audio book I chose was Rejection Proof, by Jia Jiang, a story about a Chinese-American’s mission to score 100 rejections, with the aim of strengthening himself against his reluctance to ask for what he wanted – which I hoped might inure me to the rejections a current manuscript of mine was soon to receive.

 

Then I found a book by the blog superstar Clean Mama, about natural household cleaning recipes – a book I’d never buy but thought might be useful. ‘If you do nothing else in this book’, Becky Rapinchuck wrote, ‘scrub the sink with this paste after cleaning up the kitchen each night’. ‘Oh yeh’, I thought, and promptly decided to give it a go.

 

The last book I checked out was Dynamic Aging, a manual for stretching muscles in the second half of life to retain strength and balance, complete with unappealing line drawings and triple-spaced text. Written by a young American physio, it advocated increasing daily movement to 3 to 4 hours, which seemed to me almost messianic in its intent. Again, not a book I’d buy. But I thought it might help me think through what to do with my less than supple hips.

 

On the way home from the library, I bought washing soda and lemon essential oil, for Clean Mama’s sink scrub. I left the pink book about confidence on the windowsill in the bathroom. The magazines and cleaning book I left on the table in the kitchen.

 

That night, after cleaning up the kitchen, I tipped a cup of washing soda into a jar, added 30 drops of lemon essential oil, used a knife to mix the oil into the soda and found a second scrubbing brush. Then I sprinkled a quarter of a cup of the mix on to my sinks, added a squirt of dishwashing liquid, a small amount of water and set about scrubbing my sinks. The lemon oil wafted up as the sinks came clean, buffed with that day’s teatowel. Done. Clean Mama was right, the sinks looked great, and I knew I’d be glad of having done it the next morning. But every night, as Clean Mama suggested? Well, that was another thing.

 

After luring the dog into his crate, I went upstairs, where I lay on the carpet in the bathroom, too tired to go to bed. I picked up the exercise book lying on the windowsill. ‘I’ll just read the last chapter’, I told myself. And so on and so on until I’d read the whole book. Reading it made me realise that I’d swallowed the idea that ageing means a slow but ineluctable weakening of strength and wellbeing. Dynamic Aging suggested that there was another way. Not an easy way. Like all maintenance activities, it involved time and commitment. But perhaps, I thought, heading to bed – where I slept deeply – I would thank myself in years to come if I did what it takes to keep my core strong.

 

The Rejection Proof audio book, which I’d never have downloaded or bought, I played in the car the next day, driving my dog to the country kennels where he sometimes spends the day. It was fabulous. It changed my thinking about how I might respond to the rejections soon to come my way from a manuscript of mine. The fact that the author was Chinese American, also made a big impression. I was surprised, and embarrassed to be surprised, at his sophisticated command of both the English language (his second language) and his own experience.

 

It’s the serendipity of visiting the library that I like. I like going not knowing what I want to read. On passing through the automatic doors, I give myself over to another impulse. Curiosity, I suppose. I go to the library to find out more about what I need to find out about, without knowing before I get there what that might be. I got through menopause without visiting the doctor this way. I got through my kids’ adolescence without going mad this way. I get through my unconventional marriage this way. ‘Everything’, my naturopath once told me, before I entered menopause, ‘is normal’. The nice thing about the library is that everything is normal there too.

 

 

the perfect dog

I was going to have the perfect dog. The same kind of dog that my grandmother used to walk in the park every morning, rain or shine. We got that dog last October. On the background of my phone, a two-month-old still Digger stares out at me, mud on his head, as if butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth.

 

I never said it out loud, but Digger was to be my defence against loneliness. Whatever else life threw at me, in years to come, he would be at the centre of a life that I was as yet unable to imagine.

 

Every morning, since last October, I have let Digger out of his crate, pulled up the blind and unlocked the back door. Then down five steps and out into the garden we go. Digger doesn’t need me to go out with him any more. He isn’t a tiny puppy in need of toilet training. But I’ve always gone out with him, and now he expects it, waiting on the bottom step until he’s sure I’m coming. I love these early minutes, before the garden wakes up. It gives me a chance to see the morning as it really is – dew on the grass, blossoms budding – so different to the stream of things in need of doing that greets me as soon as I step back into the kitchen.

 

I wanted the perfect dog, even knowing it didn’t exist. Having had to end the life of an anxious dog just a year ago, I felt that we deserved a break. Instead of a neurotic dog from the pound we would get a reliable dog, a trainable, child-friendly dog from a breeder. Personally I’d have gone for a non-shedding breed, if I hadn’t known that other traits were more important. As did our vet. A dog that didn’t bark would have been nice. (I know, I know, not really a dog at all.) In the end, after much deliberation, we went for a yellow Labrador. My daughter was still at home to train him and was, she kept telling me, tauntingly, a better trainer than me.

 

I’m sure I’m not the only one who only reads the dog books after they bring their puppy home. Yet even the most detailed dog book couldn’t have described how total the impact that Digger has had on my life, especially once I made the decision that I would get my life back quicker if I put him in the middle of it while he needed me most. That is when it hit me. Just as my kids were making moves to leave home, I’d saddled myself with a cross between a toddler and a small pony. If there was such a thing as post-puppy depression, I had it. How could I placate a boisterous, bitey, demanding puppy and keep my writing life afloat? Digger wasn’t going to defend me against future loneliness, I chided myself, he was going to be the cause of it.

 

Then a friend told me about the local dog park. Unlike visiting the dog beach, where my heart leapt into my mouth when Digger careered up the beach and embraced every which dog, right from the start the dog park felt more tame. Digger still careered about, jumping vertically and being rounded up, ears flapping like Dumbo, by faster dogs. But I didn’t feel panicked at the dog park. The metre-high fence around the long rectangular park worked to contain Digger and to relax me.

 

At first we went to the park once a week, then three times and, when my daughter was away, sometimes more. I could do some work, or go to yoga, and leave Digger in the car until we got to the dog park where he ran off his buzzy energy and I chatted to other dog owners who told me all about what I was in for. On cold mornings it was sunny and, even in the rain, dry inside my husband’s oilskin jacket, the hillside park had charm.

 

Initially I chatted to other dog owners to pass the time of day. But as the months passed, I realised that I was doing more than this. It was small talk, yes. But it wasn’t trivial talk. I was getting to know a range of people via their relationship to their dog. The woman who kicked a tennis ball across the kitchen to amuse her collie puppy as she ate her breakfast. And the surprisingly large number of people who slept with their dog on or in their bed.

 

Soon Digger hit adolescence and became possessed with extra buzz. The best way to channel this newfound energy, he decided with the wisdom of his puppy brain, was to go for the collar of other dogs. Not all dogs, and not on every trip to the park. But on those occasions when he did, he’d bite at the other dog’s collar until the play was broken up. Another dog owner took me aside and instructed me in how to lure Digger away before his play became too heated. Did I listen to her? No. I listened. I was polite. But privately I thought that she was interfering and that Digger was just having fun.

 

A month passed during which Digger started going for dogs’ collars at the park more regularly. Thinking that he needed something in his mouth, I bought a long red plastic stick for him to play tug-of-war with other dogs. Problem solved.

 

Three weeks ago, Digger played and played with a Golden Retriever to the point that I asked Peggy’s owner, who I knew to chat to, to give Peggy some time out on lead, which she did. Five minutes later she let Peggy off again and Peggy went straight back to nipping at Digger’s ear. The two dogs ran a little way away, locked in furious play. Then it happened. Digger got his jaw wrapped in a loop round Peggy’s loosened collar which meant that as I tried to pull Digger off Peggy, Peggy’s collar tightened to the point of choking her. Now Peggy’s owner was at my ear, swearing and hissing as I struggled for the thirty long seconds it took me to get Digger’s jaw out of the tightened collar. Peggy vomited over her owner’s shoes and I stood back in a sweat, Digger on his leash.

 

Terry and I looked at each other. We were both crying. Digger was quiet. Neither Terry nor I were angry. Terry said that it had been 50/50, in terms of who was to blame, though I felt it wouldn’t have happened had it not been for Digger’s collar habit. Terry said that the next time they came to the dog park, and Peggy played with Digger, that she would take off Peggy’s collar. I smiled my thanks and silently wondered if Digger and I would ever return to the dog park again.

 

Back home I texted the dog trainer who has helped me in the past and she texted back some sensible advice. At her suggestion, I booked Digger into a second day a week at the country kennels that he was already booked into once a week, where he could get as boisterous and muddy as he liked with 28 other dogs. And for the next few weeks, instead of visiting the dog park, we went for long walks, which Digger didn’t like nearly as much but I liked more because the risk of collar biting on a bush track was nil.

 

A month passed. Last Sunday, I woke up with the thought that I could only return to the dog park if I gave up my happily-ever-after story of the perfect dog, and thought through our next visit before I even got to the park. I got a sardine from the freezer and wrapped it in a plastic bag which I put in my jacket pocket, thinking that I could use it to lure Digger away from another dog if I thought he was about to lose control. I made a mental pact with myself to leave the dog park after a shortish amount of time. And I decided to stay in his range, just in case.

 

It was a cold sunny morning, my favourite weather. Digger seemed happy to be back at the park. Did he know that I was watching out for him as he raced from one pack of dogs to the next? Thankfully he behaved well. Not impeccably, but well for a teenage Labrador. We left the park the moment that he started eyeing off the bright purple harness of a four-month Pug pup. He never found out about the frozen sardine in my pocket and he tagged along, tail wagging, as we walked up the hill, behind the park, to see the early spring lambs. ‘But’, said my daughter, that night at dinner, ‘didn’t you say you were never going to the dog park again?. ‘Yes’, I said. ‘Never say never!’

you only have to know how to cook 12 dishes

Hearing Yotam Ottolenghi speak, in our city concert hall, didn’t change the way I cook. I didn’t go home, his cookbook under one arm, and switch on my computer to buy his rose Harissa paste on-line. But I did go home thinking differently about my life in the kitchen.

 

Two middle-aged men, talking from low comfy chairs on a large stage, in front of a publicity screen of a yellow lemon, wasn’t jaw-dropping theatre. Yet, there we were, 1500 of us, mainly women, lapping up their words as the conversation meandered from the profit-and-loss-led restaurant world, to the pleasures of home cooking.

 

This was when, for me, the conversation got interesting. ‘When friends come to your place for a meal’, Yotam said, ‘they don’t want to be surprised by a new dish. They come to your place because they like you and enjoyed what they ate when they last came over. They don’t come to be impressed by some dish you’ve never cooked before. They came in the hope of talking in a relaxed way round your table.’

 

I sat up in my seat. This is what I’d left my own kitchen table, part way through supper, to hear. Not commercial restaurant gossip. I’d come to think through the perennial dilemma I feel in the kitchen, around wanting and not wanting to cook. I’d come to hear how I might make cooking into something that I looked forward to and liked doing, rather than a chore I had mixed feelings about it.

 

The people I know who love being in the kitchen are good cooks. Some of them are trained chefs. Others devoted themselves to cooking from a young age. All of them seem to thrive on cooking with an audience. They enjoy throwing a meal together, rarely consult recipes, and never appear to fuss. I also know quite a lot of people who, all thumbs in the kitchen, avoid cooking whenever possible. They delegate cooking to an able partner. They eat out. They warm up frozen meals or resort to a small stable of dishes with a minimum of pantry ingredients. They eat to live, rather than the other way round.

 

Yotam Ottolenghi was suggesting another approach to cooking that I hadn’t thought of. Something simpler and so glaringly obvious that I’d spent decades in the kitchen blind to.

 

Ottolenghi isn’t a trained chef. He learned to cook as a student at university on a tight budget. He learned to cook because he found himself starving. He missed his mother’s Middle Eastern cooking and his father’s Italian cooking. He worked out how to cook by experimenting, by trial and error. Possibly as a result of this, thirty years on, he still loves cooking.

 

Sitting in the audience, I felt a weight lift. I wasn’t being told to perfect my knife skills. I didn’t have to fork out for an expensive cooking course held at an inconvenient time and place. I didn’t have to start writing menu plans a week ahead or frequenting special shops to look out expensive ingredients (although, Yotam did keep returning to a rose Harissa paste only available on his on-line shop).

 

‘If you’re a home cook’, he said, ‘be a home a cook. Don’t expect to be a chef. And don’t be put off cooking by cooking shows on television. Home cooking is at an all-time low and the ratings of cooking shows are at an all-time high. Forget about expertise. Just cook the kind of dishes that you like yourself, and your family and friends will too.’

 

‘You don’t have to know how to cook everything. When friends come to your place, they come wanting more of the kind of food they enjoyed last time they came over. They don’t want a stressed out host who can’t relax until after the main course is served. There’s absolutely no rule about having different courses. A home kitchen isn’t a restaurant kitchen, with a sous chef to make sure courses go out on time. Don’t add to the pressure by trying to keep a dish hot in the oven without drying it out. Just get everything on to the middle of the table, and sit back and enjoy the feast.’

 

The two men on the stage nodded in agreement. ‘Besides, home cooking is often code for cooking for kids. And kids don’t like fancy food. But they do like good food. And they never fib about liking a dish. They either do, and say so, or don’t and make a face and push it away’. Laughing between themselves, as they soaked up the murmurs of the audience, Yotam went on to say something that completely changed my attitude to cooking.

 

‘If you’re a home cook’, he said, ‘and nearly all of us are home cooks, you really only need to know how to cook 12 dishes. Good cooking is about practice. Enjoying cooking is about confidence. So it makes sense to focus on a finite number of dishes, a repertoire of dishes, which you can expand on and adapt but always have in your mind to fall back on. You know what I mean. One great soup. One terrific cake. One risotto or rice dish. A vegetable dish that doesn’t have vegetarian stamped all over it and that anyone can tuck into. One amazing dessert. One meal-in-itself salad. One roast that can be barbecued in summer and will warm your kitchen in winter.’

 

‘This’, he said, ‘is all you have to do. If you get these core dishes right, that’s enough. Of course you can change them, but the main thing is to get up enough confidence that you feel able to express yourself in the kitchen. Because unless you get the timing right – cooking is all about timing – you will never feel truly competent. Timing comes down to practice, to doing the same thing over and over, until your brain knows what to do without you telling it.’

 

There was a hush in the auditorium as mobile phones dropped into laps. Did that mean, I wondered, that I didn’t have to buy Ottolenghi’s cookbook? Would I be better off slipping out of the concert hall, at the end of the talk, and scribbling down the 12 dishes I would like to be confident cooking, and stop intimidating myself with a level of expertise that will never be mine?

 

In the end I felt so grateful to Yotam Ottolenghi for saying what I needed him to say – yet till that second hadn’t known I needed him to say – that I bought his yellow cookbook.

 

The next morning at breakfast I sat down with my notebook and wrote down my list of 12 dishes. It felt ridiculously simple to do. There was barely any dithering. I wasn’t beset by the kind of indecision that usually preys on me when I sit down to plan meals. Instead I identified 12 dishes that I knew worked in my kitchen and worked back from that. When I was done I looked over my list. I knew I’d cheated a little, by extending each category. Still, it was a basic list.

 

I also felt pleased to admit that I didn’t want to be a great cook. That I love good food, but don’t always love cooking. The idea of being able to frame my relationship to cooking by identifying a set number of dishes that, like old friends, I can rely on, makes the world of difference to me. I can feel confident in the kitchen without having to master a huge number of recipes. I can be a minimalist cook and feel no shame in that.

I’ll never be a great cook, just as I’ll never be a great artist. But I can be a perfectly good home cook, and I can start right now.

Here is my list:

1. Soup – chicken, stock, vegetable
2. Salad – Greek, Tabbouleh, vinaigrette
3. Roast – chicken/salmon
4. Rice – risotto/fried
5. Ragu/Bolognese
6. Bread – sourdough, pizza
7. Vegetarian – roasted veggies, soaked beans
8. Sauces – humus, mayonnaise, guacamole
9. Eggs – baked, scrambled etc
10. Cake – carrot
11. Tart – fruit
12. Pie – shortcrust