Last Thursday was a perfect day. Not perfect in the sense that everything went ‘right’ (whatever that means), but perfect in a way that makes you look at your life and feel unbelievably lucky.
 
It was sports day at my daughters’ primary school. A glorious, sunny day made even more poignant due to the fact it was my eldest’s last sports day at the school. Children were lined up on wooden benches and mini school chairs, resplendent in tee shirts baring the colours of their school house. Squinting under sunhats and wriggling excitedly in their seats as parents filtered over the playground to the field.
 
We desperately scan the rows of tiny faces to find our own offspring and trill with excitement as we spot their beaming faces. Of course, we only saw them an hour ago – frantically deciding which yellow tee-shirt was the comfiest and being asked to brush their teeth 12 times, but still.
 
Picnic rugs out, head teacher’s welcome speech done (on a speaker system that only lets you catch every third word, but you get the gist) time to start the races. Running, sack, three-legged, hoops, the timeless egg and spoon! We’re whooping and cheering like it’s London 2012 again. The rush of joy when the creature you made smashes the egg and spoon like a boss. The thrill of finding out which house has won the most points.
 
It’s joyous. Simply joyous. For a moment on a school field bathed in sunshine there is nothing to touch us. All the headlines and worries, the annoyances and fears, disappear. Even the occasional work email is dismissed. It can wait. We could be any set of parents in any town from any point in the last 30 years. The smiles, the cheers, the warmth and the fun outweigh, just for an hour or two, anything that lies beyond the school gates.
 
We wave goodbye to our little ones as though they are setting off on an Atlantic voyage, rather than knowing we’ll be back at the school gates in an hour’s time to pick them up – and return to work or laundry piles knowing that just for a moment – today was a perfect day.

Like thousands of others, we’ve been spending our evenings in the company of four lads from Liverpool as they tinker with their guitars, casually creating some of the best music ever written.
 
It goes without saying, but I’ll do it anyway, that Get Back is one of the best pieces of television of the year. Every moment is fascinating. The interactions. The fashion. The jokes. The arguments. Yoko just being there. Not to mention Glyn Johns – a scene stealer if ever there was one.
 
What I wasn’t prepared for was how emotional Get Back it would be.
 
The Beatles have always been special to me. They’ve been part of my conscious from the moment our family got its first CD player. We only had three CDs to play on it at first, and one of those was Sgt Pepper. When the rest of the house was busy I got the huge stereo all to myself. I would don the neck-bendingly heavy headphones and listen to Pepper over and over again.
 
I was captivated by my mother’s stories of phoning in sick to work to travel from Manchester to Liverpool to watch them play at the Cavern. From then, until the present day, my mum in the 1960s remains my absolute icon – she’s not bad at a Sunday roast either.
 
The Beatles were in my life from that moment on. In every CD collection, on every iPod, saved to every Spotify playlist.
 
When I moved to London, a flat just off Abbey Road became available and it was a no-brainer. Yes, the kitchen was the size of a primary school supplies cupboard (no joke – we had a one at a time policy in there) but I got to walk over the Abbey Road zebra crossing every single day on my way to the underground. Over the years I took hundreds of photos for tourists as they recreated the famous album artwork and pointed lost fans find to the right spot.
 
Then, coming home from a birthday dinner one year, my boyfriend stopped on the exact piece of road the Fab Four had walked over 50 years previously – and proposed.
 
At school, for a time, I was in a Spice Girls tribute act (Baby, if you’re wondering) and one night we were the ‘support’ for a local Beatles band called Accrington Stanley. It was clear, therefore, that when we got married, they were the only choice for our wedding band. The wedding day drew to a close surrounded by friends and family merrily singing Hey Jude at the top of their voices.  
 
Over the years I’ve wavered over who is my favourite. Paul at first, as he seemed the friendliest. Angst-ridden teen years, it was all about John. 20s and 30s were firmly George. Watching Get Back it has switched almost every 10 minutes. I’m obsessed with George’s boots, Ringo’s eyes and calming demeanour, John’s manic playfulness. Then, Part Three starts and in walks Paul hand-in-hand with a six-year-old Heather and I literally fell to pieces.
 
Potted background: I too was a small blonde child who acquired a bearded step-dad who is an absolute legend. OK, so he isn’t a Beatle, he’s actually a town planner, but still. I was in BITS. My husband was alarmed by the tears at first, then found the whole thing quite amusing. Needless to say, Paul has rocketed to the number one spot in my heart once more and may stay there. All long hair and bass and beard. Sigh.
 
Only an hour and a half left of the eight-hour feast and we are still left wanting more. Caitlin Moran tweeted recently that she will be watching it once a year for the rest of her life – I may just join her.
 
 

I think I have an addiction. I don’t smoke or take drugs ­– heck I’m 40 and I’ve never been drunk. Nonetheless, addiction has found me. It crept up slowly. I didn’t see it happening. One minute I was hanging a picture on the wall, the next asking for a nail gun for my birthday.
 
The problem is, I think I may be addicted to DIY.
 
There wasn’t much of a DIY scene in our previous house. It was a new build, so everything was already shining, new and freshly painted. I enjoyed the odd touch up, a shelf here and there. All good, innocent fun.
 
Then we moved. To an older house. An older house that needed work. I started browsing Pinterest, followed house renovation accounts on Instagram, then Stacey Solomon moved house and I was done for.
 
She also moved to a fixer-upper (albeit four times the size and hundreds of years old) and her Instagram stories were my gateway. She was painting and sanding. Ripping up carpet and tearing off wallpaper. It all looked like such fun.
 
Soon, I was tearing the 90s floral wallpaper feature wall down, painting the downstair’s loo tiles and booking in trades (only for things that, if I attempted, could prove fatal). Ordering wallpaper and paint samples and booking my dad in to teach me how to change light fixings.
 
Today, when I should have been writing, I was furtively searching Screwfix for a thing called a ‘cable channel’. The joy of finding the right width was better than anything you get at the bottom of a bottle of Moët. I’m guessing. I obviously wouldn’t know.
 
My ever-accommodating husband watches from a far. Ready to step in to hold a spirit level, unscrew screws that haven’t been touched in 30 years and order wood from the timber merchant when I chicken out. He paints the parts I can’t reach and pops his head into rooms I’m to check I haven’t been gassed by paint fumes or accidentally uncovered asbestos.
 
We’re getting our biggest bit work done in a few weeks. Actual builders are coming in to knock walls down and rip out the kitchen. I’m hoping I won’t be pressed up against the door like a Victorian orphan outside a pie shop, longing to have a go on their sledgehammers (oo-err).
 
Maybe, instead, it will cure me of my obsession. Watching the professionals at work may make me see the truth of my own inadequacies and urge me to hang up my electric screwdriver forever. Or maybe not. I’m guessing not.

​Wandering from half-packed room to half-packed room, I find myself asking: WWJD?
 
Alas, I haven’t turned to religion under the stress of deadlines, an impending house-move and turning 40. Rather than calling on high: What Would Jesus Do? I’m asking: What Would Jo Do?
 
My sister Jo is a wonder to me. Her house is clutter free and always has been. I can step into her home unannounced on any given day and be met with a peaceful calm that can only be gained through a sniper’s instinct for tat.  
 
She’s not a Marie Kondo devotee or an Instagram-esque tidier – annoyingly she’s just naturally tidy. She does it without thinking. While my kitchen drawers overflow with paperwork, Kinder-egg toys and novelty bottle openers, hers have the things she needs, plus SPACE. You can see the bottom without need for excavation.
 
That’s not to say her house is a Hyacinth Bucket / Monica Gellar mash up where no glass goes un-coastered. It’s a warm, welcoming, lived-in home. Small pairs of shoes and dog toys lie there and about. She just doesn’t have seventeen pairs of shoes bursting out of a cupboard, or plates of toast crusts lying on the arm of the sofa from that morning’s breakfast. She naturally picks up the things that need to be picked up. It’s a gift I will be eternally jealous of.
 
After six years growing small people (and one small dog) in our first bought and paid for home, we seem to have accumulated a lot of ‘stuff’. Mementos and gadgets. Toys and junk models. Books, books and more BOOKS. As I sit staring at a pile of CDs that haven’t been played since the early-00s, I ask myself WWJD? I already know the answer. Keep a few and dump the rest. What my subconscious-dwelling elder sibling doesn’t know is that I’ve already whittled this pile down from a huge box. That was painful enough. In my head, I’m keeping them to make collages of album covers for some kind of future Pinterest-worthy artwork. I’m holding each one and remembering the shop I bought them in (mainly Spin-a-Disk in Northampton and Sonic Sounds in Lincoln complete with patchy floor and teenage-boy fug).
 
To date, we have donated around 8 bags of clothes and bits and bobs to charity. Without my WWJD mantra, this would have been much less. Add to this a husband who airily casts an eye over the charity bags and says, ‘Oh, you’re getting rid of that?’ as though I had just bundled up one of the children. Honestly, I think I deserve a medal.  
 
I have finally got rid of pre-pregnancy clothes and books I didn’t enjoy. The kitchen gadgets we never used and commemorative plastic cups. Toys the kids haven’t played with for years. Embarrassing early writing samples (not all – I have left a few for my grandchildren to wince over when I’m gone).
 
After all that purging, I reluctantly admit that the loss feels good. I’ve always had a tendency to surround myself with knickknacks, but clearing the clutter from the loft, under the bed, on top of the wardrobe, is scarily liberating.

I won’t go as far as to say no material things matter, because they do. The box with my babies’ hospital tags and the outfits they came home in are more precious than gold. The tattered set of Jane Austens I bought from a charity shop with my best friend as a teenager – priceless. The ticket stub from my first ‘official’ date with the husband – probably means I hoard too much, but I am grateful to have it. And that sums all this waffling up, really. Gratefulness.

Grateful to be in a place where I have things to purge and things to keep, and grateful for my inspirationally tidy sister.



​

​For most of my life I have been skinny. At school I regularly batted away anorexic jibes from the mean girls, and reassured the kinder ones that I didn’t have an eating disorder. I ate, I just didn’t put on weight. At secondary school I grew tall, and my body just couldn’t keep up.
 
I envied girls with curves. Boobs and bums. Athletic legs that looked perfect in skirts where as I, quite frankly, looked like a heron. Sixth Form coincided with the rise of the Kate Moss, waif aesthetic. My stick-like figure was now envied, but not in a nice way. I once overheard a conversation where my name was mentioned and someone piped up: ‘Oh you know, the one who walks around thinking she’s a model.’
 
I did not think I was a model. I still thought I was a heron.
 
I was desperate to wear the All Saints-esque baggy cargo pants and crop tops, like my more diminutive friends. Alas, the selection on offer at Miss Selfridge were always far too short for me and, unfortunately, it now looked like the poor heron had got caught in a carrier bag. The pockets of my cargo pants flapping in the wind.
 
On to university and not much changed, weight-wise. I was eating unhealthier foods (natch) and without the institutionalised torture of double cross-country to endure – exercising less. However, the comments remained. A friend of my boyfriend (now husband) even said my arms were so thin I looked like I was in pain. They aren’t friends anymore. He was a bit of knob, to be honest.
 
My point is, being skinny wasn’t all Instagram and fabulous clothes. Mainly because when I was a teen / 20s Instagram hadn’t been invented…
 
After two babies (and two C-sections) my body recovered. I didn’t have to think about losing baby weight because it just disappeared. I had a bit of a flappy tummy, but nothing to write home about. As annoying as it sounds (and I know how annoying it sounds) I just didn’t think about my weight. Breastfeeding, high metabolism, who knows. I was still a slim jim. Not a heron anymore, but certainly not a penguin.
 
As I reach my 40s, I feel like my body has changed completely. A large part has to do with the pandemic, of course. Our days centred around food and we have eaten handsomely (what else was there to do?). Lunchtime spreads provided comfort from a scary world and missed loved ones. Despite taking up jogging, we were moving less. No school run, no work meetings, no commute. I went up a dress size and all but two bras felt like they were suffocating. I finally had boobs.
 
The hard-wired, patriarchally-conditioned female in me started to panic. I have an extra roll when I sit down – it must be banished! I simply can’t wear size 14 jeans even if they are comfortable!
 
How stupid. How pointless. I’ve been skinny. I didn’t particularly enjoy it. Why would I punish myself to get to be that size again? I’m 5ft 9”, strong with a healthy BMI, good diet and wonderful family and friends. That’s a goal, not a situation to escape from.
 
Luckily, my social media isn’t filled with body-perfect celebrities. Thanks to Jameela Jamil, Em Clarkson, Danae Mercer et al, I’m bombarded by positive messages and calls to arms to ignore diet culture in favour of health. Plus, I absolutely, 100%, do NOT want to pass on body insecurity to my children. Philippa Perry, in her wonderful book The Book You Wish Your Parents Had Read encourages us to be in all the photos, regardless of how we feel we look at that moment in time. Importantly, she also advises to never body shame yourself in front of your children – as this is where our narratives begin.
 
All this sounds rather wonderful and positive, doesn’t it? But 39 years of advertising and messaging doesn’t disappear overnight. I still worry my tummy will look big in certain outfits, or that friends who haven’t seen me for a while will be horrified that I’ve put on a few small pounds. It’s maddening and I am grateful to the women out there who are campaigning for the media that I grew up with to be regulated. Airbrushing and filters have a lot to answer for.
 
However, for the most part, I am looking forward to sailing into my 40s confidently. Riding on my successes as a person and the love of my family, and a few pairs of fabulous mom jeans and graphic tees, to give me confidence. After all, as Jameela Jamil says, we are so much more than what we weigh.
 
For anyone who might be struggling with post-lockdown body worries, try this trick I read about the other day: Think of the people around you who you love and admire – both men and women. Think of the adjectives you would use to describe them. What comes to mind? Funny, Kind, Intuitive, Strong, Loving? I could pretty much lay my life on the fact you didn’t say ‘Thin’.
 
After all, it does not matter if you look like a heron, penguin, or, as is my current vibe, a fabulous giraffe.
 

 Typically, January is most cited as the month everyone hates. It’s cold, grey and there’s no Christmas to look forward to. People stop drinking, stop eating dairy, stop eating all together. Start going to the gym, start running. Payday takes at least 12 weeks to arrive. Plus, our social feeds are filled with the empty, ridiculous platitude: ‘New year, new you!’.
 
As well as all this unmitigated crap (for crap it truly is, as I believe Jane Austen once wrote) January now has the weight of carrying 2021 on it’s world-weary back. For some reason, a decent amount of the population believed that saying goodbye to 2020 on the stroke of midnight meant that, magically, COVID would disappear and we could all start hugging with gay abandon in a matter of days. The thing is, COVID doesn’t care if it’s December 31st, 2020, 2021 or Tuesday afternoon. It’s still going to keep doing its thing.
 
I worry for January 2021. There’s so much pressure to be great. It’s not used to it. It’s like the office junior who’s given a big presentation to do because everyone else is off sick. With COVID, presumably.
 
I used to love January. New stationery, for one. All the leftover Christmas chocolate. A sense of opportunities to be taken, if you felt so inclined. And it’s also quite a fruitful time in publishing. But now everyone else is all over January, too. It feels like that time I did a presentation about Jamiroquai in Year Seven and all the boys said I was ‘weird’ (oh yes, well done Scott for the seventh presentation of the day on Tottenham Hotspur. I grew up in Northamptonshire, why did all the boys support Tottenham?)
 
I digress.
 
A few years later, JK went all mainstream and everyone was listening to Canned Heat on shared headphones in the corridors before double science. I was livid, naturally.  
 
This year, January feels more of a slog thanks to Lockdown 2.0. The sparkly distraction of Christmas has gone. Homeschooling is in full swing. More restrictions seem inevitable. But one thing I’m not going to do is blame the month. That would be like blaming your shoes for stepping in poo. Instead, I’m going to focus all that pent-up month-rage on June. June is the WORST. No family birthdays, no holidays (up-top, school-age parents!) and there’s always a random, horrible, heat wave.
 
Let’s all get behind January this year. It’s going to need all the help it can get.

*Not January Jones. Although, do leave her alone, too. She’s done nothing to you.

I haven’t written a blog for a while. There are two reasons for this:

1. By the time the two Halflings are fed, bathed and wrangled into bed, I clean up the house (and by that I mean sweep enough toys off the sofa to allow me to sit down) flip open my laptop and do whatever work I am actually paid to do. 
2. We’ve just moved house. And here’s the thing. When you are building up to a house move – once the arse-achingly awful financial and bureaucratic stuff is out of the way – you start to daydream about what each room will look like, maybe even create a Pinterest board or two (actually seven). The reality is: you move in, unpack the essentials and life carries on. Laundry needs to be done, food needs to be cooked and, heck, The Great British Bake Off and Mad Men still need to be watched.

 
In a nutshell – I’ve been busy. All of the above still applies, I’ve just got more okay with it. There are still no pictures on the walls and six boxes (mainly containing books) to be unpacked.
 
It’s been nearly two months since the move and today I’ve been thinking about our old town. I absolutely love where we have moved to, but it’s only when you step away from a place that its idiosyncrasies stand out.  
 
For just over four years our family resided in a quirky little enclave called Tring in Hertfordshire. We loved it and found it maddeningly frustrating in equal measure. So, now that we’ve moved away – lured by a bigger house and family on the doorstep – I wanted to write my own rough guide for people who (gasp) might not have heard of it.
 
NB: To those reading this who still live in Tring, I mean all of the following with Love. Capital L.
 
Tring - Home to the world's best-looking window cleaner. Seriously. Fact. I'm happily married and not really inclined to noticing other men (ahem), but honestly Mother Nature – well done. Just. Goodness me. I'm sure he's the main factor his business is still running as I'm not sure his brain matches up to the package. I don't think I even paid him for the last two times he came round (to wash the windows, I hasten to add). 

​Tring - Where, if you want to open a successful business, make sure it's a hairdressers or estate agents. In the last year, four units on the high street have been changed into two hairdressers, another estate agent and since we moved, two empty shops have been knocked together to form a second branch of an existing estate agent. That will make 11 places to cut your hair and nine places to buy a house in less than a mile’s worth of high street. Tring deserves better than this. If there are any restaurateurs or deli owners reading this (what am I saying, OF COURSE there are) get thee to one of the delude of estate agents in Tring and buy up some real estate.

   

​Tring – Where hundreds (possibly thousands?) of long-deceased stuffed animals reside in a branch of the Natural History Museum. It’s a beautiful building filled with specimens that are well over 100 years old and worth a visit. If only to see this guy... I miss his cheery little face.  

Tring - Where you'll meet the friendliest Marks and Spencer staff in the country. Go there after visiting the museum to remind yourself what mammals with a pulse look like. I once spotted a cashier out jogging and cheerfully waved and said hello – I don’t think she had the foggiest who I was, however.
 
Tring - A place as intensely proud of its history as it is fearsome of its future. Recently, Tring celebrated its 700th birthday with a parade through the town (which E took part in, dressed in traditional medieval attire – no, it wasn’t a Disney princess dress with a mop cap made out of a napkin. Every peasant had their own quota of bright blue satin and gold sparkly embroidery in 1715). There were also impressive floral displays and month-long celebrations. All very jolly. However, when a plan for 400+ new homes to be built on the town’s outskirts was proposed, it was met with indignation, petitions in every cafe and the sharpening of pitchforks.
 
And finally, Tring... Where we welcomed our beautiful babies into the world, met life-long friends, had a pair of fabulous neighbours who knitted stunning cardigans and scary clowns. Where E went to a fantastic nursery and wonderful pre-school, where we lived in two houses and nearly bought two more, where we made the painful, but actually brilliant, decision to move away from.

​We’ll miss you, but we’ll be back. 

Over the past two weeks, if you had happened to glance into our front room past 7pm (and a lot of people do, we live within a tiny cluster of Victorian streets where the main pastime is eyeing up other people’s front rooms) you would have seen a glowing laptop, a pack or two of playing cards and a puzzled expression on my hitherto un-wrinkled brow (P’ha!). No, things haven’t become so bad that I’ve developed an online gambling habit. I have, however, been writing a book about card games and it’s been surprisingly fun. After a few rounds of my new favourite game Spit (see me for the rules) I sent off my manuscript and headed for the next project – a retelling of some classic fairy tales.

It’s weeks like this that I love doing what I do. Next week’s blog post: I’m so tired, why do I do this? Blah blah blah....

It was E’s fourth birthday last week. Four. I can’t believe she’s four. Some days it seems she’s much older, some days it seems she’s still a baby. Since M came along I think I have taken for granted that she’s only been in this world for four years. That’s less time than One Direction have been doing...  whatever it is that they do.

I expect too much of her. I expect her to be level headed and reasonable 100% of the time, when really, how can I expect that of her when I can’t achieve it myself?  And I've been around 29 years longer. After a day of whining, squabbles, refusals and demands I sometimes can’t wait for bedtime, only to look at her sleeping and feel that swell of tears behind my eyes just thinking how perfect and beautiful she is. How clever she is. How funny and, yes, talented she is. No, I refuse to hear the bum notes in her rendition of Let It Go. Or that she says 9, 10, eleventeen. That’s just logical. A perfect rainbow scribbled over in black crayon? Surely a comment on the political and economic climate of the day.

I am sure most mothers would pick certain things about their children they would like to... um... ‘tweak’. Upgrade. I would take out the whining audio and replace it with a sweet, quiet voice as the default setting for example. But really, doesn’t she have the right to whine? She’s four. I’ll say that again. Four. 48 months. That’s a very short space of time to learn how to eat, speak, walk, use a pencil, use the toilet, be polite, keep clean, use a scooter, ride a bike. It’s exhausting.

I looked at E yesterday as she napped on the sofa following a particularly grueling three hours at nursery school and was struck by a memory of coming home  at that age. Feeling that wash of relief and exhaustion. Being back in the family home, warm and safe. I realised how fast she is growing up and how much her small shoulders have to carry. Not only starting education, but being a big sister – the ‘grown-up girl’ in the family. That’s a whole lot of responsibility. There’s toys to be fetched, weaning to be helped with (‘No, darling, I’m not sure M would like a fizzy cola bottle for desert, but thank you.’) toys to be passed down, voices to be lowered during nap time and, worst of all, parents to be shared. Have I mentioned she’s four?

So, in the final minutes before I pick her up from another afternoon at the local school, I am determined to give her a bit more of a break, cut her a little more slack, play princesses with her for longer than the half an hour it usually takes for me to want to tell Elsa where to go.

Until she’s five of course, as that’s really quite grown up enough.