Why Mummy’s Sloshed

Despite my normal-length trousers and the fact that I prefer to play Buzzword Bingo with my colleague Lydia while the creative sorts are whanging on about how, going forward, they’ll be reaching out to take ownership of the synergy outside the box and drilling down to circle back to make this happen in a transparent and diverse value-added paradigm, blah blah blah, wank wank wank, I’ve done rather well at this company. The short-trousered ones come up with things they want to make, and my team and I provide the software to make this happen. I’m in fact now the head of my department, which means that I get an office with a window (and the comfiest chair), and also means I’ll be the first one sacked if anything goes wrong.

I’d be pretty devastated if I lost my job, actually, quite apart from the financial impact it would have. I try to tell myself that I have many transferable skills, and would easily find something else, but I’m forty-eight and I don’t want to start over at a new company where I don’t know that you mustn’t mention After Eights in front of Eric from Marketing because of an unfortunate incident at the Christmas party, and where I don’t know where the toilets are.

Of course, if I got made redundant, perhaps it would be an opportunity to do something completely different. I like my job, but it would be wonderful to have a vocation, something you spring out of bed in the morning raring to go out there and do – something I love. I invented a very clever game app once that made me quite a lot of money – not retire-on money, but enough to make my finances less precarious, until I decided to get divorced, which made things a little rocky again. I’d thought that app invention might have been my vocation, but it turned out all the other ones I tried to invent were rubbish. But it would be nice to have the sort of job I could talk about at length at dinner parties and people would find hearing about it interesting. The trouble is, the older I get, it turns out that the things I love and that might be my vocation mainly seem to be watching rubbish TV, eating cake, sleeping, talking nonsense to my dogs, reading Jilly Cooper, and drinking wine, gin and vodka. I’ve tried and tried to see how I could turn any of these things into a vocation or a paying job, but so far I’ve not come up with anything.

I’ve also tried to expand my hobbies, to see if perhaps I could find my calling that way. Mostly, I found that I really like Vesper Martinis, which not only make you feel very sophisticated when you’re drinking them, but are also an excellent drink choice for ladies who perhaps were not quite as vigilant with their pelvic floor exercises as they might have been. They’re very small, you see, but also extremely potent, so they get you extraordinarily pissed for a very little amount of liquid. Unfortunately, Hannah and I tested this theory to the max when she got a Saturday afternoon off from Little Edward and abandoned him to his father so that we could go out and be ladies what lunch, and we drank four of them after wine at lunch and then we couldn’t speak. Jane called me ‘disgraceful’ when I got home, and also ‘a shameful example’. In my defence, I never ever claimed to be a good example and always held to the theory that since I wouldn’t be a good example, I’d better stand as a terrible warning instead. Of course, on the Day of Shame with all the Vesper Martinis, I was quite unable to communicate this to Jane, being forced instead to mumble that it must’ve been something I ate, and that I needed a ‘lil lie-downy’.

I’ve tried rather more adult ways to find my vocation as well. I always quite fancied being an archaeologist, and thought for a long time that perhaps that would have been my vocation if only I hadn’t done computer science at university to spite my mother, who thought it sounded like my course would be full of bespectacled boys in nylon anoraks and how would I ever find a decent husband on such a course, and who would want to marry someone doing such a male course? My mother thought I should do English Lit like nice girls do, and try to bag a law student early, or maybe a nice doctor. Secretly, of course, since I went to Edinburgh, where all the posh boys that don’t get into Oxford or Cambridge go (or they did before Prince William went to St Andrews), she was hoping I might manage to snag myself a title, but failing that, a lawyer or doctor would be acceptable. Or some nice chap who was going into the City. I don’t think it ever occurred to her that perhaps I was going to university to further my education and pursue a career. As far as she was concerned, the only possible reason for a woman to go to university was to find herself a rich husband, like she did.

Since I’d been so unreasonable and clearly scuppered my chances with the lawyers and doctors by tainting myself by association with the beige-anorak brigade (who were actually perfectly nice and normal and didn’t wear beige anoraks at all), she was relieved I did at least manage to get myself an architect in the form of Simon, though I was annoyed at myself that to some degree I had followed my mother’s formula and met a nice boy at university and gone on to marry him. In my defence, I probably had a lot more casual sex with random blokes than my mother ever did in her day, and when I met Simon I was so utterly head over heels in love with him that getting married just seemed the natural next step, because of course we wanted to spend the rest of our lives together, so why wouldn’t we get married?

I always had a hankering for archaeology, though, especially after it turned out that Simon and I wouldn’t be spending the rest of our lives together after all, and so I took part in a community dig in our village a couple of years ago. It turned out that archaeology wasn’t my vocation. I’d thought it would involve careful sifting through priceless artefacts and then perhaps some Indiana Jones-style adventures with a rugged and dashing archaeology sort in a tweed jacket with leather patches on the elbows. I had a vague vision of myself with my hair in a prim bun, and some academic-looking spectacles, and at some point I’d take down my hair and remove my glasses, and the rugged and dashing sort would exclaim, ‘Why, Miss Green, you’re beautiful,’ and then we’d snog loads while fighting off the bad guys trying to steal our amulet or something.

It wasn’t like that. There was a lot of mud. Archaeologists’ clothing turned out to tend much more towards sensible man-made fibres than tweed jackets, and even if there had been a rugged and dashing sort there, there would have been no snogging, since there were also twenty-five OAPs getting in the way and telling me off for using my trowel wrong. They made me draw pictures of stones. I don’t know why I had to draw the stones and we couldn’t just take a photograph. I suspect they made me draw the stones to give me something to do and stop my overenthusiastic trowelling, even though I don’t even see how you CAN trowel mud wrong. I lost a pencil and got told off. I did see a shrew, though, and I liked the shrew, and also I like my dogs, of course, and I have three chickens who only semi hate me, so then I wondered if maybe zoology was my calling, but I googled it and it turns out the top job for zoologists is not being David Attenborough but being a zoo keeper, which even I can guess probably involves dealing with a lot of poo, especially if you get the elephant or rhinoceros enclosures. So it was back to the drawing board again.

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