Today is my birthday. I am now the grandly depressing age of forty-two. And it is a Monday. There should be a law against having birthdays on Mondays. It is absolutely the worst day of the week to have a birthday on.

My forty-second birthday was not nearly as good as my fortieth. I had been rather in dread of my fortieth, convinced that it was nothing more than the marking of the inexorable slide into cronedom and haghood, that it would be the bringer of sagging and wrinkling and walking into a room only to announce that I couldn’t remember what I had gone in there for (actually, that is happening more and more). But in the event, Simon swept me off to Paris for a gloriously romantic weekend (though I do not recommend having sex after you have been eating croissants in bed, the crumbs get everywhere and are very hard to remove).

We walked hand in hand by the Seine, and Simon grumbled yet again about why I felt the need to buy old postcards (‘Because I just do, OK, Simon, it’s not my fault that you have no soul’), we baulked in horror at the queues for the Eiffel Tower, and Simon was forced to bundle me out the Louvre when I took exception to the crowds of tourists clustered around the Mona Lisa, as I was very hot and rather over people and was remarking loudly that I was not at all impressed and wasn’t it rather small and dingy a painting for people to make such a fuss about, and some of the tourists, having travelled halfway across the world to make a dream come true by seeing the Mona Lisa, were muttering and taking exception to my views on Great Art. Due to the many people in Paris, I also found it necessary to frequently pop into bijou cafés and have my equilibrium restored with delightful pichets of vin rouge, which meant that I largely spent the weekend in a splendidly blurry haze.

There was one quite unfortunate moment, though, when Simon left me alone in the very posh hotel, as I wanted a soak in the bath, and he decided to go down to the bar for a drink. The hotel had the most gloriously huge, deep, wide bathtub I had ever seen – not only that, but it was a Jacuzzi bath! Oh the bliss, I thought! How relaxed and reinvigorated I would be after a good old wallow in that!

I tipped the tiny little bottle of ‘complimentary’ bubble bath into the splendidly deep, hot bath I had run, hopped in and set the Jacuzzi settings to ‘high’, but instead of lying back and enjoying a tranquil moment with lovely warm jets of water soothing my aching muscles, I found myself being spun around into a vortex. The bath was so large, and the Jacuzzi so powerful, I was sucked into a whirlpool in the middle of the bath, unable to reach the controls on the side and turn the bastarding thing off. In addition, the VERY FUCKING TINY bottle of bubble bath had been whipped into a giant foam mountain, obscuring my vision, disorientating me as to where in the bath I was or where the control panel was, and very shortly spilling over the edge of the bath.

Simon, thank God, had got downstairs to the bar, realised he had forgotten his phone and come back upstairs for it. He opened the door to our room to be greeted by bubbles pouring from under the bathroom door, and me screaming for help. When he finally finished laughing he did at least turn off the bath and rescue me, but it is very difficult to attempt to maintain any illusion of poise when one has had to be fished from a killer bath, looking like a drowned rat.

This was also the evening that I insisted we went to a jazz bar in Montmartre so we could be cool and Parisian and sophisticated. Simon had warned me I wouldn’t like it, and sure enough, within about ten minutes I was grumbling that it was just noise and there was no proper tune. Simon looked smug and pretended he was enjoying it, while calling me a philistine. He wouldn’t let us leave till we had finished our drinks, and as I had demanded a Campari and soda, thinking it would make me look very European, as well as being pretty and pink, it took me quite a long time to choke it down. It turned out that Campari and soda actually tastes like very nasty cough syrup and Simon said that he wasn’t buying me another drink if I wasted that one, as it had been the princely sum of €15 in the over-priced jazz bar. Sometimes Simon is very cruel.

Anyway, now I am forty-two. Quite irretrievably into the realms of the fortysomethings, which is even worse than when I turned thirty-one and had histrionics because I was now a thirty-something (mainly because I remembered watching Thirty-something in my teens and thinking how terribly old they all were, and now I was a fucking thirtysomethinger myself, and I was afraid of turning into Hope, who always seemed so boring and sanctimonious, even though everyone found her inexplicably fanciable, a bit like Sharon in EastEnders). My forty-second birthday was celebrated by hoovering, doing the laundry, shouting at the children that they were not even to look at each other, much less speak to each other since they did not seem able to say a single word to their sibling without winding them up, and eating an indifferent takeaway when I insisted I wasn’t cooking on my birthday, as Simon had huffed and puffed about going out because he had an early meeting the next day, and ‘It is Monday night, darling, and it’s not like it’s actually a special birthday, is it?’

No, no, he’s quite right, it’s not a special birthday, because it’s only my birthday. Everyone else in this house gets special birthdays every year, because I bloody well make sure they are special, but no one ever thinks to repay the favour for me.

Tuesday, 13 September

Well, I don’t know what the significance of the cock and balls in the interview room was, but whatever it was there for, I passed the test (either that or the other candidates reacted to it even worse than I did – perhaps they added spurting jizz and pubes?). Anyway, the whys are not important. What is important is that I got a SECOND INTERVIEW. It’s next Monday, which should give me plenty of time to prepare, and even better, it’s with their head of development who is currently in California, so it’s a phone interview and I don’t have to worry about what to wear! There was a horrible moment when I thought it might be a video call, and I would have to find a non-scabby corner of my house to sit in and look executivey, but they said just an ordinary conference call with the Very Important Man and Morose Ed would be fine, so I don’t even have to put make-up on and can fish crumbs out of my bra mid-conversation if need be! Happy belated birthday to me! Maybe my family is indifferent to me, but at least the universe or karma or something is on my side.

Wednesday, 14 September

Oh buggering bollocking arseholing twatbums. Tonight was ‘Meet the Teacher Night’. Everyone knows that even if your child has had the same teacher for the last three years, you have to go along to Meet the Teacher Night (although you don’t actually get to Meet the Teacher – you get to sit on a tiny chair and watch a PowerPoint presentation about the curriculum that will in fact bear no resemblance whatsoever to what your child will really learn about over the coming year), because if you don’t you are Judged, both by the Unmet Teacher and by the other parents, who will notice your absence. And of course, despite the fact that most people have more sense than to shell out for a babysitter to enable them both to go to the Meet the Teacher Night, there is always at least one extremely smug and enthusiastic couple there together, who hold up all the proceedings by asking inane questions about how the teacher might deal with completely hypothetical situations. Meanwhile the rest of us attempt not to roll our eyes or face palm because these tits are causing tedious delays until the moment when we can pop home and sink face first into a large gin.

I thought I was being nice by giving Katie a lift to Meet the Teacher Night, so she didn’t feel daunted walking into the school by herself, but it turned out that this was a foolish thing to do, because although Katie is very lovely, and also a kindred spirit, which is nice to have living across the road, she is also a much better person than me, as well as still being naive and innocent in matters of playground politics.

Thus it was that when we walked into the school foyer together and found Fiona Montague and Perfect Lucy Atkinson’s Perfect Mummy standing there, brandishing clipboards menacingly as they attempted to sign people up for the PTA, instead of sidling past with a feeble excuse and trying not to make eye contact, Katie stopped and said she would LOVE to hear more about the PTA.

‘Oh, that sounds marvellous!’ said Katie with enthusiasm. ‘I mean, who wouldn’t want to help raise funds for the school? And I expect it is also a really good way to meet other parents, isn’t it?’

Lucy’s Mummy and Fiona brightly assured Katie that yes, indeed, it was an excellent way for someone new to the school to meet other parents, probably much the best way there was.

‘And what about you, Ellen?’ suggested Katie, ‘You’ll join too, won’t you, and keep me on the right track, stop me making any terrible playground-politics faux pas? I don’t really know how all this works, but you must be an old hand by now.’

‘Errr,’ I said desperately. ‘Well, the thing is …’

‘What’s wrong, Ellen? Don’t you want to help raise money for the school?’ asked Katie with wide-eyed innocence.

‘Yes, of course I do,’ I protested indignantly. ‘And I am already on the list of people who have agreed to help at actual events. I’m just not totally sure that I’m really a committee person, that’s all!’

‘Oh, there’s nothing to it!’ said Lucy’s Mummy.

‘It really takes hardly any time at all!’ chirped Fiona.

‘Think of the children!’ begged Katie.

And so somehow, after seven years of cunningly avoiding joining the PTA, I found myself agreeing to go along to the AGM and even to consider a committee role, as long as it wasn’t Treasurer, in case I accidently embezzled the money and had to go to prison while the children featured in a Sad Face article in the Daily Mail.

Simon laughed like a drain when I told him of this when I got home, and reminded me of how, when Jane first started school, I had been so terrified of being forced to join the PTA that I had had a series of distressing dreams in which I was attending PTA coffee mornings or committee meetings, only to find that I was stark bollock naked. Sometimes I fear that Simon is not as supportive a husband as he could be. I also really hope that there was nothing prophetic about all my naked PTA dreams – no strangers need to see a woman of my age naked, no matter what Trinny and Susannah used to claim as they made those poor unlucky women strip off while they jiggled their boobs. Thinking about it, that was such a weird programme. Who thought going on it would be a good idea? ‘I know, I’m not very confident, and I don’t like my clothes, so I’ll go on national telly and let a pair of poshos grab my tits, before advising me that a nice scarf will be the end to all my woes!’ It was probably the thin end of the wedge that led to programmes like Embarrassing Bodies, when people who claim they are too ashamed to go to the doctors are quite happy to whip their suppurating cocks out on camera (I once made the mistake of watching a clap special of Embarrassing Bodies. On the plus side, I lost three pounds, as it put me off my dinner for days).

Monday, 19 September

Aaaargh! Today is my second interview, by phone, and oh happy days, Simon is sick. Really sick. Not just with a sniffle, or a cold, or a bit of cough. He is terribly, dreadfully debilitated, and it is touch and go whether he will make it. He sits hunched over his laptop, wrapped in his nastiest and most synthetic fleece, googling and googling his symptoms, finding ever more terminal diagnoses and wondering aloud every five minutes whether he should call NHS 24 or an ambulance. In between he groans dramatically, or coughs feebly.

‘You have man flu!’ I said unsympathetically.

Simon moaned pathetically. ‘I think it might be Zika virus,’ he whimpered.

‘How can you have Zika virus? You haven’t been anywhere with Zika!’ I pointed out briskly.

‘I was in London last week. There was a woman on the Tube who kept coughing. That could be where I caught it.’

‘No, darling, you did not catch Zika on the Tube, because it is not an airborne virus. It is spread by the special Zika mosquitoes. And anyway, Zika is only serious if you are a pregnant woman, and last time I looked, my love, you were neither a woman nor pregnant! So I think perhaps you might be malingering a little and making something of a meal out of the fact that you are suffering from a common fucking cold!’

‘I’m sure I have a fever,’ Simon mewed, still tapping away at Dr Google. ‘Can you take my temperature? Ebola is airborne. Maybe I’ve got Ebola. The first symptoms are a fever, a headache, joint and muscle pain, a sore throat and severe muscle weakness. I have all of them! Oh God, I have Ebola. I’m going to die. Don’t you even care? You are so unfeeling. Please take my temperature.’

‘If you did have Ebola, why would I want to come anywhere near you?’ I said. ‘But you don’t. You have a severe case of hypo-fucking-chondria, that’s all.’

‘My poor nose is so sore,’ sniffed Simon. ‘Why don’t we have any of the special Balsam tissues?’

‘Because they cost twice as much as ordinary tissues.’

‘Why are you so unsympathetic?’ he whimpered.

‘Because you have a cold. A fucking cold! Man the fuck up!’ I snapped brusquely.

‘But I feel so ill. It must be more than a cold. Please take my temperature.’

‘You know the most reliable way to take a temperature is rectally …’ I said evilly.

‘What? No! You’re not putting it up my bum! Just put it under my arm or something.’

‘That gives very inaccurate results …’

‘I just want a bit of love and sympathy from my wife. Is that too much to ask for? Just a little bit of nurturing, but instead you are threatening to violate me with a thermometer. Why are you so cruel?’

‘I am sympathetic. I made you a cup of tea when I got home from picking up the kids and made no comment whatsoever on the bloody mess you made in the kitchen while I was gone, while apparently being too sick to get off the sofa!’

‘I was just trying to keep my strength up,’ whispered Simon feebly.

‘Well, now you have fortified yourself, you need to look after the children and keep them QUIET, because I have this phone interview at 5.30 p.m. Do you think you can do that?’

‘What? Who has a phone interview at that time?’ scoffed Simon.

‘One of them’s in America.’

‘So?’

‘The time difference? I can take the call upstairs, if you can just keep the kids down here and out of my hair so I can actually concentrate and hear myself think. Please, Simon, this is important!’

‘But I feel awful,’ groaned Simon. ‘What am I supposed to do with them? Can’t you just tell them to play quietly or something?’

‘NO! Someone needs to be supervising them, because otherwise, the minute I am on the phone their radar pricks up and they immediately start causing havoc and barging in and screaming and bellowing. Don’t you remember a couple of years ago when I tried to have a work call at home and we ended up in A&E because Peter managed to get a pea stuck up his nose?’

Simon looked blank. ‘Did he?’

I sighed. ‘No, of course you don’t remember. You weren’t here. You were on yet another trip, which was why I was dealing with everything by myself, yet again, which is why it would be nice if just for once you could help me out and keep the kids out of the way.’

‘I’m just saying, I’m not well,’ complained Simon. ‘Yet I’m supposed to look after the kids. You know, my mother would never have expected my father to look after us.’

‘What the fuck does that have to do with it?’ I snapped. ‘You are not your father and I am not your mother and this is the twenty-first fucking century, so just get with the programme and LOOK AFTER YOUR CHILDREN because I am going to get ready for my call!’

‘But what about dinner?’ Simon wailed plaintively after me. ‘Am I expected to do that too?’

‘I’ll make dinner when I’ve finished,’ I shouted over my shoulder. ‘Just keep the kids QUIET!’

The call started well. Max, the very important boss man, turned out to be American as well as being in America, so he did that lovely American thing of being very jolly and positive and polite. Ed still did not say much, and mostly was a slightly disturbing heavy-breathing presence on the line while Max and I chatted. After about twenty minutes there was a screech from downstairs. I tensed. Shortly afterwards there were thunder footsteps on the stairs, and I braced myself, while seething with fury. Then the hammering on the door and the bellowing began.

‘Is everything OK, Ellen?’ asked Max kindly. ‘There seems to be kinda a funny noise coming from your end?’

‘Yes.’ I said desperately. ‘It’s, err, it’s a crossed line, I think.’

‘A crossed line?’ said Max in confusion. ‘Isn’t this your cell phone though? I didn’t think you could get crossed lines on a cell. Heck, I didn’t think you still got crossed lines at all!’

‘It’s, um, it’s a British thing.’ I improvised as the screaming increased, and I thanked my lucky stars that at least the bedroom door had a lock so the little fuckers couldn’t get in. ‘We still get them because our networks … errr … the war … you know?’

Ed made what could have been a snort of derision, or possibly just a snore because he had fallen asleep, having not said anything for the last fifteen minutes, and Max said, ‘The war? Um, OK, I didn’t know that, that’s interesting.’

I tried desperately to concentrate and sound calm and professional for the brief remnants of the rest of the conversation, but I think the damage was done by my frantic babblings about the war. Everyone knows you Don’t Mention the War. I know almost every episode of Fawlty Towers off by heart, so why the FUCK would I mention the war instead of just apologising and explaining that it was my delinquent hell-fiend children?

I stormed downstairs afterwards to find Simon sauntering out of the loo with a self-satisfied expression on his face.

‘What the fuck do you think you were doing?’ I yelled. ‘You just had to keep the kids quiet for a bit. That was all. Where were you?’

‘I had to go for a shit,’ said Simon indignantly. ‘I TOLD you I wasn’t well. I’m all out of sorts. Usually I only shit in the mornings – I’m very regular – but clearly the Ebola has affected my digestion.’

‘And you couldn’t wait? You couldn’t hang on till I was off the phone, so I could actually have what is possibly the most important call of my life in peace without the children fighting outside the door because apparently Peter has taken some fucking keyring of Jane’s and so her honour was impugned and she had to scream the house down about it, despite neither of them having a key to put on it? You couldn’t have just left it for a FEW BASTARDING MINUTES?’

‘When you have to shit, you have to shit!’ said Simon. ‘So, what’s for dinner?’

‘Oh, go fuck yourself!’ I snarled.

Thursday, 22 September

Well, I went to the PTA AGM. I dragged Sam with me too, on the basis that if I was going down, I was taking as many people as I could with me. He objected strenuously to this, pointing out that I should really have known better than to have succumbed to the pressure of Perfect Lucy Atkinson’s Perfect Mummy and Fiona Montague, even though everyone knows how hard it is to resist them, especially when they are holding their Very Important Official-Looking Clipboards. He tried to wriggle out of it by sighing that sadly, as he was a single parent, he had no childcare. But I was prepared for that and had already told Simon that he would be looking after Sophie and Toby, as well as his own darling poppets, and so, finding himself outmanoeuvred, poor Sam had little choice but to accompany Katie and me to the school hall, down the corridors scented with an eternity of school dinners – that heady whiff of cabbage and stale chip fat – to find Lucy Atkinson’s Mummy and Fiona Montague presiding over a hall containing a grand total of eleven people, out of the approximately seven hundred parents at the school. I felt very bad about never coming along before – I had always assumed these meetings were brimming over with enthusiastic voluntary-type people who had filofaxes and liked organising things and knew how to use glue guns. I had never realised how poorly attended they were, which certainly shed some light on why Lucy’s Mummy and Fiona could be slightly militant when trying to drum up PTA support.

Lucy Atkinson’s Mummy kicked off proceedings by tendering her resignation as Chair and inviting someone to come forward to take her place. A deafening silence met her words.

Cara Cartwright was sitting beside me and whispered, ‘Don’t worry. She resigns every year, and no one has yet dared try and replace her. She just likes to feel needed.’

Lucy’s Mummy, however, shouted, ‘Come ON! Someone must be willing to replace me. I DON’T WANT TO DO THIS ANYMORE. If no one will step up and replace me, there will be no PTA. There will be no Halloween disco, no Christmas Fayre, no Summer Fete, AND NO FUCKING MONEY FOR SCHOOL TRIPS, NEW WHITEBOARDS OR ANY OTHER BASTARDING THING! This is my daughter’s last year at primary school and all I really want to do is spend ONE school event with her. Actually WITH her, not throwing another pound coin at her to go and have a few more shots on the tombola because I’m too busy running the event to do anything with her. Is that so much to ask?’

The silence was really quite awkward now.

‘RIGHT!’ bellowed Lucy’s Mummy, slamming her Important Clipboard down on the table. ‘FUCK THIS SHIT! I am out of here. Hell mend the lot of you!’

‘Me too!’ said Fiona Montague.

Ohhhhhh, this was MEGA awkward. I do hate a pregnant pause, and so before I really knew what I was doing, just to end the tense atmosphere, I somehow found myself putting my hand up and mumbling, ‘Errrr, I’ll do it. If no one else wants to, that is?’

Fuck it, I thought to myself. I clearly had blown all chance of the Dream Job and so I might as well do something useful with my time in between the eating biscuits and inventing abortive apps.

‘Will you, Ellen?’ said Lucy’s Mummy, a slightly manic look in her eye. ‘Oh, that’s marvellous news! Now we just need a treasurer to replace Fiona, and a secretary.’

‘Umm, Sam?’ I hissed, nudging him in the ribs. ‘And Katie, you got me into this.’

Sam sighed. ‘I’ll be the treasurer then.’

‘And I’ll be the secretary!’ said Katie.

‘Oh wonderful!’ cried Lucy’s Mummy. ‘We’re FREE. I mean, that’s marvellous of you to offer. Technically you should be proposed and seconded, etc, but to be honest it’s so hard to get people to volunteer in the first place that we haven’t bothered about that in years. Now, would anyone else like to join the committee?’

‘Oh, go on then.’ said Cara Cartwright. ‘In for a penny, in for a pound!’

‘I’d like to join as well,’ said a new voice from the back of the hall. Everyone craned round to see who it was. A tall woman with immaculate hair and full make-up had walked in, with two very clean children in tow.

‘Sorry we’re late,’ said the new woman. ‘I’m Kiki. I was just taking some photos of Lalabelle and Trixierose playing outside. Yes, I would like to join. I think there’s a lot of things that could be improved.’

Lucy’s Mummy had looked nonplussed for a moment, but she ralled enough to interrupt. ‘Errr,’ she said, ‘I just need to stop you there. The thing is … sorry, was it Coco?’

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