Redownloaded Tinder this afternoon, anticipating a fresh batch of potential suitors from over the summer. There were quite a few new men, many of whom had clearly been busy on fishing trips, climbing mountains, etc., during August, and were showing off their achievements accordingly.
I did have a message that was a couple of weeks old, from a guy called Dom. He’s forty-one and a doctor. He used my actual name rather than just starting the message with ‘Hey, gorgeous’ and made a reference to something I’d said in my profile about the Brontë sisters, so clearly he has been reading the same ‘how to write a good first Tinder message’ articles as I did earlier in the year.
I replied.
Less than ten minutes later he replied again.
Very promising.
We chatted for a while about books and TV shows we liked and controversial issues like whether the cream or jam goes first on a scone. (Cream first, obviously.) I nearly confided in him about the family cake/sick bowl but thought better of it.
I sent a picture to WIB.
‘Wow!’ said Lou. ‘He looks dishy!’ Sometimes I feel like Lou was born in the wrong era.
‘Is he really a doctor?’ asked Sierra. ‘Or has he just posted that picture of himself with a stethoscope round his neck to make himself look more fuckable?’
‘Well, he says he’s a doctor,’ I said.
‘Of course he says he is,’ replied Sierra, ‘but if he’s got kids he could just have picked out something from the Fisher-Price medical kit.’
Applied for four more jobs this morning, all part-time and badly paid. Is this the choice you have to make? If you don’t want, or aren’t able, to be at someone’s beck and call five days a week, are you destined to work forever for £10.25 an hour?
Message from Dom: ‘This might be a bit forward,’ he said, ‘but are you free on Thursday night?’
I felt a little flutter of excitement. Clearly, he was keen. The girls aren’t back until Friday afternoon, so I was free. I left it a while to reply though so I didn’t seem desperate.
Seven minutes later I replied.
‘Yes, I could be,’ I said. So cool.
‘Great!’ he said. ‘Here’s my address, do you want to come over about 8 p.m.?’ I said I thought it might be better to meet somewhere neutral for a first date – safety first and all that.
‘Oh, you have to come here,’ he said, ‘otherwise it won’t work.’
‘What won’t work?’ I asked.
‘I want you to fuck my housemate,’ he said.
I looked at the screen for a bit and scratched my head. As in ‘so that he could watch’, maybe? Out of pity? Either way it wasn’t exactly my dream first-date scenario.
‘Um, what?’ I said. ‘You want me to fuck your housemate? Is that a joke I don’t get?’
‘No,’ he wrote back, ‘he wants to break up with his girlfriend and we thought if she walked in on him shagging you, that would be a good way to give her the message.’
This was just so awful on so many levels that I didn’t know where to start.
‘Can he not just text her?’ I said, possibly missing the point.
‘Nah, she’s really clingy and annoying,’ he replied. ‘It needs to be something conclusive.’
I had another look at the stethoscope. Perhaps there was a touch of Fisher-Price about it.
No job offers. (Other than fucking housemates, obviously, but I don’t imagine I was even going to get paid for that.)
Rejection email from the disability charity on the grounds of me ‘not having the necessary experience’. That’s a joke. The job description was all answering the phone and opening the post and I’ve been managing to do that perfectly well for myself for nearly forty years.
A second rejection from one of the jobs I only applied for yesterday, as a doctor’s receptionist. I was relieved about that one, to be honest. All that sniffing – it drives me mad when it’s just Jess, so I’m not sure I could cope with a whole room full of it every day.
The girls are still at Ian’s mum’s but I went along to Chapter One parent group this afternoon. Lots of people were asking whether or not we are going to carry on after the holidays. The general consensus was that people would rather come to our group than to Busy Beavers – friendlier atmosphere and better choice of biscuits being the key reasons given.
I went downstairs to see how Dylan felt about us making it a permanent event. He said he was more than happy to have us. I offered to pay him from the money we collect for coffee and biscuits, but he said that so far he’d got at least one sale out of it every week and that was good enough for him.
All the parents seemed very pleased.
Three more job rejections but … drum roll please … two interviews!
Hooray!
One is a marketing job at the dog rescue centre, which I actually think I’d be pretty good at as it’s very similar to a lot of what I was doing at the museum. I wonder if I could somehow turn Cecilia’s cocker spaniel and its bowel condition into ‘experience of working with dogs’? It did sit under my desk a couple of times when Cecilia came in to stuff envelopes.
The second interview is in one of the really lovely interiors shops in town as a ‘retail store colleague’. (I.e., to work in the shop.) I don’t especially want to work in retail, but Lou wants the staff discount, so I said I might as well try.
Girls home at teatime. They seemed pleased to see me for about five minutes.
Dog interview is on Tuesday, ‘retail store colleague’ is Wednesday.
Other people with similar ideas on how to spend the last weekend of the summer holidays – 1,923,827. Time from me buying Jess an ice cream to it ending up on the pavement – 12 seconds. (New PB.)
The sun was shining when we woke up this morning. I say ‘when we woke up’ – when I first woke up it was with a naked Barbie shoved in my face at 5.37 a.m., so it was dark, but I quickly quashed ‘Barbies’ as a concept for that time in the morning and just let Jess get into bed next to me.
When I woke up the second time, then the sun was shining, so I decided we’d have a wholesome family day out. It’s the last weekend of the summer holidays, after all.
I sent Jess to wake Flo to see what she fancied doing and I went downstairs to make sandwiches. It was an hour before they emerged from Flo’s bedroom, by which time I was feeling incredibly pleased with myself as I’d gone as far as boiling eggs.
‘We want to do minigolf,’ said Flo, coming into the kitchen and grabbing the box of Weetos down off the shelf, ‘but only if we can get dark chocolate sorbet from the gelato place.’ She took a handful of Weetos straight from the box with her hand and shoved them in her mouth.
‘Minigolf it is, then,’ I said, passing her a bowl.
‘I’m good, thanks, Mum,’ she said, wandering off into the lounge with the box. ‘I’ll just have breakfast and then I’ll get dressed.’
‘Shall I help you get dressed, Jess?’ I asked.
‘I’m good thanks, Mum,’ she said, mimicking Flo with a toss of her hair. ‘I’m going to choose my own clothes and look pretty like a pony.’
Most of Jess’s ponies are naked save for oversized hair clips and large plastic shoes, so I was intrigued to see what she came up with. I made a cup of tea and took it out into the garden with my phone.
There was a new post from @simple_dorset_life. It was only from last night but it has 325 likes already. I can’t imagine I will ever do anything in my entire life that 325 individual people will like. This photo was of a beautiful cup of coffee on a rustic wooden table top. Next to the cup was a vintage silver spoon and in one corner was the merest hint of a succulent.
‘I treat myself to one coffee a day,’ said the caption, ‘so I make sure it counts! I love the ritual of preparing the coffee machine, grinding the beans and steaming the milk before sitting down to enjoy each and every sip while my husband spends some time with the twins. It’s the tranquillity of the moment as much as the caffeine that gives me fuel for the day ahead. #blessed #coffeeart #simplepleasures # mindfulness’.
An hour later and we were walking down towards the beach, me with a carrier bag of sandwiches, crisps and hard-boiled eggs, Jess wearing a bikini top, tutu and an elaborate hat. She was wearing the hat at an angle and, in fairness, it did have an edge of Applejack about it.
Minigolf was a little on the frustrating side as one or two (million) other families had had the same idea. At each hole we had to wait for about ten minutes for the family in front of us to finish their round. They had a little boy with them who looked about two and was pretty much the same size as the golf club. I’m pretty sure there is a minigolf rule about taking a maximum number of attempts at a hole, but these guys were keen for their children to get the full experience.
Jess got very twitchy and snapped one of the feathers off a plastic parrot, but I hid it behind a fake treasure chest before anyone noticed.
After golf we walked up to the park for our picnic lunch. It was hot and there were small children everywhere running around with no clothes on, splashing in and out of the fountains. Jess immediately took off her tutu and pants and ran off without so much as a sniff of my cheese and tomato sandwiches.
I lay back on the grass. Flo was chatting to me about a girl in her school who had got a tattoo without her parents knowing. She sounded very disapproving.
‘Er, Mum,’ she said, ‘you might want to look at what Jess is doing.’
I turned my head to the side and brought my hand up to shield my eyes from the sun. I could see her crouched in the fountain. At first I thought she might be just examining something in the water but then I looked at her face and recognised the pink cheeks and look of concentrate.
‘Oh shit,’ I said, jumping up.
Literally.
As I ran towards her I realised things were already past the point of no return. She was about to shit in the fountain, a fountain full of dozens of other unsuspecting children, and I wasn’t going to be able to stop her.
I panicked.
I reached the fountain and Jess. She didn’t even notice me, so involved was she in her task. I imagined the furore that would follow a poo floating around in the water and I instinctively cupped my hands.
‘Mum!’ shouted Flo in horror. She’d caught up with me and was staring down at us, Jess squatting just above the water, me with my hands cupped beneath her.
And then there I was, in a public park, with a large poo in my hands.
‘Oh my God,’ said Flo, laughing now, ‘that’s hilarious, Stay there!’ I realised she was getting her phone out of her back pocket.
‘Nooooo!’ I wailed. ‘Don’t film me! Help me!’
She was laughing too much, though, the camera pointing at me as I crouched there with the turd, ankle deep in fountain water. Jess, having finished, had stood up and turned around to look at me.
‘Where did that come from Mummy?’ she asked innocently, looking at my hands.
‘From your bum,’ I said, starting to laugh myself.
She looked unsure.
‘Really?’ she said.
‘Really!’
‘Oh,’ she said. ‘Well, you should wash your hands, Mummy, because that’s disgusting.’
‘I know!’ I said. Flo was mildly hysterical by this point, but still filming. Other parents had started to notice a commotion and were looking over, so I closed my hands (carefully) and tried to look casual as I walked back to our picnic area.
‘Quick, Flo,’ I said, nodding at the sandwich bag, ‘tip the eggs out and hold it open for me.’
‘Ergh!’ she said. ‘You can’t put it in there!’
‘What do you expect me to do, carry it home? Jesus Christ, just open the bag before this thing starts to dissolve or something.’
Once we’d bagged the offending item I left Flo in charge and cleaned myself up in the park toilets. Poo safely disposed of and hands scrubbed, I went back to the girls but couldn’t quite bring myself to peel and eat an egg.
We stopped for the promised ice creams on the way home and Jess instantly dropped hers on the floor, obviously.
I sent WIB the link to Flo’s video, which she had kindly uploaded to YouTube already. It had only had seven views, which I felt kind of disappointed about. If I’m going to have to catch a shit in my hands in a public park, then the least it could do is go viral.
Had a message on Tinder from a guy called Kier. Didn’t tell him about our wholesome family day out.
Classic last day of summer holiday activities completed today:
(Question: what actually is the point of a skort? Why can’t they just wear shorts? Why the requirement to create the illusion of wearing a skirt for PE?)