Always Be My Baby

So lovely to be back. I do love my home town.

And all my friends and my mad, mad family.

Yesterday I spent in a social whirlwind, leaving the house at 9am and not returning until well after midnight, which used to be a frequent thing in my old life, but in Stepford with the tiny ones is almost unheard of as we live ten minutes from everything and are always returning to base, like homing pigeons, for naps, snacks, forgotten precious items, or just to hang out because it’s easier. So this was very exciting for me and also made me feel like I was myself again in some essential way.

I started out by making my way to my Aunt’s house to dump the car, whisper and confer with various cousins, uncle etc. about secret present plans, dinner arrangements that evening as it was her 60th birthday and she must at all costs be spoiled and cosseted. Aunt is a mother of four grown children and now a grandmother of two rather delicious tiny ones, and while she was busy raising her kids she also managed to squeeze in a part-time job as a teacher of graphic design at a prestigious London art college, cook about forty billion delicious meals for anyone who happened to drop into her huge, beautiful house, decorate and redecorate the former in jaw-dropping style and still have time to listen patiently and non-judgementally to tearful and troubled souls who would come to sob on her already rather burdened shoulders (and perhaps empty her chocolate biscuit tin at the same time).
You might guess that I have quite frequently been one of the latter, but I am not the only one. Not by a long shot.

She is my role model for calm, competent, kind motherhood. I really don’t know how she did it. I struggle with just the two and I’m not nearly as patient.

After I had ascertained the plan for the evening I skipped off to meet Potty Mummy for a morning of Kulture at the Saatchi Gallery and immediately blew my cover of sophistication by asking pathetically if we couldn’t start off with tea and cake instead of going after the exhibition which is what you’re really supposed to do. I just couldn’t do any clever thinking before I had some carbs and sugar. (Wait, aren’t they the same thing anyway? In my book they are, the best kind of carbs, anyway.. )
She was utterly gracious. She also didn’t eat cake. Or have sugar in her tea. Ok, just me then.

We had a great time at the gallery. They have a lot of stuff in there that is not very good but is quite side-splittingly funny so I recommend it for a good giggle. It also might have been that I had been up since 3am with jet lag so was very tired and the sugar hit me just at the right moment but PM laughed too so unless she was just being polite I think I am right, here. Or I’m a big pleb, but either way, it’s free, so you might as well drop by when you’re shopping on the King’s Road and a bit cold.

Afterwards I wandered into Peter Jones (oh, the bliss) and here I fulfilled my secret mission to buy some oilcloth table covering which is going to horrify Husband, but our kitchen table is not really a table, it’s an old library desk and as such has a ‘leather’ (I use this term loosely) center which gets all sorts of disgusting food matter stuck in it unless you really scrub it.

I am the only one who really scrubs it.

I do not like doing this.

So to make life easier I am buying these very colourful and quite whizzy oilcloth table coverings you can buy by the meter in cool designs.

Mission accomplished.

I headed off to M&S to buy a see through bra strap.

You simply don’t understand how much I wanted this particular item. I’ve been thinking about it for weeks because I need it for Friday. It fits a certain bra that only comes from M&S that is the only one that works with this particular outfit and nothing else will do.

When I was signed to my old record label they gave we band members each an allowance for clothes which, at the beginning, wasn’t very much and was also, quite unfairly, the same for the boys as it was for me. I found this totally unreasonable and asked my manager to complain and ask for more.

This got me nowhere.

Finally I went in to the head of the label myself, a somewhat shy man, not used to dealing with women and said to him very directly that I needed extra money because every single outfit needed DIFFERENT SHOES and DIFFERENT BRAS or else it just wouldn’t work and at the mere mention of underwear he turned scarlet and literally got out his chequebook with his pen shaking and asked me to name an amount just to make me go away.

RESULT!

From there I met an old friend for tea at Sketch and we had a delightful catch up and then on to meet another friend for drinks at Soho House until finally it was time for the big birthday dinner.

I went to South Kensington on the tube and found my way to Rocca, a charming and inexpensive little Italian restaurant that I highly recommend, where I was greeted warmly by the staff and seated at a long table for twelve. I was the first to arrive so I went off to the loos, but by the time I came back the family had arrived.

The birthday dinner is worthy of a post in and of itself, but perhaps the most moving moment of all was seeing the  birthday girl flanked by her ninety year old father and eighty-two year old mother, opening her presents from her parents, eyes sparkling with girlish delight, and hearing the cry of joy as she found the garnet ring her elderly dad had bought for her and the look of pure love and pride in his ancient eyes as he gazed upon his little girl on her sixtieth birthday.

Our babies are our babies forever.

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