Being Me

'I don't like eating peaches,' I said to Paul yesterday as I bent over the kitchen sink trying to consume a fruit that didn't want to co-operate. 'It gushes juice, for a start, so I have to eat it in this undignified position. And it's got this velvety skin which keeps slipping about. I feel as though I'm noshing on someone trying to shrug off a posh jacket.' He watched me as I struggled on. I thought, 'I wonder if he's finding this arousing.' But he wasn't, because he turned away to check through the spice cupboard to see what needed to go on the shopping list. I'm not surprised. Plump woman with peachy face leaning over kitchen sink isn't a pose you see in 'Hot Ladies' magazine, I bet. After I'd recovered from the peach-eating, which necessitated a full scrub-down - I may as well have gone for a shower - we had a tense conversation about another kind of drip. 'All these brown stains near the recycling b...

I went to a grammar school in the 1970s and part of the girls' uniform for the Lower School was a blue beret with a gold tassel. I was eleven when I first wore it. Here's a blue beret. Here's a gold tassel. The tassel was attached to the centre of the beret. It was long enough to lie across the top of the hat and then hang down over the edge of it by several inches, bobbing along as you walked. As a ridiculous piece of headwear, it rivalled this. And this. And - remember this? I'm not saying the beret-with-tassel made us feel conspicuous, but if the sun caught the tassel, a magpie on holiday in the Outer Hebrides caught the glint and started back. My question is: why would anyone do this to a child? I swear Freud wrote books about gold-tasseled hats and their effect on the adolescent psyche. He must have done. I'd heard rumours, before I started at the school, about what happened to new first years. 'The older kids ...

We walked into Warwick town today from our Leamington home. It's about two miles. I had to return some shoes to a shop. I thought they'd fitted me when I bought them last week but somehow by the time I got them home my feet had decided to become puffer fish. Stuffing them into the shoes was like trying to wrestle a baby back into the womb the way it came out. Had I had a bout of body dysmorphic syndrome? Why had I bought shoes to fit a pixie? I'd never felt more like an ugly sister, with a shoe dangling from my toes uselessly. Back to the walk. My husband said, 'Let's not walk to the shop down the main road. Let's take the scenic route by the river. It'll take about ten more minutes.' I checked my watch and started timing him. 'If this takes hours,' I said, 'I will have no mercy.' I am still smarting from a 'brief' walk he took me on when I was heavily pregnant thirty years ago and I thought I would have to give bi...