The Secret Life of a Slummy Mummy Read Free

causing a critical ten-minute delay in proceedings. Despite the best-laid plans, packed lunches prepared the night before, uniform stacked neatly on chairs, shoes lined up in pairs by the front door, breakfast already on the table, toothbrushes sitting beside the kitchen sink, you cannot mitigate against unforeseeable disasters. Getting to school on time is as finely tuned as air-traffic control at Heathrow: any slight change in plan can throw the whole system into chaos.
    ‘Nothing disastrous,’ I say. It is utterly baffling to me that I used to be able to put together the lead package on
Newsnight
in less than an hour but am so singularly unable to meet the challenge of getting my children ready for school every morning.
    It seems unbelievable that I could persuade cabinet ministers to come to the studio late at night to be grilled by Jeremy Paxman, but cannot convince my toddler to keep on his clothes.
    ‘Is God bigger than a pencil?’ asks Joe, who worries far too much for a five-year-old. ‘If he isn’t, could he be eaten by a dog?’
    ‘Not the kind of dogs that wander these streets,’ I tell him reassuringly. ‘They are too polite.’
    And it is true. We are roaming through upper-tax-bracket territory in north-west London. There are no pasty-faced chisel-headed boys walking pit bulls here. No William Hill. No turkey twizzlers. No teenage pregnancies. We are in the heart of dinner-party land.
    It is the first day of term and already standards have slipped. As they walk along the pavement the children are supplementing bits of toast with fistfuls of cereal from a couple of those variety packs.
    My vision is reduced by myopia to the most impressionistic strokes, and I recall a moment two weeks ago on a beach in Norfolk, when I stood before the North Sea with a woolly hat pulled down over my eyebrows and a scarf wrapped around my neck just below my eyes. An easterly wind, uncharacteristic for the time of year, blew into my face, making my eyes water. I had to keep blinking to stop the view from blurring. It was like looking through a prism. No sooner had I focussed on a seagull or a particularly lovely stone than the scene fractured into a spectrum of different shapes and colours. It struck me then that this was exactly how I felt about myself. Somehow over the years I had atomised. Now, faced with the prospect of my youngest child starting nursery three mornings a week, it is time to rebuild myself, but I can no longer remember how all the pieces fit together. There is Tom, the children, my family, friends, school, all these different elements but no coherent whole. No thread connecting everything together. Somewherein the domestic maelstrom I have lost myself. I can see where I came from, but I’m uncertain where I am going. I try to cling on to the bigger picture but can no longer remember what it is meant to be. I gave up the job I loved as a television news producer eight years ago, when I discovered that thirteen-hour days and motherhood were an unstable partnership. Whoever suggested that working full time and having children equated to having it all wasn’t very good at maths. There was always something in deficit. Including our bank balance, because there wasn’t much change from what we paid the nanny. And besides, I missed Sam too much.
    What I should do in the here and now, with the playground looming in the distance, is think up a few stock replies to those friendly inanities that mark the beginning of the new school year. Something sketchy, because most people aren’t really interested in the detail. ‘The summer was hard graft, culminating in a disastrous holiday on a Norfolk campsite, because we are short of cash, during which I slid into my current introspective mood, reappraising key areas of my life, including – in no particular order, because my husband is right, I can’t prioritise – my decision to give up work after we had children, the state of my marriage, and our lack of money,’