A few gray hairs have appeared on our dog Budgie’s chin. She’s only seven and is part of our family. The silver streaks are a reminder that we are inching slowly to the inevitable day when she will no longer be with us. “Having dogs is a sad business,” my dad says. “You fall in love with them and when they go, they break your heart.” I once heard Ricky Gervais describe dogs as life’s greatest invention, the closest thing to something spiritual most of us will ever experience. As a joke, my husband asked me whether Budgie was my best friend. “Yes,” I replied, and I wasn’t joking at all.
I write a diary and I try to think of something to say every day. Occasionally I stop myself: “You can’t write that,” I think. “What if someone reads it?” When I was small, I tried to read my sister’s diaries. She kept them hidden in a box but made her handwriting impossible to read just in case someone found them. Writing to be read is very different from writing a private diary.
My mum only reads memoirs. She says she learns most from reading about people’s lives, their thoughts and above all their mistakes. I recently spoke to the novelist Elizabeth Day on the podcast I host with my sister Isabella, Lessons From Our Mothers. She suggested first processing something and letting it settle before sharing it with a wider audience. Good advice. As for my diaries, I hope no one gets hold of them.
It is a joy to work with Isabella on our podcast. I am so lucky to have her beside me when we are interviewing people. It’s so much easier to say to her “I completely disagree,” than to say it to someone else.
We will soon be hosting our first live show, with our guest Michael Morpurgo. His novel The Butterfly Lion was a childhood favorite of mine, and I always imagined myself with a pet lion. I had forgotten how moving his books are. When I got to the last page of Private Peaceful, I was in tears. I’ve noticed that in many of his books, mothers die. The same is true of a long list of Disney films: Bambi, Cinderella, Snow White, The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast and so on. It’s a common theme. A motherless hero is poignant. And the purpose of our podcast is to think about what mothers give us, or struggle to give us, and what it means when they are not around.
After my husband, Harry, rowed across the Atlantic in 2016, I assumed that he would have scratched his itch for challenges. He hadn’t. He is now training for a mammoth 400-mile triathlon from Newcastle to London, involving cycling, paddleboarding and running, which sounds like three mad ideas rolled into one. He’s called it Journey for James, aiming to raise £100,000 for James’ Place, the charity his family founded in memory of his brother James, who took his own life in 2006.
James’ Place provides dedicated support for men in suicidal crises, and it is desperately needed, given that suicide remains the leading cause of death in the UK for men under 35. Harry will travel from Newcastle to London via Liverpool and Birmingham in eight days, visiting each of the four James’ Place centers along the way. He has been training for months, slipping out of the house at 5 a.m. every day.
Our home has become an adventurer’s haven, stashed with bikes, boards, shoes for every discipline. There’s even an inflatable ice bath in the garden. It is not quite the water feature I had hoped for.
My in-laws seem to welcome the chaos that comes with grandchildren, and we are very grateful. They live in the country and when we visit from London, the children can run around freely. Last weekend, our children and their cousins were tearing around, when one was hit over the head with a plastic golf club, one wet his pants and another was sick. My lovely mother-in-law simply said: “That’s life,” and laughed.
Although we have recently moved house in London, trading our flat for somewhere with more space, our hope is that one day we’ll move to the country too. As I write this, we’re staying with our friends in Stroud; I am surrounded by dandelions and the children are creating a water slide in the garden.
I’m wondering whether we should move to the countryside even sooner than planned. And yet, back in London, we’re starting to meet new people, we’re finding a rhythm and we’re discovering a sense of community. I am caught between two ideas of life for our family. I’m not yet sure which one matters most.
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