Arabella Byrne

‘Before you ask, Mummy, the answer is no.’ While this could be any number of conversations that I have with my seven-year-old daughter, this one has a particular tang. It is the thrice-annual bargaining round that I do in the run-up to any school holiday in which I try to get her to go to a kids’ camp. An executive at Goldman Sachs in equity sales does not work as hard as I do to seal the deal – but I fail every time.  For a brief, prelapsarian period when she was five and more biddable, I had some success. I managed to get her into all manner of summer holiday camps in Oxfordshire: activity camp, Shakespeare camp, tennis camp, even God camp. You name it, I signed her up. Sure, we had some argy-bargy at the moment of drop-off, but in she went.

It was when I saw two other women wearing the same red-and-white-striped Boden swimming costume as me that I realised what I had become. Twenty years ago, I wouldn’t have been seen dead on a beach in Salcombe in a Boden swimming costume. I would have been topless on a riverbank in Provence, smoking a Gitane and reading Duras. These days, I don’t have time to care, and I summon G.K. Chesterton as my guide: ‘Don’t ever take a fence down until you know the reason why it was put up.’ I have children, a husband and dogs, and we have come – without really meaning to but by some centrifugal bourgeois force – to the Costa del Boden for our summer holiday. In short, we appear to be in favour of the fence. Where?

Strangely, it was the Sunday Telegraph, not the red tops, that in 2002 coined the acronym Wags after staff in a Dubai hotel used it to describe the wives and girlfriends of England football players. Little did they know that the term would have the traction that it still does nearly 25 years later. Of course, when most people summon core Wags to mind, they think of the glorious bitchiness of the football Wags in their 2006 Baden-Baden Euro glory – all fake tan, Ugg boots, hair and sunglasses like Barbies on speed. Sadly, they don’t make them like that anymore. These days, Wags don’t need the papers to pap them; they are Instagram celebrities before they have even got the GHD hair straighteners out – they’re not trying as hard. But I’m not here for the football Wags.

Many were the jibes when Boris Johnson announced that he was ‘thrilled’ to be back on the tennis court in 2021 as lockdown restrictions eased. ‘Bloody posho poncing about on a tennis court’ or ‘how typical’ were probably some of them. Sir Keir, naturally, made sure that he was photographed on a football pitch on the same day. But here’s the thing: these days, playing tennis isn’t posh. Yes, chins love to watch it and play it – helped by tennis courts of their own – but the playing of tennis has become democratised. Reports of next-gen community tennis clubs springing up all over the country have become widespread, according to the Financial Times. And yet tennis has always had a class problem.

Today, I go to Ascot. The last time I darkened the turf of the Royal Enclosure was in 2017, when I was heavily pregnant with my first daughter. In the photograph of my husband and me that day, I resemble a whale with a plate attached to its head, while my husband looks as if he might at any moment burst into flames from wearing tails and top hat in a heatwave. As you can imagine, we both look rather cross. Curiously, though, on the edge of the photo, there appears to be another couple posing for the camera who look to be having a brilliant time. The gentleman is wearing a cravat of some sort, no tails or topper, while his lady love sports a pink minidress.

Look, if you will, at Kate Middleton on the Isle of Mull for her wedding anniversary. There she was in skinny jeans, tucked-in blue shirt and tweed blazer, shod in what looked like sensible walking boots. It’s a look I like to call Royal Prep School Mummy, and she’s been at it for years: on school runs, at charity netball matches, and Anmer Hall photoshoots. It works, as it always has done, by combining registers. The tweed blazer nods to all sorts of Balmoral-ish, elitist accents – but we forget all about that because of the blue shirt and skinny jeans, items we might well own ourselves. Hilary Mantel may have famously called Kate a ‘shop window mannequin’, but I want to know which one. Joules, Boden or Cath Kidston? https://twitter.

Many years ago, long before Covid and when Donald Trump was still a property magnate-cum-reality TV star, I crossed the pond to study for my PhD at Penn. Not Penn State, which everyone seems to have heard of because of some obscure sex scandal; not Princeton, basking in its Michelle Obama afterglow; but Penn. It’s in the Ivy League, before you crinkle your nose: it has Gothic Revival buildings, frat houses, jocks, and Americans talk endlessly about how old it is. Some call it the Jewish Ivy, thanks to its high proportion of JAPs – Jewish American Princesses – who went there after a Gossip Girl existence at private school in New York. I wasn’t sure what to call it, but I was young, impressionable and ready to wear the Penn merch and Nikes at the drop of a baseball cap.

It was when I nearly reversed into two brand new Land Rover Defenders in the car park at my daughter’s prep school that I realised something was going on. Of course, I had seen them before. I live in Oxfordshire where the A-roads are one long parade of Land Rover Discoveries, Range Rovers and Volvo SUVs from one junction to the next. But recently Defenders seem to be the ‘it’ car on the block. Land Rovers used to connote a certain kind of rarified upper-class masculinity – think Prince Philip, think chins hanging out of them on a shoot – but the new Defender, puffed-up and boxy like a fat peacock, unintentionally parodies what marketeers might pompously call its ‘brand heritage’.

Have you ever looked after a child that doesn’t nap from 5 a.m. to 7 p.m.? I have. Just to be clear, I’m talking about a 14-hour day with no relief whatsoever from grannies, nannies or DHs, the ghastly acronym that Mumsnet uses for fathers to signify ‘darling husband’. Next question: have you ever looked after a child for the standard 14-hour shift and not turned a screen on? Don’t lie, because no mother on this planet will ever believe you. Seasoned mothers know that the only way to make it to the business end of the day – 5 p.m., give or take – is to fill chunks of the never-ending day with screen time, sometimes quite large chunks since you’re asking.