My British kids

“Please let me wake up on Friday in the Britain that I know,” tweets just about everyone. But not me. I’d like to join in, it’s not that I don’t feel the referendum angst, but I feel oddly detached. Sure, I get the economic arguments, the emotional pull, and the historical logic. Who’d want to turn their back on a club promoting peace? Which is how I remember explaining the odd-one-out flag, those yellow stars in a circle of friendship against a calm blue background, as I lay in a Jerusalem park gazing up at the colours of Europe fluttering over the King David hotel with my then three-ish-year-old son.

But me and Britain have never got on, not properly. I used to blame my parents for choosing December to immigrate from sunny Singapore. The itchy jumpers. Tight trousers. And the dark. Ugh! But that was 30 years ago. Three decades. I’ve had plenty of time to feel at home, even if I was born in Bangkok and did spend the first 10 years of my life in south-east Asia.

I’m good on Wales. I even voluntarily holiday there, Tenby specifically, where my grandpa still lives, and have done since I was a baby. But apart from a couple of hops to the Lake District, and the odd trip west, I’m hopeless on the rest of Britain. From London, Paris feels nearer than Liverpool (it isn’t, I know), and the shops are better. I’ve always sought holiday heat and sun, which means I’d rather head south than north. And I like languages.

Even now, when people ask where I’m from in the UK, I say, ‘Nowhere, really.’ I mean, I’ve lived in London for years, almost decades, but I’m not “from London”. And I’m certainly not from Buckinghamshire, where we lived for the schools and because it was close to Ealing where first my dad, then mum, worked. But I’ve never known what it feels to be From Somewhere; to have somewhere to emigrate Home at Christmas.

I didn’t even expect still to be living here by now. I thought I’d have spent years globe trotting from continent to continent. Yet here we are, in south-east London, in the same house we moved into eight years ago for god’s sake. Which is nearly as long as my entire Singaporean childhood. How I scoffed when the friend I made aged 10 told me she still lived in the same house she had as a newborn; now my son, Louis, is on track to do just that in only two years time. The same son I imagined speaking at least one if not two different tongues fluently by now. I half feel like I’ve failed him.

And yet. And yet. If these long months of campaigning have made me think anything it’s that maybe it’s not a disaster that Louis, his brother, and his sister are born and bred Londoners. I want them to know the world, but perhaps they’re in luck also knowing where they’re from, and not just because their passport says so. Not that being from Britain means they need to turn their back on being part on something bigger; the 8-year-old is a passionate Remain-er.

So let me, for his sake, for their sake, let me wake up in a Britain that they want to grow up in.

 

Time pressure

It started with a photo my mum sent me. A memory of a day at Walmer Castle, two, or was it three years ago? Me, gazing out of the shot, clutching the two boys, just the two boys. I remember the day well. It was early Spring and we’d all walked there; it isn’t far from her house, along the path next to the pebbly beach. I love those first warm days, when you don’t mind what you do as long as it’s outside. I love the colours down there on the Kent coast, the soft blues as you gaze over to France when the sea and the sky seem to merge, the greens bursting from the shingle, and best of all, the pink plumes of valerian that are everywhere at this time of year.

I remember everyone’s outfits: I was slightly too cold, over optimistic without a jacket in an old grey cardigan and habitual stripy top; Louis, 4, insistent he was fine in his new T-shirt, a gift from my aunt in Australia; and Raf still young enough to be told to zip up in a Patagonia jacket I’d bought cheaply before we left DC. I remember especially the plastic orange toy Raf is gripping: the Gup B from the cartoon Octonauts. It was their combined Easter gift, bought with money sent by my Grandpa, their Great. (‘Thank you for my elevation from merely Grand to Great,’ he wrote in a card welcoming Louis to the world.)

We wandered the gardens, the boys poking the frogspawn in the pond and Raf trampling the flowers in his one-year-old enthusiasm for life. Trees were climbed, cream teas consumed. I’m sure there was angst, too. I was doubtless over caffeinated with exhaustion, my habitual state. And I doubt everyone walked there and back without a fuss. But none of that shows in the photo. It’s no surprise everyone preserves their lives through the screens of their smartphone cameras; they’re hungry for future memories.

Thinking back now about how long ago that day was, I feel anxious about how much time has passed. And why it feels like nothing much has changed. Sure, a lot has happened in three years, not least their sister. But the feeling just stokes my restlessness, a perpetual itch I try and scratch with the odd trip, but it’s always there. I almost felt reassured earlier, reading an interview with Maggie O’Farrell, who confessed to also feeling restless, stuck home with three small children. But she’d dealt with her angst by churning out another brilliant novel, while I’ve merely dipped into a new Netflix show and scrolled through a zillion tweets. People complain about never having enough time, but it’s just as challenging to have time and not know what to do with it.

(Snap in question on Insta.)

 

#Freelancefinds

There’s a lot to find out about being freelance, not least how to find work. While I, ahem, work on that, here are a few other discoveries:

• If you need somewhere to work, you could join the London Library, which Simon Schama wrote about beautifully in the FT recently (link below) or you could save your cash and hang out at the National Theatre. The wifi is really good. And there are many places to sit, so no need to buy a wig to avoid being recognised when you realise you’ve come every day this week.
• You don’t even need to keep buying coffees and cakes; everyone else using it as their rent-free office brings their own. And did I mention the wifi?
• That said, you can justify spending a tenner on edible sundries when you’ve saved the same amount on a seat somewhere else. And the cafe doesn’t blast out irritating music like hip coffee shops.
• There’s not much that a daytime yoga class can’t fix, although the poses might still make you feel like crying.
• If you’ve been made redundant from a newspaper, it might be useful to be able to spend your “re-training” grant on therapy instead to cope with all your likely-to-be-rejected pitches. That’s assuming you still like your career enough to plough on as a writer.
• But finding out you can’t claim for clothes as a work expense might make you reconsider switching career.
• Seeing someone “like” one of your (many) random Tweets will, briefly, feel like some sort of social interaction, even if you don’t know them, or they’re just a bot.
• You can tell yourself that going to an exhibition won’t count as slacking off because it just might spark an idea. It will, however, be mentally exhausting wandering around waiting for said spark.
• You’ll be hunting so hard for ideas that you will dream in sub-standard newspaper prose, or wake up convinced you’ve had a great idea to pitch. You won’t have.
• You might think you’ve had a good day and some useful meetings, but then you’ll remember nobody paid you for it.
• An entire working day can pass and all you’ve done is refresh your emails looking for the replies that don’t come.
• Losing your job feels a bit like a bereavement, which it sort of is, so it’s okay to mourn.
• If you’ve had a baby at any point in the last eight years, you’ll find just sitting somewhere ON YOUR OWN rewarding in its own non-financial way.
• That said, you will feel guilty remembering you’re paying your nanny vast sums so that you can sit here on your own writing this.
• But you will find surprising solace in being your own commissioning editor and publisher.

(That Simon Schama piece on the London Library: https://next.ft.com/content/cc66202c-0d54-11e6-b41f-0beb7e589515)

 

My kid’s strike

“Keeping children at home, even for a day, is harmful to their education.”

So says Nicky Morgan, the Education Secretary, who is cross that thousands of parents did just that on Tuesday.

 

The school boycott, organised by campaigners Let Kids Be Kids, was a protest against six and seven-year-olds sitting tough tests in Year 2. Tests that require hours of weekly homework battles and warnings from teachers that if they don’t work hard, they’ll struggle to get a job.

Yep, six year olds are being told to worry about gainful employment. I know because it happened to mine, last year. And parents don’t like it. Not all parents, obviously, but at least 40,000 of them who signed a petition backing the “kids’ strike” on 3 May, underlining their unease about “unnecessary testing and a curriculum that limits enjoyment and real understanding”.

Hippie nonsense, snort those who think kids need to get real and knuckle down, even – and perhaps especially – if it means learning to spell words like “characteristics” and “associations” Did I mention the children in question are only six or seven years old? Which, incidentally, is the age they’d have started school in Norway or Finland.

As for “harming” their education by missing a day, seriously Nicky Morgan? Let’s be honest, not all kids will suffer if they stay home; it depends on the home. Personally, I don’t think keeping skipping one day cuts it, which is why I kept my then six-year-old son off one day every week last year. And it’s why my Reception-age four year old misses school every Monday.

Our boycott last year wasn’t about the exams though, or really, if I’m honest, the homework; mine was the type to race through anything although his early enthusiasm has now waned. No, if anything, my son stayed home because I fretted the curriculum wasn’t rigorous enough. Drilling incomprehensible words into 30 disinterested children for a week of tests didn’t leave much time for anything else.

So I asked the headteacher if we could hang out instead, and she agreed. Admittedly, I promised we’d hang out in museums, and even do a project – on Steam – but the idea was to escape the confines of the classroom. And yes, I know he was lucky I could take the time; in fact, I was on maternity leave, so time wasn’t an issue.

Just like he was lucky to have the type of pandering middle-class parent who worried about his tedium threshold. But I make no apologies; just because others couldn’t and wouldn’t have done the same, doesn’t mean I shouldn’t.

So we had a Summer of Steam, of the quirky Brunel, the mighty National Maritime, and the stupendous Science Museums. We ate steamed dumplings on the streets in Chinatown, and steamed our own carrots at home in a nod to a science experiment. We even sketched the Fighting Temeraire in the National Gallery, listening to a guide tell a group of (older) schoolchildren about Turner’s poignant tribute to the end of the sail era and the advent of steam.

If Nicky Morgan wants to see what we got up to, she only has to ask; I know his headteacher was happy.

 

Me and The Three

One of the oddest things about having kids is the odd looks you get when you try to go anywhere with them by yourself. Take our Mother’s Day trip to Leeds Castle the other week. People actually commiserated with me being out alone with three children. Which seemed a bit rich given the date.

What should I have done instead? Stay home getting cabin fever in a rapidly-too-small house in a bit of London that works if you want a (long) walk into town or to the Tate Modern but is nowhere near a decent park? No thanks. Not that they *need* walking like dogs; I’ve always hated the way that charge gets lobbed at children, especially boys. It’s me who climbs the walls.

Plus, I like taking them places. Most of the time. So the prospect of a week on my own with them during the holidays left me with no choice but upping the ante. Especially now I don’t have to be anywhere else, like at work. Which is how I ended up on an early Sunday morning flight to Asturias, our clothes for the next three days wedged into a single wheel-on bag, with the wrong hands-to-child ratio for comfort.

It was all going so well until that security queue. And to be fair, I can’t blame the 18 month old for being peeved at being parted from her hand-me-down ladybird rucksack. How was she to know it would ever emerge from the hungry mouth of the X-ray scanner? She’s not prone to meltdowns but her reaction was fairly spectacular. Even I felt a bit sorry for myself, for about five minutes. But, in retrospect, that was mainly because I’d left enough time to buy a couple of kids’ magazines (yes to the Beano, because it alone lacks a stupid plastic toy) but not enough to get a coffee. Fool! And she cheered up once she spotted all the planes out of the window as we waited to board.

And if taking three kids aged 7, 4, and 1 on an easyJet flight on my own sounds nuts, well, at least she was still young enough to sit on my lap, leaving a side free for each boy. In any case, it wasn’t the flight out that was bothering me but the thought of our 21.25 return home three days later. Or specifically, how I’d manage to get the two littlest ones off the plane and through security at what would be the equivalent of 23.30 Spanish time without a buggy to help because we live in the UK not Scandinavia.

For  now, though, I had the iPad. And the Huawei, and a lovely Spanish lady across the aisle with her own two small children, who within minutes of clocking my crazy travel plans had handed me her business card and at least three ways of contacting her in case of any Asturian emergencies. Talk about solidaridad!

 

 

 

 

 

easyJet Roulette

My mistake was telling the seven year old about easyJet roulette. A sniff of a plane trip and he’s like a Bloodhound. Possibly because those flights are pretty much the only time him and his brother are allowed free rein (reign surely works here too?) over the iPad. Not to mention the Huawei that the sales guy needlessly threw in as a freebie when their dad upgraded his phone handset. (Why?)

The rules are simple: pick some dates and scroll through each easyJet destination hunting out the cheapest. Parameters are optional but super early or late departures were out, or so I thought. As were any flights longer than two hours. It had worked so well last year, with Porto coming in the clear victor. And very lovely it was too, not least because  we discovered a gem of a resort – something of an oxymoron – up in the hills, in the form of a turn-of-the-last-century mineral water bottling plant that now sports ultra-chic eco cabins for rent. (Pedras Salgadas, should anyone want the tip.)

There was one extra handicap that hadn’t applied last year: I’d be solo. Sorry, I mean solo in charge of three small people, including, for added fun, an opinionated 18 month old who, it would transpire, had strong feelings  – and even stronger vocal chords – on being robbed of her bag at airport security. But I’m jumping ahead. Could I fly on my own with the three of them? Should I? Would I?

Quite possibly, I’d have bottled it, had Louis not got himself involved, notably at 9.30pm on a school night when he “couldn’t sleep”. By then, he knew Spain was on the cards, specifically Asturias, the secret northern region that is almost untouched by British holidaymaker for no other reason than it tends to be wet. Naturally, in the manner of all things easyJet, I deliberated for so long that the cost of getting us all to my roulette winner had jumped, but only by £80.

More worryingly, I found that the easy morning return had turned into a late night horror when I needed to shorten the trip to, er, just two nights. Which sounds nuttishly brief, but I figured being on my own would make the three days feel like an eternity. Plus downgrading from a hotel to an Airbnb, suddenly made our jaunt to Asturias better value than a cottage in the New Forest, my vanilla alternative. But, hey, what’s a trip without a challenge?

Of course I booked the flights.

 

 

Free…..lancing

“Will you freelance?” they asked. And the alternative, I wondered. Saying you’re unemployed? Thank god it’s an option. Freelancing. Lancing that free time, draining those hours and minutes I might otherwise struggle to fill. Except I haven’t had much free time in the last eight years. There’s been the maternity leaves, yes, but never Time, not to myself, not really.

Even when they were sleeping, I could never believe they wouldn’t wake up. And so, I’d walk and walk, in the winter chill of DC, and the late autumn heat of Jerusalem, only it was harder to keep going there with number two, what with dragging his three-year-old brother behind me on his trusty green scooter. Later, with Etta, I’d relish my London walks on the rare days we had together, the boys otherwise occupied at school and nursery. With her, I’d fill my head with the sounds of podcasts: Serial, to start with. Then endless Desert Island Discs. But I’d always be thinking about her, the baby who was always about to stir.

Now that I have nowhere to be for the three days I’m nominally working – truly, nowhere, because the house is full of a toddler and her nanny – my mind dreams of the things I’d like to do with my time. The yoga, the swimming, the unbooked massages. But what about my inner guilt, the voice chiding me for missing all the writing commissions going to my fellow freelancers?

I make a call. “I’m a freelance journalist,” I say to the person on the other end of the phone. That’s what they hear. Me? That I’m homeless. I wonder how often I’ll forget and tell people I’m from the Independent? Now I’m just independent. I hope I can like it.

A year of living redundantly

It hurts, losing your job. It really hurts. It’s what you do, work. It’s who you are. Except suddenly you’re not. Sure, I knew it was coming. Ever since I joined the Independent, nearly 15 years ago to the day, I knew it was about to fold. We all did, deep down. But I always hoped otherwise. True, there was never any money: not for promotions, not for trips, not for anything, not really. But we kept going, day after day, and then, after I joined the Indy on Sunday, week after week. And, eventually, hour after hour, once our editors eventually embraced the web.

What we lacked in circulation, we made up for in influence. In spades. We were feisty, punchy, and quirky. But it wasn’t enough. Not even the success of the i Paper – our rubber ring, we were told – could keep us afloat. Or was the i Paper too successful? Too irresistible? Either way, I saw the news late on a Wednesday evening on Twitter: the Telegraph’s James Quinn broke the story that Johnston Press was poised to buy the i Paper.

I was just back from a day up in Darlington, interviewing someone for the New Review. It was to have been my best week back at the papers since my maternity leave: the next day I was meeting a gallery owner, Steve Lazarides, for the Independent Magazine. But just like that, it turned into my worst week, and one of my last ones. Despite the fevered speculation about what that i paper sale would mean for the future of the Independent titles, we had to wait two long days to learn our fate. I remember hot tears on the Circle line home that Thursday night; more as I walked the dark streets back home. And then floods of them in that silent newsroom when the email came, just before noon on the Friday, confirming that the Independent would live on online only, and the print titles were to cease.

The upside, if you could call it that, was we had a six-week stay of execution while the sale went through. Six weeks of being paid. Six weeks with somewhere to be published. Time at least for me to write up my two magazine features, which by a bizarre quirk of timing ended up as cover features on consecutive days; my first and last such coup. But oh, the downside. And the drawn out agony of inching towards the finish line.

It’s almost a relief to be out the other side, except I don’t really mean that. I’m lucky, I suppose. I’ve been there long enough to get some cash, which will help for a year. But my time off with the kids means I know 12 months goes quickly, and what then? “What are your plans?” everyone. Like I have any, other than to write. Hopefully for cash. Which makes me wonder why I’ve spent the last hour writing this instead of pitching stories to unknown editors.

But don’t they say you should write every day? So this is it, day one of A Year of Living Redundantly, which is an awful title, I know, but someone wrote a book about A Year of Living Danishly, and I wished it had been me, so the phrase has stuck in my head. But that’s too long for a website, so I went for suzeletter because: suzeletter! And who doesn’t have a newsletter. Why, I’ve got no idea, but that’s for another time. Maybe.