I want to start by apologising for the lack of entries this month. I know I sound like a shy curate, addressing a wife who is chewing her pink Draylon headboard with ill-disguised sexual frustration, but I really am terribly sorry. I could say that I had a really bad headache, or an attack of phlebitis - but that would be a lie, because I don’t get headaches and I’m really not sure what phlebitis is. So all I can say is that I’ve been a bit busy and have had to put my diary on the back burner for a while. It’s quiet in the house now; my girls are safely tucked up in bed, and I should be too, but I’ve just had an e-mail from my good friend Deb, who has just got round to reading the diary entries. She wrote to tell me how much she liked them and now I’m feeling terribly self-import and clever, when I should be feeling sleepy and really rather dim.

I’ve never been that bright. I got nine ‘O’ levels, but I was really rubbish at maths, and now when Rosie talks to me about number lines, I just shrug like Homer Simpson and tell her that I have no idea what she’s on about. We don’t have deep discussions on mathematical theorem in our house, but we do have wrestling. I took the girls out into the garden yesterday and let them beat me to the ground as a treat for having excellent reports. It’s good exercise and I think it gives them a very good grounding for adult life. In my opinion tumbling around on the grass with your mother is a far better pastime for a young girl than disco dancing or piano lessons. I’ve just watched a programme about pushy parents, and it made me glad that I’m so apathetic. I did muster up the energy to take the girls on a bicycle ride, which was lovely and refreshing and really quite exhausting, but now the house is quiet and I can reflect on the past week and try my hardest to write something interesting about it.

I’m just about to take the plunge and buy an Apple ibook. I’m aware that many people now enjoy reading this journal, and so I think I need to have the means to write wherever I go; I’m forty in a couple of weeks and I figure I need a nice treat. I’m buying the laptop with my summer holiday in mind; last year I took Rosie and Alice to a ranch in Colorado, and if last year’s trip is anything to go by it should provide a very rich seam of material. Colorado is the land of the cowboy, and our ranch was teeming with fit, lean wranglers who doffed their hats and called me M’am. They all seemed to have impossibly white teeth, and impossibly tight buttocks and it was all I could do to stop myself saddling one of them up, riding him hard and putting him away wet. In the end I refrained from doing anything reckless because cowboys in the Rockies have their own very special way of warding off the unwanted attentions of amorous widows: They spit. And I can tell you that there is nothing more unappetising that the sight of cherubic lips, parting seductively, only to suddenly expel a great gob of dirty brown sputum. Cowboys spit constantly; it punctuates their sentences like a salivary full stop, and I dread to think of what it tastes like to actually have to kiss a mouth dripping fetid tobacco juice. But having said all that, you can forgive those handsome wranglers anything; it’s very easy to make them blush; they are charming, polite and utterly adorable. So we’re off to the Rockies again in August, in search of high adventure and diary material. I have an appointment with a horse called Molly and a grinning cowboy who goes by the name of Brad…

On a slightly more serious note, Father's day has just been and gone, and I wish for the sake of all those people that don’t have the luxury of a father, that the whole day could be wiped off our calendars for good. Father's day used to cause Rosie and Alice a huge amount of grief, especially when they were asked to make a Father's Day card at school. A couple of years ago Rosie decided to make a card for her uncle Eddie, which I think cause more than a few raised eyebrows in the staffroom, but this year her wishes were different; this year she said to me, 'Daddy isn't alive any more, so there doesn't seem much point in making him a card.' Her words took me a bit by surprise, but demonstrated that she has come a long way in the last six years. She and her sister picked some flowers from the garden and took them down to Charlie’s grave, and as I watched them walking hand in hand down the lane, each holding a posy of roses and daisies wrapped in kitchen roll, I thought how wonderful it was to be the mother of two such beautifully balanced girls. And I know why they are that way: They are happy because I am happy; they don’t have violin lessons or a pony, but they do have a mother to wrestle with whenever they like. They laugh and joke and sing because they see me doing the same; they walk with unburdened shoulders because they know that I am not expecting them to spend the rest of their lives in mourning. My girls deserve a happy childhood, and it is up to me to give them one.

A man wrote to me yesterday and told me that he and a group of friends organised an Unfather's Day barbecue, which seemed like a jolly good idea to me. The plain fact of it is that such days are painful in the early years and there’s really no way of avoiding them. Mourning is like being crushed by a big, steel roller; events like Father’s day appear like sharp spikes on the drum - you can see them coming towards you and you know they are going to hurt, but there is nothing you can do to escape the pain. The roller has passed over me now, and I no longer get distressed by the sight of stores filled with presents, and shops stacked with cards. Pain passes into memory, and misery fades like the ink on a sun-bleached ‘With Deepest Sympathy’ card. So to all of the people who are reading this entry in post Father's Day gloom, please let me assure you that in a few years time you will see Father's day for what it really is – just another Sunday in June.


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