I’m not generally a picky person, but there are some things that do irritate me. For instance, I cannot go to sleep if there are any open drawers in my bedroom. I like things to be squared away before I shut my eyes, and if I catch a glimpse of a chest of drawers showing too much lip, then I have to get up and push the offending drawer tight shut.

I was at the cinema last weekend with my girls, watching the film trailers before ‘Cinderella Man’, and I was suddenly overcome with the same feeling of intense irritation. The trailer in question was for the new big-screen adaptation of ‘Pride and Prejudice’. Now, I like a good period drama just as much as the next woman, but I shan’t be queuing up to see this one: Firstly, because I think the man playing Mr. Darcy looks rather unsavoury. He doesn’t hold a candle to the lovely Colin Firth and looks to me like someone you might see hanging around a public lavatory, simultaneously scratching himself and rolling a spliff. But it’s not him that made me sit up and take notice. As I watched the fair Ms. Knightly, all soft lighting, shot silk and lip-gloss, I realised where I’d seen her before, and understood why it is that I’ve never really liked her.

It’s her chin. She looks like my chest of drawers after I’ve had a good, long rummage for a forgotten jumper. She may have lovely skin, a great figure and cheekbones to die for, she may be fêted as the new Elizabeth Taylor, but I just can’t ignore the fact that her bottom jaw juts out in a way that makes me want to take a swipe at her with a heavy-bottomed saucepan. Call me a perfectionist, but, just as I feel compelled to shut drawers properly, I feel the urge to re-align Keira Knightly’s mouth. I never felt that way about Elizabeth Taylor, because she was indeed a great beauty, and I do question the wisdom of comparing the two women. Personally, I think Keira might have made an error of judgement when she took the role of Elizabeth Bennett, because if she’d got a part in ‘Cinderella Man’, and found herself in the boxing ring with Russell Crowe, she could have enjoyed a bit of rough and tumble with a real man, and a spot of maxillofacial tweaking into the bargain. Job Done.

It’s been a week of interesting developments. I’ve been on my lime rendering and pointing course, which I absolutely loved. To get there I had to drive into the heart of darkness that is mid-Devon. It is as sparsely populated as it is impenetrable, the Devon banks so high and the lanes so narrow that it’s anyone’s guess where you are half of the time. Last year I bought myself a cunning little gadget in order to help with the difficult art of lone navigation. It’s a PDA and a GPS navigator combined, and when I get into my car and plug it in, a nice lady tells me exactly where to go, which negates the need to pull off the road in order to squint at a map. But last week I thought I knew better. Last week I ignored the nice lady, and, when she told me to turn right out of my lane, I turned left, because I thought that was quickest route. I got to my destination almost two hours later and donned my work boots and protective clothing in order to learn all about lime. It’s lovely stuff, and when I’d finished the course I was filled with the urge to point something, or render something, or point at something and shout, ‘That needs rendering!’ But it was late and I had to drive home to my girls, so I put all thoughts of horsehair and lime putty out of my head, and let the nice lady take me home.

I had a feeling she’d know a quicker route, and indeed she did. We went in the opposite direction to the way we had come, I was in the middle of nowhere, and it was getting dark, but I just kept on turning when she told me to turn, and we eventually got home a full half hour quicker than we would have done if I’d been navigating myself. Sometimes you just have to let go of the reins, but it’s not easy to do when you’ve become so accustomed to doing everything by yourself. I don’t like being independent. I like depending on somebody, because it’s reassuring and it makes you feel loved and protected, but I’ve had to wean myself off the comforting feeling that comes from having a man around, and it wasn’t easy to do. In the early days even emptying the bin made me burst into tears, because it was just so difficult to do without help. I was so used to Charlie appearing from nowhere, like the shopkeeper in Mr. Ben, and holding down the bin whilst I pulled out the bag of rubbish; it was easy, everything worked like clockwork, we were a team and we were happy. But you just can’t dwell on the past if you want to go forward; you can’t long for what has passed because then you will live in the past, and your future will be as black and desolate as the bottom of a rubbish bin. I didn’t choose to live this way, but I am determined to make the best of my life, and if that means that I have to sit and listen to an annoying woman telling me where to drive, then so be it.

When we got back from our trip to the cinema, Alice went out to play and Rosie fell asleep on the sofa. I disappeared into the barn because I had a cunning plan. Rosie has decided that she wants to learn to play the drums at school, and has been pestering me to get her a pair of drumsticks so that she can practice at home with pots and pans. Oh joy…

Anyhow, wooden spoons didn’t seem to be up to the task, so I decided to make her some drumsticks. Whilst I was shaping the sticks I was thinking about our trip to the cinema, and of how much we all enjoyed it. It was a gamble to take the girls to see a film about boxing, but I wanted them to learn about the Great Depression, and I was also rather keen to see Russell Crowe looking lean and mean, ripped and ready for a fight. It turned out that I needn’t have worried about the girls getting bored, because Alice was soon happily buried in a bucket of popcorn and Rosie was as engrossed in the film as I was. We all thoroughly enjoyed ourselves, and it made me think back to the first time I took the girls to the cinema after Charlie died. I was really looking forward to seeing ‘Toy Story’, but I never got to see the whole film because Rosie and Alice played up so much that I had to take them out of the cinema. I remember shouting at them all the way home and telling them how they’d ruined my day. I remember feeling the utter misery of a woman who is desperate to fill the empty weekends, desperate to entertain her children, but desperate to find just five minutes of peace. I was at my wit’s end, and I thought it would always be that way, but now I find myself with space and time at weekends, and I know I can make my girls happy by just being with them; by making a simple pair of drumsticks; by showing them that I’m content. The drumsticks are fairly rudimentary, but to see Rosie’s face when I placed them in her hands, you would have thought they were made out of solid gold.


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