Dear Readers, you may have noticed that there haven’t been any postings for some weeks now; the reason for this was that I was just too happy. I had actually decided to stop writing my diary, as I felt that it had run its course and that I was beginning to repeat myself. I had concluded that nobody was reading it anymore, and so there didn’t seem much point in it. I was blissfully happy, re-pointing the long, stone wall that runs the length of my lane, I was content and everything in my life was lovely. Now, that’s just boring isn’t it? That’s like one of those hateful round-robin letters that you get at Christmas. You don’t want them, but every year some kindly individual feels compelled to force-feed you morsels of her perfect life, and you choke on every paragraph. You don’t care how gifted her children are, how well they can play the piano, how successful and buff her husband is, how much her house is worth. Like tiny grains of maize they are individually inconsequential, but together, once ingested, they leave you feeling as liverish and bloated as a foie gras goose. For years I picked such letters out of my post box, and for years I threw all but the most nauseating straight in the bin. Some are so choice that they deserve to be read aloud to an audience, and I still have a small collection of the most gruesomely smug and badly written examples, which I take out from time to time to remind me why I must never, ever write such a letter. So is this diary such a letter, but in a vastly elongated form? Well, that conclusion must be left to you, but if you do write and tell me that you are tired of my ramblings then I will stop forthwith.

But for now I have a veritable cornucopia of woe to expunge. A Pandora’s box of beastliness that opened up a couple of weeks ago and that I’m still trying to deal with.

It all started with Lyme disease. Lyme disease is what you get when a certain type of tick bores into your flesh and make you ill. A few weeks ago I got another form, which is called Lime disease. I became an annoying little tick, who would bore anyone within shouting distance about the joys of lime mortar. Friends began to avoid me, work colleagues shunned me, but I didn’t care, because I’d found something that I really loved doing. This diary was neglected, my children began to tire of seeing me mixing mortar and standing at the wall for hours on end, but I couldn’t get enough of it. I was really, really happy, and then one evening when we were all snuggled up on the sofa together, Rosie turned to me and said, ‘Mummy, I don’t care if we don’t get another daddy, because I’m so happy with just the three of us.’ Sometimes Rosie comes out with these little nuggets of blinding truth, and I’m always at a loss as to what I should say. But I really didn’t have to say anything, because when your child comes out with such a profound statement, all you can do is be thankful. And I am thankful, and I was just as happy as Rosie, until that fateful day when it all went very, very wrong.

My state of mind is such that I can cope with almost anything, and most of the time, when bad things happen, they happen so infrequently that I am not troubled by them at all. It’s rather like treading in a cow pat, if it happens once in a while it’s no big deal, but on that fateful Sunday I bypassed the cowpats completely and tripped and fell headfirst into a slurry pit.

Two events started the ball rolling, making me firstly very worried and secondly exceedingly annoyed, but I tried to be calm, because it was a Sunday and I’d promised Rosie that I would help her to make a dress. Now, I’m a pretty fearless person, except when it comes to sewing. It was hard enough to get me into a shop to buy the material in the first place. Rosie caught me at a weak moment and I agreed to let her choose a dress pattern. I had tried to steer her towards something easy, as it was her first project, but she has a mindful of Chanel and Prada, and she headed straight for the dress patterns. The woman behind the counter was kind enough to recognise that I was struggling, so she measured out the correct amount of material and sent me on my way with a bag full of bits and bobbins and a pattern called Simplicity, so how hard could it be?

I’m good at cutting news stories together. Cutting news stories is easy; it’s bits of sound and bits of picture and sometimes a bit of ribbony music to tie it all together, and it ends up being seamless and thoroughly watchable. I once cut a news feature about a long-established haberdashery shop in mid-Devon. It will stay with me forever, because the people who worked in the shop were clearly all a bit touched from years and years of working with pins and petersham. One scene featured a woman looking at an assortment of sew-on patterns. She clearly wanted a motif for whatever horror of a cardigan she was knitting, but asked instead for a motive. I suspect that she’d actually just stabbed her long-suffering husband with a crotchet hook and was asking Mrs. Rist, the lady behind the counter, to give her an alibi. I have a deep distrust of haberdashery shops and cutting that particular item only re-enforced the belief that if you love to sew you’re going to end up going insane and killing your husband with something sharp and pointy. However, as my husband is already dead, I figured that it wouldn’t hurt to help Rosie on her way to becoming Devon’s answer to Vivienne Westward, and so we set to work.

At about the same time as the pieces of material were going together, the website message board went into meltdown. I only keep half an eye on it, but on that particular morning I was locked into an unfolding drama that I might write about one day, under that title, ‘They shoot ponies, don’t they?’

And all the while I was trying to stay calm and help Rosie, because I’d promised her that I would devote my morning to her and that nightmare of a dress, and I didn’t want to let her down. And I was trying to figure out what the hell the instructions meant, but they made no sense to me, and try as I might I just couldn’t work out which bits of fabric were supposed to be joined together, and in what order. And then I realised that I was getting more and more angry, about the message board and the dress and the other things, and that Rosie just wanted me to help her, and that the pattern was called fucking Simplicity, and that was a big lie, and how could they lie to me? And there I was with 20 quid’s worth of material and I could have gone out and bought a lovely dress for Rosie for that, and saved myself an ulcer, and it all got too much and I broke down and cried. I cried for the first time in years, and poor Rosie was so shocked and upset to see me in tears that she began to cry too, and then we just sat and cried together. Eventually, I stopped to mid-sob and turned to Rosie and said, ‘I really hate sewing.’

It all seems such a long time ago, but still pricks me occasionally, like one of those pins that are still left in the unfinished garment that I cannot bear to return to. My friend Nellie has kindly agreed to help Rosie finish the dress, and so I can get back to my wall and my happy life.

So that was my slurry with the winge on top, and I hope you liked it.

I’m feeling much better now, so do you want to hear some more about lime?


© Kate Boydell 2004. All rights reserved. e-mail: [email protected]. Close window.