So, and here is the absolute truth, I wasn’t going to have children. I was going to be the super cool aunt who the nieces and nephews got over excited about seeing, with a lovely house. I was going to get a well paid job in London, hopefully working up to running a storytelling business. I was going to live in Greenwich, flitting around the market on a daily basis and now and again fitting in some work. Sitting in front of a roaring open fire at Christmas, looking out of the window of my huge central apartment I would watch the tourists bundled up in scarves and gloves marvelling at the place in which I lived. And I wasn’t going to have sick down my shoulder.
And so I sit, in Plumstead (it’s in the BOROUGH of Greenwich, I’ll have you know) and, shockingly, not that many tourists make it out here unless they want to know what the definition of the word ‘grim’ is. I am in an end of terrace house which is pretty well falling down, with my husband and our baby. The only bit of storytelling I have managed in the last year is for a friends 60th birthday party (but who doesn’t enjoy reading Down the Back of the Chair to sixty 60 year olds? Genuinely amazing fun) and the most cosmopolitan thing I have done recently is shave my legs. And, incidentally, there is sick down my shoulder.
This is not, as it would first appear, awful. It is just so different to what I had anticipated when I used to come to London in my knee high boots and cookie hats thinking “Oh I can’t wait to slot right in to London life!” It is the dawning realisation that real life continues even when you think you’re probably, more than likely, about to live the life of somebody who only exists in a film. Bridget Jones I am not, no matter how big my pants are.
But this has led to the most exciting thing to happen in my life, apart from the birth of my Son of course, which is that I am going to university. I am going to study creative writing, who would have thought? A prospect which I always thought actually impossible, even in my make believe London world, but is even better than that of telling stories to children for a living. As you can tell, hard graft is not exactly my wont. And while I currently sit here with formula milk strewn about my person, raisins on the floor because I’ve not had chance to tidy up yet (apart from all the time I’ve spent writing this. Obviously), cracks up the wall which appear to be groaning open by the second, and a man standing outside my front door about to slot the fifth takeaway menu of the day through my front door even though it’s only 10:15am, I still couldn’t be more excited.
At the age of 27, Rachael, welcome to the beginning of your life. Embrace it with open arms! Then go and wipe that sick off your shoulder…
