Drinking tea at 5.45 in the morning: what does it achieve?

How apt it would have been on this, the birthday of Emily Dickinson, to announce that:

I started early, took my dog,
And visited the sea . . .

But, sadly, I did not. Instead:

I started early, groaned a lot
And made a cup of tea . . .

And then I climbed back into bed, thinking 'I ought to finish that book while I drink my tea', but failing to do so; and then thinking 'I must get up and put away all SD3's clothes (which, owing to her bedroom floor being so completely impassable, have been accumulating in accusing piles in my room instead of making their way into her chest of drawers)', but I didn't; and then thinking 'I could be at my desk clearing an hour's worth of work instead of lying here drinking tea'; and also 'I could, belatedly, be turning all that soaking fruit into a Christmas cake instead of lying here drinking tea', neither of which materialised. I continued to lie there drinking tea. And then I thought of someone else whose birthday is today, and someone whose birthday was yesterday but I completely forgot to pop a card through their letterbox, and then I thought: 'at what age, precisely, will I finally get to grips with all this life/work balance malarkey and turn into a domestic goddess?'.

Tea drained, I eventually got up and woke the rest of the household. In less than a month it will be time to make New Year's Resolutions. What will mine be? To get to grips with all this life/work balance malarkey and turn into a domestic goddess, of course.

I seem, hazily, to recall having made a similar resolution last time around. Has any progress been achieved on the domestic front in the last twelve months? I checked back to see how I was doing at this point exactly a year ago, and this is what I found.

I think that answers my question.

Onward and downward . . .

Feelin' good

Reflected once again last night on the curious ability of a well-made 'feel-good' movie to make one, in short, Feel Good.

At the end of a day in which I achieved nothing more than some inconsequential domestic cleaning and tidying, followed by further cleaning and tidying, most of it carried out with extremely bad grace whilst railing silently at absent family members through clenched teeth . . . I was utterly ready for bed shortly after nine.

Was also feeling grumpy at having twisted my knee whilst negotiating a groyne* earlier in the evening.

While waiting for the kettle to boil for two large restorative mugs of tea, I slumped on the sofa, flicked on the telly and there was good old Bridget Jones's Diary. I've seen it dozens of times so I wasn't going to bother watching it again, especially given how out of kilter it was with my extremely foul mood.

Well, OK, just until I down the first mug of tea, then. Hmm, actually, it's worth watching just a tiny bit more, so I'll just pour myself a small glass of wine . . .

By the closing credits I was purring. And I went to bed a happy woman. How incredibly shallow and easily manipulated I am!

* note crucial spelling here - I'm referring to inadvisedly jumping off a wooden structure jutting out of the sea , rather than anything of a more intimate nature ...

Have you ever . . .

. . . jotted down a name or number on the back of your hand with a biro in the absence of a scrap of paper?

Here's someone who took things a little bit further!



It took eight hours of writing, five permanent markers and was done to draw attention to a campaign to promote writing on designated graffiti spaces rather than other people's property.

And it took three baths and two showers to clean it all off!

Which reminds me of a small domestic nightmare which took place on the evening before the start of a new school year seven years ago. SD#1 and SD#2 had played happily together in the garden all day long. A game of pirates. I called them in for a bath.

Son had a drawn-on moustache, copious 'stubble' and a large black eye-patch. Face paints! How sweet.

Except that it didn't come off in the bath.

'What did you do this with?' I enquired . . . not terrifically calmly.

'CD marker pens', came the reply.

Several hours, a lot of soap, and even some light scrubbing with a nail brush later, the remnants of the eye-patch were still visible.

So off he went to his first day at a new school with a black eye and a faint moustache ...

No time to write . . .

. . . been v busy turning these

. . . into this

+ school parents' meeting + son despatched to Devon for adventure holiday + only 2 hours' sleep last night = zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

Catching up

Gosh, has it really been five days since my previous post?

Usual excuses: work, work, family, work, family . . . oh, and I've even been reading books!

Yes, it happened yesterday:

while SD#1 and her father were in the European City of Culture, videoing and photographing, respectively, their favourite band at the most famous club in the world;

while SD#2 recovered quietly from his birthday party at Mersea Outdoors, a picnic, an afternoon and evening walking from East to West Mersea and playing on the beach, staying up to watch the Eurovision Song Contest, a sleepover with a couple of friends and playing all morning in the garden despite the pouring rain (their idea, not mine);

while SD#3 watched back-to-back classic musicals (Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, Oliver and Annie) while simultaneously trying out some new ‘blending chalks’, completing half a Ratatouille colouring book, and making ‘rubbings’ of every textured surface in the house;

while the washing machine chuntered patiently through several loads of muddy clothes and the wind and rain lashed the windows (hard to believe after such a glorious Saturday) . . .

I sat in a chair and I read a book.

And then I read another one.

It is hard to describe quite how luxurious this felt. A rare treat. I could get used to it.

Anyway, what with one thing and another, I’ve had time for only the briefest skim across the blogosphere but here are some bits and bobs I’ve landed on:

* Are there simply Too Many Books out there?

* If so, maybe Amazon’s swingeing new rules on selling Print on Demand titles will help . . .

* Is there ever anything new in Crime Fiction?

* Hooray (as always) for Mick Inkpen. But which Kipper character are you? (And why couldn’t I find a copy my favourite Inkpen title in any local bookshops last weekend?)

* A comment on marginalia on one of my favourite blogs leads to an enquiry into the implications of Green Ink.

* Further ripples in the Sea Glass pond.

* And Leonard Cohen is back.

Hallelujah!

Boy, 11

11 years ago today, a surgeon produced, as if by magic from behind a green screen, a 10lb 2 oz baby and announced 'well, you've got yourself a fine rugby player here, Mrs Doyle'.

And he was right. I have.

Happy Birthday, Boy.

Oh! So it's not just me, then!

Bye, Spot!

Amused to see what Adam at Crockatt and Powell Booksellers has been getting up to with some favourite children's books. They really suit my jaundiced mood and made me laugh. (Laugh, that is, with the crazed cackle of the Seasonally Affected Editor whose deadlines are all clashing and whose favourite (ancient) FatFace trousers just fell apart in the wash.)

Here are a couple of examples - there are lots more here and (by special request) here (though please don't click if you're below a certain age or likely to be offended!)


Have any other weary, jaded parents ever got to the stage where they can read The Very Hungry Caterpillar and other favourites aloud while actually thinking about something completely different (and I mean completely different!) and then come to with a start when it's finished and think 'oh, where am I?' - without the hapless young listener having noticed that anything is amiss?

After 14 years I have it down to a fine art.





I do like Eric Carle's books a lot, but I've always seriously had it in for Spot. Hate the pics, hate the bland, unimaginative 'stories', hate (with a deep, brooding, black malevolence) the videos, hate the fact that I have spent several hours of my life laboriously sellotaping and pritt-sticking all the little lift-up flaps back on, time after time.

I finally sent the whole lot of them to the Mersea Island Charity Shop last year - hooray! So this one is very apt.

Thanks Adam. Please come up with more sooooooon!

Oh, and I do commend C&P's lively blog to book lovers everywhere, especially any who have ever worked on the other side of the counter. I particularly enjoyed this recent post on the future of 'real' books.

Worrying . . .

This is something I worry about on a daily basis. Like most children, mine use the Internet - especially the eldest, who is online most of her waking life, it sometimes seems.

There are sooooooo many issues to deal with - a whole new world of worrying that is new to our generation of parents, and it's such a fast-moving world, with so many implications, that one has to worry overtime to keep up.

The frequency and ease with which I find myself faced with a Google page full of ultra-hard-porn sites having innocently entered a key word/phrase in search of, eg, missing bibliographical details in an academic book on international law . . . well, it's frightening. Frightening in that I would not wish my children to encounter such sites accidentally and enter them out of natural curiosity.

Yet, it is virtually impossible to researching Year 9 homework topics if high-level child security is switched on. Constant adjustment is required. Even my 10-year-old son's PC had to be re-adjusted because child-safe settings wouldn't allow him to access the thing he's most interested in at the moment - sites selling model aircraft kits, and sites with information about the historic aircraft he's mad about. Why? Because they have the word 'war' in them (as in Second World War Spitfire). Again, a daily reappraisal is necessary and I know we haven't got it right.

And daughter #1 is clever - very - and far more Internet savvy than me, despite my being welded to my own PC. She chats on forums devoted to seemingly innocuous subjects like Strictly Come Dancing or Casualty . . . but who is she chatting to, exactly?

We're all advised to 'keep a careful eye on our children's Internet use'. But how?? By standing over their shoulder the whole time? Impossible. I'm delighted that she researches her homework topics so fully, and I'm delighted that she has a wide circle of nice real-life friends to chat to on Bebo etc. I don't want to intrude upon her privacy, nor can I afford to give up my working evenings in order to stand in the corner of her room watching her every keystroke.

So we talk about it, and she's like, yeah, whatevva, it's OK. I'm cool, I know what I'm doing, don't worry.

And I worry. And worry. And worry. And read articles like this and sites like this this and this . And worry some more.

And I've signed this NSPCC petition, because of course it would be a start if PCs were sold with security options ready installed. And I applaud the NSPCC's campaigning, which often has a big influence on public policy-makers.

But . . . it's not the whole answer. Not by a long, long way.

How do other parents deal with these worries?

Treasures from the Christmas Book Box

Well, it's well and truly Christmas-time now, and there's no getting away from the fact, however far short of finished my shopping is. I've been to the School Nativity Play, in which Small Doyle #3 was to have played a 'Jiving Camel' [sic] but, owing to the absence of a more crucial cast member on the night, had at the last minute to assume the role of The Donkey instead. The Donkey still got to jive, however, so that was OK. But it was nevertheless a disappointment not to be able to wear the Camel costume, which, I had been warned, was sooooo realistic that she might easily have been mistaken for a REAL Camel.

And then it was belated 6th birthday party yesterday - 21 small girls learning a dance routine to High School Musical, passing (hurling) the parcel and loading up their paper plates with far more sausages, crisps and cakes then they could have managed in a week, but that's kids' parties all over, and it was generally voted a resounding success. Exhausting though - even for those of us who weren't dancing (just idly serving food and clearing away again after a morning spent sauntering around supermarkets in a laid-back fashion - I daren't use the 's' word after having read Random Distractions' pertinent remarks on this point or I fear I shall be taken to task . . .).

So many busy days and late nights for the children this last week that there hasn't been a lot of time for bedtime stories. But tonight we will be back to the big pile of Christmas Books, which emerged on 1 December when the Christmas Boxes came in from the garage.




I absolutely and completely refuse, on any account, to start decorating the house for Christmas until the end of the school term. It's just a grumpy 'thing' of mine. It's not Christmas yet, it's Advent. It's bad enough that the shops have been twinking and flashing relentlessly since the beginning of October (at least), without us all having to join them the instant December arrives. Mine is already almost the Only Unlit Garden in the Village. It will twinkle (discreetly, with white lights) eventually . . . just not for a few days yet.


I simply prefer Christmas to be concentrated, rather than allowing it to expand to fit all available surrounding days, weeks and months. Shops do it because they need to make us buy stuff. But why follow suit and get all tinselled up while everyone's still slogging away at work and school?




Before I had children, I'd leave it until Christmas Eve until I put the tree up, brought in the holly and tied ivy and red ribbons to the door-knocker while listening to the Service of Nine Lessons and Carols from King's College, Cambridge at 3 o'clock. I've had to pull back a little since then, but still haven't given much ground. My children are resigned to this Scrooge-like peculiarity of their eccentric mother and have even given up nagging me for flashing Santas on the roof and lifesize glowing reindeer in the driveway.


Anyway, as usual, I digress from what was to be the subject of this post, and that is all the much-loved Christmassy books in my children's collection.

Favourites include Little Angel by Geraldine McCaughrean, with illustrations by the always brilliant Ian Beck, and also Beck's Christmas Story carousel book, which is unfortunately out of print.

Shirley Hughes's Lucy and Tom's Christmas - very cosy and reassuringly realistic, down to the 'tears before bedtime' necessitating a brisk walk in the fresh air with Grandpa.

Nick Butterworth and Mick Inkpen's The Nativity Play is hilarious and parents will relate to its knowing observations as much as children.

Best loved of all here, without a doubt, is The Christmas Miracle of Jonathan Toomey, by Susan Wojciechowski, which I would strenuously recommend to absolutely everyone of all ages. It is a deeply moving human story of survival, hope, redemption and love, with the most astonishingly beautiful illustrations by Patrick Lynch.

Jonathan Toomey is a reclusive widowed wood-carver, nicknamed 'Mr Gloomy' by his neighbours, because of his dour demeanour. The other villagers don't realise that the reason for his unsmiling gloom is that -

'Some years earlier, when Jonathan Toomey was young and full of life and full of love, his wife and baby had become very ill. And . . . died, three days apart from each other. So Jonathan Toomey had packed his belongings into a wagon and travelled till his tears stopped. He settled into a tiny house at the edge of a village to do his wood-carving.'

One December a young widow, newly arrived in the village, calls on Jonathan with her seven-year-old son, Thomas. She commissions him to carve a nativity scene to replace one her grandfather made her which has been lost in her move. Gradually, the widow - through her persistent acts of quiet kindness - and Thomas - through his innocent, trusting frankness - force Jonathan to confront his grief and transform it into a source of inspiration in his work. The story ends on Christmas morning, with the dawning of new hope - hands tentatively held and laughter where once there had been none.

It's an intense story, sensitively told, and with a depth not often encountered in a children's picture book. It doesn't shy away from its troubling themes of bereavement and loneliness, and its resolution, while positive and warm is not at all sugary. Patrick Lynch's paintings are genuinely breathtaking - I gaze at them for as long and as many times over as my children do.

I have read it aloud hundreds of times because we've had our copy since it was first published here in about 1997 and it's demanded every single day from the moment it reappears until just before it's the last book to go back in the box on Twelfth Night. (It has been made into a film, but seems to have gone almost straight to DVD and only in Region 1 (ie US/Canada) format at that, which is a shame, because it would have been interesting to see how it had been interpreted.)

I was just composing this post when I noticed that Tarviragus has posted some fascinating photographs of the most amazing wooden crib made by a carpenter for West Mersea's parish church - how wonderfully apt.

The domestic non-genius

Just a quick update on all that Blog Readability Test nonsense: it turns out that the whole thing was not only a load of old tosh, but some kind of Google rating scam to boot. See Topsyturvydom for all the technical details. Basically, the message is: don't go there, don't do it, and, whatever you do, don't get the badge to prove it!

Even I'd noticed that the 'Test' didn't seem in any way linked to, or mentioned on, the website it purported to be part of. But once again, old fuzzy-brain here didn't go the extra mile and ask 'why not?' People exhibiting greater intellectual rigour have worked the whole thing out, so thank goodness for them, I say.

I'm just too busy wrestling with the statutory tables for a book on tax planning while peering over my shoulder to check whether the various mounds of laundry (dirty, clean, wet, dry, folded, unfolded and waiting (ha! as if . . .) to be ironed) have started to creep round the door of my study to mock me in muffled textile tones.

Which nightmare scenario allows me to introduce, quite effortlessly, my Muse of the Day:


There are so many Domestic Arts blogs out there, and they're gorgeous to look at and beautifully lifestyley, and make the lowly 'rest of us' all feel duly inadequate, which of course is a very large part of the Point of them, one suspects (through one's jaundiced eyes).

But they are all so completely filled with beautiful, tidy, clean, exquisitely arranged things, that it's rather like flicking through a year's worth of Country Living unrelieved by advertisements for conservatories, stairlifts and home gyms.

Do these people's homes never contain small dishes of assorted Action Man feet, odd Barbie sandals, broken sparkly hair ties, wrinkled conkers and pieces of unidentified Lego? Do domestic artists' children not solve the conundrum of 'room tidying' by scooping both dirty and clean clothes into big armfuls and depositing them in the laundry bin tangled with some festering bath towels they accidentally forgot to hang up to dry before the stench set in?

Is there never jam on these people's Farrow-and-Balled walls or chocolate biscuit trodden into their hand-woven carpets? And - to return to my original embittered theme du jour - where the heck is all their family laundry and why doesn't it dominate their lives utterly, or, if it does, why do they never mention it in the interests of Balance and some small, underlying sense of Reality?

Ach, ignore me, it's just been one of those days.

The tenor of which brings to mind the beautifully printed Philip Whalen poem on Susan's Green Chair Press blog . . .

Something to do

You've seen what a muddle my bookshelves are in, so it's hardly surprising, I suppose, that whilst rummaging for one thing I should happen unexpectedly on another. In this case an old, old friend - and just seeing its faded, battered cover and yellowed pages whisked me right back to 1968 (yes, I'm afraid I do go back that far, which is not an altogether edifying thought).


It's my copy of Something To Do by 'Septima', first published by Puffin Books in 1966. Mine is the 1968 reprint and it was given to me by a teacher at my Primary School, who was also a family friend. It must have been on my eighth or ninth birthday. One of my Puffin Club bookplates (inexpertly cut along the dotted line by me with my blunt-ended scissors, no doubt) was licked-and-sticked (luck-and-stuck?) to the flyleaf. Smudgy ink, new fountain pen.


Something To Do sums up what life was like in those far-off days. When children's telly came on for an hour and a half between Playschool and whatever 5.55 delight was on at the time (Tin-Tin, The Magic Roundabout, Hector's House . . .). Betweentimes it was 'The Testcard and Music' (quite nice music, sometimes, which one could dance to in one's dressing-up princess/ballerina/fairy clothes).


A rainy day meant that one couldn't play endlessly outdoors in the garden, or someone else's garden, or along the path beside the railway, or round the roads on one's bike or generally roam around looking for discarded Corona drinks bottles which one could take along to the corner shop and claim the 'deposit' back to spend on sweets (no mobile phones - our mothers hadn't a clue where we were - so long as we came home at tea-time it didn't really matter what we got up to).

A rainy day meant finding something else to do. And that's where Something To Do came into its own.

It is described by the Editor of Puffin Books, Kaye Webb, on the opening page thus:

'Here at last is a book to fill up all the wet days and dull days that produce the question "What can I do?" in every family. Something To Do has suggestions for things children can do at home, indoors and outside, without spending much money or being a terrible nuisance.'


Ha! Being a 'terrible nuisance', indeed. What we all tend to forget when we harp nostalgically back to the days when the majority of mothers were at home and 'there for' their children (and thus 'good' mothers, in contrast to the 'bad' working mothers of today) is that, in fact, they weren't. They were at home, yes, but by goodness most of them weren't sitting around reading us stories all the time, they were BUSY. In those days, running a home meant a bit more than organising the cleaning lady and loading the dishwasher/washing machine/tumble drier a couple of times a day. It meant a hard old grind, wrestling with pre-washing-machine 'boilers' and 'wringers'; scrubbing away at tough stains with bars of hard soap; heaving laundry out of hot water with huge wooden tongs; washing terry nappies; scouring pans with brillo pads and carpets with messy shampooers; making curtains and children's clothes; darning socks; growing vegetables; shoving leftover meat through the mincer without losing the ends of one's fingers.

Children had to 'run along a play' and 'be off out my kitchen' and generally avoid being a nuisance, just as much as my children have had to shove off and entertain themselves while I work at my PC. My mother may not have had client-imposed deadlines and the stresses of finding enough hours in the day to earn sufficient money, but she had other deadlines - home-made meals to put on the table at certain times; getting the washing dry enough on 'washing day' to iron on 'ironing day'; eking out the housekeeping money; catching the butcher's shop and the baker's before they closed for lunch (no 24/7 supermarkets for disorganised people then).

Before I was old enough to go to school, I remember having Little Grey Rabbit and Thomas the Tank Engine stories read to me in the afternoons, when a 'little sit down with a cup of tea' was permissible between the chores. The rest of the time, it was me on my own, with my knitted duck, my imagination, my garden, my Lego and, later, my sister to play with.

Enter Something To Do:

'Every busy mother's vade mecum. It will refresh her memory on half-forgotten pastimes, and save her any amount of brain-searching with its detailed information and plans for practical entertainments.'

And so it did. Looking through it now, it seems almost comical in its old-fashioned innocence. Every month there was a 'bird of the month' and a 'flower of the month', a poem, games to play, things to make, ideas for vaguely 'improving' activities outdoors and indoors. Detailed diagrams show how to make an Advent Calendar or some scenery for one's model railway. It's all very post-War and frugal, and pre-Blue Peter in its outlook. And, it goes without saying, entirely Middle-Class in its literary, domestic and environmental interests and aspirations.

But who cares? I was a child of that time and that class and this is why it has been such a delight to rediscover this battered pink paperback. I realise now how well I knew it. Not because my mother used it as her own good mother's handbook, particularly, but because it was very much mine. Its covers are faded because it was rarely on my bookcase, but out, sitting on the chest under my bedroom window, being referred to as I planted seeds in little pots and watered them daily, or made lavender bags out of old scarves, or paper fans with lolly-stick handles. I took it all very seriously!



The illustrations are by Shirley Hughes, in her characteristic homely, reassuring style, and they capture small things about the age which now seem charming. In the 'games to play' section for December, a group of children are playing 'What's the Time, Mr Wolf?'. The little girls are in party frocks with ribbons in their hair (not much has changed there, then), but the boys - the six-year-old boys of 1966 - are wearing shorts, long socks and ties! It's such details which bring home to me what another world I grew up in - and how very OLD I am now!!

Here are some pages from December. I may pop up some more each month next year.
Just for Something To Do.




While thinking about what to write about today, I visited some of my favourite blogs, only to find this most distressing example of the ghastly petty awfulness of some people. Why? Just, for goodness’ sake, why? My heart goes out to you and your family, Anne.

On a lighter and more frivolous note, I suddenly felt inspired to post a nude photograph of myself on my website. Cute, huh?!

It's dark in the park

I wasn’t sure what to expect from this novel. I’d read a couple of Rachel Cusk’s earlier books – Saving Agnes (which won the Whitbread First Novel Award) and The Country Life (Somerset Maugham Award) – so I knew how intense, darkly comic and keenly observed Cusk’s writing can be. And it is all these in Arlington Park. Yet while there are moments of grim humour, this is absolutely not a light comedy of middle-class suburban manners. It may be set in kitchens and bedrooms and within the maelstrom of domestic life, but it’s a whole world away from chic-lit and Aga-sagas.

And there’s a dead bird on the cover. Which kind of sets the tone.

This is not a book for domestic goddesses – nor for those for whom homemaking and motherhood are arts and ends in themselves. Neither will it be welcomed by those for whom the maintenance of hope and harmony and the preservation of a particular view of what women are for are made possible only by keeping too many awkward questions firmly at bay. It should be avoided at all costs by women who suspect that, if they once stop paddling furiously beneath the calm(ish) surface of domesticity, they will sink without trace – for the subject of Arlington Park is festering anger and dislocation; its characters women who stumble around their child-laden lives in a slightly puzzled daze, occasionally colliding with male partners who seem strange, alien creatures from a quite different world. (I fear that most male readers will be entirely baffled from start to finish.)

But, if you’re a woman and you’ve ever lifted your head from the chores for a moment, looked around and asked ‘who are these people around me?’, ‘do I really know them?’, ‘do I even like them?’, ‘how did I get here’, or ‘what is the point of all this, where will it all end and what will become of me?’, then this will strike some chords. And they won't be sweet, harmonious chords, but dangerous, dissonant ones. Cusk is fearless in laying bare the kind of awful truths that most would shy away from articulating. She exposes the fictions of middle-class women’s lives. Yet the writing is so very, very good and so intelligent that we are gripped by an almost morbid curiosity as we are offered windows into the day-filling activities (or inactivities) of a disparate group of women whose chief connection is that they all live within the leafy, aspirational boundaries of Arlington Park.

The chapters are often so loosely connected that at times I thought this might have worked better had it defined itself as a series of short stories rather than as a novel. Some of the women meet at a coffee morning, others on a shopping trip and there’s a gruesomely awful dinner party near the end which brings another group together, but there is no ‘storyline’ in the traditional sense. Everything takes place during the course of a single day, and the book's structure does lend emphasis to the aimlessness and disorganisation of the women, the tenuousness of their supposed friendships. Nothing really 'happens'. And that is the point.

While her observations can be searingly cruel, Cusk never holds up her characters for our derision. Neither does she ask us to pity them. She is simply showing us their situations as they are on the day in question. If we recognise them, and there's a resonance with our own lives, then so be it, but the writer doesn’t offer any answers:

'Maisie . . . felt entombed, unprotestingly, in the untidiness of the house: it was draped over her like a shroud with no openings for her arms and legs, so that when she walked around it or reached out to touch it she felt a kind of dragging following movement, and a sense of amputated numbness. Little plastic figures – of horses with gaudy pink fountains of hair, of girls with encephalitic heads, of miniature train drivers and men in hard hats, of jungle animals and red Indians and tiny women with plaits and gingham aprons – lay everywhere on the floor on their sides . . . There were balls of tissue paper and the empty lids of felt-tip pens, hair slides and plastic combs and pencil sharpeners, marbles and rulers and crayons and the little rubber carcasses of burst balloons; there was a rocking horse draped like a tramp in layers of contradictory garments, through which his head protruded with despondent dignity; there was a multicoloured landslide of Lego that spilled out over the tracks of a toy train. There was a big disorderly heap of books on the top of which a small magnifying glass rested. There were clothes, new and old, clean and dirty, that had escaped their allotted places and were joined all together in riotous celebration.’

In an interview in the Daily Mail in 2005 – Cusk, having weathered the critical storm surrounding her non-fiction account of becoming a mother, A Life’s Work, concluded:

‘Overall, I now find family life a great source of joy, but as a woman you pay a big price for it. I remain fascinated by where you go as a woman once you are a mother, and if you ever come back.’

It is the possibility of ‘coming back’ which Arlington Park explores so starkly. As we leave the characters at the end of the book, the outlook isn’t great. All that these mothers can achieve, it seems to say – if they’re lucky - is some small turning point or other, some brief epiphany, through which they glimpse their true selves for an instant before returning helplessly to the domestic fray.

I’m very pleased that I read this book - I do believe that it's an extraordinary piece of writing - but I did make the mistake of reading it while at a low ebb, and I cannot pretend that it didn’t make me feel a whole lot worse! If you’re a mother, read it when you’re feeling strong. Or when your children have left home.

(NB A long and thought-provoking article in the Guardian by Rachel Cusk - which begins with some highly percipient observations about book clubs and goes on to meditate, via Chekhov, on the many difficulties facing a writer who tries to render the absolute truth about modern living can be found here .)