Nothing. Zilch. Nada.

Thanks to the readers who donated to Bloggers for Haiti. We have now reached eight times the original target to send one Shelterbox out to the survivors of the earthquake -  it would be brilliant if we make that ten. It will take a very long time to fix Haiti, so if you haven’t already donated, please click here.

Tom continues to say really cute things. Take last week: I told him about Haiti in the most basic way possible. The following day, he was watching telly while I made the tea. He insists he’s too old for Cbeebies now and has learnt how to turn over to CBBC. It’s mainly a lot of precocious kids on there but there’s also Newsround and that’s what was on when I walked in the front room.

“Are these the people whose houses fell down?” he pointed at a report from Haiti.

“Yeah, that’s right.”

“Oh. They can’t eat breakfast or colour in or eat tea or play with their toys. Can we send them our house please?”

I know it’s twee but he really does make me proud. I thought of this the other day as I stood in a long queue in Primark, listening to the unfeasible amount of screaming babies wriggling in their buggies. I remember shopping there when I was pregnant. I couldn’t afford many good maternity clothes so I had one pair of jeans with a stretchy waistband and used to buy big baggy tops in Primark. I remember walking through there, a load of tops draped over my arms, listening to those wailing kids. I caught sight of myself in a mirror, all pale under the fake yellow light. Huge, bloated, a constant frown on my face. What the hell am I doing? I thought. This is all I’ve got to look forward to.

Yesterday, I found an old notebook. It had notes in it that I wrote when I was pregnant. I don ‘t even remember writing that stuff, I can’t believe how distraught I was. From now on, I’ll just be mopping up baby sick and watching daytime TV. I wrote. One of my friends confessed recently that she was worried about me when I was pregnant because I was the ‘least child-friendly’ person she knew.

Tonight, Tom said “You’re my favourite family person Mum.”

“Thanks. You’re mine.”

“Why?”

“Because you’re ace and I grew you in my tummy.”

“Did you choose me?”

“No. I didn’t choose you and I’m glad you’re such a good boy because I didn’t know you would be and I was frightened.”

“Why?”

“Because I didn’t think I’d be good at being a Mum.”

“You are really good at being a Mum though!”

“Thanks.”

“You’re my zero family person.”

“Zero?”

“Yeah. Zero comes before one. You’re my best.”

I know I’ve said it before, but it’s loads better than I thought it would be.

Writing about all this soppy love stuff seems like an appropriate time to mention a reading I am doing next month in Preston. Novelist Jenn Ashworth has asked me to read at Word Soup, alongside Joe Stretch, whose take on love is far from soppy. I used to knock about Preston when I was a teenager, so that’ll be strange. Look here…

The Haiti Post

“The snow… the ice… it’s trecherous! It’s ridiculous!”

This time last week I was still stuck at home with Tom, whose school was apparently still inaccessible. The enchantment of the snow had quickly warn off. Deep piles of bright, powdery stuff had been replaced by a slippery crust that was almost impossible to walk on. Eventually, school reopened on Tuesday and getting there was a tricky choice between slip-sliding along the pavement or walking in the middle of the road, where there was no ice, but a lot of cars.

“I am fed up of winter.” Tom moaned, when I dragged him up from another near-fall. “Whose idea was it to send all this snow?”

“Mother Nature.”

“Who’s she?”

“She’s the lady who decides about the weather.”

“Where does she live?”

“In the sky.” I was chucking out any old answers to his questions as I concentrated on keeping us both upright. “She’s got an office in the sky.”

“Does she sit at a desk?”

“Yeah.”

“Has she got a computer?”

“Yeah, she’s got a big screen with a picture of the world on it and she decides who gets what weather.”

“Well I’m fed up with Mother Nature,” said Tom.

Of course, Mother Nature doesn’t just do weather. I’m pretty sure earthquakes are her department too. So, I and millions of others are really fed up with her because of what happened in Haiti. It breaks my heart when these things happen, as they so often do, to places that are poverty-stricken and helpless. I want to do something, so many of us want to do something.

I am not going to write here today about the banal details of mine and Tom’s lives. January has been a difficult month, but now I realise how trivial all of that is. This blog has a lot of readers. Today, I implore every single one of you to donate to Haiti. Maybe you have been meaning to donate since it happened and are a bit overwhelmed by all the different appeals for aid. Perhaps, like me, you’re skint. If you are, you don’t know true poverty and hopefully your overdraft will allow you a pound or so. Maybe you’ve donated already. If you have, donate again. Go to the Bloggers for Haiti page and follow the easy instructions. It doesn’t take long.

None of us can argue with Mother Nature or undo her work. All we can offer is the smallest of gestures that might help fix Haiti, a task immeasurably greater than digging a school out of the snow.

My Snowy Twenties

I began the year, like so many others, in a pointless muddle of alcohol that did not signify how I meant to go on.

Something told me not to go out on New Year’s Eve, to avoid the inevitable debauchery and nurse my escalating cough. I wondered whether to stay at home or go and celebrate with Tom and the rest of my family.  I’d made promises though, there were loads of parties to get round, it was going to good.

It wasn’t though, not really. I spent New Years Day stuck to a sofa across Manchester, wearing my party frock, bleary-eyed, longing for my son. I was with good friends, we’d partied all night, it had been fun, but I wanted to see my boy. What was I thinking, spending the beginning of the new year in different city from my son, in different world?

My cough kept me awake all of Sunday night. It was school in the morning. Getting Tom there on time is one of my new year’s resolutions, along with being tidy, starting to be sensible with money, writing more, going to bed and getting up early, ironing Tom’s school uniform and many more. Eventually, I surrendered to my insomnia and put away clothes all night, rubbing my eyes and waiting for Tom to wake.

I felt proud of myself for wrapping us both up and leaving the house on time (even if I had only managed it through not going to sleep.) Tom and I slipped all over the glassy pavements.  We trudged across the crunchy grass in the park.

I love mornings I thought, gazing dreamily at the glistening frost No one else around.

No one else around.

I gazed across the park. There was no glow from the lollipop lady’s flourescent jacket in her usual spot by the main road. Poor Tom moaned at me as he slipped and skidded all the way back home.

“Why didn’t you know school was closed Mum?”

I don’t know. Because I am always stressed out, because the  term dates letter probably fluttered about on the hall rug for a bit then got put out for recycling, because –

“- I’m silly. I’m silly and I’m sorry.”

It would have been nice to enjoy the reprieve and spend the day with Tom, but I was ill. So, he had to colour in while I lay on the couch coughing and dozing.

Then the blizzards came. I knew before I opened my blinds what I would see, because a hush had descended on the street. School was closed again. I felt ill and I was supposed to be working, but Tom was making it difficult with his constant demands to play outside. So, on my lunch break, I found myself in the brightest, deepest snow I have ever seen, making a snow dalek.  Friends arrived and we ran up and down the back alley, pelting each other with powder snowballs, falling to the ground and making snow angels. Rosy-cheeked and breathless, I stood in my slippers cooking homemade soup for Tom’s tea. A world away from the wildness of New Years Eve, but the freshest I’d felt all year and the best beginning to 2010.

What Time do You Call This?

On Sunday night, nothing looked right. I lost two and a half stone this year and felt like I had put it all back on in Christmas week. I sighed, trying on three dresses.

“You look beautiful in that one,” Tom said, dropping his ‘t’. The dress in question was the best of a bad bunch so I trusted his judgement and kept it on.

As I left the house, Mum held Tom up to kiss me.

“Where are you going?” he said, looking concerned, “It’s bedtime.”

He did have a point. It was dark and cold and I was going to stand in a packed nightclub and dance. I go out a lot at home in Manchester, but Tom is usually already at my Mum’s when I set off. I remember my first night out after I had him, when he was four weeks old. I had to keep sitting down because my caesarean wound hurt every time I tried to dance. I felt defeated as it meant so much to me to still be able to have a good night out. Silly, really. When I came home in the middle of the night, Tom was awake. I remember it so well, he was wearing a blue Peter Rabbit babygro and my friend and I sat on Mum’s bed with her and Tom, not quite believing he was real. Fast forward three years and he’s advising me on what to wear and worrying about me going out into the night.

I came got in from the frost at 5.30am. Tom and I share a room at Mum’s and he had wriggled out of his duvet. It was cold so I stood over him, bleary-eyed in my party dress, and tried to tuck him back in without waking him. He snuffled and curled up in his Thomas the Tank Engine pyjamas, looking all babyish again. Was that really the grown-up little boy who had made me feel guilty for going out just a few hours before?

Yes it was. Two hours after I crawled into bed and managed to drift off, I was woken by a peck on the cheek.

“Where were yer?” Tom asked.

“Liverpool.” I said, without opening my eyes.

“Liverpool? But it was too DARK to go to Liverpool. What were you doing?”

“Dancing.”

“Dancing? That’s silly. It was bedtime! Will you help me colour in?”

And despite the fact I was knackered and despite the fact it was all a bit surreal, I got up and coloured in with him. Of course, when Mum got up I went back to bed. Without her I simply couldn’t do it. Any of it.

Tonight, I am going out partying, even though I know my boss would tell me off if he knew…

Tom and I had a great Christmas and he loves his bike (but I really need to teach him to pedal.) It’s nearly the end of the year and it has been a very good one for us both. I’m still skint, but I am happier than ever. Tom is starting to read now and never stops making me laugh. Things finally started to happen with my writing in 2009. Much of that is thanks to this blog. I still feel a bit strange about baring my soul on the internet, but the blog isn’t going anywhere (for now, anyway.) Thank you to everyone who read / commented / linked in 2009, I hope you have a wonderful 2010…

My first New Years Day with Tom, 1st January 2007. I can post this because he doesn’t look like this anymore! We were in London, having lunch at the Tate Modern after a walk along the Thames. A couple opposite us were giggling and the bloke said Tom looked like Winston Churchill. It feels like last week.

Margaret

This is Margaret. I built her and Tom named her and leant her his hat. Shortly after this photograph was taken, her head fell off.

I had to work today and by the time I was finished, it was almost dark. I had wanted to take Tom to the park (who knows when we’ll see snow like this again?) After all, there was no way we could have built a snowman (or woman) in our tiny yard. It was dusky though and really cold, so I kicked open the back gate and clawed a load of snow in off the alley with a long-handled dustpan. It was harder than I remembered, getting all that snow to stay put, trying not to make something that just looked like a big phallus. My fingers stung, it was so cold that Margaret froze solid and I was able to chip away at her with a trowel. I got quite into that and began to believe that I was going to carve some amazing, realistic ice sculpture, until her head began to topple.

Building Margaret was the first time I have really felt festive this year. I got into trouble with friends and family last week for suggesting that I might not bother with a Christmas tree. (Last year I brought in my olive tree from the yard and it caught a terrible disease from the Christmas cactus.) I just didn’t see the point. Then I passed the charity shop and picked up a pre-lit, pre-decorated model for two pounds. I also bought a gold garland for 50p, which is draped wonkily across the mirror in the lounge. I wasn’t going to bother wrapping all the little presents, as I don’t have time to spend on something that is undone in seconds, but I am beginning to feel a bit bad about that….

I forgot about how wonderful Tom’s imagination is. I must start writing stories for him. A few weeks ago, we trudged to school in a downpour and he shouted out

“Mum! Look at the space rocket car.”

I kept my head down and out of the rain but he kept on “Mum! Look! Please take a photograph of the rocket car!”

Looking up, I saw him pointing at a hearse, fully loaded with coffin and flowers.

Later that day, as we walked home down a damp alley, Tom stopped still, eyes wide and asked me to shush.

“What is it?” I sighed.

“Tooth fairies!” whispered Tom, eyeing the midges that were circling his head. “They’ve got sparkly dresses and wings, but where are their wands?”

If he gets that excited about hearses and midges, I can’t begin to imagine how exciting Christmas must be for Tom. Remember how it felt to genuinely believe that Father Christmas somehow had time to visit every household with a child in the entire world in one night, scramble down the chimney, have a mince pie and some sherry and climb back up again? We had a gas fire so I was always suspicious. I remember being very young though, trying to stay awake in the hope that I might catch a glance of him.

I gave Tom baked beans and cheese on potato cakes for tea tonight.

“Mum, that is the best meal I have ever seen.” He said. Then, tucking in “You are the most fantastic cook in the veld.”

Something tells me that even if I don’t manage to get every tiny stocking filler wrapped in time for Christmas, Tom will still have a magical time.

Animals

 

It’s Christmas. Tom’s fourth Christmas. Time for the elephant in the room to start trumpeting loudly, spraying me with icy cold water and generally making himself known. He isn’t an elephant though. It would be easy to call him something like a rat or a dog, that kind of thing but the truth is, if we’re going to use animals as metaphor, he’s just a very cowardly ostrich.

Last week,, I endured Alesha Dixon’s irritating voice for a full hour as I watched Who’s Your Daddy? a documentary about people growing up without their fathers. She interviewed tabloid darling The Sunderland Shagger about his utter disregard for the eight children he has fathered. What a horrible little man I thought, then I know one like that. At the end of the programme, a 23 year old woman had an emotional first time meeting with her father and discovered that she had eight siblings. I felt sick and cried. I wondered how I had ended up involved with a man with the same moral fibre as The Sunderland Shagger. The only conclusion I could come to was that he was older and unpredictable and made me feel like a 14 year old rebel again. Ironic as I was about to spend the weekend conducting writing workshops with 13 year old girls as part of the Reclaim project at Urbis.

Reclaim went brilliantly. The girls are so talented, driven and confident. I wish someone had taught me about being self-respectful when I was that age. I wish someone had made me aware of gender inequalities so that I hadn’t just written off feminism as right-on and outdated. I wish how I looked for boys and how they made me feel hadn’t been the be-all and end-all.

One very good point that Alesha Dixon’s documentary made was that women are utterly villified if they abandon their children but when men do it, people shrug, because that’s just what some men do. Last month, I watched the weedy sea dragons on David Attenborough’s Life with fascination. They dance all night and the lady impregnates the man. In the morning, Ms Weedy Sea Dragon swims away and leaves Mr Sea Dragon to carry then raise the (many) babies. I wish I could be a weedy sea dragon I thought.

Tom keeps reminding me how much fun being left holding the baby (or little boy)  can be though. Yesterday morning, he said.

“Mum, I used to have a Daddy didn’t I? But he was rubbish. No, sorry, I mean he wasn’t very good.”

I sighed. What to say?

“Are you bothered about him Tom?”

“No!” he said “I don’t mind. I love you.”

Tom is really mature. The other day, he was lamenting the news that his two new six-year-old friends had had their Nintendo DSs stolen.

“It’s a shame.” He shook his head. “The poor kids.”

Tom just keeps making me really proud. He was an extra in a friend’s music video at the weekend and when I went to collect him, people kept telling me how good he had been. He had fallen and cut his head at the beginning of the shoot but still behaved impeccably all day through take after take. On Sunday, he met the Reclaim girls at Urbis and they all adored him. I have just bought his first bike, even though I am skint and this is the first year he will undertsnd the concept of Father Christmas coming down the chimney.

I don’t think the elephant will ever leave the room completely, but at least Tom can make him retreat to the corner with his tail between his legs and hide under some junk for a bit.

Where Have I Been?

I have been hiding in the hills in John Osborne’s house. I have been ensconced in a little room with a single bed and a writing desk. There was a wide window sill and a proper sash window covered in condensation that looked out across the hills. The hills were black and misty, even though Housman called them blue. I have been eating really good food with some of the most interesting and inspirational people I have ever met. I slept a lot (a little too much actually.) Most importantly of all though, I wrote.

The view from my window

Back in summer, when I won my Arvon 41 scholarship, the Writing from Life course felt so far into the future, I couldn’t really get excited about it. Suddenly, winter arrived and I was there. My tutors were Helena Drysdale, who has written some wonderful travel stuff and Kate Clanchy, whose collection of poems about motherhood, Newborn, actually managed to engage me (I struggle with poetry.) Brilliantly, tonight, Clanchy’s heartbreaking but beautiful story The Not Dead and the Saved has won the BBC National Short Story Award. If you have half an hour to spare and a handy box of tissues, please listen, here http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/radio4/nssa/nssa_20091201-1600b.mp3.

Talking of tissues, a lot of them were used and scrumpled up on the Arvon course. Writing from Life turns out to be a lot more emotional than other kinds of writing. It left me feeling exhausted but also got me kick-started with my novel. We had no Wi-fi, which was good. I had no phone signal and wanted to speak to Tom, but kept missing his babysitter when I called her from the payphone. Last Wednesday, I trekked over the hills into the village of Clun, where they have hi-tech public toilets that play opera music to you, but no mobile phone signal. I overheard a shopkeeper on the phone to one of his suppliers, talking about an order

“I don’t have a fax machine or an email address!” He sounded a bit cross. “Some of us don’t live in THAT century.”

Oh.

Now I know what people mean when they talk about time standing still. I have been to the middle of nowhere in Australia and India and still been able to find a phone signal and / or an internet cafe.

“Arvon is life-changingly good,” someone said to me when I told them I was going on the course.

Yes it is I thought, every night when I followed my torch beam along the dark path back to my room, life will never be the same again.

Home for a week.

I briefly toyed with the idea of staying in on a Saturday night to preserve my new found purity, but found myself staring at the below, on the back of a toilet door in a dusty old Ancoats mill. From one historical building to another.

Last night, as I changed wet bed sheets at 1am and bathed my little boy, I realised that life hadn’t really changed, but I had been so privileged to have the Arvon experience. I missed my MA graduation for it, but that’s OK, because my desire to write has never been stronger. It’s like a physical feeling that’s hard to describe without sounding pretentious so I won’t try. I like it in this century and if I need to escape, there’s always my novel…

Bizarre Books and Battles

I have an MA.

I never thought I would be able to say (or write) that. Nothing changes really, unless I want to start putting letters after my name. I have a very good reason for not being able to attend graduation. This is a relief because I don’t want to put on the silly costume. I got bullied into it when I got my degree and I don’t want to do it again (although, admittedly, it did feel rather good to be clutching a toddler and a degree outside the Bridgewater Hall that day.)

I have started a new job too. It’s great because I get to do lots of writing, about travel, which is a fun thing to write about. I am missing the library, the lovely people I worked with and the books though. Here are some of my favourites:

Not a guide to chemical mind-expansion but a book for IT managers grappling with the concept of manufacturing software.

Essential reading.

Nobody should ever forget how to heat their church.

I am writing a novel too, but I will put more about that here as it starts to take shape.

I feel proud of being clever enough to have a Masters now, but once I would have been ashamed. It’s not cool to be clever, or it wasn’t when I was at school.  I used to get bullied for everything though. Mainly, it was because I was the Vicar’s Daughter. It could be anything though: at primary school, it was being shit at PE, the huge gap between my two front teeth, my vegetarianism, the fact I liked Tori Amos. Then at high school, it was the shit-at-PE thing again. Also, bleaching my hair in an attempt to look cool and it going banana yellow, getting drunk and being sick, choosing to spend lunchtimes in the dark room and the brace to correct the gap between the teeth.

Kids are horrible, aren’t they? And even though I have been lucky to meet some amazing people in my adult life who understand me completely (all the misfits come together in the end), nothing could have convinced me of the insignificance of those people at the time.

I knew I’d have to help Tom out at some point and I wanted to go about it the best way I could, because it is so hard being a kid. I didn’t expect him to be three when it happened though. Tom is cool, all my friends love him, everybody likes hanging out with him and listening to the clever things he says. Maybe he’s only cool amongst the grown-ups though.

Last week, Tom had a scratch on his face. He told me that a boy a school had done it and promised me he hadn’t provoked him. I asked why he didn’t tell the teacher and he just shrugged. Today, as we walked home from school, Tom said “Mum, Jack says he will only be my friend on Mondays because I’m stink.”

I know he is my own child, but I am confident that he isn’t stink. And I know these kids are tiny and none of it means anything, but I want to prepare Tom as best as I can for how nasty I know it can get. Once again, he said it was unprovoked and once again, he said he didn’t tell the teachers.

What do I do? Encourage him to stick up for himself (I was brought up to turn the other cheek and used to do so until I really lost my rag, then lash out and get bollocked more than the bullies.) Tell him to tell the teacher so he becomes known as a grass? I’m certainly not the type to march down to the school and kick off. Tom has to fight his own battles. This feels important , I need to get it right. I need to show him the right way to fight his battles and I don’t even know how to fight my own.  

Damn, wasn’t he gurgling contentedly at me from a cot five minutes ago?

The Answer is Not at the Bottom of a Teacup

The more Tom learns about the world around him, the more specific the dad questions get. Does he live in a house or a flat? Is he in Australia?  Is he died? What’s his name? Shall we ring him?

This morning my quarterly outburst about Tom’s dad came. I’d been cross about men and something set me off. I was on the phone to the authorities, trying to sort things out by being calm yet assertive. Something that should be perfectly straightforward is a big complex puzzle of passed bucks and bollocks. It’s to do with cases being stuck in queues for the clerical team but until then they’re with the interim team and remain unallocated while the IT team try to resolve the error, which could take days or weeks, no one knows and then they’ll be released and sent to the correct team, which may be the clerical team or possible another team, no one knows. Lost cases, like luggage, only more important than clean knickers and sun cream.

“STOP SPEAKING TO ME IN JARGON!” I screamed, “It’s like a Doctor diagnosing patients with the Latin name for a disease!”

That’s me with ‘nutjob’ marked next to my name and the case moved to the bottom of the toppling pile.

“Gerra cup a tea luv,” said the poor lady on the end of the phone between my sobs.

 That’s about the worst thing she could have said. Why do people think tea is some sort of cure-all? It’s an insipid drink evocative of the smell of dirty dishwater and has no mental effects whatsoever. People love it though. They worship tea. They have mugs and posters and pens that declare it. All the tea in China. Tea and sympathy.

It’s a bit of a running joke between my friend Ellen and I, the tea thing. I had known her about a week when I came home from work early after finding out I was pregnant in the office loo.

“What’s the matter?”

“I’m ill.” I said, then, about half a second later: “I’m pregnant.”

“Really?” she said, calm as anything, “Have a cup of tea.”

She put the cup in front of me and because I felt dreadful for burdening her and because she was so kind, I tentatively sipped it. I managed about half. I later confessed that I hate tea and only drank it to be polite. That brew has become legendary between us. It might not have solved my problems, but it brought two very good friends together. Now she lives in Japan, where tea is even more revered than it is in England.

One friend, who was a new mother said “When it was all finished, the midwife brought in a cup of tea and it was lovely.”

Really? After I gave birth, the midwife brought me a shot of morphine syrup. That was lovely.

No amount of tea was going to do anything to alleviate my wrath this morning. I had a meeting in town, at Cup, which has just been renamed ‘Teacup on Thomas Street’. I love Cup (still just Cup), but not for its tea. It’s my favourite workspace in Manchester and does really good coffee. I arrived late for my meeting, bedraggled, red-eyed and exhausted. ‘TEA REVIVES YOU’ screamed the framed prints on the wall. No it doesn’t.

After my meeting, over a coffee, I had a little rant at one of my closest friends. She listened so well and made me feel better as we made plans for the weekend. I collected Tom from school and found myself laughing as he called me ‘The Best Mum in Town’.

Tea hadn’t revived me, but good friendship, a bit of sympathy and the Best Boy in Town did the trick. Roll on the weekend, Tom’s going to his Nan’s and it’s time for rum revival.

The Biggest Adventure of All

"This Little Piggy" on the steps of the Sydney Opera House

The Milla Milla moment

This time two years ago, I was on my way to the airport with an enormous rucksack, a changing bag, a buggy, a carseat on wheels and a 20 month old child who I’d just discovered had nits. We were going to Australia and taking the most ridiculously long route to get there. This was a mission. Four flights and almost 36 hours of a mission (sorry environmentalists.) This was a mission to prove that, despite having had a baby, I could still travel. This was a mission to prove wrong the people around me who thought I would turn into a miserable, downtrodden shell if I went ahead with my pregnancy. This was a mission to prove to myself that I could still do all that I needed and wanted to, because I believed more than anyone that I would become that spent shadow of my former self.

I was lucky enough to have one friend living in Tropical North Queensland and another with an apartment in the centre of Sydney. All we needed was to get there, which I paid for with the money my Nan left me when she died earlier that year (I have to put this in because otherwise I get criticised and accused of being rich.)

Only when I had to take my sleeping boy out of his pushchair for a security scan did the enormity of what I was doing hit me, but instead of feeling fear, I felt exhilaration. Absolute exhilaration, I’ve got goose pimples just writing about it. When we began our descent into Sydney (three flights down, one to go), I welled up. I said “Look baby we did it, we’re here, we made it to Ozzy” and I’ve still got the photograph of him sitting next to me on the plane, beaming at me in that moment.

Looking back, I can’t believe how lucky I was to experience such a magnificent adventure with my son in tow. People said he wouldn’t remember but he learnt so much about the wildlife in that trip and still loves looking at the photographs. We went on road trips, Tom slept in his buggy in the corner of rainforest lodges, we frolicked on the beach, I went on the Barrier Reef, we took a cable car over the jungle, we fed kangaroos and cuddled koalas, it was just magical. The best moment was when my friend was driving us over the stunning Atherton Tablelands and I had a migraine. She kept shouting at me to open my eyes and look at the breathtaking scenery. Then she pulled over at Milla Milla falls, in the heart of the rainforest and persuaded me to get out of the car. I felt like I’d walked in on one of my own dreams. There was this hazy pool with water cascading into it, gargantuan electric blue dragon flies, turtles basking on the rocks, plants and flowers that didn’t even look real. Tom sat on my knee and dipped his toes in the water, looked in front of him and said “Aah wow!”

It doesn’t matter how far in the past our voyage to Australia gets, I will always remmeber that moment so clearly, as a pinnacle not just of our trip but of the biggest adventure of all. I thought Australia would set a precedent for amazing trips, but my overdraft won’t allow it. It seems insane to me now that I could ever afford it. And anyway, how could we ever compete with that? For now, Easyjet flights to Marrakech are obscenely cheap and I am on the lookout for a family-friendly Riad. Mountains and markets by day, then just me, sleeping Tom and a notebook in the evenings. “You can’t take him to Marrakech on your own!” a few people have said. Oh yes I can and oh yes I will.

(The head lice survived the epic journey, which means that all the lovely Korean people on our Korean Air flight who passed him round the plane like a giggly parcel will have probably caught them. I still feel guilty about that.)

Our home in the jungle, Kookaburra Lodge