The Mumpreneur Diaries: Business, Babies or Bust - One Mother of a Year. Mosey Jones
Читать онлайн книгу.
entertained the idea of starting up as a PR, childminder, doula, radio presenter and website manager. I don’t think we’ll be adding hairdresser to that list.
Wednesday 9 April 2008
We make yet another pilgrimage to the venerated grandmother north of the border. It’s nice to visit the old home town. In a life where I’ve picked up two fathers, four mothers, two half-siblings and three step-siblings, seven schools and twelve family homes – and that’s just up to age 16 – it’s nice to know that Gma and Gpa stayed put in the same village for all of my nearly 35 years. Gpa’s moved on to stay with some floozies with white dresses and wings and a big bloke with a beard, but Gma’s feet are still firmly planted on Scottish soil (as opposed to in it).
Indeed, there is much to love about the old family homestead: discovering an old printing kit I was given for Christmas 1983, ink all dried up and letters missing; or finding the electronic keyboard Gpa made for me out of wood, a sheet of aluminium, some wires and a battery bigger than his fist. The benefit of having a relative with a double first in Physics and Maths and part of the team that developed RADAR was that he could take a bundle of wires, wood and metal and make something really quite wonderful. You can take your Barbie, I’ll have my home-made stylophone any day.
Unfortunately, despite being fascinated by computers and the internet, my Gpa selfishly failed to install broadband into the bungalow before he popped off to electrify the angels’ harps. So here I am armed with a laptop and a feature on toddler play to file by tomorrow and no way of getting on the internet, not even with dial-up.
We are but minutes from Silicon Glen where many of the IT advances were made in the 1980s and 1990s but I can’t get a signal on my mobile or connect to the internet. With my web habit this is a serious problem. Nor does Gma’s village have anything like an internet café. It has a café but the only cookies they’re interested in have chocolate chips and go nicely with a cuppa.
In the end I resort to filing copy the way so many hacks did before the war – over the phone, using my voice instead of the beeeee-awwwww-bipbip-beeeennnnnnggg of the modem.
I’m also too embarrassed to do this direct to the editor of the magazine. After all why pay a freelancer to dictate to you something that you may just as well have knocked up yourself? Instead I call Middle Sister who is handily at her desk in a super-cool sports and music marketing agency in London.
I wonder what they make of:
‘“Your toddler will enjoy shouting rude words like POO and WILLY”—got that?’
‘Do you want me to capitalise all of poo and willy?’
‘Yes, please.’
I hope her boss in their nice open plan office is understanding.
Tuesday 15 April 2008
The trip to Scotland was nice but it puts us all out of sorts. Perhaps it’s the seven-hour slog up and down the M1 in the middle of the night that does it. You can’t contemplate a journey like that during the day. Bored children with permanently full bladders make for slow progress. And during the brief moments when you are actually making time up the motorway the children are bouncing up and down in the back, hyped on sugar from the endless chocolate bribery. Boy Two is a little young for the sugar rush but Boy One has a surprisingly long reach for someone strapped into a car seat.
So an overnight drive it is, speeding through the wee hours down the coast, listening to mad programmes on Radio 2. The Husband ponders why stations insist on playing bagpipe music or Wagner when you really need a bit of Bon Jovi or The Eagles to keep you going. But the children are both snoring peacefully in the back so we have to be grateful for small mercies.
At one point we both get hit by a dose of the snoozes so we need something more peppy to keep us going. The Husband has stored some comedy on his MP3 player so we plug in a bit of Billy Connolly to blow the cobwebs away. We’re right in the middle of a lovely juicy skit about inventive sex, in which Billy C gets himself in a right old froth and shouts, ‘FUUUUCCK, Fucking FUUUUCK!’ with great gusto, when a little voice from the back pipes up:
‘He said “fucking”, Mummy. Has he got naughty manners?’
I find myself completely incapable of speech. I’m trying so hard to stop myself from laughing that I clamp my mouth shut and my eyes well up. The pressure threatens to blow my ears off. It’s just as well there are few other cars about because I’m finding it hard to see. Eventually the Husband recovers his composure long enough to say:
‘Very naughty manners, darling. Now, how about a bit of “Puff the Magic Dragon”?’
The humorous interlude is unfortunately short-lived. Every time we do this trip the combination of petrol station food, recycled air and sleep deprivation leaves us all twitchy and tetchy. Back home the Husband starts to pick on the state of the house, a niggle that then swiftly descends into the usual argument over money or, more importantly, the lack of it:
‘I just can’t stand all this clutter, it makes me claustrophobic, ’ he complains.
‘It’s only Boy Two’s toys and he’ll grow out of these soon, then we can get rid of them.’
‘But can’t you put them somewhere?’
‘We don’t really have anywhere to put them, but I have ordered some storage boxes to go under Boy One’s bed. When they arrive we could stuff a lot in them.’
‘How much did they cost?’
‘About £80. Why?’
‘You shouldn’t be spending any money. We don’t even know if I’m going to have a job in a month. You don’t seem to have got anywhere with this business thing.’
‘It takes time to get going.’
‘You haven’t even got a name yet.’
‘The name’s the most important thing, I’ve got to get that right. And what about you? We’d have had that cheaper mortgage if you’d got your paperwork to me in time.’
With that I deal the decisive blow. The Husband is on my case in a second if I let a credit card bill go past the payment date. He is an arch-interest avoider. And yet when we had to bail from our mortgage company last month because the monthly payment went stratospheric, he dithered for so long about getting his proof of salary to the new one that we lost the low percentage deal. I managed to secure another one that was only a tiny bit more expensive but not before blubbing down the phone to the operator. She must have thought I was a victim of spousal abuse:
‘It’s just [sob] that my husband won’t help me.’
‘I’m sorry, we can’t get that rate back. The system’s automated.’
‘But we had everything, all the papers but his and he wouldn’t pull his finger out [sob]. Can’t you do anything?’
‘Sorry.’
The new deal we finally secured wasn’t a great deal more expensive than the first but I now have some great ammunition to shut the Husband up when he starts nagging. I’m not sure how long I can get away with it for, though.
Thursday 17 April 2008
Returning from the shops I find a waif and stray on my doorstep. I often find friends and acquaintances loitering on my doorstep as it’s a conveniently warm place to hide if you miss your train, what with the station being barely a two-minute walk away. Anecdotally, ours seems to be the coldest station in England with an icy wind howling past the platforms as frequently as the trains. Of course, being of good Scots stock and naturally well-insulated, I don’t find this a problem at all. I am, however, surrounded by soft, southern Sassenachs.
Perched on kerb is in fact