In the last week alone I have espied three different cases of women harking back to the ‘golden days of yore’. That lovely vague wafty time we all have in our heads when we weren’t alive yet and things were somehow better. (That is one of the many curses of being human; being deeply suspicious that things are better without you but wanting to be a part of it anyway.)

I’ll expound: there was an old school friend planning a regency wedding, a former drama student on a photoshoot in some stately grounds for something dramatic, (doing that ‘wan’ look women do when they want to look ‘classical’), and a woman I didn’t know from Adam practically goatherding her wilful teen to the hallowed Jane Austen shelf in a bookshop (even though the teen was definitely angling more for underage vampire sex – I saw her pupils dilate going past Twilight, the dirty hormone; she wasn’t thinking of her educational furtherment; she just wanted to know if the wolf boy finally decks the pale undead dude with the pointy teeth. Topless. And wet. At the top of a tree or something. Anyway.)

These things caught me in a rare bad mood. I’d been in a right hump all week so instead of being my usual “let’s put on a bonnet and run around a privet maze, giggling” self, I tutted, and scowled. Yes. Scowled.

“It’s like you all want to live in different, better times.” I thought, bitterly – as though that was completely unreasonable.
(Though of course we all do, a bit. We all have ‘the time we’d like to live in’ and it’s hardly ever ‘right now’.)

But I was not sympathetic to my sisters’ epoch whimsy. No.

“Oh, I’d so love to live in Jane Austen’s time! I would! I would, I wouldy-would-would!”

No, love – you wouldn’t. You wouldn’t want to live in those times. If you lived in the years of yester, the estuary twang in your voice tells me you’d be a mere rung above destitution. You’d probably be gathering skirts around your waist in an oom-pah-pah bar in Dickens’ east-end, or snuffling in some bins for pheasant bones round the back of an eminent surgeon’s townhouse, (flogged when caught, and cast out of your syphilis-stained boarding house). You’d have had your childhood sweetheart Billy Thompson ripped away from you to work in some ramshackle stables up north, and your best mate Flora Biffins would have died of typhoid. In your arms. In a field. In the rain. At best you’d have a chance of dragging yourself out of the mire if your hard-working father, a born actor, had inveigled his way into a Chancery Lane gentleman’s club and won some valuable land in a midnight game of baccarat disguised as landed gentry. You’d then be used as a pink-cheeked bargaining tool while rich men bid again for the lost land to make way for a lace factory with a hidden sideline in back-room blowjobs. Worse than being an objectified sex husk to a man you didn’t love, you’d be wearing a corset so unforgiving your insides would be folded like a fan and every time you sat down at an unfortunate angle you’d groan like a disconsolate accordion. You’d be wearing a bonnet so cumbersome it could break a coalface apart with one beak blow. When not applauding your husband’s many redoubtable achievements like having sideburns the size of Norfolk or having a foreskin that looks a bit like Lord Byron if you squint, your feeble hands would be permanently employed in the tedium of cross-stitch and pianoforte practice – while your toes would divide the tasks of stroking a one-eyed lapdog by the fire, painting a cherub on a jug, and catching up on correspondence with a crippled rheumatic cousin from another county. You wouldn’t be able to vote, laugh too loudly, or be a lesbian. Scratch your tit on a bus, or decide what you want for dinner. You certainly wouldn’t be able to follow your heart, go to university, or burp really loudly in a lecture theatre after five pints so that your fellow under-graduates think the ceiling is coming down. Plus loads of other stuff; that’s just the first swathe that popped out.

I huffed at all this. And then I got over it and thought of Colin Firth rising up out of the lake at Pemberley. Because that really is a thing for all time that no bad mood can outlast.

Just when you think life might be letting you turn into a lady, you find yourself on your hands and knees, scrubbing. It’s things like getting carpet burn from your own misdemeanours that let you know you’ve still got a long way to go.

The stain wasn’t that bad, really. It was only a light daubing of dark blue nail varnish that I’d managed to smear on the plush hotel carpet, not a whole retch-inducing “You’ll never sojourn in this luxury chain again, young lady” amount. So that’s something at least.

It wasn’t so much the act of general spillage that made me feel like a lummox cast out of a Swiss finishing school for squirting ketchup on a Rembrandt. No – I can shake off an act of clumsiness like a Las Vegas stripper can shake off a nipple tassle. It’s in my blood. I once dropped a suitcase on a French boy’s head and acted coolly as though I’d merely scuffed a croissant. (He on the other hand was worryingly dazed. I hope it’s not caused any lasting damage. I didn’t keep in touch – he wasn’t my type, and I suspected he was milking it a bit. Crumbs, I hope he’s still alive. It was a big case now I come to think of it. I always overpack.)

Anyway. It wasn’t the fact I’d smeared Angsty Midnight polish everywhere and was likely to get myself a sizeable fine from the posh country hotel. No. It wasn’t even the covert dash downstairs to the swanky spa, fluttering my eyelids at some bemused beauticians (who stared balefully at my lashes like they could definitely be lengthened to this season’s camelesque), confessed I’d had an awful style mishap (intimating fingers not furnishings) and was in dire need of some nail varnish remover. Even that, though fraught with clammy fear they might plonk me down for an actual manicure, a procedure I’m unversed in, went ok.

Then once I’d scrubbed the guilty marks from the virgin carpet I still felt relatively fine.

But I did feel like a disgusting little grub when I went out for a (very ladylike, though not bonneted) stroll of the grounds, pausing to graze a mound of forget-me-nots with my wistful fingers, to sniff the lustrous boughs of wild garlic sprawling over the path, and came back to discover I had trodden in unidentifiable faeces. That’s when I got really cross with myself. “FOR FUCK’S SAKE, SADIE! CAN’T YOU JUST BE LIKE JULIE ANDREWS FOR ONCE IN YOUR LIFE?” (Julie Andrews having been my yardstick of grace since she got a standing lamp out of a medium tote bag without breaking a sweat.)

My one saving grace was that it was the kind of poo that stuck to the shoe. That firm sort of stool that feels guilty you trod in it and clings resolutely to the sole, refusing to do further damage. I imagine it to be the dropping of a gentleman beaver, rather than a minxy fox. A reserved Colonel of a poo. The kind of poo that would wear a cravat. You know the kind of poo.

Anyway, I tended to the poo before I went down to the introduction to the arty types I was attending a weekend of seminars with. I was annoyed that I had already had both cosmetic and faecal dramas so soon after check-in. I then ruined my plans of becoming demure and classy by drinking Boddingtons at dinner and laughing too loudly at things no one else laughed at. Loud clumsy idiot girl.

But then I went upstairs to my starched white bed sheets, peeled off my jeans (tight from ale and three courses), and read a message from my boyfriend saying he missed me and that bed was empty without me.

Sometimes it’s the little things that make you feel like a lady.

A photograph of a couple grinning outside two red phone boxes. A nice but seemingly unremarkable picture. The caption beneath it on Facebook gives it further context: a passing stranger was commandeered by the couple to capture the moment just after the man had proposed and was accepted. The picture goes from ‘nice but unremarkable’ to ‘lovely’.

The grinning woman is my Mum. The grinning man is Andy, her fiancé.

What takes it from unremarkable to the lovely thing it really is, is the extra context that is left out of the photo’s caption. Mum’s secret history of the setting.

The phone booths are in Billericay, where she grew up as a fostered child from the age of two. Her sister, six years older than her, remained with their father and their mother, who was confined to a wheelchair after a stroke rendered her immobile down one side. I won’t relay details of my aunt’s or my grandmother’s life, but Mum had a severely lucky escape.

Nevertheless her childhood was not a happy one. Living in the austere environment created by her very Victorian foster ‘mother’, Mum still visited the family home every fortnight, in an awful decision made in its naive nascency by the social services. Caught between the two, Mum missed out on love, security, and a sense of belonging.

Mum remembers the visits. She remembers her sister making her hide behind the giant wheels of her father’s army truck as he stumbled around looking for them; she remembers her pushing a chair under the door handle of the bedroom at night. She remembers wanting her mother, but being afraid of the limp woman in the chair, whose only barely audible utterance was “she’s mine”.

Mum texted me after the proposal: “Andy didn’t know that the phone boxes where he proposed held memories of such an unhappy period in my teens. Now completely obliterated by his love. I am a very lucky woman.”

I wanted to say she is not lucky, but that only now in her fifties is she getting merely an ounce of the happiness she has deserved all this time.

In her teens Mum went to the red phone boxes everyday to phone her social worker to try and get her out of the foster home where she was desperately unhappy. Daily she would plead her case for her own future. Those glassy booths of dubious privacy I suppose became symbols of her feelings of anguish, hopelessness, and repeated rejection. They are now symbols of love – and the sense of home and peace and belonging that comes with it.

Something in the simplicity of the picture jarred me more than the girlish excitement of the conversations I’ve had with mum about her wedding, her dress, more even than the repeated exclamations of “I’m just so…happy, Sadie!”

I’ve been writing a book about my Dad. A very difficult man whom Mum could write her own very different book on. (Who’s dead by the way, if you’ve missed my more maudlin columns.) The book is about loss and grieving and all that sort of waily stuff. Writing it has made me recede from a lot of things.

The phone box picture made me see that I have been overlooking the people that are still here and to be cherished too. In trying to do the right thing for my Dad, I think I stopped doing the right thing for my Mum. I’ve been down a hole. Slow to get on board with her new relationship. I’ve felt cautious. But the picture, with the split second of loaded meaning it captured, has brought me back.

I finish this column here because I’ve gone all blurry. Happy tears, for the living. For my mum, and the man who brings out the girl in her, all fresh and new.

Five burnt matches. Some cold candle wax for the picking. Stray poppy seeds on the table from five nights ago, a tissue. Two pint glasses with tepid dregs of tap water, one with a lipbalm smear round the rim. A cushion on the floor just because. Scattered papers, some nail varnish with the lid half unscrewed. Pens. Blankets. A gnarled dog chew.

That’s just some of the stuff I’m looking at currently in flagrant disarrayment in my lounge.

I’m surveying it all quite proudly. I feel like taking off a sock and draping it coquettishly over the lampshade. Just because I can.

The other day at the pub, I casually mentioned something to do with cleaning and a friend raised his eyebrows in surprise and said “Huh. I never had you down as domesticated.”
I felt like I’d been struck. I wondered if he imagined I cocked my leg at the coffee table or wiped chicken fingers on the curtains. I turned to my other friend with my mouth open indignantly to intimate a “can you believe the cheek?” but was met with a blank look. Then I realised that both friends were relatively new ones. And that they did not know.

They did not know about Old Sadie. About the Old Sadie that spent years being a bit too, shall we say, pernickety. They did not know that I was to domesticity what Lady GaGa is to couture; on occasion more than a bit OTT. They didn’t know that I used to have a demi-obsession with limescale, and would glaze over with psycho eyes staring at a tap that had those disgraceful white crusts. That if I was home alone I would seldom sit down because I would always be searching for something else to clean or clear. That nothing made me feel as good as when a room was utterly spotless. That dust would be constantly polished away, sides disinfected, windows and pictures shined of smears. That bathroom suites must permanently look like they had never been used. I could go on. They didn’t know that I spent way too much money on cleaning products, that I would over-stock the cupboards with emergency sprays and gels and cloths and sponges, would sometimes have several duplicates or even triplicates of the same item, and would worry that a product I especially liked might suddenly be discontinued without warning. I could go on. They did not know that I had a near photographic memory for the way I had arranged things and that if a cushion was moved, a broom re-propped, an ornament re-angled, a book removed from a shelf and put back (dare they) in the wrong place, I would know. And I would put it right again, quietly, without delay. I could go on. And on.

A friend told me once back then during the sparkling years that they sometimes felt like I judged their house, and their mess. I was hurt because not only would I never have judged their mess (because it was not my own), but that I liked it. It was homely and comfortable. Free.

Years later I can see that all that endless faffing wasn’t that I was a clean freak at all. I don’t think a bit of dirt does us any harm and I tut at people who bang on too much about germs and hygiene. I think kids should be allowed to get grubby, that washing up can be left overnight if you have better things to do, and that the time I used to spend constantly retracing my steps like an OCD cuckoo clock doll in marigolds was an affront to the limited time I have on this planet.

The ‘dirt’ was not my issue. I think I just wanted to make everything ‘nice’. I think for a very long time I threw myself into cleaning because staying physically busy took my brain and heart off other things, that I wanted to preserve (or, more likely, feign) order in a chaotic mind, and that cleaning was a psychological trick; ‘everything’s fine and shiny – you are fine and shiny!’ It was something small I could tackle when the important stuff couldn’t be usorted.

It’s all pretty standard. A lot of people have similar things. There’s probably lots of textbook psycho-babble about ‘control’ that would fit perfectly to it.

But I think having someone essentially say “I always kinda thought you might be a bit of a skank, Sadie” (as I over-translated my friend’s casual observation that night) was the first time I’d acknowledged the extent of the polarised change. Feeling aghast that someone could perceive me to be in any way domestically ‘relaxed’ was an outflinging from the buried erstwhile me; for one moment I cared that anyone could have made such a wrong assumption. Then the new me shrugged it off, and was even a little flattered. Where once friends thought I loved nothing better than staying in and being a bit manic with a duster, now they think I am far too busy doing other, ‘better’ things.

That means I’ve come a long way. I am not the fussy girl you don’t want poking around your kitchen anymore. I will leave your bathroom alone. My brain won’t twitch if I see a mess unfolding in a room; I let it be. I don’t need the cleaning. I can let some sauce dry on the chopping board with the best of them. I can leave things lying around, unwiped, uncleared. I am free to enjoy my space and let my space take on who I am and am happy to be. I can leave signs of life lying around because I am happy with the life I live.

Maybe I’ll even turn into the kind of happy slob who can leave the toilet seat agape and stalagtites hanging from taps, who keeps a fried egg stuck to the wall for later and wears spinach in their teeth like lunchtime tinsel, who nicknames their e-coli spores Betty and Sam, and takes the loo brush out for long country walks. Here’s to dreaming, eh.