Well, I thought he was gay for a start. That’s the main reason I was surprised when the boy popped back with a love note. I say ‘love’. I mean ‘mildly optimistic of a positive response in a moment of spontaneous endeavour’. Not sure that’s love.

‘The boy’ had just bought a book from me about testing your cat’s IQ. It’s a modern classic. It shits all over Tolstoy apparently, but he looked a bit embarrassed about it. He joked that he didn’t even like cats. I joked back that maybe he could perform evil tests on them instead then, like Mengele did on twins in Nazi Germany. You know, the standard sort of charming exchange you have with total strangers. He laughed, paid, and left. For my part I instantly regretted my contribution to the banter. You shouldn’t make jokes about thrusting cats into Nazi Germany style laboratory tests. Not on Christmas Eve. It’s too leftfield. It’s not what Jesus would want. It’s not what anybody would want. There are concrete reasons why the Nazis were so unpopular. And feline algebra exams in gas chambers is just one of them.

Half an hour later the boy returned, inched slowly up to me, left a note on the side then scampered off. I was selling someone a guidebook on Prague, no doubt making some witty repartee about how funtimes it was for Czechoslovakian dogs during the occupation, so sort of just smiled politely to one side at him. I didn’t think much about the note until a good while later when I read what he had written. On a Clintons receipt. It said “Hello. You really made me smile this morning. Give me a call or text? P.s. I’m sorry, I feel like a fifteen year old boy, but just had to do it!” and then his name and number. 

Well. If I’d known sick jokes about turning kitties into bunker chic standard lamps were such a turn on I would have used them years ago instead of doing all that ‘getting to know you’ smalltalk, blushing, mumbling, and tripping over my own feet.

I nearly fell over. (Old habits die hard.) Was this young scamp really initiating a potential romance? Was this a joke? Was he hiding round the corner waiting to burst out and laugh in my face, to teach me for casually hurling Persians into Petrie dishes for the sake of a bit of bookshop light relief? Could he not see I was a 35 year old divorcee who hadn’t had time to do her roots? OF COURSE HE FELT LIKE A FIFTEEN YEAR OLD BOY. HE PROBABLY WAS A FIFTEEN YEAR OLD BOY. 

Ok, so he could have been about 25 at a push. He was ‘a bit trendy’, and wearing one of those saggy hats that boys wear that look like they are stowing a small family of possums at the back of their head. You know the ones. The ones that permit them to think they don’t have to wash their hair for a fortnight. Could he not tell that were we to embark upon a relationship it would swiftly descend into a constant cycle of me going “OOH, LOOK OVER THERE,” before tearing the hat from his head and washing it just as he’d achieved his optimum level of boy-head skank-musk? Is that what he wanted from me?

I folded the note away and put it in my pocket. I might not have had any intention of actually contacting him, but I at least wanted to analyse his handwriting at closer quarters for signs of psychopathia. There had to be some reason why he was picking me out for this attention and it can’t just be my very funny jokes about stitching pussies together for gestapo trench coats. Unless he was canvassing all the shops in the high street and trying his luck. For all I know he might have been fluttering his lashes at Audrey, 57, manager and hot-flush queen of Wallis too. (She probably would have run after him and mounted him with a sprig of mistletoe between her teeth before he left the shop. She’s a game girl, Audrey.) (N.B. Audrey is fictional.)

I showed a gal pal the note and she mischievously said “You should text him. Go on a date. You never know.” And I thought, she’s right. You do never know. But also I thought – you do know though, actually. You do. As you get older you do know some things. It’s one of the benefits. You accumulate a wearying number of bad experiences that if you are canny can rebrand as ‘wisdom’. I knew that there was no future for me and this fresh-faced note-writing skank-haired possum-storing cat boy. I knew it the moment I barely glanced at him. I knew it the moment I had no chemical impulse to text him a winky emoji. It was just not meant to be. I might be dead good at jokes about cats, but I am no cougar.

Hi gang. Hullo. I’m not sure if I’ve ever addressed my column directly to you before. I suppose it’s not the done thing if you can’t talk back. It’s not a chat at a bus stop, it’s a newspaper; I write, and a few days later some of you read it. There is a delay, a disconnect. But it always feels like I’m talking to you even if I don’t refer to you directly. So.
I just wanted to pull some of you aside for a little chat. Not those of you who are busy being jolly, you can crack on with your business (and while you’re at it do my wrapping), but those of you who are skulking round the edges, not feeling up to this Christmas thing at all. And those of you who might even be feeling a bit worse than that. Those of you who might not be terribly in the mood for this whole life lark in general. It happens. It’s natural and common and sad but temporary. But at Christmas it can be like carrying blades around in your pockets, trying to smile for the world while your fingers are secretly bleeding, can’t it.
This is our secret little column while everyone else is dashing about getting last minute presents, clicking the crap out of Amazon and mulling the bejesus out of anything vaguely liquidy. This is for us. This is our cosy little huddle in the rain, our big middle finger up at all the tinsel. Don’t worry, the others can’t hear us, they’ve got jingly bells in their ears. And handpainted silver pinecones up their bumholes too, probably.
So, gang. I’ve noticed lots of people are sad at the moment. Have you? Lots of my friends are out of work, have money problems, are feeling directionless, mojo-less, have broken up with someone, have sad hearts, are in ill health, have an uphill struggle with their own bodies and science and healthcare to face, or are being roughed up by hoodlums in their head. Dark things, dark times. So many people depressed it’s sometimes hard to believe that depression is not as ordinary as having a nose. (It sort of is for some people.) Lots of very real and sad and scary life glitches getting in the way of the obligatory happiness of Christmas. We put such overwhelming pressure on each other, on ourselves. Let all that fuck off for a minute. Let it all just fuck off in its kooky Christmas jumper. It’s just us. Under our big moody blanket, tutting and grunting and saying all the bad swears like anti-Buddhists chanting in existential unison. “Life. You. Prick.” Beautiful.
I think humans have an instinctive ability to flock their bad times together, a harrowed herd mentality, flocking like sheep, huddling in a field on a dark night. Perhaps our moods affect each other more than we yet scientifically understand. Perhaps there is such a thing as a cosmic energy, collectives of high and low mood that we plug into. Perhaps it’s the planets pinging us like pinballs, perhaps it’s gravitational forces, quantum doodah. Perhaps it’s something in the water, perhaps it’s war. Perhaps it’s election fall-out, a nation in decline. Maybe it’s just our turn, if there is any fairness apportioned to the way of things. A democratic sharing of all the shit. Maybe this particular shit will make us stronger, better, more human, giving, sharing. But for now it’s just…shit.
Perhaps I’m more attuned to it as a solid mass of shitty shitshit because of the way I’m feeling. Perhaps I’m tuning into the happy stuff less than I normally might. I feel sad and lost. And that’s usually ok when it wends and winds its way around me – not optimum but doable – but what’s really rankling is I feel like I’ve lost my sense of wonder. There, I’ve said it. Like my vision has been shot and all I can see is a cracked screen. I’ve been skirting around it for weeks, writing columns about other things, but there’s the truth. Some sad life stuff happened and now I’m trying to ‘get on with it’. But it’s not working. I feel all wound up; ground down. Broken. Perhaps I need to work harder at shaking myself off. But there are times when we just can’t. When we don’t want to. Even for Christmas. I think I can actually safely say that this is the first Christmas where I’ve felt like crawling under the covers and not emerging til someone in a position of authority (and right now that could be the night shift manager of the local offie) can categorically promise me, hand on heart, tits, balls, head, arse, whatever, that the world is brighter outside.

And because I’ve not talked much about it, everyone apart from about five people who know me better than perhaps I’d like, thinks I’m doing ok. That I’m busy cracking on. That I am working hard, going out, writing, working, laughing, writing, drinking, entering the Yuletide season with a warm glow remembering the year that’s just been. I am not. Guys, I have watched the whole of Breaking Bad in about two weeks. All of it. And now I’m onto Better Call Saul. And I watched the whole of Luther in between too, as a ‘cheery’ buffer. I went down a dark little hole to try not to think about real stuff. You know you’ve gone too far down the burrow of distraction when you wake up from a fevered sleep thinking “better get up and check on the meth lab.” You know you need to re emerge. You need to get real. At some point. (Like, after you’ve watched the whole of 24, Lost, Dexter, House, Homeland, and Peaky Blinders. Fuck knows what that’s about, but I will definitely know before 2016. I will have sucked Netflix dry as a turkey bone.)
So this is for the other sad folk of Christmas; a carol to the orphans of hope and the castaways of joy; the lost, the lonely, the people in the dark; even for the dicks who just like to Grinch it up to be different. To all those merely wishing next year will be…better. To any degree, just better. When all the glitz and buzz of Christmas seems like it’s for everyone else but you – this little column is for you. Don’t feel alone. Hullo. I’m here, waving at you now. And there are thousands of others too. (Wave, everyone.) And here’s a bit of loving bossiness while I’m bossing myself about too…
Do some little things. Start there. Wear something nice that feels good on your skin, that makes your eyes look nice. Eat something that makes you feel like a naughty child. Listen to music that makes your cells rise up not sink down. Handjive in the bathroom mirror. You will feel so ridiculous the corners of your mouth will not fail to twitch in remembrance of a smile. Buy yourself a present. Thank yourself, outloud. Believe in something fantastical, like the robins are talking to you. They are. If you want. Phone or write to someone you don’t talk to often enough. Talk. Listen. Be kind. Say nice things, they will make you smile too. Look up at the big deep sky and breathe and allow your problems to feel small for a moment. Banish them with all that magic you have in your amazing brain. You can. It hasn’t gone. You are still you, and what’s more you are a better you than you are giving yourself credit for.
Don’t just cry and hole up and tell everyone to fuck off for a bit. Don’t tell the sweet lord baby Jesus to go swivel on his birthday. Or regurgitate cheap chocolate on your mismatched stale pyjamas. Or swig port from the bottle and hiccup profanities to the Queen’s speech. Don’t spray mince pie crumbs at anyone who gets on your tits and blame it on the pastry being dry. Don’t watch a film that has some variant of Scrooge in it and then turn it off while Scrooge is still being a miserly old bastard. Don’t kill Tiny Tim. Don’t let George Bailey drown. Don’t let the burglars ram Kevin with a red hot poker; he’s only nine. It’s not right.
No. Do the better stuff.
It’ll be ok, you know. You’ll be ok. I’ll be ok. This will pass. We still have sparkly bits inside. They’ve not gone out, they’re just a bit folded up and squished at the moment, facing the wrong way, in a box, under the covers. Somewhere. There. In a forgotten drawer in the big old chest of being you.
I raise my glass to us, depressing dreary lovely raincloud nice sad hopeless pretty beige and teardrop blue old bastards this year. I will even wear a stupid paper hat at a jaunty angle, just for you.

But you are not having any of my Ferrero Roche. That’s my crystal meth and I will take you down.

I’ve been walking through my old neighbourhood quite a lot to get to my sister’s. The most direct route from the bookshop is straight through town, cutting over the intricate death lanes of the bus station where I quite often almost meet my end in front of the number 27. Then there’s the gaggle of drunks who huddle in wonks at all hours with their plastic bags of tins. I see no reason to take a detour. They don’t look at me and I don’t look at them. But I see them. They seem happy enough. They settle there in rowdy bliss like scholars of Ancient Greece arguing on the steps of the Acropolis, bowing to the wisdom of Socrates, who in this case is a swarthy six pack of Tenants Super.
I carry on past a sort of mini China town – a restaurant with glazed ducks in the window, a shop of with hand-scrawled Chinese characters on fluorescent cards promising to herbally cure all your ills from bad backs to halitosis and low libido, and a tiny old chiropractors who I’ve heard tell will snap you to within an inch of your feeble life but always undercharge. 
I carry on a straight line down ‘the dodgy road’, which is famed in local lore as a hotspot for ladies of the night. The roads get worse here before they peel away into clean-gardened suburbia, and people tell me not to walk this way, but I like it all. People live here, just like anywhere else. I don’t believe in snobbery; we’re all our own kinds of mess behind our own walls. And I’ve never believed this road quite deserves its shady reputation. I’ve never seen any obvious shenanigans.
But then there she is. Standing on a patch of street that smells of drains and chicken bones. 

She must be ‘one’. One of those ladies. Kicking her feet between the wall and the streetlight. Wall to lamp and back, flicking her eyes around her. One meter to the left or right she would have been lit by the full bright moon but instead has chosen the yellow umbrella of streetlight. Has chosen the cliché, has chosen the connotations of that post, that artificial light. Perhaps it feels safer under electricity than under nature. Perhaps she doesn’t want to sully the moon.
Her clothes aren’t what you might think. She’s no Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman, but then this isn’t Hollywood. It’s winter in an English seaside town. The rough bit. She looks like she’s rolled out of bed and pulled on a black woollen cape with grey patterning that is some vague adaptation of a Native American design. Something that could have been pulled round cold shoulders on vast wild prairies in another life but instead finds itself mass reproduced in New Look. She’s dressed for winter. I’m glad. I wonder what’s underneath. What concessions she has made to the fantasies of men. She looks lonelier than the drunks, though of course it’s presumptuous to think that just because she is standing alone that she is lonely, and that just because they are together that they are not. Our loneliness is not indicated by the proximity of other people.
It’s not that late. But it’s dark. As I near her, a plumber throws his tools into the back of his van and we, her and me, turn to the clatter of it, united in one brief moment of sensory reaction. He drives off. I can smell her perfume as I continue past. Like sweets soaked in liqueur. Innocent things poked by sharp tang.
It occurs to me she might be there to meet a friend. A real friend. But I don’t think so. Her eyes don’t say that. Her body doesn’t say that. All that I have heard about that road doesn’t say that. You can tell a lot about someone by the way they wait. 
I want to say hullo, just so that if she is feeling in any way scared or doubtful or sad or judged about what she is doing there, if she is feeling like she has slipped a few rungs lower than she thought she ever would, if she is feeling transparent and naked and valueless, she has one friendly voice saying if only for a moment, “Whatever you do tonight, that is not all that you are.” But I don’t. 
What circumstances keep me from that same decision, from that same act, from the repetition of that act, that choice, that feeling of no choice, from that life? How close might I ever come, if life wends a different way? If I sink a few rungs lower than I thought I ever would? We never know. That’s why snobbery is an unjust assertion of false values. A cruelty to ourselves and others. We are never as far from anything as we think.
  

I never used to ‘do girls’. Let me quickly rephrase before you think I’ve made a surprising life decision.

I never used to ‘be a girls’s girl’. I used to think I was a lad’s girl. If you stuck me in a room with a gang of Lynx-wearing boys (or Brut for the more sensitive souls) who hadn’t washed their Nirvana t-shirts for a month, I was home. Fast forward a few years later, stick me at a bar with men who swigged pints and chatted about ‘non-girly’ things, and I was home. I didn’t want to sit obligingly at tables with birds who were wearing something nice they’d bought that day, with heels that made them walk funny and perfume that smelled of sweets, talking of nice things. I belonged with the men. 
But women who sell this nonsense to themselves for whatever reason are denying themselves a wonderful thing. Because I now suspect that I told myself I was a boy’s girl for one main reason. Which is…
Boys seem dead exotic when you haven’t got any at home. I liked seeing what they got up to. And that meant getting up close to them. So I didn’t have much time for standing next to nice smelling women who chatted about girl things because I understood all that stuff because I was a girl and I had other girls at home. More of the same was a waste of time. I wanted to wander around the zoo of the possibilities of my own life. Men were like the monkey cage. The familiar and the curious and the unknowable all in the same skin. Similar to me but different. No one leaves the monkey cage without wanting to go back. 
I suspect some girls feel comfortable around men because they either grew up with them, or some may even genuinely feel like they are more like the boys they know than the girls they know. But for me, I think I just needed to observe. Because one day I might want to be with one, to love one and understand one, maybe even stay with one and die with one. Maybe even feel that strange knowing that swirls around your heart with the tag ‘soul mate’ flickering in the breeze of complicity. It was like going to the movies and being able to walk into the film and stand beside the thing I did not know. And who doesn’t want to do that?
I think now that I get older – and this is something which is possibly now more important – actually what I, and other ‘non-girly’ girls like me, was identifying with was not the boys themselves, but with a refusal to be pigeon-holed. 

Perhaps I had enough feminist spirit lurking somewhere as a kid and as a younger woman to know that I didn’t want to be told what kind of woman I should be. I equated men with freedom and choice and power. I equated women with the confines of all the nice behaviour and accepted femininity I had observed. And I didn’t want that.
I spend my time now with more women than I do men. Talking to, writing to, hanging out with, hugging, confiding in. I have had the beautiful luck to have somehow ended up with a network of female friends who fill my inner chambers with light and love, who challenge me, stick up to me, tell me when I am wrong or being dumb, who tell me when I’ve done well, who hold me and stroke my hair and hold my face and look into my eyes when I am crying. I have women I would actively go to in a heartbeat after a life of telling myself I don’t need anyone or anything. I need them. And every day throws up a succession of little sweetnesses that fills me with gratitude.
I do women now. They’ve got my back. They’ve got my boobs and bum and head and heart and blood. I am boob-honkingly burptastically in love with women. Because I am one, whatever I want that to mean. Through loving other women, I am really beginning to love being one myself. And that is something I’ll get to keep for life.
  

I’m on the tube. To my left I have a man who smells of rice and has paint on his jeans, and to my right I have a lady holding a wet umbrella. The umbrella is dripping on the floor and making a little pool of water which jiggles as we shunt along. I can’t stop staring at the pool of water; it’s hypnotising me as my body is rocked by the motion of the train. The pool is holding itself firmly in a rotund jelloid oxbow lake, like a capsule with an invisible skin. Every time the train jerks, the pool threatens to break and spread out into thinner rivulets, but does not. I want to see what happens. I’m invested in this little sucker now.
I’m in a bit of a trance because I’ve just come out of a meeting at the BBC for which I felt overwhelmingly unqualified. The development team liked my play and wanted to meet me and when someone at the BBC likes your stuff and wants to meet you, you ruddy go. It was a bit of a shame that I got stopped and frisked by a big security dude on the way in for having a weapon, my trusty Swiss Army knife that goes everywhere with me, but then I suppose it’s good to be kept on your toes. There’s nothing like being made to feel like a terrorist on your way into an important meeting; it’s very energising. Maybe even better than two red bulls and an espresso chaser like that other meeting I went to where I spoke really fast and then thought I was having a heart attack in the lift.
I’m in this trance because when you go to a meeting and have to talk about yourself it’s quite hard. You have to answer questions and have thoughts and formulate it all in words that hopefully come out of your mouth in a stylish sensical fashion. More than anything you can’t believe anyone wants to know what you think about anything. And then when you leave you enter a fog where you recount what you’ve just said, and wonder which bits sounded dumb and which bits sounded alright, and then you get on the tube and because you can’t punch yourself in front of people without looking mental you do it in your head instead and then enter a little daze and begin looking at a pool of water gathering around a lady’s umbrella.
I suddenly feel very grown up. Here I am, on the tube, in London, on my own, without my mum telling me which line I need to get to get to where I’m going. Going from a meeting at the BBC to another meeting with two literary agents. Writing my column on my phone. I have a column. For a newspaper. You’re reading it now. Hullo. How did I get here? How did I get to be 35? What’s going on? Shouldn’t I still be rollerskating or something, or eating Wotsits in my Wendy House? Shouldn’t I be sat on the stairs eavesdropping on the babysitter or begging my mum for a perm? What would a younger me have thought if I could have had a little glimpse into this day? Into me having a knife confiscated at the BBC before sitting down to talk about my career in writing?
I think I would have been happy that life had meandered in a way that let me have a day like today. Even if it’s not quite eating crisps in a plastic house waiting for the Flintstones to start.
And the little pool broke at Kings Cross and trickled down to my foot and gently nudged my shoe as if to say “Yes. You’re doing ok.” and I smiled. 
  

I was counting Viola’s freckles and had just got to 17 when she began prodding my boob. “Boobies are funny.”, she said with a giggle. “I suppose they are”, I replied, staring down at her 5 year old little finger, prodding away. “Compared to war and treading in dog poo and stuff.” We carried on like that for a bit, me staring at her tiny digit depressing itself into my vest, and her giggling because she knew that most people would stop her poking their boobs before she even got going. Perhaps I am a bad auntie, allowing her to be tactile with a part that is usually treated with more decorum. But facts are facts and boobs are squishy. Why not let her make the observation? She’s five, and curious. Boobs are probably hysterical when you’re five. I mean, I think I was more of a Scooby Doo girl than a Booby Boo girl at that age, but we can’t all be the same.
Then I drew the line when Viola tried to sneak a peak of nipple because, well, really. There is that panic we all respond with around children because we are now so trained to be on the look out for perverts that we are struck by a ridiculous fear that we look inappropriate hugging our own nieces. I feel the same when my nephew, almost 9, kisses me on the mouth. He’s a beautiful loving boy with a heart the size of an ocean and he likes to kiss people hullo, goodbye, and a thousand instances in between, on the mouth. It’s very lovely if a bit wet, and we are all dreading the day he reaches the age in boyhood when he will stop being so unabashedly affectionate. So I let him kiss me on the mouth because he shouldn’t be tainted by our adult nonsense, but at the back of my head is that little bell. “This wouldn’t look great in the middle of Lidls.” It’s a sad state of affairs when you have feelings of reservation in your gut when the son of your sister wants to express that he loves you in the most natural way humans have, in the way we expressed love long before we ever had words for it. But that’s where we find ourselves in this paedophile-aware age. Being careful with loved ones just in case anyone’s watching. Sad.
So I stopped Viola at the nip. I laughed nervously and moved her hand, and she giggled, because she too knew it was a step too far, because she has been taught that there are some parts we must feel modest about when we are grown up. There are some parts that are always naked – hands and faces – there are parts that are sometimes naked – arms and legs and necks and feet – and there are parts that become our private places, seldom seen, and treated shyly, sometimes even a shade guiltily. 
Viola is still at the age where she stomps around naked, where she lies on the floor legs akimbo with no awareness. What a beautiful age that is. Before body image kicks in, before we are sexualised, before we compare ourselves endlessly with other “better” bodies. Before we become so well-trained and ‘appropriate’. Before we become unfree.
I went back to staring at her freckles. At the delicate curve of her nose, at the pale thin skin under her eyes, almost translucent with youth. At her face which sometimes looks like my sister’s and sometimes looks like mine, which will one day be older and different. At her tiny body growing in the tiniest increments every second. For a moment I could almost see her growing. I could almost forward the frames to when she will be bigger, older, wiser, when she too will be the possessor of those hilarious artefacts, boobs. When she will be a woman. And I was sad and excited for her, and wished I could fit her with a pause button. While she is still free.
  

There’s a lot of wisdom to be found in this world if you know where to find it. I think the Dalai Lama said that. He was probably in a hurry; he’s said better things.Like “My religion is very simple. My religion is kindness.” Nailed it.

And “Be kind whenever possible. It is always possible.” Yes, Mr Lama. Bosh.
I’ve been pondering the acquisition of knowledge a lot lately. Mainly in a meandering kind of way, but the other day I was provoked into an almost sudden death knowledge type scenario. I was asked to clarify something as my eight year old nephew Elliot was doing his maths homework. I froze as I looked at the screen of numbers. Did he not know me at all? And then I realised – no. He wasn’t there for the years of feeling dumb, the years of extra tuition with an old Welsh man who spittled his tea over me like Mr Twit, he wasn’t there for the torturous revision, the horrifying exams, and the panic for weeks afterwards waiting for results day. He wasn’t there, because he wasn’t born. So he didn’t know that Maths was my old nemesis. He just wanted to ask me something about minus numbers.
I looked at the sum. Said something vague, which, to my staggering surprise, turned out to be right. But then I ran out of wisdom for the other questions. I couldn’t teach him anything; I couldn’t help.
I realised I haven’t really had to think about all that stuff since 1996 when school was telling me if I couldn’t get up to C grade level Maths my life was essentially over. I might as well hurl myself on the reject pile before the world did it for me. But the moment I opened that envelope confirming the hard-acquired C, Maths went out of my head. I’ve done bits and bobs in shops and whatnot, but the pressure otherwise dissipated immediately. So why had it been so important?
If we’re just going to forget stuff, what’s the point of learning?

I wondered what Elliot believed was important to know as humans, right now, while he is that glorious all-is-possible age of eight. I quizzed him while he ate his pasta.
I asked him what really important stuff he’d learnt lately. He told me that e-safety was crucial. They’re doing assemblies on it at his school at the moment, so you’d expect him to be scathingly satirical and culturally up-to-date on it. He said something wise about me not even knowing what pixels were when I was his age. I told him to “watch it, sunshine.”
I asked him how he thinks people can be happy.

He said “I think people would be happier if they did more of the stuff they like”.

I asked him what he didn’t like about becoming an adult.

He said “I am not looking forward to getting older and older and then dying.”
At one point while I was questioning him, he put his chin in his hand and said “This is hard, isn’t it”, and I said yes. I loved him for thinking of the answers to questions that really aren’t his concern yet.
I asked him what the coolest thing he knew was. He answered “how to build lego – you can build whatever you want – the first thing that pops into your head and then you try to make it – that’s really cool.”
I asked him what he was most proud of in his life.

He said “learning how to speak, or otherwise I would not be doing this at all”
“what, helping me with my column?”
“Yeah” (I didn’t tell him that was a doubtful privilege.)
“Oh, and getting my imagination. And maybe learning how to write. That’s really good. You need to learn how to write.”
And I realised, properly realised, while Elliot thought really hard about stuff with pasta sauce around his mouth, that this super sweet and naturally wise eight year old was going to be one of my best friends for life.
  
  

One of my best friends is growing a baby and I am so proud. I don’t know exactly why I’m proud. She’s not done much yet except lie on a table a couple of times and buy some new bras. All the magic is going on inside her while she gets on with normal things like work and trying to keep her dinner down. She’s not in control of operations; it’s not as though she’s conducting it all like a grand opus of biology. It’s pretty automatic that gestation stuff. If we tried to interfere it would all go horribly wrong. If all the buns in all the ovens needed our help we would be running around in a tiz with burnt oven gloves before the first trimester was even out.

I don’t have any right to this pride I feel in her. It’s nothing to do with me. I didn’t put the baby in there.

Anyway.

I can’t wait to go visit her soon. I want to watch her shuffling around being bloated and grumpy and cute. I’ll probably want to lie on her belly and talk to it. It’ll be a cosy little scene, there in her Kent country cottage with the fire blazing before October’s even over, me dutifully drinking the wine she can’t crack open for months and talking at her vagina while she and the dog stare at each other and wonder when might be a wise time to shove me off and send me home.

It’s a beautiful thing to be kept abreast of her internal development. “It has teeth and fingerprints and is the size of a peach”, she informed me on the phone less than an hour ago. It’s eleven weeks old for goodness sake. How on earth has it got fingerprints? They are some of the most delicate almost imperceptibly tiny bits on our outer form. Unique as snowflakes. At this rate, in the time I’ve taken to write this, the foetus has probably moved out of home to do an architecture degree in Durham or something. Precocious little nugget.

Yes. In the time it takes me to think about throwing out a dead basil plant, this creature has made itself a fully functioning heart with chambers and ventricles and everything. Is my friend’s child better than me already? Will it overtake me? Am I intimidated by a fist-sized baby alien? It all seems disgustingly sorted in there, all protected and miraculous and over-achieving. Am I going to hate my friend’s baby?

I may now be in awe of her and ‘it’ – Little Mr/Miss Show-Off – but I know that when she is up to her elbows in green poo and her baby can’t even find a nipple without help, I will be back to feeling slightly less inferior. When she has sick in her hair and her baby doesn’t even know why it’s crying, I might even feel smug. I haven’t had sick in my hair for over a year and I almost always know exactly why I am crying.

Why is our development in the womb so advanced, so precociously lightning quick, all fully formed by eleven weeks with only size left to muster, yet when we burst outside into the cold light, the rude air of real life, why then do we slow down? Why does it take humans months to learn how to walk, when gazelles are galloping the plains by the time their amniotic gloop has been licked off? Humans start off so well and then spend the rest of our lives slowly slowing down – learning less, being less magical – so unlike our fine beginnings in the womb.

Writing this, I think I have figured out why I am proud though. Because my beautiful friend is doing all this alone. Single Mumdom. She is a superlative grumpy pregnant lady with a stoic appreciation of the wonder going on within, and when she is a mother she will be all these brilliant things, and so much more to Little Mr/Miss Waily Stinkypants. And I will love her as half of a double-act even more.