How Hard Can It Be?. Allison Pearson

Kate. And lead us not into temptation and deliver us from gluten. I am meant to be exchanging the wasteland of midlife elasticated leggings and quiet despair for the waist-land of pencil skirts and professional possibility.

       From: Candy Stratton

       To: Kate Reddy

       Subject: Headhunter Humiliation

       You go for one interview and Midget Prick says because you’re 49 you need to get euthanised and YOU BELIEVE HIM? SERIOUSLY!? What happened to that fabulous woman I used to work for? You need to get to work on your résumé and start lying big time. Anything you know that you can do, tell them you’ve done it in the past 18 months, OK? I’ll give you a great reference.

       And get a hairdresser to do you some highlights. Not Clairol over the side of the bathtub. Promise me.

       XXO C

      6.21 am: About to leave for the gym when, somewhere, there is the unfamiliar sound of a phone ringing. It takes me a couple of minutes to realise it’s the landline. Takes twice that to track down the actual phone, which is chirruping forlornly to itself behind some sections of plasterboard that Piotr has stacked against the kitchen wall. Who could be ringing this early? Only cold callers and what Richard insists on calling ‘The Aged Ps’ use the house phone these days, now that everyone has a mobile. Yes, even Ben. It was impossible to hold out any longer once he turned twelve. He claimed it was ‘child abuse’ to deny a kid a phone and he was going to ‘call the government’. Plus, he added, there was no way he was going to show me how to transfer my files onto a new laptop if he didn’t have a mobile. Hard to argue with that.

      The phone is covered in a thick layer of chalky builder’s dust. Sure enough, the caller is an Aged P talking very politely to an indifferent answerphone. Donald. I hear his Yorkshire accent, once so rich and thick you could have cut it like parkin, now papery and fluting in his eighty-ninth year. When Richard’s dad leaves a message, he speaks slowly and carefully, pausing at the end of each sentence to allow his silent interlocutor time to respond. Donald’s messages take forever. ‘Come on, Dad, spit it out!’ Richard always shouts across the kitchen. But I love my father-in-law, his air of musing wistfulness like Sir Alec Guinness; he addresses the machine with such courtesy it’s a reminder of a lost world where human spoke unto human.

      I listen to Donald with half an ear while rummaging in the fruit bowl for a breakfast kiwi. Better than a banana, surely. Can’t be more than forty calories. Why does this always happen? Like hand grenades when I brought them home from the supermarket two days ago, the kiwis have turned to mush; it feels faintly obscene, like I’m palpating a baboon’s testicle.

      ‘Terribly sorry to disturb you so early, Richard, Kate. It’s Donald here,’ says my father-in-law unnecessarily. ‘I’m calling about Barbara. I’m afraid she’s had a falling out with our new lady carer. Nothing to worry about.’

      No, please God, no. After two months of negotiation with Wrothly Social Services, which would have exhausted the combined diplomatic skills of Kofi Annan and Amal Clooney, I managed to secure a small care-package for Donald and Barbara. That meant someone would help with the cleaning, bathe Barbara and change the dressing on her scalded leg. It’s a pitiful amount of time they’ve been allocated, so short that the carer sometimes doesn’t even bother to take her coat off, but at least there’s someone checking in on them every day. Richard’s parents insist they don’t want to downsize from the family home, a stone farmhouse on the side of a hill, because it means leaving the garden they have tended and loved for forty years; they know some of the trees and shrubs as well as they know their own grandchildren. Barbara always said they would move ‘when the time was right’, but I fear they missed that particular window, probably about seven years ago, and they are now stuck in a rambling place they refuse to heat (‘Can’t go throwing your money around’) with a vertiginous staircase – the one Ben fell down the Easter he was three.

      ‘We do hate to be a burden …’ the voice continues as I’m lacing up my trainers. Check the clock. Going to be late for first training session with Conor. Sorry. I know if I was a good, self-sacrificing person I would pick up the phone, but I simply cannot face another Groundhog Day conversation with Donald.

      ‘… but you see Barbara seems to have caused offence yesterday when she said that Erna didn’t have good enough English to understand what was what. Barbara made Erna a cup of tea and Erna said “Thank you”, and Barbara said “You’re welcome”, but Erna thought she said, “You will come”, and that Barbara was giving her orders, but she wasn’t, you see. Erna was rather rough with Barbara, I’m afraid. She left in quite a huff and she hasn’t been in for a few days. I’m happy sorting Barbara’s bandage myself, as I do remember my First Aid, thank goodness, but she won’t let me into the bathroom with her and you know that’s how she burnt her leg in the first place. She runs the hot tap and then she forgets to put in cold.’

      A man who, almost seventy years ago, navigated a Lancaster bomber through the treacherous skies over occupied Europe – he was three years older than Emily is now, a thought that always makes me want to cry – sounds resigned to his fate: calm, composed, stoical and utterly utterly helpless.

      ‘If it’s not too much trouble …’

      Oh, all right, all right. Just coming.

      ‘Hello, Donald. Yes, it’s Kate. No, not at all. You’re not a bother. Sorry, no, we haven’t got your messages. We don’t always check the … Yes, it’s better to call the mobile if you can. I did write our numbers on the calendar for you. Oh, dear. Barbara caught the carer smoking in front of the Bishop of Llandaff?’ (Hang on, what’s a senior Welsh clergyman doing in my mother-in-law’s herbaceous border?) ‘Oh, the Bishop of Llandaff is a type of … Yes, I see, and Barbara doesn’t believe you should smoke by the dahlias. No, quite. Yes, yes. I can see that. And she’d prefer a carer from the area if possible. OK, I’ll give social services another call.’

      They’re bound to have a non-smoking, English-speaking, dahlia-friendly home help at short notice, aren’t they?

      Eventually manage to hang up after promising Donald that we will pay a visit once the kids are settled back in school, once Emily’s exams are out of the way, once I have a new job and a functioning kitchen and once Richard can take time out from his twice-weekly therapy sessions and cycle races. I make that the Twelfth of Never.

      Text Conor to say sorry, I’ve had a family problem, and I will definitely see him at the gym on Friday. If I’m ever allowed to have some time for myself. Is that really too much to ask?

      7.17 am: ‘Dear God, listen to this, Kate.’ Rich is sitting at the kitchen table. He looks up from the paper, squinting in the sharp light streaming in through the windows. Beautiful big Georgian windows, a gracious pair, but one sash mechanism is broken so you can’t open it, and the sills are riddled with rot.

      ‘Can you believe it?’ Rich sighs. ‘It says, “Hackers access one hundred thousand Snapchat photos and prepare to leak them including under-age nude pics”. Darling, do the kids have this Snapchat thing?’

      ‘Um, drner.’

      ‘Luckily we know Emily isn’t going to be posting pictures of her genitals for public consumption, but lots of parents haven’t got a clue what their kids are up to on social media.’

      ‘Ingggmr.’

      ‘I mean it’s totally inappropriate.’

      ‘Mmmm.’

      Since his midlife crisis took hold my husband has started subscribing to progressive left-wing periodicals and using words like ‘inappropriate’ and ‘issues around’ a lot. Instead of saying poverty he says ‘issues around deprivation’. I don’t know why no one says ‘problems’ any more, except maybe problems have to be solved, and they can’t be, and issues sound important but don’t demand solutions.

      ‘I’ve