Month One, Day Eight

Holiday! We bundle bags full of walking gear into Jack’s car (my own car is too crap for the purpose) and head for the M1. The Yorkshire Dales.

In my fantasy life, the Yorkshire Dales are where I live. I own a small stone cottage on a ridge half-way up a hill. All around me rushes the sound of spring water. I grow vegetables and keep chickens in the garden and make myself boiled eggs every day for breakfast. I bake carrot cakes. I write beautiful novels. The world loves me and wants to know me, but I am an enigma.

Usually in this fantasy, I am alone, without partner or children (I don’t know why, and prefer not to analyse the reasons), but now and then, a hazy image of a man I’ve never met appears. The only clear thing about this man is that he has yellow hives bursting with fat bumble bees. They dutifully produce the finest golden honey every year, and I sell it to local visitors from an old wooden stall which I set up outside the garden gate. There is a sign, hand-written on an old piece of cardboard that hangs from a string: Home-grown vegetables and finest Yorkshire honey.

I sometimes share this fantasy with Jack (substituting the man I’ve never met for him). He says, ‘Do you know how much work would go into this vegetable patch and these chickens and the bees?’

‘Sorry?’

‘Who’s going to do the planting and sowing and digging and slug-killing? Who’s going to clear the dead rats out of the chicken shed?’

I toss my head. ‘I haven’t thought that far ahead,’ I say.

‘It won’t be you.’

This is probably true. I want to live a simple, noble life close to nature without doing any of the work. I don’t say this out loud, though, in case it raises the question of whether this will also be my approach to parenting. I want the clean, angelic faces and adorable clothes, but don’t make me deal with vomit, shit and tears.

About three months after we first got together, Jack took me to stay with friends of his who used to be normal people. Now, they have been overrun by babies. They have four of them. Not one of these children ever sleeps. At least, not one ever sleeps in its own bed. If the parents want to have sex, they have to shut themselves in the dining room (where the children are afraid to go) and do it on a lilo. Both of these parents look ten years older than Jack. They never go out, never eat a meal that they don’t have to divide up and share with the small, parasitic bodies hanging around their legs; never enjoy a bubble bath without some child jumping in and weeing in it. . .

Only one child went to bed before midnight when we were there. The others were up, demanding our attention, screaming, vomiting. It was exhausting. It was endless.

By the time we left the next morning, Jack had slid into a depression I thought he might never come out of.

‘Are you alright?’ I asked.

He shook his head, disbelieving. ‘I can’t believe what has happened to them,’ he said. ‘They’ve disappeared. They look awful.’

This was true.

‘It doesn’t have to be like that,’ I offered hopefully. ‘Some people put their children to bed.’

‘But they’re still children when they wake up.’

There was no way of arguing with that.

Now, as we approach our beautiful old cottage in the middle of Yorkshire nowhere, I remember that visit, and begin to question this insane, primitive longing I have for a small person to come and turn this deep peace to chaos.

But we're on holiday, and according to the rules of biology (which I still have no faith in), I will be releasing an egg some time this week. And I have nothing with me to stop that happening.