Chronicles of a Trailing Spouse...

So DH has his Christmas staff party tonight and I am reminded of the many, many staff parties there have been over the years - good, bad and downright ugly. There was the first (and only) staff party for the company he worked for in Abu Dhabi. I think fondly of this one as it was not long after we arrived in the UAE and I had lost a startling amount of weight with absolutely no effort whatsoever. Travelling from Al Ain to Abu Dhabi for the big night, I took great pleasure in buying a gorgeous, strapless purple number from Reiss in Marina Mall which was a UK size 10 and ever so slightly too big. (It now hangs, unloved and unworn in my wardrobe, unlikely to ever be zipped up again...) As always, it isn't a Christmas party unless we haul the entire brood with us, installing them in the hotel room with TV and the room service menu while we party it on downstairs. At the time the eldest was only 8 so we got a babysitter to the room. The poor girl was Ethiopian and hadn't a word...

It happens in a split second doesn’t it? One moment you’re browsing the underwear section, trying to decide between the Spanx or Charnos control pants for that dinner party, while the two-year-old tugs a rack of bras down on his head; the next moment he’s gone. I lost my son in a mall once. He was two and a half at the time. We were in Marks and Spencer and he had freed himself from his buggy to look at the toys with his sister. He always did this and, unconcerned, I ventured over to a nearby section to browse the toiletries and cookery books, confident that both children would still be there when I returned.  But when I did, five minutes later, I found my daughter leafing through a book, alone. ‘ Where is Oscar?’   I demanded. ‘I don’t know’ , she shrugged. ‘ Can I have this?’ she held up a Disney Princess diary. He must have followed me over to the toiletries , I told myself calmly. Yes that’s what happened. Pushing the empty buggy, I wandered over t...

It’s hard to believe we left Paraburdoo just over a month ago; looking back on it, that life seems like a bizarre half dream, the type you get after you’ve drank too much champagne then fallen asleep in front of a blaring telly. Life in our new home has settled into a comfortable rhythm; the older children head out across the frosty garden each morning, while the daylight is still struggling to establish itself, to take the (free) school bus to a neighbouring village where they attend their secondary school. Having seen them off, I’ll snuggle back in the sofa bed (the marital bed is on a ship somewhere in the South Atlantic and won’t be here for another month) with a cup of coffee in front of Good Morning Britain, cuddled up to the smaller children until it's time to get dressed. Watching this show should be illegal...it's a time thief!  The four-year-old is now in (also free) playschool five mornings a week, something which has left me at a loss; rattling a...

When we first moved to Paraburdoo I wrote here about how one of the things I've really enjoyed about my life over the past few years, is the experience of stepping from one world into another; something which requires little more than a job offer, the will to do it and the cost of the air fare. The Pilbara outback couldn't be more different to the Oxfordshire countryside; they are both beautiful and unique in their own right and I'm so lucky to have been able to live in both. But moving to the UK was a daunting prospect and one I'd been avoiding for years. There's something predictable and prosaic about Irish people in need of work moving 't'England' and I squirmed at the idea. Having spent my first ten years in the UK I was well acquainted with the Irish clubs and Paddy's day celebrations spent eulogising about home. I'd been to the pubs of Cricklewood and Neasden where the long-termers spoke with that funny half Irish, half English brog...

An edited version of this column appeared in the May 2014 edition of Good Taste Magazine (Dubai). I’ve noticed that I rarely mention the middle child in this column. Unfortunately I think an occupational hazard of being a middle child is that you tend to go unnoticed quite a lot – especially in the middle of five - so today this column is devoted to the often overlooked but never undervalued child in the middle. The middle child in this family is nine, his name is Jude (yes, after the song), and he is my invisible child. According to the experts, birth order and sibling relations have a powerful impact on personality traits, self-esteem and even ambition – where we come in the family can quite literally determine what sort of person we turn into. For example, world leaders are overwhelmingly first born children. First-borns are trailblazers, receive most of the attention and identify strongly with power - certainly my eldest child has a very domineering personality an...

I haven't properly blogged in quite a while. I'm not entirely sure why this is, but I think outback living has awakened an inner gravity I always suspected I possessed but never properly explored. My sense of the ridiculous has fled, the scrapes I get into are few and far between these days. Writing my light-hearted monthly parenting column has become a struggle. In addition, in the isolation of my little kitchen a thousand miles away from the world, I've become weighed down by stories, preoccupied by the news - ebola, is it a plot to exterminate us? Gaza - what hope is there? Flight MH17 who did it? Putin a force for good or evil? American propaganda, when will the world wake up? Flight MH370 where did it go? Will they ever investigate the fall of Tower 7? Every morning I read the news all the way to the bottom of the page and the words make me heavier. All the while the question of my life in Australia growing all the more urgent. I turned 41 last birthday and it fel...

We’ve been pretty lucky health-wise with our kids ( touch wood !). Two of them have never seen a doctor for anything other than immunisation, and apart from the time when four of them came down with chicken pox, we’ve been troubled by little more than the odd sniffle. We did, however, go through a scare with the ten-year-old boy several years back, when we thought he might be autistic. I’ve chosen to write about this because only last week yet another friend confided she was having two of her kids tested for autism, and it struck me that this is something I hear all too often from other mothers. Before I go any further, I want to say two things: firstly, I’m not a medical expert, and am talking purely about my own experiences. Secondly, autism is a very serious condition and my heart goes out to anyone with an autistic child, it is not an easy path. But I do wonder if these ‘spectrum’ conditions – such as autism, Aspergers, ADD -- are over-diagnosed at times. When my...

One of my favourite memories from childhood is of my mother creeping into my bedroom late at night -- following a party or dinner out -- a little tipsy, and reeking from the heady mix of Bacardi and coke, YSL’s ‘ Youth Dew’ , and a dozen Silk Cut purple cigarettes.  Full of conviviality and rum, she would whisper promises of treats and trips-out into my sleepy ear, before tiptoeing out of the room to rejoin my father downstairs for a night cap. Snuggling down under the covers, I would drift off into a contented slumber with her loving words still dancing in my head. The world was a safe, good place. I've always hated cigarettes and cheered for the strong arm of the nanny-state the day the smoking ban was introduced into Ireland; but even today as a non-smoking adult, the mere whiff of cigarette smoke can evoke feelings of warmth and safety, bound up with a million memories of my mother and the close bond I shared with her as I grew up. My mother was a twenty-a-day ...

I’ve been feeling old lately; my grey roots come back quicker than they used to, my face takes at least an hour to look normal in the mornings, and my knickers have become high-rise elasticated torture devices designed to contain the hateful middle age spread. What’s worse is the fact that the eldest child has just turned 13; a date which loomed ominously on the calendar for months, like a death knell to any lingering belief that I was still a ‘young mum’, rather than the fully paid up veteran I actually am. Being the mother of a teenager is a big responsibility, and I’ve decided to mark the occasion by offering her some advice which might help her on her way. So here it is: Dearest Emily, Thirteen – wow, how did that happen? Is it really that long since we met? The day you were born was the worst and best day of my life. Nothing could have prepared me for the tsunami of pain which tore through my body that day; wave after wave of agonising contractions  which seemed ...

What is it about motherhood that makes women so nasty to each other? How often do you open a magazine or paper to read yet another article criticising stay-at-home mums for being unambitious and lazy or berating their working counterparts for being cold-hearted career bitches? The latest woman to weigh in on this ongoing and seemingly endless debate is ex-Apprentice star and controversial TV social commentator Katie Hopkins, who recently tweeted, ‘Full time mummy is not an occupation. It is merely a biological status’. Why people feel the need to come out and make these sort of incendiary comments aside, you can’t help but wonder what she hoped to gain by saying this at all other than alienating at least half of her female Twitter followers. Of course she's not new to controversy. This is the woman who said she wouldn't allow her children to play with kids who had what she deemed to be working-class sounding names, such as 'Tyler' or 'Charmaine'. S...

Life in the outback presents many challenges; you can't get bread on a Tuesday, a broken school shoe isn't replaced easily, you can't hide on a bad-hair day since it's impossible to be anonymous. But one of the biggest challenges facing families up here is the question of education. For such a small town, there is a pretty high percentage of home-schoolers for example. Many people here are unhappy with the local primary school; the teaching population can be transient, teachers come and go, and I've heard of one principal who simply up and left one day with no prior warning. And so, it's a bit of a lottery whether you're going to get a decent teacher for your child, since finding good teachers who are willing to come up and live here is not an easy task. High-school presents an equal if not bigger challenge. The 'local' high-school is 80 kms away and has an equally transient teaching population, resulting in many families choosing to send their ...

For Christmas DH got me possibly the most special and original gift ever. He commissioned a piece of art by Pilbara-based artist Natalie Briney, whose art I came across when I was covering the local annual art exhibition PACT (Pilbara Artists Coming Together) for a local paper last year. I loved her work on sight and immediately sought her out for a short interview for the paper. After that I spent several months obsessing about owning one of her wonderful paintings, and Christmas provided the perfect excuse. Heavily influenced by the Mexican artist Frida Kahlo, Briney nonetheless puts her own wonderfully refreshing, feminine and unique stamp on the work, to create beautiful and extremely individual pieces. I'm not an art critic - my knowledge of art doesn't extend beyond the Leaving Cert - but I think that the future holds great things for Briney. I hope so, since I own an original! In times where, let's face it, there's very little we want for, a commissioned...