Chronicles of a Trailing Spouse...

(An edited version of this column appeared in Good Taste Magazine, Dubai in September 2012) Thing 1:My creativity knows no bounds ‘ Are you going to be doing that all night? ’ whines my husband from the sofa. It’s 11pm on a school night, and I’m sitting on the floor surrounded by bits of cardboard, glue, crepe-paper and scissors. I've been here for over three hours and have so far produced: a one-foot-high, red and white striped hat for my seven-year-old ‘Cat in the hat’ ; a t-shirt with a ‘ Diary of a wimpy kid’ design painted onto it, for my nine-year-old Greg Heffley wannabe; a blue wig which has been fashioned from the insides of a scatter cushion dipped in blue paint, and glued to a rubber swimming hat, for ‘ Thing One’ aka the five-year-old.  Yes, it’s Book Day tomorrow, and like any good school event, the real work is done at home - long into the night – by us, the hapless parents. And any plans for an evening spent, glass in hand, sitting in front of ‘ Colin...

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...