Odyssey In A Teacup (26 page)

Seriously? The best you can offer me is a cliché? You, of all people!

It was a lie anyway. Time was flying, but I wasn’t having fun. And maybe it seemed to pass quicker after having the children, not just because of the 1:20/30/40 ratio, but also because I tried to fill every waking hour with activities. So time blipped and zipped, and I lived inside a timeline with a chain of events that looked something like this:

 Tuck shop duty

 Bathroom renovation (agonising over the accessories)

 Birthday parties

 Making radish flowers and curly shaved carrots strips (by soaking in cold water); attractively scoring cucumbers lengthwise with tines of fork (for dinner party salads)

 Adding a bedroom (agonising over paint colours and window furnishings)

 Step classes at the gym

 Meetings with teachers because Hannah or Casper were in deep doo-doo

 Kitchen renovation (agonising over fixtures and fittings)

 PA meetings

 Shopping for a new car

 Buying a new puppy (Casper named her
Oeuf
)

 Club Med family holidays

 Having a pool put in (agonising over waterline tiles and paving surrounds)