In my shoes

Today I’m very honoured to welcome the lovely DulwichDivorcee, journalist, writer and mother of two, as a guest blogger here as part of Guest Post Day. Please make her feel welcome!

They do say you can never understand anyone until you’ve walked a mile in their shoes. Well, I find myself completely daunted by the task of filling Ella’s kitten heels even for a short spin as her guest poster – she has how many teeny tiny children, she used to homeschool them all and she finds time to work too? One of her children has a very serious kidney condition, yet she rides all the storms of his illness so graciously. And she blogs like an angel, of course.

Now, I’m not saying life isn’t tough in Dulwich.

I’m not saying it, because it isn’t true – life in Dulwich is the reverse of tough. It’s actually lovely, and any wrinkles on the smooth surface of life here at Divorce Towers are mostly self-inflicted, I’m sorry to say. Leaving your husband is never a recipe for a quiet life, and it’s a miracle that the girls, the cat and I aren’t still in therapy.

Every now and then, though, something happens that isn’t all my own fault, and I am hugely delighted to blog about it. Take the latest Boden party.

The Boden party idea is soooo Dulwich. That is to say, it’s a ridiculously middle class English ritual. A mummy decides to host a party featuring samples of clothes from the well-heeled mummy’s bible, the Boden catalogue, and a bunch of other mummies turn up, largely to have a good look at the hostess’s taste in curtains and cushions, and, as a sideline, to peruse a couple of rails of frocks rather listlessly.

This time, the party was at the weekend, when my daughters, Child One  – the teenager – and Child Two – the aspiring teenager – were very much present. Always happy to help me rid myself of my excess pounds (that’s pounds sterling, not pounds flab, alas) they decided to accompany me, while reserving the right to turn their perfect little noses up at anything I contemplated buying for myself, the darlings.

Naturally, by the time we arrived, the place was rammed. It was like one of those adolescent parties advertised on Facebook, where 400 people turn up in half an hour, only this time it was 400 well-brought up mummies, all saying, ‘no, after you,’ and ‘you try that one – I think I prefer it in the black.’

The hostess was delightful, but firm on one point – we had to take our shoes off before coming in. Sure enough, inside the hall, before entering the party proper, there was a very long row of shoes, neatly paired up - mostly boots, as it was a freezing cold day.  Fair enough, I can completely sympathise with the hostess’s need to minimise carpet destruction – it’s just that I hadn’t been expecting to expose my feet to the public gaze for another couple of months, when the temperature might just about rise above freezing. But I bared my tattiest socks with only a slight grimace of pain (at least I didn’t have to unveil my toes, yikes) and we stacked up our shoes next to the rest and wandered in.

It was too crowded for serious shopping, too packed even for frivolous purchases. We had a quick look around, the girls grazed as much as they could on crisps and fizzy drinks, which are kept in very short supply at Divorce Towers, and we left, with no bargains snaffled.

On the way home, an email pinged into my iPhone. It was sent to everyone who’d been at the party. ‘Thanks for coming, but did you leave with the wrong shoes? Someone was left at the end without a pair of boots to go home in. Their Next Uggs were taken, size 6, and a pair of similar but smaller black Uggs were left behind, size 5.’

The girls and I snorted. Fancy wearing the wrong shoes home! Who would do such an idiotic thing? Who could possibly not notice having the wrong size shoes on? I sent a smug email straight back. ‘Not us! But thanks for a lovely party.’

The days zoomed by, till the next weekend, when we were off to a friend’s for lunch. Mustering the girls has now become almost a big a chore as when they were tiny little bitty things, and a lot of ‘we’re leaving in five minutes’ have to be yelled before we are all Good To Go. Child One, as always, was exercising her powers of brinkmanship a million miles beyond any reasonable brink, taking an armful of clothes with her to the car and struggling into them only as we got moving.

It wasn’t long before we hit trouble.  ‘Mum, my shoes have gone all weird! They’ve grown! They’ve gone all big. They’re floppy ….what have you done to them?’

It didn’t take a whole team of rocket scientists to establish the horrible truth. Child One was the twit who’d left the party with the wrong shoes on. Grrrrrrrrr does not even begin to cover it – and it definitely wasn’t my fault.

I did have to make it all right again, though, so various apologetic emails later, I was sitting in a frozen carpark,  feeling like a spy in a very low budget Cold War movie, waiting for the irate lawful owner of the shoes to turn up.

Inevitably, when she’d slammed the car door a couple of times to make her feelings ultra-plain, the cross mummy asked the very same question I had asked myself. ‘Who on earth could leave a party with the wrong shoes on?’

This time, I could answer. A teenager, that’s who.

A very big thank you to the lovely Ella for letting me walk in her shoes and an even bigger gggrrrr to Child One for not being able to walk in hers.

Blog: www.dulwichdivorcee.com
Twitter: http://twitter.com/dulwichdivorcee

*********

A big thank you to the lovely DulwichDivorcee for a wonderful post, and thank you to the ever-innovative Erica at LittleMummy for arranging today’s inaugural Guest Post Day. And I’m blogging about being stuck in the mud (or possibly a stick-in-the-mud) over at DulwichDivorcee today, please come over and give me some support because I’m quite nervous!

Tagged as: Guest Posts