petite anglaise

Because I never experienced jealousy when I was in a relationship with Mr Frog, I wrongly assumed I had kicked the habit.

Not so. The green eyed monster was only lying dormant; in prolonged hibernation.

I wonder now whether this absence of jealousy wasn’t a warning sign, which should have alerted me to the plain fact that my feelings didn’t run deep enough. I was complacent, secure in my belief that whatever our failings as a couple, he wouldn’t look elsewhere. Despite late nights spent in the office in the company of pneumatic young stagiaires, and nights out on the town with colleagues, to which I was never invited. Which could have been a cause for concern, but only aroused resentment and bitterness that I was trapped at home, while he was out in the real world seeing people and socialising.

Now, for the first time in eight years, I am subject to bouts of totally irrational, corrosive jealousy. I hate myself for even having these feelings. As if wildly unpredictable mood swings weren’t enough for any man to deal with.

It’s not that I don’t trust the man in my life, or the women he is friends with, whether they be old flames or not. On a rational level I know that he is a very moral and proper person. I also know that he is so hopelessly smitten with me that he is willing to overlook all my failings. But this is purely irrational, and no amount of reasoning - with him, or myself - can lay these demons to rest.

Because I’m not jealous of anyone in his present. It’s his past I have a problem with.

Sometimes I find myself wishing I could erase whole swathes of his history. Those dark times when another woman was there to pick him up when he stumbled and fell, to comfort him, to heal him, to put him back together again. Wildly contrasting highs and lows, moments which I fear were more intense than any we may live together.

I know that these things have made him who he is today. Her influence has helped to mould him into the person I fell in love with. And yet, even though I understand this, I want to make these times disappear. To erase them. Overwrite them.

This jealously is a form of masochism. When I’m alone, feeling low, I torture myself. Willingly. Vivid pictures of their shared past swim before my eyes and try as I might, I can’t banish them. Words that he used to describe that period of his life, in emails I received long before we were an item, play over and over inside my head, refusing to be silenced.

I can’t make this stop, so my strategy is to share these feelings with my lover, preventing them from festering quietly below the surface, only to erupt one day and cause irreparable harm.

I can only hope that one fine morning I will wake up and realise these feelings have left me.

I’m afraid I haven’t got around to posting today, so instead I leave you to guess which of the “people” depicted on this delightful drawing by Tadpole (aged 2 yrs and 3 months) is supposed to be yours truly.

I think I will have to resign myself to the fact that I am doomed never to be mistaken for an elegant parisienne.

I haven’t the faintest idea how to knot a Hermès scarf just so around my neck. In fact, I’ll go so far as to admit that I don’t even care for Hermès scarves. Nor have I ever understood the whole jumper knotted loosely around shoulders over the top of winter coat look. Unlike most French girls, I am congenitally incapable of arranging my hair in a charmingly dishevelled little chignon, so that it looks as though it was twisted up and secured with a pencil in less than twenty seconds (a look which I suspect takes half an hour to achieve). I simply don’t look French, a point which was confirmed by several (disappointed) British bloggers I met recently.

Even if looks don”t betray my non French origins, my uncouth foreign behaviour inevitably will. Whether it be downing several beers in quick succession, or partaking of snacks in public places, something will always give me away.

Which brings me neatly to the story of the ill advised bolognaise panini on the line 7 métro.

The scene: horribly late for work, following a distastrous morning where a suspected, but in fact non-existent, infantile tummy upset and an errant nanny with no mobile phone conspired to force me to take a whole morning off work. One sixth of my precious three statutory days off to care for a sick child squandered for no good reason. Having finally deposited the irritatingly high-spirited, perfectly healthy Tadpole with the childminder, I realised I wasn’t going to have time to grab lunch before work, so there was no alternative but to eat on the run.

My hungry eyes spied a baker’s shop by the entrance to the metro. Upon closer inspection however, the sandwiches on offer did not look particularly appetising. French bread may in itself be A Very Lovely Thing, but many shops don’t use a great deal of imagination when concocting their sandwich fillings. Ham and plastic emmental cheese. Plastic emmental cheese with salad. Rosette sausage. Nothing which took my fancy. And after the stress of the morning, I craved something slightly naughty, as a pick me up.

My attention was arrested by a small, handwritten sign advertising paninis. I enquired about available fillings. They were a little odd. The classic mozzarella and cheese, or mozzarella and Italian ham had sold out, so all that remained were steack haché and bolognaise flavours. I opted for bolognaise, in what I can only describe as a moment of temporary insanity.

I regretted my choice almost immediately. It took for ever to cook. Standing next to a refrigerated cabinet of cakes, I tapped my foot nervously and glanced compulsively at my watch every thirty seconds or so. But it was too late to change my mind now, I had already paid. And the baker’s wife is a scary looking, red-faced person; not a woman whose feathers you would want to ruffle.

At last, the panini was toasted, and the lady handed it to me in its long paper bag with a single serviette. I snatched and ran. Into the métro, down the steps and onto the platform, where I paused, and first became aware of my predicament.

The paper bag was already translucent with grease, and rather a large amount of bolognaise and cheese filling appeared to have freed itself from the confines of the bread and and oozed down into a corner of the bag, which was visibly weakening by the second. The serviette was already drenched, my fingers slick with sauce. Just when I thought things couldn’t get any worse, the bag began to drip. Garish red liquid, which narrowly missed my clothes, occasionally splattering one of my shoes.

It also occured to me that the contents of my sandwich did not look dissimilar to the nappies I had changed that morning. Which clearly didn’t help.

Any sane person would have consigned the cursed sandwich there and then to the nearest rubbish bin, but my rumbling tummy and sheer pigheadedness prevented me from doing so.

So, drawing a small amount of comfort from the fact that Paris is a big city and none of the people sharing my métro carriage were ever likely to lay eyes on me again, I slumped down on an available strapontin and began nibbling gingerly at a corner of the sandwich from hell, studiously avoiding eye contact with my fellow passengers.

Pieces of minced meat leapt out and deposited themselves on the floor of the carriage around me. A piping hot chunk of chopped tomato landed on my toes. The bag continued to drip, drip, drip, even enveloped in my entire packet of emergency tissues. I had to hold the sandwich away from my body after every cursed bite, whilst I used a baby wipe on my mouth and chin, so as not to look like some sort of crazed métro vampire.

A perfectly groomed Parisienne got on at Chaussée d’Antin and wrinkled her delicate nose in distaste at the odour of my food. The only available seat was next to mine, and she declined to take it, preferring to stand well out of range. I could imagine what she was thinking only to well. Judging by her figure, she had never so much as sniffed a panini in her entire life, and the only thing which she would deign to put to her lips in a public place would be a bottle of Evian.

My journey over, I dropped the greasy packaging and remnants into a bin, wiped down my shoes and peeping toes, and inspected my trousers.

And emerged from the métro vowing never to buy a bolognaise panini as long as I live.

Even English girls have their limits.

“GOT TO FIND SOME CAKE!” shouts Tadpole, at the top of her lungs, to no-one in particular. She has got into the habit of repeating everything I say, turning the words over in her mouth so see how they sound.

As a result, I have to exercise extreme caution when we are out and about. No more thinking aloud along the lines of “I must remember to pack some seriously negligent pants for the weekend”.

I am feeling rather desperate. Mr Frog is due to appear to whisk off Tadpole for the evening in just under half an hour, and I promised Tadpole we would have surprise cake and candles for his birthday. Forgetting a key piece of information when I did so: our local bakery is closed on Wednesdays and Thursdays.

I peer half-heartedly through the window of the Chinese takeaway, with its unappetising looking boules de coco and almond tarts. Not really Mr Frog’s thing, and definitely not Tadpole’s. How about a brownie from the kosher sushi and bagel emporium across the road? No go. The metal shutters are pulled firmly closed. With a sigh, I retrace my steps towards the garage, which harbours a huit à huit minimarket. Cake out of a packet will have to do. Sacrilegious in a country where the pâtisserie fare is so unbelievable, and the packaged cakes so dire, but it can’t be helped.

Intentions: good. Execution: room for improvement.

The minimarket has a predictably poor selection. Some tired looking madeleines, a cake anglais (which generally refers to a rather pale and wan fruit cake containing glacé cherries, the likes of which I have yet to actually eat in England), and a bag of individually wrapped fondants au chocolat. I settle for the chocolate cakes, and dash home.

Mr Frog appears, shortly after the appointed hour, and I ask him to stay for a beer, to give me an excuse to repair to the kitchen. I have arranged three cakes on a plate, a striped blue candle lolling at a drunken angle in the centre of each. Tadpole, the soul of discretion, says “happy birthday cake mummy” in a stage whisper as I am leaving the room, but I don’t think Mr Frog notices.

As I bring my masterpiece through to the living room, Tadpole starts singing “happy birthday” right on cue. Mr Frog looks up, startled, and I can see he is genuinely touched.

For a fleeting moment, I catch myself wishing that we were still living together as a little family, sharing moments like this every day.

I soon arrived at the conclusion that for a working mum, committing “adultery” would be logistically rather complicated.

A typical day consisted of getting Tadpole ready, dashing with her to the nanny’s, leaping into the metro, breezing into work five minutes late and then doing the whole thing in reverse come 6pm. From Tadpole’s bedtime onwards, I was “free”, but trapped inside the flat, unless there was a babysitter on offer. Hence my strong presence online.

But I simply had to take things further after our first meeting and its rather dramatic dénouement. I couldn’t not. I needed to know.

I had never been unfaithful before. I had very black and white ideas of what was right and wrong, and any sort of cloak and dagger behaviour or sneaking around was most definitely wrong in my book. Nor had I experienced a modern electronic courtship, punctuated by rapid fire exchange of text messages and emails. But over the next week the feeling that something momentous was happening intensified with every shred of contact. I had to see him again, and soon, whatever the consequences.

He evidently felt the same as I did, despite his huge reservations about interfering in my life and causing me to lie to my partner. After all, he’d been on the receiving end of this type of behaviour in the past, and described the experience as “wretched”.

I lost five kilos that week. I shook like an alcoholic with the DT’s, adrenalin coursing through me. I barely slept at night. It felt as though guilt was etched indelibly into my face, and I couldn’t quite believe that Mr Frog hadn’t noticed that something was amiss.

Fear and excitement were bound together in such a way that I couldn’t work out where one began and another ended. I caught myself staring at my daughter through hot tears, barely able to grasp the enormity of what I was contemplating and what it would mean for her. My only desire was to curl up in a ball under the bedclothes, shut out the real world and lose myself in the scenes which were playing out across the inside of my eyelids. Making dinner or attempting normal conversation with Mr Frog was hell; an agony of going through the motions, my mind elsewhere. I took evasive action, in the form of long baths or evenings spent cowering behind my monitor; he snoozed in front of the television in the next room, happily oblivious.

When the time came, my alibis were rehearsed and ready. I told my boss that the childminder was sick and left work abruptly. I dashed, heart racing, to a hotel in the Marais. I spent an afternoon there. And an evening. And a morning. In between, I picked up Tadpole and waited for the sitter to arrive; I crept back to our non-marital bed in the small hours.

The very next evening I told Mr Frog I would be leaving him. Because even though I couldn’t be sure what it was or would develop into, this new, very precious thing I had stumbled upon, what I did know was that me and Mr Frog were a thing of the past, and had been burying our heads in the sand for far too long.

My life is no longer quite so French as it was.

Exit croissants, baguettes and warm goats cheese salads. These days I seem to be mostly eating granary toast with marmalade, bacon (admittedly the streaky, French version which is distressingly inferior) sandwiches with ketchup or HP sauce, or tucking into a nice piece of mature cheddar with some Branston pickle. On my last trip to Yorkshire, I returned with a suitcase bulging with the best that Tesco had to offer. Including 240 teabags.

Exit French cable TV, which for a princely sum currently offers only one decent programme in English per week (Desperate Housewives, at long last), and enter slightly illegal Sky TV at the weekends, so that I can indulge my fondness for BBC2 comedy or Channel 4 drama. And regale Tadpole with such delights as Bob the Builder in version originale. She now squawks “Can we fix eet?” every time she spies a digger.

It feels like by leaving Mr Frog for my English Lover, I have taken one more step away from my original aim: becoming “almost French”.

I wrote last year about how my initial enthusiasm for all things French, which had begun in my first French lesson at Mill Mount Grammar School for girls at the age of 11, and culminated in my moving to Paris in September 1995, had started to wane perceptibly. Where once I had watched indiscriminately whatever was broadcast on French terrestrial TV to “improve my French”, read only French novels and eaten only French food, as a matter of principle, I suddenly found myself yearning for English language and culture.

Clearly I was experiencing withdrawal symptoms.

It was time, I decided, to cut myself some slack. Living in France didn’t have to mean total assimilation, and indeed, if I didn’t watch out, my mother tongue would ultimately suffer. “Target language deprivation,” as a commenter helpfully pointed out, is a very real phenomenon, and can result in expats speaking a dreadful bastardised version of their mother tongue after a few years away from the mothership. To combat this, I signed up for cable TV and bought English books from W H Smiths. And binged on English culture. I even watched Eastenders religiously for a number of years, although, thankfully, I have now managed to kick that unfortunate habit.

The next step was changing my job, and I swapped a Franco-French office where I had never really felt anyone knew the “real me” for an English company where two thirds of the staff were British, and we all went for beers on Fridays.

Despite all this, at the end of the day, I still came home to a French partner, and socialised with his French friends.

Nowadays all that has changed, and I am faced with the delightful prospect of renovating a crumbling farmhouse, with a huge satellite dish perched atop the roof, greedily hoovering English television from the airwaves, in the British enclave that is Brittany. Eating English breakfasts with my English Lover, and washing it all down with cup upon cup of PG tips.

Somehow, if I ever do get my papers together and apply for French nationality, I rather think the fonctionnaires will laugh in my English face.

A mobile phone rang in someone’s pocket. The owner glanced at it and looked up with a sheepish, apologetic grin. “It’s sitemeter. Sorry, I’d better to take this,” he mumbled, before turning his back on us momentarily so he could talk about Very Important Things in private.

The kind of banter one would only expect to hear at a blog meet.

The regular patrons of the Champion pub in Notting Hill Gate may well have wondered which planet this strange assortment of nervous looking people were from, when they started sidling in, one by one, on Saturday afternoon, often with a copy of the Guardian tucked under an arm. A private handshake of sorts.

As for yours truly, I did cheat by meeting a couple of people at a secret location beforehand, so as not to arrive alone, but after a couple of glasses of wine on an empty stomach, my butterflies were stilled and I mostly flitted around the pub repeating “I’m just so excited! There are so many people here I was dying to meet!” like a broken record to anyone who would listen.

But I was excited. Because without exception, everyone I talked to was lovely. It felt more like a reunion between old friends who hadn’t caught up in a while than a meeting of strangers. Because we Know Things about one another. More about some more than about others, admittedly, but their voices seemed familiar. They talked like they wrote, or sounded just as I expected them to sound. I asked after their building work or other half as if we’d met many times before. People asked me quite personal things (usually prefaced with “Stop me if this is too personal, but”) and I replied, honestly, because it felt perfectly normal to do so.

One person had a very exciting device and he let me hold it. Others plied me with alcohol (and if I forgot to reciprocate, please excuse me!) and potato wedg(i)es. I resisted the urge to throw a pair of (clean) undergarments at That Man From Norfolk.

I’d love to do it again. On the condition that a few other people I really, really, really, really want to meet come along too…

Autumn has arrived in Paris. The trees which line our avenue, partially obscuring the view from our fifth floor balcony when fully clothed, are beginning to shed their large golden brown leaves, making it more of a challenge to steer the pushchair clear of any déjections canines which may be lurking beneath.

I am slightly embarrassed not to be able to say what type of trees they are, but as I have mislaid my childhood “Spotters’ Guide to Trees”, I’m at a bit of a loss.

Tadpole insists on walking through the leaves, listening to the crackle they make beneath her Startrite shoes, pronouncing them to be “crispy, jus’ like cornflakes!”

It won’t be long before an army of little green men bring out the heavy artillery of leaf blowing/hoovering contraptions, working around the clock to clear the pavements. Men with futuristic looking machines on their backs, powering leaf blowers which blast the debris violently into the gutter. (Tadpole doesn’t like the noise these make, and shrieks, eyes like saucers: “regarde! it’s a big hairdryer mummy!” Hairdryers are Very Scary Things. Apparently.) There are green hoover trucks which drive up and down the roads, sucking up the blown leaves from the gutter with a huge serrated tube. In parallel, more traditional, labour-intensive methods are used involving sweeping brushes and huge green plastic bags.

In the mornings, on our run to the childminder’s house, it feels rather like an obstacle course negotiating the blowers and the sweepers, in addition to the usual pavement power washers and the sprinklers set up in the park, so that they slowly rotate and catch passing pedestrians unawares.

With all this frenetic, noisy activity going on, much of it at dawn, when it really would be nice if it were quiet enough to get some more beauty sleep, you’d be forgiven for thinking that the pavements might actually be clean.

Sadly, the little green men are no match for the combined forces of the Parisian pigeons, dogs with scoopless owners and cigarette butt tossers.

Living in Paris is a dirty job, but someone’s got to do it.

My birthday weekend was a resounding success.

In spite of the fact that we had to take a late train to Rennes, after a day on which I would rather not have been at work, with a Tadpole who was visibly wilting more every second and had lost what little grasp of logic and reason she normally possesses, but who was hell bent on fighting the urge to sleep. Suffice to say that there were moments where complimentary earplugs would have been welcome. For everyone in the carriage.

In spite of the fact that Tadpole swallowed several cherry tomatoes without first biting or chewing, which resulted in her thoughtfully redecorating my Lover’s apartment (with special attention paid to the sofa) in warm cherry tones the following morning.

In spite of the fact that once I had left Paris, and finally began to let go of the stresses of the past week, I then spent most of the weekend in a comatose, horizontal state, unable to venture out from between my cool, white sheets for any extended period of time, lulled by the mutterings of cricket commentators in the next room (or the slightly less soothing sound of Grand Prix). Not the most dynamic weekend I have spent in recent times.

But my ipod now boasts a lovely, baby blue leather cover which fits ever so snugly. I had to amend one of my 33 things when I opened my other birthday gifts. I am also the proud owner of a very fetching pair of “I’ll never get laid in these” Miffy pyjamas.

The highlight of my weekend was being treated to a divine meal where I feasted on foie gras poêlé and magret de canard à la fleur d’oranger and other such delights.

So, on balance, this birthday girl is not complaining. (For once.)

Censorship is a terrible thing. Especially when it is self inflicted.

The subject which is preying on my mind, to the exclusion of all else, is the fraught atmosphere at work. However, I’ve come to the conclusion that I need to exercise caution about what I say.

If I won’t allow myself to write about work, then I find myself rather lost for words. Which is why I have been a little quieter this week.

But, in honour of my birthday, how about a quiz?

Which of the following statements are not true ?

a) I can speak some German, especially if you want to hold a conversation about bowel movements;
b) I have read every “Nancy Drew” detective story ever written;
c) The worst punishment I can remember as a child was not being allowed to watch “The Famous Five” on TV;
d) I own a signed Then Jericho album;
e) I hate aniseed and liquorice. And sprouts;
f) The only time I ever felt the slightest inclination to watch porn was when I was pregnant;
g) My favourite teddy bear as a child was a Peter Rabbit, made by my great grandma’s next door neighbour;
h) The sampler I made at school when I was 9 featured a BBC micro computer in cross stitch;
i) My porn star name is Pixie Eden;
j) The only time I ever trod the boards was as a Penguin in a school play at Clipstone Brook Lower School, Leighton Buzzard;
k) My favourite boss to date was a one-armed racing driver.

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answers

e) is incorrect. I do hate aniseed and liquorice, however I like (brussels) sprouts.

Clarification: porn star name. This does not mean that I have a second career as an “actress”. Of the many methods used for calculating your “porn star name”, I have used the formula first pet’s name + mother’s maiden name here. Surfing on the web, I found name generators, along with a delightful quiz in which you are asked to guess which of a list of names belongs to a porn star, and which to a My Little Pony. Surprisingly difficult.

My boss managed to reduce me to tears twice yesterday.

The main culprits were hormones. It was one of those days where I knew instinctively that any harsh word might provoke an extreme reaction. Either I would end up in tears, or I would fly off the handle. Or both. From the moment I arrived at work, and gauged my Boss’s irritable mood, it was like driving towards a brick wall in slow motion. The collision was inevitable, only the timing remained uncertain.

The accusations that were levelled at me during our heated exchanges did give me some food for thought. Apparently I am ‘detached’ and ‘disengaged’ from my job. I countered that I felt I had come in for far too much unjustified criticism of late, and resented being used as a metaphorical punching bag every time my boss’s stress levels started to rise. My solution is generally to pull back, keep my head down, and try to make myself into as small a target as possible. A vicious circle: the more I withdraw, the more he resents my detachment and snipes at me. We seemed to have reached a deadlock, and I was rather afraid that we had said some things which would be difficult to unsay.

And so it was that I left work in a sorry state, drafting a letter of resignation in my head as the métro rattled through the tunnels, panicking as to how on earth I could afford the life of single parenthood I had chosen without my overpaid secretarial job. Leaving Paris is something I have been considering for some time now, but I want that to be a positive choice, timed to suit my needs, and those of my daughter. I don’t want it to be about running away from a situation which has gone sour.

Thankfully, things have a way of looking better in the morning. After a poor night’s sleep, turning arguments over and over in my head, I agreed to do everything I could to reverse the damage, and my boss, also looking tired, conceded that he had overreacted somewhat and let things get out of proportion. I resigned myself to putting on my most convincing Miss Moneypenny act in the coming weeks, until my boss’s confidence has been fully restored.

Of course what I was really beating myself up about all evening, was my guilt about working on my blog on company time. I have no idea why I allow something which will never pay my bills or feed my daughter to take up so much space in my head, however unfulfilling my day job might be. I know without a doubt that if its existence is discovered, and my boss finally understands just why it is that I have been so detached, I will be unceremoniously fired. Not for having a blog per se, or even for neglecting my work - because I only work on the blog when I have nothing else to do - but because the pieces of the jigsaw will fall into place and he will finally understand what it is about me that has changed. And feel aggrieved that I have kept secrets from him.

Here’s hoping that none of that ever comes to pass.

I found myself missing Tadpole this weekend.

For the first time, I spent a child-free weekend in Paris while my daughter was only a mere 200 metres down the road, at “daddy’s house”. I found myself wondering, whenever I ventured out on some errand, whether I might bump into her by chance in the street, or catch sight of Mr Frog pushing her buggy in the distance. I eyed his block of flats wistfully, and pictured her there, drawing Noddy with her felt tip pens or reading her library books.

Since Mr Frog moved out in early July, I have been away on the weekends when Tadpole was not with me, making the most of my freedom to visit my Lover in Rennes. On those rare occasions when I was in Paris, Tadpole happened to be staying with the In Laws. It is only now, with the holiday period behind us, that we will begin to adjust to the new status quo, and face up to what sharing Tadpole’s time really feels like. And whereas when I knew we were not even in the same town I was able to switch off my ‘mummy side’ altogether, knowing that she was so tantalisingly close this weekend made her absence achingly tangible.

As I lazed about in the stuffy, airless apartment on Sunday, reading a thorougly depressing novel, my mind persistently wandered. If I closed my eyes, silent, super 8-like images of Tadpole in the park with Mr Frog played across my eyelids. When the temperature finally dropped to a more bearable level, the Lover and I took a stroll through the Parc de Bercy, en route for the cinema, and my thoughts turned once more to Tadpole. I mused idly on what she would be having for her dinner, or whether she would behave herself at bath time. Was her nose still running? Did she have any new scrapes or bruises on her chubby little knees?

The most poignant reminder that Tadpole was close, yet just out of my reach, came in the supermarket on Saturday. Joining the queue, I smiled at the checkout lady, who has always made a fuss of Tadpole on our weekly visits. I can’t be sure whether I imagined her look of disapproval at seeing me doing the grocery shopping with an unknown man who is not Tadpole’s father. It was probably paranoia on my part, but I could feel the outline of a scarlet letter branded on my forehead. When my turn finally came, I felt some words of explanation might be in order, but managed to prevent myself from sharing my private life with what amounts to a friendly stranger.

As I packed away my shopping, the checkout lady remarked cheerfully that she had seen la petite puce earlier that day shopping with her daddy. Her words, however innocent, stung.

Did I feel jealousy, that Tadpole had been there without me? Or remorse, that I have divided our little family into two units, who shop apart?

I’m not sure what it was, only that I smarted as though I had been slapped in the face.

If I was a cartoon character, there would have been animated steam pouring out of my ears.

“I have a problem with the holiday request form you submitted.”

I groaned inwardly. His slightly petulant tone of voice did not bode at all well.

I had returned to work, after two weeks off (which I hesitate to call a holiday, having only glimpsed the sea, briefly, from the vantage point of an aeroplane), hoping that my boss had seen the light and decided to to stick to his side of the bargain. I would make an effort to work more closely with him, and he would stop sniping at me when work pressures got the better of him.

“I have a problem with Friday 9th. I’m travelling at the beginning of the week, and I’m going to be horribly busy…” he tailed off, patently aware that his excuses were sounding exceedingly feeble.

It hadn’t occurred to me for a second that this might be his response. Not one other member of support staff was due to be absent that day, and my holidays officially take into account only other secretaries’ absences. Not the whims of my boss. Who, incidentally, goes away once a week pretty much all year round, so following through this twisted logic, I’ll never be able to go on holiday ever again.

“I see,” I said slowly. “The thing is, the 9th is my birthday, and I was hoping to go away for the weekend.”

I banked on the the word “birthday” tapping into some well concealed vein of sentimentality and bringing about a change of heart. In fact, with hindsight, I suspect the significance of the date had not been lost on him. This was a power game, pure and simple.

“Can’t you go away in the evening?” my boss countered, trying to sound as though he was being entirely reasonable.

“No. I’m afraid I can’t,” I replied, trying now to appeal to the father in him, and elicit some sympathy by playing on my single mother status. “If I work until 6pm, and then collect Tadpole, so the earliest train we could make leaves after her bedtime. Unless I could leave a little earlier? Or work a half day?”

Two can play at sounding reasonable. Perhaps compromise was the way forward.

He mumbled something unintelligible and pretended to give this idea some thought, before dismissing it on the grounds that he might be too busy to let me go early. He then made a great show of signing my other request for a long weekend in November. To show me how generous he could be. Let that be a lesson to me: never put in for multiple holiday requests on the same form.

So on my birthday, I will be mostly sitting at my desk, bristling with resentment.

And plotting an elaborate revenge.