The girls have been on summer holidays now for about one-fifth of the year. It’s been a glorious summer. Despite some loss – or perhaps because of it, making us realise how fleeting and precious life is – we have had an amazing summer, during which we got to do some incredible things. Twelve hours from now, the new school year starts.
They’re both a little nervous – a new school for Lily, a new class for Katie. They will both have new classmates and new teachers and, in the case of Lily, new subjects that she’s never studied before.
I’m a little nervous too, as I always am at the start of the school year, hoping they will have positive experiences and will enjoy themselves.
They’ve got their bags packed, their clothes ready, and we’re in bed early tonight. The house is going to be very quiet tomorrow!
The girls are only just realizing, perhaps only now taking an interest in the fact that I had a life before they came along. Some weeks ago, I was talking about Australia with someone. Afterwards, Katie said to me, almost as an accusation, “You never told us that you’d been to Australia,” like I’ve been keeping it from them on purpose. I’m sure I’ve told them before about the three weeks I spent on the east coast of Australia when I was 23. Maybe not. Either way, they were intrigued and wanted to know more. Lily then teasingly said, “What else are you not telling us?”
A couple of weeks later, Katie had to do a school project about her mother. Maybe it was about a parent. I don’t know. Anyway, she did it about me. I remember Lily doing the same project at the same time last year. I asked Katie if she wanted to interview me, but she told me no, she’d find out all she needed on the Internet. Dear God! What would she unearth?
Home from school a couple of days later, she says, “It says you lectured in Cambridge?” She can’t believe it. I explain that I was a post-doctoral fellow at Cambridge and that I gave some lectures in the Geography department. “But at Cambridge?” she asks. She really can’t believe it and it doesn’t seem to matter that I wasn’t a don, but rather an occasional contributor to a course or two as part of my fellowship. “Cambridge,” she says again.
Then she discovers some of the stuff I’ve had published – newspaper and online stories about my research, and such like. “You can write,” she says, impressed; this new information absolutely at odds with the mummy figure who forces her to eat her greens and nags her about leaving her trainers on the middle of the living room floor. I tell her that something I wrote my was once used as evidence in hearings at the US Congress.
“So, what on earth are you doing here?” she asks, referring to this tiny corner of Spain where we now live. I explain that, for me, coming here was the end of one great adventure – the boat, the cruising – and the start of another – a new culture, new language, a new community of people, an adventure that I’m still on ten years later. For her, this place is home. She’s lived here since she was four years old. It’s boring old Sanlucar, from where she wants to get out into the world, not a place you’d leave Cambridge for!
This morning, as the girls were getting ready for school, Lily asked, “Mum, have you ever been to a disco?” I almost choked on my herbal tea. When I told them about the Huntsman in Edenderry, the Wednesday night bar-exes in the students’ union in Maynooth, the Saturday night’s at the Crazy Cock in Fukuoka, the night I met their father, my first date with their father, they looked at each other and rolled their eyes. Lily asked me to show them my dance moves. “You know my dance moves,” I laughed. I’m relieved there’s no evidence of my disco days on the Internet.
Me in place 