Making It Up as I Go Along by Marian Keyes
Then vows, kiss the bride, clapping, communion, register signing, organ, back down the aisle, porch, coldness, shaking hands, photos, cheery comments about coldness of day, car, drive to Wicklow, more photos, more photos, more coldness, more cold photos, extra coldness, just one more cold photo, in you go, just this one last one, yes, know you’re cold, just this last shot, dinner, speeches, book opened on how long speeches would last, a fiver a bet, I bet twenty-three minutes, only out by four minutes, but the winner was Ema (six –yes, only six), who put her winnings behind the bar for everyone to have a drink on her. Very generous spirit.
Much dancing, which I sadly missed as I had sneaked up to the room to check who had been evicted in Strictly Come Dancing, then discovered that I was vay tired and that everyone else was vay drunk, so decided to go to bed. Plan foiled when Caitríona, Suzanne, Seán Ferguson and Himself knocked on door, also wanting to know who had been evicted. Alas, I could not tell them as the results show had (perplexingly) been on an hour earlier than usual. However, my friend Judy saved the day by texting the result. Then they left to spread the news.
On Friday 24th I went to London to report on Behind the Scenes for self-same Strictly Come Dancing!
Other news this month – have been watching I’m a Celebrity. Gas. I’m not boasting but they asked me to be on it. Christ alive, I’ve never been so glad that I said no. Kangaroo’s bits. God, no.
Also, I am a judge on the Orange Prize. I’ve known for ages but have been sworn to secrecy but announcement was made on Weds night. Dragged my rotting carcass to meeting, awash with Lemsip. Am thrilled, thrilled, thrilled to be a judge, very, very honoured. Also will get many free books. Naturally, my joy will be corrupted by snobby types complaining that if a chick-lit author is judging the Orange Prize, then the barbarians are at the gate, my dears. But my response will be a mature and dignified one. Yes. TOUGH SHITE, SNOBBY AMIGOS! THEY ASKED ME AND THEY DIDN’T ASK YOU!!!!!!
Now, Baxter. Baxter is a small pink toy dog which Caitríona bought for me in New York. However, Caitríona does not trust the post and the only time we ever get anything from her is when either she or a good friend is coming to Ireland. About two months ago Danielle came, bringing my birthday present from Cait (lovely things from Bliss), also Baxter. However, I didn’t know that Baxter was called Baxter. Danielle said he looked like her mother’s dog Dessie, and I thought, ‘What a fine name. I shall call you Dessie, little pink dog.’
I immediately became very fond of Dessie and foresaw a long happy life with him.
THEN! A message from New York. Caitríona said she had heard rumours that I had been hitting ‘Baxter’ with a big stick and that she was very concerned. She and Seán had apparently employed quite a different method of discipline with ‘Baxter’. She admitted that she was sorely missing ‘Baxter’, that although she had taken the decision to send him overseas to a wealthy family in order to give him opportunities that he wouldn’t have got had he stayed ‘Stateside’ she was regretting her altruism. Between the Big Stick rumours and the ‘name change’, she was considering reapplying for custody.
Naturally I wasn’t hitting Dessie with a big stick. It was quite a small stick, more of a ruler than a stick, and it wasn’t so much to cause him pain as to remind him of things like erect posture, etc.
When Cait and Seán arrived from New York for the wedding, I was concerned that they might try to kidnap Dessie and smuggle him back to New York on a false passport. Himself and myself didn’t want this to happen. We have become quite fond of little Dessie and regard him as an exceptional dog. As I explained to Seán and Cait, we have invested a lot in Dessie, both financially and emotionally. We have high hopes for him. We have given that little dog everything.
She asked if she could see him and we had to say, ‘Sorry, no, he is with his Mandarin tutor, Mr Lee, we want him to be fluent in Mandarin by the end of the year. So that he can start learning Arabic.’ She asked if she could see him that evening, when he had finished his language class, and we had to tell her, ‘Sorry, no, he does his callisthenics every evening from six until ten.’
How about after 10 p.m., she asked and we had to say, ‘Sorry, no, that is little Dessie’s “playtime” in which we structure “spontaneous creativity”. This evening we are teaching him to make pancakes, then he is doing his tapestry, he is recreating a life-size copy of the Bayeux Tapestry and hopes to have it finished by month end.’
‘After playtime?’ she asked and we had to say, ‘Sorry, no, but after playtime he has his driving lesson.’
Suddenly, in a sharp voice, she asked, ‘How much sleep does Baxter get?’
‘Dessie,’ I said, emphasizing the word “Dessie”, ‘gets a full five hours. We find that five hours is the optimum time. This careful calibration is the result of lengthy experimentation, in which we cut back his sleeping time in half-hourly increments and monitored the results. We even wore white coats and carried clipboards and wore strange visor-type flashlights on our heads. Initially Dessie did well at three and a half hours, but then he started to hallucinate, so we increased it little by little to five hours a night.’
Yes, well, anyway, we enjoyed it very much. Caitríona said to tell you that I made him read The Brothers Karamazov in the original Russian. Also that I plan to send him to Military Academy during the school holidays. Also that she has a viral throat infection.
Interesting news from Ljiljana. On her return from Ireland after the wedding, she fell foul of a sore throat, which she parlayed into a nasty ear infection, necessitating antibiotics. She said she has never felt so much like a Keyes, not even on her wedding day.
Previously unpublished.
December
Nothing happens!
Let’s be kind to ourselves
A diligent month – I worked. I wrote, I read the Orange Prize entries (which hardly counts as work) then I wrote some more.
For Christmas I went to Cambridge to Chris, Caron and Jude. Also present were Himself’s parents, John and Shirley, and Caron’s mother, Bobbi. It was a very nice day and I didn’t have a repeat of The Cat-Cake Incident – see, I was worried about how I’d fare around the orgy of chocolate that constitutes Christmas, but I’ve come through and am ‘in the clear’. Christ alive, it was hard though. Funnily enough, I’ve no interest in drink, none at all, but to see a chocolate truffle going into a mouth that isn’t mine gives me a pain of longing in my stomach.
Wait till I tell you something funny: a few days after Christmas, Himself comes up the stairs and says, ‘Do you want to go on Celebrity Big Brother?’ And I said, ‘When? We’ll be in London around the 9th of Jan, won’t we?’ And he says, ‘NO! You big thick! Not on Dermot, but on Celebrity Big Brother. The show! All of it!’
Well, mes amies, I was dumbfounded. I am a GINORMOUS fan of the show, but decided that it might be disastrous to be on it. Just in case I was getting too big for my boots, Himself said, ‘Someone’s dropped out at the last minute, they’re desperate, they’ll take anyone. When I told them you probably wouldn’t do it, they asked me if I’d be interested.’
Then, a few days later, the front page of the Star was all about how ‘a number of A-list stars have pulled out’ of Celeb BB and how the bosses ‘are in crisis talks’. So as a result I do not think I am ‘It’.
So how did I spend New Year’s Eve? Despite many invitations to glitterin’ events (well, Mam and Dad invited me to a do in the golf club because the pal that was meant to be going with them was in hospital and the tickets had been paid for and for one lapse-y, insane moment I actually considered it and then I thought, ‘Christ
In the end was in bed by 9 p.m. I mean, I hate New Year’s Eve – I’m famous for it. In my humble opinion, New Year’s Eve is the worst night of the year, even though many people think it’s the best.
However, if you did go out on that dreadful night, I hope you had a wonderful time and a) that you didn’t lose one of your shoes; b) that you didn’t spend the chimes weeping alone in a corner; c) that you didn’t try to get off with your friend’s boyfriend; d) that you didn’t have your phone stolen; e) that as you wandered the streets in search of a non-existent party, you didn’t fall and cut your knee; f) that you didn’t pay more than a hundred euro for your taxi home; and g) that you didn’t wake up this morning in a strange bed, in a strange part of the city, with your coat MIA. (These have been some of the ways I have ‘celebrated’ NYE in the past, so you will see why I prefer to go to bed at 9 p.m. on the evening in question and park myself out of harm’s way until the whole wretched business is over.)
And I’ll tell you something else – no resolutions! No, not one! I never make them because life is hard enough and I genuinely believe we all do our best all of the time. We are HUGELY imperfect and we always will be and the last thing we should be doing is making our already hard lives even harder by trying to achieve a load of things that we are SIMPLY NOT CAPABLE OF.
We will inevitably fail (because we over-aspire) and then we feel like wretched failures and even worse than before we began trying to run six miles a day, or live on a tenner a week in order to clear the credit cards, or imbibe only spinach juice.
No resolutions. Repeat it with me. No resolutions! No resolutions! NO RESOLUTIONS! (Unless you are trying to stop smoking, and the only reason I will support you is because life is made hell for smokers, you are practically stoned in the streets, you poor things, and I suppose things would be marginally more pleasant for you if you were free of it.)
So repeat after me: ‘There is no need for me to make New Year’s resolutions because every day I try my best. I may live a messy, lapse-ridden, imperfect life but it’s the best life I can live. If I fail in some small way (chocolate, wine, over-spending, laziness – pick your poison), it’s not because I’m a bad person, it’s because it was all I was able to do on that particular day. I’m a human being and that means it’s a waste of time, striving to be perfect.’
Even those people with shiny, happy, perfect Facebook posts aren’t shiny and happy and perfect all of the time – they’re just showing us the parts they want us to see and we shouldn’t lacerate ourselves with self-hatred for not being as thin and tanned and going on as many holidays as them. You might find it hard to believe, but they too get strange nameless fears and pangs of bleakness and bouts of peculiar sadness – despite having spent New Year’s Eve in Mauritius wearing a Missoni bikini with their photogenic spouse and children.
Come on, let’s say it together:
‘Just for today I will go easy on myself, I’ll let up on the constant demands I make of myself and I’ll allow myself to be mediocre.
‘Just for today, the world won’t end if I don’t achieve anything – if I even regress.
‘Just for today, I’ll forgive myself for all the pain I cause myself by virtue of being human.
‘Just for today, I won’t speak harshly to myself.
‘Just for today, I’ll treat myself with all the compassion that I deserve.’
And off we go, living our lives.
Previously unpublished.
THE BEGINNING
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PENGUIN BOOKS
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Penguin Books is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com.
First published 2016
Text copyright © Marian Keyes, 2016
The moral right of the author has been asserted
Cover illustration © Bill Brown
ISBN: 978-1-405-92208-1
ANTARCTICA DIARY
* I have since taken agin Zayn and no longer want him in my show.
MADEIRA
* Explanation in ‘Guilty Pleasures’, p. 314.
Marian Keyes, Making It Up as I Go Along