The Displaced Nation

#1 – It’s Life, all right, but not as I know it

Why is it that, just as you get Life under control, Life decides you’re too complacent by far and snatches your security blanket away? And not only snatches it away, but rips it down the middle, throws it in a muddy puddle, and stamps around on it for good measure? Then Life hands you back the pieces and says, Take that, you smug bitch. How much in control do you feel now, Libby?

You see, last night at dinner, Oliver mentioned that his company would like him to transfer to another department. He rambled on a bit, but that was the gist. I confess I was a little preoccupied when he made this announcement, trying to stop our two-year-old from feeding the dog his Marmite toast. (The dog is gluten intolerant. Of all the dogs in the world, we have to pick the one on Atkins, the one who won’t eat your leftovers.) So my response was something like, “Lovely-darling-and-don’t-even-think-about-it-Jack” before grabbing Fergus  — that’s the dog – by the collar and dragging him into the study, where he would most likely eat final demand electricity bills instead. Unlike me, he s not intolerant of those.

All in all, it probably wasn’t the response Oliver was after, and it made me feel a bit guilty. I try not to feel guilty, but I’m a full-time mother now and therefore must be more supportive of my husband, so guilt goes with the territory. At any rate, that’s what my mother tells me every time she phones. God knows what she was doing in the 1970s while other women were burning their bras. Out shopping for whalebone corsets, I imagine.

Oliver, naturally, is all in favour of the idea of supportive wives, and sucks up to my mother unashamedly to get her support as well. He once sent me an email, one about 1950s housewives knowing how to treat their husbands properly. You’ve probably seen it. Wives are advised to hand their husbands a G&T the minute they walk through the door, tidy the children up and the toys away – or perhaps it was the other way round — and to shut up while Hubby speaks because his opinions are more important. Oliver claimed the email was a joke. I told him it would have been, had I been employed and salaried, but right then, with baby-sick permanently welded to my shoulder, I failed to see the humour and Oliver was fooling no one. Millennia of male chauvinism cannot be wiped out by Harriet Harman — whatever she may think – or a few charred Cross Your Heart foundation garments.

But back to Oliver s announcement. Once I was reseated at the table, Oliver said, “You didn’t hear what I said, did you, Libby?”

“Yes, I did.”  I handed Jack a triangle of Marmite toast. He mushed it into a ball and chucked it at the window behind me, where it stuck for a second before sliding down, leaving a greasy snail trail. “HR wants you to transfer.”

Oliver waved his hand around in a circle. “And?”

I thought. “And you’ll get a pay rise?” I said hopefully.

“Plus a relocation package.”

I stopped persuading Jack to eat, and stared at Oliver, who seemed satisfied that he’d at last got a reaction.

“Relocation package? Relocation to where? Liverpool? London?”

“Massachusetts,” Oliver said. “We’ll talk about it.”

And that was the point when Life snatched away my security blanket, hurled it in a swamp, and danced the mashed potato on it.

#2 – Fishy motives

We’ve spent the weekend talking about this hypothetical move to America. Well. I say ‘hypothetical ‘, but it isn’t. And I say ‘talking’ although it wasn’t really that, either. Oliver appears to have done most of the talking already with the Relocation Manager in his Human Resources department. (What happened to Personnel Departments? Have we come so far down the line of political correctness that we can’t acknowledge we have personalities? Are we less likely to offend someone by calling them a Human Resource rather than a Person? These things bother me.)

As I was saying — when Oliver promised we’d talk about it, he actually meant we would talk about the after effects of the decision, not the decision itself. That seems to be settled all over bar the shouting wife, you could say.

“We’d live in a little town near Boston,” he said. “You know Boston. It s where the Cheers bar is, and where they filmed Ally McBeal. You love both those programmes.”

I told him that he loved watching EastEnders, but he wouldn’t want to move to Walford.

He gave me a withering look. “Walford’s a made up place. It’s not real.”

“More real to me than Boston.”

“It wouldn’t be permanent,” Oliver said. “Just think of it as a two-year holiday.”

Humph. If I had to pick one characteristic in Oliver that I’d happily trade (excluding spur-of-moment unilateral decisions to emigrate, of course) it would be his homing pigeon tendencies. He gets culture shock if he goes farther north than Leicester. Take him to Spain and he will make a beeline for all the restaurants whose menu items end with n chips. We went to Disney World in Florida the year before Jack was born, and Oliver insisted on wearing his Beckham football shirt everywhere. Well – he and the rest of English-accented Orlando, it must be said.

I hadn’t intended to play the trump card so soon in the game, but my options were running out fast. “You do know,” I said, “that they don’t sell roast chicken flavoured crisps over there? No Quavers or Skips? No Hula Hoops?”

Oliver opened his mouth as if to say something, then shut it again. For a moment, he looked uncertain. Was it possible our future teetered upon a specific combination of E-numbers and MSG?

Then he smiled an indulgent smile, the sort I give two-year-old Jack when he’s done something unbearably cute and naive and I knew that even the threat of no Skips or Quavers to satisfy the midnight munchies wasn’t going to work.

“Libby, love. It’s Boston. They have their own fantastic food. We don’t need chips.” Chips? Lord help us. He was into the lingo already. “There’s lobster and crab cakes, and what’s it called? Clam chunder.”

Not quite into the lingo, then. “Chowder.”

“Chowder, chunder, same thing. But my point is, who needs crap like prawn cocktail crisps when you can have the real deal fresh from the ocean there?”

I shook my head, knowing our fate was decided for the next two years. Oliver was basing a three-thousand-mile upheaval on — seafood.

And oh. Did I mention he’s allergic to fish?

#3 – Black pudding, Play-Doh, and playgroup dons

Oliver and I are keeping quiet about the move until plans are definite. We each have different reasons; he doesn’t want to lose face if it doesn’t happen, and I want to pretend it won’t happen at all.

It’s quite astonishing. In less than two weeks, we’ve switched roles. I used to be the one who liked going abroad and trying new food, whereas he’d eat burger-au-E-coli twice a day for a fortnight rather than pollute his digestive system with local cuisine. Once, in Ibiza, I tried to get him to eat a piece of morcilla. “Oooh, no, not that foreign stuff, thank you,” he said, shuddering as if he was a contestant on Fear Factor and I d tried to tempt him with deep-fried cockroach. Thing is, he didn’t realise it was Spanish sausage. He thought it was black pudding. Lancashire black pudding was foreign enough for Oliver.

But now it’s me dragging my heels about going abroad, while he’s suddenly turned into Gordon-bleeding-Ramsay, evangelising about fresh local produce that brings him out in a rash.

Calm. Breathe.

It’s quite difficult to keep this a secret, though. Take this morning, for example, when Jack and I went to playgroup. Carol Hunter cornered me before I could get Jack’s coat off.

Carol’s the sort of woman you’re glad to leave behind in the office rat race when you go on maternity leave. You think you’re entering a cocoon of babies, teddy bears, and Johnson’s products, unsullied by bossy women with expensive highlights. Then you discover these women have not only infiltrated your baby-powdered haven but established their own Mafia, ruling the playgroup, PTA, and school governing board.

Carol’s the Don of the local ring.

“Libby,” she said in a confidential tone, gripping me by the elbow in case I made a run for it. “Libby. We have to talk about your volunteer record. It’s somewhat… threadbare.”

Oh, hell. You see, everyone with a child in playgroup is supposed to sign up to help on a regular basis. That’s the idea. But what actually happens is you volunteer once or twice, spend two hours smiling through gritted teeth while Carol or one of her captains micromanages you in the art of finger-painting, and then forever after keep a low profile when volunteers are needed. There s a lot of Mafia moaning goes on about it, of course. Usually over skinny lattes in Starbucks, while their little darlings sprinkle brown sugar packets on the floor, about how it’s always the same people who do all the work, and how this playgroup would’t survive if it weren’t for Carol and her chums. But you ignore it. These women used to get their kicks playing the office martyr in their pre-baby lives, and they’d hate to be deprived of their sackcloths and ashes now.

“You’ve only done three sessions since last October,” Carol went on, clamping down on my arm even harder. “Can I put you down for the Play-Doh table next week, with Angie? Then two sessions in May, and a couple in June?”

I coughed. “All with Angie?”

Frankly, I’d rather sign up for evening classes in embalming than for six playgroup sessions with Captain Angie, who can t go five minutes without dropping into conversation that she went to school with Supernanny.

And then it struck me. “Tell you what,” I said. “Let’s make it easy. I’ll do all of July, twice a week, until the schools finish for summer. Six sessions. How’s that?”

Carol opened and shut her mouth a few times, but no sounds emerged, which was pretty satisfying. It s not often she’s lost for words. No doubt she’d been revving up for a big fight about this, probably culminating in a hit job in Starbucks. Remind me to check the cisterns for firearms next time I’m in there.

“Fan-tast-ic,” she eventually murmured, and wafted off to persecute a new mother of twins.

It was all I could do to stop myself from shouting, “Because come July, Carol, I will most likely be eating lobster on the other side of the Atlantic, and not even you and your molls will be able to drag me back to the Play-Doh table.”

It s as good a reason as any to emigrate, I suppose.

Episode #4 – How a dog’s life can really get up your nose

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Image: Travel Map of the World by Salvatore Vuono / FreeDigitalPhotos.net