My mother

I am back in France after two weeks away in Tbilisi and London. Next week sees me off to Germany so I have a week with my daughters before the next bout of work. But in the meantime I am preparing for that, doing my tax return (late – they have given me until 18/2) and also doing some work on the next book project. It is warm here and today I think we have settled on the idea of buying a newly built house. This is of course an anathema to middle class english inhabitants who buy up the old places. That is before they realise they are freezing cold in the winter and are often in flood zones. We have friends who have to live in one room in the winter because of the cold.

Anyway my mother. My mum has fallen obsessionally in love with a polish opera singer aged 31. She offered to be his ‘manager’ about 9 months ago – getting him gigs and so on. She has never managed anything in her life (although no bad thing as I always say to try something new). He agreed – desperate for work and started to sing in Conservative Clubs etc. He was also giving her singing lessons at £25 per hour – one a day (which my naïve father was paying for) and it turns out that she was having a lesson every day of the week. He, because he needed the money and she because she wanted to be near him. Anyway the longer this supposed ‘business relationship’ went on the more it became apparent that he was taking her for every penny he could, and I do not blame him, while she was just wanting to be attached to him. Apparently he never even kissed her. Anyway things have come to a head because he said he was moving to Southend (I presume to escape) and then when she threatened to open an office in Southend he announced he was moving to Europe.

At the beginning of January he went off, with it transpires a girlfriend of his own age who is pregnant and they are marrying in the summer. My mum ended up chasing him around Europe, having a fight in a Brussels hotel with the police having to be called and is now en route to Munich where he is singing in the next couple of weeks. I don’t think he knows she is coming. His mother has banned my mother from the wedding and, if she could, Poland altogether. She is blind to the warnings of her family and totally blind to the fact that she is making the biggest ass out of herself. Plus they are fighting over custody of some hideous 4x4 which he claims is his and she claims is hers. I suspect it is his. I have missed out some other stuff – regular humiliations in front of friends, my mother spending vast fortunes in Ann Summers to make herself sexually alluring, quaffing vast quantities of cheap red - no doubt to numb the love pain and 10 grand spent on a man who has no interest in her. The strangest thing about this is I am not the least surprised and neither is my sister. The only one who seems to know nothing about this is my father who is sat in the middle of it all. She spun him a yarn about going to Germany to sing Gershwin in a Berlin Jazz Club. My god.



I did something I don’t normally do too. I am not a great film watcher because I do not have the attention span but I did enjoy ‘Sideways’ at my friend Brian’s on Saturday. No doubt the excellent burgundy he offered for refreshment relaxed me sufficiently to make it agreeable.

Album of the day: White Noise: An Electric Storm – Delia Derbyshire. A free download of this seminal 60’s electronic album is available on the internet.