Confessions of a Reluctant Recessionista

simply because he can’t stand to sit through the inevitable friends and boyfriends catch-up conversation we always seem to have when we get together.
    Over a cup of tea at the kitchen table, Mum launched straight into it.
    ‘So that Dan’s history now, is he?’ She did not seem distressed at the thought. Although she’d never met him, he’d gone down in everybody’s estimation over the whole Dad’s birthday affair. I nodded glumly.
    ‘Are you OK, love?’ she asked.
    ‘I’m fine. I’ll be fine,’ I said, doing my best I’m-putting-a-brave-face-on-this-face, aiming for sympathy as well as admiration for the fact that I was trying my best to cope under difficult circumstances.
    ‘And work?’
    ‘I’ve been applying for everything in sight, but it’s an incredibly tough market at the moment. I have been doing part-time work though. Things are a little tight. I couldn’t afford a new dress for the wedding, for example.’ OK, that was a lie, but I honestly don’t think a dress from H&M should count.
    ‘Well, you’ve got lots of lovely things anyway, haven’t you? Never known anyone with so many clothes. So, the wedding was fun, was it? Was Ali there? How is she these days?’
    ‘Weird,’ I said. ‘I’m not sure what’s going on with her. She’s been acting really strangely lately.’
    ‘Strange? How?’ my mother asked, her face the picture of alarm. ‘Do you think it might be drugs?’ My parents, who don’t smoke and who think that more than two glasses of wine a night constitutes binge drinking, are terrified by the very idea of illegal drugs. They firmly believe that a toke or two of marijuana will set you on a certain road to a lonely death in a bedsit with a needle sticking out of your arm.
    ‘No, I do not think it’s drugs, Mum. She’s just been … a bit distant. Quite unfriendly, actually.’
    ‘Perhaps she’s got man trouble? Does she have a boyfriend at the moment?’
    ‘No, I don’t think so.’ I wasn’t about to tell Mum about the married Frenchman, but she had a point. I hadn’t thought about that. So wrapped up in my own Dan/Tania/bad dress drama that I hadn’t even thought about the Frenchman. Maybe he was at the wedding? Maybe he was at the wedding with his wife? God, that would have been awful for her, pure torture. And I didn’t even ask her about it. She was right, I do think about myself all the time. I am a selfish cow.
    Dad appeared at the back door, kicking the mud off his shoes before coming into the house.
    ‘Right. I’m going to wash my hands and then we’d better get going. You know what Celia’s like if we’re late.’
    My twenty-seven-year-old sister hit middle age early. I blame Michael. She was always a little uptight, a bit of a control freak, but I’m sure she was more fun when we were teenagers. She met Michael when she was nineteen and they were married by the time she was twenty-one. At twenty-two she had Tom, two years later Rosie, and three years after that she had Monty.
    Celia and I are very different. For one thing, she has never worked. Well, she wouldn’t say that. She’d say she works harder than anyone else on the planet because she has three children of five and under. Shemay well be right. What I mean is, she’s never had paid employment. She doesn’t know what it’s like to work in an office, to have colleagues, to receive a pay cheque. She went from school to Northampton college (where she did a catering course) but after she married they immediately started trying for a baby. Michael felt that the stress of working life would not be good for her while they were trying. She agreed.
    She’s never lived alone either. She went from my parents’ house to a shared house at college to living with Michael. She says she can’t think of anything worse than living by herself. I lived alone for two years when I first came to London and I loved it; I still miss it sometimes – being the only person authorised to touch the remote control, not being judged for spending entire days lying on the sofa in one’s pyjamas reading Vogue and eating ice cream, never having to do anyone else’s washing-up. Solitude has its compensations.
    Celia missed out being twenty-something. If you ask me, she’s already missed out being thirty-something, too, and pretty much fast-forwarded straight to her mid-to-late forties. She is incredibly grown up. I suppose you have to be once you become a parent. And while I know that Celia wouldn’t