Confessions of a Reluctant Recessionista

and so Dad, Celia and I opted for the beef, while Mum ordered lamb. When it arrived she looked at it suspiciously; the pale, slightly spongy meat on her plate did not resemble the traditional roast to which she was accustomed. Gingerly, she took a bite. Then, her face blanching, she returned her fork to her plate and summoned the waiter.
    ‘Excuse me,’ she said, loudly and slowly so that he was sure to understand, ‘but are you sure this is lamb? L’agneau ?’
    ‘ Oui, madame, ce sont des cervelles d’agneau .’ He smiled at her warmly, enjoying the moment. ‘Zees are ze brains of lambs.’
    And my mother was back in the toilet, throwing upagain. For the rest of the holiday we ate spag bol and fish and chips back at the apartment, with Mum complaining bitterly that it wasn’t much of a holiday if she had to cook all the time.
    My parents are provincial. They are petit bourgeois. I love them dearly. But for as long as I can remember I have wanted to get away – not from them so much as from their life. The idea of Dan sitting on the sofa in the peach-themed living room of our mum and dad’s 1930s semi in the Kettering suburbs, drinking a pint of Tetley while admiring my mother’s collection of Royal Doulton figurines, or discussing the front-page story of the Daily Mail with Dad, was just too awful to contemplate. So when they invited us down for the birthday party I lied and said that Dan couldn’t make it – he had to visit his grandmother in Edinburgh who had taken ill.
    I’d told Dan that he was invited but that he needn’t bother to come because he’d find it boring, and he put up no argument at all. However, for some inexplicable reason he decided that he’d earn some Brownie points – perhaps for use at a later meeting – by ringing up halfway through the afternoon’s festivities to apologise for his absence and to wish my Dad a happy sixtieth. He was so sorry he couldn’t make it, he said, but there was just no getting out of the annual Hamilton Churchill team-building weekend. The look on my father’s face will stay with me for a very long time.
    And Celia knew it. With a resigned sigh and a heavy heart, I conceded defeat.
    ‘All right, Celia, I’ll cancel my plans. I’ll get the train up on Saturday. Can you pick me up from the station?’
    ‘Not on Saturday, Cassie. The party’s Saturday and I’ll be busy all day getting things ready. Come up Friday night. I’ll come and get you and we can go for a bite at the Harvester with the kids.’
    Oh, joy . . .

2
     
    Cassie Cavanagh is homicidal
    How would I like to kill him? Let me count the ways: stabbing, shooting, poisoning, shoving him beneath the next DLR train . . . I was ten minutes late this morning. Ten. And of course it wasn’t my fault – if you live in London, it genuinely almost never is. It’s typical though. I actually woke up before my alarm went off so I decided to set off for work earlier than usual so that I could finalise party plans and get a jump-start on the day. Ha. So much for early birds and worms and all that.
    It was a glorious October morning, the air crisp and the sky cloudless, the kind of morning which absolutely demands that you don your brand new, bright red trenchcoat and enormous Marc Jacobs sunglasses even though it is only six fifty in the morning and the sun is barely up yet. Although I was unable to wedge myself onto the first two Northern Line trains to arrive at Clapham Common, I was stillahead of time when the third one arrived and, miraculously, I was actually able to get a seat, on which someone had kindly left a copy of Metro , allowing me to catch up on world events before I got to the office.
    I was just flicking through the paper reading yet another Cheryl Cole story (the only woman in Britain, Ali once said, who has worse taste in men than I do), when, between Oval and Kennington, the train came to a sudden, shuddering halt. The lights dimmed. They came back up again. The temperature began to rise. I wriggled out of my coat, accidentally elbowing the portly middle-aged lady to my left and provoking an exasperated, exaggerated sigh.
    I read Metro from cover to cover (Jude’s right, there really isn’t that much of interest in it), including all the horoscopes. ‘ Geminis in love ’, of which Dan is one, ‘ face a turbulent week ahead ’, apparently. While Virgos like me are ‘ going to get their just rewards ’. Sounds ominous. Fourteen minutes later the driver read out an