Would the real baby Jesus please step forward?

Let's face it, you have to be a particularly abhorrent two year old not to be adorable. Especially if you spend most of the day immersed in a pretend (and much more satisfactory) world. This week I’ve been reminded that things are not always what they seem, and that sometimes this is a decidedly good thing.

I've been reprimanded for stepping on the Impster's imaginary dogs, not hearing her imaginary cats meowing, and accidentally washing up a chopping board with her imaginary olive pesto ('and now,' she hollers outraged, 'I have to start all over again!' Oops). To get her into the bath it is necessary to make believe picnics and train rides, and to get her out again, tents and camels; to get into pyjamas, ball dresses and glass slippers, and to bed a hastily improvised story on a subject of her choosing. I have been allocated the unflattering roles of Ugly Sister and Big Ears, but happily have also been permitted to marry a prince and eat strawberry tart, which seems like a fair enough trade.

It turns out that Christmas time has been specially designed for two year olds. On Christmas Eve I took the Impster to the children's service at the cathedral, dressed as an angel (any occasion which calls for the wearing of fairy wings in public goes down very well with the both of us). Just a few minutes before the service I hastily bastardised her white bridesmaid dress, fashioned a tinsel halo, and accidentally stabbed her with the needle a few times in a fervent attempt to attach the wings. Ta-da! - one angelic child.

But when we arrive, things get kind of complicated. 'Where's the Angel Gabriel?' she asks. To which I point out all the other angelically-attired children. 'No, the Angel Gabriel'. Oh, the real one. I see. 'Well, he's probably in the sky somewhere at the moment. He only pops down occasionally when someone really needs his help.' She ignores this unsatisfactory response and provides her own: 'He's upstairs with the baby Jesus I 'spect.' I nod sagely.

Ditto the wise men, ditto Mary, ditto the shepherds. Yes yes, she can see the children dressed up (durr Mummy!) but when are the real ones going to turn up? 'I can see the stable,' she says, looking up at the wooden screen in front of the choir. And as a baby starts crying mid-carol, she turns to me and says, 'That's the baby Jesus going waa waa waa I s'pose.'

The service, heaving with several hundred barely-continent toddlers does not last long, and there is a rush for the doors. But not for us. The Impster is not leaving until she has located 'the real baby Jesus'.

My explanation of how he lived a rather long time ago and isn't a baby any longer and how we are just remembering the story, suddenly seems fraudulent. You see, only the day before we have taken her on a steam train and she has met 'the real Father Christmas' who has given her presents and everything. Just like the story.

Now, if a two year old indulges in pretend it is a beautiful and charming thing. But somewhere along the line, pretending becomes dishonest and wrong, and we despise grown ups with any hint of 'pretence' about them. That’s why some very dedicated Christians actually refuse to let their children believe in Father Christmas. But without him, surely childhood is a bit, well, serious. If we stoke our imagination when it's young, let it run riot, fuel the furnace with all sorts of fantastical nonsense and whimsy and amusement, then just maybe we are expanding our capacity for belief; to believe in whatever we finally decide is worthwhile believing in.

So right now, as well as being ceaselessly entertained, I'm utterly evangelical about indulging in as much Christmas magic as you can conjure. I will never stop believing in Father Christmas. And if you've spent the week playing charades and feeling all bah humbug, do me a favour and just pretend.

You are where you live (well, maybe)

No one could accuse me of impatience when it comes to housing matters, though one might be justified in questioning whether my tenacity doesn’t suggest a mildly alarming psychosis. Having offered on our future abode no less than 18 months ago, at last we appear to be in danger of actually moving in. The intervening period has taught me the value of waiting for what you want (as if) and (more truthfully) the nature of my housing personality. Now what about yours?

1. If someone mentions moving to the country, you
(a) offer to accompany them for all viewings no matter how far away
(b) lend them your copy of John Seymour’s Complete Book of Self-sufficiency
(c) ask them whereabouts in Surrey
(d) laugh your stilettos off

2. When looking at property details you
(a) know you can’t afford it but can’t resist a peek
(b) book a viewing if it has a family-sized kitchen
(c) immediately check the square footage
(d) only pick them up if the house has serious curb-appeal

3. You know if you’ve found the right place when
(a) you’ve been waiting for it to come onto the market for the last 10 years
(b) you walk in and it feels like home
(c) it ticks all the boxes
(d) you spot the Eames lounge chair

4. You idea of home is
(a) the house where you live in your dreams
(b) the house where you were born
(c) the house where you live now
(d) the house on p24 of The World of Interiors

5. Your partner falls in love with a house by the sea, so you
(a) immediately check out www.upmystreet.co.uk
(b) assume they mean a beach hut
(c) wonder if its insurable
(d) enquire about the view

6. When viewing a house you
(a) look to see how much value you can add
(b) are blown away by the period features (including the original Burlington cistern)
(c) hope to move in without needing to even redecorate
(d) envisage knocking down two walls and moving the staircase

7. For you, suburbia is
(a) regrettably more affordable
(b) lovely if your friends live there
(c) where you currently live
(d) hell on earth

8. When asked the current value of your home, you
(a) can cite three recent agent’s quotations
(b) have no idea, you’ve been living there too long
(c) make a quick calculation based on the national average
(d) ask whether that includes soft furnishings

9. The thing you value most about your home is
(a) its location
(b) its contents
(c) its spaciousness
(d) its interior

10. Your favourite property programme is
(a) Property Ladder
(b) The Home Show
(c) Location, Location, Location
(d) Grand Designs

If you answered:

Mostly As – you are a property Obsessive. You’ve just moved, but you still subscribe to Rightmove updates. You think about property approximately once every three seconds, and never visit a new house without mentally redesigning and revaluing it. Your local estate agent now thinks you fancy him because you unavoidably slow down every time you pass the window.

Mostly Bs – you are a property Romantic. You are hugely attached to where you live and have lovingly restored all the cornicing and architraves. Home is very much where your heart is and a bit of mess just makes the place feel lived in. If you don’t live in it already, you’d like your next house to be your home for life, and you’re likely to pay over the asking price for it.

Mostly Cs – you are a property Pragmatist. You love the built-in storage, double garage, and the fact that the station is just 10 minutes walk away. You’ll move if you’re relocated but otherwise would rather stay put and have more money for holidays.

Mostly Ds – you are a property Stylist. You believe your home and haircut confer serious style and offer a window to your identity. One of life's perpetual worries is finding a decent cleaner. When you have a life crisis, redecorating your house provides instant solace and maximum therapeutic benefit.

The Thing About Publishers

I’m still digressing, and doubtless regressing, but here goes.

I just love the business (some would venture profession) of publishing. On the one hand, you have those fresh-faced editorial assistants, with a humungous passion for books and a deeply Romantic notion of the author as solitary creative genius. On the other, you have a few ginormous egos in charge of a powerful marketing and publicity machine, ruthlessly operating under the belief that where we used to have artists living in garrets, we now have promotable celebrities. (Or that even when you come across genuine talent too big to ignore, it can always be made bigger with some help.)

Science long since gave up on the idea of individual genius. In that plain-speaking, objective way it has about it, it seems to have concluded that many heads are better than one. Today, the individuals that shine out like rare gems are ‘entrepreneurs’, not inventors. With ever-increasing specialisation and technological complexity, individual scientists are no longer famed for new discoveries made – it’s all a matter of collaboration.

Well, never was there an industry more slavishly in pursuit of individualism than publishing. So much so that vanity publishing is a term that deserves a broader remit. The literati is full of extraordinary egos: author, agents, salesmen, editors alike all believing in the individual genius (always their own and occasionally their authors’ too). And it strikes me that this has a powerful attraction in our recessionary times. The thought that individuals have unique and irreplaceable talents, offers soul-filling comfort of the rarest kind. With every P45 that’s handed out, another applicant for Britain’s Got Talent is born.

The Thing About Mothers

Here’s a thing: why do we never ask even our closest friends whether their mothers worked? One friend’s mother – Mother Marjorie as we know her – is the wellspring of constant motherly wisdom to all of her daughter’s friends, not to mention the source of rallying pre-party expressions such as ‘tut tut, eleven o’clock and not a sausage pricked!’

It’s a weird thing, but I have no idea whether most of my friends’ mothers ever went out to work (apart from those I grew up with). We just don't ask our friends what their mothers did in the way we might enquire about their fathers – to them and to us the role of mother always seems enough. Simply by existing, our mothers matter to us. Simply by being, we are of mind-blowing importance to our children.

The problem for women today is that we’re educated for the workplace, not for motherhood. Motherhood flies in the face of all we have learned, because it is not about doing, but about being; it is not another project, but a whole way of life. Annoyingly, it’s a way of life that totally undermines and overturns all our former values and assumptions.

Motherhood is a great leveller, but it’s also full of different possibilities. Feminism might have given us choices, but it failed to solve the contradictions they posed. I’m fairly sure feminism would work better if it were designed for men. Men wouldn’t attempt all this multi-tasking and run themselves ragged trying to ‘have it all’. No, men would make a simple choice about whether to outsource the parenting role or the bread-winning role and respect each other’s different decisions. They certainly wouldn’t spend endless amounts of emotional energy on the feelings of guilt and envy and incompetence that mothers do.

In an incomparable expression of writerly genius, Helen Simpson once wrote of 'the deep romance and boredom' of motherhood. Having a child is like having the most intense, addictive, emotionally turbulent love affair of your life. And it's also like having a job where the rewards are great, but the day to day work is as tedious as hell. A bit like banking perhaps (one does get the occasional bonus even when times are hard).

So it’s no wonder that motherhood often doesn’t seem enough to us when we are faced with the mind-numbing tedium of it. But as mothers, we owe ourselves a daily reminder that we are insurmountably important, that our role is totally unique and impossible to delegate, and that even if we’re one day forgotten for everything else we’ve done, we’ll still be remembered for being someone’s mum. To our children at least, that is enough.

The Thing About Accountants

Work has been much on my mind of late. Guilt at not doing enough of it probably. But I’ve also been having some career counselling, which must be a real drag for my counsellor, given that I arrived at our first appointment great with child and clearly no intention of getting a proper job. It turns out to be brilliant therapy though (a bit like the Priory, only without the pills). Someone is being paid to work out what makes me tick, and then explain me to myself so that I can live happily ever after.

Most people moan a fair bit about their job, while being oddly compelled to continue doing it. It’s an odd thing that most of us choose our career path pretty blindly and then stick to it. The other odd thing is how I have come to be friends with no less than thirteen qualified accountants (and I’m excluding all the ones I’ve worked with, however nice they’ve been).

Thirteen? This clearly exceeds the point of usefulness. But the unequivocal if surprising fact of the matter is that they are really good fun to be with. And the reason they’re such fun is this: they never talk about their work. They know it’s bloody boring so they don’t mention it.

Accountants kind of mess up our current thinking about work. We live in an age where we define ourselves in large part by our work choice, which is why when people meet you for the first time it usually only takes them 60 seconds to establish what you ‘do’.

If you meet someone who doesn’t ask you that question, I’d bet there’s a 90% chance you’re talking to an accountant. By and large, accountants do not work for the thrill of the challenge, or to create something of their own making, or to leave a legacy, or for the glamour of it, or in pursuit of a higher cause. Work for them is not an end in itself, but simply a job that needs to be done, which pays well, in order to make the most of time not spent at work. They take their sense of self not from their work but the things that happen outside it. Paradoxically, accountants value ‘lifestyle’ above all.

So, respect to my opposite-brained, bean-counting friends. They manipulate their excel spreadsheets with a dexterity not short of artistic genius, without cherishing the conventional modern belief that YOU ARE WHAT YOU DO. The rest of us, slavishly in search of self-fulfilment, might do well to consider this once in a while: if life is one big balance sheet, is work really an asset?

The Antidote

Much good cheer to impart – at last I’ve had an utterly divine, entirely successful holiday. All thanks to G for introducing me to the remedy for the Impossibility of Holidaying. Namely, the 24-hour Holiday. There is only one rule: you must be child free for the entire duration.

It’s pure genius. Basically you are so extra specially grateful for the chance to escape for a non work-related purpose, that you get 67 times more excited than you would about a normal holiday. And because being left to your own devices is such a rarity, the day seems like an entire week. So by my calculations it is 67x7 = 469 times more fun than a day spent on any other kind of holiday.

Leaving the Impster in the care of my mother, K and I escaped as early as we could like two overly excitable teenagers playing truant. We spent a day of generous indulgence at the Champneys Forest Mere Spa, and then the night at the deliciously romantic West Stoke House, before returning the next morning to resume normal parental duties (me) and to fly to Buenos Aires for a few days (K).

Strictly speaking, it was a 27-hour holiday. That I pushed the limits of my mother’s babysitting patience no further, is doubtless an indication that she finally possesses a very serious deterrent against any wild or delinquent behaviour. She only needs to withdraw her babysitting services to ground me for life. So here is the new improved me – spirits soared, opulently satisfied, full of gratitude and goodwill to all mothers, stealthily plotting my next great escape.

To the Hermitage by Ambulance (or, Russian Hospitality)

No, this is not the screen adaptation of a Malcolm Bradbury novel starring George Clooney, but a true and faithful account of how the Impster and I came to be travelling in St Petersburg last Thursday somewhat unconventionally.

With flashing lights and a masterful U-turn, our ambulance driver swings across four lanes of traffic to drop us at the bank of the River Neva so that we might make the next hydrofoil for our day's sightseeing at Peterhof. I offer him many spasiba's, and he kisses me warmly on both cheeks and pats the Impster’s head. Konstantine is my proof that Russians make powerful allies. If they're on your side, they can make things happen and will stop at nothing to help you overcome a predicament.

As a random pregnant tourist with a toddler, however, most Russians wouldn’t piss on you if you were on fire (never mind give you a hand with your pushchair). Russian cities are not child-friendly affairs. To attempt them with an infant leaves one exposed to the view that as a mother, one is at best eccentric, and at worst unfit for purpose. Lifts, highchairs, pushchair ramps, baby-changing facilities, and (it slowly dawned on me) children under the age of eight are nowhere to be seen in St Petersburg. And as the week went on, I had a creeping suspicion that mothers might actually be banned from the city centre. For one thing, the women living here of child-bearing age are intimidatingly svelte (possibly as a result of the unpardonable cuisine creating a kind of national Cabbage Soup Diet.)

For another, they have clever ways of making sure children don’t interfere with their cultural tourism, as I discovered when I went to the Russian Museum and was told that only disabled people could use the lifts. To be honest, I’d had better days than last Wednesday, redeemed only by the prospect of seeing a fantastic collection of Kandinsky’s. So to discover that the House of Culture was denying me access, put me in a magnificent rage (‘f-ing Revolution’ etc etc). But the good Book advises to, ‘Leave off from wrath, and let go displeasure: fret not thyself, else shalt thou be moved to do evil’, and being in a pretty murderous temper, I head for the House of God. Unfortunately, St Isaac's Cathedral is closed on a Wednesday. (This is the city that simultaneously made one of its cathedrals the museum of atheism and religion for a time, which is possibly an indication that it shouldn’t be relied upon exactly for nurturing spiritual wellbeing.) In the end I did what any oppressed English mother would do, and contemplated a fag and a McDonald's. But on my way I stumbled across St Petersburg’s answer to The Dorchester, which went a considerable way to lifting my spirits (plus, the Impster still got her chicken nuggets, chips and a toy, because you can order absolutely anything there).

And now, somewhat in the manner of Ronnie Corbett, let me return to the matter of the ambulance. On Monday morning, dear K wakes up feeling, as Withnail would have it, 'unusual'. By Tuesday morning he is off-puttingly pukey and shaking uncontrollably, so I think it best to call a doctor (all the time privately convinced he shouldn’t have had ice in his drink the previous day). Two hours later he’s in surgery with a nearly-ruptured appendix, and I’m harbouring visions of a theatre equipped with vodka anaesthetic and a hacksaw. Turns out we’re in the poshest hospital in the city, and after a brief sojourn in intensive care, K ends up in a private room with en suite, river view, telly, fridge and no hyperactive toddler - so is marginally better off than me. And one can't but admire the Russian method of convalescence, his room being furthermore agreeably furnished with six wine glasses and six shot glasses (not a water glass in sight).

Here he resides at the current time, visa expired, regrettably unable to leave the country due to a faux pas on my part. All I did was to call BA to try to get him upgraded on the return flight. Admittedly I may have laid it on a bit thick, but how was I to know they would take it into their heads that he was unfit for travel?

It's been a curious week all in all. On Monday my brother had his gallbladder removed, on Tuesday K was relieved of his appendix, and on Wednesday I began to wonder how many other expendable organs we might be housing. Perhaps in California one could plausibly sell the idea of getting rid of a few, as a new surgical weight-loss method?

Anyway, being so posh, this hospital does a good line in English-speaking guardian angels. Dear Olga pities my lone-mother-in-St-Petersburg experience so much that she insists upon ambulance transportation to help the Impster and me get about (the charge for an ambulance is £250 an hour, so she can easily find one hanging about the place). A Russian on a mission will go to any lengths.

A few nights earlier, Madonna has come to St Petersburg to do a gig in Palace Square. We get accidentally caught up in the hordes of fans, and then caught in the torrential downpour which follows (Russian rain is really something else). Next day, as Dimitri is driving me to the hospital, he tells me how the authorities tried to break up the rain clouds by shooting things into the sky. Can you believe that? I know Madonna can be, well, prima-donnaish, but they actually tried to move the rain for her. My friends, that’s Russian hospitality for you.