than occasionally pretending to be a real grown-up.

I think that my actual grown-upness might have peaked between February 2010 and September 2011.  This is the period when I lived together with my boyfriend of the time, in a rather nice apartment on Pall Mall (the Liverpool address, not London).  Shoes off at the door, nice bathroom/kitchen, little balcony.  We had a shared bank account for bills and rent.  We both had OK jobs, we took holidays.  *Sundays were my favourite day then, lazy wake-up, the papers, big breakfast, walk, chat, nap, movie……..  Look at Annie P , all growed up.  That’s how imagine the accepted view of adult life is.  Lovely.  Then the arse fell out of that world.

You might be surprised that I didn’t say I was at the height of my adultness when I was married, and it would be a natural assumption.  But I was twenty six at the time, what did I really know then?  I hadn’t lived with my fiance for three years, he in Wales and I studying in London.  I shared a big house in Queens Park owned by Mr and Mrs Brown, held together with sawdust and glue and painted pukey blue throughout.  Five of us lived there and found creatures burrowing into the carpet under the sofa.  We stayed for a couple of years.  He lived in ‘our’ fisherman’s cottage in Wales, alone with ‘our’ dog and drove ‘our’ yellow VW Beetle and we saw each other twice a month.  Yeah, super mature.

I have periodically during my life, had to start over completely from scratch.  When on a whim, I impulsively moved from London to Liverpool to get my foot on the property ladder, I lived in mouse-infested halls of residence for six weeks while the purchase of my new house there completed.  I was thirty-two.

And now having moved to Barcelona almost three years ago, I at the age of 43 39, share an apartment with another woman in EXACTLY. THE. SAME. SITUATION as me.  A year older, no boyfriend, no children but lots of nieces, nephews and godchildren.

She’s gone away for the Easter holiday, so this is my opportunity to fake being a grown-up.  I am swishing about the place as if it is mine, (imagine full length house coat and feathery mules here.  I am.)  And I’m wondering how long it is before I can really get away with wearing a turban, giant sunglasses and giant earrings at all times, breakfast, lunch, dinner, indoors, outdoors, to bed.   I will at least feel like a proper grown-up for just over a week and then life will return to normal, figuring out how to actually save money, start a pension, open a health insurance policy, maybe buy a flat.

*More or less my Sundays are exactly the same all the time, because they have really always been my favourite day of the week, with or without a significant other to share them.  I just insert a different person as and when it becomes possible.