You know when you were a kid and your parents said, “stop whingeing, these are the best days of your life”?  Well, they knew what they were talking about and we all should’ve listened up, and immediately played hard and funned the sh*t out of life.

They imparted this pearl (constantly) because they had – unbeknownst to us – reached the peak of adultness, and while teetering on that dizzying tip, realised that the view from up there was actually a rather dull sea of gin, bills, responsibilities, keeping things alive (animals, the wine stocks, plants, children, themselves) and…….. more gin.  It wasn’t in fact really, all that.  Not at all.

Anne Pank frauding it. LARGE.

It struck me this morning, as I stood in front of the mirror at stupid o’clock, just before I left for work that I looked like a very reluctant teenager.  All ill-fitting suit, book laden satchel (vintage), and bimbling around like Bambi on ice in my heels. I looked like a little girl playing at being a grown-up, and for a split second, I felt like a complete fraud.

I’m not going to lie to you, I’m a little bit bored of being a grown up at the moment:  I’m currently looking to move again, after this neighbourhood successfully put the fear of jebeebus up me very recently, a tiring and tedious process.  I need to grow my little business which has stalled for a year or so, I have bills to pay, I have work to do, and a forty-something sense of responsibility to go to work to make the money to pay the bills.  And I have to admit, I have an even bigger urge to run in completely the opposite direction from all of that (that opposite direction being a romantic notion of Paris at this particular moment).

It’s inevitable that we all get to this point I know, and we all sadly have to just suck it up.  But sucking it up sucks big time, HARD, like a cyclone vacuum.

No amount of praying to the gods of lottery is going to help here.  I’ve just got to get on with it. But I’m tired.  I’m periodically up and at ’em, firing on all cylinders, and then I’m so tired I don’t want to get out of bed.  I’m totally incapable of maintaining any life except my own – just about – (I’m like the Aileen Wuornos of the plant world), I can’t hold down anything vaguely resembling a normal relationship, and leaving the house without thinking that I’ve forgotten my keys/knickers/phone/to turn off the oven, is virtually impossible.  It amazes me from day to day that I have a roof over my head and food in the cupboards.  It’s safe to say, I’ve been successfully pretending to adult since I left home at nineteen, but to my mind others are adulting much better than I am.  Everyone is much adultier than I’ll ever be.

I think my fairy godmother has had it easy the last few years, so I think it’d be a good time for her to make an appearance and wave that magic wand.  No?  With Halloween fast approaching, it seems a pretty appropriate time to make the request…..

And while I’m waiting for that to happen, you’ll find me in my lounge fort, dressed up like a princess, having tea with my imaginary friend.