I Am Not In France

Non-Working Monkey is on holiday, to which the obvious question is, how can she tell? Except that recently she has not been a Non-Working Monkey at all, but instead, a working Non-Working Monkey. And now she is a non-working Non-working Monkey again, and she is on holiday.

The mother of my children is on holiday, too. My children are on holiday. With their mother. They are in France. Non-Working Monkey is in France too.

Perhaps they will pass each other on the boulevard. Or place their towels next to each other on the plage, and Non-Working Monkey will see my children and say, “Jesus!” (Tip: for various reasons, try not to get downwind of Trasha). And my children will see Non-Working Monkey and say, “Look mummy, why isn’t that monkey working?”

I am not on holiday.

Instead, every day I take the bucket – actually a mountain bike from Decathlon, £149.99 including panniers, cycle lamps and bell, up the steepest hill in south London – to the well, to keep the family fed and watered and the kids with shoes on their feet, to stand behind a counter – it’s a bookshop, and not really a well - whilst grown men mistakenly (?) call me *babe* and old ladies ask me questions like;

“I’ve got a complete set of the original bible from the time of its very first printing, where do you think I could sell them?”*

And I must do this because it has somehow come to the attention of the karmic Gods that I used up my quota of holiday for this life, in the 1980s. The whole of the 1980s. And a part of the 1990s.

When I woke up, I remembered nothing except sitting in the bottom of the basket of a hot air balloon, squealing like a baby, as we sailed at 8000 ft above the Normandy countryside and the not-yet mother of my children leant over the side and said look, look, you can see the curve of the earth from here.

*An actual documentary question, asked of me as I stood typing this out at the till.


(This post was written by The Bookseller Crow, except someone else has posted it for him in my absence because I didn't set it up right, see? The permissions thing. I am a fool!)