Consider this:

Boss' wife, rat-arsed, regales me with an incensed (and detailed) account of how she couldn't find the right Louboutins in the right colour and size in Zürich. At circa one thousand francs a pair upwards, Louboutins are as common as muck. Hell, Paris Hilton wears them! Fortunately for me, I’m semi-legless too, which makes her monologue bearable.

And this:

I’m dribbling over a pair of gorgeous black suede ankle boots I find on the net. Unfortunately, my shoe budget has bunions (yes, dear benefactors; be kind to the tip jar in my sidebar and I might surprise you with some eye candy).

[I take credit cards too.]

And then this:

A group of kids who live in Zone 3 around Chernobyl (Zones 1&2 are uninhabitable) spend a week’s holiday in this country, paid for by a charity. A shoe manufacturer gives each child a squeaky new pair of hiking boots before a trip up a mountain. There is a choice of two colours each for boys and girls. Faced with choosing, the kids have no idea what to say. They don't know about 'choice', you see. Choice is a concept that does not exist in their world. Gifts and new shoes are unknown.

When Jamaican sprinter Usain Greased-Lightning Bolt ran the 100 metres in 9.69 seconds at the Beijing Olympics, it was one of those where-were-you-when moments for me. God, what a glorious demonstration of supremacy! It gave me goose bumps. I had to phone Mountain Man, who had predicted a nine-sixty-something time and was running up a mountain when I reached him to tell him the news. Almost at the summit, he’d stopped to dive into a wood sheltering a crop of sweet wild blueberries and was about to make his way to coffee at the small timber chalet of a little old lady who lives nearby and hikes up there to spend the summer. The Swiss are like that; it’s in their genes and even the chain-smoking, eight-espressi-a-day types leave you standing on a slope, any slope. Mountain Man's great passion lies in running up mountains I can barely hike. And then he runs back down again. Bolt runs the 100 metres (track) in 9.69; Mountain Man runs the marathon (road) in just under three hours and the 100k (field) in just over eight.

Mountain Man would be mortified if he knew I’d mentioned him and Bolt in the same sentence. But he doesn’t know and would be secretly flattered if he did. Bolt races the clock; Mountain Man races himself. Mountain Man runs for kicks, but all his attempts at explaining why have hitherto failed, because how do you confine your ecstasy in mere words? I don't think I need to know, which is strange: in essence, I'm the kind of person who always needs to know.

I shall never understand him, which of course is part of the attraction. (On a difficult day, it's ten thousand spoons when all you need is a knife.)

Bolt: If it turns out that he was cheating, I'm going to wring his bloody neck.

PS. Yeah. Naff title.

There’s a story of here I haven’t told: the story of when it rained without respite for three days. It was high summer, and warm, and I went away for the weekend. I left to low-hanging cloud and returned to deluge. I left to the scent of sweet summer rain to visit a place with wall murals that could make a whore blush and returned to the scent of rich earth yielding to decay.

It was too warm for the precipitation to fall as snow at higher altitudes. Streams swelled to roaring walls of water that engulfed everything in their path. It was a freak occurrence that shattered people’s faith in man’s dominion over nature and jolted them back into an almost mediaeval faith that bowed to the inevitable. Someone died. This is Switzerland; no one was uninsured and no one lost their livelihood, but someone died. I don’t like to think about it but I do, and once I pictured packed cemented mud sacrificing a torn, tree root-entwined body to blue skies.

My part of town wasn’t affected. I live in the oldest part, the original part that was settled a thousand years ago. It was pristine, like a time warp left behind by the previous days’ events. In times of crisis you shut down and seeing is believing, and you had to walk into town to watch dust turn to mud turn to the outreaching clammy tendrils of destruction. You could taste, smell and ingest the oppressiveness. It seemed ridiculous. It was a sick joke that went down like lead, spreading in the sunlight like a carpet of fungus behind a damp brick wall. If it had been a film noir, ravens would have circled overhead. But it wasn’t, and the birds had taken flight. It was my son’s birthday.

Now, when it rains heavily you can smell the unease, and it holds you in an insincere embrace and seeps into your bones like fine drizzle. (We have an affectionate term for drizzle in our family: we call it “English” weather.)

I’ve been told I live in paradise and today, with clear sky washed clean and wispy remnants of cloud hung out to dry on flanks and in gullies, I’m not in the mood to be argumentative. My favourite season waits in the wings: late summer/early autumn, when you can go outside and see, according to altitude, three seasons in one.

For several years, he held me at arm’s length. He would hold me captive with his limbs; flesh so supple and warm, muscle so taut, had me entranced and lulled by his voice, enraptured by his articulacy and impressed with his knowledge. But he never let me in. I can only speculate about the reasons. I’m sure he had them, but of course I could never be certain. He loved to quote classical philosophers but loathed to express emotion. Maybe it was just him, his modus operandi; his way of dissembling and keeping everything neatly in its proper place. Maybe it was me. Maybe I was too much to handle. Could it be that I am toxic in high doses? Is it a classic Venus v Mars dilemma? Then again, perhaps it was arrogance, and he wanted a plaything that could be put back into the toy box when play time was over. I know he cared about me, but I shall never know.

Long ago, I had a lover who was, after we were no longer emotionally and physically entangled, overheard describing me as ‘demanding but rewarding’, which, translated, meant ‘she’s a total pain in the arse but sucks cock’.

B made me laugh. I didn’t expect him to, I wasn’t courting laughter, I wasn’t even hoping for laughter and if you’d asked me a minute earlier, I’d have sneered derisorily and said that raising a mere smile was a preposterous image and totally f*cking out of the question. But there I was, on my stomach on the bed on a hot afternoon with the blinds tilted shut, toes flexed back in hand, boobs unhappily confined in the yellow top with the shelf bra (god, shelf bras are so bloody useless if you’re a c-cup – what a joke) and squashed against the mattress, the weave of the bed cover chafing my knees, laughing an all-out raucous and disgraceful belly-laugh. I flexed my leg back further and the skirt started to chafe too, so I kicked out, clamped the phone between ear and chin, messed my hair up, rolled over onto my back and drew my legs up until I could hug myself gleefully.

You could say B and I have a purely professional relationship, but I know about his near death experience and he knows about some of the things I’ve done and his wisdom – he is about 100 years older than me; in his own words – and the fact that he calls me ‘young woman’ (as in: “now, young woman!”) and I don’t feel like slapping him says reams about us.

I wanted to say “B, I want to kiss you, you daft sod. You made me forget myself for two seconds and for that I love you.” I’m taking all the laughter I can get.

We met halfway and headed for the forest. I was restless and had to get out; I needed to walk fast and far and meet exhaustion head on. He was complicit. I don’t know how we ended up in the forest; it might have been his intention all along. Maybe it was just years of familiarity and habit that led us there, in the pouring rain. We walked along the dam wall on a narrow grassy path – popular with dog walkers - with a six metre vertical drop either side. I think I became anxious, because I tensed and he, walking behind me, sensed I would balk and told me to keep walking and focus on a point some fifty metres ahead. We crossed the bridge through a curtain of warm rain and then we were in the forest, a primordial womb-like world apart from the one we’d left behind. The bark chip carpeted trail cushioned steps and muffled sighs. Snails crunched beneath careless soles. A stag beetle clung to a trunk, and a creature of prey had carefully draped, as if offering up a sacrifice, the disembowelled carcass of a mouse over an exposed root. A woodpecker in a treetop serenaded and followed us a short distance, until it became reunited with its mate. We paused to eat a crop of the sweetest, tiniest wild raspberries. Steam rose from the forest floor. I was soaked and didn’t care. We talked, discussed, made plans. We found a silver birch tree and he leaned against it, back to the trunk, facing me. And I leaned forward into him, my palms on his chest. And then I battered his chest with my fists, gently first, and then not so gently, because this is what we did and do. He caught my hands in his and smiled at a memory recalled. I stretched up on tiptoes to kiss him, and felt closer to him than I have in months.

Mountain Man has gone up a mountain to help break the world record in serial fondue eating (I am serious) and the little man has gone with his aunt, a farmer’s wife, to stay on an alp (this is what passes for ‘summer holidays’ this year chez o), where he gets to fall flat on his face in cow shit at least half a dozen times between sunrise and sunset and ‘help with the milking’, which as far as I can ascertain - as he was very, very excited before leaving this morning - involves holding the cows’ tails out of the way while they are being milked, no doubt by hand. And then of course there’s the cheese-making and sundry other inspiring outdoor pursuits that take place on a working alp in summer (if I can think of any I’ll add them forthwith). This odd fascination with cows and muck is in his blood – one of his first outings as a three-week-old fresh out of neonatal intensive care was with the same aunt (as luck would have it, she’s a neonatal nurse by training), who wrapped him up warmly and took him to the barn at milking time. (She also kept him overnight, which was bliss.) She is an angel.

This morning, the teenager and I, being of the same indolent disposition and singularly uninspired but quietly thrilled by the serenity that appeared to have descended on the household, decided to assemble the following and eat it for lunch. It was a leisurely lunch and we did. Every single forkful.

 

Five a day: lemons.

 

Amaretto and eggs.

 

Mascarpone.

 

Espresso. Chocolate powder. Chocolate. (Seven a day, then. That's even better for you, no?)

 

She did.

 

And so did I.

 

There was plenty left over, so we did it all over again.

 

He got a plate to lick clean. Because he begged so prettily.

I must be ovulating.

My twenties were spent battling with infertility and a cycle with an irregularity that matched my inner life; my thirties with half-hearted attempts that my body, wiser than my mind, aborted (although my mind hung on despite its terror and they had to be scraped out of me – do you know the feeling of nurturing a dead embryo?) and then, a glorious surprise; a pregnancy my body obviously wanted but my mind didn’t want, then did want very much, and both body and mind - after the realisation that there was only one choice that made sense - reunited, bore joyfully to fruition. Finally, in my early forties, I find I am as regular as clockwork, textbook stuff, for the first time in my life. Although my body dictates my desires, my mind seems to have mellowed and no longer lusts for the stranger; the man in the shrouded and dank dream-corner or the nightmarishly vivid one who rides up on a black steed holding the reins of the saddled dappled mare. You don’t ride off into the sunset with him.

Right now (yes, this is subject to change), body and mind lust for the one I know; the one who sprinkles shards of liquid energy as he shakes his head and steps out of the shower, cock at full-mast, imperious, calling to me to lap the salt-pearl of pre-come from its tip.

Taking a toothbrush to the grout inside the shower (we’ve lived here for eight years and I’ve had total faith in the bionic powers of Mr Clean and his ilk until now; this recent activity is a sure sign something is afoot), it did cross my mind, after I’d swatted the two flies that had been copulating on me first, and then on the bathroom mirror and listened to daughter’s humorous account of her first and hopefully only brush with morning detention (‘morning’ means 6.45am incidentally, and she was sentenced to this for committing the heinous crime of screwing a piece of paper into a small ball and flicking it at her friend during a lesson, who flicked it back and also got done: they didn’t even get a warning, which is standard practice, and I think it might have something to do with her maths teacher not being in the best of moods because she’s allegedly knocked up by a colleague whose credentials include habitually propping up a local bar until closing time and missing the train on a school trip. They phoned his mobile but couldn’t rouse him, I heard, and my sources are impeccable). Anyway, I was thinking, after the flies were dispatched and daughter laughed at (I had to sign a detention consent form and teased her endlessly by offering to tick the second option which said: “I do not consent to my child’s detention and request a meeting with the teacher involved, the head, board of governors, the peace envoy to Chechnya and the Dalai Lama”) that it would be nice to have someone do this chore for me, preferably one of those servile souls – invariably male – who used to advertise in the newspaper (and maybe the ones the internet left behind still do) their willingness to do a lady’s domestic bidding in her home, free of charge, in exchange for the opportunity to do it in their birthday suit. This is nothing more than an idle fantasy, of course, because I’ve always been suspicious of proposals like these. There’s no such thing as a free lunch after all and I couldn’t vouch for Mountain Man’s benign reaction on coming home to a strange man, naked save for a pinny, marigolds and a feather duster - could he bring his own feather duster? I don’t have one - gleaming taps, pristine tiles and scrubbed grout notwithstanding. But oh, we have lots of tiles and miles and miles of grout and now I’ve cleaned, say, a square metre, the rest looks rather dingy. So I’m tempted.

Daughter did Sudoki in detention. Contrary to the results of her extensive prior research, they weren’t allowed to eat or mess around in the internet. The teacher-in-charge was half asleep. Daughter and friend spent the last ten minutes flicking paper clips at each other.

Last night, I met a hero (I wish I could tell you who, how and why). Not a hero in the archetypal-mythological sense, not a hero as defined by the inflationary use of the term, e.g. sports hero (although, if you googled him you’d unfailingly find the word hero in the first five articles you came across and no doubt beyond; I didn’t read further), but: an ordinary man who has known great personal tragedy and shown great courage in the service of others.

He shook my hand, didn’t let go and thanked me - me! - for playing my part. He wasn’t as tall as I'd expected; his palms were warm and his smile infectious. He was generous, unobtrusively charismatic and called me “ma’am”. He asked me which part of Britain I came from (I managed to stutter a reply). He jocularly referred to himself as a colonist and I smiled and replied that I didn’t hold it against him, which just goes to show what rubbish you spout in the face of greatness. We talked while he clasped my hand in both of his and then he pulled me over the room in full view of everyone to introduce me to his wife and friends.

I’m still choked up. I’ve never felt such awe, and my faith in humanity has been reasserted.

I didn’t want to go to this function although my name was on the guest list. It doesn’t take much to dissuade a mild-to-moderate agoraphobic from leaving her comfort zone; a stubbed toe, minuscule change in temperature or the wind blowing from the wrong direction will suffice. And the day hadn’t got off to a promising start; I was feeling irritable, overwhelmed and beset with minor woes. In short; my “lady function”, as a correspondent so endearingly referred to it, was acting up, as the lady function tends to when it’s been overruled, suppressed, ignored and eschewed in favour of “getting things done” for a length of time.

Mountain Man was having none of it, and when I say that, I don’t mean he was being particularly assertive. Assertiveness has a 100% failure rate. He was being sly by addressing desire rather than fear. (We agoraphobics are a selfish bunch; dangle a juicy carrot in front of our inner hedonist and attention whore and we’re out of there like a shot.) Also: I can go almost anywhere as long as it’s with him or another "safe" person. That’s the way it works. (Other things work too, such as a daily 5mg dose of Cipralex, an antidepressant that is prescribed off-label for agoraphobia. I am proof of its efficacy.) If you’d like to know more, she describes it brilliantly. (Especially this: "I can't bear being the centre of attention. So obviously I'm looking forward to my wedding day! If I run away from the altar it'll look quite bad. I'll have to get pissed, or take loads of Valium." I know the feeling so well, if not pertaining to the same event. Sedation is infinitely preferable to getting plastered and it goes without saying that one NEVER implements both methods simultaneously.) All I can add to her observations is that agoraphobia is something only other people get until it happens to you.

“People say I come across as quite confident, which is weird. It's the one thing I'd like to be.”