When your own family affairs exactly mirror those of the Firm
I AM absolutely hooked on The Cry, BBC One’s hit new drama. Jenna Coleman, above, is a revelation. Yes, she was good as Dr Who’s pretty assistant and as the young Queen Victoria but her performance in this emotionally searing series is quite extraordinary.
Jenna plays Jo, a young first-time mother who visits her partner Alistair’s native Australia with three-monthold Noah, so Alistair can claim custody of his daughter by his first marriage. Jo is exhausted by motherhood: she doesn’t get any sleep, largely because her scuzzball partner (beautifully and sinisterly played by Ewen Leslie) hardly helps look after their son at all. On the interminable flight to Australia he sleeps, eye-mask firmly in place, while Jo tries to calm her grizzling baby as passengers make hostile remarks about her maternal abilities.
There are many twists and I won’t spoil it for you if you have yet to catch The Cry on BBC iPlayer. Suffice to say that Noah disappears when they reach Australia, apparently kidnapped. Jo has to endure trial by media as well as her own grief and guilt. Coleman portrays the tangled emotions of a mother bereft by loss and suffering from post-natal depression. This drama is relentless, and it’s not an easy watch. But once you start watching it you won’t be able to stop. It’s gripping. IT’S quite weird to find your life mirrored in newspapers’ royal headlines. With a profusion of babies and weddings in my own family it seems we are at the same stage in life as Charles and Camilla, Andrew and Fergie.
Last weekend, during the celebrations of Princess Eugenie’s wedding (she looked so happy, in such a lovely dress) Richard and I found ourselves at the same hotel near Windsor where many of the wedding guests were staying. As we arrived at around 5pm on Saturday afternoon the manager wryly told us they’d all just left for the bride’s big post-wedding party at Royal Lodge, Prince Andrew’s nearby home. They weren’t expected back until the early hours.
The reason we were at that hotel was because it’s where our daughter Chloe is holding her own wedding reception in December.
And on Sunday morning we attended the local country church in which she’ll be wed to hear the vicar read the banns. Then back to the hotel to meet the wedding planner and watch Eugenie’s guests stagger down from their rooms looking distinctly the worse for wear. Among them was comedian Jimmy Carr, who told us the royal party was “brilliant” and he’d never drunk so much in his life. A good time was clearly had by all.
But like Charles and Camilla, our lives have been full of weddings, pregnancies and babies this year. Harry and Megan’s marriage in May, and now the happy announcement of her pregnancy, completely chimes in with what’s been happening to us. Two new grandchildren born since January, a wedding in a few weeks and a christening and another engagement also on the cards.
So apologies for writing about family life again but at the moment we’re so swamped by the huge events being experienced by our four grown-up children that I can’t think about anything else.
When you dwell on the major milestones of life they include births and marriages but the marriages of your own children (and the birth of their own offspring) in fact drown out your own early experiences. Somehow they feel even more emotional.
Added to the 30th anniversary of our old TV show This Morning, which included shots of our own kids as babies, I’ve been a nervous wreck this October. In a good way, obviously. Next year will, I hope, be calmer but somehow I doubt it.
it’s a fracking dress code
FRACKING for gas began in Lancashire on Monday and protesters gathered in force. But as angry face after angry face appeared on the TV news I was increasingly distracted from their objections by their clothes. All without exception wore woollen bobble hats pulled down low almost to the eyebrows and thick woollen scarves wrapped around their throats. Why? It was summer-warm earlier this week. Is this some kind of year-round uniform only anti-frackers wear? Or are they especially cold? If it’s the latter, maybe they should actually welcome cheaper gas to heat their homes.