A Year of Doing Good Read online

  He looked me up and down dubiously, and inside my puffa coat I sucked in my stomach so hard it slapped against my spine. My husband is one of those lean runners who have the same rangy body in their forties as they did in their twenties. I have someone else’s entirely. A few years ago, heavies took mine away in the middle of the night, wrapped it in chains and threw it out of a low-flying plane into the sea; I’ve had to make do ever since.

  ‘And did you get fit?’ The bastard knew the answer.

  ‘I went running.’

  ‘Once. You went running once.’

  Running is hard. All that effort. All those hills. Frankly, if I’m not working, I am with the kids and if I’m not with the kids, I’m working. But I can slot a good deed into my day without breaking a sweat. How hard can it be?

  ‘Are you serious about this resolution?’ My husband has been known to claim I complicate our lives. He can talk. As a journalist, he lives in a state of semi-permanent deadline: either he is working all hours at his desk at home or he is working all hours in London pulling together supplements for a national newspaper. He is driven – one of life’s perfectionists; I, on the other hand, am one of life’s amateurs. ‘Does doing stuff for me and the kids count as a good deed, for instance?’ He sounded momentarily hopeful.

  I stopped walking to watch the dunes. We have a boy of nearly ten, a boy just turned eight and a five-year-old daughter with a smile like the first day of spring. Usually, you glimpse one or other child barrelling along the tops. I held my breath till first one and then the next and then the smallest appeared, running and leaping the gaps where the dunes fall away, their shouts of delight and fury carrying across the sands, over our heads and out across the grey-blue rolling sea. Reassured, I considered my husband’s questions. I was serious. Did doing things for him and the kids count? Surely not. I am going to draw up some rules of engagement – like in war.

  Good deed no. 3: rang Sophie, my best friend from school, who is sick with Lyme disease, to cheer her up.

  Tuesday, 4 January

  The lock has stopped working on the back door and a handy sort of mate came over to try and fix it. I didn’t bother mentioning we are so neurotic that last night we decided Al should sleep on the sofa in the kitchen in case a paedophile tried to gain entry and abduct a child. At least that’s how mad I thought we were. Actually, Al’s even madder than that, because he confessed he slept with an axe within reach.

  While my mate was fixing the lock he mentioned his sister is having her first baby, so out came two enormous boxes of baby toys I had cleared from the kids’ rooms. A good-deed result. The only problem was that tonight when we got back from a day out, the boxes were still there on the kitchen table. This particular good deed may be on a slow burn. Whether he wants them or not, my mate is now morally obliged to take them. In any event, the question arises how much self-interest is permitted in a good deed? Frankly, I would fall at anyone’s feet if they took away clart, debris or general baby clutter from this house. Question: is a good deed still a good deed if it benefits the giver as much as the receiver? (These good deeds are an ethical quagmire.)

  Good deed no. 4.

  Wednesday, 5 January

  The cottage where we live is a former farm labourer’s cottage – one of a string, the others used as holiday homes. Built as one-storey, then there were two, the whinstone and sandstone walls are soft-buttered with pale mortar and steep-roofed in grey slate. Behind the cottages is nothing much – a massive breeze-block and iron barn where a farmer stores piles of golden wheat and plastic sacks of fertilizer like immense Chinese pork dumplings. But in front, quilted pastureland of green and golden silks falls away to the distant grey-blue sea, and despite the massive beech and sycamores that stand guardian alongside, there is openness, space and a sense of possibilities. The countryside isn’t quiet, though – not this countryside anyway. Soft, brown garden birds sing and chirrup and whistle, and wings flap heavily as wood pigeons bustle through the trees avoiding the rooks’ nests caught like knots of hair in their skinny wintry branches. And then there is the wind, sometimes so slight you scarcely notice it, sometimes pushy and loud and straight from the North Sea.

  The problem with living in Northumberland and working from home, I am discovering, is that it’s all big skies and sheep, and you don’t see many people to do good deeds for. I was mulling over the fact I might have to go into the village and mug a pensioner so I could make him a cup of sweet tea when my friend Lily rang asking me to do her a favour and pick her son up from school because her four-year-old daughter had fallen over in the playground and she had to take her to Accident and Emergency. She seemed taken aback when I cheered.

  The little girl was fine, though sporting an egg on her temple, and when Lily arrived she gave me a bouquet of roses with velvet petals the colour of a Caribbean sunset. The flowers were gorgeous but disconcerting. Question to self: can a good deed still be considered a good deed if you are rewarded so thoroughly for the same? The reward was not solicited, but the roses are very lovely and it is not even as if taking care of the boy was any great trouble. I didn’t realize I would have to think so hard about this good deed business.

  Good deed no. 5.

  Thursday, 6 January

  We moved to Northumberland because my husband loved it. I came round to it, or it came round to me – who knows? When I moved from the East End of London, I left behind old friends who knew and forgave me for the fact I had moved away from them, but there was no one who loved me as deeply or as well in Northumberland. Who has friends when they move some place new? People who buy them off Amazon, that’s who. I did that for a while – though the postman complained – but gradually, along the way, I acquired friends-in-the-North. It took me a while, though, to catch Lily.

  Lily owns 149 pairs of shoes (I know because I made her count them) and 70 bags, many from Hermès, Mulberry, Prada, Gucci, Louis Vuitton and Fendi. She moved up to a smallholding in the wilds from a fancy gaff in Newcastle a couple of years after me, and she seemed just my type (although my handbag comes from M&S and I have no shoes to speak of). The problem was she was always busy, busy, busy, whirligigging around as if the pieces of the pale blue sky would fall down and flatten her if she stopped moving. It took me years of nagging to get her to stop long enough to realize she was my friend and there was no getting out of it, however hard she tried and however fast she ran in her paint-splattered trackies and her diamanté flip-flops.

  Lily started life as a paediatric nurse and went on to a big job in IT with a six-figure salary (hence the bags and the shoes) and a favourite plane seat. Now she runs round in ever-decreasing circles juggling snippets of consultancy with managing the smallholding, a five-star holiday cottage business and her kids (which is an even bigger job but for a lot less money and absolutely no benefits). We have in common the knowledge that it is a thin line between a been-there-done-that career and a has-been-never-do-again life. It helps that once we both had proper careers – till she got made redundant and I got a bad case of family-first, career-second, which can frankly kill you stone-dead with regret if you let it. It helps too that her children and mine are the same age. She is late for everything – usually because she has tried to fit one more thing between the-very-last-thing-on-my-list and it-was-round-the-corner-so-it-seemed-a-crime-not-to.

  The first time I invited her to my house for coffee with a few girls, she arrived early and promptly washed up my breakfast things and then ran upstairs to clean the bathroom. She was obviously brought up the same as me: you don’t come for tea and leave a sink of dirty pots behind you. The only time up here I haven’t done the same is when I was asked round for coffee by a very lovely, very posh mummy with lots of other posh mummies, and I had to physically sit on my hands to stop myself from washing up because there was no way on God’s earth the idea of clearing the table was in anyone’s mind other than mine.

  Good deed no. 6: checked on a cousin recently bereaved.

  Friday, 7 Jan
uary

  Distracted by a migraine that felt as if black rats were hanging from my eyeballs by their claws. It chewed up my entire morning, which I had to spend in bed with only my eyeball rats and drugs for company – beta blockers, paracetamol and codeine. It was so bad Al had to get the kids off to school while I wallowed upstairs groaning. Of course I now have almost a week of good-deedery behind me, so as a distraction, and to protect myself against charges of moral laxity, I drew up my Rules of Engagement:

  Some good deeds may require time, emotional investment and a great deal of energy, but modest – indeed itsy-bitsy – good deeds are permissible. Life is in the detail. I am officially allowed to think small.

  Good deeds for extended family (including my aged parents) and my network of friends are as acceptable as good deeds for strangers, bearing in mind it is family and friends who dominate my life.

  Good deeds for the nuclear family of husband and children are not acceptable. I cannot count feeding my kids, putting them to bed or doing their washing as a good deed – even though many is the time such maternal duties are a considerable inconvenience.

  It is impossible to predict the consequences of a good deed. More important than the success or failure of a good deed is the intention behind it. The intention must be to provide benefit to someone other than myself or a general benefit to society.

  There is a chance that the good deeds will occasionally provide benefit to self (for example, thanks or roses or less clutter in one’s own house). This is acceptable providing the main motivation behind the good deed is not to require said benefit.

  Good deed no. 7: gave my expat cousins a CD of their favourite movie soundtrack, picked up while out shopping.

  Saturday, 8 January

  Good deed no. 8: picked up someone’s change when it fell to the floor in the newsagent and returned it.

  Sunday, 9 January

  Had my expat cousins over for dinner. They grew up in Yorkshire but emigrated to Africa in 1975 when she was an air hostess and he was a policeman, to escape ‘the rain, a Labour government and a terrible cricket team’. After thirty-five years in Africa, they decided that however brightly the sun shone over the rainbow nation, they didn’t want to see out their days there, and a few months ago returned to Blighty. The year they left Britain, inflation was running at 24 per cent; The Sweeney premiered on ITV; sitcom stars Windsor Davies and Don Estelle were at number one with ‘Whispering Grass’; Harold Wilson was Prime Minister; and the Conservatives elected Margaret Thatcher as their first woman party leader. Give or take another punishing economic crisis, they have come back to a different country: inflation isn’t a problem, although everything else in the economy is; violent, no-holds-barred 1970s detectives are ridiculed, not glamorized; Don Estelle is dead – as is Harold Wilson; and they just made a biopic about the fact Lady Thatcher, who served as PM for eleven years, has dementia. I believe they are in shock. Luckily he still has the moustache he went out with.

  She is sixty-three and he is sixty-eight, their parents are long dead, there are no brothers or sisters and they don’t have children. What is ‘home’ after all? Not a flag, nor a cricket team, nor even your own history – home is who you love, so they have come home to us as their nearest and dearest. Both of them are wrapped in so many layers they are like birthday presents waiting to be opened come the day, and they have not been warm since they arrived. I cooked roast beef and trimmings – including very flat Yorkshire puddings – to remind them how bad British food can be.

  Good deed no. 9.

  Monday, 10 January

  Finally went to the doctor about my migraines after my post-new-year stonker. I’ve decided to see a consultant, and needed a GP referral. The doctor said he would dig me out a name and told me my blood tests were all fine, which was a relief. At least I know now that migraines aren’t from a grapefruit-sized tumour, which is what I was beginning to think, and which would have been a shame because I have always liked grapefruits.

  After the doctor, as my good deed, we went to see the little old lady who used to live in this house and who moved down to the village after her husband died. She lives in a neat little yellow-brick bungalow on a well-tended little estate with handkerchief lawns and palings around the very tidy gardens and, to my utter horror, it turned out that we had completely forgotten her New Year’s Day drinks. Every year she has open house with bottles aligned on the cabinet, and her family sit round in her living room and people wash in and out of the house and drink whisky at ten o’clock in the morning. This year, I had so many people washing in and out of my own house, her invitation completely went out of my head. While we were there, her neighbour came in, as she does every morning and every afternoon. The neighbour is about to go to Australia, where she heads every year, and was full of stories about pythons trying to eat her brother’s cockatoo and my personal favourite: a whirligig dustball blowing into the house which turned out to be a spider mother (festooned with spider babies) who got stomped on and all the spider babies fled to the four corners of the room. It quite put me off my golden crunch biscuit.

  Al is heading for London tomorrow and is not due back till very late on Thursday night. This removes tomorrow’s fallback position of a blow-job which he kindly offered to let me give him (at no extra cost) in the event of running out of other good deeds to do. I have told him I can always cheer up the postman.

  Good deed no. 10.

  Tuesday, 11 January

  Good deed no. 11: let the electricians into a neighbouring holiday cottage.

  Wednesday, 12 January

  About noon there was a barking and a tremendous commotion, and when I went outside, the access road outside the cottage and my garden were a heaving muddy mass of panting, stiff-tailed hounds searching out a scent. Blow my horn, the hunt was upon us. From atop his horse, the whipper-in was shooing the hounds back out, and as I went to shut the farm gate the hunters in their black jackets all waved cheerily and thanked me with exquisite courtesy as they trotted on and the doggy tail-end Charlies leaped and scrambled over the ivy-clad stone wall, back to the pack.

  I had no sooner gone back inside to my desk than there was more hallooing and clipping-clopping, and when I went back out into the winter sun, Ally and the Lovely Claire were up on their enormous shiny horses waiting for me by the shut-up gate. Ally and I met through the school, while Claire is the partner of the farmer who owns the land around our cottage and the barn full of wheat and Chinese dumplings behind it. They are both deeply glamorous and looked like something from a ‘County Belle’ photo-shoot captioned, ‘How tight to wear your jodhpurs this season’ – unlike me, who wasn’t to know the county set would invade my garden and was caught out in a murky sloppy joe with a serious case of bed-head. We held an impromptu coffee morning, but instead of coffee I served up plastic beakers of Pinot Grigio, and as soon as she’d drained dry her plastic beaker Ally announced that she was giving up alcohol for the month of April and would I like to join her.

  Giving up alcohol strikes me as a terrible idea, but in the spirit of good-deedery, I said: a. for the record, I had no idea why she thought I might be suitable for such an experiment; and b. if the friend she is doing it with dropped out on her, I would take her place.

  I absolutely didn’t mean it. Surely doing good deeds means I get to drink twice as much as normal?

  As a thank you for the refreshments, once she had emptied her Mr Incredible beaker, Claire suggested I get up on her horse and she would lead me up and down the access road. The Lovely Claire is the only person I know who trills over large and small pleasures – sometimes I imagine her perched on a branch of a tree clad in jewel colours and an ostrich-feathered headdress and tail, trilling out her joy that dawn has come again. She has one of those naturally sunny dispositions – plus, she is beautiful, statuesque and blonde. Perhaps it is easier to have a sunny disposition if you are downright gorgeous? I am five feet two inches – if I was only that bit taller, I might be less cranky myself. Altho
ugh I am immensely fond of her, I normally refuse to stand anywhere near her, on the grounds she makes me look bad.

  At well over six feet tall, she needs a horse of seventeen and a half hands (which doesn’t mean much unless you know about horses, but the term ‘monster’ would genuinely cover it). It is her life’s ambition to make me love horses. It is my life’s ambition not to. Once I had mounted the damn thing – that is to say, stood on a garden bench, put my left foot in the stirrup, stood up in it and then thrown my right leg further than I thought possible – it struck me that I was far closer to the sky than I wanted to be. Regarding me thoughtfully as I sat there trembling, Ally advised a twelve- to thirteen-hand pony would be fine for me and that I might feel safer on something smaller. I am guessing she put it on the record in case I went online once they left, googled ‘monster’ and bought one on eBay. In any event, aside from sitting on an engaged missile heading for a Taliban stronghold, it is difficult to see how I would have felt less safe. On the grounds she knows everyone in Northumberland, I asked Claire as she led me up and down the access road whether she could persuade someone in the local radio station to take the little old lady’s seventeen-year-old grandson for work experience. She is going to ask a presenter mate of hers and get back to me.

  By the time we finished, and Claire had managed to get me off the horse again, which involves letting go of everything and trusting the ground will eventually meet your feet (skydiving would have got me there quicker), the hunt had long gone. I doubt the girls managed to find it again, but they didn’t seem to care. I heard them clipping-clopping down the lane as I went back to my desk. Clip-clop-trill. Clip-clop-trill.