strange time in my life

I’m not saying that I don’t like Mother’s friend Janet, but I don’t like it when I see Mother’s mouth turning into an o shape, knowing that she’s going to finish her sentence “I meeting up with,” with “our Janet,” the most boring person in the world. It’s not that I am offended by Janet, it is not that, it is just that I don’t know who the communal people mother is referring to when she says “our” (me and her? Her and Dad? Her and her sisters?), and Janet is boring. Janet is boring because she tells stories. Not exciting tales of how she had to rescue a dog from up a tree because it had tried to retrieve it’s stick that someone had thrown up there, having the confidence to jump up onto a low thick branch, but unable to come back down again, but boring stories about how someone cut in front of her in the queue in Tesco, or how she had received a letter from “Old Bob”, and detailing every mundane point Bob had told her.

So whenever I see Mother’s mouth moving into an o shape, mid way through “I’m meeting up with our Janet,” I just hope that the sentence isn’t over yet and that she’s going to carry on to say “at her house,” or, better, “in her cottage in the Lake District.” Janet is a lucky woman with a second home, and I like it best when Mother and her see each other there, as I do not have to interact with Janet in any way. Also Mother knows my feelings about Janet, so hardly ever tells me about her trips with Janet. Worst of all, however, is when Mother ends her sentences with “later on this after noon, and she’s coming here for cake.” It is at that moment that I think about where to go and who I can meet up with, or where I can walk that takes 3 hours.

Mother and/or Janet always seem to manage to get into a pickle that forces me away from what I have found to do so I have to come back home and rescue them from the wasp nest they found, the tarantula that has appeared, or the injured cat that has nested at the end of our lawn. For someone as boring as Janet, she manages to get into a lot of unusual situations when she’s with Mother. As soon as I’m covering myself with antihistamine or thanking the harmful species rescuers or arriving home from the RSPCA, however, Janet has forgotten all about her drama and has resumed telling Mother about the flower design she saw on some curtains she was going to buy for the conservatory her and Gregory were still debating whether or not to get.