Shari Low - The Motherhood Walk of Fame

Anyway, my kids were fine, so I crossed them off the ‘Why am I discontented today?’ questionnaire. They were wild, mad, crazy, and no doubt destined for borstal, but for now they were fine.

Maybe career? I find it difficult to discuss my career in isolation as it’s actually inextricably linked to my family background. You see, I am not, as appearances, birth certificates and DNA suggest, the daughter of a haughtily superior schoolteacher and a woefully inadequate finance salesman who shared every penny the family ever had with his pals Johnnie Walker and Jack Daniel’s. I am, actually, the secret love-child of Jackie Collins and Sidney Sheldon. I haven’t quite worked out how I managed to find my way to a Scottish maternity ward all those years ago, but I’m sure that Jackie had a good reason for giving me up for adoption. Maybe the Mafia were after her and she feared for my safety. Perhaps she didn’t want me to grow up spoiled and superficial and thought I’d become a more grounded, soulful person if my childhood was spent in an area of urban deprivation on the outskirts of Glasgow (in which case, Mom, I can assure you that it worked–I’m lovely, now please come and get me). Anyway, whatever the reason, for my whole life I knew that when I grew up I wanted to be a writer, just like my real parents. I’d write a ton of salacious best sellers, go to live in LA, have a kidney-shaped swimming pool and do dirty things to brooding Italian studs.

Sadly, it hasn’t quite worked out that way. My first book, Nipple Alert, did pretty well for a debut. Fab! magazine even said it was a ‘riotous romp’. Okay, so they say that about everything with a pink cover, but it’s a start. My second book, Pre-Mental Syndrome, sold pretty well too. Not Marian-Keyes-oh-my-God-let’s-buy-a-Ferrari well, but it sold out its first and second print run. So I should be loaded, right? Wrong. Why did no one tell me that unless you sell ten gazillion books the dosh doesn’t trickle in until about 347 years after you’re dead?

So to keep the bank manager off my back and my secret credit card in the black, I write a pathetically pretentious weekly column on the joys of motherhood for Family Values magazine. Which should really be called OK Ya!, because it’s nothing but an upmarket, incredibly naff suck-up to upper-class and celebrity mothers. Excuse me, my gag reflex is trembling again. The magazine demands that it’s written from the perspective of the perfect mother, so to write it I need a massive stretch of imagination and a sick bag on hand for the really nauseating bits. But hey, I’m a mother with a Tonka-truck of bills so I’ll take the money and keep on churning out the gospel according to a mother that I’d want to kill if I ever met her.

Life hasn’t exactly turned out how I imagined, has it? Sunny Beverly Hills? Great career? Kidney-shaped pool? Italian studs? I got pissing-down Richmond, a ridiculous job, a puddle out the back door, and I suppose if Mark clutched a pizza and kept his mouth shut he might just pass for someone who once spent half an hour in a transit lounge in Rome.

I opened the back door and lit a Benson & Hedges. Filthy habit. I’m so glad I stopped doing it in public years ago. Far better to freeze one’s arse off in secret in the valiant pursuit of an iron lung than to acknowledge to your husband and children that you have the willpower of Pavarotti in Pizza Express.

I could hear music coming from next door. I use that term loosely. It sounded like the greatest hits from the Nepalese panpipe charts. Then I caught sight of two feet dangling upside-down in midair, through next-door’s kitchen window. There’s only one thing bloody worse than a neighbour who listens to Nepalese panpipe music, and that’s a neighbour who listens to Nepalese panpipe music while they’re doing yoga. How’s a girl supposed to enjoy toxic free-radicals and poisonous chemicals destroying her skin and clogging her lungs when the neighbour is spoiling the environment with spiritual music and invigorating exercise?

It shouldn’t be allowed. Especially when the neighbour is supposed to be your best friend. If she were any kind of pal she’d be out here with a sneaky Silk Cut and a Bakewell slice.

Friends. In the past I’d have waged my worldly goods on at least one of them having a situation that could be responsible for this gnawing feeling, but nope, nothing dramatic, disgraceful or worrying sprung to mind there either. Kate next door is nauseatingly happily married to an architect called Bruce, a nauseatingly great mother to a Walton-like brood, nauseatingly toned and together, and has a nauseatingly glam part-time job as a fashion stylist. Just as well I love her a nauseating amount really. Although, I do realise that it breaks the solemn code of friendship: thou shalt not have a friend that’s skinnier, smarter or more successful, as envy giveth thou frown lines and wrinkles.

Kate and I have been best friends since we were kids on a council estate about five miles from Glasgow. There was a gang of us: me (Carly Cooper, now Barwick–or it would be if I had ever got around to officially changing my name after I got married), Kate, Carol, Sarah and Jess. And we stuck together through thick (Carol flunked O-level cookery), thin (and she makes Posh look like she’s got a high-grade Dairy Milk habit), richer (Sarah married a millionaire), poorer (after she escaped a life of abuse and poverty with her first husband), sickness (Jess once had an affair with politician Basil Asquith, who turned out to be the MP for Very Sick and Perverse Sexual Habits) and health (yoga, panpipes).

Strangely, we didn’t do that normal thing where you lose touch after school, then find each other twenty years later through Friends Reunited, drag your partners along to a reunion party, only for pheromones to fly like pigeons on steroids and the next thing you know you’re throwing your car keys in a bowl and it’s a wife-swapping scandal in the News of the World. Or does that only happen in the Cotswolds?

We all, via jobs, men or missing each other, ended up living in London together for years and although we’re a bit more scattered around now, we’re still pals. We’re kind of like Girls Aloud, only with lower breasts and slight hints of jowls.

In fact, some of us are real family now. Carol, once Scotland’s favourite model and for many years the international face of the Visit Scotland tourism campaign, married my brother Cal, also a model and once the face and bollocks of the Calvin Klein underwear range. What was I thinking when I was in the womb? I was obviously so busy floating around doing frivolous things like developing internal organs that I left all the best-looking genes to my brother. Anyway, they now live in one of the really big expensive houses up on the edge of Richmond Park with their twins in the attic and my other brother Michael in the basement. Michael asked them if they’d mind if he slept over one night. That was four years ago.

Jess lives in France now with partner Keith and her son Josh. I think she went for the peace and quiet. She was a major tabloid story here when her affair with the MP was rumbled and splashed across the Sunday Echo. Lord, do I have any normal friends? Anyway, she then married the journalist who exposed the story, had Josh, discovered her husband was a no-good cheating bastard, left him and met Keith–a lovely builder who adores her. They renovate old properties in a wine region in the South (could be Champagne, Chardonnay, Lambrini…I’m never sure) and keep chickens.

And Sarah? Aw, get ready to say ‘aaaah’ and have your faith in human nature restored. Sarah left school, went straight into a horrendous relationship with a psycho, had two kids, finally fled from Sleeping with the Enemy a year later, met Nick Russo–celebrated restaurant owner and the man I lost my virginity to, although I’m sure the two aren’t connected–fell in love, married him and now they’re in New York overseeing the opening of Nick’s fourteenth restaurant.