My girls don’t usually ask me to write about anything. Normally, they’re begging me not to mention them, their friends, the strange ways of teenagers …. anything, basically, which even touches vaguely on their lives is strictly off-limits.
Until I bought them new brushes the other day. One of the awful things for divorced children is that they get used, in theory at least, to travelling between parents, constantly on the move. This was an aspect of the whole business that I didn’t consider at all at the time that Mr X and I were in mid-split. I didn’t really know anyone else who was divorced and, even if I had, I’m not sure anything would have diverted me from my course. But anyway, the children absolutely hate being nomads, constantly leaving something crucial in one place or the other, and I’m also not too delighted to get those late-night phone calls saying, ‘I need my piano music/blue boots/best earrings NOW!’.
Of course, they are actually lucky that both their parents love them madly and want to spend time with them. They know, at some level, that there are lots of children who are much worse off, who’ve lost contact with one or other of their parents, voluntarily or involuntarily, and are coping with far worse travails than the odd missing sports sock. But, equally, it’s hard to get things in perspective when you’re a teenager whose blood supply is 95 per cent hormones and 5 per cent moans.
So when I got them hairbrushes to replace some which had been lost in transit this summer somewhere between Mallorca, France, Wales and Italy, they were very sweetly thrilled. So much so that they asked me specially to write about them. They are called Tangle Teezers (and no, I am not being paid one penny for this mention) and they are brilliant for those, like us, with very thick but at the same time fine hair. They get through any tangles without tugging, goodness knows how, and leave your hair all softy. Fab. And they’re a British invention which was, best of all, turned down by the Dragons’ Den.
