So today I’m going to see Boynotquiteonthenetheredge for the first time in 2 months.

And I’m a bit nervous.

A lot of people seem to have been very interested in how BNQOTNE and I have been doing in lockdown, when not locked down together. HOW HAVE WE BEEN KEEPING THE MAGIC ALIVE, I’ve been asked. Well, we have followed a simple 5 step plan.

And no, none of them are about Zanking. (Zoom Wanking). Sorry.

1. Realism

First and foremost, we haven’t been.

Keeping the magic alive, that is, obvs. (I can’t comment on the other thing, clearly, as I’m a model of discretion and patron saint of personal boundaries).

The thing is that this is not a particularly magical time, is it? Anyone feeling super magical? No? We’ve both been trying to do our jobs, entertain and home school (haahahahahhaaaaaa) small children, on our own, without any of our normal anchors or support mechanisms, including each other.

It’s boring and exhausting. It’s also weird and worrying. And LONELY. And HARD. That’s not particularly… magical.

2. Shared hobbies

When we have managed to escape reality for a bit and aren’t too bloody busy or depressed, we’ve been throwing ourselves into new hobbies.

Have you seen that brilliant Museum Challenge thing where people are recreating fine art paintings with props from home? Please look it up, you won’t be disappointed! BNQOTNE and I have been doing this, but with nudes.

I’ve never been much into sending nude photographs because I’m old, it’s never been on my radar – and frankly I wasn’t born with the natural knack of the selfie.

Despite this, so far I have managed to recreate Boticelli’s Birth of Venus standing in a suitcase rather than a giant clam shell, Eve with a supporting cast of stuffed toys including sequined snake – and several reclining nudes from Degas to Schiele.

In return The Boy has sent me an image of him as David wrestling a lion (a giant bouncy unicorn) and Franz Von Stuck’s Mermaid (with a Barbie). My favourite has probably been a self portrait by Egon Schiele again, of the artist in an orange towel – only the Boy used a Sainsbury’s bag. I literally laughed until I cried.

We have both become competitive over attention to detail, lighting and prop absurdity.

Getting the right shot takes time and considerable dedication. You need to balance your phone on something the right height at the right angle. You get a better image with the front facing camera, which gives you the maximum of 10 seconds on timer to get yourself in front of it and in the right pose.

Sadly in my rush to mount the rocking horse for my John Collier Lady Godiva parody, I stubbed my little toe on my makeshift washing basket tripod, and I think I actually broke it.

Still got the damn shot, though.

They do say love hurts. So does taking nudes, the way I do it. Anyway, I defy this not to be the most middle class thing you hear today. KEEP ME POSTED.

3. Theme Zoom dates

Why wouldn’t you?

We’ve done Buffy fancy dress and binged watched series 6, and a slightly different kind of art date, where we both did various self portraits in different mediums, with wine.

Mostly clothed.

4. Bad puns

There’s been a great deal of exchanging memes, or general word play and punning.

I still think I got too little credit for my recent cheese/sex puns, which somehow came up in conversation, and included cum-embert and mask’n’boneme. (It is possible the lack of physical intimacy is taking its toll).

5. Sharing the small stuff

We’re still sharing the cute stuff the various smalls say, the less cute stuff when they’re whinging, fighting, refusing to do any bloody work or generally being ungrateful little eejits, what’s for tea, what we’ve done at work that day, political thoughts, bad dreams, daily highs and lows.

That’s really what life boils down to, after all. And if you’ve not got the small stuff you can’t have the big stuff.

But now.

Now we’re going to see each other in person for the first time in 8 weeks, and I’m NERVOUS.

It sort of feels like a much higher-stakes first date.

I’m nervous because I haven’t driven the car more than to the shops and back once a week, and he’s a 40 minute drive away, and I’m rusty. And a terrible driver at the best of times.

I’m nervous because when I get there (presuming I do) 2 metres is still so damn FAR.

I’m nervous becuase I’m supposed to be going for a long walk on my stupid broken toe, which is still sore.

I’m nervous about all the garlic I ate yesterday and that he’ll be close enough to smell it on my breath. I’m nervous he won’t be.

I’m nervous because I’m touch starved and haven’t touched another adult – or indeed been touched by anyone not launching a killer-bee-wasp attack, demanding a strictly lift, handing me something nasty, or requiring an injury to be tended to – for a really, really long time.

I’m nervous because I could really, really use a damn hug.

I’m nervous in case I don’t have anything to say because we’ve said it all on text and everyday is exactly the same anyway, and even if the small stuff is what matters in the end it’s ALSO true that there’s nothing new or interesting, and we’re basically living in the film groundhog day.

I’m nervous because I’m different on text, and that’s a large part of how we’ve been keeping in touch – I’m funnier, I’m quicker, I’m more honest.

Given the last few weeks, I’m also a lot bloody thinner too…

I’m nervous because I can’t disguise the lockdown weight gain by controlling my lighting or angles. Or props.

I’m nervous because we’ve both been having good days and bad days and they haven’t always coincided.

I’m nervous because everywhere people are so fed up and so confused by the patently stupid new rules that they’re making up their own, and that worries me, and I don’t want to give him anything, or get anything and bring it home.

I’m nervous that I’ve been looking forward to seeing him so much, and what if he’s not as pleased to see me as I am to see him.

I’m nervous that I’ve pinned a lot on being able to see him, and it making my life so much better, but what if it doesn’t: what if everything still feels awful, what if it makes it WORSE? What if it’s snatched away again in another lockdown?

I’m nervous, because I want him like me, still. And life is hard and confusing and I’M not sure I like me much at the moment, and everything about being locked away is setting off all my abandonment issues, but on acid.

I’m nervous about everything, because everything is scary right now.

The one thing I’m NOT nervous about is him dumping me and sharing my nude photographs – partly because I doubt he’s that much of a Zanker, and partly because if he does I look great and they’re bloody hilarious.

Wish me luck.

I feel like I spent most of my 20s trying not to get pregnant.

Then I feel like I spent most of my 30s trying TO get pregnant. With varying degrees of success.

Now I’m entering my 40s I’m back on NOT, again, other than the odd womb pang when I see a small baby asleep – which usually disappears pretty fast when it wakes up.

The trouble with not wanting to be pregnant in your 40s is that there really aren’t any brilliant options.

First of all, my vagina is old. And grumpy. Possibly, you might say, CROTCH-ety.

To be fair, it’s been through some crap… Like children, which I suppose technically have been through it. Not in my case, obviously, because of the c-sections – but still.

All of this has left it with very little sympathy for womb pangs, and some Very Fixed Ideas.

Far from being loosened by the two pregnancies/children, for instance, it has now adopted a very strict shut-door policy to any lumps of dry cotton shoved up it from a cold standing start. Nope. Nopity nope nope nope.

This makes swimming on my period rather inconvenient, and I’ve tried explaining it nicely, but it doesn’t care. It feels much the same way about moon cups.

Another of its new and Very Fixed Ideas is that condoms are evil, and it will stage an unholy Thrush Protest if faced with one. This is also somewhat inconvenient to the mid-life dater.

It is also Over the pill. Nothing but break-through bleeding, cramps, and mood swings FROM MERRY RED HELL.

See? Definitely crotchety.

Not that the pill is now much of an option anyway….I’ve spent at least 25 years on the combination pill, on and off, but apparently when you hit your fourth decade it’s pretty much out of bounds – I think on the grounds of thrombosis/cancer/misc other horrifying side effects.

Your GP will of course offer you the MINI-pill.
This is in no way the same thing.

For a start, some of them come with a 3 hour window of pill-taking-opportunity, and if you miss it, you’re not covered. Now I got used to the 12 hour window of the combination pill, and the 7 day rule because I kept missing it, but 3 hours is TIGHT. Tighter than my lady bits faced with a tampon. Even now I’m old and boring and don’t actually go out partying, and even now there are mobile phones with alarms on, I still honestly couldn’t guarantee I’d take this reliably. And then if you have a dicky stomach or put on a few pounds, IT MIGHT NOT WORK ANYWAY.

Of course after that there’s then patches and implants and injections – but it’s all more hormones, isn’t it? Pretty much like the ones in the pill that aren’t good for me and my vag is throwing tantrums over.

The fact is I’ve had a LOT of artificial hormones in my life. Decades worth. And when I’m staring sweating and anxious down the barrel of pre-menopausal hormonal doo-lallyness, do I really want to carry on? Does my vagina? Don’t we deserve a… break? A bit of au naturale? All it really wants in life, after all, is nice comfortable cotton underwear, no harsh detergents, and regular orgasms. It doesn’t really seem like a lot to ask.

So next up on the list is the coil, the middle-aged woman’s contraception of choice. Well it was my choice, anyway.

You can rest assured that my vagina was really NOT happy about having a coil put in, although it relented on the second attempt. After being probed with a camera. And then a ruler. Don’t ask.

A very nice if rather blunt doctor explained to me that in this version there was still local hormones involved (as opposed to national ones), and that I could still expect significant cramping, weight gain, acne breakouts, and break-through bleeding for up to six months. Oh, and while he was in there he might perforate my womb and would I just sign this waver thingy?

I hand on heart honestly can’t imagine there being any health situation other than Women’s Things where this level of risk plus HALF A YEAR’S worth of side effects were considered normal and acceptable. It’s madness. But it didn’t really feel like there were any other good options that didn’t involve absitenance, which me, my vagina AND my womb all voted against in practically unprecedented unity.

Then I was told I had to periodically check it was in right, by feeling for the strings.

Now while it does seem to be a demonstrable fact that the length of arm between someone’s wrist and elbow is the exact same size as their foot, I can, after a brief survey of friends, inform you that there is not the same universal correlation between middle fingers and cervexis. Cervi? Who knows? Anyway, unless I am making friends with particularly digitally stunted people, it’s not possible to feel the bloody thing. So the coil is very much an act of faith as much as contraception. As indeed is all contraception…

I feel like I could now go on a very long feminist rant about women’s rights over their reproductive organs and how limited or rubbish the options are and why better options with less side effects aren’t a priority in modern medicine and why our pain and long term symptoms hormonal and otherwise are ignored or miniminsed – and don’t get me started on the menopause – or abortion – and the impact all that has not just on women’s physical health but mental health, on their families and on thier careers, and on workplaces and the whole bloody GDP – and this is in a first world country and just think about what women go through around the world – but time is short and January is depressing enough.

At the end of my appointment, Dr Blunt gave me a nice wee card, and cheerfully told me to come back in 5 years.

“We’ll whip this one out, pop another one in, and then that’s you done love.”

THAT’S YOU DONE, LOVE.

So I am now one coil away from the end of my child-bearing years.

I swear even my vagina thought that was a bit harsh.

Certainly it’s been crying blood ever since, trying to get used to the idea. Or to the coil. One or the other.