Knee Deep in Knightsbridge. The book of the hit-blog.KNEEDEEPINKNIGHTSBRIDGE

By the spring of 2007 the shape of my new life had settled. Its shape was small and damp and below the filthy pavements of Knightsbridge where hookers plied their trade. We had to remove a cage in the sitting room.

My Boy was away at school near Reading, safe from the nightmare vision my life had become. The trial that would decide our future was still months off. And I was learning, night by night, exactly what The Hovel was made of. For the first time in my life I had more unfilled hours than I knew what to do with. Apart from the dogs, no one to look after Monday to Friday after over a decade of caring for someone else more than I cared for myself. I could be busy and out all day when I had work but coming home to an empty nest felt like a bereavement. It’s a weird old feeling having no one to care for. No fridge to fill, or clothes to wash, no house to clean or parties to go to together. An empty home with no one waiting, sounded a bit like my womb or what was left of it. Not sad. Just weird. I had my friends. But it’s not the same as that comfy sweater you put on around the house. The person you do take for granted in the nicest possible way. Your life partner. Did I want to live on my own? No. I’m afraid of the dark, and of being by myself, unless I have a dog or a large amount of Melatonin. Did I think I could cope? No. Absolutely not.

I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t eat. I tried to get through each day, but nothing felt real. The night sweats that woke me in a frozen terror four or five times a night were not nerves. They were my body going into shock, and into an early menopause. I didn’t know that then.

Sleeping there was difficult at the best of times. Last night it was impossible. It wasn’t the Central Line rumbling below my bed. It wasn’t, amazingly enough, that old bastard upstairs, the one with the all-night prostate problem and the wooden floor he has sworn blind he does not have. It wasn’t even the rain crashing down the metal pipe that runs down the wall beside my pillow.

No. Last night I was kept awake by the scratching of little animals scampering around, despite the best efforts of the Melatonin and Valerian I shovel down my throat at nine each night to get some sleep in this noisy shit-hole I call home for now. I couldn’t work out whether the scamperers were clearing up the debris from last night’s supper upstairs, or running between the floorboards and the ceiling joists above my head? They are full of lovely orange insulation that must be perfect for nests. Whatever they were doing, they are noisy bastards, and it is their time to die. No one keeps me awake all night and can expect to see another dawn. Which is, of course, exactly what I did see, as the jumbos started roaring in from Hong Kong at around a quarter past four this morning on their way to land at Heathrow.

A

The Hovel was below the pavement of a Knightsbridge street. So were the bins.

Under the front of every one of those white stucco houses there is a vault. They were built for coal, a hundred and fifty years ago, when a man came round with a sack and tipped it through a round hole in the pavement so that nobody upstairs had to look at it. Nobody burns coal any more, so the vaults house the bins.

The vaults opposite my front door held the bins for the whole building. That is eleven flats with two people living in most of them so that is at least twenty-two people's rubbish going down to the hole opposite my front door. Emptied just once a week.

Did anyone clean them? You must be f***ing joking.

Because I am not laughing about their main inhabitant. The huge, great London rat. I had lived in this part of London for years before I ended up underneath it, at street level and above and I had no idea they were there. That is the thing about a coal vault. It is directly under the pavement you are walking along. The people going past six feet above my head, with their carrier bags and their small dogs, had no notion that anything lived down there at all. Neither had I, until I was living there in the smelly old former brothel.

You learn things. You learn not to go out to the bins after dark. Unless you have your rabid dachshund with you. Jimi could think of nothing better than launching himself, Superman- like, into his second persona as Urban Rat-Killer to the Stars. Unless I had him on a lead he was straight in under the door, which had a six-inch gap at the bottom and all I could hear was screaming as he did what he was bred to do. It made me heave so I did try not to open the door unless he was on a leash. If not, he would be in the shower faster than you could say, ‘Mine’s a dead one.’

Sadly I got used to them, in the end. We were on nodding, or should I say, squeaking terms. That is the part I would rather not have discovered about myself.

Our Judge, it is fair to say, was in no mood whatsoever to be trifled with.

The FMC turned up late again and, alongside him, an unqualified ‘adviser’ The FMC had picked up from somewhere. He was quite extraordinary looking with long white hair and an air of a Harry Potter villain about him. He began hissing at my Rottweiler before the Judge had even taken her seat. Clare stood up and said to him, ‘Who are you? And what are you doing here in private proceedings?’ She slayed him with one of her icy stares. The Judge walked in, took one look, and enquired briskly who on earth he was supposed to be? Un-persuaded by the answer, she promptly turned him out of her court. And that, M’learned friends, was the last we saw of him, thank God.

The highlights, just like the football, only rather closer to real life: when the FMC’s barrister solemnly declared that his client ‘couldn’t walk down Verbier High Street on a thousand pounds a week’, my Rottweiler and I nearly drew blood gripping each other’s hands to stop ourselves howling, I sat there thinking that if the CSA took his passport, he wouldn’t be walking down Verbier High Street on anything at all. A second Judge was brought in to observe proceedings, they really are that gripping, and by five o’clock the poor soul was quietly nodding off, head swaying, jerking awake, and I got the giggles all over again; I took no offence, for our affairs bore the life out of me too. But there was a darkest moment. When our Judge said, plainly, that these ghastly, dragged-out proceedings would have ‘a dreadful effect’ on the way my boy develops, I burst into tears, and could not stop for a good ten minutes. Because she was right. She was completely right. And then, then she turned, put her hands on her hips, looked like she’d swallowed a wasp, and ripped into the Father of My Child exactly as we always knew, in our hearts, that one day somebody finally would.

Child proceedings are private, so I can only tell you this. The judge told the FMC that our son needs two loving parents, not just the one; that our son needs a comfortable home with his mother, and that we are not to be separated. That it was obvious he had considerable means, but that getting true financial information out of him had been all but impossible. She considered him angry and resentful, and found his attitude to our living arrangements unattractive. She was disappointed that he had not bothered to view a single property, and horrified that he had ignored my pleas to stop pouring thousands into Neurexa shares, at least £12 million worth of them, while paying nothing towards his son since October 2007.

And of me? She told the court that I was articulate, and not a little witty. She said she had enjoyed the blog, and wished me well, and would follow its future with interest. She would not be banning it. I was free to carry on writing. Only one line of those four great bound folders of my blog was ever read out in court. Just the one. She was a woman of the world, and was neither much interested nor much shocked. She awarded me half my costs, to be paid within eight weeks. All through this awful saga the FMC had sworn, many times, that he would never be made to pay a penny towards them.

B

Every wrecked household has its one dish, the thing you can still afford and still bear to make. Ours was chicken and rice. I cooked it the way other people say their prayers. My lawyers wanted me to go after him for everything. I wanted enough for a boy and a bowl of chicken and rice. It tells you all you need to know about The Father of My Child that even that was, apparently, asking too much.

My boy was at his father’s flat the other evening, wondering aloud what he was going to be given for supper, he fancied a takeaway from his favourite place in the world Maroush on Beauchamp Place, but all I could hear down the phone was his dad moaning about the cost of it. But having never cooked our boy a square meal, takeaways is what it was going to have to be until he learned to cook.

Funny, that. In eleven years of living with the man he never once let me order a takeaway. He thought them a shocking waste of money when he had me at home to cook for him. I used to sneak a curry in on football nights, windows flung wide so he wouldn’t catch the glorious whiff of it when he got home, I remember those illicit little feasts with a rosy glow to this day.

Now, of course, his credit-card receipts show a completely different story M’Lud. That he eats out every single night of the week, entertaining his coterie. Home cooking is an anathema to him. But not for my boy. There is nothing on earth he likes better than my chicken and rice. We even have a song about it, he and I, a daft little ditty we made up, that goes. ‘Chicken and rice, tastes very nice. Everyone here likes chicken and rice. Eat it all day, never throw it away. We all love chicken and rice.’ Silly beyond words, but it makes us howl every time. That, you see, is what a home actually is. Not a mansion in Knightsbridge, not a villa in France, not a portfolio of 120 flats. It’s a small boy and his mum, singing a ridiculous song over a shared bowl at a kitchen table, in a basement that smells of damp, and not minding one bit. He can keep his restaurants. We’ve got the ditty. The Sea Bass Letter We got on the No.11 bus and headed down to Fulham for lunch with my boy’s godfather. Sadly it ended in disaster. My boy behaved so badly, refusing point blank to eat the fish and mash he’d insisted on ordering, that we had to get up and go. He literally had a hissy fit from Hell. I have never seen him like that. Godfather having several kids of his own was cool about it and waved me off saying, ‘Go walk it off.’ We walked all the way back to SW3, up past Fulham Broadway, CFC Stamford Bridge, past the Chelsea & Westminster Hospital and into the Royal Borough. We walked in silence for the first five minutes or so. And then I asked him what he thought he was playing at. He wasn’t sure. He seemed genuinely confused. I remember getting older and finding life confusing as I became a teenager. I would have terrible mood swings too so I was sympathetic. We moved on after I said that really must not happen again and he was to apologise to his godfather with a call when we got back. We came home to The Hovel and I sat and cried into the noise of the old buggers upstairs laying their new floor. Bang, bang, bang, like living under the M4. So we put on our coats and went out for another walk. A long walk. Miraculously his friends at school offered to drive him back to Reading for me on the Sunday evening which was really lovely. He was so happy jumping into their car with his new Pokemon cards to show the boys. On Wednesday morning the sweetest letter arrived from my son. It said, ‘Dear Mummy, I am very sorry about what I have done. I have realised that if I don’t LIKE sea bass I should have a try. And if I have a try, I MIGHT LIKE IT! So I am very,

When the CSA letter itself arrived I very nearly framed it. It’s a real jaw-dropper. On second thoughts, before I frame it, I might photocopy it two hundred times and hand it out to passers-by when my son and I go skating at the Natural History Museum this afternoon. ‘Your Child Maintenance Payments. Having looked at this, we’ve worked out that Mr XXX, should pay £0.00 a week. Please remember that even if we’ve worked out that your child maintenance is £0.00, you may still be entitled to some arrears. Because Mr XXX, has a net weekly income of less than £5.00, his weekly rate is nil. Yours sincerely, the Child Support Agency.’

Wow. I just love the line about us maybe, just maybe, being entitled to some arrears, after all these years!

The CSA is as much support as a ten-year-old bra. As much support as a wheelchair with no wheels, and no one to push it. They are a total and absolute disgrace, and that these people are the alleged custodians of our children is not merely frightening, it is terrifying.

I’ve been trawling the reduced bin at the Waitrose on Motcomb Street with my equally skint girlfriend, two ex-wives of very rich men, hunting for tinned carrots and potatoes at eighteen pence a go, minutes from their sell-by date, when who should we bump into one morning but the beauteous Nigella Lawson herself. Naturally, we seized the moment and asked the Domestic Goddess what on earth one is supposed to do with a trolley of about-to-expire root vegetables. And do you know what? Even she was a bit stumped. She wasn’t, if I’m honest, terribly helpful, she suggested shoving the lot into a big tortilla, though I confess I had other ideas about where I’d rather shove them, all involving the Father of My Child’s back passage. Ho, ho, ho.

But we did have a laugh, over the bargain bin. She’s a good egg, is Nigella. And there is something rather wonderful, and very levelling, about standing there in your reduced circumstances, comparing notes on eighteen-pence carrots with one of the most glamorous cooks in the country, squinting at the same wilting produce. Recession, it turns out, is the great democratiser. It gets us all to the reduced shelf, goddess and grafter alike.

But it is what he gave our son that I shall never quite forgive. My boy unwrapped, barely wrapped, a black stone with an elastic band round it. Neither of us had the faintest idea what it was, until it broke open to reveal a fossil inside; a fossil from Peru, apparently, which seemed fitting somehow. And a games console with no memory stick and no games, not wrapped at all. But the thing that broke my heart clean in two was this: late on Christmas Eve, I found my boy carefully writing out a gift tag, and I asked him who it was for. ‘It’s for me,’ he said, ‘because Daddy forgot.’ How sad is that? A small boy, writing his own name on his own present, so that there would be one under the tree that somebody had remembered. I could have wept. I did weep, later, where he couldn’t see.