Dear Yummies,
Upon the groves and the park walks of the city, the greener pastures, you trundle lightly with your streamlined and turbocharged buggies. You talk languorously on your video-mobiles to other yuppie mummies, clad exclusively in Dolce & Gabbana loungewear. You do not have infant-sick on your jeans or bags under your eyes. You are pristinely gorgeous and rich.
Yuppie mummies, you drive your small, precocious offspring to Montessori schools in Land Rovers totally inappropriate for London roads before heading off to the gym for a few light stretches. You have a health-conscious overpriced lunch in a designer café. You arrive home just in time to berate the housekeeper for misdemeanours real or imagined.
I wish I had your lifestyle, Yummies, but I think I would still feel the emptiness. With the necessity to work removed, does the light shine harder through the mesh of your everyday existence? Is it harder to fill the days? Your children are the joy of your life, but is their presence at a removed distance dimmer, more hazy, as satellites to the (regained) body beautiful?
Hampstead Heath rings with the clout of celebrity playing rough with old money; here is your playground. Send the nanny ahead and loll in exquisite satisfaction that your bills will be paid, your child well educated, doctored, nursed, fed, and watered; your husband will work, maybe too hard, and you will remain to monitor the wear on the silk parlour chairs.
Boutiques adore you; you are beloved of taxis, manicurists, stylists, joie de vivre, decorators, and caterers. Yuppie mummies, lain toe-to-toe you would stretch in a colour-coordinated, multilingual line from Hampstead Heath to Belsize Park. You are a statistical anomaly. You may be a dying breed, but rich men always need to marry and procreate. You stay in your ghettos. You live brightly, not widely.
When we trespass upon you, we feel your stares. We allow them. We know you cannot live, cannot breathe in less rarefied air.
Anna McKerrow
London, UK