If, by chance you did not appreciate the significance of the original boeuf bourguignon post then I will enlighten you, as I have just been enlightened. Yes, Football Mum, I can see why you were spurred you on to cook the boeuf bourguignon and blogg at the same time!

Last night, I went to the cinema and saw Julie & Julia the movie, which was a treat. It actually is a true story about two cooks, one of whom blogged about her cooking! This was interesting enough but what was even more serendipitous and motivating for me, was that the two cooks could also be described as idle wives in accordance with my definition.

In the movie, the modern woman Julie Power is a wife, a writer, a cook and the originator of the blogpage called The Julie/Julia Project. She set herself the challenge to cook over 400 recipes for the Julia Childs French Cooking Cookbook and blog about it as she went along. She literally created the idea and business at her kitchen table or sink, whichever suits you, and what an idea it was!

Julia Childs was equally amazing. She was married in the 1940’s to an American Diplomat. They traveled a lot with her husbands work and she was very interested in food. They did not have children. She seemed to have a thirst for doing things with her life and eventually was lucky enough to find her bliss. It then became her life. Her kitchen became a TV studio and from there she worked until she was in her eighties. What a joy!

Is that what we are all aiming for in our idle Dom? I know I am!

Apparently I am a bit weird. The graphic designer that I have working on a prospectus told me that mine was the last e-mail that he received at 2 a.m. and the first that he received at 8 a.m. Did I sleep, he wondered, ever? I told him that I had been up finishing off my beef stew (oh, yeah, I’ve abandoned the French. Yes, I’ve been slagged enough today). I told him that if it could be sent via e-mail, it would be on his desk by now. He deserves it.

You see, in the last little while, I’ve been making a lot of mistakes. I don’t make mistakes very often or at least I didn’t up until I left my job over a year ago. Somehow the routine of work kept me on the straight and narrow and the fact that little mistakes could cost thousands focussed me on the job at hand. But this football thing has my head very messed up. And these mistakes keep being noticed by other people before I notice them. I don’t like that one little bit. If I f*** up, I like to find out before anyone else does so I can fix it before anyone else grimaces disapprovingly in my direction.

I was in particularly foul form a few days ago after having several mistakes pointed out to me and really not in the humour for two of my children to behave as though I was a piece of furniture rather than their mother. I lost it, spectacularly, and said I was off. The older one continued de-stalking strawberries for her smootie and the younger shrugged her shoulders. As I stormed from the room, the older one directed the following utterance at the food processor “don’t you think you’re a bit old for that kind of behaviour”.

Am I? Does one ever grow out of throwing a strop that a gay fashion designer would be proud of? Or am I really as self-obsessed as one of my good friends keeps reminding me I am? The friend, aka anyone else, of the mistake-pointing-out. The same one I delivered a little package of beef stew to earlier today, apologising that the potatoes were floury when they should be waxy.

I had the table set for dinner before I went round to my friend and I admit to feeling very virtuous as I told everyone to take their seats at the abnormally early time of 6 p.m. (we eat late in this house, a consequence of my anti-social football schedule) opened the oven door, celebrity chef-style, and proudly carried my creation to the table. My youngest doesn’t mince her words. “I hate it” she pronounced. The other two were more vocal. So, having been marched upstairs to spend the evening in their bedrooms without dinner, eldest has since returned to the kitchen to apologise for not giving my dinner a chance. Too late of course. It’s been devoured by myself and their father. And so she busies herself making macaroni cheese (her favourite). Note to self – do not eat all the dinner when the kids say they hate it. They’ll be back.

And so I send e-mails in the wee hours and first thing in the morning because I’m determined to make a better fist of it and to be on top of things and because all I really want is approval. After all, an idle wife doesn’t really want to be reminded that maybe that’s all she should be. Am I being a little hard on myself? Maybe, just maybe, 5 hours sleep isn’t enough anymore and maybe, just maybe, those floury potatoes won’t be so offensive because the beef is so good.

There’s probably something far-reachingly gluttonous about sitting at one’s laptop at 11 p.m. issuing instructions to one’s partner to ensure that they put apricot chutney on the ham and cheese bagel that you’ve demanded because the boeuf bourguignon won’t be ready for another half an hour at least. In fairness, at this late hour I can’t give sufficient respect to the dish that I spent a good hour preparing and which requires over 2 hours cooking.  It will instead be popped in the fridge at around midnight and heated up tomorrow evening when I can devote an hour to lovingly savouring each succulent (one hopes) mouthful.

These days who would believe that central to the renovation of my house last year was the installation of a 6-ring, 2 oven, 1 grill glorious piece of stainless steel that would not look out of place in the finest kitchens in Paris? Certainly not the fans on the terraces every Friday night who no doubt think my sole purpose in life is to ensure that my beloved football club survives the next financial crisis. But I’m not the only woman that suffers from this particular dual personality affliction in the world of wives and mothers. I share it with none other than the legendary Delia Smith, she who first graced our TV screens on Swap Shop every Saturday morning during the 70s and because of whom I would turn to another channel for the few minutes that her cookery spot was on. I wonder was Delia one of those elderly ladies who joined me in attending Julie & Julia last Saturday night and like me, had she just gone to escape the burden of the football club resting heavily on her shoulders.  I’m still grappling psychologically with the fact that I turned 40 relatively recently never mind trying to get a handle on the fact that Delia and I now have two things in common – a love of cookery and football. Please God make that be where the similarities end for her sake as much as mine. However, the fact remains that I haven’t cooked a decent meal since we returned to our renovated house last Christmas apart from Christmas dinner.

And I was sceptical when my partner told me what he’d booked. “It’s a film about cookery”, he grinned. “It got a rave review on rotten tomatoes”. I was still sceptical, so much so that I lost the will to resist the Ben & Jerry’s counter and stocked up on a large tub of Phish food and Jamaican me crazy. Oh I was close to being proven right. At first I thought the film was a must-see, the best kept secret in town, so long and slow was the queue leading to the cinema entrance. Soon I realised that it was merely the fact that the attendees of that particular screening were in the main twice my age, spoke very loudly and walked very slowly in what seemed to be all-female groupings of 3 or more. It did not bode well for my evening out. I took my seat reluctantly and my partner failed miserably to suppress his amusement at the look of disgust settling on my face. Let’s call a spade a spade – I was quite convinced that my precious night out was rapidly descending into a cinematic re-working of “Keeping up Appearances”. I was wrong, I was very wrong. I laughed, I shed a tear (a little one) and I left the cinema very much more satisfied than I was leaving the terraces the previous day when we lost 3-1.

And Eric Cantona will have to take a back seat for a little while because Julia Child has de-throned him and tomorrow night, I won’t be scanning the football forums, I’ll be tucking into her boeuf bourguignon. It’s cooling as I type, I’ve made sure that the fork pierced through the tender meat as she said it should and I think I’ve just fallen in love a little bit.