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We may think we are happy, whether it's married with children, living in a big house out in the suburbs with an adoring husband and two beautiful children, or being footloose and fancy free in a cool flat with a great job and lots of friends, but isn't there often a small part of us that thinks the grass is always greener? That longs for what we don't have...
From the outside Vicky Townsley would appear to have it all. Features Director of the hugely successful Poise! magazine, she lives alone in London, is single, solvent, and seriously successful. But she'd give it all up in a heartbeat for marriage, children, and a house in the country complete with aga and large lurchers. Amber Winslow on the other hand, has exactly what Vicky Townsley wants, albeit on the other side of the Atlantic. A huge stone mansion in Highfield Connecticut, the requisite golden retriever, children (and, naturally, full-time nanny), and a busy charitable commitment for the local Women's League that some might think was just for social climbing.
But Amber isn't happy either. Amber hasn't found quite the fulfillment she had expected from being a full-time wife and mother, so when she spots a double page spread in Poise! magazine asking married readers to life swap with a glamorous, single journalist in London, she sits down and writes a letter. But she never expects to be picked...
Life Swap is the story of what really happens when two women, both of whom think their happiness lies somewhere else, decide to walk in one another's shoes for one month. It's the story of the grass not being as green as you might think, and of discovering that happiness is not always where you expect it to be.
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This is not a straightforward story of romance. Which is not to say there are no happy ever afters, but that you ought not open this book knowing that the Prince and Princess disappear hand-in-hand off into a glorious sunset.
In many ways, the story I'm about to tell you is not about romance at all. If anything, it is a story of real life. Of how each of us may think we know exactly what we need to make us happy, what will be good for us, what will ensure we have our happy ending, but that life rarely works out in the way we expect, and that our happy endings may have all sorts of unexpected twists and turns, be shaped in all sorts of unexpected ways.
And our own personal paradise may be someone else's version of hell. Or indeed vice versa...
Take Victoria Townsley for instance. At thirty-five she is wonderfully, fantastically successful. She is the Features Director of Poise! Magazine - a magazine so stylish, so hip, so glossy and perfect, Victoria is the very embodiment of what the Poise! reader strives to be. Tall and on a good day slim-ish, she uses Aveda on her glossy hair, Eve Lom on her peachy skin, and Bliss lemon scrubs on her not-so-toned-except-you'd-only-know-that-if-you-saw-her-with-her-clothes-off body. In short, she does exactly what the beauty director of Poise! prescribes as the latest and greatest of all beauty products, guaranteed to give you youth, dewiness, and to prolong your life by thirty years.
Victoria - Vicky to her colleagues and friends - lives in a beautiful flat off Marylebone High Street, decorated in Heal's best neutral shades, accented by rich chocolate brown leather accessories, Vietnamese bamboo bowls picked up on a travel junket last year, and a touch of oh-so-trendy chinoiserie in the form of Chinese dressers that were found one Saturday morning down at Portobello Road.
The fridge is stocked with bottles of white wine and a couple of low-fat yoghurts. In the butter compartment is a half eaten bar of Cadbury's Chocolate Milk, but Vicky has forgotten it is there, and it is now three months past its sell-by date, although on Wednesday, two days before Vicky's period starts, she won't very much care about that.
Vicky's cat, Eartha, is curled up on her bed, lazily rolling over to stretch a paw out to claim her domain, happily looking forward to Vicky's arrival home from work when she will jump on her lap purring, thrilled to be the most important person in Vicky's life, thrilled in fact, to be the only one to sleep in Vicky's bed on a regular basis.
Because whilst you and I might look in awe at everything that Vicky has, at how she has built a career up from nothing to become one of the most successful female journalists in London, how she has no responsibilities, is able to go to glamorous parties and book launches and preview shows every night, and sleep in until nine in the morning, Vicky is not happy.
At thirty-five, Vicky is stunned that she is still single. Stunned that each of her friends have slowly been picked off, that she has been bridesmaid more times than she cares to think of, but that no-one has ever chosen her.
And it's not even as if she has come close. She never worried about it in her twenties, when her longest relationship was six months, when she was far too busy making a name for herself in journalism, jumping from the Liverpool Echo down to London as a staff writer on Cosmo, switching to Poise! A few years later. When she hit thirty she vaguely thought that now she ought to start thinking about settling down, but by the time she came up for air, at around thirty two, she realized that all the good men had been taken, and all of a sudden her prospects didn't look too good.
On her thirty-fifth birthday Vicky stayed home and got drunk. She replayed all the movies she'd loved when she was single and hopeful - An Officer and a Gentleman; Baby Boom; When Harry Met Sally, and she'd forced a few tears as she thought about how lonely she was and how much she wanted a husband and children, how much she wanted the life that her brother Andy had.
Andy, three years younger than her, had married his girlfriend from University, Kate. They had three children, Luke, Polly and Sophie, two huge lurchers and had moved out of central London a few years previously to bring up their children with fields, and green, and ponies.
It was, in short, everything that Vicky ever wanted. She adored Kate, always described herself as having the best sister-in-law in the world, in fact thought of Kate as the sister she always wanted, and she loved her nieces and nephew more than anyone in the whole world.
Vicky thought she was going to die when they all moved out of London, but she hops on the train down to Somerset at least twice a month, and spends happy weekends sitting around the scrubbed pine table in the aga-heated kitchen, bemoaning her single status as Kate rolls her eyes, attempting to shake off a Polly who's clinging to her leg and shrieking with glee as Kate drags her across the kitchen floor, saying she'd kill to be in Vicky's shoes, and that Vicky doesn't know how wonderful her life is.
Vicky does know how wonderful her life is, it just isn't the kind of wonderful she wants. She wants the kind of wonderful that Kate has. The kind of wonderful that involves children shrieking with laughter, giant dogs draped over squishy sofas. A kind, loving husband who worships your every move.
At that point Kate was the one shrieking with laughter. 'Does Andy worship my every move then?' she'd said.
'Well no,' Vicky grunted. 'But you know what I mean.'
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