Pop

When I was about fourteen my dad decided it was time to have a conversation about sex. Being the forward thinking type, he started this conversation on the way to my nan's house. Whilst she was in the back of the car.

 

I can't remember exactly what prompted him, but the conversation went:

 

"Now you're a teenager you're going to have times when you feel randy. "

"Randy? What? No..."

"That's quite normal. As long as it's about girls."

"Oh my god, stop."

"You're probably starting to touch yourself - "

 

At this point I made a lunge for the steering, prompted mainly by my nan who was cackling like a witch. My dad deftly reached over and prodded me in the testicles with his index finger. I deflated like an old football.

 

"I guess that'll postpone this conversation for a week or so. "

 

We never had that conversation in the end. The closest we came was when, whilst I was watching Hawaii 5-0 he stood in the doorway of the living room and said:

 

"Alright, Boy?"

"Huh? Yeah. "

"You're not gay, are you?"

"What? No."

"Righto."

 

And off he went.

 

Not that he was particularly helpful when I finally brought a girl home.

 

"Ah, you're the girl he keeps talking about! Nice to meet you, come into the house, Claire. "

*Through gritted teeth* "Her name is Rachel."

"Richard?"

"I f**king hate you."

 

He was an unreconstructed male, my old man - part of the sixties mod scene, somewhat in the mold of Alfie, but without the dress sense.

 

Exhibit #1

So on occasion his opinions were a bit stuck in time. But as a father he couldn't be faulted. Except the time I woke him up an hour after he'd got back from a night shift and he threw my Action Man down the stairs.

 

I was always a bit of weed as a kid, but despite his exasperation at my lack of gumption he was fiercely proud of me and my brother.

 

"Get in the water you big Jessie."

Later in life we worked together at the same place, a race track in the south of England. At one point I was even his boss, which wasn't always the easiest relationship to have.

 

"Chief Marshal to John..."

"What did you call me? "

"Er... John?"

"What, are we on first name terms, now? "

"Well, I..."

"I AM your dad."

"Yeah,  but..."

"I'm not answering unless you call me dad."

"Look, John..."

"I can't HEAR you!"

*Sigh* "Chief Marshal to dad?"

*Chuckling* "You loser."

 

But he was always there in an emergency.

 

"Er, Dad... I've got a bit of a problem."

"We've know that for a long time, Boy. You just have to accept that it won't get bigger than that."

"Can you just... not, for a minute. I've just had a car crash."

"Are you okay?"

"Yes."

"Good."

*Pause*

"Also, you're a dickhead."

"That's not helpful. "

"I was aiming for the truth more than being helpful. Where are you?"

"Trumpington. "

"Bwah hah hah ha! Brilliant!"

 

I have a thousand memories I could bore you with: him racing me home from work,  rounding a corner to find me sheepishly reversing out of a hedgerow. Or the time he came with me when I drove two hundred miles to see Stone Henge on New Years Eve and discovered it was shut ("You," he said with a twinkle in his eye, "are a moron.") Or the time I asked him how many commandments there were in the Ten Commandments which he never let me forget. He taught most of my friends to drive, and they still talk about him like he was a legend. Which he was.

 

And then in 2002 he got cancer. Towards the end, in early June we were sitting in the garden whilst he smoked a Silk Cut ("Why did you get me Silk Cut? It's not like it makes a difference, you tit!") in his pyjamas. We'd both been silent for a while when he asked me

 

"What are you thinking, Boy?"

"I'm trying not to smile when I think about the inheritance."

 

He grinned at me, told me he'd never liked me. It's the last good memory I have of him. He fought very hard for another week and then he was gone. He was fifty seven.

 

Thirteen years have gone past, I got married, had kids, am lurching into my mid life crisis. My world is completely different to then, but I think about my old man all the time.

 

Except when I'm having sex.

Oops!

Thursdays are a ball ache. In particular because I have to take the Kids to their swimming lesson, which appears to be run by the last surviving concentration camp guards dressed as a bunch of menopausal women.

For a refreshing change of pace the Boy's swimming teacher has stopped swimming alongside the Kids whilst criticising their lack of Olympic potential. Now she sits in (or more precisely - wears) a chair and hectors them loudly from the side of the pool. So it appears even buoyancy isn't a requirement for a swimming teacher these days.

This makes me quite ragey, so today I decided to deal with it by staring angrily at the back of her head and not saying anything. It's a good job she didn't turn around because I'd have had to look somewhere else.

Exiting the swimming pool then became an intricate rage inducing maze of bovine parents with vacuous expressions standing in doorways. The Boy then turned getting changed into something akin to pushing an eel into a balloon. While every other kid in the place left fully dressed he failed to negotiate his way into a pair of pants. So I did the parent-wanting-to-shout-at-child-in-public thing by giving him a wide eyed silent snarl that promised lots of shouting later. This would have worked admirably if he'd been paying bloody attention.

So the shouting happened outside. I stomped off to the car, the Kids dawdling in my furious wake. Instead of getting in the car, they started having a fight.

Dear reader, I'm not proud of what happened next for reasons that will become immediately obvious. I must have been thinking of Withnail and I when an emotional ketchup burst came out and I yelled;

"GET IN THE BACK OF THE VAN!"

Several points to make here.

1. I have a car
2. I was standing next to a school
3. There was, on the other side of the road,  a man mowing the lawn who actually stopped to look at me
4. The Girl burst into tears and then, crucially, cried:

"I WANT MY MUMMY!"

On the up side I managed to get a wheel spin out of my twelve year old diesel dustbin. Plus the Girl (who is vegetarian) dropped her guts* in the car so pungently I nearly hit a lamp post.

* farted

Clarse

I'm writing this during the Kids interminable Saturday morning athletics class in an effort to have somewhere to put my eyes. I rue the invention of Lycra, particularly because the athletics instructors fit into one of two categories: very fit or bizarrely immense. Either way, when they start demonstrating squat thrusts or lunges right in front of me the effect is the same -  my eyes try to get out of my ear.

Athletics is only one of many extracurricular activities the Kids are signed up for. Earlier this week the Boy had a social engagement for which I was his designated driver. Last year he joined the cubs, which strangely he seems to enjoy in a totally unqualified manner. I say "strangely" because you often find him saying things like;

"I love playing Lego, but I wonder if it might be a bit dangerous. "

"Yes, it's right up there with using a rectal thermometer on a crocodile."

Anyway, his social engagment was something called a "Gang Show", which I assume wasn't run by the Bush Boys.  I dropped him off outside the local theatre and was chatting with Akela when he notice that I had a lot of blood on my thumb.

"Industrial injury? "

Now, I could have said that I'd cut myself building a log cabin, or that I'd caught it on my lathe, or that it was a shark attack. Because as a man I will occasionally be sparse with the truth if I think it might postpone someone's inevitable realisation that I am, when all is said and done, a complete tool. However, I went with;

"I was zesting a lemon. "

Which is about the most middle class injury you can get aside from getting a paper cut from your copy of the English Language version of Le Monde Diplomatique.

Plus - I've never zested a lemon in my life. I actually did it grating a carrot whilst making coleslaw. And why was I making coleslaw? Because we're too cheapskate to buy it from the supermarket.

Naturally the response to my reply was a long silence, followed by:

"Oh."

I don't know why I'm trying to convince people I'm middle class. I'm about as middle class as a string vest or a pack of 20 Rothmans. I'm sitting in a sports hall in the rougher end of town and my Kids are the least well dressed here. In fact they look like they're going to tarmac someone's drive. And there's nothing wrong with that. I should embrace my working class heritage. So I will do that back by sitting back and reading the paper.

Oh, bollocks. 

Buffoon

Once again I'm away from the family on a business trip. This time I'm at an international conference at which I'm due to give a presentation to delegates from Europe, Africa and North America on a very weighty subject. This seems remarkably foolhardy on the part of my employers as only yesterday I found myself utterly foozled by the simple fact that the Wife has the same surname as me.

We are all, at heart, the children we once were. I suspect that even Stalin wondered how he'd got from a small boy in Georgia to the most feared man in the world. Shortly before polishing Hitler's skull no doubt

I realise I've just compared myself to Stalin.

Moving on...

It doesn't feel like thirty years since I was asking questions like this,  from the Girl:

"Mummy, when are we going to  Denmark?"

"What? "

"When are we going to Denmark? No, not Denmark. Where did you say we were going?"

"Southend. *"

Or, as my Dad always like to recall, the day I asked:

"How many commandments are there in the Ten Commandments? "

The correct answer is eleven, by the way. The last one is the most important: Thoult Shall Not Get Caught.

Still, at least he only told everyone he met about that. He didn't, say, put it on the Internet.

You see, whilst the Kids can be excused their eccentricity because they're kids, my penchant for rampant buffoonery isn't as easy to shake off. I still deal with the world on the level of a six year old, so my life is a constant battle with social ineptitude.

Many years ago I was talking about this with a deeply religious friend, who in turn told me that she felt incredibly awkward talking about sex with her boyfriend because it made her feel dirty.

"Don't worry, I won't tell anyone you're a bit odd."

She said, not unkindly.

"And I won't tell anyone you're frigid. "

I replied in a similar tone.

Apparently that's a no-no. She used words which rhymed with " truck" and "bunt". To this day I'm still a bit baffled about her reaction. And the reaction of everyone I've told about this (normally a whistling inhale of breath and a look of disdain).

She's a nun now, by the way.

Even today I've been crippled with the fear that I'm going to look odd carrying around a packet of chocolate digestives at this conference (I'm a mad man for chocolate digestives). It's only that, by pure luck and that I found the hotel have supplied a little paper bag for such an eventuality.

And it's apparently a "sanitary" bag. So that's good.

* For those of you that live outside of the UK, Southend is like Las Vegas, only with less commitment.

Wisdom Truth

OK,  I'm going  to be honest,  we got Netflix and frankly Breaking Bad is a bit addictive. But hey,  don't have a pop at me,  when did you last write to me, eh?   EH?

Exactly.

Recently a friend of mine wrote quite movingly about the experiences he'd had over the course of his life so far, and how he hoped to have the opportunity to pass on his knowledge. Naturally I couldn't miss an opportunity to piss on someone's barbecue. I made the point that I'd been passing on my "wisdom" for eight years with the net result being I now had to share my house with two raving maniacs.

"Daddy? "

*With due sense if dread and resignation* "Yes?"

"Have you ever worn girls clothes?"

"Nope."

"You'd look nice in a dress."

"Thanks, Girl. "

"When we get home you could put on mummy's wedding dress and then she'd laugh when you answered the door."

"She probably wouldn't laugh."

"YOUR BOOBS WOULDN'T FIT! "

"Shut up,  Boy."

For the benefit of posterity, I would look fabulous in the Wife's wedding dress. I have a lovely turn of ankle. However I'm a gentleman and it doesn't do to look better than your wife.

Last week the Boy (in his typically unwitting way) confused a friend of the mother in law  to the point of apoplexy just by telling her his middle name.

"That's a nice name. "

"Yeah,  it's my dad's dad's name."

"Oh really?"

"Yeah, it's quite sad really,  we don't get to see him much any more."

"That's a shame,  why? "

"He died before I was born."

There was a time when I could come home from work put my feet up and watch some telly before the Wife came in and pointed out the washing up needed doing, the laundry was getting rained on and the house was on fire. These days I have to brace myself to ask the question

"How are the Kids?"

"The Girl is climbing the walls."

"Oh god,  what is it now? Did you confiscate her throwing knives?"

"No.  She's literally climbing the walls. Look."

In the living room the Girl had removed her socks and was scaling the wood surround on the wall. She climbed all the way to the ceiling, before throwing herself backwards onto the sofa. Since the Girl has the bone density of hardened steel,  this ejected the cat from the sofa, who exited the room at close to light speed. It also made me have an aneurysm. Since then I've been trying to source Kryptonite on eBay.

God forbid I bother asking the Kids what they did at school. Last time I did it the Boy appeared to go into Factory Reset. We had to teach him to walk all over again.

It doesn't help that over the "festive period" I've been battling manfully with tooth ache caused by a broken wisdom tooth. Battling manfully is defined by crying in the car park outside the dentist surgery, I should add.

Dealing with my Kids when I'm happy is tough enough. Let alone when I feel like someone is hitting me in the face with a rusty shovel. I've been a bit shouty of late. The up side is that because it's tooth ache,  no one can understand what I'm shouting about. So for most of Christmas the Kids treated me like that bloke at the local supermarket who shouts at the cheese. Wary incomprehension.

Still, after an emergency tooth extraction and having three fillings  (one of which was so deep the dentist had to tie a rope to his feet to get back out again)  I'm back to being the usual reasonable person that everybody expects me to be. Now bugger off, it's the season 4 finale.