Archive for January, 2010

Today is a day I used to dread when I was a kid – the last day of the long school holidays. Six weeks previously those long summer days were stretching before you like an eternity; but now that ignorant shithead time had caught up and the new school year beckoned. My son cannot wait to get back to school; in this regard we are very different.

I revelled in every second I wasn’t in school – building dams in the river, falling out of trees, going camping in the nearby countryside (at the age of 10!), shoplifting in Woolies, skinny dipping down the local lido, vandalising building sites, getting visits from SO19, trying to cop off with girls who’d sooner catch a disease than snog you, making endless mix tapes from the top 40, getting the train to London and spending all day in Hamleys or Harrods toy department, playing ‘war’ with the local kids or even simply just knocking a tennis ball about the local municipal courts.

When I was kid in the late ’70s, the first skateboard craze happened. I had a pimped out 32″ wood deck, AC-90 trucks and a set of (hell yea!) Kryptonic wheels. Having graduated from some shitty Woolworths special, that skateboard held a fond place in my heart – I can still hear the noise those bright red ‘Kryp’ wheels made over the flagstones of my street.

I credit my dislike of school to the Catholic religion. In their infinite wisdom my parents sent me first to a Catholic primary school and then to an all boys Catholic secondary school. By the time I left St Michaels (since sold off, knocked down and combined with the Catholic girls school because it was built on valuable green belt land) I had absolutely no idea how to socialise with girls, I’d become a die-hard atheist and I’d got a B in my R.E. o’level and an E in physics. Apart from the middle outcome I suspect that’s just the way the Catholic church and their circus of bullshit wanted it.

Fortunately, the sprog is attending a public school which doesn’t labour the god angle too heavily. There’s a scripture class every week, which is opt-out (and believe me, we have), but apart from that they don’t ram it down your throat. At my primary school the place was run by nuns with the chief penguin Sr Veronica brainwashing the kids. I can remember standing at the bottom of the playing field at that school, watching the trains in the near distance on the Cambridge-Kings Cross mainline and wishing like only an eight year old kid can that I was on that train with those lucky people, going somewhere, being somewhere other than the oppresive shit-hole I had to show up to everyday. So I guess it’s fair to say that *my* love of summer holidays began there. And so I guess I’m actually pleased that he’s eager to get back to school, because it means they’re not shit-heads there and that he’s getting some enjoyment out of his days.

Incidentally – check out the note at left. I found this on the sprog’s desk and I love it. In case you can’t read his hand-writing it reads thus:

Chores

1. Breakfast.
2. Check mail for missions.
3. Go on mission.
4. Report back to H.Q. and tell your boss you finished.
5. Have brake.

Anyway. The wife’s parents are now thankfully a distant memory, but the fact remains that they well and truly fucked up our summer. In order to fix that a little bit, Liz, Jack and myself are off down the cast in a couple of weeks time. We’re spending the weekend in a cottage next to the beach and we’ll be doing nothing of cultural or educational value, whatsoever.

Fucking hell how much longer is this tortue going to go on? Yesterday we had a meal. My parents were invited over (they haven’t had much of a look-in since the harbingers of doom arrived) for a sit-down originally arranged for midday. Except I had to go patrol the beach due to a couple of no-shows and so it was re-arranged for the evening.

When I got back I asked if there was enough food for two more people – there was – so I invited some surf club friends over here whose house I’ve been using as a bit of a bolt-hole. So we sat down to eat a full roast pork meal – despite the fact that it was 33 in the shade.

Over the table Carrion begins her assault on the ear-drums and the senses, holding forth on the same subjects she always holds forth on. Her discourses invariably fall into one of the three camps:

1) What it’s like in England.

2) What it was like in Singapore in the 1960s when they lived here.

3) Royal history.

Of these, particularly given the audience last night, option 1 would be a peculiar choice given that only two of the nine people at the table weren’t born there. Yet that was an opening gambit, “Yes of course in England … ” this and “Yes of course in England … ” that. Really? Is that fucking true Carrion? It gets cold in olde England does it? It has seasons does it? It has supermarkets does it? Fucking hell! Those 40 years I lived there I must have been sleep-walking, this is all new to me!

God forbid anyone mentions anything even remotely related to royal history, because then she’ll get well and truly stuck into option 3. She’ll regale us all with tales of royal intrigue that even the most ardent republican already knows. He abdicated did he? For the love an American divorcee? Good golly.

But things only start getting wrist-slashingly dull when the atmosphere-sucking vulture gets onto the subject of Singapore. Yes, Carrion and David were in Singapore in the 1960s when he was an aircraft mechanic and she was a very slightly younger bride-0f-satan. On and on and on she drones, “Yes of course but back then all the natives wore traditional dress and lived in wooden shacks, but now it’s all sky scrapers and western clothing – you could be anywhere.” But watch out if David is roused from his slumbers, because he might chip-in with a Prince Phillip style quip along the lines of, “The black chappies that used to work on the base were Tamils and they were so very black that we used to call them Black Enamel Tamils.” Ahahahahaha. Hohohohohoho.

My invited guest Wes did me proud. We were discussing the cockatoos that make a mad racket as they prepare to roost. Wes told me that the nickname they have is Mother-in-law birds on account of the incessant noise they make. I didn’t dare look in Carrion’s direction at that point for I feared lasers would shoot out of her well-0f-souls eyes and reduce me to a smoking pile of ash and scorched Crocs.

Then some other friends of ours turned up too, along with their kids. The sheer volume of people in one place was too much for my parents who said a hurried goodbye and fled. By now I was starting to flake. I’d been on the beach all day patrolling and that, in combination with a bit too much sunshine and a few too many Coronas, I started nodding off in the living room armchair. So I sneaked off downstairs at 10:00pm and went to bed, alongside the sprog who had retired to our bedroom because it was a couple of degrees cooler than his.

We all woke up at about 5:30this morning, the temperature was still 29c and so we had a refreshing early morning dip and tried not to think about the witch in the front bedroom. Only a week or so to go I think, at least I’m back to work from tommorow and have an escape. Hurrah.