Charlie Don't Surf

Well, we’re going to be doing it tough from here on in. The pacifying foil to the M.I.L.’s endless bitterness is on a plane to Singapore en route to the U.K. Yes, dear old Aunty Jean (Carrion’s older sister) has flown the coop and by now is probably enjoying some distance from the streak of pure evil that is her sister, my wife’s mother, my mother-in-law, satan’s fucking bride.

All the old traits that we’ve come to hate over previous visits are back in evidence. Of all her many delightful qualities, I think the main one is her over-arching sense of her own self importance. This evidences itself in many ways, but without doubt the most annoying is the way she constantly talks over the top of everyone else. And god forbid you try and raise your voice in return to make yourself heard, she’ll just get louder and louder and louder until that horrendous pretend-posh voice with its jarring nails-down-a-chalkboard clipped edges is drowning everything out, up to and including any jet engines that may be running at full power nearby. If she’d been a bit older during WW2 I reckon it would only have taken a couple of broadcasts to the Germans before they surrendered en masse. She talks over the top of TV shows and films too – not just background TV mind you – but shows or films we’ve all sat down to watch. She just can’t keep that flappy fat gob of her’s shut for more than a nano-second.

Another of Carrion’s charming traits is total knowledge about everything. She was having a conversation with Liz this morning and my wife mentioned that I suffered from acid reflux. “Oh no, don’t be silly, that’s just heartburn.” My wife looks at her querulously, “So when he wakes up in the night gagging on his own bile and has to take a pill every night to suppress this, that’s heartburn is it?” Because of course Carrion knows all about everything.

An artist’s rendering of my M.I.L.

The sprog has begun fighting back. Yesterday he was on the toilet and Carrion knocked on the door and said she needed the loo, to which Jack replied in a forthright manner, “Well you’d better go downstairs then, because I’m going to be some time.” At this precise moment the poor sod is out with his grandparents at the air museum in Nowra and Liz has advised him, in order to make the day go as smoothly as possible, to pretend that he’s on a trip with his strict school teacher.

I’ve been escaping to the beach or, when the weather’s shite, my office. I have done more patrol hours this year than anyone else in the club, because sitting on a beach, even one blowing NE 40knots and getting sand in every orifice is preferable to being around the soul-sucking battleaxe.

Other than that, things are going great.

Well now this *is* embarassing. I have woken up at 5:30am this Christmas morning and my eight year old son is still sound asleep. In my defence I can only say that I’m not excited for myself, but for him because I know he’s getting some presents he’ll love. Still, it’s quite a funny situation but one that in many ways sums up the sprog (and, ermmm me, I guess). He’s the one that eats a grown-up and varied diet, echews sweeties for fruit and will strip a lamb chop or drumstick cleaner than a piranha fish would – while I eat reformed chicken pieces in the shape of dinosaurs and gorge on sweet things of all kinds. He’s the one that embraces the touchy-feely bits of films, while I skip through them in search of more explosions. He’s the one who gets genuinely upset if he thinks he’s pissed anyone off, while I get genuinely upset if I haven’t.

So time for an update I guess. We’re now, ermm, two weeks in with the in-laws and as many of you have observed, there haven’t been any major ructions yet. There are a couple of reasons for this – firstly, up until yesterday I’ve been working and secondly when I haven’t been working, they’ve been out and thirdly if by some strange conjunction it looks like we’ll all be in at the same time I either go patrol the beach or visit friends. But thanks to the largess of my employer I am now off on holiday until the 11th of January, which is cool, but is highly likely to start messing up the teetering equilibrium we have in the house.

Carrion has come out with some classics already this year, helped along by the fact that her big sister (Liz’s Aunt Barbara) is here, a big sister with whom she rarely sees eye to eye. We were round at my parents the other day and Carrion said, “You always monopolise the conversation, Jean,” (she calls her Jean despite the fact that her name’s Barbara and prefers to be known by that), “and you always talk over other people.” I snorted my coffee straight up my nose and had a painful coughing fit when she said that. It was akin to Pol Pot accusing the Dalai Lama of terrorising people.

David has been alright so far this year. Don’t get me wrong, he’s still makes Ebenezer Scrooge look generous – but he’s been busy doing stuff around the house. We now have a new hob (or old one died 18 months ago and we’ve been too skint to replace and so have been cooking on a camping stove) and a new cooker which we bought, but he fitted. He has removed the old cooker, fitted the new one in its place and fitted our convection microwave above it, freeing up lots of lovely worktop. He did nearly fuck up the recently replaced pool pump mind you, by attempting to copy the procedure he saw me do when I was vacuuming shit off the bottom of the pool, but he didn’t a very good Bart Simpson, “I didn’t do it!” impression. I gave David a sim card for his phone (I bought an experimental $30 sim from voda to see if their coverage had improved round here) and he practically fell at my feet in gratitude.

So anyway – today we’re having Xmas lunch round at my parents. My sister and B.I.L. will be there, but my younger brother will not. We are having a mixed menu of traditional and Australian because, as per usual, nobody could agree on what to eat. Once we’ve done the present thing, I will be donning the red and yellow and heading off to the beach for a couple of hours to patrol. Not that I’m trying to escape or anything you understand.