Hooverville

You know that film Disturbia? You know with Shia Desperation [cute, but clueless]? The one that was a remake of a film made by a fat silhouette? Well, for the uninformed and those too lazy to read the links, it is about this dude who gets to thinking that his neighbour is some psycho serial killer on account of some strange shit going down at his house. It later transpires that he isn’t, but then, in time honoured tradition he is; unless you were planning on seeing the film and don’t want the surprise ruining, in which case, I don’t know whether he is or not.

Phew! Glad we cleared that up. I live in a semi-detached house; the neighbours in the house we are attached to are complete loons. Not serial killers, just complete OCD freaks. I think they must have met at some support group, because they are always cleaning the windows and hoovering – always with the fucking hoovering. She is a bit madder than him. She has a lazy eye and wears a clear plastic headscarf all the time no matter what the weather.

I remember a couple of years back, when her husband was still working, I got to the bus stop and she was waiting there for a bus, her plastic headscarf like a resplendent crest in the bright spring sun. Of course, I ignored her, my iPOD cranked up, my look, casually aggressive to anyone over forty raised on a daily tabloid diet of ‘teenager terrors’. The bus was late and she kept pacing up to the timetable and shaking her head; eventually she stopped in front of me and mouthed something; I was forced to remove my headphones and ask what she had said, as she was stood in front of me looking impatient.

“Do you kow if the bus is coming?” she asked.

I turned and looked down the street, “Err. No. I am sure it will be here soon.”

“You that strange girl from next door aren’t you?”

Mad people have so little tact. “Yes. That’s me….strange girl.”

“You have our bin.” she said forcefully.

“I’m sorry?”

“You Dad mixed them up last week, you have our bin. What are you going to do about it?”

“Errr…ok. I’ll change them round I guess.”

“You do that!”

There was then a long pause, where she went back to looking up the street, before turning back to me and asking, “You know Tony L at number 45?”

I nodded slowly.

“He a tosser,” she continued matter of factly, and then noted the bus was coming, “Oh thank God. It’s here. See? See!”

“Yeah I see it.”

As the bus pulled up and the doors flapped open, she turned to me before getting on, and taking into account I was at my most punky on that particular day, she said to me, “You should consider less make up. You are a pretty girl.”

She got on the bus and since then I have not spoken to her. Mostly I just get annoyed at the prolonged hoovering on a Saturday and Sunday morning, which on more than one occasions as caused me to shout from my crib, “Stop fucking hoovering already!” My Mum always collars me about it, “Lon, please don’t shout at the neighbours ok?” Adding on of her favorite phrases, “It’s not very lady like y’know.” Lady like? What the hell is that? Absent from my vocabulary is what it is.

It’s the same with my Grandad, although he always employs such archaic phrases with a wicked twinkle in his eye, like he knows my Faustian trysts are the complete antithesis of the Austenite social niceities. Marry Mr Darcy? I don’t think so. Jump Mr Darcy’s bones? I am there, with a bottle of tequila, a pack of cigs and some condoms! My Grandad, the only grown up that I come close to divulging some glimpses of my tangled personal relationships, will say things like, “So you plan to woo this gentleman then?” or “Are you and him courting yet?” It is strange how when dressed up in the language of a 19th century novel, even the most sordid acts can be recast in a heroic and noble light. My Grandad makes me feel like I am on some grand quest, conquering foe after foe in the search for the perfect intimate moment. Finally into the lair of the the on who claims to be incorruptible; it shall take all your womanly charms to arouse his carnal desires fair maiden.

My Mum and I have just started talking again. When we have had a bad argument for a while we don’t talk and then we leave each other notes. The last one to me read

“Sandwiches in the fridge. REMEMBER we have a social engagement at the weekend and you still need to buy a nice dress. You CANNOT go in jeans or one of your skirts. Pick up Michael from Grans please. Mum xxx”

We are going to a wedding at the weekend. One of my Dad’s idiot brothers is marrying some chav from Doncaster. It’s his second marriage and fourth kid already. Sometimes when I look around my family and my estate, I get this kind of uncontrollable throwback support for some good old fashioned eugenics. By letting fuckwits breed we are adding to our carbon footprint and national debt, whilst simultaneously lowering the average intelligence. My Mum has to recast me for these weddings as Little Ms Jane Bennett; some family feud that started over who got some carriage clock as part of an inheritance, or some such shit, means I cannot give any hint of delinquency or rebellion. My Mum will tug me into these little pockets of well to do female relatives and introduce me, “Oh Lon you remember Aunty such and such and your second cousin…”. Oh, but here is the fly well and truly in the ointment this time; I am legally entitled to drink now.

Before we started communicating via post-sticks, my Mum dropped on me, out of the blue, that our neighbour, the husband that is, was suffering from Alzeheimers. She has been talking to the couples daughter seemingly, who had been on the verge of tears as she related this news to my Mum. I suddenly felt that deep cold pity for Mrs Hooverville; you know the kind of pity you get where you feel guilty afterwards because you judge it to be an inauthentic emotional spasm? It’s a projected pity. It made me feel sick because its the same feeling I get whenever I see an ex-friend of mine who was crippled in an accident. I was not responsible, but something makes me feel like I should be.

Now every small event is magnified. I see Mrs H struggling through her front door, burdened down with shopping from Lidl and I immediatly feel guilty, sad and pull of pity. I have been thinking of N quite a bit since my Mum told me this news and what happened to him. It is strange how completely unconnected things can stir up emotions. I have started wearing less make up, I check the bins to make sure my Dad has not mixed them up and I smile and nod at her when I see her. What else can I do?

 

Saving The Nation: My Family & I

It makes me laugh when politicians like David Cameron, who incidentally looks like an advance copy of his own Tussauds wax work, talk about the importance of the family in fixing ‘broken Britain’. I am absolutely certain in the charts of evil pollsters my family unit appears statistically close to the median across a range of crucial indicators; on paper we are lumped in with the rest of the saviours of Britain following the next election, but really David Cameron should come and visit my family, for if we are supposed to be the cohesive, tax-incentivised remedy to societies ills, then I just don’t see it.

The thing is although I find my family stifling, embarrassing and sometimes downright vindictive, I do love them, wart, quirks, mental disorders, arguments and all. Shhh. Just don’t tell anyone OK?

Oh Hush Now Lon

Mostly bemused detachment works as the best defence against my families antics, which also has the fringe benefit of annoying the hell out of my mother. I do love her contradictions though, as the same traits of the contrarian hypocrite sometimes surface in me; perhaps that’s the reason we find ourselves arguing one day about something, and then a week later arguing with each other again, but from the polar opposite of the position we were arguing from previously.

She has been on at me since Christmas about my lack of commitment to my college course; she suspects I have not been attending all my lectures, and should would be right, yet last week she tells me that she needs me to stay in because she had arranged to have new tiles for the bathroom delivered and she could no longer be around to receive them; now this was a college day and her answer when I pointed this out? “You never go to your lectures anyway. Look Lon, I never ask you to do anything around here, just do it….. please.”

I can always tell when my parents have been arguing. It will always be about money – she spends it like it is going out of fashion, he invests in toxic assets at the turf accountants – as they simply don’t care that much about anything else enough to argue. Yesterday when I got back from college, or rather from bunking off college, all the hallmarks of a blowout were there.

1. My Dad always in the kitchen, always seemingly having lost the faculty to see things that are right in front of him. Cupboard open, cupboard slam,  cupboard open, cupboard slam. “Where are the fucking teabags? Why can I never find anything in this fucking place?” My Dad held out for along time, far beyond my Mum, in the not uttering expletives in front of me, but I think the futility and irony of this position eventually dawned on him; maybe her heard Lola and I talking about some of the complete bitches we know. He always has his music on in the kitchen too; loud lounge music, not sure why, after all is one not supposed to lounge to lounge music, not worry about ones ears starting to bleed? One day I have visions to walking in on a blood soaked kitchen with a hammon organ version of Moon River playing and tiny fragments of a shredded Racing Post floating in the air (Oh Lon – Melodrama much?)
2. Ahhh perhaps the answer is here. Mum is always in bed with the ‘mystical migraine’. Recovery always coincides with the start of the evening TV programmes she likes, by which times she feels ‘a bit better’, but still rubs her forehead with her eyes closed, and with furrowed brow normally continues for good measure, ‘Lon, do me a favour and fetch me some more codeine tablets”.
3. Michael, my brother, is alone in the lounge watching TV on his own, like some angelic force for calm and order amongst the chaos. Yesterday I go in and he is watching the History channel, specifically a World War II series called Britain At War or something. I love history and he has picked up my habit of channel surfing to the history channels, combined with his own love of the ‘animal channels’. After making my Dad a cuppa – the teabags had been left out on the worktop, peeking out cautiously from behind a box of Frosties – I went to check on Michael, rummaging through some of the unwatched DVDs as I sat down next to him, I asked, “Want to watch Horton Hears A Who?” He replied, “No thanks, this is good. It has tanks in it.” It was hard to argue: it did have tanks in it. Michael is six. I wanted to watch Horton.

I sometimes talk about ‘surviving my family’, but actually I find my neurotic and dysfunctional family quite endearing. Saviours of the nation we ain’t, but like those particle thingies my exasperated science teacher was always trying to get me to understand, we may at times orbit one another at a greater distance, but we will never break free from that orbit entirely and we will always snap back into a vaguely family shaped atom…or …errr…well you get the picture anyway. In future dispatches then, which will inevitably find me bitching about my family, if it ever gets too much for you, just link me back to this post.

Here in honour of my Dad’s mood music is one of his favorites.

X- Lon -X

 

A Peculiarly British Death

One thing the British pride themselves on is our ability to queue in an orderly fashion. I bet during the war there were even orderly queues to get into the bomb shelters as the Luftwaffe circled above. Nothing is more likely to cause otherwise reasonable and placid Brits to explode into an intermperate rant than some one not oberserving the rules of the queueing. These rules are quite straight forward:

1. New arrivals join the back of the queue; even those in wheelchairs and the elderly, it doesn’t matter, wait your turn.
2. You must grumble and chunter about how long the queue is and then lapse into talking about the weather. Some rebels choose to invert the order for these topics of discussion – normally men I have to say.

My Dad takes particular exception to drivers who overtake everyone down the outside lane and then indicate to cut in when they reach roadworks they were notified of some 2 miles back.

“What are you doing?!” he will exclaim as someone breaks solidarity and allows the queue-breaker to cut in, “No, don’t fucking let him in. Fucks sake. Noooooo! Bastard.”

Normally he doesn’t swear when Michael is in the car, but this is an exception. We hate queue-jumpers then. My Grandad probably sees the fact that it now happens so much regularly as part of his wider inditement of a society losing any kind of respect and manners, or at least, should I say, respect for the right things. Mostly I avoid places that have queues: hey if they are that popular, I can’t be seen gracing them with my anti-establishment kudos can I? For all my detached disinterest though, queue-jumping is one of those things that can tap into my emotions, prod my culturally inherited psyche into feelings of disdain. Everything else is sport, but not queue-jumping.

No surprises today when I saw this news story.

A woman has been found guilty of manslaughter after a shopper was killed following a row over queue jumping.
Antonette Richardson called boyfriend Tony Virasami to Sainsbury’s in Merton, south London, but he punched the wrong man, who suffered a fatal brain injury.

Essentially Richardson went to buy some fags, another shopper pushed in, so she got huffy and called her boyfriend who came in and punched the wrong person. This is fucked up on so many levels. When did the queue jumping disputes start to be resolved by bringing in muscle? Shameless. Back in my grandfather’s day the person cutting in would have been socially shamed by the chuntering and tutting of the others present. No longer though will the mild admonishing of ones peers suffice for this crime. Sneering and grumbling about folk, for so long the British form of social control, has been replaced by a hypersensitivity to any sleight and jumping about five steps of conflict resolution straight to summoning some hulking meathead to dish out vigilante justice. If there is a sign of society in terminal decline, then it is not the antics of a few pissed up teenagers, it is this.

Just as an aside, does anyone know why it is called manslaughter? I have always thought it an unusual term for an act considered less serious than murder, as it sounds worse than murder to me. [“He didn’t just murder him, he manslaughtered that bastard”]. I also surprised that we have not tried to rebrand the term so it is no longer gender specific. Sounds like a job for Harriet Harperson.

X- Lon -X

 

Secret To A Long Marriage?

Poor old Anne Hathaway is having a bad week. The perky-as-fuck star of trainwreck movies like the Devil Wears Prada and Get Smart (her agent is demonstrably not getting smart) has had two embarassing incidents this week; it appeared she had won at the Golden Globes only to have that revealed as a mistake, and more crushingly perhaps, she was embarassed by her parents, who have told a gossip columnist in a recent interview that the secret to their 28 year marriage was the “great sex”.

I am not without sympathy in this case. I mean it is bad enough when your parents get all amorous on the sofa after a few too many Christmas sherries, but to have them expose the fact to the world that not only are they still having sex, but that it is ‘great sex’, a term innocuous on the face of it, but suggestive of some pretty creative fuckmongering I think, well, it is all enough to make you want to stick your head in the oven. I am sure it is considered enlightened in this day and age to be able to discuss old people shagging, a sign of maturity and an acceptance of the reality that sex is not just about nubile young bodies colliding in Hollywood style clusterfucks of orgasmic joy, but also about old people sharing the same wild, passionate intimacy. We need to grow out of these anachronistic views of sex and be able to discuss is openly with no sniggering or recoiling; we should be able to grasp the sexual freedoms that, on paper, have been bequeathed to us since the post-war kids started getting high and sexing it up.

No, no, no! I am going to have to be a reactionary stick in the mud here. Old people having sex with other old people is just wrong and it should be stigmatised in polite conversation. It is ethically wrong for such people to pollute our minds with images of their crusty old bodies slowly creaking, like two undulating pieces of sandpaper, rasping against each other. It sets my teeth on edge. There are very good reasons why we have developed both evolutionary and cultural mechanisms to protect us from the thought of wrinkly old bones being prodded between the well thumbed flaps of grannie fanny; it is because it makes us face our own ephemeral youth, something that is not possible when one cannot maintain the fiction of old people as a seperate sexless species.

So does this make me a hypocrite for fucking older guys? I mean some of them have hardly been the most Adonis like physical specimens, so how can I put out for them and hold to the position I outlined above. Old people fucking one another? Ugh – no thanks. But older guys getting into my knickers? Oh yes! Hawwwt. I suppose this dichotomy comes from the fact that thinking about other people having sex and thinking about yourself having sex with someone are two different things. Simply thinking about other people having sex is completely free from context and any expression of sexual power or identity. Sleeping with older men, as a young woman, is full of its own subtexts and assertions of sexual identity; the man say, is proving that he is still youthful and able, and for me, well there is that thrill of never knowing if his pacemaker will go during a vigorous sexual encounter.

As for the Hathaway Snr’s claim about great sex being the reason for their long marriage, well I would think that was a rare reason for most lengthy marriages. I am pretty sure my parents stopped having sex after Michael was born, and even his surprising arrival, which cannot have been spurred by how much of a ray of sunshine their first born turned out to be, can only really be down to either alchohol or my Mum thinking Dad was someone else. No, from observation, most marriages last out of boredom, habit or in some cases a post-fuckfest companionship. Marriage is a peculiarly ill-formed institution when places against out biological drivers and out psychological make up; add into this modern cultures obsessive promotion of sex at every turn and the only surprise is that the divorce rate stays so low. If it were not for the raising and nuturing of ankle-biters then one would question why we need marriage at all.

Secret to a long marriage? Neglecting your partners flaws and not caring enough to find out their secrets. If that fails, try great sex…..with someone else.

X- Lon -X

 

Grounded

I am a sick fuck. I just saw this tragic story of Christmas child death on the BBC website and after thinking “Fuck that is horrible. Poor them”, I reflected on the following:

• “At Christmas too.” – As if dropping a TV on your kid at any other time wouldn’t be as bad.
• “It can’t have been a flatscreen.” – It has to have been one of those old skool bulky muthas that looks like it was manfactured in Poland by the people who eventually came over here to steal our jobs. Dad is also mouthing off about how big things like TVs have got and how small mobiles have got; he would probably see this as evidence of these dangers made manifest and lead some kind of bullshit campaign to return the world to the days when everyone had to squint at tiny screens.
• “If there is a metaphor for what TV is doing to the nations youth, then this is it.” – This is how out of touch, eighties throwbacks, clueless fucktards my parents are when it comes to parenting; I am grounded at the moment, for reasons I may or may not come to, and what do they do to accentuate my punishment? Well they take the TV and DVD player from my room, but leave me with my PC. Duh! Take away my access to Celebrity Big Brother and Wall E, but leave intact my ability to access the internet and get groomed by Speedophiles or find extreme porn.

My parents use grounding for its symbolic value; they know deep down it is ineffectual as a deterrent of future aberrations. They feel the need to do something, to react, but since I have had Childline on speed dial since I was 12, it is about all they can do. My Dad never has had the heart to properly thrash me and my Mum is just too lazy, so it’s now I get these speeches all the time full of empty rhetoric and hollow threats. “Whilst under our roof, you will follow our rules” Exsqueeze me? Rules? Since when did we have them? Besides they almost certainly conflict with my human rights as documented in Article Bleh of the Declaration of Impotence. “If you don’t like it here, why don’t you move out?” And live where? Maybe I could turn tricks in Dewsbury and get myself a bedsit.

It’s criminal really how easy it is to get your way with parents that pay lip service to parenting. If it were just about me, I would be over the fucking moon, but our kid is only 6; what chance does he stand with the parental equivalents of Paula Radcliffe? My Dad is angry with the world that he thinks stitched him up, which is why he has the ice cube maker going all weekend, and my mother the borderline manic depressive, shifting from one fad to the next and fucking every low life loser that smiles at her on Pub Quiz night.

You might be thinking in such an atmosphere of laissez faire parenting that it would have to be some major fucked up thing that I am grounded for, but they never have caught me in those acts that really push the boundaries of rebellious, teenage delinquency. No, I am grounded for a lesser crime, when realistically, if properly punished for the sins I have commited,  I should be in solitary confinement for six months and certainly not have access to MSN to arrange drops of ‘recreational materials’.

X- Lon -X