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