THE TRUTH, THE WHOLE TRUTH, AND NOTHING LIKE THE TRUTH

Here’s a text I received from my wife the other day concerning our fifteen year-old son:

I asked William to wear his coat this morning. Very wet and rainy. He needed to put his blazer in a plastic bag as there was no room in his school bag. I heard him get ready, heard him with a plastic bag. I looked out of the window to find him not wearing or carrying a coat . . . he’s a little shit and should go to acting school. Apparently it’s not raining now. I just love the touch of rustling the carrier bag and carrying the plastic bag to add authenticity . . .J

I replied by saying:

That’s my boy!

To which my wife responded:

My brains - your stupidity . . . a match made in heaven. J xxx

Oh well, I suppose they do say that opposites attract. It’s strange though, that whenever William does something bad he’s my son and at all other times he’s our son. Thinking about it, however, I’ve only got myself to blame because as a teenager I was particularly adept at lying my way out of almost any situation that may have potentially resulted in feeling the back of my mother’s hand or the whack of a teacher’s cane.

I grew up in Blackpool and received my education at Highfield Secondary Modern School, where my friend Pete and I played truant on such a regular basis that we eventually came to regard it as an integral part of the school’s syllabus. I never missed the lessons that I liked – English, Art and History – but Maths, Geography and especially Religion were fair game. Religion was not what it is now – a balanced study of the world’s main theological movements and their impact on our twenty-first century multicultural society

Back in the sixties the subject of Religion was just that. We were taught nothing about Muslims or Budhists or Hindus or any of the other religions of the world because as far as the English educational system of the fifties and sixties were concerned they didn’t actually exist. Britain was in the final death throes of Empire when I started school and that meant reading the Christian Bible was compulsory.

I was already a committed atheist by the time I was fifteen and therefore saw no point in sitting through a lesson I had absolutely no interest in. Playing truant and smoking and ogling at girls on the seafront was, for me at least, a much more meaningful, educational and mind expanding experience.

I learned how to copy my mother’s handwriting and signature for the notes I would take into school the next day and how to cook up excuses and lie convincingly to teachers about why I had not attended school – one of my Aunts died three times over a period of six months, whilst the family dog was run over and killed by (in chronological order) a milk float, a motor bike, a car and finally a lorry.

Towards the end of one lunchtime break Pete and I were forced to put all our powers of deception to the test when we were seen by the headmaster on the seafront. He was in his car and was therefore able to get back to school before the afternoon lessons started, whereas we were on foot and Highfield Secondary Modern was a good hour’s walk away. There was no way we could get away with it as we had been caught (or at least seen) red-handed, and so we spent the rest of the afternoon formulating a brilliant (but simple) way of explaining why we were not in school.

The following morning we arrived at school early and went straight to the headmaster’s office and knocked on his door. It was fifteen minutes before Morning Assembly was due to start. He called us in and we stood in front of his desk feigning remorse with guilty expressions on our faces that we had practiced between us (and in front of mirrors) the night before. We knew that he had seen us on the seafront but we also knew that he couldn’t be sure if we had seen him – and that was how we played our hand.

“Excuse me, sir – but we’ve come to apologise,” I said.

“For what?”

“Well, sir, me and Pete played truant yesterday and we’re both feeling really guilty about it because we’ve never done that sort of thing before, and we thought the best thing we could do was to come and see you and admit to it and apologise to you for doing it.”

The headmaster didn’t say anything for a few moments and we thought we’d been rumbled – but then he began to smile.

“Well done lads,” he said. “Boys who play truant are weak-minded and stupid, but what you’ve just done is very brave and honest. I wish there were more boys in this school with the integrity to admit when they’ve done something wrong and I hope for your sakes that you will never consider doing something like this again.”

“No, sir,” Pete and I said in unison.

“Good. Now get yourselves off to assembly and we’ll say no more about this.”

“Yes, sir. Thank you, sir.”

“That was genius,” said Pete as we walked down the corridor on our way to the Assembly Hall.

And indeed, it was. We had never even considered that lying and telling the truth at the same time could be as effective as just simply lying. On top of that the headmaster had told us that we had integrity – we didn’t know what integrity meant but we were sure it was a good thing.

When I got home I looked up the word integrity in the dictionary.

integrity /in’tEgriti/ nn. 1 the quality of having strong moral principles. 2 the state of being whole ðthe condition of being unified or sound in construction.

–ORIGIN ME: from Fr. intégrité or L. integritas, from integer (see INTEGER).

“We have strong moral principles and are unified and sound in construction,” I told Pete as we walked to school the next morning.

“What?”

“That’s us. That’s what integrity means – and we have it.”

“Wow,” said Pete, “I’ve never had integrity before. I hope it’s not catching.”

Despite having strong moral principles and the fact that we were unified and sound in construction we continued to play truant at any and every opportunity, thereby making us – at the very least – unified and we took unashamed pride in the authentic look of the forged signatures on the carefully written absence notes we handed in describing the funerals we had been forced to attend after another fictional relative had passed away.

Back in 2004 my wife and I lived in the village of Ramsey Mereside in Cambridgeshire and our two boys would have been aged seven and eight respectively.   William had – and still has – neat, legible handwriting – unlike his older brother Oliver who (until he started boarding school) wrote in a spider-like scrawl, made all the more difficult to understand because of the numerous and sometimes hilarious spelling mistakes.

It was therefore easy to distinguish who had written what, and so when we discovered the words

William Francis Owen

written neatly (in black permanent marker) across the newly painted wall of the bedroom they shared, we knew at once that it was William’s handiwork.

“Oliver did it,” he told us.

“But that’s your handwriting,” his mother said. “Oliver doesn’t write like that and he would have spelled it incorrectly.”

“I didn’t do,” William insisted.

“Did you do this, Oliver?” my wife asked, beginning her ruthless cross examination.

“No.”

My wife handed Oliver a piece of paper and asked him to write the words William Francis Owen on it.

He wrote:

WiLLemFRaNciSoweN
 

She then handed the paper to William and told him to do the same.

He wrote:

William Francis Owen

“That’s the same handwriting that’s on the wall,” my wife correctly pointed out.

“Oliver made me write my name on a piece of paper and then he copied it onto the wall.”

He said it with such gravitas that he was utterly believable. It was an amazing example of lying from the lips of a seven year-old, and he had done it without any formal training. I was impressed – I had not been able to attain such a convincing level of truthful untruthfulness until I was at least thirteen.

It took four hours of questioning from my wife until she eventually prised the truth out of him.

I would never have lasted that long under my wife’s relentless interrogation. She is an expert at getting the truth out of people. Political prisoners who had been remained silent after being beaten, water-boarded, deprived of sleep and had all their finger nails pulled out with pliers wouldn’t stand a chance under her simple (but effective) method of interrogation. She only has to say one word when she suspects me of lying to her and I blurt out the truth.

That word is “Really?”

It’s just a word isn’t it – and a short one at that – but by saying it in a sinister and unforgiving fashion, whilst looking at me in a questionable and mistrustful way, I’m shamed into immediately telling her the truth.

“Did you phone the bank today, Stephen?”

“Yes.”

“Really?”

“Errrmmm, well  . . errmm – no, but I’ll do it tomorrow.”

“Really?”

“Errrmmm, OK – I’ll do it now.”

William is now fifteen and he has far surpassed me in the art of truth bending when I was a similar age. When Pete and I were fifteen we could make the reasonably plausible believable – but William is a master of making the unbelievable totally believable.

And if you don’t believe me prepare yourself for what follows. It was a mystery that would have baffled even the great detective Sherlock Holmes, had he actually existed. I think I’ll call it The Strange Case of the Disappearing Cherry.

My daughter Jessica had baked some cakes, one of which she had saved on a plate for Oliver. They were very nice cakes – each with a glacé cherry on the top. When Oliver returned home Jessica handed him his cake which he placed carefully on the table so as not to disturb the cherry. Oliver loves glacé cherries – he would eat a whole jar of them in one sitting if we were foolish enough to let him and so he turned to thank his sister. It was a terrible mistake - he took his eyes off his cake for less than a second and when he turned back the cherry – that had been, only a moment before, gracing the perfectly risen top – had vanished.

The only other living organism in the room was William, who was sat innocently on the other side of the room watching the television.

 “I didn’t do it,” he said.

“Yes you did,” said his brother.

“You’re the only other person in the room,” remarked his sister.

“No, Oliver, don’t you remember telling me that the cherry accidentally fell into your mouth and you had to eat it?”

I don’t know how he did it, but I’ve thought of four options:

1) He moved like lightning across the room, picked up the cherry, ate it and then moved like lightning back across the room to the exact same spot he had been sat before the cherry was introduced,

2) He is secretly a genius and had found a way of overcoming Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle,

3) He had taught himself how to be an illusionist and had played a cruel trick on his brother using mirrors that made it look like the cherry had vanished when actually it was still there – thus giving him the opportunity to eat the glacéd red fruit in his own sweet time,
or
4, and I think this is the most likely) he’s a little shit and should go to acting school.

“Did you eat that cherry?” my wife asked William.

“No, mum,” he replied.

“Really?”

William looked her straight in the eye and with a calm voice that showed no trace of deception or fear, replied, “No mum. I didn’t.”

That’s my boy!

 

LUSTY LASSIES

Yes - it's that time again - my favourite night of the year - Burns Night. We celebrated the 255th anniversary of the birth of The Ploughman's Poet last night with another (our fourth) successful Burns Night Supper with almost a hundred guests in that little known corner of Scotland - Saudi Arabia. Those of you who have witnessed one of these special nights will know that I always do the Address to the Lassies and this year (as well as doubling up as The Laird of Castle McMitchell) was no exception.

 

When I was asked to do my first Address four years ago I looked on the internet for some ideas on what to do and what I discovered there were a few blokes stringing together a load of old, feeble, uncomplimentary jokes about women, culminating in a gushing of sentimentality about how great they were, thereby making redundant everything they had said previously.

 

I realised almost immediately that my personality prevented me from doing the same and so I decided to write my Address as a story about mistaking Burns' beautifully romantic poem A Red Red Rose with Neil Diamond's song Red Red Wine, which is all about getting pissed on (surprisingly) red wine (which I posted on here as Robert Burns - Diamond Geezer). For the next two years I spoke about sex and love (on here amalgamated as Love - With Wings) and so now here I am again in 2014 with an edited version of my final Address to the Lassies for The Causeway Club- speaking about lust.

 

I hope you enjoy it.

 

 

Four years ago my wedding anniversary fell, like it does almost every year, on the 25^th of May. But that day was a special day for another reason – it was also the day my old boss decided to have his leaving do in Bahrain. It was our fourteenth anniversary that year and I thought that because it wasn’t an important milestone (like 25 or 50) it would be OK to attend my boss’s leaving do instead of staying in with my lovely wife.

I’d already arranged a get-together with some friends that weekend to celebrate our anniversary and so rather than just tell her that I was going to Bahrain I thought it would be right and proper to ask her if she didn’t mind.

“If you want to go to Bahrain,” she told me, “you go to Bahrain.”

I had no idea that she could be so understanding.

I took the day off so that I could spend some time with her and I bought her some flowers and chocolates and then at around three in the afternoon my colleagues and I all piled into cars and we left for Bahrain, where we would all get absolutely hammered and not return back to Sara Compound until the early hours of the morning.

Now, you can call me naïve if you wish, but I’m not that good at reading the signals women give off and it wasn’t until the following morning that I fully understood, obviously after my wife had explained it to me, the schoolboy error that I’d made the day before.

When she had told me that I could go to Bahrain if I wanted to, what she had actually meant was that she didn’t want me to go to Bahrain. Now, why didn’t she just say that instead of making me think that I could go to Bahrain and confusing my standard man’s brain (which is comprised of equal parts OCD, Asperger’s and ADHD)? 

The worst thing about it is that she has never ever let me forget it, and like most women she can remember every single thing I’ve done wrong or buggered up in all the years she’s known me, and because I have inbuilt compulsion to lie and make excuses to her when things go wrong she never fails to bring up these things if an argument is not going her way.

Women have an amazing memory recall for the seemingly inconsiderate or selfish things we men have done throughout our married lives. I can barely remember what happened in the past two hours, let alone what happened four years ago and so this year I thought I’d start planning our wedding anniversary early.

I went on the internet at the start of this week to look at the prices of confectionary on Hotel Chocolat’s website but I got side-tracked when I came across an advertisement for a site that claimed that it was better than POF. I didn’t know what POF was and all I could gather from the advertisement was that POF was full of UGGOS, whilst their site was full of HOTTIES. This was illustrated by a series of mildly pornographic photographs of scantily clad, oiled-up women of various ages.

And so after doing a bit of research I discovered that POF stood for Plenty of Fish and it was an online dating site that with the help of a team of PhDs it had created the most advanced matching system in the world that can tell you what you need in a relationship and where you screwed up (without knowing it) in the past. The site doesn’t, however, actually qualify what their team of PhDs majored in – but if I were to hazard a guess they would most probably all have certificates in clairvoyance gained from the University of I Just Made It Up.

The POF dating site has been advertised on magazine covers and even in The Daily Mail. So there you have it – you now know that anything you read on the site bears no resemblance to the truth because it’s been included in the pages of The Daily Mail.

So what kind of people does POF attract?

Well, all the people on there were pretty boring and desperate so here’s one I found in the marriage seekers column of The Indian Times instead:

“Excellent Sindhi girl, MBA from Cornell University USA. Beautiful, fair, honest, humorous, happy girl from highly educated family. Seeks highly qualified professional doctor or engineer or Financier or Industrialist or Enterpreneur Sindhi or non-Sindhi boy from USA or UK or India.”

Now, there’s a girl who’s set her sights on what she considers to be the perfect man/men, although somebody should really prepare her for a life of disappointment because (as every woman knows) the perfect man doesn't exist.

The thing is – Robert Burns would have loved Plenty of Fish. It would have been perfect for him. We all know that in his time Burns was a renowned philanderer and as famous for his numerous love affairs as he was for his poetry. He was married to a lassie called Jean Armour (who bore him a total of nine children), but he is also rumoured to have wed his lover, Mary Campbell, when his first marriage began to go on the rocks.

Here’s the first verse of one of his secret poems, which he may have written around that time:

Ye jovial boys who love the joys,

The blissful joys of lovers,

Yet done avow, with dauntless brow,

When the bonny lass discovers.

I pray draw near and lend an ear

And welcome in a frater,

For I’ve lately been on quarantine,

A proven fornicator. 

The poem is called The Fornicator and a collection of these secret poems were discovered after his death (probably on a top shelf somewhere) many of which employ the frequent use of the dreaded C Word. The title of one poem in the collection is Nine Inch Will Please a Lady, and that should give you a fairly good idea of its content (and it’s one of the cleaner ones in the collection).

What the poems show is that – yes, Burns did love women – but more than anything he lusted after them. And it’s not just men that are lustful – women can also be as lustful as men, if not more so.

Back in the dark ages, when I was eighteen and there was no such thing as internet dating,  like most young single lads in the seventies, or indeed throughout the ages, I only ever thought about one thing – sex.  I was stationed at RAF Coningsby at the time and I met a girl called Patricia (not her real name) at the Saturday Night Castle Club Dance and after only one date with her I quickly realised that there was something special about her – something that made her more desirable than all the other girls I’d been out with put together. Patricia, it turned out, was every single man’s dream woman. Not only was she a rich farmer’s daughter, she was also a raving nymphomaniac.

Now, I’d like to say that Patricia and I made love all the time – but we didn’t – we just had mad sex in lots of varied and interesting places. We did it anywhere and everywhere – in fields, in woods, under hedges, on riverbanks, by bridges, on bridges, under bridges, in her house when her parents were out playing bridge, in lifts, in garages, on the back row of the cinema, on newly-polished lino floors, on threadbare carpets, on rickety chairs, in her garden, in her neighbour’s garden, in sheds, on Black and Decker workmates, in her bathroom, in her bedroom, in my room in the barrack block when my mates were out, in the back of her car in dark, secluded lay-bys (which was often awkward as her car was a mini and I kept getting my foot stuck between the gear stick and the handbrake). 

She even demanded it once while we were sitting on the couch in the living room of her house watching telly. Now, I know that’s a fairly common place to perform an act of love, for both single couples and those who are newly-married – but what added a new dimension of urgency and terror to it for me was that her mum was in the kitchen at the time cooking the evening meal.

As I said, I was young and virile then – but as you get older and then get married and get even older and have kids your wife tends to go off all that kind of stuff. Women have got a sort of sixth sense when it comes knowing what’s on a man’s mind. At the end of the night, even before my foot has laid its first step on the stairs my wife knows that I’m thinking about the possibility of sex.

“If you’re thinking about sex you can stop it right now,” she usually tells me.

How did she know?

I suppose it’s probably because I’ve fluctuated between the ages of sixteen to eighteen ever since she’s known me. But that doesn’t stop me from trying because, like most men, I was born with a recessive gene that causes involuntary carnal perseverance, which means that I can’t help myself from making the first move. And let me tell you, when you’ve been married for a few years, making the first move can be a frightening and treacherous procedure – I’m never entirely sure whether my wife will respond to my advances or just get angry with me for waking her up.

I’m fairly convinced that when the kids came along they were put on this earth solely to destroy any remaining thoughts we may have had of having uninterrupted sex for the next twenty to thirty years.

Children change everything. There is a saying (that I just made up) that getting married changes your life, but having children destroys it. I live in Saudi Arabia and things are changing here too. Only recently the Grand Mufti has allowed the formation of a women’s rugby team. Apparently they’ll be calling themselves the All-in-Blacks.

Actually I just made that up, but what I didn’t make up is the advice given in the book The Joy of Sex, which gives some interesting advice about how to be more creative when attempting to make love. I tried this but it didn’t really help at all and in retrospect I can now tell you that making a Japanese Samurai helmet out of papier mache in the bedroom was probably not want they meant by being creative. I thought I might get some ideas by watching the film Ghost but that proved to be a very expensive and exhausting experience. You can only imagine the disappointment I felt when, after forking out a hundred quid for a potter’s wheel and then having to lug it all the way upstairs to the bedroom, I discovered that watching my wife making a Greek Urn, wearing only a front-loader bra and her best big pants, did nothing for me at all.

Obviously when the book used the word creative it was alluding to the use of sex-aids, but having them in a house that has small children scampering about can lead to some rather awkward and embarrassing confrontations.

“Look Daddy, I’ve found a pink rocket in your bedroom and it goes bzzzzzzzz.”

The book also suggested that dressing up and pretending to be other people was a good way of making your love life more exciting – and I can still remember those halcyon Sunday mornings that we spent cavorting around the bedroom – me as Superman and my wife as Wonder Woman – listening to our children screaming outside the door, unable to get in because we’d coated the door handle with Vaseline.

I must admit that frolicking around the bedroom in a Superman suit was a little embarrassing for me at first, but once I’d got used to the fact that my underpants were on the outside of my trousers everything worked out just fine.

What I’m trying to say here is that its lust and love that makes the world go around and Robert Burns knew this. His collection of secret poems weren’t published until 2009 because they were considered too lusty for human consumption.

But since then many scholars of Burns have always thought there was something missing from the collection and they were indeed correct. Following the rather shocking news that an ancient document was discovered revealing that the town of Doncaster was never formally signed back to England after the Scots were driven out (which means that, to all intents and purposes, Doncaster is actually still part of Scotland), a lost secret poem was discovered in a burnt out house in Paisley (and that was on one of the better estates).

You should consider yourselves fortunate indeed because Travels With My Rodent has been granted permission by the World Federation of Burns’ Aficionados (a society that I just made up) to be the first to publish it.

It is written in the Scottish dialect, so English people may find it a little hard to follow (unless, of course, you’re from Doncaster). And so, without further ado, here it is:

Noo we can gab aw nicht abit th' weaither

Teel ye 'boot mah friends oot oan th' coast

I coods ask a lot ay bampot questions

Ur Ah coods ask whit Ah pure want tae ken

Noo rain can faa sae soft against th' windae

The sun can shine sae bricht up in th' lift

But ma father aye tauld me, "Donae make wee talk" he said,

"Come oan oot an' say what's oan yer mind"

If Ah said ye hud a bonnie body - woods ye hauld it against me

If Ah swair ye waur an angel, - woods ye treat me loch th' devil tonight

If Ah waur dyin' ay thirst - woods yer flowin' loove come quench me

If Ah said ye hud a bonnie body - woods ye hauld it against me

 

Aye, aye, aye.

At the end of the day we all love the women that we have decided to spend the rest of our lives with. We can’t live without them. I’m finding it difficult to live out here without my wife because I’ve loved her from the second I set eyes on her, and so I’ll leave you with another poem by Burns (a real one this time) that all you lusty lassies should keep in mind when your menfolk come home from a hard day’s work. It’s called Supper Is Not Ready:

The master to his lady said,

“My honey and my succour,

Oh shall we do the thing, you know,

Or shall we take our supper?”

With modest face, so full of grace,

Replied the bonny lady;

“My noble lord, do as you please,

But supper is not ready.”

NO SEX PLEASE - WE'RE AMERICAN

 My first book, a novella entitled Permanent Moments was published on the 15th December last year and it contains a revised version of one of the stories that have been posted in this blog. The story in question was called The Smell of Last Night’s Fingers and it raised a problem with the publishers because it features a scene describing two fifteen year-olds indulging in under-age sex. The reason why it caused a problem was because the publishers are American and the age of consent in the US is eighteen.


This is the front cover of the book. If you look closely at the picture in the lens of the camera

I'm the child with the long legs

 

After a few increasingly angry emails (all from me) I wrote to them explaining that the chapter takes place in Britain where the age of consent is sixteen and so if a reference to this was included I would change the age of the characters to conform to British law.

I thought that was fairly reasonable.

 

The publishers disagreed and it was at this stage that I threw my toys out of the cot and behaved in the most childish manner possible.

I told them that I was going to rewrite the second half of the chapter so that no sex at all was mentioned.

This is what I submitted to them.

 

These are the changes to the chapter ‘The Smell of Last Night’s Fingers.’

I have checked through the rules and it does fall within the requirements of the publisher.

“After line 36, I would like the word CENSORED to appear in Franklin Gothic Heavy font and in letters large enough so that the word stretches across the entire line, like this:

C E N S O R E D

Page 76 – Page 80: Remove everything from Page 76 line 37 (Pete, who was . . .) to Page 80 line 8 (the final line of the chapter) and replace it with the following:

AUTHOR’S NOTE: Unfortunately I can’t go any further with this chapter because of a caveat placed into the contract by the publisher, which I signed without reading properly and which states:

We do not permit any explicit or graphic descriptions of sexual situations featuring individuals under the age of eighteen. This does not mean that we are opposed to the characters in a story being involved in sexual situations for character development, because that does occur in real life, however, we want to make sure that all the details of the sexual situations are avoided. Avoid descriptions of the act entirely, specifically the following: kissing in a sexual manner; sexual touching; visible signs of arousal or sexual attraction; nudity of underage individuals; double entendre.

I never read contracts because I (wrongly) assume that they are sensibly written by sensible people. I am a British writer writing about British things that happened in Britain in the 1960s and aiming this British book at a British audience.

Unfortunately my publishers are American.

Because the characters in this chapter (and indeed, throughout the book) are under age and therefore still at school I was informed that I was only allowed to include a sex scene if I made the characters eighteen years old (the age of consent in the US being eighteen and not sixteen like it is in Britain). This is obviously ridiculous as the whole point of this chapter is the fact that the characters are under age. I tried to argue my case with the content evaluators, but to no avail, and they informed me with some finality that since they are US publishers “characters need to be eighteen.”

It strikes me as supremely hypocritical that a country where High School shootings are becoming more and more commonplace that a publisher would restrict the use of sex in a book because the characters are under age. If they feel that banning scenes of two under age people having sex will discourage other under age people from having sex, then, by using that same rationale, why not ban the use of guns in books, particularly guns that are being fired – at other people; surely that would discourage Americans from shooting each other on regular basis.

Recently I went to see the film Kick Ass 2, which had, unfortunately been cut by US distributors so that the film could be seen by a family audience. Every single word of bad language had been removed from the film, although, strangely, all the violence had been left in. The message that this version of the film clearly sent out, therefore, was this: It’s OK to stab someone in the eye with a sword but it’s not OK to use the word “fuck”. Also the original Kick Ass film had an under-age girl, not only stabbing people with swords but shooting them and using the word “cunt”.

These films were made in a country where, via music channels, children are exposed to soft porn disguised as pop videos; where disgraceful reality programmes such as Teen Mom – she’s a mom and a teenager, geddit – pander to an audience that’s all but dribbling into their TV dinners – but don’t worry, despite the fact that she was under age when she had sex, the network didn’t show the act that got her pregnant in the first place. It’s a country where rich criminals posing as evangelists roam the networks extorting hard earned cash from gullible poor people who are labouring under the misapprehension that God actually exists.

Ah, America, you are a land of contradictions.

Anyway, for those of you curious enough to find out what was missing from this chapter (you’ve read this far, so you must be showing at least some interest) you can read it by the going to the 25^th entry of my blog Travels With My Rodent, where the chapter originally appeared. All you need to do is type www.travelswithmyrodent.blogspot.com  into your internet browser and then search for 25: The Smell of Last Night’s Fingers.

In case you’re wondering where title of the chapter comes from, let me just say that it ends with the line “And, of course, I let him smell my fingers.”

I hope you enjoy what you find there.”

 

So there you have it – a childish, knee-jerk, reactionary rant that was inappropriate, xenophobic and pointless all at the same time.

The Content Evaluators understandably rejected it as it must have seemed plainly obvious to them that I had quite clearly gone totally insane – or worse, judging from what I’d written I had turned into that most intolerant and despicable of creatures –  a Daily Mail reader.

I eventually got over myself and rewrote the chapter using a different situation and with the ages of the characters changed to eighteen.

And do you know what?

It actually improved the story.

So what the hell do I know about anything.

This is the back cover of the book. The rather arty back-and-white photograph is actually a selfie taken on my phone.

The book is available on Amazon as both a paperback and a kindle book. The kindle book is only £2.67 (cheap).

So that's my ruthless sales pitch over.

Have a Happy New Year!

 

CHRISTMAS EVE WITH THE F*CKW*TS

Throughout their long and painful marriage Kurt and Amelia Schwartzkopf never really got on with each other. They didn’t even like each other that much on their wedding day, but they felt that they should go through with the ceremony rather than let the few friends and relatives they had down by cancelling the biggest party any of them would ever likely to have in their entire lives. There was one other reason why they decided to tie the knot and that was because they were both old-fashioned with old-fashioned values (apart from the old-fashioned value that stated that people shouldn’t have sex before they got married) and consequently, Geraldine (who eventually became known as Gerry) was already growing in Amelia’s womb when she and Kurt walked down the aisle.

They got on with each other when they first met, of course, but as their relationship developed they began to dislike each other, not intensely at first – that would come later after they had been married a few years – but just a little bit at a time.

Kurt and Amelia’s relationship was described by Gerry in her terrible autobiography, published earlier this year, A Child Called Blackhead as being “like falling in love, only in reverse”.

A Child Called Blackhead was so bad that it became an international bestseller, filling the remainder bins of airports worldwide. Not only that, it was entered into an annual competition that is held every six months to find a book worse than Fifty Shades of Grey. Unfortunately A Child Called Blackhead was up against a book so impressively bad that it made scholars of English Literature throw themselves off tall buildings in protest against its lack of any plot or story, its scant regard to logic of any kind, its (barely) one-dimensional characters and its relentless use of adjectives. The top prize was of course awarded to Dan Brown’s thinly disguised travelogue for idiots Inferno. Spurred on by her failure Gerry continued to write badly and just six months later her lack of any literary merit paid off when she walked away with the coveted annual award with her highly controversial autobiographical biography My Parents And Other Fuckwits (A Dan Brown book was not entered as the computer program used to recycle and rearrange the events, characters and plots of his previous books had crashed).

In My Parents And Other Fuckwits Gerry describes when she foolishly decided to spend Christmas at home during her first year at university. What follows is an extract from the first chapter of her book (obviously the punctuation in the original has had to be edited for clarity and whole passages have had to be rewritten – it seems that during the six months she spent writing her book she also attended a creative writing course run by Dan Brown and as a result her pages were littered with unnecessary adjectives – which I’m glad to inform you have all been removed).

I didn’t want to go home at Christmas but I decided to go for two reasons. The first was that all my friends had gone home and the second was to sponge off my parents for two weeks.

My father was a second generation Ukrainian whose father had been forced to fight for the German army during the Second World War and had surrendered to the British at the earliest opportunity. My grandfather, whose name was Sven Schwartzkopf (he was a second generation German), was shipped off to England where he was held in a Prisoner of War camp in Norfolk and it was there that he met my grandmother, Doris, a local land girl. After the war Sven explained to Doris that if he was sent back to Kiev he would most likely be shot for being an enemy of the people or at the very least incarcerated for the rest of his life in a gulag somewhere in Northern Siberia. Doris agreed to marry him and in 1946 they had their only child, Kurt, my father.

Sven was faithful to my grandmother to the end of his days because she had, quite literally, saved his life. He died in 1989, just two months short of the Berlin Wall coming down and it was a few months after that that Doris received a large envelope postmarked from Kiev. Inside the envelope were two letters, one from Werner Schwarzkopf and the other from his son Ivan, and a slightly creased, dog-eared black-and white photograph. When Doris looked at the photograph she was shocked to see a younger version of her dead husband looking back at her with what appeared to be a carbon copy of him by his side. It turned out that Sven had a twin brother called Werner that he had not told anyone about. Werner (who was still very much alive) had been a member of the Secret Police in Kiev and had kept Sven’s existence a secret from the Secret Police for fear that he might be taken out and shot or at the very least shipped off to a gulag in Northern Siberia.

During his time in the Secret Police he had taken courses in English under the guise that if ever they needed to use him as an undercover agent in the West then he would be an asset. In reality it was so that he could talk fluently to his brother and the family he had as he felt sure that one day they would be reunited. Werner’s wife had died recently and now that the spirit of Glasnost had reached Ukraine, he thought it would be a rather good idea if the family all got together once a year at Christmas.

Werner and Ivan were two of the reasons why I never wanted to go home at Christmas. They were like peas in a pod. Whenever either of them went to the toilet they would always come back into the room with the dot of shame, a two inch diameter circle of piss due to insufficient shaking that had soaked through their underpants and into the denim of their matching jeans. There it would remain for an hour or so before it disappeared, by which time it was time for them to go for another piss.

They were disgusting.

I had used what money I had to buy presents for the family and I packed them in a suitcase, together with some warm clothes and caught a train to Norwich.

Werner and Ivan had already arrived when I turned up at the house on Christmas Eve and they were already drunk, as were my parents. Mum and Dad had also been arguing with each other. Arguments were a tradition in our house at Christmas and they would sometimes go on for days. This would be followed by a period known as The Silent Treatment, where my parents would spend days (sometimes weeks) not talking to each other and they would relay messages to each other via a third party, usually me (but not necessarily) until one of them cracked and broke the silence. I would have said that things returned to normal but in reality arguments and The Silent Treatment were usually the norm.

Another tradition on Christmas Eve was to open one present each. When I was small this was carried out before I went to bed, but since I’ve grown up this is now done before Dad, Werner and Ivan went to the pub. Mum never went to the pub because by Christmas Eve she was giving Dad The Silent Treatment.

I noticed under the tree that there was only one present for me, so if I opened it I would have nothing to open the next day. I was about to say that I would rather wait until the morning when Mum said, “Pass us Gerry’s game will you, Ivan.”

Right so that was it. I’d got a game for Christmas. I unwrapped the present and held the game (Monopoly) up and gave my relatives a forced smile. “Thanks,” I said morosely.

“Right,” said Mum, “I’m off to bed. Werner, Ivan – goodnight.” She gave Dad The Silent Treatment and then went upstairs.

Werner, Ivan and Dad waited for a few minutes and then went to the pub, where they stayed until Betty the Landlady forcibly threw them out at the end of the evening.

I was left on my own on Christmas Eve. Brilliant. I made up the bed settee (Werner and Ivan were in my old room and the spare room), but before I went to sleep I thought I’d get my parents back for every miserable Christmas I’d spent with them down the years.

I took a black marker pen from my handbag and on the wrapping paper I wrote exactly what each present was that I had bought them. Then I carefully opened all the other presents and wrote what they were before sealing them back up again.

You have no idea how good it made me feel. I undressed and put on my nightie and crawled into the lumpy bed settee. Sleep came easy but it was short lived and I was woken by Dad, Werner and Ivan crashing into the house. They were trying to be quiet and, like all drunks, were making a really bad job of it. I could hear them shushing each other louder than normal people held a conversation with each other and they began giggling uncontrollably when they realised what they were doing and then they began shushing each other again, etc.

Dad broke the cycle of shushing and giggling by ordering Werner and Ivan upstairs to bed and to use the toilet now rather than wander around naked in the middle of the night searching for the toilet door as they had done in previous years.

Mum had not been impressed.

I could see Dad in the kitchen from where I was lying on the bed settee. He was stood on his tip-toes hunched over the sink and at first I wondered what he was doing. And then I realised – he was having a piss in the kitchen in the kitchen sink, although he had thoughtfully taken the washing up bowl out of the sink before he started.

“Da-ad!” I said in disgust.

It was what he said in reply that made me forgive him and provided the highlight of an otherwise awful Christmas. He turned in mid-piss, and with his head doing the drunken nod, he looked at me and treated me to a broad smile.

“Don’t tell your mum,” he said.

It was priceless. And besides, seeing Dad pissing in the sink on Christmas Eve Night was just another tradition I had to look forward to each year.

The End.

Merry Christmas to all the people who have read and supported my blog over the last year – you know who you are.

Have a Happy New Year – I know I will – my first book, a novella entitled Permanent Moments was published on Friday 13^th December, just in time for Christmas and is available on Amazon, Barnes & Noble and Good Reads as a paperback. It will be released as a Kindle book in two or three weeks.

Thank you and have a nice day.

Travels with my Rodent will return in mid-January.

A MERRY RUBBERY CHRISTMAS

When I was a loveable blonde-haired five year old and living at my grandparent’s house with my mother after she had left my biological father three years earlier, Father Christmas was still real and the thought of him visiting me was almost more excitement than I could bear. My presents – that had been kept hidden about the house – were stuffed into an old bolster cover and propped up in a corner of my grandparent’s bedroom. There it would stay until the following morning when, dancing with excitement, I would burst into their bedroom at some unearthly hour on Christmas morning. Mum would already be there and the three of them would lie on the bed and watch with adoration as I opened each of my presents with unadulterated glee, exclaiming to everything I opened: “A (insert present of your choice)! Just what I always wanted!”

They enjoyed every second of my moon-faced wonderment and they gave thanks that they had been blessed with such a beautiful and appreciative child.

But nine years later things were very different.

When I turned fourteen and became the archetypal teenager (argumentative and thoroughly dislikeable) my mother had already been married (to Mr Right) and divorced (he turned out to be Mr Wrong).

She had moved back in with her parents, but my presents were no longer lovingly bundled into a bolster but neatly arranged under the tree in the front room, where they would stay until everyone was up and out of bed, at which point I would be able to open them.

All houses had a font room and a back room. The back room was used as an everyday room whereas the front room was only used for special occasions. Special visitors were shepherded into the front room and, other than the absence of a television and the presence of doilies draped over the backs of chairs, the front room was the same as the back room. The strange thing about our front room was that it was at the back of the house – grandma preferred the view at the back and she also objected to 'the bloody nosy neighbours' peering in when they had guests.

Back in the 1950s this arrangement often bewildered guests who had never been to the house and they would start to walk to where the traditional front room would normally be located only to be directed to the totally alien ‘front room at the back of the house” location. Some guests found the experience so distressing and disorientating they had to excuse themselves and visit the toilet where they would be forced to vomit the incomprehension and perplexity from their bodies before they could continue.

By the end of the 1960s, however, the average person’s perception of what was acceptable in a house had changed and it was no longer considered strange or unconventional to have a front room at the back of the house. In the history of interior design my grandma, although way ahead of her time, went totally unrecognised.

Mum went out drinking on Christmas Eve with Aunty Sylvia and they would stagger home, giggling about the good night they had had and the terrible men they had met. At Christmas my mother tried to forget about my disagreeable behaviour whilst trying desperately to understand why she had been cursed with such a sullen and unappreciative child. A good night out, she soon discovered, that involved alcohol (and plenty of it) was the perfect formula required to induce memory loss and a sense of blissful indifference.

On Christmas morning I raced downstairs to find my presents arranged neatly under the tree and my grandparents and mum eventually emerged, looking tired and bleary-eyed, I dived in amongst them, my fingers probing the brightly coloured paper. Along with a wooden fort and several boxes of plastic soldiers, I found an Eagle annual, a pair of socks and a jumper, two Airfix model kits (a Spitfire and a Hurricane), a Painting-by-Numbers set, some crayons and a Batman colouring book, a pair of boxing gloves and a Chad Valley Bowl-A-Strike.

Also in this confusion of presents was something that I’d always wanted – a red and white Powerball.

A Powerball could bounce over three stories high, higher than any ball had ever bounced in recorded history and with practice an assortment of tricks could be performed as long as you had a handy wall nearby – or so the advert on the telly said. This was fortunate as there was an abundance of walls where I lived – and almost all the houses in our street had at least one.

The Powerball or Bouncy Ball was invented by Norman Stingley, a chemist from California who, in 1965, spent his spare time compressing various scraps of synthetic rubber together.

We can only imagine the sparkling conversations that must have rebounded around the Stingley household each evening. In fact I often imagine it as one of those dire American sitcoms from the 50s and 60s. I’d like to think that it would be called something like My Favorite Polymer.

Mr Stingley arrives home to the thunderous applause, cheers and whistling from a moronic audience who have no idea why they are doing what they are doing.

 All the characters have ridiculous American accents.

Mr Stingley:    Hi honey, I’m home.

Mrs Stingley:   Hello dear. Did you have a good day at the laboratory?

Mr Stingley:    Yes dear – I used 6000lbs of pressure to compact some rubber into a ball.

Mrs Stingley:   That’s nice dear. Myra next door has got some new curtains.

Mr Stingley:    That’s nice.

Mrs Stingley:   Yes dear, that is nice. Curtains are so much more useful than balls.

Mr Stingley:    That’s a matter of opinion.

Mr Stingley winks at the audience then grabs hold of his wife, bends her over the table and has dry sex with her as the audience whoop, cheer, whistle, cat-call, bark, applaud and then begin shooting each other for no apparent reason other than that they are too stupid to think of anything else to do.

Norman Stingley’s painstaking research did however result in the mass manufacture of polybutadiene rubber balls about the size of  ping-pong balls that rebounded proportionally to the amount of force used when they were thrown at a hard surface.

But I didn’t care about any of that and so I ripped off the card and plastic packaging like someone possessed and held the hard, glistening ball in my hand. I was in rapture as I charged outside in my pyjamas, ready to set my Powerball off on its maiden journey.

I drew my hand up and bounced the Powerball with all my strength and it shot up into the air – higher than I’d seen anything go. I watched, squealing with delight, as it started its descent, eager to have another go. But my delight quickly turned to despair as the Powerball hit the roof of the house and bounced off in another direction and I was left gazing helplessly as it disappeared over the neighbour’s house and vanished.

I never saw it again.

I stood in the garden in total and abject misery. I’d had my Powerball for less than a minute and it was gone.

I felt like crying.

When Mum, still in her dressing gown, stepped out of the house and into the garden she saw me standing in my pyjamas looking up into the air like a moron.

“What are you doing out here?” she asked.

“Playing,” I replied.

“What with?”

“Nothing.”

“What with?”

“My Powerball,” I said, after a moment’s hesitation.

“Give us a go of it, then,” she said.

I looked at my mother in disbelief. “I can’t – I’ve lost it.”

“What? Already?”

“I just bounced it and it went over the roof.”

My mother smiled in sweet triumph. “I knew that would happen,” she said. “I don’t know why you wanted the bloody stupid thing in the first place. Waste of money if you ask me.”

As she walked back to the house I stuck my tongue out at her. It didn’t get my Powerball back but it did at least give me some degree of satisfaction.

Unfortunately Mum saw me reflected in the kitchen window and she came back and gave me a clip round the ear.

“Parents aren’t allowed to hit children at Christmas,” I said.

She hit me again for good measure.

And then it started to rain. It wasn’t real rain – it was just drizzle – but it was the kind of drizzle that just made you feel unrelentingly depressed.

It was supposed to snow at Christmas.

I watched my mother as she turned to go back into the house and thought to myself: this is the worst bloody Christmas I’ve ever had.

I must have stood there for a good five minutes before the door opened again and Granddad stepped out wearing his overcoat over his pyjamas.

“You alright then?” he asked.

“Not really.”

“What's up with you?”

“Christmas,” I said, “is bloody rubbish.”

“I’ll let you into a little secret,” said Granddad, “it doesn’t get any better. The older you get the more rubbish it becomes. The way to make the most of it is to prepare to be disappointed. Only if you’re prepared for the disappointment of Christmas can you truly enjoy the warmth and good cheer of it.”

I stood there with Granddad, looking at the kitchen door wondering what he had meant when the door opened and Grandma popped her head out. “What are you two daft buggers up to? Get inside or you’ll catch your bloody deaths.”

She closed the door and Granddad and I looked at each other and started to laugh.

“You don't have a dirty old sweet in your pocket, do you Granddad?” I asked.

“I’m afraid not, lad,” he said. He fished around in his pocket and said, “But I have got one of these.”

I couldn’t believe it. In his hand was a Powerball. “I bought another one just in case and you can have it if you let me go first.”

“Go on! Go on!”

Granddad pulled his arm back and bounced it with all his strength on the pavement of the path.

We watched it shoot up into the air.

We watched it go higher than anything we’d ever seen.

We watched it hit the roof of the house and bounce out of our sight and out of lives.

Forever.

"Bugger," said Granddad, placing a sympathetic arm around my shoulder, "I knew it would do that."

The end.

This is the first of two Christmas stories. The second "Christmas with the F*ckw*ts" will be posted on Christmas Eve.