It’s very strange (and slightly unnerving) the way our relationships with our parents change over the years and how, almost out of nowhere, they start behaving in a way you find either amusing or infuriating, depending on your caffeine levels.
My parents split up last year after 45 years of marriage and my Mum has found herself unexpectedly living on her own. And when I speak to her now there are certain traits I’ve noticed which I could have sworn weren’t there a year ago.
To pluck one example from the top of my head, she lists things. Not in the same way that you or I would write a shopping list, or a list of household chores, or errands, or a list of famous people we would like to see crucified on live television. Not those sort of, you know, useful lists. My Mum’s lists appear unbidden during conversations, arriving out of the blue and hanging around for much longer than they really should.
Not only that, but the lists often seem to breed, forming lists within lists and providing the listener with more detail than is absolutely necessary.
For example, I spoke to her the other day and she related to me the sad tale of the death of her freezer. Just before she went away on holiday, she noticed that it wasn’t working and assumed, like we all would, that it had reached the end of its useful life.
“That’s terrible,” I opined, trying to sound as interested as I could while simultaneously playing Football Manager on my laptop, “you had loads of stuff in there, didn’t you?”
“Oh yes,” she replied, “I had that ratatouille in there, some courgette and tomato soup (you know, the one I added butterbeans to, it was absolutely delicious), some sausages from the farm shop up the road, some fish fingers, some veggie sausages, two packs of skinless chicken breasts…”
“Oh dear” I attempted to interject, like a fool.
“A packet of mince, some frozen peas, some of those onion rings that you like, some fish, you know breaded fish (the fish with breadcrumbs on it), the Ark of the Covenant, Shergar’s front legs and the last of the Mohicans.”
I made a noise that I thought conveyed a convincing mixture of interest and sympathy. It went “Hrrrrum?”
Anyway, it turns out that the demise of this cold storage unit was directly attributable, like so many things nowadays, to the actions of my father. He still pops round to Mum’s to do stuff like clear the guttering and mow the lawn (driven, I can only assume, by guilt and a desire to feel that his family are still a functioning unit). He had done something to the wiring in the shed where the freezer lives and he had, basically, forgotten to do an additional electrical thing that turned out to be quite important.
You will, dear reader, forgive my vagueness with regard to the work undertaken by Dad. My Mum did try and explain to me exactly what had happened but I suffer from an affliction which I hope and pray affects others too. This takes the form of not being able to concentrate when anyone is saying anything to me that involves DIY or any of its bizarre spin-off activities. I am not, as many will attest, a practical person. I have friends and acquaintances that have built extensions to their houses, installed kitchens in said extensions and know their way around a combustion engine. Me? I have never even put up a shelf. DIY is a strange, cult-ish world that holds no appeal to me at all and, when people are regaling me with tales of its myriad perversions, it takes approximately three seconds before their voice turns into that of the teacher from “Peanuts”, my eyes glaze over and I find myself mentally transported into a warm and welcoming fantasy world of my own.
So, anyway, I digress. As it was his fault that my Mum’s food supply for the forthcoming apocalypse had been irrevocably destroyed, he had promised to replenish said stocks while Mum was away on her hols.
“I bet he hasn’t” she said, “let’s have a look.” And off she went, cordless phone in hand, to the shed.
“Oh he has, look.”
A strange sense of foreboding began to permeate my subconscious.
“There’s some mince.”
Oh God…
“And some pork chops, some sausages, some fish fingers, a steak pie, the collected works of Friedrich Nietzsche..."
