Take two e-types, a long stretch of road…and don’t forget the rizlas
Breathe a huge sigh of release all ye who read this blog. I had intended to spell out in words of one syllable ( well maybe not all in words of one syllable) exactly why The Passion of Christ is one of the best films made it the past decade and precisely why Mel Gibson should scoop up every prize going at the next round of awards. It would have involved a whistle stop tour of Catholicism, a brief diversion into comparative religions, a tirade in support of Christianity (I know, I know it’s so not trendy, so not cool and you don’t get to chant or wear groovy bead bracelets…although kum by ah has not only got to rank as one of the greatest songs ever written if you say it to a collie then you can round up sheep too) and a denunciation of all fundamentalist modes of thought no matter what system of (dis) belief they originate from…and then I read herebemonsters divinely inspired “Little Bastards” riff and laughed so much I fell off the chair and nearly garrotted myself on my headphones (I was listening to Lynrd Skynrd ironically enough so I’m obviously an anti-Semitic, fundamentalist, porn loving, redneck nazi thug with the bible in my right hand and my gun in my left - or possibly the other way round, but you get the general drift)
As some of you may know and as some of you will have worked out - herebemonsters is my bro. Yes I am the heathen of haute couture. I am that genius wot he writ about. Honest. I know you can’t tell from the stuff I post up here but it’s true. Well OK (she says looking to one side modestly and wiggling her feet in embarrassment - I do wiggle my feet when embarrassed - its my only tell) he may possibly be exaggerating a little bit in the hope of actually getting a birthday card this year - but since most people who read this don’t know me - just take it at face value, after all everything you read on the net is true isn’t it? (”what do you mean it it’s not? must all my illusions be shattered so cruelly?”)
Although I often blog about the aunts and the cousins and the unfortunate sods who in a moment of madness married them it’s because I consider them all to be as hilariously funny as a modern day Jane Austen novel. ( if you don’t then tough, this my blog) I don’t tend to write much about my personal life or my past…partly because some of it is too boring and I can’t be bothered to make it interesting, some of it is so weird that you’d think I was making it up anyway, and most of it I keep quiet on the grounds of self incrimination but somewhere down the line recently I’d forgotten that there is a difference between being discreet about your past and wiping it entirely.
I’d wiped my past as thoroughly and as thoughtlessly as I once wiped my hardrive. (Exactly how you manage to delete Finder on an Apple Mac I still don’t know) I’d become bound up by life. I should have seen it coming - I’d started to wear less makeup and more dusty black - but I didn’t. Its the thing I’ve always dreaded happening but somehow it had crept up on me and I think a lot of it can be blamed on bus stops. There’s nothing like standing at a bus stop for making you feel that life’s crushing you to the ground. Couple that with the proliferation of half completed projects that are breeding like bacteria all over my hard drive and a long winter in a town that never seems to get any daylight and you get a classic case of the grumpts. A case so bad that I wasn’t even able to pull myself up by the bootcamp theory I instigated several years ago as a method of getting over such sloughs. (Bootcamp theory of happiness - get on with it and if you can’t get on with it, then get on with something else - you’re a long time dead) I was lucky - just sometimes you need a kick up the ass to remind you of certain facts. I got the nicest possible kick from reading herebemonsters blog.
For those of you who read herebe and are envisaging us as the children of some upper class hippies, that is not the case. Neither of my parent’s families were rich. They weren’t even comfortably off.
The day before pay-day, the cupboard was bare. Both my granddad’s worked in factories all their working lives. Both were extremely intelligent men though in very different ways. One had to leave grammar school at fourteen to support his family when his father died. My other grandfather was taken from his parents at thirteen to work as slave labour in a concentration camp. He was the only one of his family to be taken and when the war ended he was shipped to England as a displaced person. He thought that he would be able to go back home when things settled down. Instead Russia annexed Latvia and closed off the borders. He never saw them again. Despite being able to speak 10 different languages and turn his hand to anything, he worked in coal mines, in the foundries and in the factory that employed the majority of men in the town. My nan scrubbed buses (the outside’s of them - in the days before they had machines to do it how do you think the buses were cleaned and how come they were cleaner then than they are now? An army of women working through the night, that’s how) My other grandma didn’t work except in the munitions factory during the war and afterwards she had the unenviable task of clothing, feeding and caring for six children on not enough money and with no labour saving gizmos. My great-grandmother was a housemaid until she got married (I can still remember her telling me stories of when she was in service- up at 4 in the morning to lay the fires and 2 weeks holiday a year - and we complain about our work time regulations?) One great-grandfather was a pattern maker and built the wooden templates of the great turbines used in dams and ships throughout the world, another was a master baker (until he got flour on his lungs). The introduction of the grant system meant my mum, her sisters and the one trendy item of clothing they owned between them (a pair of jeans - which seemed to spend more time being stolen by the others than being worn) got to university, that and forward thinking parents, most people even in the late sixties didn’t see the point of it. This is not a reflection on the chauvinism of the late sixties - its a statement of financial necessity. My father had to leave school at fourteen to be apprenticed in the same factory as his father and grandfather before him. There was no choice in the matter - in the North East you earned your keep, you put food on the table, it didn’t magically appear and there was no-one you could tap if you ran short.
The French (as usual) have a wonderful phrase for ones personal history - they call their lives, my story (or your story or their story). It elevates life to the realm of high art and if that sounds pretentious then think on to the momentous occasions in your life. Your children being born, that heartbreaking break-up, the completion of a project you’ve given your heart and soul to, a betrayal of trust, the meeting of your other half. Aren’t those moments worth dignifying?
What my bro. and I experienced while growing up was the strange union of two extremely weird and wonderful people - my parents - I wouldn’t swap either of them for the world and I will only believe in reincarnation if there is a cast iron guarantee that I’ll be born to the same people and have the same amazing brother, otherwise no deal. (Do you think that will guarantee me a birthday card from him?) For those of you don’t know us, it may seem like herebe is slightly embellishing his account of our childhood and skipping to the good/exciting/interesting bits in order to prove a point- he isn’t. Those of you who have known us from childhood will probably feel that he toned it down a little - he did. I freely admit that is a wonder that we turned out to be the well balanced, reasonable people we are (spot the deliberate attempt at sarcasm)
By the strangest of chances dad became a Sat diver. In the seventies Sat diving was an exceptionally well paid job - they were making approximately 8 times the average weekly wage - a day -but the death rate was one in four and of those that were left, a serious injury rate that claimed one in three. To put it bluntly their survival rate was equivalent to that of a U boat crew in the second world war. At the time there were only two hundred and fifty of them in the world. You do the maths.
If you were told tomorrow (and I sincerely hope you aren’t) that you only have a limited time to live, what would you change about your life? Wouldn’t you try everything you’ve always wanted to try, buy everything you’ve always wanted to buy and not think about tomorrow? Unless you’re living a life less ordinary than most of us - you’d change things How about if you were told that when you went into work on Thursday there was a one in four chance that you’d die there. How would you spend Wednesday night?
Like all childhood’s, mine and the doll murderers (herebes) had high points and low points. We were never treated like children, never excluded from adult lives or conversation unless we showed ourselves incapable of behaving in a manner that was socially acceptable to the company that we were in. As the company my parents kept was funny, brighter and way more interesting than that of people our own age, we learnt fast. In many ways our lows weren’t as low as some of the people I know. That doesn’t make me better or worse than any one else - this isn’t a competition - it just makes me me’er
Herebe reminded me of where and who and what I came from. It’s something no-one should ever forget. I know that people do. Many people of a certain age who would call themselves “middle-class” tend to gloss over the fact that they pulled themselves up by their bootstraps. Part of the reason is that they’re ashamed of it, afraid that they’ll be looked down on by the MD’s and CEO’s and their corporate wives. It throws a long shadow over their lives. This is a shame. Because unless you know where you’ve come from then how can you know where you’re going? Every journey has a start point. I’m not advocating that you dwell on your past to the extent that it overshadows your present (nor should you dwell on your future to the same extent - moderation in everything except excess) Chips look good on plates not shoulders.
Now for the tuppence psychology bit. What I got from my childhood and from life up to this point was this. Everything you experience affects and shapes your life. Everything that your parents and grandparents and great-grandparents have done or felt also affects your life. If you look at things from the right perspective - even the bad things, it makes you a stronger, more able and better (in the sense that you are a more whole) person. If you look from another perspective, it wipes you out, you start thinking of yourself as a victim, other people then start thinking of you as a victim and you become a grey person haunting the street mourning the coulda, woulda, shoulda’s that litter your life. If that happens, put the gun in your mouth and pull the trigger. Live as if you are about to die. Every day. It isn’t always easy: there are bills to pay, work to go to, crisis’s and problems to solve, but there is a trick to it. It may seem to be a bit of a Pollyanna hypothesis but its no less valid for that. Just remember that while you’re alive, while you’re still breathing, anything is possible. Everything bad that happens to you is transitory and it’s all a matter of perspective. In the most ghastly of circumstances there will be something funny you can fix on.
That old saying - you have to laugh or else you’ll cry- is true. It really is - for example, in your second year at uni being deliberately poisoned with carbon monoxide by a landlord who you have on tape as admitting that he knew the cooker and boiler was faulty when he put it in, is traumatic (and carbon monoxide poisoning is nasty: you start hallucinating, you hear voices, you get home put the heating on and fall into a waking sleep where you can’t move, you have mood swings like a fucking trapeze, if it wasn’t for the fact that I once read a story about a princess who was beautiful because she always slept with the window open, I’d be dead now)…but when you add the fact that this landlord was Jewish, the situation does have a certain black humour. (oh God now people will really think I’m anti-Semitic) Let me try again, 2 years later - getting home from work at ten at night because you’re holding down two jobs to pay the bills to discover that you’re locked out of your flat (that you’re the only one paying the rent for) by a psychotic ex-boyfriend (with big ears) who’s just ripped up all your clothes (and thrown them out of the window), read your diary including lurid accounts of your sex life to your grandma (who only called to wish you a happy birthday) and cleaned out your bank account, after battering down the door of your new boyfriends house at six that morning and repeatedly head butting him while wearing a motorcycle helmet may be seen as an unfortunate incident in anyone’s life. Now add to those facts that, whilst you’re trying to convince the psychotic ex to let you back into your own flat, standing next to you is a school friend who you haven’t seen for three years, who you had invited down to London in order to convince that they should move in with you and who is now having a panic attack cos her return ticket is booked for three days time. I think in certain circles such a situation is defined as a social disaster. But, if you look at it this way - when we eventually did get back into my flat (to discover that all my uni notes, all my writing from the age of nine and all my photos had also been ripped up.) - there is a certain amount of fun in the fact that a/ while the ex was lambasting my family, my morals and taunting me with the fact that no musician would choose a girl over a drummer (and…er… like…get real here - a drummer over a girl? - listen, in the hierarchy of bands the fucking groupies rank higher than the drummer) I was listening to his brothers pathetic attempts to chat up my friend in the kitchen, and b/ six months later I discovered that the ex had been in a very bad motorbike accident. (don’t feel sorry for him, he was the sort of motorcyclist that gives them all a bad name) If I had still been with him then I would have been killed outright and the only thing that saved his life was the fact that having broken his crash-helmet on my boyfriends head he’d had to buy a new one. Every cloud has a silver lining and even if it doesn’t the rain is good for the garden. .
I’d forgotten this. It wasn’t that I was looking at my past from the wrong perspective, I’d just stopped looking at it at all. Not through choice, not because I was repressing or suppressing. I’d just stopped doing it. I’d got into the habit of complaining. I’d started to be one of those miserable people who complained all the time about being tired, feeling ill, being unhappy and there was no real reason for it. If someone asked how I was, I’d whinge. Christ I’d even started complaining about my job. I work three days a week and make good money for it. There is no stress. When I leave on Friday I don’t think about it again until the following Wednesday. The people I work with are nice and treat me with respect. I have the time and the ability to pursue the other things that I want to pursue. I have no-one but myself to support. I’m not stuck in some factory, I’m not scrubbing buses, I’m not trying to feed six kids on not enough money, I’m not someone’s servant, I’m not trying to build (literally) a home for my family while wondering if my man’s going to make it back alive. I’m not sitting in a sat chamber wondering if the gas mix is going to be alright this time because I know the hairy-arsed diver (all divers are hairy-arsed) that’s mixing them and I remember how he was adding up the last time we played darts so how the fuck he’s gonna get the mix right I don’t know. I’m not in a concentration camp at thirteen waiting to be shot, I’m alive. Anything is possible.
We all compartmentalise our lives. This is what I did at school, this what I did in my twenties, this is what I did with my first girl/boyfriend. This is what I thought at age ten, this is what I thought at age forty. We file away all our experiences and forget that they make us who we are. Sometimes we look up the people we’ve known, drag out the photo’s or spend an evening reminiscing just to remember that we were really there and then we shove the memories back into their box and forget about them again. Those boxes we file our lives into get shut so quick that it feels like it never happened. How can we know where we’re going if we don’t know where we’ve been and what and who we come from? There have been a million things I’ve done in my life and I’m only just in my (very) early thirties. But until very recently I never put them all together and took pride in them. They’ve just been work or play or just happened, even though a lot of the work, play, happening has been of the kind that would be someone else’s glittering career, most memorable memory. Yet I never put together all the pieces of my life and gloried in them. Winston Churchill (I think it was him) said that the mark of success was to go from failure to failure with the same enthusiasm. How can we grow if we don’t remember all of what we experienced and look at it all like a triumph. The prevailing climate nowadays is to look at your life like you’re a victim. How much pain did you endure? How much stress can you take? How tired are you? How far can you soldier on? Forget that. This is your story. Elevate it to being high art. At whatever age you are, if you survived to this point you’ve got something to be proud of. Dignify your life. But don’t waste it.
PS. In the interests of historical accuracy I will point out that all herebemonsters reminiscences are factually correct. However as I’m his sister and a little (very very little and if you dispute that then you’ll get a fat lip mate) bit older than him (and how much of a bummer is that - not only did he get the grey eyes and blond hair while I got green eyes and bog standard brown hair but I didn’t even get a bro 2 years older than me so I’d get to meet his friends) and as its my job to nitpick ( it is honest - its in the big sisters contract) I just thought I’d correct those inaccuracies which he was maybe too young to remember clearly.
1. I never passed the blame onto him for any of my misdemeanours. Even if I had ever been naughty as a child - which lets face it is most unlikely, I wouldn’t do that. All big sisters are paragons of virtue, and love and protect our little brothers- no matter how many of our dolls they decapitate, how many times they rat on us to our parents about the unsuitable boys were dating, or how many of our albums they steal.
2. Having read this blog and hopefully herebes blog too - when he says he works fucking hard, believe him. You’ve read what he’s come from. The workers he’s sprung from. I work fucking hard, it was how I was brought up. He works harder than me. I don’t know how he does it. I wish I could do the same but I do occasionally need to sleep. I’m so ( I was going to say inordinately but that suggests that the praise is not merited) fucking proud of him.