The F Word

“You’re not wearing that!” the Piano Festival being 15 driving minutes, and 16 temporal minutes, away it was time to take issue with T14’s slouching hoody, low slung slacks and moody face. The park beckoned yet he had to go and play Schubert.
“I’ve told her. I hate bloody festivals.”
“'Luddy festivals,” cried F12 gleefully, gathering close his audience attendance kit: 2 Nintendo DSs, a clutch of books, Catty, his gun. “Not BLOODY! Mum! He swore, T14 swore! Tell him off!”
“Enough! You: 30 seconds. Shower and get changed,” I hissed, gathering my own audience attendance kit. My kindle slims the need to grab at 3 books (current read & 2 spares for panicking). Then the credit card bill had arrived. A sea of download costs. Could they not be elided? E frowned. I lied and self-justified.

The dog, sensing action, and pitifully anticipating japes, circled the hall with annoying
avidity; all bum, and rubbing her nose in everything.
“Get in the fucking kitchen,” E hissed.
“She doesn’t understand,” I snapped importantly, “Bed… Darling … Bed …. C’mon! C’mon …. Good Girl!! …. Beh-edddd! …. Get in your fucking bed! T14! Shower! Now! … !”
“…..”
“We’ll go to PizzaExpress afterwards! I promise.” The things you do. “Just. Get. On. With. It!”
The shower pump lurched dangerously into action. My heart skidded.

I fired up the computer; it pissed around with its whirring icons and password crap. PizzaExpress is so bloody expensive nowadays that it’s only affordable with half-price vouchers. Which means, to fund the freeloaders, that it has to keep upping its prices.

“We might as well fucking forget it! To think, I had to get out of a meeting early. Why do I bloody bother.”
“It’s cost a fiver to enter. We’re going. We’ll be fine. F12!! Get in the bloody car …”
“T14’s not …”
“GET …”

The printer sulked. I turned it off. And on. The only language these appliances understand is to turn them off. Revenge through annihilation. It sulked its way through a load of solipsistic self-checks. Mechanical eye-rolls. While it was thus obsessed, I rang PizzaExpress.
“Oh, soh-ree!” said the voice with a chucklesome regret. “Our booking system closed, oooh, 3 – min-utes – a-go!! It’s on-line. I’m afraid,” he purred happily, “we can’t over-ride it.”
“What? You not allowed to operate a diary any more? Like, write something in with a pen?”
“Nooo!” the very thought! “Everything ..” you middle-aged fule “…is on-line now.” His enthusiasm waned, “You’ll have to come as a walk-in.” He all but started filing his nails.
I sighed; most testily, “Well, if there’s any wait at all we’ll Go Somewhere Else.”
That’ll have scared him. Adrenaline threatened to short circuit me. I needed turning off.

The Festival, presumably, prides itself on being a celebration of the arts. Its website is light on enthusiastic hi-falutin and busy on, well, not much. A rare reality check pervades: it boils down to turn up and behave.

For some crazy reason, the Goddess of TV Parking smiled on us and we parked right outside the Town Hall. Right Outside. Like we were royalty and getting married.
A white van man beeped us irritably, and roared, “’S’for fucking taxis!!”
I threw him the Vs and shouted, “Not til 6. Tosser!”
I smoothed my nice East outfit and hissed at the children to get a bloody move on. Sometimes my degree, my way with words, comes in so handy.
T14 slithered out like T1000 in The Terminator making it through a gate. His lip curled to his nose.
“I’m NEVER playing this Scherzo again!”
“No, no, no!! Honest.” E and I were ushering, as if the pair of them were geese, “No Schubert even, ever… Stand Up Straight! … You! DS in the car …! Because I say so. Because it bleeps.”

Long, long ago, when I was about M14, I went to a funeral. My first. The family approved. “A perfect first funeral for Milla. No-one liked Isobel.”
My mother put her smart coat on and a fruit cake in the boot of the Jag.

We drove north, a long, long way. Up and up and bloody up. My brother and I possibly bickered in the back.
At Knutsford Service Station, I was forcibly ejected and ordered to remove my make up. Out-rageous. A glittery pink eyeshadow stretching to my temples was deemed – had the word existed in this incarnation then – inappropriate. Much eye rolling occurred. My brother smirked. The familiar hiss of “Do as you’re fucking told” was trotted out.
We arrived at the holding cell, the icicle house from which the funeral proper would kick off. Our hostess, Little J, shimmied forth, glassy-eyed and dripping “darlings!” but no warmth.
My pixie boots kicked surlily at Persian carpets. My mother kept her coat on.

Alcoholic desperation, that helpful blurring in times of family incarceration, was met by offers of water from Little J, a reluctant niece-in law pressed into action by unfortunate geographical proximity to the great dead one.
Distant arms of the family united in triumphant disappointment at the paucity of the hospitality. Little J, famous for her lapses, had again sunk to the occasion. She retired frequently to the pantry and tottered out, reinvigorated by a session with the bottle.
Kedgeree was grimly served. Possibly knocked up the day that Aunt Isobel kicked her clogs and given the odd stir since. The rice was cold, the haddock ripe. Knives and forks did what they could with the bleak offering, rallying chiefly in disguising the leavings. Conversation, bleak at best, stalled.

Back at home, Granny, sister to Isobel, but too poorly, apparently, to attend, snuggled on the sofa, clicked at her knitting needles and turned on the telly. She had a thing for Ivor the Engine. Her son-in-law, another Ivor, was an endless recipient of her jumpers. It made her chuckle. “Chuff Chuff!” She could never quite believe how small he was and knitted large. Her daughter, her other daughter, my mother’s sister, muttered something about there being only so many jumpers a son-in-law could be expected to wear. “Who is the mother-in-law?” my grandmother asked, pressing the button on the remote control to amplify Ivor the Engine and drown out her own daughter. Her glass of advocaat sat at hand half hidden behind a photo of her dead husband. His vicar smile cheerily alibi to the denial of her quick tot.

The funeral itself, however, was deeply entertaining.
My mother’s extended family rose from the pages of Debrett to sit tight-lipped in ancestral pews and pass poisonous judgement with pleasing frequency. “Has she managed to orf-load what Elspeth calls the White Elephant…?” one rello whispered about another’s misery with the housing market.
Elspeth, suddenly aurally alert, shot daggers at being crucially implicated in an insult which left the reporting rello untainted.
She narrowed her eyes. “My cancer sticks, Thomas.”
In those days smoking at funerals was all but expected and Elspeth was content, in this only, to oblige. Husband Thomas, Knight of the Realm and, more crucially, keeper of the cancer sticks, fumbled with the stiff switch of the rigid triangular bag owned by all elderly ladies in those days, and carried by their husbands. A cigarette was obediently located and transferred and the new owner’s fingers irritably clicked for a lighter. Never happier than in a state of suspended dissatisfaction. Sir Thomas panicked and forced his arthritic digits into the unyielding folds of the triangle. Elspeth waited icily, her hand out, her expression elsewhere. The things you remember.

Meanwhile, the vicar was talking, a grim hymn was endured and another reluctant sprig of the family was ushered in.
A nervous nephew hovered, hopelessly, too tall at the lectern, “Aunt Isobel,” he began, stooping into a non-existent microphone. “Aunt Isobel survived an illness which would have killed a better person.”
The silence grew new textures. The family exchanged a ripple of thrilled glances and pursed lips.
Little J clattered out of the pews.
“Gorn to put the heating on!” percolated Aunt Elspeth in a Revenge is a Dish voice, “Marjorie says. She waits – seems – til the headlights come rahnd the corner, at the bottom of the drive. Puts the heating on then. Not before. Freezing!” She happily mimed a brrrrr. Thomas dodged the vibrating fag end.
Marjorie mangled her triangular bag. Her time would come.
“I mean,” said the nephew, a little too late, flustered, “an illness which would have killed a lesser person.”

Back at the house, the hospitality failed to reach the Norfolk heights even of lunch. We were introduced to second cousins. A succession of Flavias and Hugos and Jaspers all of whom’d populated Eton’s Pop and trounced the bladdy locals at lacrosse in Argentina passed before us in a fleshy, entitled blur. We’d heard all about them. Their blank faces suggested derring-do tales of the black sheep end of the line hadn’t travelled north.
“Oh!” said my brother cheerfully extending his easy-going hand, “D’you hate us as much as we hate you?”

My mother proffered the fruit cake, cooked against the much-anticipated, never-experienced breakdown on the motorway. It was fallen upon and divvied up. We never saw a slice.
“Tay, darling?” it was Little J, tottering on heels, hair awry, skin flushed from an unshared gin, a teapot dangling worryingly from a tiny wrist, “Nevvies aw string?”
Our heads cocked like Lolly’s. Uncomprehending.
“She says Navvies or Strong,” boomed Marjorie in that stage whisper they all shared, “She means Navvies or Drawing Room. You’ll get Navvies.”
My mother likes tea where the water has been told that there’s a bag in the room, but one never so vulgar actually as to mingle with the old H2O.
My father has control issues with milk allocation. Less being so very much more. Tea at the hand of others is never going to go well. Both blanched. “Nevvies or String” became a family catchphrase.
In the distance, Little J was trilling at The Young, at the bloated Flavias and Jaspers and Hugos, “Chraist, Ai don’t know; just forage, dahlings, forage.” That’s become a catchphrase, too.
“Everything AOK?” barked Thomas, “Marvellous.”

When we got home, Granny phoned, “Darling,” she commanded. We could all hear, whether in the room or not, “Tell me about the wedding.”
“Funeral, Mother, funeral,” my mother corrected. “It was your sister’s funeral.” A dismissive paw cutting the air could also be heard. Details, shmdetails. “Little J,” Granny settled back for a laugh, advocaat loosening the throat, “What was Little J wearing?”

Back in 2011, we entered the Drawing Room of the Town Hall (£9 the poorer), hissing and tutting. We’d forgotten the cheque for the music teacher and had to rummage a lie. A sea of the local smart school gels filled the seats. The beastly competition. They bustled back and forwards, back and forwards, at one with the Steinway, laughing and tossing their glorious hair.
We caught eyes us 4 and flared nostrils.
They announced their pieces with glorious confidence, Hong Kong via America, yah. They played with confident aplomb. What the adjudicator later called “robustness”. They were well attended, not necessarily by parents, but by a buffering of teachers. A floppy haired man passed his hand through his rampant wiggy follicles and fiddled with his glasses and bopped up and down with studied self-regard to turn the pages.

T14 played very well. He didn’t win. He didn’t stand a chance. The adjudicator ran through the results, entrant by entrant. At the end, the floppy haired man stood up, “Er,” he said irritably, bladdy amateurs, “you seem to have forgotten Sophie!”
The adjudicator shot a horn-rimmed glance and the audience rustled to show that no, Sophie had not been forgotten. We’d all noted Sophie and her robustness. Sophie looked embarrassed. “Oh, OK,” Floppy conceded, flapping an off-hand hand. “My mistake.”
“Who’s else would it be?” said F12 with Family loudness.

We walked across to PizzaExpress. I fiddled with slight panic in my audience attendance kit for the PizzaExpress vouchers – last seen on the kitchen island.
“You seem to have forgotten Sophie,” bellowed F12.
“NO! My mistake!” shouted T14.
They muttered together. Even crossing the road seismic changes can happen. I tensed for the push, the shove, the “He started it!”
T14 was glued to his iPod. “I seriously can’t stand … ” he burst out laughing, “I seriously can’t stand it when a sentence doesn’t end the way you think it octopus.”
We laughed.

RIP Rap

“Have you heard of Nate Dogg?” T14 asked. He’d just got in and by-passed all the normal Hello stuff.

T14 has taken to adding –dog to his friends’ initials, and then talking about them as if it is a perfectly normal way to behave, “Hey, C-dog, A-dog’s got hair like J-dog, what a loser,” sort of thing. It makes conversation confusing, which I’m sure is the point, trying to decipher who all the various dogs are. Particularly when J-dog is, in this case Justin Bieber and A-dog someone we don’t even know’s brother. And when C-dog turns out to mean his own brother, F12; the C standing for Chubbs. F12 is a slip of a lad.
See what I mean?
So it goes without saying that I rarely know what he is talking about. The –dog nonsense is new and, I’m hoping, will be sent to the big kennel in the sky by the weekend.

So I said, “No,” I didn’t know who Nate Dogg was, while harbouring up my sleeve a suspicion that it might be G-dog’s sister. Something I could produce on the second round of guessing to impress and endear.
He rolled his eyes. “Nate Dogg! Like one of the biggest rap stars….”
Well, point proved. “Rap Stars,” I scoffed, “No, of course I’ve not heard of – why would I have heard of anyone called Nate Dogg.”

The whole territory is fraught. I hear Lady Bracknell’s handbag in my scorn, I hear my grandmother asking me in Edwardian air quotes if I was Shacking. Up. With. My. Boyfriend. I hear judges enquiring who are the Beatles? Then we have Brian True-May: has his sacking meant that I can no longer express within the four walls of home that rap don’t float my boat? Am I dissing their art? Could they care less? Could I? Dizzy with PC it's hard to remember how to react sometimes.

Conflated with all this is T14’s on-going, occasional assertion that he has an Afro, so big as to preclude him, say, from getting in the car when the destination doesn’t suit; huge arguments can arise because of the existence or otherwise of the Afro and what it thinks about the various activities on offer. F12 scoffs in irritable outrage, I stoutly defend. Nothing is simple. This boy with the smoothest of smooth hair is in mourning that he’ll never have an Afro, so he and pretend he does. And when he isn't in Afro-land, he's being a Liverpudlian, or a Glasweigian, or a Welshman. It's all very inventive, and probably not allowed anymore. It all gets so confusing. Accents in brown paper bags.
"I have got an Afro," he will say. Possibly in heavy Welsh.
"You haven't," says F12 dangerously, made furious by the whole thing. "Mum! Tell him, tell him he hasn't got an Afro."

“Sing something of his, then,” I said, ever reasonable. "I might realise I do know who he is."
“They don’t sing,” he said dismissively, “they rap. That’s the whole point of rap stars, they rap.”
“Well, rap something then, go on, mutter it in an aggressive way.” It was almost impossible not to fall over laughing. I did some very amusing middle aged woman swaggery stuff and edged my trousers down to hang ‘em low. I tugged at my invisible saucepan on sideways cap and jingled my bling.
“I can’t. But he was signed to Death Row Records. I can’t believe you’ve not heard of him. Don’t Laugh!! He’s Dead!”
“I’m not laughing at him being dead, I’m laughing at you. Nicely, of course.” God, modern parenting. I tried to show an interest. “How did he die? Shot? An overdose?”
“NO! It was a stroke. Another stroke.”

His brother walked in, dwarfed by the enormous backpack he must wear to get through a day at school. His knees buckled as he shrugged it off in small, heavy jerks.
“Hey, Chubbs, you’ve heard of Nate Dogg.”
“Yeah,” said Chubbs, F12, cautiously, not sure how this was going, whether he was going to regret such an admission. How! How has my tiny professor heard of Nate Dogg?
“Well he’s died.”
“How?”
“From a stroke
“Cool,” said F12. “Like Peter Griffin. He had a stroke.”
“But he didn’t die and aaaargh! He’s a cartoon. Peter Griffin’s just someone on ‘Family Guy.’ I can’t believe this family. Nate Dogg was a real person. And you’re like laughing. You can’t laugh at someone dying! No one CARES!”

E got home. “Have you heard of Nate Dogg,” I asked.
“Yeah,” said E. E knows everything. “Sure. He’s one of Snoop Dog’s homies. Or was. He’s dead, died from a stroke.”
“Go and lurk,” I said busily shovelling him out of the way, “T14 will ask you. He needs a sensible answer. F12 and I let him down; he’s sulking.”

So E went and lurked, in a "I've heard of Nate Dogg" kind of way but T14 was onto the next stage of mourning and was busy killing zombies on screen. My mother used to look at them playing in the garden. "You weren't like .... this," she'd say. I never quite got her then. But this this, I certainly don't get. Rap. Zombies. Screens as a way of life.
E didn’t ask. Which was a shame. T14 had lost heart and hadn’t sought out the right person to ask, but still retained some sort of moral high ground in purse-lipped zapping. It seemed the wrong moment to suggest that he chill - advice he is happy to throw our way in moments of crisis - nor the time to insist on him practising the piano. Grade 6 might call from my bossy perspective, but Nate Dogg’s song still sings to him. Or raps. Whatever that is.