There’s a certain sadness I get fairly often. The feeling that somehow, somethings not quite right, and somehow out there, there’s an alternate universe version of me actually having a good time. In a stable and loving relationship. With more hair, naturally…
I've got Pet Shop boys disease.
"Miserablism" its called....Watched
‘The Others’ today.Very good, but spoiled by the ending being revealed in the Guardians film quizzum last week.
Got a bit weepy earlier also. Where’s all the time go? 10 years ago, I had just left uni. Now look at the mess I’ve made of my life – homeless, jobless, no bank account, separated, and I’ve nothing to show for any of it except a lot of regret. I get up in the morning, and there’s no reason for waking at all. I’ve nothing in life of any value.
Ten years gone, and nothing to show for it. Yes, I’ve got a wedding ring, had a threesome, made mucky polaroids with gurls, and played gigs where people have paid money to listen to songs I’ve written. Whoop de doo. Great. Wonderful, what a CV.But really, what have I got to show for any of it except regret?
I’d be sleeping rough if not for a friends help. Im still no closer to a deposit on a house – after all, in order to earn enough to buy an average home in the UK you need an income of £80,000 a year. Or £40,000 if buying it with a partner.
The average annual income in the UK is £353.60 a week. That’s £10.28 an hour – pretty much double of any job I get hired for. Or about £18,000 a year. Which means you need to be earning well over DOUBLE the national average before you can even contemplate buying a house. According to official DSS figures, over 25% of households earn less than half the national average income. That 14.1 million people by last count. Look
here for the statistics.
And my dad says I should be saving up for a mortgage. He hasn’t got a clue, really.The poverty gap is widening. The rich get richer, the poor get poorer, and that’s that. No one cares.
I’d love to be keep closer touch with my family. All there are is a phone call away – except my mum, who I miss dearly, and for that I’d need a séance ; if you believe in such things. The above example is just one reason why I tend not to be in touch much with my dad.
Pretty much everytime I see him, I feel intimidated by him. By the fact he’s going to look down on me, to judge me, to label me a disappointment. To make me feel small, like a child again, while he ,lectures on about how I put my mother in an early grave, about how I SHOULD be buying a house or getting a proper job,. About how , with my start in life, I could be running the country by now. Big ambitions ; ambitions maybe he once held for himself. Parents always tend to foist there own unrealised ambitions on their children, especially when they realise it’s not going to happen for them.
I’m 31. There’s never been a prime minister of England younger than 47.
You know something, the vast majority of us don’t get to be famous. Don’t get to be successful. We plod along with our entry level jobs as best we can, hoping to be able to sustain our existence and pay the bills somehow. The gap between Rich and poor gets wider and wider. I see jobs advertised in the granuiad for 10 times the amount of money I could reasonably expect to earn, but I’m still supposed to buy the food in the same supermarkets, try to find somewhere to live in the same rented-accomodation sector, to live and survive. Why not – and this is a crazy idea – instead of paying insanely stupid money to people for jobs, have a mean average wage, the same amount across the country, hell the world? Call me an idealistic old foold – because I know it’s impractical and fuck it, bordering on the communistic – but then inflation would pretty much disappear, inequality would be non-existant and everyone could have the same, reasonably comfortable standard of living.
Shit, I just solved the
POVERTY gap. Wow! Unfortunately, it means I’m a commie, and there’s no way that’s ever gonna be accepted by the vested interests that make tax breaks for the rich.
Anyway, I digress.
My relationship with my dad is distant. When I contact him, he tends to make sarcastic, belittling comments. Like he always has. Like the time when I was 11 and he called me a
“dildo” in front of all his rugby mates, after complimenting me for weaving my way through the assembled crowd with his drinks.
“You’d be good as a scrum half” he said after that, before calling me a dildo.
Always sport. Everything revolved around sport. Everything, Every anecdote – came back to sport in the end. Every success – like the time when he represented England in the tenpin bowling league in 1968 – sport. It rules his life.
Now , as a teenager, you stop being
“Graham, Michael’s and Diana’s Son”. You start just being
“graham” (or
“your name here”, if your name isn’t graham, like I suspect it probably isn’t.). And You start to find and define your own personality. And you do this by defining yourself by what you are not – you are no longer your parent’s child, but a person in your own right. Fact is, you’ve been a person in your own right since birth, but by defining yourself by what you are not, you are accepted as yourself. Not just there because you are such and such’s child. So I defined myself by NOT being like him.
He was always obsessed with sport. Not me. Not being physically gifted, not particularly athletic, and not particularly enamoured with the sports clique at my school – rough and tumble lads who thought that fun was taking the piss out of you, growing sideburns and sporting so much hair it makes www.hairybears.com look positively like a freshly shaved scrotum, then they’d wait for when you got back from the showers on the weekly games afternoon, before ripping the towel off and running out of the changing room, leaving you wet, naked, and having to run into one of the other 2 classes changing room starkers. Very fucking funny.
Naturally, their sporting prowess mean that they always came first at the end of year assembly when they gave out
“colours” for performance at sports. The only colour I ever got was silver, for cross country running, and that was simply because I’d actually turned up for every event.Though I’d inevitably turn up last, I’d do it. Cross country was the kind of sport where you didn’t have anyone bugging the shit out of you at school, because you’d start and then run until you reached the finish line. No team of 15 people trying to ram your knee into a tarmac sports pitch. Nobody trying to knock you over in the middle of winter in the snow for the sake of an over inflated pigs bladder – especially not people who weighed 15 stone of pure sinew, muscle and adrenaline whilst wearing bandana’s, sporting sideburns and doing a passable impression of
Bruce Springsteen and
Rambo simultaneously. No , with Cross country, you’d just run and that was it until the finish line. No one to bug you, just the solitude of a long distance runner, a minimum of human contact and no-one trying to fuck you over ever 16 seconds.
No thank you. So I defined myself by not doing that. Naturally, being as crap at sports as I am, I soon came to conclude I didn’t like sport. Why? Three fundamental reasons mainly. Firstly, Someone always has to lose. Out of 40 participants, 39 go home the loser. Doesn’t seem right somehow. Or fair. All that effort for nothing. Absolutely fuck all. What have you achieved, except getting out of breath? Nothing. You haven’t built anything. You haven’t made anything,. You just run around some track in cold weather, getting hypothermia and pissed off.
Secondly, I always got accused of using
“brute force and bloody ignorance” whenever anything broke. Hang on, isn’t that what the winners in sport use? I suddenly developed a very confused face at this sudden realisation. That ultimately, the only person who wins is the one with the biggest muscles, the fatest legs, the stamina. The only lesson I could conclude from this was that , quite simply,
“Might is right”. Next time you disagree with anyone, only the person with the biggest reach and quickest fist is right. There’s no ethics in that lesson. No morality. Just brute force. Brutal. Senseless. Pointless.I'll remember that next time we decide to bomb somebody who we disagree with, because Might is right. Well, Just 'coz you got the power doesn't mean you got the right, does it?
Thirdly, that Sport overtakes peoples lives to an insane degree. After all, I only reason my dad had
“the Sun” delivered to the house, was because of the Sports pages. The only reason I got to watch MTV when I was growing up , was because we had cable. The only reason we had cable? The sports channel. He’d come home, sit in front of the TV, stick on the Sports channel – and it didn’t matter which sport it was, it was mostly Rugby, Football, Golf, Snooker, Cricket, Bowls or motor racing , but it could have international snail racing for all the difference it made. He’d sit there transfixed, in a comfort zone, then fall asleep. And then if you wanted to watch anything else, he’d say
“I was watching that”, oblivious to the fact that he was snoring his bloody head off, then fall asleep within 30 seconds. You could use a bloody stopwatch.
But despite the fact that it was £8 a month extra to have the movie channels on this package which the rest of the family (ie the other 3 people in the house as opposed to his 1) might actually watch – or less than the price of the daily paper which he’d inevitably read whilst taking an enormous shit at the EXACT time you needed to get ready for school or work (ie 7 to 7.30AM) – it was never once an option. He’d get the sport exclusively to himself, and the rest of the family can go piss up a tree, metaphorically speaking that is, wouldn’t get the other 10 movie channels. He only paid for what he wanted, and nuts to the rest of us. Either way, I’m glad that MTV / BSB music channels / VH1 were on the freebie susbscription or something, otherwise I’d never have left the house between 11.30 – 12.30 on a Saturday because I’d be watching the CHART SHOW, VCR remote clutched tightly in hand, hoping that they’d show more than 60 seconds of the new Guns N Roses video.And I always hoped they wouldn’t put their annoying, smash-hits-esque little fact boxes over the chord positions in the guitar solo’s.
So much so, that my father worked five days a week. Actually, it felt like seven. He’d seemingly disappear for weeks on end, seeming to reappear at random, or whenever he bloody well felt like it, whichever was earlier. Every Saturday, He’d disappear down the rugby club at about 12.30, get pissed, watch the match, chat with his fair-weather friends and then come home drunk, making base comments thinking he was funny, when in fact he was just an embarrassing drunk who I didn’t want to be around.Sundays? He’d get up ridiculously early- about 4 in the morning – and go fishing , until about 1pm, when he came back, dumped some fish in the freezer and then proceeded to stink the place out with his fishy smell. And the next week He’d do the same.
Repeat until Dead.
Sounds like I had an unhappy childhood. Well, I never knew anything different, though there were a lot of things he and I were diametrically opposed too. Running away from the house everyday and leaving ‘er indoors to do all the housework, and then claiming I put her in an early grave for a fucking start. Wasn’t that time when you brought back 30 rugby shirts to get washed, volunteering my mum to do it just to appear
‘In’ with the boys is it?
Of course not.
Everytime he mentions that, I bit my lip. I have too. He’ll never see it any other way than his. It’s not in his heart to accept defeat.
Everytime I speak to him, he asks the usual questions. I tried once talking to him seriously, I opened up to him one Christmas a couple of years ago, I tried to explain the way I feel, but the words fell out of my mouth and onto the floor I guess, because they don’t appear to have reached his ears. Maybe it’s because they were words he didn’t want to hear.
I tried to explain that I feel intimidated by him. That I don’t like to go around, because he always judges me. Tells me how to be living my life. As if there is no other way but his, and then gives me a disapproving frown and looks despairingly, and says “What you want to be doing is saving up for a mortgage, get a place of your own”. He just looks on disappointed.
That’s all I am, a disappointment.
After all, I don’t have any accomplishments to show him do I? I don’t have a spectacular career – well, any career at all actually. I don’t have a book, a movie, a CD, any sporting trophies. Nothing for him to show off and boast about. Nothing to feel spectacular about.
That right dad. Your son, he’s just another guy. He’s grown up into a 31 year old man, just like you were once, and what does he have to show for it?
Same as you, a collection of memories, and a crushing sense of disappointment at the way life has turned out. Like you, I have a wife (though yours didn’t ask you to go), but unlike you, no kids (probably for best, given the circumstances with the wife). I mean, I don’t drive, I don’t own a house….
Questions I always get asked by strangers;
“Do you drive?” (no).
“Why not?” (Buses).Things like that really tend to sum up the vast differences between say, my outlook and the outlook of others. I don’t consider having (or not having a car) particularly important. There are those who fetishise car ownership to the point of absurdity – see the krooz midz site for one example, and the entire fast+furious movies as just another symptom – and similarly there are those who think Life consists of a ticksheet of job, wife, kids, mortgage, car, etc. Not I.
My dad is one of those, who just sees the process of finding a woman, settling down, buying a house.Like I’d have the money lying around to pay the 40% inheritance tax (see, they even get it off you when you die!). On the average Uk house price of £160,000, that’s £60,000. Or put quite bluntly, the same price as a house cost back in 1996 before the house prices rocketed the 150% that they have in the past 8 years. That means the £33,000 house I looked at in 1996 is now worth £80,000.
I think you can see why im not saving up for a deposit. Im waiting for the property market to go
KER-SPLASH!
As I said, everytime I see my dad, it’s the same twenty questions. Have you got a job? (trans
:”are you working?”) From the second I answer no, he tells me I could be running the country at my age, how I should be saving for a mortgage, how I should be living my life, and so forth.
Look, you’re getting bored with even reading about it. Try having a conversation that’s like it, and then tell me how it feels.
Anyway, I fail to see the point in communicating the same, meaningless pointless factual information every few weeks. It’s tedious. I wish I could have a proper conversation with him for once where he doesn’t moan about everything, especially how it’s all my fault – after all if it wasn’t for me and my brother, he would probably be some England tenpin bowling champion or something. I’m pretty sure he’s said as much about my mum, how he gave it all up for her (apologies If I got that wrong) . It makes her sound like an inconvienience. How love got in the way of his dreams of stardom and sports fame. And now it feels like he can’t ever let a conversation go without blaming me for it in some way. For something. I’m not taking the blame for that. I’m not your emotional punchbag. But mainly, not living my life the way he thinks I should.
I’m a grown man now. I’m not a child. I’m not going to do what you tell me simple because, which was never a good enough reason when I was 13, never mind 31. You live your way your way, I live mine, and that just the way it is. Hell, you want to live my life for me, feel free. I’d swap it for that house anyday. (joke, by the way). But as long as it’s my life to live, I’ll choose what to do with it.
Christ, just let go, Dad. I’m not a child anymore. I’ve grown up now, making mistakes, fucking up, bringing a black mark on the family name. You know what? Who cares. It doesn’t matter. The rest of the world sees me as an adult and treats me accordingly. You still treat me like a child, and treat me accordingly.
There is a time when you stop being a child, and become an adult. I don’t know exactly when it is, but it’s a slow and gradual process from one to the other. I’m am your son, yes, but I’m a person in my own right. Just let it……..go. Stop talking down to me, and just talk. Like Adults. Until you stop judging me publicly, stop criticizing me – like the time you did when I was 13 and you called me a
“dildo” in front of your rugby club mates standing them to another round – until then I’ll forever be just a child in your eyes, and you’ll talk down to me condescendingly.
Is it any wonder I don’t enjoy those chats then? No. I tired talking to you once, a couple of Christmases ago, but like I say, the words somehow didn’t seem to reach your brain. I gather though, that most adults tend not to like their fathers, and think of their dad generally in terms of being a
‘prick’. Which is a tad strong, but ya know, if I met him in any other capacity than as a genetic relative, I don’t think he’s someone I’d associate with. Not by a long way. We’re too different he and I. I’m much more like my mum I guess (hope?) but there again, as she’s been dead for nearly 9 years, I’ll never know.I do miss her though, more than I can ever admit.
If I could have those years back, I would. Hell, I was thinking earlier today about the past 10 years. Where I was 10 years ago and where I am now. 10 years ago I had the world at my feet, if I listened to him. Now , I’m on my knees. Great. I look back and see where I could have changed things. And I would have. Hell, even five years ago, I could have made a big difference. It would have been enough of a difference. And I would. Hell, what I’d give up to have those years back. I’d cut my bloody hair a lot sooner. I wouldn’t have got all those credit cards, I would have stayed off the interslice and the phonebills and been bloody sensible, rather than be like an indulgent child in a sweetshop of pornography called a
“modem”. And then I would have stayed at the job, moved out, not get involved with a couple of people, been single for much longer, and well, I would be in a different place right now. I wouldn’t be like this. But I can’t change where I am right now. It’s just a long long chain of events leading to right here, right now. But god, how I wish I could change things. I’d give it all up, all this where I am right now, just for a second chance.
I feel like that woman at the end of
‘The Others’. Thinking or hoping that God has given you a second chance to make it right, but instead, just cursed with the sad reality that in fact, the hell never ends. All we have is the right here, right now, and that’s all we can change. The past is gone forever, and all the mistakes we made then are etched in stone to haunt us in this life and the next.I wish I could undo them, but I can’t. All I can change is the future, and since that’s where I’m going to spending the rest of my life there, regrets about the past aren’t going to help me much there.So, you see, there’s some hope. The light at the end of the tunnel isn’t an oncoming train after all.
Goodnight.
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