Similar Smiles #MemoryMonday

When The Girl was home a while back, we were trawling through my parents’ old photo albums, looking for ‘proof’ that she has very similar features to her (late) grandmother, my own mother.

Of course, The Girl only remembers a little of her grandmother and that was as a barrel-shaped irritable, white haired old lady (which’ll be me one day.  Wait – what do I mean one day!?).

Of course, to me, the similarity is always there.  My Girl smiles and immediately I see my mother, in all her happy glory – which was very seldom, unless sherry or Gin were involved – and I love that they share the same mouth and that The Girl at least knows how to use hers properly.  They’re probably about the same ages in these photos too, about 16/17 perhaps, where life is crammed to the gills with possibilities. In my mother’s case this meant finding a handsome man , getting married, having 2 children a budgie and a dog and then being as miserable with her lot in life as she possibly could for the rest of it. (You think I’m joking).

There’s another photo of my mother aged about 5, with her own mother, and I remember when Alice spotted it, at around the same age as this, she took it from me and looked very confused, asking: “Mummy, how come I’m black and white?” – the similarity then was astonishing – right down to the shiny bob and full fringe.  I shall endeavour to locate this.

When my mum died, Alice wasn’t yet 5.  The last thing she said to her grandmother was: “Gamma do you want some chokkit?” (Mum was in hospital at the time, waiting for a bed to become free in Southampton where we were all told the life-saving operation would be carried out – which turned out to be a bit of a tall story to keep dad from losing grip on his sanity as he watched the love of his life slip away).

And Gamma replied :”Oh, I shouldn’t really…” before breaking of a couple of squares of the Galaxy bar and trying to locate her mouth.  She may even have smiled.  In fact she smiled a lot more during those 5 days  in hospital than I think I’d seen in our shared lifetime; funny how a brain tumour can chill you right out.

Which is why I love Alice’s smile so much – it reminds me that (without going too ‘Titanic’ on you) that genes do go on… travelling through the space/time continuum and landing wherever the heck they like and delivering the loveliest of surprises.  I always knew mum had a beautiful smile, but it’s only because her granddaughter uses it so freely and daily, that I have come to see what a shame it was that she never did the same.

 

 

‘Hungover’ #MemoryMonday

Instead of posting a photograph, today I thought I’d post a poem (wot) I wrote during the third part of the Art Of Poetry module I completed earlier last year (2015).  I’ve been chatting to another OCA student recently about this part of the course in an attempt at helping her, and revisited the poems (wot) I wrote.  I never handed this one in, but after reading it, found I still quite like it.

Hungover
Hunched, she waits.
The burn of last nights’ alcohol streams
and leaves her swollen bladder.
Lank veils of nicotine-infused hair hang –
heavy swags over tired, tight eyes,
gritted, stinging, filling a mind
still spinning with memories
she craves she’d never made.

Taking a bath in the kitchen sink #memorymonday

No, I don’t look best pleased, do I?   Unless I was caught off-guard during one of my underwater recreational pursuits: usually involving an empty squeezy bottle and some plastic tubs with lids that never quite fitted, a couple of old flannels and the occasional duck (plastic).

My brother and I were always bathed in the kitchen sink, and we didn’t even live Oop North; I think it was simply easier to do it where we’d just washed up the dinner plates (perhaps we even used the same dishwater  – we were noting if not tight frugal, us Coopers).

Of course once we were too leggy to fit into the kitchen sink, we took our dirty bodies upstairs to the bathroom, where every other normal person in England probably took their, and came to realise that the long ceramic thing in the toilet room wasn’t just where mother spent an inordinate amount of time.

But my father never used the bathroom as his place in which to wash.  And this became a massive bone of contention for me as I was growing up.  He continued to use the kitchen as his personal hygiene space for as long as I remember, standing stripped to the waist with a flannel at the armpits, waiting dentures in a tumbler on the kitchen windowsill, I’d be mortified to find him in this state of undress if I had a friend round – understandably – and I’d apologise to them profusely once out of father-earshot. He didn’t restrict his ablutions to the kitchen either; if he could hear there was something particularly entertaining on the telly in the next room, he’d amble through, flannel sopping at the pit, a towel tucked into his trouser pocket, and stand semi-naked at the living room doorway chuckling away at the tellybox for all to see. Like an  exhibitionist. Then  he’d twist an end of his towel until it fitted nicely into his earhole and wriggle that clean before ambling back.

He also shaved and brushed his teeth at the kitchen sink.  I wish I’d had Mary Berry’s telephone number in those days, because I was never comfortable with the fact that he was cleaning off his grime where mother had just peeled spuds and arranged our teatime meal.

We had  so many angry ‘scenes’ about father’s topless shenanigans whilst I was growing up, especially during puberty (mine, not dad’s) but he remained adamant that as he and his five siblings grew up doing everything in the kitchen which had been the hub of the home, and it hadn’t done them any harm, he wasn’t about to change his ways because his whippersnapper daughter was too proud to find this acceptable.

Dad’s answer to most of my queries was  “If you don’t like it, you can leave home” so once I’d wised up to this, I spent my formative years biting my tongue so hard it didn’t seem worth speaking half the time.

Men in Hats #MemoryMonday

There’s not a great deal for a bloke to do in a Bridal shop, so if you can get away with arsing about trying on hats with veils and asking the assistant if they’ve got silver diamante slingbacks in a size 10, then that’s what they’ll do.

This couple of muppets were part of the ‘team’ that accompanied me to the shop I chose my wedding dress and bridesmaids dresses from, nine years ago.   Untraditionally, the lady on the left was my (then) Fiance and the lady on the right, his brother – now my brother-in-law. But because I valued every opinion on my choice of dress, my soon-to-be-Groom was not getting away with not voicing his.  I had imaginings of wearing this ridiculously too-young-dress and his heart plummeting the second he saw me; I certainly didn’t want him to think he’d married the proverbial Mutton.

And it’s fitting (tenuous pun) that I chose to blog this picture because it’s Tony’s (lady on the right) 60th Birthday today and yesterday he had his rather lovely 60th Birthday Party at a nice Italian restaurant we seem to frequent whenever there’s something large to celebrate.

As is apparent from this picture, the brothers (there’s 4,  and one sister) are the closest and the funniest I’ve ever had the pleasure to be in the company of.  Every family event I’ve been to has always been filled with laughter, terrible jokes, ambitious dancing, singing and shared memories. Not to mention the endless supply of delicious food and free-flowing drinks.  Of course there’re occasionally sad times, but the strength of their familial bondsupports each and every one of them through any bad time they’ve encountered.

I’d never tell them this to their faces because I’m a typical emotionally repressed Brit, but I love them all.  Very much.  Happy Birthday, Tony x

 

The last school pack-up #MemoryMonday

The fact that I even took a photograph of this must have meant I knew at the time how much I was going to miss making up my daughter’s packed lunch  for school every day.

Maybe it’s not so much the preparation of the packed lunches that I miss but more the fact The Girl’s not here anymore to need me to make a pack-up lunch for her.

I used to love (seriously) making sure I’d got everything  in its proper little space in the right-sized container and with sufficient amounts of all the food groups to ensure she got a good balance of nutrients from the parcel of love she took with her every day; I suppose it was a bit like knowing there was a part of me still with her making sure she was being taken care of, even if I wasn’t there and doing it in person.  I felt a connection with the pack-up. Perhaps that sounds a tad over-sentimental but there it is.  I always made sure ther was a paper napkin folded on the top and sometimes (to her embarrassment) I’d hide underneath that a little post-it note telling her how much I loved her, knowing she had the strength and grace to rise above any teasing she might have been subjected to following its discovery.

Sometimes it irritated me, especially when I was making one for her and one for the husband (goodness knows how maddening it must be to have to make 5 or 6 every evening) and the recipients of these were chortling and rolling about in the next room enjoying whatever entertainment  (usually The Simpsons) was on the telly at the time. I’d feel a bit like my mother always insisted she felt ‘like a slave’ to everyone’s needs but her own.  But you know, if the husband had offered to make the pack-ups and give me a break so I could sit and watch some TV instead, I’d probably have shooed him away anyway.  Only I could make proper pack-ups.  I was in charge of those.  And that’s the way (uh-huh, uh-huh) I liked it.  Thank you very much.

Let’s promenade with a nice cup of tea #memorymonday

This proper dapper couple are my Great Grandfather and Great Grandmother, Bertha  on my mother’s side of the family.

I’ve no idea where they are – Margate seems to feature in a lot of scribbles on the reverse of similar b/w pics and I can only guess at the date being shortly after the 2nd world war simply because they look so blinkin’ cheerful and not at all concened about over-flying doodlbugs. I mean I love my cup of tea but I’ve never walked around carrying a teacup and saucer before – a saucer! (saucer now looks like a completely alien word now I’ve typed it thrice).

I never met my Great Grandfather but I do remember my Great Grandmother.  We used to visit her on Sundays where she lived in caravan on the grounds of my great aunt and uncle’s house (she used to live in the house herself and I’ve no idea why it was decided she’d have her own space in the garden – maybe that’s where I get my ‘I want to be alone’ streak from) she was wiry and white of hair (another similarity in progress) and always looked elegant and kind but if my grandfather – her son, was anything to go by, then she might have had a bit of a mean streak – I remember it being mentioned. she looks nice enough here, but then as I’m discovering as I trawl through the annuls of my history, a lot of smiles are painted on purely when there’s a camera about.

 

The Sky is Fallen #MemoryMonday

Ah yes, the  bliss of returning from a week in Magaluf (no laughing) knowing that back at home, the house you moved into less than a month ago is in the safe, guiding hands of your trusted ‘project manager’, responsible for overseeing all the decrepit property’s improvements, viz: replacement double glazing, rerouting of old plumbing system and new boiler, opening up previously boarded-over kitchen door and finally ripping out the old kitchen and replacing it with a spanking new one,

A bit like that old Changing Rooms programme, I hear you thinking.  Yeah, we thought that too.

In my mind I had all kinds of joyful welcomes awaiting mself and my 12 year old girl when we returned relaxed and tanned from our exotic holiday away (I said no laughing) and to be fair, because we arrived in the wee smalls, we couldn’t really make out the extent of the renovations because we were too exhausted to turn very many lights on and take a little tour of our new and improved home.

So, and because it was a little chilly thereabouts, especially after the heat of the tropical retreat we’d just flown in from, I flicked on the new heating system, made us both a hot chocolate and we crawled into my big bed together to keep warm and recover.  Ant and Dec* (our cats) were probably around somewhere, curled up nice and warm in a corner or something and we’d make a nice big fuss of them once we’d all had a good night’s sleep.

So when we finally got up the next morning and walked into the kitchen to find… well, the ceiling ON the new cooker and the new floor, I thought I might have still been dreaming. I certainly didn’t remember that on the plans I’d gone over with the builder – perhaps a new twist on kitchen design that had gone over (literally, if I’d been standing there at the time) my head?

I’m all for cutting a long story short.  I’ll also cut out all the tears and tantrums and screaming and panting and phone calls and more tears and tantrums (me, mainly) and get to the crux of the issue here. But I never know where to start with this particular (what is now a humorous) anecdote.

Do I begin with Dec cat having gone missing during the renovations, or do I begin with me having flicked the heating on the night we got in?   So it turns out that whilst my brother had been round one night to feed Ant & Dec, he realised he hadn’t seen the latter for a while, and so asked the PM (no, not Tony Blair – the country’s leader at the time).  In a moment of hush, they thought they could hear the cat wailing, and beliving it to be coming from beneath the floorboards – which had been removed in parts for the new plumbing system – took the boards up which they thought he might be under; had a good look, decided he wasn’t there and so nailed the boards back down….. unknowingly puncturing a pipe in the process.

So when I’d turned the heating on the night before, a nice slow seepage of warm water made very sure that when we got up in the morning, the ceiling of the kitchen was not in the place it had been when we’d first arrived.

Ta-Dah.

But this was not the end of the story.  Dec was still missing, although quite vocal (he loved his food and probably missed it). The workers returned, lifted more floorboards, repaired the pipe, repaired the ceiling, left gaping holes in the floors where the cat might alight should itrealise we’d left bowls of food out in order to encourage it out from its hiding place, and we waited.

Eventually the cat crept back out; ignored us completely and went straight for his food – as any good cat should, but phew – he was back.

This is also not the end of the story, but there’ll be other images of what else happened in that stepping-stone of a house, I’m sure.  Watch this space as they say. 😉

22 Years Ago Today #MemoryMonday

LEFT: Look at the hair – look at the mental floral curtain/wallpaper/dado combo – look at the Mona Lisa smile that says “Oh yes, I’m a pregnant woman of today, I’m huge and I’m proud and I’m loving being pregnant so much that once this baby is out, I’m going right ahead and having another five or six at the very least – I’m going to give Ma Walton a run for her money”.  But most of all, yes, LOOK AT THAT BELLY!

Cut to RIGHT:  and where’s that serene smile of smug self-satisfaction? Where’s the list of ten or so other baby names for the ones that follow this first one out – where’s the mental floral wallpaper/curtain combo and why do I have the distracted look of the recently condemned?  Because I don’t like pain, very probably; because I equate pain with not feeling very well and I can’t shift into the ‘productive pain’ mindset that all the midwives tell you to focus on, and right now, my neat little birth plan which said : “ten minutes tops, no drugs” has already gone clean out of the window and I am up to my ears in epidural top-ups at 3 hour intervals.  That look says: “Shit.   Nobody told me it’d hurt THIS much.”.

15 minutes shy of 24 hours later, and I’ve never felt more out-of-body than I did right then.  I’d been starved, strapped, strung up, sliced open and had metal instruments of torture inserted into regions nobody has a right to stand around staring at.

LEFT: taken less than a minute after my baby girl was born – less than another minute later I handed her to an astonished, bewildered-looking new father and promptly threw up all over some staff and hospital equipment. Then I went into shock and had to have an injection to stop me shaking.  It wasn’t the beautiful experience I’d expected.  In fact traumatic I’d say.   Perhaps for the both of us.

RIGHT:  This is the day after and Alice is less than 24 hours old.  We’re both a little in shock I think, but at least she’s not having to sit astride an inflated rubber ring, having terrifyingly painful trips to the loo and wondering how quick-set concrete breasts suddenly appeared inside a  nursing brassiere.

It’s lovely to think that my gorgeous girl used to be able to fit in the palm of my hand like a puppy and even more astounding that the little critter that emerged from the nethers of my reproductive organs is today the most wonderful person I’ve ever had the fortune to be in the same room with.  She delights, confounds, challenges, educates, amuses and makes me eternally glad every day that she was born.  It’s certainly not true that you forget the pain of childbirth, but for our resulting relationship I would go through a hundred more excruciating labours.  She is the most precious part of my world. Happy 22nd Birthday my darling, darling puppy xxxx

A Sixties TV Dinner #MemoryMonday

This was routine most evenings.  I’d have been about 3 – mother would’ve been hugely pregnant with my new ‘playmate’  – and I’ll need a whole post to describe how traumatic I found this promise once I discovered it wasn’t the white rabbit in tartan dungarees that I’d imagined this new arrival to be – and I’ve no idea how old Kimmy the crossbreed dog was. Probably 8 or so.

It’s weird to think that dad was just 31 in this photograph.

Because I ate before dad came home from the butcher shop he worked at, he’d always have his dinner on his lap in front of the (tiny) telly.  In fact this happened for most of his life as far as I remember and I think we only ever sat at the dining table in the front room for special occasions – Christmas, Birthday teas etc. My brother and I used to eat our teas at the picnic table and bench in the kitchen after school and mum would pass our servings through the partition/shelving unit that separated the dining end from the cooking end.

I used to love dad being home because it alleviated the tension of it just being me and mum.  Mum wasn’t such great company; I think she found it hard to know what to do with this little girl she’d tried  5 years to conceive; odd then that she’d decided to go through it all again. But she was very fond of pointing out that my brother and I were like chalk and cheese – he was a simple, happy bundle of fun and I was anything but.   I do remember having the feeling I needed to be noticed and I guess this translated itself (to mother,anyway) into me being clingy and demanding.  I can see how it would happen;  I’d been an only child for 3 years and once the spotlight had left me, I felt in a very cold and dark place.  Luckily I still had my Nanna’s attention otherwise I dont know how I should’ve managed.  I think mother would have sold me

The Half a Century Boy #MemoryMonday

So here we are  my lovely chubbly brother and I, in a 1966 back garden in the ‘burbs of Bedfordshire, enjoying a cheerful play on our garden swing.

We weren’t always quite such good buddies, my brother and I.  In fact our personalities were so vastly opposite (he was happiest enjoying his own company and I was the clingy, tearful, demanding first born who couldn’t  understand why a 2nd child had been necessaryin the first place) and so any photographs of us together and smiling are rare; until you get to our twenties where we’ve both left home, moved into the same shared house and got on so well you’d think we’d been joined at the hip since birth (a biological feat worthy of medical marvel if ever there was one).

I’d been – as you know – scouring the contents of our *Priests’ Hole searching for suitable material for these #MemoryMonday snapshots whilst also at the same time, searching for a suitable image of the little bro’ to make a personalised *Moonpig card for his half century celebration which was yesterday. And I came across this.  One of those rare moments where he isn’t in his vest and pants grubbed up to the gills with garden earth and wailing that his horrible big sister has forced him to eat a proper ‘mud pie’ with worms and all, nor am I the picture of a sullen and/or attention-seeking little charmer making odd faces at the camera which I always imagined my parents would one day believe a hidden delight and hug me for it.

This one tells a slightly different story.  In this I am the (told you) sullen 21 year old sister at the occasion of my brother’s 18th Birthday.   He is perched jauntily at the edge of the picnic table and bench combo that passed as out kitchen dining set and is sporting the kind of 1983 shiny suit that made fans of Spandau Ballet go weak at the knees and swoon before them (note the rolled-up sleeves a la Miami Vice) and I have every confidence that swooning before his spangly Spandau suit was the plan this 18year old had in mind when he put it on (the jacket had been the present from our parents and I’d bought the matching trousers) before joining me at one of the nightclubs we habitually frequented during this halcyon decade.

We’ve had our ups and downs, my brother and I. But I  think secretly we’ve always been glad of each other.   We’ve gone from confusion at each other, despair, hatred and spite towards each other and frustrating disbelief of each other, but through it all there’s been a bond that perhaps comes from having to grow up with the same odd, cold, unfathomable parents.

I wouldn’t wish another brother in the world and I would give him my last button if it would help him (he won’t believe this as Coopers are infamously tight). SoHappy half century, kiddo.  Here’s to the next 🙂 x

*might not be a Priests’ Hole, could be a weird-shaped cupboard

*other personalised gift-making companies are available