Fragmented modern families – can I get an app for this?

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I haven’t seen them for some time, you must understand. In her case easily a year; in his, not much less.

And I’m a bloke. Details of who’s seeing whom, who’s pregnant by whom and who’s split from whom, have a tendency to exit one ear as fast as they entered the other one. A flaw in my social skills that was always likely to be horribly exposed in this age of fragmented families and the shifting sands of once solid titles like ‘Mum’, ‘Dad’ and ‘Uncle’.

So when the two of them approached yesterday, even a social dullard like me picked up on the fact that the toddler in her arms wasn’t on the scene last time I saw them together.

After a few moments of catching-up pleasantries, I’m introduced to him.

“Meet our new addition to the family,” she says.

Interesting, I think, I’d thought her child-bearing days were behind her. Ah well, modern medicine and all that.

“What a lovely little chap,” I say, “and doesn’t he look like his mummy?”

The air suddenly develops a slight chill. “I’ll take that as a compliment,” she says stiffly. “He’s adopted.”

iPhone; we have a problem.

While I’m not yet into app culture, I reflected afterwards that if those who create them could come up with something that makes embarrassing moments like this a thing of the past, I’m upgrading my cellphone tomorrow.

Call it the Fragmentogram. You see two vaguely-familiar people with children approaching, you point your phone at them and it gives you something like this:

“Bob and Sheila. You met at Dougie’s 50th, 18 months ago, when both with different partners. His split amicable, hers messy. Don’t mention secretaries. Co-habited since January but he has commitment issues. Both kids hers, he can’t have any. One on right has learning difficulties – don’t stare.”  

Seriously, make the damn thing and name your price. I’ll be the guy leading the stampede.

If you could be invisible for a day

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

 

 

“We were discussing this at college recently,” Older Son confides. “Most of the lads talked about hanging around women’s changing rooms but it suddenly occurred to me that I would probably go to Paris and beat up street mime artists until their audience broke into rapturous applause.”

Either he’s subconsciously read that line somewhere else or he is prone to moments of inspiration that I envy.

Some things, Vanessa Feltz, you don’t declare at airports

And to think they once clamoured for Sarah Kennedy’s head over foot-in-mouth disease…

Check out this classic of celebrity narcissism from Kennedy’s Radio 2 replacement; confessed from Vanessa Feltz‘ own lips on yesterday’s early morning show.

Now I’ve always cut Ms Feltz some slack over her supposed ‘meltdown’ in Celebrity Big Brother. It’s standard TV hyperbole to label as ‘meltdown’ what you and I would call ‘letting off steam’. Is the woman mad? Absolutely not.

But now I’m wavering: tune in at the 1:11:50 mark, when one listener confides that she wished she could take a tablet that would stop her daughter going to China for 10 months.

Turns out Ms Feltz has been in the same situation, when her own daughter went to work on ambulances in the Middle East (wonder which side of the Green Line that was?)…

“Saying goodbye wasn’t enough,” Feltz recalls. “I suddenly screamed ‘Saskia, I love you more than any other mother in this airport loves her child…’”

Her daughter apparently gave her a withering look, which was probably mild compared to what any parent within earshot would have liked to have given her at that moment.

I’m still not buying ‘mad’ but it would seem I must now grant you ‘delusional’.

PC’s acid test: they’re not paedophiles, they’re “minor-attracted people”

While I’m uneasy with World Net Daily’s indelicate bracketing of child abuse with homosexuality, that rather pales in the light of the rest of their report on the latest deliberations of B4U-ACT, an organisation that works with those sexually attracted to children in the state of Maryland.

WND reports that at a symposium held by B4U-ACT last week, speakers “promoted the idea that the American Psychiatric Association should remove pedophilia from the list of mental defects in its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.”

Pride yourself on your open-mindedness? See how these soundbites grab ya…

• “Dr. John Sadler (University of Texas) argued that diagnostic criteria for mental disorders should not be based on concepts of vice since such concepts are subject to shifting social attitudes and doing so diverts mental-health professions from their role as healers.”
• Another speaker “argued in favor of acceptance of and compassion for people who are attracted to minors.”

An observer at the symposium, meanwhile, was horrified at other themes that it developed: the unfair demonisation of paedophiles, an objection to the word “wrong” being applied to them and the idea that children are not inherently unable to consent to sex with an adult.

I don’t know if this symposium had a title but ‘Moral Relativism Comes of Age’ wouldn’t have been far off the mark. So what did you do at work today, Daddy? Why, I attempted to sanitise child abuse, darling. Now don’t go spitting in Daddy’s face like that…

The irony is that those at whom the symposium was aimed are in this line of  work precisely because civilised people regard paedophilia as repugnant: no exceptions, no pleas in mitigation. If that sits uncomfortably with the refined intellects mouthing the inanities listed above then they need to find a desert island where they can set up the la-la-land they apparently crave.

By all means, care for your patients or ‘clients’ as you no doubt insist on calling them. Analyse them and attempt to understand them to the nth degree but be in no doubt that you do so not because their psychiatric intricacies look good on your c.v. but because you’re charged with that task by a Society who wants these people controlled, restrained and cured – that’s right, CURED, go on, say it out loud… – as far as is humanely possible.

And don’t you dare patronise ordinary people for their revulsion, tut-tutting that old shibboleth ‘demonisation’ as if it were some gigantic roadblock to your doing a decent day’s work. You work in the public sector, you dance to the public’s tune and that public happens to have zero tolerance when it comes to adults who view kids as sex toys. Do excuse our primitive ways.

You’re not paid to destigmatise, folks: you’re paid to find answers to one of Mankind’s greatest evils. Do your job and save the sordid idealism for your own time.

Why writers have it easier than musicians

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Older Son plays his song at a church flower festival this morning. Browsers and moochers mill around him like he’s just another ornament, while family and friends hang on his every note.

I have heard this song rehearsed for what seems like months now: belted out with style when the voice was good and dragged out like a cat from the fireside on those nights when his voice was ready for bed some time before the rest of him. I’ve heard boy and guitar examine the tune from all angles, most of them simply because they happened to be there.

All my pride in this self-taught, confident musician doesn’t mean there weren’t days when I’d have paid him money just to sing something else.

And yet this morning, I’m struck by how polished it sounds, as if I’d become blind to the fact that all those ragged practices might one day unite in a seamless whole.

Writers are lucky. Our rehearsals are secret affairs. The words appear and are rearranged silently and as long as we shoo away the over-the-shoulder audience, no-one beyond a few feet of us is any the wiser as to the almighty mess from which we fashion something presentable.

The musician without access to sound-proofing never knows this luxury. His creative gestation period is an unavoidable spectator sport from the moment the Muse starts kicking. Which is why, when near-perfection finally dusts itself down and emerges from the rubble, he astounds us all the more.

And that’s the trade-off.

Wrong place, wrong time…

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So much for ‘doing things as a family’. The Church fish supper social segues into the medley from hell – wartime ditties and Fenland folksong. Audience participation mandatory.

Hacked-off Older Son texts mates halfway through to see how their party’s going. “Get back to you,” comes the reply. “Stripper taking bra off.”

I’m not popular.

Jesus and clothing arguments

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Older Son may be becoming a bit of a theological handful.

“Haven’t you got anything a little smarter to wear for church?” I just asked him.

“No,” he replied, “but then when did Jesus ever dress for the occasion…?

Bye bye, Dad

If you never forget where you were when you heard that your dad has died, I’m stuck forever with the mundanity of a residential side-road just outside Stamford; the first available backwater off the A1 when it came to returning a call whose content I knew before I even reached for my phone.

It didn’t matter that you couldn’t wait for me to reach you. Two hundred miles away for over 30 years, I’d always known the odds on my not being there were miniscule. What mattered was that my sister was; holding your hand at the nursing home while unseeing eyes flickered for the last time and cathedral bells pealed in the background.

Given the sorrow I felt when you’d told me months before how lonely you were becoming in your own house, I was more than content with that arrangement.

I continued my journey regardless. Stared you and death in the face together, stroked your cool cheek and thanked you for everything.

That was the easy part. The worst: engaging my stroke-ridden mother with small talk in an upstairs room while watching the body of the man to whom she’d been wed for 51 years, being slid into the back of a hearse in the forecourt below.

And now, back home, I sift through the mental rubble, as grief – hitting home as belatedly as people warn you it will – congeals around the usual outcrops.

I despair at the unknowing brevity of our last conversation last Tuesday: me on holiday, you weak and exhausted after treatment. “I’m a bit better,” you said quietly down the phone, “but I won’t stay on long.”

A bit better. I went fishing with barely a care in the world the following morning. I would never talk to you again and I smiled contentedly at catching three stupid trout.

Yet had I known that was our last contact, who would have ever got the phone out of my hand?

I think of the last time I saw you alive. Surrounded by impending death, I was still happy just to have you around, rants and all. Happy to see you among people, and close to mother, the pair of you spending evenings together in the bedsit-type suite that you’d turned into a home from home. A year or two of this, I told myself: the perfect ending.

All told, you were there just a matter of  months, yet for all I might wish you back, would you thank me for it? Life was closing in and you were an old man increasingly unable to reconcile yourself with a body that could no longer run like clockwork. It took so much to make you happy and so little to make you angry these last 18 months, an imbalance that I fancy would have only intensified the longer you lived.

And I wrestle with the same awful perception that tormented me when my grandmother died. A sense of you being stranded in time, unable to move beyond 22nd August 2010 because the world has dropped you off and is moving on without you.

Yet if the Christian message is true, you’re the one who’s gone on ahead, and I’m the one playing catch-up. So I wrestle with perspectives.

Worst of all though, and there’s a moral here for those who swear by routine, is the period between 8.30 and 9pm: the time we’d speak on the phone every evening. Will it be weeks, months or even years before that thirty-minute spell comes and goes without me aching to hear those conversational bookends you used every time?

“Dad here…”

“Love to you all. Bye-bye. Bye-bye…”

[pic courtesy of Light Knight]

Care Home Chronicles Pt II

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The residents’ lounge must have eight or nine elderly occupants asleep in there this morning as Dad and I walk by, all of them leant forward with their heads slumped on their chests. Out like lights.

It occurs to me that I’m just one loud “BOO!” away from being a mass murderer.

Care Home Chronicles Pt. I

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Staying in an old folks home for four days: part parental visit, part glimpse of the future.

“You might get someone sticking her head round the door in the middle of the night, wanting to know if your position needs changing,” says the Warden.

Promises, promises.