Tag Archives: parents

My Mother… Landlady Extraordinaire

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Regular readers may recall my mother’s role as a student landlady, in which she believes all the tenants are simple (see My Mother… and the Simple Students). She regularly peddles round on her bicycle to impart advice such as, ‘Put the bins out – and don’t forget to lock the back gate!’, and ‘Drinking at this hour? It’s a wonder you ever get any studying done!’.

After the departure of last year’s batch of simpletons, my mother set about her annual summer cleaning of our student house.

But as she hoovered away at the carpet with her trusty ‘little vac’ (the Dyson rendered ‘utterly useless’), she kept feeling holes in the floor of the lounge: holes that my father had been blithely ignoring for the last few years (bringing with it a very literal meaning to brushing them under the carpet).

Finally pulling back the carpet, my mother was alarmed to find large areas of the floorboards has been devoured by a particularly voracious strain of woodworm – a grim discovery that brought about her new saying of the summer, ‘The floorboards were like WEETABIX!’

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Rather than immediately consult with a woodworm expert, my 65-year-old mother decided to venture into the bowels of the house herself, squeezing down a tiny hatch she found in the corner of the lounge. On her hands and knees, she managed to crawl, caterpillar-style, the entire length of the underbelly of the property, to inspect the extent of the damage with a torch.

Re-appearing, covered in soot, my mother – the pot-holing pensioner – claimed that no-body over 5ft2 would even make it down there.

My father’s role in this was to investigate a solution. He apparently managed to operate Google and read up on some super-strength woodworm killer, although given the scale of his internet ineptitude (see My Parents… and the World Wide Web), I’m not sure how this was possible.

After weighing the job up at length, the parents decided it probably was time to call in a joiner, who arrived to replace the Weetabix floorboards and told my mother he had replaced part of a joist underneath the house too.

Not content with just taking his word for it, my mother then ventured back down the hatch and slithered underneath the house – torch poised – to see if he really had replaced a joist. Luckily for him, he had.

This September brought with it a new batch of students and further parental eccentricity. I told my mother that I had organised for two Polish girls to move in and she was to meet them at the house on Friday.

My father began making noises about collecting them in person from Liverpool airport. He said it wouldn’t be any trouble. But, in the end, they settled for a ‘meet and greet’ service at Preston train station, and a personal taxi service to the student house. Contracts duly signed, normal landlords would probably wish them well and be on their way.

But not the parents. Oh no… their concierge service continued. When I phoned my mother to ask how it had gone, she said that they had pretty much spent the whole day with the Polish girls.

Apparently, they drove them to the University library and actually waited in the car for them while they registered. The girls were then ‘terribly hungry’ – hadn’t eaten for 17 hours, in fact. Ever the hostess, my mother toyed with the idea of taking them back to their house for dinner but instead she settled for dropping them off at Aldi to do some food shopping. She thought they’d feel at home in Aldi, she said, because of its continental connections.

In the midst of this madness, my father – the chauffeur – had produced one of his infamous maps with a highlighted route and instructions on how to get from the house to the University on foot.

They left the Polish girls happily ensconced back at the house, munching on an Aldi pizza and watching X-Box (I think she meant X-Factor).

At the end of this tale, I asked my mother what the Polish girls were like.

‘One of them seems quite sharp,’ she said. ‘Pidgin English – but definitely all there.

‘But the other one is terribly feeble. She barely spoke.’

I just knew what was coming next.

‘In fact, she seemed a bit… simple.’

My Parents… and the World Wide Web

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Some time ago, my parents heard about something called the World Wide Web and decided that they might want to become involved in it. They contacted ‘a nice man from the church parish magazine’, who came round to the house and got them up and running with the internet, choosing the trusty Post Office as their internet provider.

I didn’t even know that the Post Office did internet connections. But it does, apparently. And my mother dutifully cycles there each month to pay the bill in person.

To say my parents haven’t quite got to grips with the digital age would be an understatement of gargantuan proportions. Only the other week, my mother asked me, ‘What is the difference between eBay and email?’.

My mother once tried to move the cursor using the laptop’s touch pad and five minutes later, she had only just made it half way across the screen. She hasn’t been near the computer since.

My father is a little more advanced. He has an email account that he checks roughly every six months. I think he once looked at our house on Google Earth. And there’s been rumours of him attempting a Google search on Bob Dylan.

The other week, I visited them for the night and foolishly mooted the prospect of using the internet. My mother shook her head nervously and my father looked baffled. After a bit of a conflab, my father appeared with his dusty laptop, switched it on and told me that it might take ‘a little while’ to load up.

45 minutes later, having watched Coronation Street and drunk two cups of coffee, my father returned and peered curiously at the laptop. It was STILL loading up. He appeared to think this was perfectly normal.

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‘What on earth is it doing?’ I wailed.

‘It’s okay,’ said my father. ‘We’ve got the hourglass. Something must be doing… something.’

‘This isn’t normal Dad,’ I said, clicking at the start-up menu furiously. ‘There is something SERIOUSLY WRONG with it!’

My father stared at the desktop.

‘What is a P…D…F?’ he said.

I couldn’t for the life of me think how to explain what a PDF was.

‘I don’t have the energy for this, Dad,’ I said. ‘I am LOSING THE WILL TO LIVE.’

‘Well, what does P.D.F stand for?’

‘It’s complicated,’ I replied.

We both sat there for another 10 minutes. My father occasionally peered suspiciously at the screen.

All of sudden, a plethora of blank Internet Explorer screens sprang up, with the message ‘Not Responding’.

‘Aha!’ cried my father, triumphantly. ‘It’s working!’

‘But why are there 10 blank screens?’ I said.

‘It’s because you’ve been impatient,’ said my father. ‘I told you not to jab at the keys!’

‘Impatient?! It’s been an HOUR!’

There was still no sign of getting onto the internet. Alarm bells should have rung when they first mentioned the Post Office.

‘Right, that’s it!’ I said, leaping up. ‘I’m sorting this out once and for all – I’m phoning Sky in the morning.’

The parents looked utterly terrified.

‘Please don’t,’ my mother begged. ‘They’ll make us set us set up one of those direct debit things and we only want to pay in cash.’

(The parents don’t believe in banks, cash cards or direct debits, preferring to store their life savings in the local building society – or, for all I know, under their mattress. See: Cash Is King)

The next morning, I drove back to Leeds and dropped the ailing laptop off at the local computer repair shop. An hour later, they phoned to confirm the worst.

I rang my father.

‘It’s bad news,’ I said. ‘The laptop has a serious hard drive failure.’

‘A… hard… drive??’ said my father, in a bewildered tone.

‘What on earth is one of those?’

Great Uncle Keith… and the Scotland Road Trip

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I’m not sure quite how it happened but I found myself on a 600-mile road trip to the far recesses of Scotland with a toothless 85-year-old in my passenger seat.

We hadn’t seen my Great Uncle Keith for 25 years so it was a bit of shock when the phone rang at my parents’ house and a feeble voice rattled down the line, saying, ‘Hello, It’s Keithhhh.’

Great Uncle Keith, my father’s uncle, had slipped off the radar some time in the early 90s. He met a ‘lady friend’ called Valerie, who had seemingly wanted him all to himself and as a result, he had severed ties with the family.

A quarter of a century on, and with grasping Valerie having passed away, Great Uncle Keith had decided to re-connect with my father, his long-forgotten nephew – from all of 25 miles away in Manchester.

My father is an only child but his father George (now dead) had two other brothers – the aforementioned Keith, and Jack, who married Jill (!) and moved away to Scotland to lead a hardy life of hiking and extreme outdoor pursuits.

We hadn’t seen Jack and Jill for years either but would occasionally receive a postcard from them, usually from far-flung places like the Himalayas, accompanied by messages such as, ‘Did a steady 30-mile hike yesterday; tomorrow tackling Everest…’ or, ‘On the Inca Trail. 40 degrees. Terrain easy.’

Given that Keith hadn’t seen his brother Jack for many years either, I rather generously offered to drive him up there for a Scotland for a family reunion. My parents, never ones to miss out on an adventure, were to accompany us on the trip also, in order the provide some light relief or drive me to despair, depending on how you looked at it.

The first shock was the kind of surprise that you can only get when you haven’t seen someone for 25 years. Far from being the sprightly piano-playing uncle that my father fondly remembered, Keith was now a dithery old man, with only a few silver wisps of hair and, more worryingly, a distinct lack of teeth. He was to stay at my parents for the night before we embarked on the Great Road Trip to Garelochhead.

Somehow, at 2am in the morning, he managed to bring a whole glass shelf crashing down in the bathroom, causing my father to nearly have a heart attack and my mother to get terribly flustered indeed and make statements such as, ‘What on earth was he doing, CLATTERING around in the dead of night?!”

Morning came and the great road trip had begun. I was behind the wheel, with toothless Great Uncle Keith safely ensconced in the passenger seat. My mother was giving a running commentary of the scenery, while my father sat studying one of his Ordnance Survey maps. Four hours later, with a short lunch break (in which gummy Keith attempted to eat a sandwich like a gurning Les Dawson), we arrived at Jack and Jill’s little house on the edge of Loch Lomond.

I vaguely recall Jill from my childhood. She was rail thin, terribly fit and as sharp as glass. A retired headmistress through and through, she didn’t suffer fools gladly.

Jack was much more affable, very quiet and extremely fit also. Now 89, he was – unbelievably – still running up the fells and back before breakfast.

As the car pulled up, Jill waved a spindly arm. And the first thing she said as she greeted her long-lost brother-in-law was, ‘My goodness Keith, where on earth are your TEETH?’

It was a question that all of us were itching to know the answer to. We never did really get to the bottom of it.

She cast a shrewd eye over all of us and turned her attention to my father, who was visibly attempting to hold his stomach in.

‘And Michael,’ she went on. ‘Haven’t you put on weight?!’

Somewhat ironically, given her obsession with how porky we’d all become, she emerged from the kitchen with a mountain of cheese scones and insisted that we all tuck in immediately.

Jack, who had been out doing a spot of windsurfing on the loch and also appeared to have grown a handle bar moustache, arrived shortly after, and they both proceeded to regale us with tales of Pensioners Do Extreme Pursuits.

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Two hours later and having been force-fed several more cheese scones, the parents and I began to make noises about leaving for Glasgow – thankful that we’d had the foresight to book into our own hotel – and telling Great Uncle Keith that we would return to collect him in 48 hours. He looked petrified.

Driving back two days later, Keith was already waiting on the path with his battered suitcase. He had never looked so pleased to see us. As we bundled him into the car, Jill peered in and said, ‘Now Keith, remember what I said. Straight to the dentist as soon as you get back. And then you must consult a dietician immediately.’

Privately, I thought the chances of Keith, who only ever ventured as far as the corner shop, consulting a dietician were extremely slim (excuse the pun) but I didn’t dare voice this under Jill’s steely gaze.

‘No Teeth’ Keith just smiled compliantly, showing his gums.

On the journey back, Keith told us that Jack and Jill had marched him several miles up a hill – not to fetch a pail of water – but to explore the former residence of Glasgow-born designer Charles Macintosh (famed for those silly chairs with an elongated back). Reaching the summit, they found that the house had yet to open for the day.

‘Never mind,’ they said. ‘We’ll just walk several miles into town for lunch and come back in a couple of hours.’

On the verge of collapse, puffing Keith had to plead not to be taken back up the hill, at which point Jill expressed her horror at how unfit he had become.

Overall, he’d enjoyed his mini-break, Keith concluded. But he was glad to be getting home.

‘Perhaps you’re getting a bit long in the tooth for these trips away,’ my father quipped.

My Family… and the Dawn French fixation

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We are in the middle of the annual family sojourn to Cornwall, where my father has taken up residence on his favourite seat in the garden to study the passing ships with his binoculars (no doubt contemplating his own imminent foray out to sea in his beloved dinghy ‘Chrismick‘).

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This was, until his binoculars fell upon a particular palatial home, built into the cliff directly opposite. My father sat studying the house for quite a long time and pondered who might live in such an opulent mansion.

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That afternoon, my sister visited the cove below and reported that she saw a girl ‘fitting the description’ of Dawn French’s daughter Billie, padding from the beach and into the mouth of its imposing gates.

A lengthy discussion was then held by the whole family (along with lots of Googling) at the end of which it was decided that all the evidence pointed to a firm conclusion that this was in fact the residence of non other than Dawn French.

The next morning, my father rose early, filled his flask with coffee, took up position in his chair and trained his binoculars on the house, looking for any sign of movement.

‘Dawn Watch’ continued that evening, followed by another discussion about the rotund comedienne. My sister had been following her on Twitter and discovered she had been at a book signing in nearby Falmouth. There was every chance that Dawn might be at her Cornish home, fuelled by my father’s report of a light going on in the house at approximately 9pm.

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And then, finally… a firm sighting! At 2.09pm yesterday afternoon, my father excitedly summoned us all to the garden and one by one we peered through the binoculars. Before our eyes was the unmistakable silhouette of Dawn French, on the balcony of her 40-room mansion enjoying the afternoon sun in a billowing kaftan.

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Swept along by the excitement of the celebrity spot, the family began a running dialogue of her movements, with even my mother getting in on the act: Dawn’s looking out to sea; Dawn’s now leaning on the balustrade; Dawn’s now going inside the house; Dawn’s just scratched her bottom…

Dawn French is beginning to take over our holiday: my sister has been googling all about her divorce from Lenny Henry and recent marriage to a man called Mark Bignell (after a 16-month romance!); my father has been on Google Earth investigating the layout of her gothic-style house (it can’t possibly have 40 rooms!); my mother has become something of an expert in Dawn’s weight loss and then subsequent gain (it must be all those Cornish cream teas and pasties!).

Gripped by ‘French fever’, my father was last seen roaring off to Fowey in Chrismick to get a closer look at Dawn’s house from the sea.

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I’m not sure where this obsession will end. Camping outside her house until she invites us all in for a traditional cream tea?

Probably.

Watch this space…

My Father… and his ‘Boat’

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One of my parents’ greatest pleasures is chugging down Fowey estuary in Cornwall in their ancient dinghy. They bought the dinghy in 1973 whilst ‘courting’ and named it Chrismick (a hybrid of their names).

The original Chrismick was upgraded to Chrismick mark II in the late 80s – and to this day it lives on, travelling down to Cornwall each year, with occasional ventures onto Lake Windermere.

But whatever you do, never call it a dinghy. In my father’s eyes, it’s a boat: his pride and joy. Better still, it fits into the boot of his car. And nothing gives my father greater joy then driving down the M6 to Cornwall knowing that he has a WHOLE BOAT neatly tucked into his trunk.

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Arriving at Cornwall, my father begins the routine of inflating and launching Chrismick – with his trusty foot pump. As children, my sister and I thought this was a great adventure.

As adults, inflating a boat with feeble puffs of air while pumping your foot up and down repeatedly seems a long and tiresome process.

After about an hour of pumping and puffing, Chrismick is finally launched into the water – and we all pile in.

There follows an audible holding of breath while my father yanks the chain on the rusty engine several times, a pause – and then subsequent cheers when it miraculously splutters into life. The trusty Suzuki engine has never let them down yet.

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The maddest part of this saga is that after a day on the river, my father then begins the long-winded process of deflating the dinghy and folding it back into the boot of his car – ready to relive the arduous process the next day. (He doesn’t trust Chrismick to be left on the water overnight).

My dad loves the challenge of studying his tide times and channels. On a good tide day, you can make it several miles in-land to Lerryn (of Wind In The Willows fame) and stop off for a Cornish cream tea.

This is another of my Dad’s triumphs in Chrismick: Venturing Places Where Real Boats Cannot Go.

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My father proudly claims that Chrismick is a six-man dinghy but five adults is about its limit. Even then, it’s a cosy affair, with my father at the helm and the rest of us perched precariously on its sides, ever fearful that the whole thing might just pop and suddenly deflate.

Occasionally, my father shouts ‘bale’ and one of us has to start scooping out water using a baling device that my father fashioned out of an empty milk carton.

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My father has a long-held dream of taking Chrismick out to sea, quashed only by my mother’s annual protests. Apparently they met a sailor in a pub down there in the 80s, who warned them that the coast in these parts is a perilous place – a story which my father still scoffs at.

But judging by the amount of puncture patches adorning on Chrismick’s faded grey sides, I think my mother’s fears are justified.

The place that my father wants to get to is called Lantic Bay – a secluded cove around the cliff of Polruan. To achieve this dream, my father would need to head out to sea, navigating choppy waters that definitely aren’t meant for an ailing dinghy.

He has been Weighing This Up for the last 40 years – more seriously in the last couple of years (egged on by The Foolhardy Husband).

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In a week’s time, we’re heading down to Cornwall for our annual family jolly.

And I fear that 2013 could be the year that my father, Chrismick – and the husband – finally set out to sea.

My Parents… and the Sunday Walks

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Every Sunday without fail, the parents and omnipresent Uncle Stephen set off on a walk – exploring a little corner of Lancashire each week. Occasionally, the husband and I join them, along with sporadic guest appearances from my sister and nephew Max.

Weather is never a problem for the stoic parents. We’ve been known to battle gales, snow and hail, all in the name of a bracing country walk. ‘A little bit of rain’, as my mother would say, isn’t something that they would allow to get in the way of their weekly ramble.

My mother also believes that no terrain is too rocky and no field too boggy for our hardy family to traverse. Once, on a walk in Haworth, we met a couple of walkers coming in the opposite direction, who advised that it was just too muddy further along, and that we probably should turn back now. My mother simply scoffed at their feebleness and ploughed on regardless.

But the most memorable walk was around Entwistle Reservoir near Bolton earlier this year.

There had been mass flooding in the area, meaning that parts of the reservoir had overflowed onto the footpath that ran around its perimeter. Signs were put up advising walkers to avoid the area.

Naturally, the parents remained completely impervious to this news.

It all began so well. There were a few puddles here and there – but further into the walk, the puddles began to grow, and a couple of passing dog walkers issued grave warnings that the path ahead was impassable and we should turn back immediately.

My mother simply didn’t believe them, and my father, upon hearing the word ‘impassable’, was even more determined to press on. He loves a challenge.

Further up, the flooding was so bad that it was impossible to see where the reservoir ended and the footpath began. It was just a giant expanse of water.

Faced with this impassable challenge, it was every man for himself.

My sister, left in charge of the pushchair, had no option but to slosh straight through the water – up to her knees!

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The rest of us (Max, aka Fireman Sam, having been hastily hoisted onto the husband’s shoulders) decided to scramble up the bank at the side, and head for higher ground.

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But my father, with his adventurous streak, plumped for a more difficult route. Determined not to stray too far from the footpath, he attempted to clamber, crab-style, along a rickety fence.

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Half-way along, with water swirling below, the fence creaking ominously under his weight, and a sign announcing ‘dangerous undertows’, he realised that perhaps this wasn’t such a good idea after all.

But while the rest of us hollered ‘turn back’ from high above, Bear Grylls With A Bus Pass gamely shuffled on, determined not to be proved wrong.

Soaking wet, with squelching feet, and splinters in his hands, my father finally staggered over.

‘Well, that wasn’t too bad,’ he announced, seemingly unfazed by this brush with near-death.

‘Now, where are we thinking for lunch?’

Odd Jobs and Drawer Knobs

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I’ve already told you that no distance is too far for the parents to travel. Lunch in Edinburgh? Not a problem. Meet you at a historic castle just north of the Outer Hebrides? See you there in eight hours.

And their go-anywhere attitude proves a blessing when there are any DIY jobs to do in Leeds (the husband having been rendered incapable of doing any odd jobs after a frightening incident involving a circular drill, details of which even he doesn’t want to share).

The only problem with my father and his handyman skills is that each task requires two long-winded journeys to Yorkshire: the first to Weigh The Job Up and the second to actually complete said job.

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My Mother… and her Telephone Voice

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Remember in the 80s, when parents used to answer the landline by saying the area followed by their phone number ie. ‘St Albans 233915?’

Well, my mother STILL does that.

The husband didn’t believe me so I told him to call my mother. She answered with a trill, ‘Hello, Preston 7437**’, as she always does.

Sometimes, I try to cut her off somewhere between the 7 and the 4, by announcing, ‘It’s ME!’

But she always persists with saying the full number, in her poshest ‘telephone voice’, of course. I think it’s something to do with her former days working on the switchboard at BT, before she became student landlady extraordinaire.

My sister and I were always drilled to answer the telephone in our best secretarial voice,  just in case it was Someone Of Great Importance (it never was).

I love that the age of mobile communication has done nothing to dampen my mother’s habit.

The husband’s late grandmother took things one step further – answering the telephone not with her number but with her full postal address.

I almost wish I had a landline so I could carry on the tradition.

‘Hello, Orange 07956 2666**, somewhere in North Leeds…’ just doesn’t have the same ‘ring’ to it.

The Big End

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I had a very random thought today: What is a car’s Big End exactly?

My childhood was dominated by my father perusing his maps and then attempting to drive down various pot-holed roads, always in a vehicle completely unsuitable for such ambitious pursuits.

And each off-road adventure always resulted in my mother clinging onto the dashboard as the car bumped and banged along, crying, ‘Slow down! You’re going to DAMAGE THE BIG END!’

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Cash is King

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From a young age, the parents drilled it into me that banks were out to rob you blind and that anyone who used them was an utter fool – a belief so solidly engrained in their minds, that even now they simply cannot believe that banks allow you to store your money in them for free. My father would sooner have stashed his life savings under his mattress then hand it over to the evil clutches of Barclays or Natwest.

No, for the parents the trusty building society, with its share options and friendly cashiers, was the only safe option to store your hard-earned readies.

This unwavering loyalty to building societies meant that while the rest of the world were embracing the electronic age of debit cards and Internet banking, the parents were quite happily driving several miles to the building society every Saturday morning, clutching their passbook and queuing patiently before drawing out a predetermined sum of money which they had calculated would see them through the week ahead.

Our annual summer holiday in Cornwall proved a little more tricky though. The weeks leading up to the departure would involve a careful calculation of how much money we were likely to need for the week’s activities. In the unlikely event that we should run out of cash, my Dad kept a map of the nearest Woolwich building society branches in the car and would think nothing of a two-hour round trip to St Austell to top up his cash supply.

For years, the parents lived in this comfortable bubble, blissfully oblivious of the need or desire to pay for anything electronically or venture near an ATM.

That was until they pitched up at Premier Inn about two years ago, brandishing a fistful of crisp £20 notes (fresh from The Chorley and District Building Society that morning, I believe) – only to be told that ‘for security reasons’ they were unable to pay for their room with cash. No cash? For security reasons?! Even now, my father recounts the story with an incredulous snort.

However, this proved the tipping point. My mother booked an appointment with the building society manager to explain this rather unnerving episode in detail, and emerged half an hour later suspiciously peering at the shiny new debit card that had landed in her palm.

To this day, the debit card lives in the glove compartment of their car. It has on it a balance of £10 and is to be used FOR EMERGENCIES ONLY (the parents don’t leave any more money on it than that for fear of an identity thief stealing their life savings – although, somewhat ironically, the pin number is permanently attached to it on a post-it note, should the four-digit date of their anniversary temporarily elude them).

I’ve tried to get them to use a cash machine. I’ve tried explained that Chip and Pin aren’t some 90s rap artists but are, in fact, a simple and convenient way to pay for your shopping. I’ve tried to explain that the monetary world has moved on.

But old habits die hard and the parents continue with their Saturday morning ritual.

Images of desperate savers queuing to withdraw their life savings from Northern Rock and horror stories of wide-spread fraud served only to reinforce the parents’ belief that BANKS ARE BAD.

And with the current banking crisis and news that soon there will be no such thing as a free current account, I’m beginning to think that perhaps, just perhaps, the parents may have been right all along.