What On Earth Is Brandon Doing To This Cat?

Today is Brandon’s birthday! My baby son is fifteen today… How time flies. To celebrate, I’m posting a few pictures:

My hopes for his future -

Perhaps Brandon will become a proctologist

My memories of taking him to see Father Christmas -

He knows if you've been bad or good

How he sees himself -

Brandon owns this t-shirt in real life

And his love of animals -

Zuul has decided not to press charges

Just a magical glimpse there, into the joy of Motherhood and the wonderful task of bringing up Brandon. May he live long and prosper!

I Am So Angry

Grrr. I have just sent a stiff email to the Stagecoach Bus Company, here in Manchester. Brandon had to catch a bus this morning and used his week-long “Easyrider” ticket. He had a valid Travel I.D. card and a valid ticket, both of which were kept in a Travelshop holder. Neither was damaged, or tampered with. Brandon was clean, tidy, sober and polite…

The driver wouldn’t let him on.

Why? Apparently the driver could tell that his ticket was “fake”. Even though it had been issued on a bus, was sealed in plastic and had all the appropriate marks and dates. He looked once, didn’t hold it himself, didn’t take it out (or ask Brandon to take it out) of the wallet. He said it was fake and asked Brandon to leave the bus, then repeated himself when Brandon held the ticket up for further perusal.

Is it any wonder that teenagers get rude with people these days? No WAY would the driver have treated me like that. And WHY did he think the ticket was FAKE? We shall never know, because he wouldn’t explain, or discuss it. It isn’t even Bran’s normal bus route, so it isn’t like he has been messing about with kids on the school bus (in the past) and made an enemy of one of the drivers. Brandon is a good kid anyway.

I hate petty little Hitlers, who get one tiny bit of power and then go crazy. I hate adults who treat all teenagers as though they were criminals. And I hate ANYONE who is mean to one of my kids… Especially BRANDON.

I feel sorry for anyone else who crosses me, or mine, today!

Brandon’s Summer School Graduation Picture

Brandon now has a Street Dance degree, innit?

Further to my last post, here is a picture of the man himself, in his little gown and mortar board. Bless. He did do a really excellent rap, about recycling plastic bags, at the presentation ceremony. Look at those tired eyes – that’s what four days of student life does to you.

10 Good Reasons To Have Children

1) You Become An Adult: This is probably the best reason to become a parent… You’ll finally have to really grow up. Once you are a parent you can no longer allow yourself to be afraid of the dark, afraid of bees, drunk every night, or going without food in the house, “Because I bought a new Xbox game”. You mature, you think things through, you get over yourself… Because you now have some perspective. Usually.

2) Reproducing Your Genes: Let’s face it, once you’ve managed to meet the partner of your dreams and you’ve built a little home together, having a child is the logical next step. If you are worried about the environment, concerned about overpopulation and questioning the future of the planet…You are exactly the sort of person who should be breeding. God knows there are enough idiots doing it, and they have to be counter-balanced.

3) Buying Their Clothes: Tiny little baby clothes. Cute kids’ clothes. Cool, hardcore, kickass, teenage fashion (or alternative clothing). All great fun to buy, but they won’t fit you in middle-age… Or even if they will, you’ll look embarrassing. Kids are your ticket into the shops that you can’t normally shop in and it’s great fun to choose clothes without reference to your own fat belly. Mind you, it doesn’t always work – Brandon wanted to buy a horrible, chavvy, pastel-coloured polo shirt last week. I was all, “Get this T shirt! It’s BLACK with skulls on!” but he refused to entertain the idea. Damn.

4) Sharing Their Toys: I don’t need to explain.

5) You Can Use Them As An Excuse: “Oh I’d love to come and help you move house but Brandon has a temperature and he feels sick”. Or, ” I’ll have to get off the phone now Mum, Little Johnny has his head stuck in the bannister”. Perfect.

6) Retribution Is Yours: Ever been in a restaurant and seen kids running wild and throwing food? It’s SO frustrating that you can’t shout at them or hit them. However, if they are your own kids…You CAN! And everyone will applaud you for it.

7) Explaining Sex: Some people think this is a HARD part of parenting. Personally I loved it. Especially when one of my sons (naming no names) told me that masturbating sounded “disgusting” and that he thought he probably wouldn’t take it up. HAHAHAHA!

8) Telling Lies: If you lie to your friends and colleagues, you end up being put in a mental home. But with your kids, you can say anything you like. And better still, they believe you! Mine thought I was a secret agent, a magician, German and (at one point) their adoptive Mother. Of course, you have to tell them the truth after a couple of years.

9) Watching Children’s TV: Everybody knows that some of the best shows on TV are aimed at children but if you don’t have kids you have no excuse to watch them. Or maybe you just won’t notice them. Without Brandon, I would not have seen Pingu, for example.

10) Securing Your Future Care: Even at the exact moment that you are wiping your kids’ arses, you know in your heart that one day they will be doing the same for you. Or paying someone else to do it. And what boy can resist digging his old Mum’s garden? Or mending her roof?

Brandon In Uniform

I love this picture of Brandon. He really needs to learn a new pose though.

Waiter Pwns My Multilingual Mother

My Mother was fussing as usual, turning a family meal out into a fiasco, because the Greek Restaurant’d had the audacity to call its meals Greek things.
“What do you think this is?” she asked, poking at something on the Menu.
“I don’t know, it’s all Greek to me!” I joked pathetically. I tend to just order things and hope for the best, I mean the Menu roughly described each item in any case.

My Mother signaled to a waiter, who walked over slowly. He was olive-skinned and tall, with high cheek-bones and thick black wavy hair, the top two buttons on his starched white shirt were undone. He stood silently observing my Mother. She tipped the Menu in his direction and jabbed at the item again…
“Is this hot?” she asked. The waiter flared his nostrils and frowned slightly, looking quizzical. My Mother gave a bad-tempered sigh, shook her head and used the well-worn British approach to international misunderstandings.
“EEEES THEEIIISS ’OOOTTT?” She shouted, in her finest pigeon English. The waiter’s face remained poker perfect…

“Do you mean heated or pungent madam?” he asked, in the most perfect, cut-glass English accent I have ever heard.

I had to stuff my napkin in my mouth when I saw the look on her face.

12 Annoying Things That Mothers Do

1) Remarking on your weight: Any weight you are is wrong, according to your Mum. You’re either fat, or anorexic. Sometimes you are heading for osteoporosis if you don’t have some cheese. Sometimes eating cheese will mean you are going to have a heart-attack, just like your Grandad did.

2) Flirting with your male friends: Your Mum is keen to know that she has still got it going on and your friends like to encourage her – either because she is a MILF, or because you are horrified. Or both.

3) Serving up the food you love, so often that you start to hate it: I don’t need to elaborate, do I?

4) Phoning you at the worst possible time: The last episode of a twenty-six part mystery series has just begun, OR you are a minute from the biggest orgasm of your life, OR you’re half way through getting a soufflet out of the oven, OR you’re explaining why you want a divorce to your other half… Good old Mum is certain to choose this moment to phone you. And it will be for a reason so trivial and long-winded that you’ll consider becoming a serial killer.

5) Telling you the same thing, over and over again:  If she isn’t doing that yet, give it a few years.

6) Showing people your baby photos: But not in a nice way. “Look how FAT he is there, he’s like a little Buddha!”. “Look at the lovely thick hair she had, when she was little… You wouldn’t imagine that from the way it looks now!”.

7) Telling people embarrassing things about you:  ”She used to wet the bed, until her periods started and then she just stopped, isn’t that strange?”. Why the f*ck would the postman need to know that?

8) Giving you too much information, about herself: “I had really bad constipation yesterday. It got stuck half in and half out – I was on the toilet for an hour!”. Thanks Mum.

9) Buying you hideous clothes: “It’s nice and colourful, I don’t know why you always insist on wearing black”. Then she hands you a garment that would make Stevie Wonder shield his eyes, in horror. And you’re expected to wear it.

10) Bitching about your other half: Nobody is ever going to be good enough for you (according to your Mother)- even though you’ve always been a bit shit yourself (according to your Mother).

11) Making you feel like a failure (no matter how well you’ve done): ” Your Father and I are so pleased that you’ve got the Nobel Peace Prize. Obviously it isn’t like getting a proper one, you know, like for Science, or Literature. But it is still good, we aren’t disappointed at all.”

12) Adding you on Facebook: Time to move on.

Expressively American

In 2004 my son Steve (then 21) was allegedly “made redundant” from a Customer Services call centre, working for a major credit card company. I say “allegedly” because that is what he told me at the time. A few months later, discussing his old job,  he accidentally used the word “sacked”. Hmmm… Not a word you should use about yourself in front of your Mother.

Having established the truth (by now he had a new job, so I wasn’t as angry as I might have been) I asked him what he had been getting up to, in his old job. Then he told me all about the antics that he and his colleagues used, to make the task of endlessly talking to customers (about lost and stolen credit cards) more enjoyable. A proper Mother would have been horrified at his stories… But I am not a proper Mother and if something is funny enough, I tend to let my kids get away with it. This is his confession:

“We used to pretend to be different people.”

“What?”

“My mate did a great impression of Doc Brown from ‘Back To The Future’. He used to ask customers what was wrong and then shout ‘Great Scott!’ when they told him. He had the voice off brilliantly. One woman told him that she hoped his throat got better soon. Hahahahaha!”

“Who were you?”

“Michael Jackson. Of course the voice would be too obvious, so I just said that ‘Dah!’ sound that he does, at the end of every sentence…’You’ve lost your credit card? Dah! Can you tell me the account name? Dah! What is your address? Dah!’ Hahahahaha! My mate would be stuffing his f**king fist in his mouth, trying not to laugh. The customers were so stupid, they never asked what I was doing. In fact we quite often answered the phone and said ‘Hello, Ghostbusters!’ and they’d just go ‘Wha?’ and we’d say the proper thing… Nobody really listens. We were never challenged. Hahahaha!”

“Where did I go wrong with bringing you up?”

“Oh come on, it’s a boring job if you don’t have fun with it. We made sure they were OK. Obi Wan answered the phone a lot. He had the Force on his side, ‘In my experience there’s no such thing as luck’ my mate used to say. Really, he was a fantastic Alec Guinness. Hahahaha! I couldn’t do that but I spent a lot of time as Harvey Keitel’s Mr. White ‘You’re gonna be OK!’. HAHAHAHAHA!”

“Steven! You’re bad,”

“My mate was great though, he was such a realistic Alan Partridge that even if the odd intelligent customer DID catch on, they’d call people to listen to him and ask him to say ‘Aha!’. It was like an extra service really… Not like the water.”

“The water?”

“Oh, it was just a competition…Who could talk to a customer whilst holding the most water in their mouth. We measured it in paper cups. Hahahaha!”

“So that’s why you got sacked then is it? All this arsing about?”

“Nah. I just kept being late.”

Bloody kids.

 Mind you, he is a very respectable member of society now and works for a large company, who have awarded him “Employee of the Year” twice in three years (his office employs 400 people). I bet he still does some larking about though!

She Hated Children!

When I was a child, I didn’t really get on very well with my brother. I was three years older than him, we had no interests in common and his idea of fun was deliberately pissing me off. However, some occasions brought us together and when they did, we had a brilliant time. Some of the greatest of these “bonding” moments happened when we were visiting Roland and Shirley.

Roland and Shirley were a couple my parents had known since Youth Club. They lived far enough away for visiting them to be a family outing and it was an outing we made maybe twice a year. The thing was though, Shirley HATED children. Roland and Shirley had (according to my Mother) asked for “the bit about the procreation of children” to be left out of their wedding service… That’s how much Shirley despised kids. This made visiting them a cross between a surreal nightmare and the funniest thing in the entire world (to me and my brother).

In case you were wondering what Shirley did for a job – she was a teacher. This meant that by the weekends her bitterness towards children was topped up to the max. We normally visited at the weekend. Before we got there, my brother and I would be instructed that because Auntie Shirley was “a bitch about children” (my mother’s words) we would have to be really, really good. Not to please Shirley, oh no, to prove her wrong. Our task was to represent every child in the World and to show Auntie Shirley that children were wonderful and that she was STUPID.

We were up for that.

Being a well-behaved child is actually f*cking hilarious, if you adopt the right attitude to it. I wish I could go back in time and watch, as my brother and I sat in Roland and Shirley’s immaculate lounge; our hands folded in our laps, our faces frozen in expressions of gentle innocence. We imitated good children with such beautiful irony that we didn’t dare to look at each other, in case it set us off. Shirley would try to break us, often by handing around biscuits to all of the adults and then putting the lid back on the tin, without offering them to my brother or me. We never so much as frowned, we just smiled on weakly and meekly. We were like artists; it was performance art of the highest level.

Sometimes Shirley cracked a little and let us play with a small bag full of plastic toys, saved from cereal packets. This was Shirley’s only concession to visiting children. We played but we didn’t really play, we were “Good Children Playing” and we competed to make our tiny characters the most polite toys on Earth “Hello Mr. Elephant, how very nice to meet you!” – all the while smirking at the floor, or making the toys copulate, when Shirley wasn’t looking.

The best time I ever had at Roland and Shirley’s house, was when my brother and I found ourselves alone in the kitchen -  with Shirley’s cat’s litter tray.  Shirley’s cat was a spoilt Siamese, who was only allowed out if it was tied on a long string. But we liked the litter tray even better than we liked the cat, because in the corner of it Shirley had neatly folded a few squares of toilet paper…

One of the funniest things I have ever seen in my life was the sight of my little brother, whispering “Mioaw, miaow” and miming a cat, wiping its bottom with toilet paper.  Hilarious and of course, made funnier by the fact that I was trying NOT to laugh.

On the way home in the car, my family always had a debriefing session, after a visit to Roland and Shirley’s. My brother and I always came in for a lot of praise, followed by a quick stop at the Fish & Chip shop, to collect our reward for being good. But we didn’t do it for the chips – we did it for (what would now be known as) the lulz.

Naughty Toy Story

Years ago I wrote a post, on my old blog, about toys. It was quite a long post, bemoaning the fact that girls’ toys are mostly pink and mauve plastic “isn’t ironing FUN!” types of crap, whereas boys’ toys are mostly kickass monsters and guns. I had fun writing it but it wasn’t particularly ground-breaking… Apart from the fact that I included this one sentence:

“My best ever toy WAS a doll (my Sindy) but she spent most of her time enacting sexual positions with a small kilted soldier-boy doll, that was a souvenir from Edinburgh Castle.”

That small part of my post opened the flood gates to quite a few “shocking” revelations about how people had spent their childhood hours. It seems that Sindy, Barbie, Ken, Action Man, GI Joe etc. were all “at it like knives” as the inexplicable phrase goes. Check out these quotes, from the replies I got to my post:

“I used to work with a girl that told stories about growing up in small-town Wyoming, one of which involved repeated flattening of her sister’s Barbies’ boobs with a hammer.”

“I used to have Sindy dolls too. Me and my sister used to go visit our friend up the road make our dolls have sex with her brother’s Action Men on the Sindy bedroom and living room sets. If my mother had known what we got up to with those things ……. oh my god, she’d have keeled over in shock.”

“…my barbies spent their days much like your doll–getting it on with Ken :)”

“Barbie and GI Joe had a lot of sex in the back of her camper”

“My barbie used to have ‘relationships’ with GI Joe (mmmm…men in uniform). Of course there was a size differential back then, but they worked that out. Barbie is nothing if not…flexible.”

“I think all girls use their Sindies and Barbies to enact sexual positions.”

“I used to make Ken tied up my Barbies, and have long, depraved sexual acts. I was also very annoyed at Ken’s lack of genetalia.”

“All I got was some barbie dolls… and Michael Jackson doll. So we used have Barbies as prostitutes and MJ as customer.”

“… turning the barbie ken domesticity into a polyamorous harem where in the spirit of fairness the one ken had to service all five barbies AND skipper.”

Well… I wasn’t uniquely depraved then. In fact, my Sindy’s sexual antics were positively innocent – I mean she wasn’t even getting the soldier doll to tie her up, or give her money. Since I made that post, I’ve spoken to a quite few of my friends about what their dolls got up to and it seems that almost all of us made them act out things that, I suppose, we were curious about. It was just a natural part of growing up. I can’t help wondering what the girls of today have Barbie doing – webcamming Ken, probably.