…my oldest boy. He thinks he’s cool, calls me ‘Dude’ – but he still insists on kissing his old dad on the lips at the school gates in the morning. Hope he stops when he’s 21.
• And, yes, I know my window frames need painting but, you know, I’ve been busy buying birthday presents.
Filed under Chronicles
The way they were: Dad and Mum on their wedding day
Sometimes my head gets stuck so far up my own arse that I forget what’s important.
Like yesterday.
I went for an interview for a job and so consumed with this was I that I forgot a date on the calendar that has been etched on my heart and mind since I was a little boy.
It was my Mum’s birthday. My late Mum’s.
‘So what?’ I hear you say. ‘She’s dead. She won’t know.’
No. She won’t. But I know. And my brothers know. And my Dad knows.
Last year on March 12, two and a half months after she died, we all exchanged telephone calls. My brothers laid flowers on her final resting place and we were all there, if not in body, then certainly in spirit, for my Dad.
But this year, I forgot my own mother’s birthday.
None of my siblings pulled me up about this, and when I got off the phone to my Dad a few minutes ago, all he said was: ‘Hey, don’t worry about it. You’re busy.’
I’m not busy. I’m self-absorbed.
I keep obsessing about the future, worrying about how I’m going to earn, worrying about my family.
Family! Fuck. Yes, family.
That’s what’s important. And yesterday, I totally forgot the most important thing to my family, the one I left when I was 16 but who are as important to me, albeit in a different way, to the one I’ve created.
We all grieve in our own ways. Some do it publicly, some privately. I dealt with my own grief a long time ago, even before our mother died, because to me, we’d lost her when she lost her mind to the ravages of Alzheimer’s.
But my brothers still mourn her; our Dad still mourns her.
All I’ve done is make a mockery of the phrase: Gone But Not Forgotten.
No-one else in our family forgot Betty Kendrick’s birthday. But I did.
Because I’m busy, see. Too busy sticking my head up my own selfish arse to realise what’s important.
I won’t be forgetting her on Mother’s Day. That’s for sure.
Love never dies. Dad with Mum. She passed away the next day.
Filed under Chronicles
You don’t expect presents when you get to my age.
Let me re-phrase that: you tell your loved ones: ‘I don’t expect presents when I get to my age.’
Hint.
And there was a moment, on the occasion of my 48th birthday yesterday, when I wondered if my ‘expectations’ had been realised.
Monday morning was frantic as usual. Heaving our creaking carcasses out of the bed, yelling at the kids to heave theirs out of theirs, then trying to get all three of them breakfasted, washed, dressed, out of the door and into school, while they were all doing fine impersonations of the Walking Dead.
So by the time I got home from the school run, I suddenly reaised that:
a) it was my birthday, and
b) I didn’t have a single card or present from my family.
Well, poor me, poor me, pour me another drink.
Such is life in the Fast Lane.
But I ain’t stoopid.
I know all good things come to he who waits.
And the second my wife walked through the door from work, my waiting was over.
The kids leapt on me like it was Christmas, and as they frantically helped me tear open my gifts, I felt like all my birthdays had come at once.
From my wife: A knife. A Tojiro Japanese Vegetable Knife, to be precise. Something I’ve coveted for two years.
From my wife: A very slimming, dark blue, fitted shirt, which tucks my gut in all the right places.
From the kids: A DVD box set – Seinfeld 9, the Final Season. The only one missing from my collection.
And from my good friends Dan and Nicky: The World Cheese Book, featuring 750 cheeses.
And from me, for dinner: Wagyu steak with thrice-cooked chips and Stilton mushrooms.
It was a very happy birthday. Thank you for all your wishes on my blog and on Twitter.
Filed under Chronicles
I’m 48 today. Forty. Eight. What has been the point of these 48 years? What have I learned? What wisdom have I accumulated that I can pass on to my children? Well, not a lot, actually. So I’ve decided to teach myself this…
48 New Things I’ve Learned In The Last 48 Hours
1. Tuna fish swim more than 100 miles a day.
2. In New Zealand, sheep outnumber humans by 15 to 1.
3. Only one per cent of the water on earth is drinkable.
4. Atilla the hun was a dwarf.
5. You mostly breathe through only one nostril at a time
6. The average housefly weighs 10 to 15 millionths of a pound
7. There was no punctuation until the 15th Century
8. A mole can dig a hole 300 feet deep in one night.
9. The Mona Lisa has no eyebrows. It was the fashion in Renaissance Florence to shave them off!
10. Each day, up to 150 species of life become extinct.
11. The most popular Campbell’s Soup in Hong Kong is watercress and duck gizzard.
12. The UK eats more cans of baked beans than the rest of the world combined.
13. The powder on chewing gum is finely-ground marble.
14. Nutmeg is extremely poisonous if injected intravenously.
15. The word “fart” comes from the Old English “feortan” (meaning “to break wind”).
16. It is possible for you to survive even after the removal of the spleen, the stomach, one kidney, one lung, 75% of the liver, 80% of the intestines, and almost every organ from the pelvic and groin area.
17. The largest cell in the human body is the female egg and the smallest is the male sperm.
18. Every year your body replaces 98% of your atoms.
19. Your stomach produces a new layer of mucus every two weeks so that it doesn’t digest itself.
20. It is almost impossible to sneeze with your eyes open. It is a defense mechanism that has evolved to protect our eyes from bacteria and debris.
21. The average tastebud lives only 10 days before it dies and is replaced by a new one.
22. Kermit the Frog is left-handed.
23. To have your picture taken by the very first camera you would have had to sit still for 8 hours!
24. Elvis had a twin.
25. Hippo milk is pink.
26. There are more chickens than people in the world.
27. Most elephants weigh less than a blue whale’s tongue.
28. In Brazil, there’s a species of cockroach that eats eyelashes, usually those of young children while they are asleep.
29. If you shaved a tiger, it would have striped skin.
30. In ten minutes, a hurricane releases more energy than all the world’s nuclear weapons combined!
31. It would take more than 150 years to drive a car to the sun.
32. The typical speck of dust that you see floating in the air is half way in size between the Earth and a subatomic particle.
33. Saturn’s rings are about 500,000 miles in circumference but only about a foot thick.
34. A new baby usually deprives each of it’s parents around 350-400 hours of sleep in the first year. That is one entire nights sleep per week, per parent.
35. If you mouth the word “colorful” to someone, it looks like you are saying “I love you”.
36. There are more nerve cells in the human brain than there are stars in the Milky Way.
37. There are 170,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 ways to play the ten opening moves in a game of chess.
38. The sound you hear when you crack your knuckles is actually the sound of nitrogen gas bubbles bursting.
39. Ice isn’t slippery. What makes people and things slip on ice is water. A thin layer of ice melts when pressure is applied to it and it is this wet layer on top of the ice that is slippery.
40. There are an estimated 50 thousand million galaxies in the universe, with the typical galaxy containing 50 thousand million to 100 thousand million stars. It is estimated that there are 1022 stars in total in the universe.
41. Astronomers believe that the universe contains one atom for every 88 gallons of space.
42. The longest word in the English language is pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconioses!
43. The plastic tips on shoelaces are called “aglets”!
44. If you counted 24 hours a day, it would take 31,688 years to reach one trillion!
45. The first website domain name ever registered was Symbolics.com
46. No matter its size or thickness, no piece of paper can be folded in half more than 8 times.
47. Most people who read the word ‘yawning’ will yawn!
48. You share your birthday with at least 9 million other people in the world.
Filed under Chronicles
