Tuesday 7 August 2007

Family favourites.

I’ve got too much to do tonight to prepare for the weekend! My ideal evening would be do some final gathering and then relax but it’s all going to take a couple of hours and then it will be time to climb the wooden stairs.

I’ve been thinking a lot about Blackpool so I suppose that means I’m looking forward to it. The organisers of the Rebellion Festival have left their usual office and have set up camp at the Festival site. I text’d the main man to add a couple of guests for our show and was surprised this evening to find that it had all been sorted. I couldn’t believe that with all the stuff he needs to oversee at the moment that he would remember my little text, but he did and I am very grateful.
Did you read what I wrote about Blackpool last year, in case you missed it here it is again.

"We stand by the concrete road, rails and wires, built for the trams way back in the distant past when it had no competition from motorcars. The wires look like tight ropes suspended between Blackpool Tower and a massive Big Dipper way off in the distance. The sun is muted behind thin slate black cloud, casting a light promising summer but disappoints nonetheless. Although I have never been there, this place reminds me of Coney Island. Funny how you can make a comparison with something you've only seen in images.


Blackpool is like a big smile through clenched teeth. It has a warm heart and will doggedly try to entertain you with its faded glories because it believes that if you are here, it's what you are expecting. It is both defined and shackled by its own past. It wants to modernise and remain the same, as the world moves on around it, it doesn't know what direction to move in, like a tram, it faces both directions at once.

The donkey man lifts yet another child on to back of his little group of four legged employees totally immune to the charms of excited little innocents getting the ride of their lives. He, like the donkeys, move slowly along the beach, yet one more beast of burden. His flat cap and clothes, sand blasted by the wind coming in from the sea. His skin, hard and wrinkled like a treasure map with no gold to point to. His head down, gazing at the footprints of the last time he came this way. Only a few minutes ago. It's the modern day equivalent of the Myth of Sisyphus where a man is condemned to roll a rock to the top of the mountain and when it rolls back down the other side, he has to start all over again. For eternity! It's almost as though when he was a young man working his pitch with the Tower Gypsies selling lucky heather, he had cursed himself. He is now condemned to give children donkey rides, with each squeal of delight and "look at me Mummy, look at me Daddy, I'm riding a donkey" stealing part of his soul until he shrivels up and is blown off of the beach by the sands of time.

The bottom of the hour glass is indeed filling as we arrive back at the hotel, we have little less than an hour to get ready before the band and crew head back to the Winter Gardens, the Empress Ballroom and the event we have been building up to for months. My lack of sleep is getting to me, for a moment there I thought I'd left my donkeys unattended on the beach. This isn't right; I should feel like a rock star! I will, later. I hope".


I wonder what frame of mind I'll be in this time. Que Sera, Sera (Whatever Will Be, Will Be)!

1963

Religion was big in my house at this time, my sisters definitely preferred “Our Father Who Art in Heaven” to “Our Father Who Art in the Living room’.
This was because there was a malevolence underpinning our family life which was ripping the soul out of it. This was happening before we moved to Harlow and before I arrived on the scene.
Before the move he had taken to hitting Sandra but not Lorraine or my mum, this seemed to be motivated by the cramped conditions we were living in (You can measure how cramped things were in that all that could be promised for the girls in Harlow was a room to share but it would be their own and that was an improvement.) and a obsession with noise disturbing the neighbours, Children are noisy creatures by nature and as I said before I think my dad stuck my cot with a wooden spoon to shut me up. I can’t imagine that was a very effective method but never mind.


This smacking is classed by some as a tool for instilling discipline but I don’t think that is a convincing rational. Possibly, if you apply it consistently, you may be able to argue it but to constantly smack only one of your children is suspect and I would imagine have a more detrimental effect on the family than positive. I don’t like the idea that the threat of violence is part of the make up of family life. This is especially true if your father is a bully, and he was, it was as simple as that.
but he was more than just a simple bully I am convinced of that.

He was a master of hurtful sarcasm, he make derogatory remarks to us all, all of the time with my mother baring the biggest brunt and the arguing went on and on and on during the day, the week, the weekend, each month and every year.

Doesn’t sound so dramatic as swift acts extreme violence does it?

But imagine being made to cry, or being made to come close to tears, every waking day of your life and then you have an inkling of what it was like for my mother. Even when these verbal assaults were directed at my mum and not us, we all felt we were being slapped metaphorically. This is what I call secondary violence. My father would continue this assault until the day he expired.

They say that a baby in the womb is aware of the sounds that filter in from the outside world, nowadays mothers and fathers play music of their culture (or of so called ‘high culture’ like Mozart) to their unborn children. I imagine that the sounds I heard was a sort of ‘Two Way Family Favourites’ of arguing, slapping, smacking and crying.

It was almost as though I didn’t like the sound of the family that awaited me and couldn’t face a life of pain so early. I slowly manoeuvred myself so that my mother’s umbilical cord twisted around my neck and began to choke myself.

I was not of woman born, from my mother’s womb I was untimely ripped
(Paraphrased from Shakespeare’s ‘Macbeth’).

The doctors noticed what I was doing and recommended a caesarean section. They cut my mother open.

As I emerged into the light, they mistook the way I looked as being typical of a newborn. I am convinced differently.

I believe I appeared with a grimace on my face, my jaw was gritted and my little hands where clenched fists.


I believe I was born angry.

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