Tag Archives: memories

Memory and the Mum-Bum Conundrum

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My partner Kate and I were discussing parenting and parental influence, and segued off into how our reading habits had been shaped by our families. As for me, I’ve been a big reader for the entirety of my adult life, but I only really became a voracious reader in my late teens, despite growing up in a house literally festooned with books. My lack of enthusiasm for the family library, though, was entirely explainable by its content, all of which was a reflection of my step-dad’s passions for ornithology and antique trains. These were subjects too arcane and remote to be of any interest to my pre-pubescent self, and my teenage self leaned towards rather different iterations of birds and steaming (and having much more success with the latter than with the former) (and, yes, I know that using ‘birds’ in that context in 2023 basically constitutes a hate crime, but I’m hoping that I’ll get off with it on the grounds that I’m a big sexy Himbo with eyes that could slacken even Anne Widdecombe’s iron-fortressed loins).

So how come I liked reading fiction so much? How come I was so fascinated by stories? Where did that passion come from? When I was reunited with my father, after being apart from him between the ages of 4 and 21, I was delighted and amazed to discover not only that he was as big a reader as I was, but also that he enjoyed most of the same authors and genres. This was no lightning-in-a-bottle similarity, either. The coincidences just kept coming: I spoke just like him; we shared the same wry, but twinkle-eyed sense of humour, with a very similar style of delivery; we looked at religion in the same way (equal parts suspicion to derision); we both thought The Sopranos was the greatest TV show ever made. How could we have so much in common when we’d spent so long apart, and after only such a short time together? If none of these things were coincidences, then it began to make sense that I must have absorbed a great deal of information at an incredibly young age that had managed to shape the person I was at my core, before slithering down into the abyss at the edge of my consciousness, never to be seen again. That’s the cruel paradox, I think, at the very heart of our existence: that if only we could retrieve that treasure trove of memories from the abyss then we would be within touching distance of finally understanding both who we are as individuals, and who we are as a species. But those memories are forever lost to us, leaving part of us forever unsolvable. A little unsolvable person trapped inside a giant unsolvable puzzle just waiting for the random anvil of death to crush them into oblivion. Still, you’ve got to laugh, haven’t you?

I called my eight-year-old son, Jack, through to the kitchen, and asked him what memories of me stood out from his formative years. What a boon it was for my self-esteem to hear him utter those four most beautiful words ever to be delivered sequentially: “Um… I don’t know?” I consoled myself that his memory, along with all other mental processing systems, had probably ceased functioning at the very second I’d interrupted his game of Minecraft to call him into into kitchen.  Jack funnelled all CPU run-time into solving the one problem he had in life: of getting the fuck out that kitchen, and back to building an underwater palace for his pet goats, or whatever bollocks he was up to. Sensing his reluctance to talk, I did what any compassionate and understanding father would do: I just kept on talking. And then talking some more. See how he likes it, eh? I talked right over that non-plussed little face until it was so non-plussed it was basically The Anti-Pluss.

I recounted to Jack what I could remember of my own father, a twofer I hoped would tell him more about me as a person, and give him a snapshot of the grandfather he’d never meet. I shared a few memories with him, but one of the most vivid in my thoughts and in the re-telling was the time my father took me to my first football match. It wasn’t quite the father-and-son bonding experience he’d been expecting. In fact it stands as proof that our relationship was far from a happy hotbed of coincidences and parallels.

Football bored -and still largely bores – me on a primal level. For this reason I spent the duration of that long-ago match amusing myself – and irritating others – by crafting a narrative around my own hands, and then acting it out. I turned those hands into two Punch-and-Judy-style characters, and wasted no time setting them in conflict.

I gave my performance my all – The Guardian said of it in its review: ‘A brave, raw and powerful experience. You will want to put yourself in Jamie Andrew’s hands time and again’. Coincidentally, I also used this as the intro for my Tinder profile.

Anyway, the giant bearded man sitting immediately to my left turned out to be something of a philistine, and gave my performance zero stars. His ratings system was his own face, which he kept swivelling round to, well, face me, adorned with tightly pursed lips and a grave stare. It was a face that seemed to say: ‘How dare you bring live theatre into the middle of my football game, tiny Frasier Crane!’ I remember seeing pleas bobbing like boats in the eddying whirlpools of his eyes, as he jabbed urgently in the direction of the pitch with his immense sausage finger, perhaps hoping that the motion of his quick-swishing digit would be powerful enough to make me suddenly give a shit about football. Like his finger was a magic wand, or I was an imbecile. “Perhaps the laddie hasn’t noticed the grass out there and all the people running on it and kicking that ball. Maybe if I keep pointing and pointing at the pitch, it’ll eventually sink in and he’ll ken he’s at a football match. He’s probably one of those daft wee weins from the yellow bus.”

Big Beardy’s efforts were in vain. In the end, he saw a lot more of my puppet show than I saw of his poxy football match. Needless to say, though, at the end of the day, and while it was a game of two halves, and the boys done well, my football fan of a father wasn’t much impressed by my snub of the beautiful game, either. He vowed angrily to my mother that he would never, ever again take me to a football match. There was very little need for righteous anger. Mainly because that’s not really a punishment when the person you’re supposedly punishing doesn’t like football, is it?

“So you don’t like doing your homework do you, boy? Well, how do you feel about NO HOMEWORK AT ALL?!!”

“That’s… that’s great actually.”

“Oh. I…eh… didn’t really think that one through, did I?”

“No. No you didn’t.”

So, Jack could bring very few memories of our time together to the forefront of his mind, and I only write ‘very few’ because it’s less hurtful to me than writing ‘no’ – NO memories –even though it’s the truth. The petty side of me wanted to bring out all the physical photo albums, and the digital photos on Facebook, and make him sift through every damn one of them. “Ah, now. See this day here? That was a bloody expensive day, son. All that money, do you remember? Just to put a bloody smile on your ungrateful little face. Mind you said it was the best day you’d ever had in your life? Well, it must’ve been a real belter, son. A proper belter. So good you cannae remember a thing about it. It’s like it never even happened. Well, if it never happened, THEN I’D LIKE MY FUCKING MONEY BACK.”

Jack could remember my mum, though. Instantly. Vividly. His exact words to me were: “I remember something about Granny two-cats.”

My kids have three grandmothers. One they call gran, one they call grandma, and one they called granny – my mum. I added a further layer of clarification to this Grandmama Da Vinci Code by referring to my mum as ‘granny two-cats and a flag’, on account of her having a flag-pole in the back garden, and two cats in the house. We continued to call her ‘granny two-cats and a flag’ even after the flag had been taken down, and one of the cats had perished in a drive-by; the main reason being that ‘Granny one-cat and a flag-pole’ sounds like something a pervert would type into Pornhub.

Granny two-cats and a flag died more than a year ago. She loved her grandchildren – all of them – and it was more than mutual. She left a big, big hole in their hearts when she went.

“What do you remember about her?”

“That she’d get her bum out,” he said, with a big, big grin.

And I started to cry. Not big wracking sobs, mind. Just a single solitary tear, like the one cried by Rutger Hauer at the end of Blade Runner. “Your gran would have loved to have heard you say that,” I said, my eyes now properly misting over, the lump in my throat throttling the final few words of the sentence. “For that to be your memory of her.” It’s a strange thing to be brought to tears over an arse.

But I think it speaks to something at my mum’s core. Something I sometimes missed because I was too blinded by the machinery of our historic and ongoing conflicts, the big booms and crashes that formed the percussive rhythm of our fiercely loving but heated relationship. Her inner child. Her need to entertain, her need to be noticed, yes, but also her need to set people at ease. To make them laugh. To make them feel good.

When I think of my own grandparents, I think of loving but emotionally distant people dressed in greys and beiges, sitting in chairs drinking tea, or sitting in seats eating soup. When Jack and his brother think of their granny, they’ll think of an old woman in a pink fluffy oodie pressing her septuagenarian arse-cheeks up against the glass door of the hall, chuckling as she does it. And they’ll smile. And they’ll nod. Because they’ll remember that they live in a world where you don’t have to lay down and die when you get to a certain age. That you can retain a connection to your inner child, no matter how old you are. That you have permission to poke your tongue out at the world. At least every once in a while. Embrace life’s oddities and weirdnesses and weirdos and absurdities. Make them a part of you. Hell, throw your head back and laugh once in a while. One day you won’t be able to.

And forget books, forget football, forget fathers. That’s a real legacy right there: my mum’s legacy. That it’s a bum is immaterial. It’s a legacy that each and every one of us would count ourselves lucky to leave behind. Because life, my dear friends, is over in a flash, and we can’t ever allow ourselves to forget the most important about it: living the fucking thing.

And doing it with both an unflinching glint in your eye, and your fingers ever-ready at your waistband.

Old Ladies Have a Song for Everything

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My gran, born in the 1920s, had a song for everything. There wasn’t a question you could ask or a line of conversation you could open up that wouldn’t trigger some long-entrenched musical memory and spur her on to do a bit of loosely-related warbling.

‘Cup of tea, gran?’

(starts warbling) ‘Oh, a tea in the morning, a tea in the evening, a tea around suppertime…’

‘You need me to take you to the shops, gran?’

(starts warbling) ‘Oh, and when we start shopping, we all start bopping, it’s off to the shops we go…’

‘You got the tests back from your anal scan yet, gran?’

(starts wabbling) ‘Ohhh, first you had a look, and then you took a snap, oh, you captured me deep inside…’

I think at least part of the reason for this habit was that singers in her day tended to sing about a greater range of life experiences, which gave music a sort of blanket relevance to daily life. Let’s face it, most songs these days are about shagging. And money. And how money can best help us with our shagging. But back then? Anything went. They wrote songs about the maddest and most inconsequential of shit.

‘Ladies and gentlemen, live from The Apollo Theatre in London, I urge you to turn your radios up as loud as they can go for the smooth, sensational stylings of Jimmy Foster and his Underwater Stockinged Turtle Band, performing their latest hit song, “The Blue Umbrella is My Favourite One, But I Guess the Yellow One is Sort of Alright, Too”.

Singers back in the 30s and 40s seemed to get their inspiration from the most banal of places. They would wake up, see a fallen cornflake half-crushed into the kitchen floor, rush to their phone, call up one of their band-mates and say, ‘Dave: get the guitar pronto, I’ve got a belter on my hands here!’

‘I mean it, Dave, this one has potential to be bigger than “Tuesday is Haircut Day, But Only Once I’ve Been to the Butcher’s”.’

Part of my gran’s habit was an age thing, of course. I’ve noticed similar behaviour in my mother in recent years, especially when she’s talking to her grandkids. She’ll start singing some old-timey song about biscuits, and they’ll just stare up at her in timid, slightly bemused silence until she stops, and then carry on blathering away as if it never happened, like the aural oddity was nothing more than a waitress dropping plates in a restaurant, or the cat farting.

Maybe they think their gran is sometimes possessed by the spirit of a deceased musical nutcase, but if they do their faces never show it. Kids are cool that way.

It’s all got me to wondering… What songs that are only tangentially related to the reality around me will I be singing to my grandkids in years to come (if luck should spare me long enough for that to happen)? I dread to think, given the amount of awful pop and dance music, and good but explicit rock and rap music to which I’ve been exposed in my life.

‘Grandpa, is there a time limit on us playing this virtual reality game?’

(starts warbling) ‘No, no, no, no, no, no – no, no, no, no – no, no THERE’S NO LIMIT!’

‘Grandpa, I don’t understand this riddle.’

(starts warbling) ‘Here is something you can’t understand (makes fist into a microphone). HOW I COULD JUST KILL A MAN!’

‘Grandpa, will you come through to the living room for a moment, please?’

(starts warbling) ‘FUCK YOU I WON’T DO WHAT YOU TELL ME!’

But, here’s the thing: I’ve already started riffing out songs to the young uns. Not my grandchildren, either. My own infant children of 3 and 5. The disease has kicked in a generation early for me. And here’s the other thing: none of the songs I sing to them – spurred on by the things they say or the questions they ask – are actually real songs. I make them all up.

‘Dad, can I have some toast?’

(starts rocking out) ‘Woooahooo, toast, toast, the way it feels, the way it feels when it’s in my mouth, I said TOAST, woooahooo, crunchy sometimes but buttery too, oooooooh hooo hooo, you gotta get that ratio RIGHT, girl!’

Only the other day I went off into a big number about the importance of putting your dishes in the sink, and my eldest son, Jack, said to me, very earnestly: ‘Who sings that one, dad? That’s a good one.’

He looked visibly impressed when I revealed that lying behind the surprise smash-hit of the season was his own father’s noble artistic vision.

I’ve got a theory: because my sister and I identified quite early in our lives this tendency in our elders to free associate the minutiae of life with music, it’s quite possible that I have internalised the jokes we used to make about it so completely that they’ve been written into my subconscious as code, and now the joke has become the reality.

But here’s another, rather more unsettling theory: If I’ve been making up all of these songs for my kids, then maybe my gran was doing the same. Maybe none of those songs about sugar, or bacon, or shirts, or daffodils actually existed, and she was just fucking mental?

Like I am.

I’m scared to look back at Frank Sinatra’s or Sidney Divine’s discography in case there’s a Kaiser Soze moment, and I discover that all of the old crooners’ songs were actually about money and shagging, and not biscuits and cups of tea like I was led to believe?

The truth is out there, people.

I think I know a song about that.

(starts warbling the theme tune for the X-Files)

We Haunt Our Own Lives

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The first house I lived in after I was born. My parents were together then. My sister – eight years older than me – went to school just along the road. I can’t remember living here. I only know it from old photographs and stories.

We can go anywhere: soar above the earth; dive beneath the ocean; drift off into the deep and silent void of space. But there’s one place we can’t go.

Back.

And sometimes that’s the only place we want to go.

We all lived together in this street – my sister and parents – until I was four. I remember it. But not too well, obviously, because mum says the house we’re looking at here wasn’t our house. Ours was next door. It was the last time we were all a family. The house we moved to next – in which the original family blew itself apart – is the house my mother still lives in with my stepfather. It’s still open and alive to us, so it won’t feature here.

We keep moving forwards, but something keeps pulling us back to the portals of our pasts, where we stand peering through the misted glass, trying to make sense of the shapes that shift before our eyes like shadows. We haunt our own lives, along with the ghosts of those gone from us, both the living and the dead, their marks passing over us like dust in the moonlight.

Then darkness.

We can never go back.

But we can’t stop trying.

My uncle and aunty lived here, with my 3 cousins. There was always laughter here, and jokes, and chaos, and copies of 2000AD.

Have you ever stood outside a place that used to mean something to you and tried to will it back to life: a place that now stands forever beyond your reach; a locked vault swollen with memories?

It’s bitter-sweet. You know that the only thing lying in wait behind that door is the erasure of the memories held in such precarious balance by the bowed and twisting column of your imagination. Someone else lives there now. Another person. Another you. Another life that’s swallowing yours, until theirs is swallowed in turn. Before everything’s swallowed.

I took my kids with me to some of these sacred places in my life. I asked my partner to photograph us. My kids and I gazed dead ahead at the past – my past – keeping our backs to the here and now. I know my kids will never get a chance to go through those doors with me, or feel what I used to feel every time I’d reach out a hand to knock on them. I know they’ll never get to meet the people who once stood behind those doors (most of them are either estranged from me or long since dead).

But I wanted to stand there with them by my side. It made me feel content, somehow. Like a circuit had been completed.

My maternal grandparents’ house. The wall used to be a hedge, and we’d vault it – my cousins and I – much to gran’s mild displeasure. I’d play Countdown with my grandparents, and listen to my papa tut at the soaps and chat shows that followed, which I suspected he secretly loved. My gran had names for every person who walked past in the street. She called her window ‘Channel 5’. We only had 4 TV channels then.

The kids, of course, felt nothing.

They were, after all, just staring at old, unfamiliar houses, no different from a thousand they’d seen before. Piles of brick and mortar, nothing more or less.

But as I stood there clutching their hands, or holding their tiny bodies against my own, for a moment I was there. We were all there. I’d taken them back with me. My brain had breathed life into the poetry of the ordinary, and turned those doors into time machines, reconstructing the things and people on the other side of that thin skin of wood with almost perfect clarity.

I could hear the shuffling of slippers down hallways, and the faint ticking of a clock on a mantelpiece; I could smell lentil soup wafting in from the kitchen; I could see ring-marks left behind by a favourite mug, and pictures hanging askew on the wall. I could see myself – younger, leaner, less corrupted – standing on the precipice of a life that would be at once more terrible and more precious and wonderful than I ever could have imagined. I could see and feel it all. The dead were alive, and the miserable were happy.

The top floor flat where my partner and I started our family. One kid was born here, but we moved to our current – much more peaceful and sanguine – home a few weeks before our second arrived in the world. Neither kid has any memory of this home. We’ve come full circle. Their story – and trail of pixelated breadcrumbs – begins here.

I think we have a hunger for our kids to know us, to feel what it is to be us. But they can’t. We’re ‘we’ and they’re ‘them’. Our lives are gone, or at least shifted, and theirs are just beginning.

But in those moments as the camera clicked, for one blessed, frozen second, we were there… actually there. And we would always be there. All of us.

In the eternal past.

Together.