Tag Archives: psychology

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.

Live, Laugh, Love, Urinate

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Our desire to splurge noble and life-affirming messages to ourselves, and to each other, in the most visible of locations is an understandable human impulse. It feels congruous to see such evocations in a great library, or a hall of justice, or emblazoned on a national monument, but it all begins to seem a little indulgent – and more than a little Californian – in the context of the homestead. Case in point: the bathroom.

This is the room in someone’s home where you are most likely to be entreated to Live, Laugh and, inevitably, Love. The message is usually delivered by way of giant 3D letters nailed to the wall. An alphabetic crucifixion. What is it about this room that seems to beg the inclusion of such lofty and uplifting sentiments? I don’t tend to find myself at my most aspirational when I’ve just caught a lungful of putrid jobby. Is the sentiment intended to cancel out the noisy and pungent truth of the filth at our core? Wouldn’t a blank wall be better accompaniment than a trite reminder of our own self-worth? I’m not a fucking dog. I don’t need to hear or see the equivalent of ‘GOOD BOY, OH GOOOOOOOD BOY!’ as I’m curling one out. I know I’m a good boy. I’m also a perfectly able shitter, with my own signature style and everything (I always finish with a snaky Nike tick – it’s all in the hips, folks). Why such puffery? I’d be inclined to lean away from self-help altogether, and keep my house-guests humble by hanging a giant ‘YOU’RE SO FULL OF SHIT’ on my bathroom wall.

My friend’s bathroom has ‘LIFE IS GOOD’ stuck to the wall. It’s positioned a few feet above the toilet cistern, so the message would be roughly eye-level with a person of average height if they stood facing the wall. Again, what is it about this particular place that necessitates such a reminder? I’ve never had a therapist, but I find it unlikely that my first one-to-one would take place inside a communal bathroom. It’s surely far from ideal to compete against a flushing toilet for your therapist’s attention. And it’s probably wise to err on the side of scepticism if you’re approached by someone claiming to want to heal you, if only you’d meet them in the petrol station toilet in ten minutes with your own carrier-bags (or cottaging-loafers, as they’re sometimes known).

I pissed in my friend’s bathroom recently, and the first thing that struck me – whilst I was busy being reminded just how good my life was – was that the placing of the message was misogynistic. This was clearly a message aimed at men, given that they were the only ones truly capable of absorbing it mid-piss. What about the ladies? Didn’t they deserve to ruminate on how fucking good their lives were? Why were only men privy to this encouragement? SEXIST!

Immediately after my wetty (that’s what I was encouraged to call a piss as a kid, and, you’ve got to admit, it’s an accurate tag) I sat down on the toilet seat and stared ahead. I was testing the theory. Sure enough, facing me was a blank wall. Not one word of encouragement stared back at me. If I’d been a woman I would have been devastated. Where was my entreatment to live my best life, or piss harder than I’d ever pissed before because I was pissing on the shoulders of lady giants? Not good enough in 2022! SEXIST!

I clung to this conclusion of misogyny for as long as it took me to work out that it was doubtless my friend’s wife who’d erected the letters. Because of course it was. I’ve never heard my friend say anything even approximating the sentiment ‘life is good’; I’d have been astonished if he’d wall-mounted it.

So if a woman had placed this message – so it could be seen by men and men alone – then the message was misandrist! Because of course it was! Women didn’t need affirmation or encouragement. It was just us men – we saggy sad sacks of aggression and patheticness – that needed a penisary pep-talk as we pished. I GUESS WOMEN ARE JUST PERFECT, AREN’T THEY? Yeah, flash those willy-wearing shit-bags an ego boost, maybe they’ll stop killing women and starting wars for a while. SEXIST!!!

But, then, maybe – just maybe – my friend’s wife had placed the message in recognition of the fact that the male suicide rate is so high, and guys need all the positivity they can get. So… she’s saving lives? SHE’S A BLOODY SAINT! GOD BLESS YOU, FLORENCE SHITE-INGALE!

By this point I was so discombobulated by the inscription on the wall and its ultimate meaning that I stomped to the faucet, turned the cold tap to max, drank deeply, filled my bladder to bursting point, and pished all over the bathroom floor in a steady stream of confused rage. Please think carefully before you place messages on the walls of your bathroom. You could easily kill an over-thinker like me.

But if you can’t beat em, join em, right? I’ve since followed my friend’s lead and placed life-affirming messages in my own house, but not just in the bathroom: everywhere. They’re bloody everywhere. On my kitchen wall you’ll find ‘COOK THOSE EGGS, KING’. In the living room, ‘JESUS CHRIST YOU’RE AMAZING AT WATCHING TV’. On the stairs, ‘ONE SMALL STEP FOR MAN, STUD’. And, of course, up high in the bedroom, BEAT THAT COCK LIKE THE POLITICAL PRISONER IT IS, YOU MUSCULAR GOD.

What can I say? Life is good.

Sometimes… Dads Can Be Wrong?

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Life affords us plenty of opportunities to reflect upon the wispy and elusive nature of memory. Who among us hasn’t forgotten our on-line passwords, even though all of our passwords are ‘password’? Who hasn’t found themselves standing in a car-park panicking that their car has been stolen, only to remember that they don’t actually own a car? Who hasn’t found themselves jamming a sausage in their eye because they’ve forgotten how to eat?

When two people are asked to recount a shared experience the opportunities for conflict and confusion multiply exponentially. Showtime’s ‘The Affair’ – a show about truth, deception and perception, starring McNulty from The Wire and that crazy chick Alice from Luther – deftly highlights how a person’s emotions, traumas, delusions, neuroses and agendas can disrupt their sense of the linear, mould their memories and in some cases re-write history.

Sometimes ‘The Affair’ will show two versions of the same event through two different character’s eyes, and the only difference will be an emphasis here, a piece of clothing there, an outburst here. Sometimes, the differences will be almost laughably extreme. The wife will remember sitting with her ex-husband in a cafe enduring a tense conversation about alimony as they both sip coffee; the husband will remember the wife charging into the cafe on horseback, slicing off a waitress’s head with a scimitar, and angrily shouting the Swedish national anthem at a frightened old man as the horse shits into a child’s sundae. I’ll often find myself rolling my eyes and scoffing: “This is bloody ridiculous. No two people could arrive at such seismically different interpretations of one reasonably mundane afternoon. Codswallop, I tells you, codswallop.” And yet… a recent experience has given me a renewed appreciation of The Affair’s perspective on perspective.

A few weeks ago, our eldest boy, Jack, staggered through to our bedroom in the early hours of the morning, and clambered in next to me. He felt hot to the touch, especially his forehead. I’d been concerned about him. He’d been coughing, sluggish, glassy-eyed and subdued, and generally not acting like his normal, bright-eyed, bonkers little self.

‘He needs medicine,’ I croaked to my partner, my hand wrapped over Jack’s forehead. ‘He’s got a temperature.’

My partner rolled over to face us, opening a blood-shot eye. ‘He’s hot, he doesn’t have a temperature.’

‘That’s what having a temperature is, being hot! I’m going to get him some medicine.’

‘No you’re not, he’s fine. He’s just warm.’

‘He’s not warm, he’s hot, and it’s not ‘hot hot’, it’s ‘ill hot’. I know ‘hot hot’. This isn’t ‘hot hot’.’

‘He doesn’t need medicine.’

‘I’m going to get him some medicine.’

‘No you’re not.’

‘Yes I am.’

‘NO!’

And that was the end of it. There I lay in the room’s murky half-light, nursing both my little boy and a massive grievance against my partner. What a cruel witch. She’d just repealed my son’s health-care for reasons that were at best arbitrary, and at worst directly linked to her crankiness at being woken up. I seem to remember getting Jack a cool drink of water, and then mumbling something suitably melodramatic, probably about him exploding at some point through the night, and THEN HOW WAS SHE GOING TO FEEL?

The next day at work I recounted the story to a work colleague, eliciting the expected response of ‘Oh, you can’t take chances, he should’ve got some medicine if he had a temperature’. Towards the end of the working day, I texted my partner to ask how Jack was doing, making sure to mention the medicine debacle and the furnace his forehead had become the night before. Twisting the knife, you know. My speciality. Here’s a little excerpt from the exchange, in medias res:

CHELS: “We miss you too. Jack is a bit weird this morning, maybe he is ill.”

ME: “I told you, darling. He’d peed himself and he was roasting hot for the whole other hour I was awake next to him. Hope he’s okay.”

CHELS: “I never disputed he was weird I just said he never had a temperature, which he never. He still says he feels great and nothing hurts. He’s just quiet. I told him that we had to come home and get some medicine and he just said okay and went to get his hat, it’s usually a fight.”

And then, a sharpened point of memory whistled its way towards my skull, smashing through bone and embedding itself in the spongy yuck of my brain. I had an unsettling moment of revelation, similar to the one the cop experiences at the end of The Usual Suspects when the whole horrible truth of Kaiser Soze hits him like a shovel. ‘I just said he never had a temperature, which he never…’ I replayed my partner’s words again and again in my thoughts. ‘…which he never…’ But how could she be so sure that he definitely hadn’t had a temperature last night, unless she’d actually taken his temperatu… Oh my. Oh dear. Oh dear, oh dear. Suddenly I remembered. It was like fireworks had been set off in my thoughts. We’d taken his temperature. Not we: me. I’d taken his temperature. A course of action, a compromise, that had actually been suggested by my partner.

‘If you think he’s got a temperature, Jamie, then go downstairs and get the thermometer and test him. If he’s got a temperature, then give him some medicine.’

If you’d given me a lie-detector test earlier that morning and asked me to give a truthful account of my hot-headed son’s entrance into our bedroom, I would have passed it with flying colours. It begs the question: how could I have hidden this crucial piece of information from myself? I hadn’t willfully constructed the version of events I’d carried into work with me that morning. There was no premeditation. No deceit. I’d simply mis-remembered. But why? Does the brain have its own version of predictive text? Has a lifetime of self-righteous anger re-written my neural network, and taught my brain how to process and store real-time events in accordance with my expectations and personality? That’s absolutely bloody terrifying. There’s so much plausible deniability swimming around in my head that my brain’s basically a mob boss. There are so many locked doors that I’m close to becoming Elliott from Mr Robot.

Perhaps our poo-pooing of The Affair’s central conceit is an act of self defence; we shut ourselves off from a truth that’s simply too terrifying to absorb. The linear reality we perceive around us is an artificial construct in a state of permanent flux; the by-product of our sensory organs sending billions of signals to an endlessly intricate yet endlessly fallible organic super-computer. Our memories are inextricably linked to our identities, and so if we can’t trust our memories, then who the hell are we? And who are we once our memories fail altogether?

Stranger still, as you’ll see from the reproduced text-thread above, our little boy had peed his bed prior to arriving in ours, and I’d washed him, changed him and put his sheets in the wash, something I’d ALSO forgotten until I reviewed those texts in the process of writing this very blog-post.

This blog-post is a sequel to this one I wrote a few weeks ago, also on the subject of our son’s physical well-being. My partner wasn’t too happy with it. She said it was funny and well-written (I’ve no trouble remembering things like that), but disputed its veracity. She agreed that the sequence of events was correct, but maintained that an emphasis here and an omission there had rendered her unfairly villainous. Apparently, it was our son’s distress and not her own stern words that had prevented me from taking him for a pee. She also claims that she’d said: ‘I’d rather he went to bed calm and happy and risk a wet bed, than put him through any more distress.’

Am I right? Is she right? Did any of it even happen? Was there a horse and a scimitar involved? I… just don’t know anymore.