Tag Archives: age

Get yer rhododendrons oot for the lads

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My kids and I caught the ferry from Gourock to Dunoon at the weekend. I say ‘caught’. It was thankfully pretty stationary when we drove aboard. I figured taking the car was a no-brainer. We didn’t have a lot of time and without the car we wouldn’t have been able to explore much more than the dock on the other side, which would’ve been about as pointless as flying from Edinburgh to Milan, wandering around the airport then immediately flying back again, all the while raving about how culturally enriching ‘the Italian experience’ was.

Gourock. That’s a strange name, isn’t it? [note to any non-Scots reading this – it’s pronounced ‘goo-rock’, not ‘gow-rock’, you fucking idiot. Honestly, imagine not knowing how to pronounce the name of a place you’ve never heard of before in a country whose pronunciation rules aren’t immediately clear. What a loser] It’s next to Greenock. What is it with ‘ocks’ on the west coast of Scotland? I’ve no idea what an ‘ock’ is, much less why two ‘ocks’ would be next to each other. I’ve even less idea why one of them would be ‘green’ and the other made of ‘goo’. A simple Google search would doubtless put paid to my speculation, but I can’t resist an enduring mystery, plus I’m ignorant and lazy. I’d prefer to imagine ‘ocks’ as whatever I bloody well want them to be, thank you very much. I mean, are ‘ocks’ decapitated crocodiles? Dismembered octopi? Is it how Jonathan Ross would refer to the green guys in Mordor if he moved to Middle Earth? There’s no doubt in my mind that the real answer is incredibly boring. It’s the same with Coatbridge: was the whole town named after a bridge of stitched-together Medieval jackets? As far as I’m concerned: yes. Yes, it bloody was. And don’t get me started on Bathgate.

None of us had ever been to Dunoon so we knew little about what to expect once we arrived, beyond what I’d gleaned from a cursory Google search (I still refuse to Google ‘ocks’). We met a kindly old man on the deck of the ferry as we clambered out of the car. After a brief exchange he was quick to suggest places we might go and things we might do. Well, truth be told, he only really had one thing in mind…

I’ve clearly phrased that in an unnecessarily sinister way, haven’t I? And I’ve left you thinking that this poor, innocent old man wanted to ‘Jack and Rose’ us in the back of his motor. Or paint us like one of his Gourock girls. He didn’t. His real intentions were, mercifully, a lot more boring than that. What he wanted us to do was visit the botanic gardens.

‘You’ll love it’, he said. ‘The rhododendrons are out.’

I looked back at my kids: two be-limbed bundles of kinetic chaos; a couple of Nagasakis in skin-suits. Voracious, vital, joyful, and mental. The whole world – its sounds, colours and energies – piped perpetually into their skulls with the force and power of the zap-bite that cooked the shark in Jaws 2. ADHD in human form. Tom and Jerry meets Israel and Palestine. ‘Mister,’ I thought, ‘These kids REALLY don’t give a fuck about rhododendrons. Come to think of it, neither do I.’

My kids might’ve been interested in rhododendrons, but only because it sounds like a shape invented by a drunk pigeon, or some sort of giant robot who spends his days fighting Godzilla. As long as they laboured under the impression that a rhododendron was one of those things they’d be excited, but the minute they found out it was a fucking flower their eyes would glaze over like Cheech’s and Chong’s would on a microscopic journey through Bob Marley’s left lung.

Don’t get me wrong. We adore nature. Its canvas. Its scope and humps and hues. Its vistas and vacuums. We rarely get hung up on the specifics, though. We’re quite happy to gaze at flowers – Geilston Gardens, for instance, is a stunning wee place – just don’t ask us which ones are rhododendrons. We don’t know what they are, much less when they’re going to be out. And we don’t want to know.

But this man wanted to know. And he wanted us to know, too. And I’m pretty sure that he wanted us to know that he wanted us to know that he wanted us to know, too. But did he always know? Did he tug, teary-eyed, at his mother’s apron strings and wail: ‘Oh, mumma, will the rhododendrons be out again this year? Oh, will they, mumma? Please say that they will!’ Was rhododendron his first word? When did this rhododendron obsession take root? And would it happen to me?

After all, there was a time when I wouldn’t have believed you if you’d told me that a time would come when I’d be willingly listening to Radio 4 in the car. Or feeling a sense of accomplishment for getting that third wash out on the line. Would I turn sixty and get inducted into some secret, and incredibly boring, society? Would I receive a card from the King that read: ‘You give a fuck about rhododendrons now. Deal with it.’?

We didn’t go to the botanic garden. We ate ice cream. We climbed rocks. We skimmed stones. We saw a seal. We wandered the fringes of a loch that used to house US submarines. That’s a bit better than fucking flowers.

Mind you… [Googles rhododendrons] they are LUSH. Oaft. That’s a beautiful flower. Maybe… you know, the next time we’re near a botanic garden… just once I could, you know [Keeps Googling] So THAT’S what an ‘ock’ is.

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)