A boy will always need his mum!

It was the brightness around the rim of the door that first drew my attention. The landing light, comprising three 100-watt bulbs, had abruptly clicked on sending intrusive white lasers into the darkness of my bedroom. Raising my head a couple of inches from the pillow I squinted to my right at the luminous digital clock on the bedside table; it was 1.05 a.m. and I had been asleep for over two hours. I glanced to my left where Mrs Jones lay, snoring rhythmically, while no doubt dreaming of a steamy liaison with Brad Pitt on the set of the film we had earlier watched, Meet Joe Black. I mused at the lightness of my slumber, in stark contrast to 30 years ago when as a young man I could sleep through the decibels of my mother’s vacuum cleaner as she cleaned around my bed in the middle of the afternoon.

Still holding the duvet under my chin, I strained to hear the nature of the disturbance on the other side of the bedroom door. I could detect faint whimpers, mixed with the occasional expletive. The baritone nature of the noises confirmed that the source was my 21-year-old son. Maybe he was having one of his occasional migraine headaches? Or had he had an i-Phone spat with his girlfriend? Curiosity finally outweighed my inertia, and I got out of bed to investigate. 

Ryan was standing on the landing, staring intently into the full-length mirror on the wall, prodding his face with his forefinger. Over 6-feet tall and weighing 13-stone, clad only in silk boxer-shorts, his face red and with droplets of sweat on his brow, he resembled someone who had done 10 rounds with Rocky Marciano.

“It’s driving me crazy” he said, once he’d noticed my presence.

“What’s the problem?” I asked, trying to instil some fatherly concern into my voice.

“There’s a friggin’ eye-lash in my eye. I can see the little bastard but I can’t shift it.”

I peered into his face. Sure enough there it was, a black lash about a half a centimetre long, still attached to his eye-lid but the other end buried in the aqueous mass of his eye-ball. My first reaction was to do what comes naturally to a 53-year old man in the depth of night and in close proximity to the bathroom – I went for a pee. My second reaction was equally instinctive, a response I have demonstrated many times before when one of our children is in pain – I went to rouse Mrs Jones.

As many men will know, waking a sleeping woman is a risky business. Indeed, it can seriously damage your health unless the reason is a house-fire or that one of her babies is in distress. I explained the nature of the current crisis and, once she had recovered from the disappointment of finding that the man mumbling to her in her sleep was me rather than Brad, she heroically swung into action. Armed with an eye-bath, a magnifying glass and two cotton-buds, Mrs Jones marched Ryan into the bathroom. I watched admiringly as she hung Ryan’s head over the sink, instructed him to hold the magnifying glass at the required angle, and doused his eye with a constant stream of warm water while stroking the target lash with the cotton-bud. I was in awe but, not wanting to crowd them, I (thoughtfully) went back to bed.

From the refuge of the bedroom, I could just make out the dialogue between my wife and son as the lash-extraction procedure continued for 20 minutes. Mrs Jones issuing firm but caring instructions, while Ryan responded with whines and the occasional expletive. Then it went quiet. I heard the bathroom door open and as Ryan returned to his room I heard him utter two words, delivered with absolute sincerity and gratitude.

“Thanks mam!”

Moments later, Mrs Jones appeared at the foot of our bed, struggling to contain a self-satisfied smile. “A boy will always need his mum!” she proclaimed.

Begrudgingly, I had to agree. Stifling a pang of envy, I turned over and tried to get back to sleep.

 

          

Don't do anything embarrassing

My 18-year old daughter, and youngest child, intends to pursue a degree course in the autumn. Last month there was an open day for Sheffield University (one of the institutions on her short-list) and initially both Mrs Jones and I were intent on accompanying her.

“You’re not both coming,” Becca whined, “I’ll look like a right retard!”

“Well go on your own then, if we’re such an embarrassment” I said, fishing for reassurance that my baby girl might feel a sense of pride at the prospect of having her old man by her side on this foray into alien terrain. She didn’t bite.

“I’m not goin’ on the train; I’ll never find my way from the station.”

As Mrs Jones had a competing commitment (shopping with her mother) on the day in question, I was nominated as chauffeur.

“Is that arrangement to my ladyship’s satisfaction?” I asked, not yet having given up on landing a minnow.

“Yes, thanks; but don’t do anything embarrassing.”

So 7.00 am on a Saturday morning we set off for Sheffield. I had hoped for some quality banter with my second-born on the outward journey, but it was not to be. The previous night Becca had been out with her mates (not just out, but “out out”) and had had no more than three hours sleep. Consequently, she adjusted her passenger seat to almost horizontal and slept. Two hours later I roused her as we drove onto the campus.

As we queued in the refectory to register our arrival, Becca eyed her prospective fellow students (She later informed me she was differentiating the “human from the geeky”). I took the opportunity to point out the future scholars who had brought both parents along and hadn’t, as yet, shrivelled with humiliation.

In a troupe of around 150, we had a guided tour of the university, taking in the sports hall, library, lecture theatres and student accommodation, during which I had a couple of senior moments when my mind travelled back 35 years to my own undergraduate days. Particularly poignant was the sight of an existing student in a hall of residence kitchen; unshaven, hair wild and uncombed, his eye squint suggesting light sensitivity, a tell-tale sign of the previous night’s over-indulgence. Ah, happy days! A period in one’s life when you feel invincible, bullet-proof, immortal – a time when that sneaky bastard called Age has curled up behind you to hibernate, outside of your awareness, for the next quarter of a century.

Following the guided tour we all gathered in a large lecture theatre to hear a talk from the course directors. At Becca’s request, we sat on the back row. We dutifully listened to the reasons why Sheffield is the greatest university in the world. PowerPoint presentation completed, the senior lecturer asked the audience of students and parents whether they had any questions. A parent on the front row asked about what specific topics were covered within the psychology module of the criminology degree. A prospective student (one that would probably fall into the “geek” category of my daughter’s sophisticated classification system) sought as to the possibility of switching in-year from being a straight sociology student to one studying sociology/criminology combined. A mother queried the closeness of the links between the Social Science faculty and potential employers.

Questions duly answered, there was silence in the large lecture theatre as the university academics awaited further queries. I raised my hand. To my right I heard a sharp intake of breath as all the muscles in Becca’s body hardened as if she’d glimpsed Medusa.

“How come there’s no Student Union bar on the campus?”

It was a long drive home.  

A moth in my mouth?

          

My senses are on the wane. (Or maybe it’s just my sense?). As that bounder called Age tightens its grubby grasp on my faculties, my perception of the world around me is inexorably becoming less distinct. My senses of touch, taste, smell, hearing and sight are all in decline.

On further reflection, maybe this statement of global deterioration in all five senses is not strictly true. At 53 years old, I am not aware that my sense of smell is any less than it was three decades ago. (But perhaps I’d be the last to know if it was; unknown to me, I might be routinely emitting body odour sufficiently caustic to remove gloss paint). And age has yet to destroy my taste-buds. If anything my sense of taste has improved with advancing years, as evidenced by my recently developed appreciation of Rioja and Caesar salad drizzled in olive oil.

But my other three senses seem to be going west at the speed of the Lone Ranger on an urgent mission to rescue Tonto. Although not yet having resorted to a hearing aid, I regularly ask Mrs Jones to turn up the volume on the television. And on the rare occasions I am obliged to enter into conversations with people from outside my immediate family, I increasingly have to focus on the shape of their mouths so as to lip-read some of the more ambiguous words (such fixed attention typically giving me an expression resembling a psychotic stare).

My sense of touch is dwindling. As my nerve-endings atrophy, I commonly feel numbness in the tips of my fingers and toes. The sensitivity of other, more intimate, parts of my anatomy has dulled and they now require more prolonged stimulation to achieve a reaction (but more about that in a future post!).      

It is, however, my eye-sight that is my greatest concern. Short-sighted, I have worn contact lenses for over twenty years. At each annual check-up, the optician informs me that my vision has deteriorated a bit further and proceeds to over-power one eye and under-power the other so as to enable me to read and drive while wearing my lenses; with each eye performing radically different tasks I fear that soon each will go its own way, leaving me with a squint of monstrous proportion.

Most disturbingly, over recent months I’ve started to see things that aren’t there. Not true hallucinations (the only time that’s ever happened was over 30 years ago while on holiday with my mates in southern Spain when, after a gruelling week of alcohol abuse and sleep deprivation, I “saw” the long-bearded figure of Old Father Time, armed with scythe and hour-glass, squatting at the foot of my bed) but my eyes playing tricks on me. Take last Friday, for example. I was in the bathroom, 10.30 p.m., preparing to go to bed (I know how to party!). After cleaning my teeth with my usual vigour, I slurped a mouthful of water, rinsed, gargled, and spat out into the white porcelain wash-basin. As I dabbed my mouth with a towel, I glanced down into the bowl and was instantly paralysed with horror and disgust. There, in fearsome contrast to the brilliant whiteness of the basin, were the chewed remains of a reddish-brown moth. With a wave of nausea rising within me, I hesitantly groped for a closer inspection, grasping the soggy winged beast between thumb and forefinger. It wasn’t a moth. It was the skin of a kidney bean. Three hours earlier I had eaten a generous portion of Mrs Jones’ home-made chilli con-carne and this blighter must have been stuck like cling-film to my molars throughout the whole of the evening. Nice!       

Beware the willy shriveller!

         

I’ve never liked taking medication. The idea of swallowing tablets to remedy some assumed biochemical imbalance has always seemed silly to me. Thinking back 35 years to my biology classes at school, I’m sure I remember the science master telling us that one of the wonders of the human body is its inherent ability to restore balance; as soon as it detects that there is too much (or too little) of something inside us - be it a hormone, a salt or an enzyme – this biochemical miracle that we all inhabit immediately responds to restore the status quo. So it seems to me counter-productive to take tablets of any kind as it must disrupt this natural process.

Throughout the first four decades of my life I generally succeeded in avoiding these toxic chemical intruders. OK, I did imbibe copious quantities of alcohol (just to be sociable) and I assume that, as a child, the docs must have injected me with anesthetic before surgically removing my tonsils, but I did manage to avoid pills of any kind. I even refused to take over-the-counter painkillers for a headache, and goodness knows I suffered many of those.

But age is a sneaky bastard! The rot set in during my early 40s when cold and flu-like symptoms seduced me into more than occasional use of paracetamol in the form of blackcurrant-flavoured “Lemsips”. Shortly after, years of alcohol abuse took its toll and I developed excessive stomach acid that only a daily 10 mg dose of Omeprazole (or Losec) could quench.   

And then the hay-fever struck. For 49 years on this planet I showed no sign of this common allergy. But Age, in all its wisdom, determined from this point on that my immune system should view harmless tree pollen as if they were al-Qaeda terrorists. So each year, come March and April, I am afflicted by light-headedness, my nostrils streaming like two soda siphons and my eyes resembling those of a vampire after feasting on a fulsome virgin. Also, much to the annoyance of Mrs Jones and my two grown-up children, while sitting in the lounge watching TV my recurrent sneezing is extraordinarily loud and accompanied by my legs slowly rising into the air on the inward “Ah” breath only to flop onto the floor on the outward “Choo!”.  Unlike my family, I typically tolerate these symptoms, but last week they were accompanied by a general feeling of malaise and loss of concentration (an unhelpful combination when you are at work) and I reluctantly sought the aid of medication.

I took the anti-histamines on two consecutive days. The inflammation of my throat, nasal cavities and eyes noticeably eased. But I suffered a disturbing side-effect, one that there was no mention of in the accompanying leaflet: my willy shrivelled! Sadly, I’m not blessed with the biggest manhood to begin with, but after taking these anti-histamine toxins I was virtually concave. This medication should come with the warning, “Side-effects may include dry mouth, drowsiness and a tendency to invert the male genitalia.”

I am participating in the Dude Write Starting Lineup this week where you can find some excellent posts by bloggers who happen to be dudes: http://dudewrite.blogspot.com)

        

My children used to need me

My two children used to need me. For long periods of their childhoods if it wasn’t for me they would not have eaten, they would have suffered the agony of ulcerated groins and buttocks caused by prolonged contact with soiled nappies/diapers, and they would have had no means of transport to ferry them in “dad’s taxi” to football practice/sleep-overs at mates’ houses/school discos etc. Now aged 18 and 21, they are both young adults and, despite not yet having left the family home, the direction of dependency is beginning to change; I need them to rely on me, at least some of the time, for me to feel useful.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not an overprotective dad who strives to control my kids’ lives or to deny they are now grown-ups. On the contrary, I bristle with pride when I bring to mind my accomplishments (OK my wife may have also made a contribution, but allow me to claim the credit in my hour of need) in fathering two children, nurturing them through each and every day of their childhoods, and enabling them to become the two contented and decent human beings they are today (granted, my son can sometimes be an obnoxious bastard with both me and Mrs Jones, but he’s yet to bring the police to our door!). 

Anyway, last Sunday evening an image caught my eye that screamed, “Your children don’t need you anymore!” On Sundays I always cook the evening meal for the family (who said I wasn’t a modern man?). Traditional fare, of course, comprising a roast joint, Yorkshire puddings, roast potatoes and veg. As always, I’d prepared enough grub for four and dished up around 6.30 pm. In response to my text prompts that the meal is ready, my 21-year-old son texts back to say he’s still in pub and to put his in the oven so he can eat it upon his return. Simultaneously, 18-year-old daughter phones to inform me that she had recently returned from a spontaneous visit to McDonald’s with her boyfriend and wasn’t hungry, but she may have it later. So just I and Mrs Jones sat to eat at a table set for four, the symbolism of the two vacant seats taunting us that things will never be the same again.

But the image that resonated deep into my psyche confronted me four hours later. At 10.30 pm I entered the kitchen en route to lock the back door as a prelude to retiring for the night. As I glanced to my left the oven light illuminated the picture, framed by the square oven door, of two plated meals (each covered by another plate to prevent drying up) one above the other, like flying-saucers in outer space, each a zillion miles from home with no hope of returning to base. I sighed, turned off the oven and went to bed.           

          

A different type of brew

Despite being born and raised in a rural area, surrounded by greenery and rugged countryside, it is only over the last couple of years that Mrs Jones and I have started hill walking. Striving for buttocks like iron girders and thighs of chiselled steal, each weekend (except for those times when I can’t be arsed) I tramp the peaks and dales of my locality.

Mrs Jones in the hills of Lancashire, UK

Last Saturday, nearing home in the latter stages of a 10-mile hike, I was heard to proclaim, “I’d kill for a nice cup of tea”. Yes, I was actually getting excited in anticipation of a brew! The same man who, 30 years ago, was a renowned piss-head who would regularly imbibe a gallon-and-a-half of ale on a drunken bender was now getting misty at the prospect of a cuppa. Oh, how things have changed!

                                                                 

Bedroom Olympics

           

Maybe there was a time when I had more ambitious aims in the bedroom. Nowadays, I try to impress my lover in a different way. My good lady wife, my partner of 31 years, typically retires to bed earlier than I do so by the time I enter the bedroom she is sitting up in bed reading her Hello magazine. I stand facing her at the foot of the bed. Slowly, nay tantalisingly, I begin to undress, removing one item of clothing at a time and letting each drop to the floor. My good lady doesn’t look up, pretending to absorb the glossy-page splendour of Kate Middleton and Prince William. When clad only in my grey, partially perished, George underpants, I pause (a deliberate ploy to ratchet up the tension). Teasingly, I slide my briefs down to my knees and let them drop, but before they hit the floor I stick out my cultured left foot and lampoon them under the elastic waistband. Standing on one leg, with my boxers swinging from my outstretched foot, I bend forwards with my eyes closed and hands behind my back (have you got the picture?) and proceed to flip the undies high into the air. Rotating like a boomerang over my bowed head, without moving my hands from the base of my spine, I catch them just above the nick of my clenched arse.

What a lucky, lucky lady my wife is!