What makes minds tick in a house of 6 where
the majority vote lies with The Youth.

Monday, February 17, 2014

Never Mind the Bollocks

Never Mind the Bollocks,
Getting Old Sucks


          Put your mind to this corker. Why is it that The Youth take great delight when I use my impressively loud horn on an ill-mannered fellow motorist, but if I reprimand a pimply teen for dropping his McThick Shake cup on the street, they cower in unfettered shame?

          Extensive interrogation of a random sample of under-10s has uncovered some priceless qualitative data. It seems that trailing on the bumper bar of the canary-coloured Ford Territory that just cut you off at the lights, with your hand on the blower for a solid 60 seconds, is COOL. That's what a young, slightly psychotic hispter might do. However, reprimanding a dude in short pants for be-fowling the footpath with his McLitter is completely UNCOOL. Old-timers do that.

          Until last week, I would have had myself pegged as the psycho hipster - I know how to ride a skateboard and post a PVP battle on Minecraft. But there was a private moment of exquisite clarity on Monday night that moth-balled that pipedream.

          At about 9pm, when The Youth had submitted to my shrewish demands to "pipe down or I'll knock your blocks off", I reclined with my standard-issue green tea, Milky Bar and daily newspaper. These delights are small but sublime. However, no sooner had I origamied my paper into the perfect fashion for the cryptic crossword than I noticed a splinter in my thumb. Annoyance factor: High.

          I harumpffffed into the bathroom, tracked down the tweezers and began the job of extracting the interloper. A good 20 minutes of tweezing, nipping and blaspheming followed without joy until I conceded defeat and realised that I may have to actually use the +1 specs I had procured from the pharmacy six months prior. I dug around in the drawer, withdrew them and gave them a spit and polish.

           I held up the thumb, which by this point was quite angry-looking and possibly bleeding. To my disappointment (as I'd been in denial about my creeping decent into long-sightedness) I could now see the digit in all its glory. Thankfully by this hour, The Youth were well into the land of slumber and so were spared the full spectrum of my florid vocabulary on discovering that the splinter was not, in fact, a splinter, but a line of black biro.

           My mother, who is certified blind as a bat, would have called on her old fave Tom Petty at this juncture, and he would have soothed her with the following croon: if you're not getting older, you're dead.