A walloping in Kingston

So I kind of had a middle aged today - my night out was very boring, uneventful, even though I was sort of a bit if a bouncer smacks me in the mouth that's just blogging gold, everyone went through the social motions until it was an acceptable hour to go home. What was interesting was being sober when everyone else was drunk really had an affect on my appreciation of a particular pub band - now keep in mind, pub rock is my least favourite type of music, but I did think that the pub band at Irish Murphys were not as abysmal as, say, the Wonderwall singer at Central. Turns out they are, I was just drunk, a sort of beer goggles for the ears if you will. Irish Murphys, for what it's worth potential tourists, used to be the last normal pub in Hobart. Devoid of bouncers, friendly, keep serving you Guinness long after the point of no return. Now it's lapsed into the same horrible over policed pub as everything else, turning away infractors for the mortal sins of wearing deely boppers or shirts with Zaire on them. I wasn't even approached by a politician. As for today, I had an afternoon nap and did the guttering, which surely an impending sign of middle age, standing on a rickety black ladder with gloves covered in dirt. When did I become someone who did guttering? I felt a bit common, like a character in a Ken Loach film who had just lost his job and was doing part time jobs on the side. Bloody Thatcher. When I lived in Penguin, one of the things we really had to get used to was people getting up at about 6 in the morning to mow the lawn, my Dad used to go absolutely spare because he had spent all night fighting with a shortwave radio to try and get the St Mirren score, and just as he got to bed, he'd be woken up by the eternal struggle between the two stroke Victa, the old man down the street and a stubborn weed. The man in question was a very nice man, but we didn't really have such things in Scotland as lawns that required such urgent attention. My Mums brother got a lawnmower for Xmas, a little toy one, but since there wasn't any lawns within about a 2k radius, he ended up using it mowing the moss that was growing up the the side of the walls - at least, I think that happened, it might just have been a Ken Loach film...oh the deprivation...

Kingston was a bit strange today, the people seemed to be on this incredible edge, everyone was agitated. I was queueing in my local Coles and there was so many frustrated and annoyed families I thought that I was somehow single handedly responsible for their hold up. Initially I quite enjoyed this, and was very slowly and deliberately choosing which loaf of bread to have (white or white? Hmmmm...) but then I realised that the major problem wasn't me, but that all the families that were agitated had these bratty children attached to them. As you can see, morality based judgements on children really fitted peg to hole into my middle aged day - but there was one kid dressed in a John Cena T who was screaming at every opportunity, he wanted cake, he wanted Jamaica Rum chocolate, he frankly wanted a kick up the arse. His parents though were exceptionally dis-interested and were engaging in their animated, line delaying conversation about Bec and Lleyton that seemed to revolve around him questioning her sexual chastity and her liking her album. The kid by the mid point of the argument had snuck about ten tons of muffins into the shopping trolley and was pretty much running around wild even before he had almost bowled over an old woman in support stockings who was casually minding her own apples. In that wonderfully old woman way, she only really registered the physical danger her kneecaps were in about five minutes after it happened, and to be honest it's luckily the family weren't Asian because she looked like just the type to launch into a massive row about immigrants, her face contorted with anger, wrinkles and just a hint of dribble. The Mum, a sort of pucker mouthed tracksuit wearer with all the sadness of a life of could of beens etched into her face, she didn't even notice as the kid continued his own boy show, not even waiting for the reviews to come in. As his Dad meandered through some basic flirting with the till girl, the till girl with the large alarming nails and the panda eye makeup, without a big dramatic build up or pronouncement, in fact without looking at the kid or saying anything, the Mum reared back and gave the kid a massive horsebite right across the leg. No one saw it but me, but the kid suddenly registered a bewildered emotion to his brain, pain to his leg, and a let down if he thought John Cena was going to help him. He was slowly trailing the trolley the last time I saw him, walking along downcast and bewildered about five feet behind his parents - both of whom weren't speaking to him, but were talking about an article in the Mercury, something about fish, not a care in the world...

Somewhat surprised to see such an overt slap in the day and age of the nanny state, I started to walk home, full of shopping bags and slight self importance. There was a small and neatly formed market that I don't mind walking through sometimes, nothing fancy, just amateur bead makers and piles of books people don't want anymore. I considered buying a Grand Final record from the 80s, just so I could cut out the ads and see if there were any for Big Ms. As it turned out, about five minutes after I got there, a giant argument broke out - a mother and daughter were rowing over the correct manner to operate a pile of books on a stable table on a Sunday morning, a tricky balancing act no question. The upshot of their argument was whether or not the mother, a woman with a Kathy Bates air of menace and a slightly unflattering pair of acid wash jeans, should be more professional in her dealings. The daughter, strangely tanned and as long of laboured metaphor as of face, was trying to organise the pile of books on the stable table so they looked more attractive to the customer. I wondered why she was applying her marketing techniques to something that was quite obviously a labour of love for her mother - perhaps a frustrated marketing degree holder unable to hold down a job, she began telling her mother that in uncertain terms she had to get professional like they do at Salamanca market. Her mother though wasn't listening, it was just that kind of day. Her mother was staring intently at the stall across from her that was stocked with delicious piles of honey in the kind of gigantic 80s style buckets, and eventually, mid university rehearsed rant, left her daughter to go and buy some honey. Her daughter, a little flustered, then completely botched the seemingly routine sale of some Catherine Cookson novels, and the buyers wandered off to buy honey as well. By the time her mother came back, they had nothing to say to each other, and sat huddled together in mutual animosity under their poorly constructed tarpaulin, staring at their pile of books and the passers by looking at them, without any enthusiasm, emotion, or desire to discuss the price of a Cookson with any of Kingstons more stubborn stable table browsers...

As I lay in my hammock today with a poorly constructed Blue Heaven Big M replica to drink, I thought about my own parents, and how I interact with them. They never hit me (well, once, after I had a big tantrum about stamps) and I don't know if I'm close to them or not. I love them, but I really don't talk to them about anything significant, as I keep my cards close to my chest. That said, by the standards of my Dads family, especially his relationship with his own parents where the obituaries made no mention of us, that's a miraculously strong relationship. I remember sitting in Dads other sisters house (not the one with the living room locked off), before she went completely missing and was lost from our lives, and it was obvious they were putting on a show for us. Her daughter by all accounts was a complete wild child, drugs, sex round the back of the Co-Op, but here she was in a pretty dress talking about popular culture as if there was no problem in life, when we knew that as soon as we left they'd be battering lumps out of each other. It was pretty awkward, and I like to think I never, apart from the night after I failed uni and hid at my girlfriends house, gave them the wild child problem. My girlfriend, I always remember she stormed in after one netball game, threw her bag down on the ground, and started telling me this hugely long and involved story about the fight she had with her Mum. I made a slight mistake though - the argument was about a purse, and the type of purse my girlfriend had brought back for her Mum from her trip to Adelaide, which wasn't the one her Mum wanted. My mistake was to assume a purse was a stupid thing to fight about, but I was too young, stupid and too into Peles International Soccer on the Atari to learn, as I now know, that's it's never about the purse or the stacking of books, it's always about a lot more, and it's pretty much always about the final straw. I never made it to the final straw with my parents, never was walloped around the leg and left to fend for myself, never saw them abandon me, and so I got up out of my hammock, and called my Dad, just to say hello. We talked entirely about football, nothing deep, but it was good, it was special...it was our way of making sure we never sat under a tarpaulin pouting at buckets of honey...

Of course, we might one day have a massive fight about his fandom of Something For Kate, but at least he won't give me a horsebite...I hope not anyway...