Mock Duck

Dwarves and elves

My friend, Lisa, and I decided that we are the elf and the dwarf in The Lord of the Rings. She's Orlando Bloom and I'm Gimli.

"Oh yes, that's about right," said The Geek, eating a sandwich.

"What?"

"You are like Gimli."

"You're saying I'm short, fat and hairy."

The Geek pauses for a moment then starts munching again.

"Well, he's Scottish."

I glare at him.

"You're saying I'm a short, fat, hairy dwarf?"

He pops the end of the sandwich in his mouth.

"You ARE saying I'm a short fat hairy dwarf."

The Geek pauses momentarily before heading to the loaf to cut another slice.

"I was just agreeing with you."

"But you're not supposed to agree with me!!"

"It was you and Lisa that said it."

"WE'RE allowed to say it. But YOU'RE not. YOU'RE not supposed to see me that way. You're supposed  to be romantic. You're supposed to see me as a...as a supermodel crossed with an angel."

He crosses over and puts his arms around me. "I do see you as supermodel," he says and I relax back blissfully into his arms. "Crossed with a short fat hairy dwarf."

All About My Father

Due to popular demand. But where to begin? I think a top ten list might be the ticket. Top Ten Things That Annoy Me About Dad. Perhaps Emma could add a few more. In reverse order:

10. Napkins

It only started in his late fifties - this insistence on the white linen napkin with every meal. Maddening. Mum thinks he only does it to create more washing.

9. Dieting

He's always on one. He's always talking about one. My Dad looks like a bone but is in competition with long-distance marathon runners from Kenya. His latest is the prawn and white wine diet. Or the venison stew and replacing butter with olive oil diet. Sick of hearing it. Not that that ever stops him.

8. Hotels

Dad is neurotic about hotels - we've always been told - because he was brought up in a boarding house which traumatised him from an early age. The result: we never went on hotel as kids. The one time we did was such a disaster that we never went again. At all. However, in his old age his enthusiasm for walking holidays has come into conflict with his hatred of hotels and he's been forced to compromise.  However, be warned. If there is anything he doesn't like -  wallpaper, air freshener, singsong receptionists - he's likely to up and leave. He has been known to drag my mother kicking and screaming to go sleep in a field instead.

Worst case of this was a fourteen hour drive from Austria into Switzerland when I was about 14. We were exhausted and hungry and I just wanted my bed. Any bed. Yet every hotel we stopped at wasn't good enough. Eventually, after hours of looking, we decided on one. I was just settling in, relieved, when Dad came crashing through the door. "That's it," he said. "We're driving back to Austria. There's musak in the lifts! "

Never before and never since have I so totally lost it.

We stayed.

7. Being early for anything.

He has to be last. Always.

6 Traveling

Traveling with Dad is a wonderful experience as long as you don't mind missing your plane. For some reason he is pathologically opposed to standing in queues. In fact if there is a queue to be seen, he will feign a sudden interest in something his has no interest in whatsoever - the perfume counter in the Duty Free for example. This is very annoying and when tackled about it he will lie and pretend that he really is interested in make-up or hairspray.

This also has something to do with his neurosis about being early for anything. In fact at my sister's wedding we had to go in separate cars because Dad refused to set off more than twenty minutes before - and that way, we figured, at least the bride and groom would make it.

5. Going on about how everyone should be pleased that he is amiable when tipsy and doesn't turn into an instant wife-beater.

Hmmm.

4. Cheese and General Food Fads

My father is not someone who believes in variety. He believes in finding The Best, and then eating nothing else for the rest of his life and pronouncing smugly upon it until you would happily kill him rather than hear it again.

He has been faddy about food as long as we can remember. I still have nightmares about the hoards of special offer doughy pizza he stocked up on in the freezer. The banana phase lasted some years. The smelly goat cheese. Now it's prawns. White wine.

When Mum met him, apparently, it was deep-baked cheesecake. He ate one a day from a deli down the road. Then there's the potatoes - but that's another story.

3. Going on about the Contract of Marriage and How changing Tax Laws are  Reneging on his "Deal".

I really don't want to get into this. It annoys the pants off me and makes him sound like Iain Duncan Smith - which is never a good thing.

2. Going on about divorcing Mum for tax reasons

This is just annoying and relates to item 3. He thinks he is being provocative, but we've heard it too often and it's just RUDE.

1. Potatoes

I think Dad's attitude to potatoes has to be one of the most annoying things about him. I don't know when he got into this, come to think of it, but he suddenly started getting fanatical about potatoes. He constructed a list. And a marking system. The categories ranged from Good to Useless, to Totally Useless. No longer could my mother just pick up the first thing to hand at the corner shop - No! And none of this different potatoes for different uses thing - bah! A good potato is a floury potato. And that's it. Waxy potatoes are disgusting. New potatoes useless. And if Mum gets the wrong sort, he just won't eat it.

Recently we found him surfing the internet for potato news and he discovered a whole other potato world out there. He is now part of a potato-fanciers circle - and went over the top ordering sacks of different specialist varieties to try...

You know, it really could be sweet in someone other than my father. But no, it's just annoying.

Fear of Latte

Yesterday I thought I was having a heart attack.

I was sitting in a chair, feeling relatively peaceful and relaxed (for me) when suddenly my heart started racing. It was beating and beating as though trying to jump out of my chest. My heart-rate leapt up so that I couldn't even count it, it was going so fast. "This is it," I thought. "I'm going to die."
"I'm dying, " I said to my mother who was looking up property on the internet.
"Oh yes?" She didn't even look round.
"There's something horribly wrong with me."
"Hang on a minute - now is this three bedrooms or two -?"
"Mum!"

The heart continued to threaten to explode through my breastplate and Mum finally turned round. Then she took some notice - I must have looked a bit more ill than I usually do when I declare another set of fatal symptoms and ask if I'm going to die. She took my pulse, looked at me in alarm and phoned the doctor.

By the time I got to the medics, it had died down. But I was faint and sick and shaken up and so tired I could hardly move.  My parents were being nice to me so they must have been worried. The doctor took my pulse and listened to my heart with a stethoscope. He stuck stickers all over me and attached some complicated-looking wires. A machine produced a graph of the electrical activity of my heart. This was serious stuff.

No abnormality there as far as he could see. So he asked a few questions.

"Any big illnesses since I last saw you in...1993?"
"No."
"Has this ever happened before?"
"No."
"You haven't done anything unusual - taken anything? Drunk a lot of coffee?"

Mum and I looked at each other.

My father's one affectation is to drink his coffee out of French-style bowls. I normally have a cup of real coffee in the morning, maybe two. That morning, absent-mindedly, I had two and a half bowls instead. Plus a cup of tea. When we worked it out it turned out to be about three quarters of a litre of coffee - maybe 4 or 5 cups...and not forgetting that tea of course.

The doctor's eyebrows shot up. "That's a lot of coffee," he said.
I shuffled about and looked at my feet. I felt dirty, ashamed. Like a secret addict who's just been rumbled.
"Perhaps you might like to try decaf instead?"

Thus, I was dismissed. Diagnosis - palpitation, very common apparently and probably harmless (I don't much like that probably bit). Otherwise known as a panic attack. A coffee-induced panic attack.

I never knew I was that frightened of coffee - but I think I just might be from now on.

Conversation with My Father

My father and I are watching TV.

DAD:  “Look, there’s a job.”

ME: (Sigh)

DAD: “Why don’t you do that?”

ME: “For God’s sake, I don’t want to be a hospital porter!”

DAD: “He’s having an exciting time.”

ME:  “Casualty” is not real life.”

A bit later:

DAD:  “There’s another job.”

ME:  “He’s a bleeding QC!”

DAD:  “You like arguing.”

ME:  “You want to pay for the degree?”

If I snap, which I often do, I will be accused of being over-sensitive, that he’s just being helpful, giving me a few ideas. But he’s not just being helpful. My father is terrified and distrustful of the arts. Yes I've worked hard, yes I've written stuff, produced stuff, put on shows, written journalism, worked for small arts organisations...but where is the career path, the steady rise, the minutely worked out fall-back position? The pension??? For my father, who chartered his own career with the precision of an aeronautical engineer, my rather messy approach to life must be the equivalent of staring into the abyss.

“You know Keith?”

“Keith?”

“Donald’s son. Keith.”

“Uh – vaguely.”

“He’s got a job. Computers. Head-hunted. This January. You want to know what he earns?”

“Nop.” (And I really don’t.)

“Sixty thousand pounds.”

“Right”

“Sixty thousand pounds!” He chuckles to himself, and shakes his head at the wonder of it all. “Sixty thou-"

“OK! I heard you!”

“… And he’s younger than you…”

Of course where my father claims he is being helpful, my mother’s view is that it's all to do with Not Having Cleared the Table Enough and How She Let Me Get Away With Murder When I Was Little. She tells me, quite regularly, that she brought me up all wrong, made a complete mess of it, and therefore I’m never going to cope with The Real World, where everyone have to Put Up With Things They Don’t Like and Suffer.

Anyone brave enough to point out that Mum’s own life is, by most standards, a pretty cushie number, will generally be treated to a cascade of violent abuse and Feminist outrage. Don’t you understand, my mother works her fingers to the bone! Housework isn’t easy you know. Endlessly clearing. Endlessly tidying. Endlessly cleaning, ironing, gardening and shopping…(…or to be more precise, delegating cleaner, gardener and Tesco’s online shopper…)

But then my mother has never been the type to let trifling things like the truth get in the way. So, on balance, I prefer watching the box with my father, than discussing housework with Mum. Even if I don’t get to see much of the programme.

“You’re clever” (Inspector Morse)

“aggressive” (The Weakest Link)

“fat” (Tellietubbies)

“Why don’t you do that?”

Hair

Tomorrow is truly going to be a historic day. The Prime Minister finally going to tell us when he's off and my Dad is going to make an appointment to cut his hair. These two historic events are not as unrelated as they first seem: my father has been refusing to cut his hair as a protest until the day Blair goes.

Strangely, this protest has gone largely unnoticed by the unrepentant PM. In fact, the only person it is really affecting is my mother, who, for nigh-on two years, has had to put up with my father looking like a cross between a balding bottle-brush, Michael Bolton and Crusty the Clown.

Roll on tomorrow, I say. I'm not sure my parent's marriage can take the strain if Blair sticks around much longer.