wake me up when it's over
Beware! Parents expect honesty from their teenage children, but their integrity can often backfire.
I had to write an essay about ‘My Family’ for a school Sociology project based on: ‘How Economic Freedom Has Changed Society’.
So, regardless of how embarrassing the content is, here’s what I submitted, my parents were absolutely furious!
They were angry because my Sociology teacher thought my essay was hilarious, so she posted it on the school website for all the bloody world to see. And, whilst I’m at it, don’t make any smart remarks about my initials. Blame my parents who, as you will soon understand, are responsible for absolutely everything that’s wrong with the world I’m forced to inhabit. Here goes.
They were angry because my Sociology teacher thought my essay was hilarious, so she posted it on the school website for all the bloody world to see. And, whilst I’m at it, don’t make any smart remarks about my initials. Blame my parents who, as you will soon understand, are responsible for absolutely everything that’s wrong with the world I’m forced to inhabit. Here goes.
How Economic Freedom Has Changed Society by Frazer Anthony Gough, AKA FAG by all his so-called moronic friends. Aged 15 and a half.
They reckon life is about compromise, don’t they? Well, not in my house, it’s not, it’s about contradiction.
Mum’s unilaterally decided we have to look after our gums better. So, she went out and bought an electric toothbrush that cost her over a hundred quid, and you’ve got to charge it every other day. Like HELLO? What’s wrong with a toothbrush that has an independent life? One that just sits quietly in a mug like old people on park benches.
Last week she was moaning at me that I’m not sorting out my rubbish correctly. We have to sift through everything with forensic attention to detail. There’s a whole row of colour coded plastic boxes in the garden. “How do you justify all this plastic mum?” She just went pale and flicked the stress band around her wrist. No wonder she’s stressed, Binday Eve is a nightmare here. Oh, don’t get me started on bottles—green, brown and white. They all have to be specifically classified too.
Hello, we are the Gough family Curators of Crap. On a Wednesday, when the bin men come, the front of our house looks and smells like a toxic landfill site.
Then there’s Dad. He makes me want to barf with his worm farm, his water butt and his stinking compost heap. They all cost a fortune to maintain, especially the worms. There’s the car too, that’s electric so as a result, we can’t go anywhere in it unless Dad can plug it in every half an hour. That’s alright though because Mum and Dad can’t see or smell electricity, so it doesn’t count as a pollutant.
Mum claims she’s an Eco-Warrior so consequently, she won’t buy anything unless it’s sold in a paper bag or eat meat. She will eat fish once a week if the shop owner can prove it’s been line-caught. Preferably by a Welsh farmer with a piece of string tied to a stick and a worm dangling off an old coat hook. Death by natural causes. The fact that the fish basically suffocates to death doesn’t seem to matter. Contradiction is a way of life here.
My favourite place in the whole world is Gran’s house. It smells of baking, jam, toast, mugs of tea and bleach. The heating at Gran’s house is turned up so high the temperature is almost tropical. I want to go and live there, but Geraldine (my mum) says; ‘Oh no, absolutely not, over my dead body young man.’. I could easily arrange that, but I’d just end up in prison, which is much the same as being at home, so why make the effort.
I do get time-out occasionally. I went to the cinema last week where me Daz and Max drank about five litres of Pepsi, ate half a kilo of pick ‘n’ mix each and, went to Burger King after. A sugar rush and fast food are the closest I’ll ever get to experiencing drugs of any class.
Max’s mum once threatened to call the CPS because Max had told her I was being forced to live like a Victorian orphan. She came around here to check up on me and ended up drinking a whole bottle of elderflower wine with Geraldine. Now they’re best friends, they regularly make jam whilst getting pissed together.
Last weekend my mum’s sister came over for lunch with a bunch of flowers. Jeez, that was a mistake. As soon as my aunt was out the door, mum burst into tears. “Peter,” she said to dad, cradling the flowers in her arms like they were a sick baby, “only yesterday these precious blooms were free to grow and multiply, now they’re nothing but a futile, overindulgent, decoration.”
She was in mourning for about two days. The flowers were hung upside-down from the kitchen ceiling, alongside the dream catchers and the wind chimes. Geraldine caresses them every day like some kind of Medieval fertility ritual. We’re all watching helplessly now as they slowly die. They stink like hell too.
When I go to my mates’ houses, their bathrooms are full of all sorts of cool stuff. Ours looks like a prison washhouse. Mum hasn’t shampooed her hair for fourteen years, luckily for Peter, he hasn’t got any, well not much, so that’s a saving. Except when he uses the electric clippers to trim what’s left of it. His hair clippings have to be left in a plant pot in the garden so that the birds or mice can use it for their nests. I’m not making this up, you know.
I’ve only ever stayed in a hotel once. That was because we had to go to a wedding. When we go on holiday we go camping, it’s the only time our flesh ever comes into contact with synthetic fibres of any kind.
All our clothes come from charity shops. Then, when they’re more worn out than when Mum bought them, she takes them back, except for the sweaters. She unravels those and knits squares to make into blankets for famine relief funds. She knits whilst she watches TV. I mean, get a grip!
My Mum, Geraldine, works part-time for a local community farm project, don’t ever dare to call her Jerry, Peter does occasionally, trust me, the resulting lecture on unnecessary abbreviation really isn’t worth the headache.
Basically, the farm project is an excuse for her to boss people about all day and walk pigs on a lead. Peter’s a biology teacher, but he’s not allowed to talk about dissecting eyeballs or dead rats because it’s bad for Geraldine’s nerves. I don’t think Geraldine likes Peter one bit. I reckon she’d rather be married to Bob Flowerdew; she thinks he’s Jesus reincarnated. She’s got a signed mugshot of him hanging in the kitchen, except it’s all a bit faded now so he looks like a snarling serial killer.
She teaches women-only planking too on our lawn or, during winter, in our living, as far as I can make out planking is a form of legalised torture.
You’re meant to lay face down, preferably on an ancient burial mound, facing East, holding a press-up position until you can no longer comfortably speak or breathe, also, if the smell in the house after one of these planking sessions is anything to go by, a significant side effect of planking is uncontrollable flatulence.
I guess I should congratulate Geraldine because these morons are actually paying to be humiliated by her.
Peter makes his own beer because he’s not allowed to buy it, that smells like a stagnant pond. He makes it in those big plastic water fountain things, Peter says they’re recycled, I reckon he nicked them. He’s allowed one glass of his beer a night and two at the weekend after he’s tended to his worms, turned the compost heap and jet-washed the drive. That takes about two-thousand gallons of water. Mega waste of resources if you ask me, but no one ever does.
Geraldine was having a grouch about how high our food bills were the other day. Peter gets his calculator out and says to me, “We need to shave a bit off the grocery bills, Frazer. What do you think, mate?”. Like why is it my fault?
So, I said, “It might be a good idea if we stopped buying ‘super organic free-range macro-bionic vegetables’ or whatever they’re called. Grown in Wiltshire and delivered all the way to Sutton in chilled vans that pump out petrol fumes and clog up the roads. Why can’t we just go to Tesco like everyone else?”
Geraldine started hyperventilating because I’d mentioned the ‘T’ word and Peter had to make her numerous cups of chamomile tea, end of that conversation.
In my opinion, as if anyone cares, economic freedom has had no effect on society whatsoever, at least not in our house. My parents have contrived a lifestyle that is so miserably complicated we exist outside the rules of any familiar cultural identity and are therefore unacquainted with the fundamental guiding principles of contemporary social order.
In short, on the grounds that I have been albeit unconsciously rendered a socially isolated outcast, I feel I am unable to contribute to this topic of discussion.
Literally, everything about my life stinks. Wake me up when it’s over.