They are all Garys to me.

 It takes me a long time to make friends. I am very wary. I didn't really question it until a couple of weeks ago. I think I am suspicious of people because I got invited to peoples houses as a kid with some pretty weird family dynamics.

For instance. When I was a junior school, there was a kid. Let's call him Gary. All kids were called Gary in those days*

*For the purposes of my little memoire all kids will be called Gary. Of course not all kids were called Gary, that would be madness and make my system pointless. If you were called Gary I apologise, if I called you any other name under my system, people would realise that your real name was Gary and there would we be? Just be thankful I called you Gary to prevent people knowing your real name was Gary, Gary!*

*I will work out a name for the girls later. I don't feel there are any comparable female versions of the mighty Gary in that decade. Maybe Tracy? I'll have a think...Oooo Tina! Yes, I think we have it Ladies and gentlemen!

Gary invited me round to his home after school to play games. I didn't feel this was too bad an idea. He seemed like a good kid. Slightly chubby with a basin haircut, brown hair and freckles. I seem to remember a tank top and shorts. Your basic trainee bank clerk. Just add water and wait a few years. I don't remember his dad. I am imagining a balding short man who smokes a pipe and smell of Hornby train sets.

I do remember his mum, a short dumpy lady that had set scoops of ginger ridged hair framing her plump lip-sticked face like a honeycomb halo. Dresses that looked like sofa material. A thick flowery textile bent into shape by fashionable ship builders. She looked very comfortable to sit on, just throw on a few cushions and a cat.

Their house was nothing to write home about. Better than ours of course. I have the instinct that they owned it. There was nice wooden polished furniture and the slow ticking of expensive clocks. 

So it felt like the last place someone would try and knife you in the face.

And yet... during a game that I played defeating Gary, he drew a pen knife, a small Christmas cracker pen knife( Yes, we had knives in Christmas Crackers in those days) unfolded and pinned me to the ground trying his hardest to stab me in the face. His little freckled face all screwed up in an angry red eye popping snarl. I kicked him off and screamed for help. His Mum rescued me grabbing her basin haired bad loser. I simply made my excuses and left. Leaving a poor woman to deal with her troubled son. Not sure if I thanked Mrs Gary for their hospitality. My Mum always said I should do that. Oh well, I'm sure she got over it.

I don't think I did.

I steered clear of Gary from then on in. This was not an isolated behaviour from the little people I was surrounded by.

I do have a really early memory. We had a garden with a gate round the side alley. I must have been 4 or 5. Could have been less. The children of our estate were wild. Roaming around in packs. They banged on my gate. We had a nice front garden, which they had walked up to rap on. Climbing up on the fence like Jackals to laugh and taunt me.

My fortress of solitude was breached. However, my mum, let me go out and play with these demon kids. Some of which became my school friends. Gary in particular.

What the heck was my mum doing? On a couple of levels. 1st, she wasn't busy as far as I could tell. Her job at that point was to look after me. Telly was 2 and a half channels. BBC1, ITV and BBC 2 you could just see if it wasn't raining too hard through the static digital blizzard. 2nd, WHAT ARE YOU DOING JEAN, he's 4 to 5 years old and your letting him run about on the streets?

I remember one of the games Gary thought would be fun to play was a delightful game of "Chicken". If you are not fully up to speed with the rules "chicken" it involved the players (ME) to run in front of cars as they tootled down the street. Only for my first run, Gary got me to run in front of a Lorry. It felt like a big one.

I think it was quite close. He honked his horn. I ran and screamed. I got across the road experiencing bullet time as I traverse the tarmac. I blame my premature greyness on that one incident.

I didn't play chicken again. I was stupid, but not quite that stupid.

Bloody Garys!

Leverage.

 I was born in Farnborough Hospital in January 1966. It was miles from where we lived in Crystal Palace, the reason for the inconvenient baby producing was that my mother had survived TB when she was a child. Being hospitalized for most of her child and teenage years. Her dad died whilst she was in hospital. She had it tough.

The age gap between myself and my siblings is 15 years and 10. I never really thought about it until relatively recently. Why did did my parents wait to produce this glorious little human?

Pure speculation on my part, so here goes.

I was leverage

I believe they just couldn't afford 3 children. So what changed?

My existence gave them a tipping point to a better area. KENT. That magical garden of England.

They were living in a block of flats in Crystal Palace. Mum hated it. I remember she described small children being tied to lamp posts playing outside their homes. Parents using the latest rope nanny technology if you like. There were bomb sites everywhere still from the war. My brothers were chucking bricks at each other. She wanted out. Who can blame her?

One way to do this was to have another child which would push you up the waiting list to get a nice council house in Kent. The plan worked. At 11 months old in the depths of winter we moved to Orpington. The house was a good semi detached house. It had a lovely big garden with two apple trees. Not the roughest area in Orpington, it had a park nearby. Compared to where they had come from it was an upgrade.

Only...What do we do with this kid now? Dad was against it, as you know, and I bet my brothers weren't too chuffed at this little kid changing the family dynamic and making everyone poorer. My mum had to give up work to look after me. She was employed in a toy shop before she had me, putting all the load on my dad, who was a milkman at the time. I am guessing the pay wasn't great.

Now a little aside here. I don't think rents were that expensive so I don't really know what my dad was doing with the money. I do know things were tight because when I was about 3, playing with some lovely metal toys...Big metal toys you could sit on. My dad yoinked me off them and sold them to a rag and bone man for a couple of quid accompanied by me screaming little tears down my chubby, dusty cheeks. That didn't seem to phase him.

 I loved that metal double decker bus. I used to have a little PG tips monkey figure I used as a ticket inspector. Funny what you remember.

I did talk to him about that when I was in my 30's. He thought it was funny. Probably thinking " What was I like?" 

Mum did take control of the finances later I believe. Maybe he was gambling. Who knows?

That's where I grew up. Orpington is a strange place. It is incredibly old in some respects. After the war there was a huge building programme and with relatively new train stations they could get people out of London to resettle. Part of the glorious commuter belt. I think that was part of what made these London borough towns a weird place to live in. People scarred by war and no real old community spirit to help them deal their shared trauma.

Well... at least he was honest.

 Against everyone's expectations, my Dad made it to the ripe old age of 90. Almost 91... he clawed at life using the armchair as an anchor on this mortal coil. After his heart attack at 80 he decided the best course of action was to move as little as possible. 

Refusing any exercise, he sat in the armchair, and basically declined. The only times we could get him out was to have his cataracts done. So he lived in fear of death. Keeping going for 10 more years of non living.

It was heart breaking.

What was interesting was, and this sounds bad. When he developed a form of Alzheimer's he mellowed. He became more approachable. Before his illness he would delight in his role as contrarian. To put it bluntly he would thrive in getting you angry. With the onset of his mental decline he became more gentle. My mother, not so much. That's a different story.

Also, he became super honest. So much so he decided to share a truth with me when we were visiting with our children. Within earshot of my daughter he told me that he never wanted to have me.

I said "Pardon.."

" I never wanted you. I have always regretted it."

I thought for a moment, looking around at my children, his grand children happily playing and chatting to their grand mother. Everyone seemed very happy.

" But you don't think that now, right?"

" Yeah, I do."

My response was to ignore it. Bury it. It wasn't until long how he died and events with my mother's attitude with me changed from my biggest advocate in the family with her own mental decline I realised the what world I had been living in when I was growing up.

My Mum was my force field against the rest of the family.

Diary of a little Known Artist

 Guess what? I hit 60. Getting to this milestone you begin to think.

 It's like doing a long run round a park and thinking, "Did I really travel that far?"

I thought I had a fairly ordinary childhood. Working class parents, living in Orpington in the late 60's to the 80's with a bunch of people all in the same boat. The majority of Families plopped from London to the "Garden" of England. Raised by the parents, or the children of parents who witnessed the Blitz.

Parents like my dad, who had seen a boy machine gunned to death in his playground by a German fighter plane. His father, referred to as POP, a fireman at the time, drowning kittens in a bucket in front of my young Dad because they couldn't afford to feed them. My mum had TB as a child during the war and was in a hospital until she was a late teen. Shunned by her family she had to make it on her own.

  These people raised me, and I don't think that was particularly abnormal in my area to have a family like this. Looking back, I think we were all slightly traumatised as a community by the violence of the war, indeed wars of the last century.

It was a very angry, violent area.

 So, with this little Blog I intend to write little bits about my life as a form of therapy. Because I've come to the conclusion I might be a messed up a bit. I am hoping that I might be able to reflect and learn a bit about myself. Hopefully having a laugh along the way.

Britain's Got Cow Talent!

Rocket Bloke Vs the 60ft Yeti Bear Monster!

I've made it to the final of the Rob Knox film festival! https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/rob-knox-film-festival-2021-tickets-162535061745?utm-campaign=social&utm-content=attendeeshare&utm-medium=discovery&utm-term=listing&utm-source=cp&aff=escb

Zazzle Easter card sale.

 

World of Cow Easter card
by StiKtoonz

Sold a lovely easter card on my Zazzle shop. 15% off with code MIDMARCHSALE