The Landlady
A weekend with mum means being locked out in the rain
The Small Daughter and I recently spent a rather torturous weekend at my mothers in Stoke-on-Trent. Well, I say a weekend, but we arrived at 7.30pm on the Saturday evening and left at Monday lunchtime so technically, we were there for just one day. I can assure you that it was the longest day of my life and it will be a very long time before I can muster up the courage to go back again, in spite of the fact that The Small Daughter thoroughly enjoyed herself in that 7-year-old way of hers…
“I was dragged to ‘sort out’ the DVD player which, according to my mother, needed a ‘stunt lead’“
Whenever I visit my mother, I always set out with the best of intentions and sally forth behind an impenetrable aegis of grown-upness. Alas, within less than five minutes, my mother always manages to crumble my defences and reduce me to a surly, monosyllabic and extremely difficult teenager by criticising my attire or manner of speaking before I’ve even closed the front door behind me.
To make matters worse, she still displays a wedding photograph of me and The Ex Husband, even though we split up very acrimoniously over six years ago. Before I’d got my shoes off, I was dragged to the living room to ‘sort out’ the DVD player which, according to my mother, needed a ‘stunt lead’.
My mother can barely switch on the television – even though she’s had one since 1966 – and approaches technology in a manner that makes Catweazle look like Bill Gates. I discovered that her ‘scart’ lead was unplugged, but she was convinced it was called a ’stunt’ lead because a man – far superior to me, clearly – had told her so. Why the same superior being couldn’t have plugged in the bloody scart lead, I have no idea.
Bedtime came as a relief, until I realised that my mother’s two grandfather clocks were currently in perfect working order and still chiming – about one minute behind each other on the hour, every hour. A three bedroom semi is not big enough to take one, let alone two grandfather clocks and I’d imagine my mother could have taught the Gestapo a thing or two about sleep deprivation although The Small Daughter snored all the way through each chiming.
You might think I’m now making this up, but The Man Who Lives Next Door breeds large tropical birds and has a huge aviary in the back yard full of the feathered creatures. Just as both clocks finished chiming 5am, we were treated toa dawn chorus of parrots, miner birds and macaws. How relaxing.
On the first morning, I set out for a run even though it looked like rain – as it perpetually does in Stoke. When I returned, it had indeed started to rain and my mother had gone out with The Small Daughter to see her friends Mr and Mrs Jones. Typically – as I remember from my real teenage years – she had locked all the doors and not left me a key, so I had to sit in the garden reading a soggy ‘Nazi on Sunday’ until their return.
The rest of the day passed in a rather chilly blur and I was reduced to watching Heartbeat and Midsommer Murders. Just before bedtime, to my horror, The Small Daughter decided to regale her nana with the sad, but true tale of how someone got punched in the face at one of our recent parties. Fortunately, the clocks struck 10pm just as she got to the punching bit. Talk about saved by the bell.
