[September 15 2004]

A Voyage Round My Mother.

So here's what I read at Cupcake last night. It's long, but reasonably self-explanatory.

Somebody told me recently that I wasn’t funny any more because I had lost my rage. So I fucked him sideways up the arse with a chainsaw and said, “are you laughing now, fucker?”

In reality he was quite right. I know I have some explaining to do. I’m really not as funny as I used to be, and there’s a reason for that. I’m only truly funny when I’m miserable, and I’m just not as miserable as I used to be. Which was miserable to the power of complete cunt. How could I have been anything but, though?

I come from a long line of miserable mad cunts from the bastard shores of hell. I am the result of my genes. One of my ancestors was killed when a boat fell on him. Another was shot by two of his own uncles after what was reputed to be his finest performance ever at the local music hall. I think he sang “I’ll Take You Home Again, Kathleen”. But he didn’t because he was dead. The rest of my forebears drank themselves to death or ended up in prison.

There was never any hope for me. I was born in Belgium for starters. Who the fuck is ever born in Belgium? And not only was I born in fucking Belgium, but my parents decided to call me Winnifred. Hey. Thanks, folks! Saddle me with Winnie the Pooh jokes for the rest of my life why don’t you? It’s not like I need more shit to ensure I am treated like the genetic freak I am, all my life.

We are a precocious family. My parents actually disliked each other even before they married. They only had sex three times. Once in 1961 after they were married, and twice years later during a period of Belgian marriage guidance. I am the product of the final coupling.

My mother’s Belgian obstetrician tried to kill me twice. When mum was pregnant with me her placenta began to disintegrate and she became rather ill. The doctor told her she must have an abortion or she would die during labour, and anyway, due to lack of oxygen and nutrients, I was just going to be a brain-damaged malformed lump, so it wouldn’t be much of a loss. Feel free to insert your own hilarious punchlines there.

My mother was extremely Catholic and decided to risk her own death for this sure-to-be brain-damaged malformed lump. How fortunate for me. Not content with his earlier efforts, the doctor, who was a little drunk when he delivered me, having been summoned unexpectedly from the annual Belgian obstetricians ball, tried to kill me again, this time more directly. Forgetting that my mother had already had two children, he decided she needed a little “widening”, and proceeded to cut through her vagina at the precise moment my premature little head popped out, conveniently slicing my entire head open in the process. I bear the scar to this day. And people wonder why I’m weird.

After that I wouldn’t eat much. Well, would you? So they kept me in hospital for quite a while. It was probably the happiest period of my life. The rest was pretty much downhill all the way.

There’s something romantic about having a drunken Irish father. The McCourt brothers have made a fucking fortune out of it. Hurrah for them. Less romantic is the drunken Irish mother, but I’m sure I can make some money out of her eventually.

“You and me against the world. Sometimes it feels like you and me against the world.”

“Hey Delta Dawn, what’s that flower you have on? Could it be a faded rose from days gone by?”

“I am woman hear me roar, in numbers too big to ignore”

I imagine not many of you are fans of Helen Reddy. You probably don’t even know who the fuck she is, and lucky you, is all I can say. As well as being a cruddy 1970s lounge singer, Helen Reddy was the one who alerted me to the fact that my mother might be a little odd. There would be evenings, starting when I was about seven, when my mother would crush me to her meagre bosom in the green leather swing chair in the living room. For hours she’d play The Best Of Helen Reddy over and over and over again, while swigging from a glass of wine and telling me my father slept with prostitutes. I didn’t know what the fuck she was talking about, but I knew even then that I hated Helen Reddy an awful lot.

My school years passed by in a bewildering blur of pain, embarrassment and nuns, underwritten by an ever-present fear of my evil drunken mother. She wasn’t violent but she was vicious in the way only a brilliant drunk can be. And, looking back, more than a little mad. Even that wouldn’t have been so bad if she didn’t have this terrible habit of passing out everywhere in her nightgown, legs spread, pubes peeking cheekily from her neglected grey knickers, as if to find someone, anyone, who could just love them. There is something quite terrible about seeing your mother’s pubic hair. It must be even more terrible seeing someone else’s mother’s public hair, so I didn’t have many friends staying the night. Also, pubes or no pubes, the risk of being awakened by my mother beating them with a towel while shrieking like a banshee at 5am, tended to put most of my friends off the domestic experience chez Eurotrash.

On my 21st birthday she fell over leaving a Greek restaurant and passed out, which rather amused my friends, and of course, caused me agonies of mortification. This was Hampstead, for God’s sake. One’s parents might be coke-snorting rock stars or actors, but to be a mere drunk was somehow so bourgeois. If you want to know where my father was, well, I’m not entirely sure. Either he was indeed off sleeping with prostitutes or he was off selling bits of oil rigs in Norway. Either way, he was off.

I’m ashamed to admit I had my own petty little form of revenge when I was a teenager. My mother was legendary for her incredibly strange hair. She had a kind of reddish-grey perm that was so extraordinary it appeared the remains of a dead sheep had landed on her head. Sometimes she’d pass out in an armchair in our TV room, so I’d light cigarettes and frazzle the tips of her hair even more, enhancing the sheep-like chic. Just a little sizzle here and there to liven up the fleece. I felt a secret thrill that I was contributing to the phenomenon that was my mother’s insanely weird hair. Looking back, I think I was almost as mad as she was. But these small acts of revenge while she was unconscious were our only release from her Stalinistic terror.

At one point, my mother developed this weird kind of sore on the back of her neck, which puzzled her hugely. It puzzled us too, it was right on the back of her neck, red, round and raw. She went to the doctor about it several times and he gave her various creams, but still the sore persisted. It was all very strange. Until one night my sister came to my room, giggling, almost choking with glee, and hustled me into the TV room, where my mother had passed out sitting on a bench that lined one room of the wall. Her head was lolling back on the window sill as usual and she was snoring heavily. My sister told me to go and have a close look at the back of her head.


I tiptoed over and oh, the joy, the fierce joy as the mystery of the sore was revealed. On the window sill, behind the precise spot my mother always sat to smoke, drink, berate us and then pass out, there was a small, plump, cactus plant. And every night, my mother would pass out, and every night her neck would fall right back on that cactus. Hence the mysterious sore.

We never moved it. It died at some point, the sore went away, and we had one less little victory in our lives.

Anyway, I went to university because I was supposed to. I drifted aimlessly through a law degree while snarling with socialist ferocity at my fellow students, who all seemed to be related to the Sultan of Brunei in some way and drove their gleaming white Mercedes to college. After I left university I became a burnt-file salvager, working for a paranoid American alcoholic midget called Helene, who defrauded insurance companies with astonishing devotion and success. It was like working for my mother, so I didn’t stay long.

I went back to university to study journalism because, well, I don’t actually recall why. By this stage I had ceased to care about anything much and what the fuck, one career is as good as another when you’re a trainee miserable cunt.

I passed my initiation as a fully-fledged miserable cunt while working as a journalist, uncovering scoops on sheep rustling and petty teenage vandalism in Gloucestershire. My first boss was a woman with bad breath and a psychotic streak called, well let’s just call her Fucking Bitchface. Fucking Bitchface hated journalists who were younger, thinner and more attractive than her. As she was hurtling down the wrong side of 30, was fat and had a face like a rotting avocado, this was generally the entire newsroom. Her halitosis was startling, her malevolence was astounding and her reach was long. I heard later she had ended up assistant deputy executive second lieutenant to the editor without portfolio of the Shithole Weekly Times, in Nowheresville, which pleased me greatly. Karma.

A few years later, my father ran off with his mistress, and my mother went mad and drank herself to death. By this stage I’d abandoned journalism to become even more miserable as a middle-management master of the universe in the corporate world in London. I was now an uber miserable cunt, if you like. I had a corporate Amex, a jet-set lifestyle and an attitude from the depths of hell.

Then I moved to America, where my misery Richter-scale hit heights never before imagined. I was breaking new ground here. Don’t get me wrong, I love New York, and in some ways it’s been my salvation, but by this stage, genetics, habit and the fact I worked for a right bunch of wankers had conspired to send me almost catatonic with despair. So I started a blog.

Apparently, I was quite funny then.

And now? Well, fate intervened in the shape of my dear friends Maccers and Elizabeth, who despite my valiant attempts to sabotage them, managed to prod me into a spanking new job caring about Britney Spears’ potential foot-fungi for a living. Now I have a job I love, excellent friends, and two fuck-off pairs of Manolos. I’m only a miserable cunt first thing in the morning. And I’m not funny any more.

Thank fuck for that.

Posted by eurotrash at 10:51 am

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