Visiting

I was over at my parents’ house on Monday. I ate far more food than I do when I cook for myself. I always do. My mother still dishes out the kind of Herculean portions I used to put away when I was seventeen and most of my bodyweight was made up of blackheads.

I watched television programmes that I wouldn’t dream of watching at home – Countdown, Richard and Judy, Deal or No Deal - and had the sort of provincial conversations I only ever have on Mondays at my parents’ house, conversations about my niece coming third in a Yorkshire dancing competition and the recent health problems of the poor man who put up their Sky dish. It is like going back home to a very small island that I left as a young adult, one where the memory of Steve Irwin lives forever through endless repeats of the Crocodile Hunter Diaries and unfortunate residents keep having to have cameras put up there.

I don’t wish to mock at all. In fact I find it rather exotic and intriguing. It is like having a working grasp of a language you are nevertheless far from fluent in. The last time I was over there I took part in a conversation that went like this:

“I was talking to your aunt Reenie, and she - ”

“Reenie? Is that Stan’s wife?”

“No that’s Bernard.”

“Stan’s wife is called Bernard?”

“No! Reenie is married to Bernard. He got a badge for being disabled.”

The image that flashed instantly through my mind of course was that of victorious old man in a wheelchair being presented with a gold medal atop a podium, with runners-up on either side of him who are merely a bit lame.

“He's a poorly man, is Bernard," my mother said. Then she dropped her voice to a respectful whisper. "He had a camera put up there.”

Why? I thought, before the real meaning hit me.

“Mind you,” she went on, “He’s just ordered some shoes from Sandra’s catalogue…” She looked at me and nodded knowingly, leaving me to bridge the gap in rationale, which I was just about able to do without help. However I was completely stumped by the next revelation.

“Reenie’s got her kitchen in St Ives.”

Naturally I couldn’t help thinking, ‘but that’s such a long walk back if you forget to put sugar in your tea.’

“It’s either that or Eternal Bow,” my mother explained. “I forget now. It was on special offer at Argos. I bought her the condiment set for her birthday.”

There followed a polite pause, presumably so that I could catch up. I almost certainly didn’t make it the whole way.

“Anyway, Reenie had a fall. She slipped on the kitchen floor and hurt her leg. They put her a wooden one in.”

I was more than a little shocked as you can imagine. “A wooden leg?” I gasped.

“A wooden floor,” my mother said, frowning oddly at me as if finally beginning to realise something she may have suspected for many years. “When they did the kitchen out. That’s why she slipped. Them wooden floors are dangerous.”

The point of the conversation – not that there needs to be a point to the conversations I have at my parents’ house; over there words loop around in aimless, happy configurations, like kites – was to ask if I would call in at Reenie’s house on the way home and take her some flowers. This I was happy to do despite the fact that my aunt Reenie had been fairly cool towards me ever since I electrocuted her cat.

It was an accident of course; it usually is (and unless I invent something of world importance in the next forty years, I think I may have just drafted my own epitaph), but people can be unforgiving where injured pets are concerned. In any case, I only electrocuted the damn thing out of a misplaced desire to befriend it.

What happened was that I walked across the living room to where it was perched on the windowsill, watching me with lazy distrust. Unfortunately I somehow managed to charge myself up with static electricity from the living room carpet, which I duly released by way of a lightening bolt straight through the cat. It shot five feet in the air with a noise that only an electrocuted cat can make. It never trusted me after that, and consequently I never quite progressed up Reenie’s list of favourite relatives.

I am happy to say that time has mellowed her a great deal. In fact both Reenie and my uncle Bernard were touchingly pleased to see me.

“Eee, it’s our Gary!” Reenie beamed from her batwing chair. Her leg was resting on one of those fussy little pouffes with tassels around the edge. It was bare and white and veiny, and the lower half was covered in a tight bandage. Her leg I mean, not the pouffe. That was mauve, if you must know. “By ‘eck, we haven’t seen you since…” Her face momentarily darkened as she struggled with a memory.

“Years!” Bernard said helpfully. He was sitting on two-thirds of a three-seater couch, not so much disabled as enormous. He was a bus driver when I last saw him, but now he would have a real problem merely getting through the double doors never mind squeezing behind the wheel.

“Years, aye,” Reenie echoed, smiling warmly at me. “Oooh, we’ll have to have a picture! Bernard, get your camera out.”

“NO!” I yelled, and the pair of them stared at me as if I had just electrocuted their cat again. “I mean, I have to go now. I’ll send you one.”

I gave Reenie the flowers and left in such a hurry that I slipped on the wooden floor and twisted my ankle. I think the cat would have enjoyed that.