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Last night I sat and watched Hidden Lives: Middle-Aged Mummies Boys Car Crash TV. I can't stop watching. It was a subtle blend of depressing and humiliating for the men on-screen. As my housemate came home she requested I explain what was going on-screen and why there was a fat man in the bath with his Mother shouting at him. "Look!" I said "Look at all the filth that's washing off of him" and provided gurgling sounds as I heaved, much like the plughole he was trying to unblock with his own dirt. Rahan has never spent a night away from home. He is 34. I was watching with my eyes transfixed to screen as his mum cuts his nails with what appear to be wire cutters. The nails are winning for a bit, but give way to soft philadelphia foot-cheese. Fans of the force will have digged Rahan's Return of the Jedi bedsheet which he has kept since he was a child. It was sad to see him him get thrown out my his mum though. But clearly it worked as he got a flat and a job straight away. What was really good though, a brilliant piece of documentary making that could only be done in a Five production, was Rahan going to the pub on his own for the first time in his life and talking to the camera, saying how free he felt. How he'd freed himselves from the shackles of his child-like past and was a man now. I'm free. I'm an adult. Freeze frame on Rahans joyous yell - up comes the 'where are they now' blurb: Rahan lost his job after three days. It was like a spoof of a spoof of a spoof.
The musician was pretty good too. They are known as KIPPERS - Kids In Parents' Pockets Eroding Retirement Savings, and this guy seemed to be sending them to the grave. It was well portrayed though. With shots of his parents heading up to A&E or his Mother walking one step at a time up the stairs to wake him up with a cup of tea. For instance, on the big day of his music gig, the 40 year old sleeps in late, has his mother prepare him breakfast and then goes back to bed to sleep 'to help him rest his thoughts' his mother explains. He is seen donning a tux and tweaking his bow tie. big build up in the narrative. They spent the entire show building up to his concert. A pasta restaurant. Pan, focus, pan, focus, settle on shot of someone yawning, pan. Cut. people getting their coats and leaving. Half empty restaurants. Yawning. They did show him looking for flats though, which was ace as he stood in a room clapping and explaining he was a musician and that the acoustics weren't quite right, which was just brilliant as he was a piano tutor, and pianos come with a sustain pedal. David Brent stylings, all real concept.
There was a third guy who didn't seem as bad, but he was still just a rubbish hubby to his new wife. You could see she was hoping her husband who owned his own building business would move out of his mums house and build a family home. Nope. He just went from one Mother to the other. The shot of his wifes face was worth it though. She looked like she was going to twist his head like a clowns squeeky balloon animal.
But why would they want to? Security for Rahan, who confessed to not know what to do without his mother. The musician seemed to just be leeching his parents lifeforce with a content, disinterested grin and Welshman number 3, seemed to have a massive genuinely loving bond with his mother who enjoyed her own freedom as much as she enjoyed his company.
So I suppose I had better tack on some kind of talking point about this and I did wonder why the three men had no desire to fly the coop. Our middle man, Musicboy, genuinely looked like he didn't want to do anything except live comfortably, which would be forgivable if he planned to look after his parents when they were no longer able to do it themselves. Someone thinks he may well have packed them off to a home by that point. This first step of independence can shape you as a person too.
When I left home for the first time it was exhilirating. No more coming home on tip-toes. I could stay up all night and leave my socks on the arm of the chair. G....girls could stay over without my dad thinking we were having a sex. Girls could come over and have a real sex if they wanted to. So there was potential. I could finally be told no when I asked 'would you like to come back to my place. Actually my first home was with a particularly scary landlady whom was a friend of a friend. She was kind of creepy but she mellowed over the years. My basement bedroom was infested with woodlice and I could never tell if it was morning or night when I was down there. But I could come and go as I wanted, hassle free. It was a dream come true. So what was your first flight from home like gentle TMO-erz and what kind of hilarity ensued?...
[ 21.10.2005, 11:26: Message edited by: New Way Of Decay ]
posted
From the friendly yet boring streets of Gaborone to the action-packed streets of Brixton. It was the business. Three days after I arrived some nutter stabbed three people at the tube station.
I like Brixton. Occationally they have a random culling of teh freaks.
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I packed a rucksack and caught a train to Essex, and was just glad to out of there. I'd been spending the previous couple of summers in london with my girlfriend anyway, so it wasn't a big deal. Just a massive, massive relief to get away from my parents and my brother, because they they couldn't stand me, and vice versa. I can't spend more than a weekend with my parents without getting frustrated and depressed, so it's not something I miss.
quote:Originally posted by Dr. Benway: I can't spend more than a weekend with my parents without getting frustrated and depressed, so it's not something I miss.
Yeah I'm the same. I love my folks, and they do do all they can to help me, but they drive me up the wall man. I spent most of my childhood and teens just being silent, and trying to diffuse the atmosphere.
So I kind of exploded into university, when the time came, and was just relieved to be free. I can't fathom people my age who still live at home - I wouldn't be able to stand it. I have nightmares about having to go back. Probably the bleakest time of my life was the ten months between leaving university and getting my first proper job, when I was living with my folks and just applying to job after job after job. Pnce I got out it was just... relief, like when you're waiting for hours to take a piss and then it all comes rushing out. It wasn't even a great place I moved into: just a room in the house of a prison warden called Alan. But, I was out and could do my all the things I always wanted (smoke and drink in my room, mainly).
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My departure was a living breathing cliché! I was driven off to university by mum and dad, with all my worldly goods, except most of the junk which stayed at home, in a Volvo. I moved into halls on campus which was a house shared with 10 other first years which ranged from utter ***** to bizarrely anal girls who tidied their pen holder every day. The kitchen had plastic school chairs and we had to take down the curtains we put up because they were a fire hazard. In winter when the arctic winds blew across campus we switched on the oven and left the door open for warmth. The two highlights of that year were going to the uni Rocksoc night and discovering that you could get clubs that didn’t play chart and disco and were full of squaddies, and the time that the most ******* housemate declared that he would do that fit bird from Placebo even though she had rubbish tits.
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posted
It was a bit nasty at the time, having to live in bedsits for the next SEVEN YEARS and all that, but the actual story of how I got to been thrown is funny in the context that I'm not a tramp or anything now.
I'll tell it you next week, and you'll see what I mean.
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quote:Originally posted by Roy: This sounds like it should be a thread.
You bastard. I give you a thread and then you come up with a thread idea in it without even contributing with the funny elelments to what's becoming a very tearful upbringing. I can't beleieve it.
quote:Originally posted by Roy: This sounds like it should be a thread.
You bastard. I give you a thread and then you come up with a thread idea in it without even contributing with the funny elelments to what's becoming a very tearful upbringing. I can't beleieve it.
Sorry. I was trying to NOT get involved with anything, you know. I was fully intending to post the funny story over the weekend. Trust me.
I could, technically, be one of those Middle Aged Mummies Boys. Sort of.
In the main, I still live at home. There are massive financial incentives for this, looking at property prices round by me.
Luckily, in reality, I actually spend half the week at Nurse When's and my "co-habiting" Parent spends half the year away in Spain looking after an elderly Aunt. So, actually, it's not that bad.
I get my freedom, a higher disposable income, and my washing & ironing done for half the year freeing up valuable drinking time.
If houses were cheaper, I'd be out like a shot (and Lordy, I need the room for my toys). The (mutually agreed) plan is that I am to buy our current flat at a small but significant discount (sitting tenant, housing association), effectively kick said parent out into the snow with the orphans, and force someone to rehouse her. I'll need a wage rise first, though, and I ain't going to get one sat here posting that's fer sure.
I suppose moving in with Nurse When is a possibility, but not one either of us would consider. I enjoy loud music, herbal cigarettes and leaving ninja stealth pants in the bathroom too much. And she doesn't really have room for all my "shit" (IE: Valuable Posessions) anyway.
Jesus: Today I've admitted to playing D&D, and living at home. Fuck. Ing. Hell. Take a look in the MIRROR, When.
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I lived in a bedsit for nine months or so in my mid twenties whilst doing an MA.
It was the one sandwiched between the crack dealer and the wife beater. North facing so that there was no danger of being relieved by sunshine. The meter ate pound coins and then spluttered them back limply at me out of the single electric heater - running around after them in the style of Homer Simpson facing a tennis ball machine used to warm me up.
Actually, I embroider. It was a heroin dealer but crack sounds better.
The spluttering and false starts are what make the leaving home story depressing. I launched myself on an unsuspecting university all hair and green (green!) Doctor Martens in 1993 for goodness' sake and emerged several years later as the requisite slightly emaciated chainsmoker with a good grounding in nudity, cheap shocks and one woman plays.
And still, seven years after the first launch I find myself voluntarily skint and writing essays in a bedsit, cursing Jarvis Cocker and all his witterings about how we'd be fully grown in the year 2000.
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posted
I briefly mentioned my moving out story on chat last night: I was sixteen and moved into my own apartment with six years older boyfriend (I paid most of rent), but my parents still made me call them to let them know I was home "by curfew".
Even though the only expense they covered was insurance, I was just so happy to be out that I dutifully obliged.
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