Alas and alack – and similar other breast-beating rubbish.
Oliver, the house yoof, fifteen next week and repellent in every teenaged particular, has found a way to taunt his parents. Up until now this has been quite difficult to do, I'm pleased to say.
I don't care for rap music above half, for example, but we old folk defend to death his right to mooch round the house muttering dark, if rhythmic, phrases I don't wish to have translated lest I discover their meaning. We watched The Hip Hop Years out of self-defence and found ourselves thoroughly enjoying it – not to mention where we could talk East Side/West Side with some authority, which hugely aggravated the little bugger, so points to us, I think.
In the same vein, whilst we poor, sad people muddle along trying to make ourselves understood in English, we mostly put up with the almost permanent use of his own patois, 'Ollin' - not unlike gibberish but with less syntax - simply because that's how he and the Massive communicate. God alone knows if they understand each other, although I suspect not, since every sentence contains at least one "Wo'??"
However, things have come to an ugly head. He has been to Wales.
No jokes, please, about sheep, sisters or any other derogatory comments concerning the principality and its inhabitants. It's far worse than that. He discovered a noodle product in a pot that requires only water to be added before consumption can take place.
This is what comes of allowing your growing offspring to take part in half term activities, I suppose. I fretted, like any mother, about the usual 'away from home' trouble spots – girls, baths, unchanged socks, but somehow it didn't occur to me to worry about his snacking options.
I've always thought these things were an offshoot of establishments about which we are supposed to know nothing. Whilst I haven't actually seen a label promoting The Porton Down Food Company ('Glow While You Grow') I have nightmare visions of white-coated lab assistants looking at the horrifying results of their rat-fed
experiments and saying "Nah, we'll never get this past the Geneva Convention – call it Sweet 'n' Sour and we'll do another mix for the chemical warfare project."
They are lush, apparently. Obviously my taste buds have become senile and useless along with the rest of me, because I signally failed to detect the merest hint of lush. All I could taste was a chilling foretaste of a luckless future, when things of this ilk had become the norm. Thank goodness I'll be long dead by then. I devoutly hope.
I remarked on this to a colleague, who sought to allay any fears I might have about these wretched things ruining a defenceless palate. "It's a youth thing. He's fifteen. He'll grow out of it - I did." Well of course I was hugely encouraged. Especially since the colleague in question had breakfasted off a King Size Mars Bar, a lemon mousse and a hot cross bun. No damage done there, then.
Revenge is the only option. It'll have to be subtle, though. There's no point sitting down to something delicious and giving our dere little lad a plastic container full of flavour enhancer – only last weekend he binned the chance to eat roast ribs of Aberdeen Angus in favour of grazing with the Massive, so that won't work.
I did think about doing away with him, but it seemed a tad extreme even to me and in any case, with that amount of preservative inside him he won't degrade for about fifty years and could cause untold damage to our fragile ecosystem in the meantime. How the hell are genetically modified crops supposed to flourish when selfish
children aren't breaking down into friable soil the way they used to?
No, he must live. That way, I can go to meet him at school carrying a huge placard saying "OLI LOVES SPINACH".
Just call it tough love.
