Sadderdays

Once the boozing began

Before the batterings began

I don’t go out to work and the cleaning is the same every day, so answer me this: why do Saturdays feel different to other days? I have the same routine every day: get up, sit at computer, eat. I ignore my family as much on Saturdays as I do the rest of the week; why does it feel different? Granted, Saturday breakfast is my fingernails – Spud plays rugby on Saturdays – but not much else changes.

Have you ever watched rugby played by real people instead of those butch blokes on the telly? When I say ‘real people’ I mean, of course, my baby. At his last game he played prop and as he is half the size of a normal human being (he’s the image of his father) and belongs to me, it was painful to watch. He tackled an opposite number who usually eats kittens for breakfast, and brought him down so hard it registered on the Richter scale, and then had to be helped from the field as his oppo had flattened him. I didn’t panic and merely stayed frozen to my spot until the Hub reassured me Spud was not going to become a quadriplegic this week. The Hub tells me rugby will make a man of any boy. What he doesn’t say is that will make human jelly of any boy’s mother. Watching his last game reminded me why I stopped going to last year’s games. I don’t mind if he wants to add more photos to his bruise collection, but he can’t expect me to watch.

‘Out of sight is out of mind’ is this mother’s philosophy. It works brilliantly with Tory Boy. He has been home all summer and if he tells me he’s going into Manchester or to a club or pub or to the corner shop, I can’t settle until he’s safe home again, for how will he be safe from the nasty knife-wielding thugs without his diminutive mama by his side? When he was at uni and I had no idea where he was or what time he would be there to, I slept like a child and put on three stone (no nervous energy to burn off cheese & onion crisps, you see). It didn’t matter that he went on fifteen hour bar crawls or wrote provocative articles for his campus newspaper – I didn’t have to see him passed out in the hall or read his hate mail, so I felt great. Roll on 26th September when I can regain my fat!

Talking of earthquakes, TB is a good son. When the last one hit Preston, he phoned to let me know he was okay. I wasn’t worried till then because I didn’t know it had reached so far. He said it sounded like someone had dropped a large skip outside. Not like when we had the earthquake clusters here in Greater Manchester a few years ago. Remember those? The Hub thought the first one was a truck hitting the side of our house. The next one happened at lunch time and it was like being inside a tv’s fuzzy picture. In typical British fashion, the media reported that some people were rather annoyed that they lost their chimney pots. We don’t do great disasters, I’m thankful to say.

My only other experience of an earthquake was actually caused by a gold mine collapse in Jo’burg. I awoke to see my alarm clock and perfumes dancing on my dressing table, and I thought I dreamt it until I read next day’s paper. No-one was hurt in the collapse, I’m glad to report. Sometimes, watching big boys’ rugby is like experiencing an earthquake: lots of thwacking flesh and I’m all atremble.

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