Friday 28 January 2011

Are you a Hobbit?

If you can't call the Teenager a Hobbit who can you call.

I am no doctor, but a fact is a fact. Apparently according to a long forgotten documentary-educational promo- in strange but true telly progs ~ extremities go first for the extra inches and grow larger than other body parts first.

Let us not get smutty, when it is enough to say, if the Teenager has a ring around his neck and thinks Middle Earth is a recognisable location for a holiday destination, this theory has my blessing based on the physical evidence before me.

Big Foot has landed, my boy is a Hobbit.

Sadly this obviously funny rant is getting scant regard by the youth of today, in fact I will go as far to say there is not respect for scientific thoery. He thinks he deserves to be treated as a fully fledged adult-in-waiting. But he is from a sock-stealing hobbit tribe. He is a Hobbit.

Is it my fault, I honestly ask you, if his feet are causing a bigger footprint than is absolutely necessary from a torso-leg-foot ratio proportional scenario. He considers I am insensitive.

I am welcoming a changeling hobbit into my family as a son, how sensitive does he want me to be?

Saturday 22 January 2011

Nays and Pots

Socialist principles were once my foundation stones of my teenage idealism. Now I am a parent of teenagers facing the career choices - now is the time for the beast to be revealed, the inner Tory will out.

And to my former ideals of the far fields of level playing, the fondest for survival of the fittest and the natural order of the modern world. To this I say thrice nay and pots and ism. This is a matter that blood is thicker than water and this is my pension plan, I want a payback, when my bed-wetting days return and the commode is my new throne. I want a son or daughter running about when I am three score and something large, wondering if the old fella remembers a name or two and congratulating me on my lack of dribbling.

For this "start them young" ladder-climbing viz-a-viz XXL nappy changing equation - I would overcome teenage academic ambivalence by having words in the ears of the social network called contacts in middling management.

My boy will have a paper round and my taxes will have to compensate for guilt lapses.

Well I never...a bread winning Avenger

Well I never.....

I return from a business trip with a feeling that while the cats away the mice will leave the sinking ship and find another big cheese to milk or something like that.

I would like to pretend it was a cold dark night as an authentic note of creative non fiction poetic licence. At least it looked dark inside the ancestral hovel, and the refridgerator was probably cold at a guess. To confirm the guess entry was to be made. The apartment is deserted, but at least entry has been made to the inner sanctum of the altar to the Plasma God. This is a comfort that at least the locks have not been changed and that my trust was well placed in leaving family heirlooms in a position that teenagers could long-term borrow.

Are Teenagers playing hide and seek - surely not, I fear not a surprise birthday party some months too late or too early....surely not.

I have a small note adorning a fridge ~ wedged under a magnetic gravity defying miniature reminder of an otherwise long forgotten cathedral somewhere on this beautiful planet; but as welcomes go, I may as well have been thankful that at least the front door mat still said "Welcome" under the mud.

So there is the note and the family ~sans Pater~ have gone to buy a new pair of young adult trousers because the former trousers are knee high to a very tall grasshopper ~ dinner is not mentioned as either in the frodge or oven. My role in this family apparently has moved on from hunter-gatherer-family-crust-earner and also taken on board cook.

This growing thing is costing me too much in trousers and not enough in lard dripping sausages methinks. Can't teenage fashion migrate to shin high trousers and pretty quick about it please.

The note mentions they will probably have a budget meal at Subways , KFCs or some such pleasure-dome. I am the family hunter-gatherer-bread-winner and why am I about to feast on beans on toast, or perhaps beans on burnt toast, if Pa Pryce culinary skills are a victim of post traumatic inner arsonist..... the bread at least will suffer .. well just beans then.

I will reclaim the house and I will be thankful I can pray to the Plasma God alone in the interrupted silence of the beans. May the Remote be with me.

They've hidden the Remote.

Tuesday 18 January 2011

Socks were just the start

Where's my socks was only the start. I am a elderly victim of sock-stealing teenagers and now they are taking liberties.

Where's my vintage sunglasses and its not even sunny.

I will rant if I want to, because my boy is putting the die, before the ball, before the ill, before the call and spelling diabolical. I do not want to hear the call of death with or without an illness, just yet.

And as a living person still, I want not only my socks, I want my sunglasses, the heritance will have to wait

Saturday 15 January 2011

W.E. stands for.....

The Pryce family ethic is work hard, work harder and if push comes to shove work hardest until the defribilator fuses and the life support flatlines and the Stand Clear instructions of the para medics are a distant whisper. There are no frills attached to this executive lifestyle that occasionally means a photograph is needed to cross reference there is a Daddy at the door and not a stranger.

Or at least that is Pa Pryce work ethic, sharing this work ethic, implanting it on the kids as if it was a DNA marker was an objective in my touching Bass ethos of 80s cliche whilst running flags up poles to see which way the wind blows but always knowing that feet and ground should always be connected. I had taught my kids well....until the teenage storm blew the flag. Light breezes become tornados so easy recently.

I thought it was another success on my parenting technique......I was about to write the parenting book made esay, I was niaive, I was in an ivory tower about to be knocked down by an angry elephant. An elephant aged double digit and three. I did not expect that dull could be put in my idyllic.

My teachings are cast aside like a working class yoke that is out of step with the real world. I am by definition an unreal bloke as I encourage homework, brushing teeth and putting plates at least in the general vicinity of the kitchen area. I am probably considered quaint in my old fashioned ways.

Pass the liver salts and hot water bottle and look forward to drawing another breath. And make that another breath a "take a deep breath Mr Pryce" ~ the heart attack can wait until the teenagers not only think they can stand on their own two feet, becasuse Pa Pryce needs to know their feet are also connected to the ground. WE will survive.

Friday 7 January 2011

Tell me a Secret, James

Conspiracy theories have taken root and flourish like mushrooms in the dark. These are the teenage years and its a case of "for only young eyes only".

Like a daily dose of newspaper expose of all things bad in celebrity that we read for sake of a good gossip on a national scale, the Pryce family breakfast is cerealised in our failed unison. Cornflakes or rice crispies or jam nutella toast.....We are different animals these days. The radio is drowned by the regular sensation of decibel shouting tirades that we share in place of platitudes about the weather, squeezed out mid gulp, that masquerades as that which the Pryce family these days call a Breakfast chat.

Then there is the equivalent of a Burning Bush, as a phone trills happily to a teenage beat. The telephone is the Peacemaker.

We have a sign of secrets to be told, teenage secrets to be told in whisper. A miracle is heard, a teenage voice that normally cannot go lower than B Horror Movie sound track during a chase between innocence and impending violence, suddenly it whispers sweet nothings into a phone, a teenager standing just so far as to be unheard, by the stairwell.

It may be love, it may be a plot for the "my drug hell" kiss and tell serialised tabloid splash, or the "let's be truants together" heee-hee, or it could be laryngitus. Who knows, but ears are pricked, neck is bent and we are trying to find out, so that I know. I am that parent.

Body language is read and I can determine sweet nothing like a dyslexic with alphabet spagetti soup, I am slurping at the font of nkwoedlge. No offence to dyslexic people I hope, please call me Lardy if you wish.

The teenager squirms a smile, it is a sign, a head is turned, a smile is hidden with a brief, fleeting flash of the eyes towards me and a look - yes that look of this is "my" conversation. Yes daughter and a conversation "in my house".

A phone is zapped silent, a head is shaken in dissapointment, and a mind is stirred more than my tea, so a teenage mind is stirred quite a lot......a teenager is not happy. A head is shaken. No surprise there.

Phone tapping is legal in one's home. No court would convict.

Saturday 1 January 2011

Firsts - The Difference in generations

First time you went to a footie game, first day of school, first last day of school, first kiss with a proper girlfriend, first time you remember a historical moment, , first time to drink a real pint in real pub, first time to double digit, first time to be thirteen... a damn sight better than first time to forty and forty plus.....

My life is losing its firsts and I am aware I have not yet climbed Everest, I am happy to leave that to others, my big firsts will rest in my younger years.

My firsts are now the first time my boy scores at football U15's, the first time I watch a daughter go on a proper date, the first time I study a clock as it if was a TV, she will come home safely.

I am growing old and firstly I wish to grow happy, that means I have done my best against the wishes of the teenage brain. To do what I consider my best and they interpret as my worst and I hope secondly my reward comes in later years.

My bedpan will be washed by what were once teenage hands.

I know the ages change as my parents first historical moment was not brought by the first TV moment to implant a brain. And for my teenagers I hope their firsts are also not brought only by a digital electron.