Nuts.

What do you do if someone is rude to you? I asked my husband this question. He said a woman once walked past him in a nightclub when he was 18 and gently caressed his nuts, which was not the sort of rude I meant at all and which had me in fits of laughter. Especially when he added she was about twenty years older than he was and later winked at him from over at the bar. When he recounted the story again that evening to friends at a dinner party, all the women collapsed laughing and all the men agreed they would find this funny if it happened to them, and quite nice. But no, I didn't mean that sort.

A few years ago, just before Christmas, a man pushed in front of me in a queue for the cashpoint on the high road. I did nothing until he'd finished retrieving his money and turned to leave, when I cheerfully wished him a Merry Christmas. Another example, a woman interrupted my swimming the other day to tell me I should move to the slow lane, despite the fact I was in the fast lane before her and wasn’t swimming particularly slowly and there were already four people swimming very slowly in the slow lane, and no one but us in the fast lane. "Why?" I asked, losing my rhythm and standing up. "Because you’re doing breast stroke," she said, "and this is the lane for crawl." It wasn't, because there isn't one, but I moved anyway. But not before issuing this stinging reposte. "Okay," I said.

On reciting these two incidents to my sons I was told I was pathetic. I shouldn’t have let the man push in front or the woman bully me out of the fast lane, they said, I should have told them both to ‘fuck off’. But I would never do that. Mostly because it's rude but also because I'm a coward and wouldn't dare. But some people do dare, and can be quite witty with it.

I once overheard two women having an altercation in Primark in Tooting, with one apparently calling the other a racist. "Fuck off!" the second woman shouted at the top of her voice. "You calling me a racist? You want to take a look at my kids!"

Another friend is hilarious when dealing with unwanted sexual advances, which she gets a lot because she's beautiful. At a party a creepy old man sidled up to her and whispered, "I’d really like to lick your *****." 
"Yeah, yeah," she responded, not missing a beat, "everybody does, mate."

And my brother once followed another driver a very long way out of his way because he had been dangerously overtaken by him on the inside lane of the motorway. He said he wanted to tell him where to get off. I told him this was dumb. And dangerous.

But occasionally I will respond, especially if I'm premenstrual. Years ago I had a row with a woman in the dairy aisle at Waitrose, who was tutting at my children. "I don’t want to be here, either!" I snapped, as she glared first at me, then at the three little boys who were rearranging the Actimel. "You want to try taking three boys grocery shopping." 
"My mother just died!" she replied, just as one of my boys started laughing. "And there's nothing funny about that!" Which kind of took the wind out of my sails and I suppose went a long way to explain why she was so grumpy that day. "I’m sorry," I said. "That’s terrible." And she burst into tears. I ended up hugging her in front of the full fat milk.

"You see," I told the boys, when they told me you should always tell someone to ‘fuck off.’ "You never know. Best to do nothing, try biting your tongue and counting to ten. Any number of things might be going on behind the scenes in that person's life. Perhaps they're mentally ill, on drugs, suffering from domestic abuse or irrational with depression or grief. And perhaps one day you’ll be really unlucky and run into a proper nutter who could do you some actual harm in response."

Because what inspired this blog post in the first place was one of my boys planning a big night out just after I'd been reading about Oliver Dearlove, who was standing talking to a group of women late one evening in Blackheath, when someone took a disliking to him. "If you don't get out of my face, I will knock you out," that someone reportedly said, before punching thirty year-old Oliver to the ground. Sadly he died a few hours later in hospital.

Love E x

@DOESNOTDOIT

P.S. This blog post is dedicated to him.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/oliver-dearlove-trevor-timon-sentence-murder-trial-killer-six-years-single-punch-death-manslaughter-a7597336.html

You have been watching.

I have been watching The Man in the High Castle with, well, I won't say with one of my sons, and I can't say with Husband, and I'm not saying by myself, so let's say I have been watching The Man in the High Castle with the goldfish, who is the only other member of the household with a pulse. So anyway, the goldfish and I spend much of the time shouting at The Man in the High Castle and telling each other what’s wrong with it. I think it’s the intriguing idea we’re hooked on (so to speak) rather than its execution. “We just really like the look of it,” I say to the goldfish, because the plot and some of the acting is a bit iffy. People don’t act right when given tragic news. ‘Sorry, your sister and her kids got gassed,’ and the actor looks like he's been told his favourite suit got spoilt at the dry cleaners. The goldfish agrees with me about this. When he can remember. It's been very bonding.

Pandering to the children.

Speaking of bonding, my earliest TV memory is watching Andy Pandy with my brother. He liked to do what Andy Pandy did. One time he tried to launch himself off the top of our stairs in his underpants. And they say television can't damage children. My mother's great love was Play School and we used to watch that with her. She worshipped Brian Cant. There's a great story about his audition when he was asked to get into a cardboard box and row out to sea. He pretended to do a bit of fishing and caught a wellington boot full of custard. 

Brian really could.

If you look back at Play School now it’s incredible how slow it was. Just peeking through the round window took an age. Years later I found myself at an interview sitting in front of the formidable Anna Home who worked on that show, and later I actually met Floella Benjamin. She was about 70, still wearing dungarees, and absolutely delightful.

My grandfather loved Morph and by coincidence the first programme I ever worked on at the BBC was Hartbeat with Tony Hart at the Pebble Mill studios in Birmingham (not to be confused with Heartbeat). They let me direct The Gallery, which was thrilling. And if you have any idea what I was talking about in those last three paragraphs then you are an antique, same as me.

Morph.

When I was older I watched Top of the Pops, Horizon, M*A*S*H, Shoestring, Bergerac, anything to do with music, science or a detective, with my father. With my mother I watched Coronation Street, The Thornbirds, Brideshead Revisited, anything to do with romance or people. Pretty gendered. We hardly ever watched ITV. People were snobby about ITV in those days. There was some family viewing, of course. For a while we all traipsed down the road to my grandparents’ house every Sunday evening to watch Life On Earth on their colour telly. Six of us, three generations, all watching together. Sweet really. And who can see it happening now? Somewhere along the way that sort of family viewing got lost.

Telly on a shoestring.

The boys barely watch television. I told them I had an illustrated science book as a child that predicted the future. “All four members of one family, in different rooms in the house, sitting in front of their own computers”, I said. “And I remember thinking, don't be silly, no way is that ever going to happen.” They just smiled at me indulgently. 

I told them watching television can teach us things, it's not just Wikipedia. In Canada, because of Little House on the Prairie, I learnt that small children are liable to fall when running down hill. Because of Sesame Street I learnt to recite the alphabet in Spanish and that men can sleep together. Because of Happy Days and The Waltons I learnt that every model family has a dad who fancies the pants off his wife. Because of The Brady Bunch I learnt that girls are blonde and pretty and boys are dark and tall. And because of Rhoda I learnt that wearing a head scarf is a great way to hide greasy hair. 

Brady days.

When we got back from Canada we did without a telly for a while and I stopped learning stuff. Case in point, I couldn't answer a general knowledge question during a quiz at primary school. Who is the actor who plays Robin in Robin's Nest? they asked me. I was outraged, and clueless. We had to get a telly after that so my education didn't suffer. (In case you're wondering it was Richard O'Sullivan and Robin's Nest was the unlikely love child of Man About The House, remember that?). At the time everyone here was in the grip of Starsky and Hutch mania. One friend had posters of them all over her bedroom wall. I never could understood why an eleven year-old girl fancied an old guy with a perm and an old guy in a cardie, although admittedly I do quite like a cardie on a man now, and also Owen Wilson who plays Hutch in the funny movie, but then I am old.

Not David Soul.

When I was a student I did a dissertation on kids’ telly and spent hours watching stuff in a broom cupboard with Phillip Schofield and his gopher. Years after, in preparation for that BBC interview, I set the video recorder to tape kids’ programmes while I was out at work and watched it all in the evening. I developed a loathing for The Chuckle Brothers. Then I had children of my own and they chuckled all the way through The Chuckle Brothers ("to me, to you, Barry.")

I watched a lot of kids’ telly with the boys. In desperation I used to stick Eldest in his pushchair in front of Teletubbies. He was all smiles until it got to the bit with the lion and the bear and then he was terrified. Mind you, Penelope Keith did the voice over.

The lion and the bear.

It was around this time that I was asked if I wanted to direct Brum, which I did. The only problem was it meant leaving the baby behind in London and going to Brum, so I didn't. After that, instead of making kids' telly, I mostly stayed at home and watched kids' telly with a load of kids. Remember Super Ted? The Story Makers? Danger Mouse? Come Outside? Raven? Arthur? The Cramp Twins? I'm an expert on all of it. When I'm old and slumped in my chair in the care home and I've forgotten who I am, I will still be able to hum the theme tune from The Cramp Twins. Could be handy.

Right now, though, I'm hardly watching any telly, apart from TMITHC. Lots of mates say the same. We think it’s because we can afford to be fussy. We know it’s all there for the taking whenever we want it, on Netflix or Amazon or iPlayer, we just don’t get round to it. Plus it’s not much fun watching by yourself and Husband doesn’t like telly, except for University Challenge, which is why I end up watching things with the goldfish.

In a hotel dining room in Sussex last week I overheard the following exchange between a couple and their waitress. "Is everything okay?" asked the waitress. "Yes," said the woman, "only, we can't get ITV on the telly in our bedroom." There's so much wrong with that statement, I thought to myself, I don't know where to start. But maybe I was just being snobby.

Love E x

@DOESNOTDOIT

P.S. From Seinfeld I learnt that ordering soup in New York can be dangerous. I love that episode.

Seinfeld.

Top of the class.

There was a quiz in a newspaper magazine last week called 'How liberal elite are you?' One of the questions was 'What is the Thunderball?' Don't know, I thought, unless it's referring to Sean Connery in that Bond movie, which I'm pretty sure it's not. What is liberal elite anyway? Where I come from there's posh people and then there's everyone else. And they don't call a spade a spade, they call it a shovel. 

When I was at comprehensive school in Yorkshire the other kids thought we were posh because we had a dishwasher. When I got to university I realised we weren’t posh because I met posh people for the first time and they were called Emma and drove Minis and slept around and said 'fuck'. This confused the hell out of me because I was told these things were common (not the bit about the Minis).

Different types of Thunderballs

in a Bond

in a game.

When I met my husband I thought he was uncommonly nice because he wasn’t posh. He had a London accent and I thought this would piss off my mother. I imagined she wanted me to go out with a well-spoken boy with a sensitive side so I steered clear of all those. Later I discovered he'd gone to a boarding school where they wore knee-high yellow stocks and marched into the dining hall playing musical instruments. On the plus side he went on a full scholarship because he came from a broken home and his family didn't have a washing machine or a car. It was around this time I realised class could be a complicated equation.

Pass the port to the one on the left.

As a kid I thought we didn’t have to worry about class because our father was a sociologist. We weren’t middle class or upper class or working class: our father was a sociologist, and an American sociologist hadn't yet come up with the idea of an out of touch liberal elite. Having said that our family life wasn’t like that of the other academics' families we knew. Our house was tidy for a start, and new. It wasn't a ramshackle Victorian pile with a freezing kitchen full of tea-stained mugs and a hall stacked with paperbacks. We had proper bookshelves and an avocado bathroom. We weren’t vegetarian. Our parents were happily married to the person they were originally married to and our mother was pretty and wore make-up. Our father wore a tie every day. Neither of them ever smoked marijuana and I never had a cello lesson.

But the kids at school thought I was posh because I said bath with a long 'a' and was called Elizabeth. So when I was 15 I reinvented myself. I was Liz. I went to the 'youthie' and danced with a boy called Glen who had a gold tooth and offered to take me to the bingo with his mam. He sent me a Valentine's card and wrote inside 'if one of your kisses was a snowflake I'd ask for a blizzard,' (you have to read that in a Yorkshire accent for the full effect). When I was at 'youthie' I referred to my parents as “me mam” and “me dad" and when I got home again, I called out, "Mummy! It's me!" Living a second life was confusing but if that's what it takes to fit in, so be it, I thought. Mad. But it worked.

Cathy born to wander.

At home we had standards. Elbows and milk bottles weren't allowed on tables. When my brother returned from university with a copy of The Sun and a liking for HP Sauce my mother was horrified, which is probably what he wanted. In truth she came from guttersnipes. My maternal grandmother worked in a factory in the Jewellery Quarter of Birmingham until she married. She'd lived in a back to back house on the same road they filmed Cathy Come Home. By comparison the house we live in now is a palace. Things she thought were luxuries are now run of the mill. We have underfloor heating and a Nespresso machine. My grandmother once stood next to me in the kitchen as I chopped a pepper and asked me what it was.

A pepper.

Eldest reckons he's working class. Husband pointed out it’s not very working class to complain when the smoked salmon runs out. Youngest was horrified by the Bertie Wooster tour of Mayfair Husband proposed when it was his birthday (Husband's, not Bertie Wooster's). I’m not sure what liberal elite is but it’s probably got something to do with eating smoked salmon and liking literary walking tours. Living in a city within spitting distance of a Waitrose is a big part of it apparently. I guess we’re all members of tribes and ours includes graduates who are theatre-goers and would never vote Tory, who buy stuff in John Lewis and could send their kids to private school, but don't, grow veg, cycle to farmers markets and have second homes abroad or in the country.

A love of the Woosters.

Signalling to one another what class we belong to is a complicated business that requires subtly shifting gears. It used to be all Volvo estates and now it's Ford, or even a Skoda. I don’t know anyone who goes on Mark Warner holidays and wears Boden anymore and yet both were de rigueur round here not so long ago. And then there’s language. Sofa or settee or studio couch? Living room or sitting room or lounge? My sister-in-law calls it the drawing room. Is it supper or dinner? Do you call delicious food "beautiful," and a loo a "toilet"? Living in North America as a child has confused me further. I'm still not sure how to say glacier, or vase. I once went into a hardware shop in York to buy some Swarfega (don’t ask) and the shop assistant told me, "it's on your own onus.” She meant she couldn’t guarantee it would work. I suppose laughing at other people's faux pas and calling them faux pas is a way of reassuring ourselves. About what I'm not sure.

I listed a few more of the questions from the quiz at the end for you to ponder, or rather, to test "just how badly you yearn to be in that category." Does class matter anymore? It probably matters the same as it ever did. Probably saying it doesn’t matter marks you out as liberal elite. 

Love E x

@DOESNOTDOIT

P.S. You write a blog? How very common.

Do you live in a city? Do you watch the X Factor? What is quinoa, and how do you pronounce it? Do you smoke? Have you ever a.) worked in a factory b.) been in a factory?Where did you meet your current partner? How often do you use public transport? Have you ever had a job that caused something to hurt at the end of the day? Since leaving school, have you ever worn a uniform? (I'm guessing they don't mean to spice things up bedroom-wise. I reckon they're thinking more of the army. Or McDonalds.)