More family than I thought

Posted: May 29, 2023 | Author: | Filed under: Brief...therefore witty. | Tags: , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

I’d love for ‘family’, in my context, to mean a little more mafia than it currently does.

My family are simply my family, of the traditional context – father, mother and a brother.

But I wish it meant people who worked in the concrete shoe shop.

Perhaps it’s in the enunciation: “The Fairmily”. Maybe then people would give up their train seats for me, or just bring their train seats to me at my family compound, so it’s more convenient for me that having to be on a train for them to give up their seats.

And I’d have a plethora of brothers instead of the embarrassingly singular sibling I’m stuck with, and their names would be ‘Paulie’, and ‘Joey’, ‘Tommy’ and ‘Mikey’. My brother’s name is Ben.

And we’d have nicknames. Like ‘Sam the Nose’ – which would be appropriate because of what I’ve got.

My brother would likely be ‘Big Ben’, because he is enormous. But that wouldn’t make me ‘Little Sammy’, because I’m only really slightly less obese.

Anyway.

Family. I’ve come to realise I’ve more of them than I previously realised.

I have long disliked large crowds, which I presumed was due to coming from a small family. Both my parents were a single-child, whilst both my brother and I are both single-children too according to how we feel about one another.

But at a family dinner yesterday, my father invited his only living blood relatives (aside from me and my brother, which is weird as one tends to picture a ‘closest living blood relative’ as being an appropriately distant and appropriately many-times-removed grandmother of an ancient generation, instead of it being me).

And there was a pile of extra family, all ages, many types of clothes, basically all one colour, and they all had no idea who each other was, least of all me.

“Here’s Sam, the less obese one I was telling you about” says my father, “and his equally less obese wife and two kids – both of whom are also single-children”.

And everyone looks at me and my family, each of them agreeing vaguely and approving the description. There’s some handshaking and pecks on cheeks, and then I left the room because I’ve got a problem with large crowds.

I didn’t feel any kind of interest towards these people and so didn’t engage (nobody’s loss), but my father was keen to get to know them, because he really didn’t know them, nor they him.

As I played with my kids, I saw him leading them in comparing old photos, the black and white ones, followed by the later coloured photos that have now gone a 1970’s shade of nicotine-brown.

And then, my father told his stories to the new lump of distant family we’d discovered, detailing his upbringing (some family remembered his childhood address – which was nice), his family and career.

I was listening and realised something I’d suspected before.

My dad is really, really super-cool.

He’s a cockney-rebel, a cage-shaker, and the new next big thing in the classic style, a rebel with many causes (in fact, he’s a Rotarian), but he’s always been willing to do what he can do get jobs done and to achieve so with flair. He’s my hero.

And looking through the photos, the variety of hairstyles and scenarios in which he had those hairstyles, were astonishing.

Meanwhile, I have a blog, and literally piles and piles of distant family that I’m about as related to as everyone else is related to the Cheddar Man.

I’d best look to emulate him. My dad I mean, but also the Cheddar Man a bit too.

They’re both fairmily after all.

Sam

The 1970s – it was all the rage at the time.

Posted: February 26, 2023 | Author: | Filed under: Brief...therefore witty. | Tags: , , | Leave a comment

You know what I mean, even if I’m not too sure of it.

That’s because you’re instinctual, and this is a compliment.

This isn’t though, fuckface.

In the 1970s, ‘Fuckface’ was just coming to fruition. A little more socially acceptable, to fuck a face, have a faced well-fucked, and a great term to call people. People like you, fuckface.

And if you didn’t know, you probably should, there was many a fuckface in the 1970s. That was their decade.

In the 1960s, Small Faces, the 1980s, the Talking Heads, the 1990s, The Spice Girls – the latter of which was a true revolution of retro-reversion for feminism, in which people from Princes Diana to the Pope (same thing at the time) realised that women could be fuckfaces too.

I like a motif to a blog, but its possible I’ve extended ‘fuckface’ as far as ‘fuckface’ can take me.

So from here, its a matter of talking about what I thought I was going to write about before ‘fuckface’ inspired me.

It’s still about the 1970s (which, as I say – were extremely popular at the time), and it’s still about faces.

Essentially, I want to talk about a 50 year-old photo I saw in my hometown newspaper, which celebrated the win of a pub darts team in some kind of regional league.

10 or so chaps, with the variety of haircuts, facial hairs and fuckfaces that you’d see commonly back then.

And what a time to look suspicious! ‘Suspicious’ was in vogue.

Not to mention that the fuckier your face was, the more iconic of the time you were.

This blog didn’t proceed last night, as my wife wanted to watch Mission Impossible II on my laptop. I’m not going to enter a fuckface argument with my wife and new millennium Tom Cruise, and nor would you, so I fled.

Bravely checking my wife is now asleep, and considering I’m now well rested (being 12 hours later), I shall continue, though I do miss Cruise.

Accordingly, I’m playing some ABC News footage from the Fall of Saigon. 1975, the heartland of the fuckface decade.

Would I, however, be willing to write-off the whole Vietnam/American War as a fuckface combat? Probably not, as people who took part in that war, or were just near enough for war-crimes, really have fucked faces to the degree of whatever literal or metaphorical extents you’d be willing to consider, quietly, so as not to wake my Mrs.

“Vietnam fucked my face” sounds the sort of script you’d read on a found Zippo lighter in the Da Lat jungle highlands.

But I was talking about a darts in an English pub in the 70s. Black and white an image, being printed in an old local paper, but being from the 70s there is also a strong beige feel, maybe even corduroy. And cigarettes.

And you can zoom in on these ten or so faces, of young and middle-aged men, and suddenly you’ll hear a distant voice saying calmly “he was a respected member of his community, worked hard at the brown cigarette factory, and once got a bullseye. But nobody knew he held a secret so terrible, that it wouldn’t be till years after the case closed that the truth became known. For in fact, John ‘Cigarette’ Brown, was a closet fuckface. Even his wife didn’t know. And his children are coming to terms with it to this day.”

Or something criminal, not in a good way.

It’s now been two days since I started writing about this nonsense. But I’ve persevered, and all I need was three breakfasts.

The benefit to taking several days to conjure up a piece of writing such as you’ve endured reading (you’re lucky, you didn’t have to write it) is that you can look back on where you began a couple of days ago, what you went through, and where you are now, and consider: ‘what the hell am I doing here?’

And I like thinking that.

Because, what the hell am I doing here?

A blog, apparently, whilst watching a vast amount of news footage from the 1970s.

And breakfasts.

Sam