Therapeutic music. No you aren't supposed to like it. I do - but that's just me. Oh it's not impossible that you might like it a bit. But no one has time today for music they like. Music must serve a purpose - I'm with the Vorticists on this, as on much else.
That's my mum. Late 1950s. She's outside the house where dad was living with his family - in the Cadland Park Esso estate. According to the writing on the back, mum shares the photo with a 1932 MG.
Dad and his brother were car-mad - and indeed his brother Michael went on to become a real-life professional racing driver. I've mentioned him before - he's still alive, about 90-something, and very sprightly indeed, living in Lockerley with a million vintage BMWs in front of his house.
Mum wasn't married to dad at the time of the photo. I wasn't born yet. This is probably the final time I'll use a family photo for a cover, or have a family photo in the house. No one in the family is much interested in having the photos now mum is dead - though a niece wants a couple, and I've chosen what I think are the nicest (eg this one) and will post them off later today.
What struck me while I was looking thru all the old photos was just how happy mum was between the ages of about 17 and 24 - not merely "smiling for the camera" etc, but very often helpless with unfeigned joy - it's clear that she was naturally a very happy person. Mum had her children while she was young, while she was this happy.
As the oldest, I think I can kid myself that I do remember my mother as a happy person, if only very briefly, when I was very young indeed. But something happened to her in her mid-twenties, and she became serious. Dad was serious and unhappy all his life - in photographs and in real life. He never had any friends, and he was always very awkward in his own skin.
Dad came from an alcoholic family and he hated it so much that he never drank, ever. Mum came from an averagely-drinking family - and it was in her mid-20s that she started to drink heavily - every single day, right up until her final weeks. Mum "wanted it all" - the children, the new car, the new house on the new estate, the career. She'd come from a very eccentric background, and she just wanted her own life to be the opposite - to be "normal". It was her form of rebellion.
Mum's whole life was all about worrying about what other people thought of her, and always wanting to impress them. She was a bit Hyacinth Bucket - not so much in the airs and graces way, but more in the possessions way. She fell for every advert. The life she chose didn't make her happy. And alcohol was the thing that made it bearable. For her it was a good thing.
For me, alcohol probably had more negatives than positives. I am naturally quite passive, and would've drifted into a normal life if it wasn't for my drinking, which made it impossible to be normal, and I'm glad of it. Now, it doesn't really matter what it is. Today is Day One Hundred - my hundredth consecutive day of sobriety. Which probably means that it's a hundred days since I first heard that mum was dead (about a week after she died).
I am always being told "ah now that your mum's dead you'll stop drinking." I still don't think that's true. I think I'm just staying sober because I know that the moment I start a binge is the moment when the roof falls in re having to finally tidy up the endless detritus in the wake of mum's life, and I want her not just dead, not just buried, but forgotten too, and in a few days or maybe a week or so that is what will happen, mum's normal life will be like it never was.
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