Authors: Caitlin Moran
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“Mummy's Special Lemonade,” on the other hand, is a much different beast. It's a gin and tonic with a massive wedge of lemon.
A
ccording to a BBC
Newsround
report last week, 70 percent of children have seen their parents drunkâand, of these, 46 percent don't think their parents should ever drink in front of them.
Before we go any further, let's just tackle the obvious yet necessary points: if we're talking about parents who go completely woo-hoo/Bill Sykes on the sauce; or who are only getting through half the school drop-off before sitting down in the middle of the road, puncturing a Gaz canister with their keys and sucking out the contents with a “special” straw, then guys, you need help. I am not interested in “partying” with you. If you come round my house with a bottle of peach Schnapps, I will hide in the coat closet, while phoning in a perfect description of you to Social Services. You are not my good-time bredren. Consider yourself eschewed and betrayed by me.
Everyone else, however, is welcome to join with me in faintly piqued incredulity at the children of today. WHAT MORE do they WANT from us? Don't they KNOW how this system WORKS? Mummies and daddies have to drink lots of wine down in one go on Friday nightâbecause the schedule doesn't
allow
it the rest of the week. It's called TIME MANAGEMENT. If I don't drink a whole bottle of wine on Party Night, I probably wouldn't get time to drink at
all
âand that, obviously, would be ridiculous. Parents drinking is the reason you came into the world, and if we didn't keep doing it, then by God, it would be the reason you went back out of it.
This is one of those many occasions where adult reason must overrule the ill-thought-out utterances of the young and stupid. You don't want us to drink in front of you? Where, pray, are we
supposed
to drink? Obviously we'd
like
to go to the pubâwe'd
like
to go to Harry's Bar in Venice, in 1951âbut we can't, because we're
looking after you.
And, I might add, looking after you in the best possible way: has mummy ever been more entertaining than when she stood on the patio table, opening and closing the big parasol, and singing “You Know I'm No Good” by Amy Winehouse? Or when she had a little “wine nap” at the bottom of the garden, and Uncle Eddie and Uncle Jimmy wrote “BALLS” on her forehead in magic marker, and you got to color in her nose and ears blue? If CLOWNS were doing this in a CIRCUS you'd think it was hilarious. And, let's face it, it's the only time mummy can be half-way bothered to play Super Mario Kart with you.
But by the skewiff logic of the younglings, my father had a better attitude to drinkingâin that we never actually
saw
him drink. Instead, we'd be left outside the Red Lion in a Datsun, engine running so that Radio One could entertain us. As we howled along to “Take On Me” by A-ha, Dad would occasionally reel out of the saloon bar door, push a packet of potato chips through the crack in the windowâsaying, “Remember you're a Womble” (for a detailed explanation of what a Womble is, please see my first book,
How to Be a Woman
, page 179)âbefore going back into the pub again.
Three hours later, he'd suddenly come bombing out holding something incongrous like a fish tank, hissing, “It's all gone a bit
serious
in there,” and pulling away from the curb at 60mph. Then he'd pass out on the hall floor, and we'd rinse his pockets for spare change.
Was he ultimately the better parent? The fact that I once watched him throw two liters of petrol onto a bonfireâ“Because
The Two Ronnies
is on in ten minutes”â thus setting fire to our garden fence, means that I can answer this, frankly, “No.”
But we are, at least, of accord on the issue of parental drunkenness. Look, man. I don't do fox hunting, diamond collecting, spa weekends, or that much nitrous oxide anymore. My leisure time has to operate within the boundaries of being conducted a) within forty feet of my children; b) between the hours of 6
PM
and 1
AM
, Fridays only; and c) costing no more than £30. Therefore, I like to get a very, very cheap bottle of supermarket whiskyâthe kind that, when you drink it, turns you into a pirate: closing one eye and shouting “ARGH!”âsit down with a couple of chatty people, and get a bit toasted.
If you're of joyous mind, that kind of drinking is like a long weekendâas exhilarating an experience as spending three days sightseeing in Rome, or walking Scafell Pike. You'll have imperially wiggy conversations, solve the world's problems three times over, spontaneously remember all the lyrics to “I Don't Know How To Love Him” from
Jesus Christ Superstar,
and wake up in the morning feeling oddly cleansed, and cheerful.
And if the kids don't like it? Darlings, you talk this much nonsense, and fall down the stairs that dramatically,
every day of the week.
You haven't got a leg to stand on.
Â
Want some more about my childhood? Here's the bit where I was in a camper in Aberystwyth, listening to
Nightowl
by Gerry Rafferty and semi-convinced that, when I grew up, I'd marry Joey Boswell from
Bread
. I always enjoy writing about my childhood. It requires absolutely no research and always seems pleasingly improbableâlike something I dreamed of when I fell asleep in a wardrobe, looking for Narnia.
A
BERYSTWYTH:
T
HE
O
NLY
P
LACE
I
S
TOP
W
ANTING
W
e first went to Aberystwyth when I was thirteen, at the height of my parents' hippydom. We had no TV, we lived on huge pans of lentil soup, and I ran barefoot across fields so long, the skin on my soles was like cork tiles.
We were spending our summers in a camper with no toilet in a field outside Pontrhydifendigaid, near Tregaron: eight kids, two parents, and three huge dogs. In my memory, when you walked towards the camper, the faces and legs of all the humans and animals were pressed up against the glass of the window, like a terrine. That camper was very full. When my parents had sex, the van would rock like a fairground ride, and all the kids would sit in the front room, quietly singing “California Girls” by the Beach Boysâto block out the soundsâuntil it was over. Our harmonies were terrible. We were not the Wilsons.
We had a Volkswagen campervanâthe greatest vehicles ever created; a cheery cupboard on wheelsâand when my parents had finished noisily co-joining, they would take us on post-coital journeys all across West Wales: up to Port Madoc, down to St. David'sâright round the yawning pig-jaw of Cardigan Bay. Wide white estuaries, book-stack fishing villages, and bleak, wet-slate hamlets where it always lashed rain against the single, solitary phone-box.
I don't know why it took us four months to finally go to the nearest, biggest townâAberystwythâbut when it did, some inner room in my heart twanged; some lever was pulled. It wasn't like falling in loveâI was thirteen, and had never been in love. I just feltânot unhappy anymore. The quiet litany of pubescent frets that I counted, daily, like rosary beadsâI was fat, I was lonely, I knew too much about my parents' sex life, I didn't have any shoes, and I wanted, more than anything, to be the best friend of the Duchess of Yorkâall stilled the first time our van drove down Darkgate Street, and turned left onto the seafront.
There was something so perfect about Aber that it halted my lifelong internal monologue. I needed silence, to fully take the place in. It had a Gothic university like a castle, castle ruins like a smashed cake, a cliff-top Victorian theme park that appeared to have been commissioned by a drunk H. G. Wells (a funicular railway! A camera obscura! A golf course using GIANT golf-balls!) and thenâslicing the town in half like a fabulous blindnessâthe cold, hard, glitter glue of the sea. Apparently, dolphins chased by the rock pools, at dawn.
Face pressed against the window, wetting it with breath, I wanted to concentrate on this town. And then eat it, whole, like a potato chip sandwich, but even better. For the first time ever, my heart stopped wanting.
“This place is shitting brilliant!” I chirped, from the back of the van.
“Don't swear in front of the fucking kids,” my dad replied.
T
wenty-three years later, and I'm back with my husband, and my kids, to the only place still that makes me happy and quiet. I came here with Pete when we were first in love, then again with each baby; and now we come every year, at the end of August: migratory creatures that can be followed on a map. We take the same apartment on the seafront, go to the same restaurants, do the same things, have the same days. I think even the conversations are the same: “No beach has better pebbles!” “No castle has better views!” “No freak shops have a better array of skull-shaped bongs, dude!”
The first day is Arrivalâfalling from the car on a journey that is always an hour longer than you remember, dehydrated and shrunken-legged. Aber's magic is thatâninety miles from the nearest motorwayâit is near to, and on the way to, nothing, except the dolphins in the Bay. You only come to Aber if you're going to stay in Aberâa night, at least; a week, usually; the rest of your life, if you're one of the hippies who first pitched up here in the 1960s, or one of the 8,000 students a year who come here for their degrees, then just . . . don't leave.
We throw everything into the apartment, then walk along the seafrontâthe sea! The sea! Sailor blue! Or else, with bad weather, as hard, thrilling and unstoppable as a swordâto The Olive Branch, on the corner Pier Street. It's a comfortable, higgledy, pine-and-spiderplants joint and, if we're lucky, the window table will be free. We'll eat good Greek foodâmy husband is Greek, so he's picky about these thingsâwhile staring across the Bay to the distant shadows of Anglesey and Snowdonia. Because it's the first day of vacation, I will have had at least two glasses of wine by the time we finish, and go down to the beach for the first time: Pete and I leaning against each other as the kids fall into the waves for the first, and then the second time; wringing out their shorts, and spreading them on the beach to dry.
It's a fine, pebble-and-shale beachâcrunchy, not clackingâand the currents bring a junk shop variety to the stones on the tide line. Quartz, slate, igneous Ordovician, meta-limestone from the Lleyn, cider-bottle glass smoothed to emeraldâwe fill our pockets with the most interesting ones; the ones shaped like letters, or animals or, once, a Volkswagen caravanette, just like the one we used to have.
You can crab, happily, for hours, off the boardwalk, legs hanging into the sea. In summer, the boardwalk is filled with coachloads of Orthodox Jewsâhats and curls buffeted by the sea breeze. It seems right that they'd come hereâBarmouth is too normal, Tenby too twee. Aber feels as practical and time-suspended as they are. It's far too windy for urban spores of anti-Semitism to take a hold here.
The sea turns silky, and electric-green, as the sun goes downâtide rising by the minute, and sucking at your knees until you leave the bay and walk home. Safe, from the apartment window, the bay explodes into sunsetâfire, fire, pink nuclear fury, and then the utter insanity of Welsh starlight, mirrored in the trawler lights, heading for Ireland.
The next day is a proper beach day, and we head sixteen miles up the coast, to Ynyslas. There's a picnic in the trunk from Ultracomida, on Pier Streetâa jewel-like Spanish restaurant/deli with breads, cheeses, olive oils and pastriesâand the drive takes you high enough to see the lionback Cambrian mountains, chasing you all the way to the end of Dyfed. Ynylas is National Nature Reserve consisting of nothing but sky, sand pools and dunes: over a morning, you follow the tide out, over endless, new, creature-filled sandpools, until you reach a newly-revealed sandbar, miles out to sea.
The afternoon is then spent in slow, contemplative retreat back to the mainland as the tide comes back inâracing across the sand, throwing up instantly-doomed sand-castles, and writing our namesâ“MUMMY” “DADDY” “LIZZIE” “NANCY”âin meter-high letters on the beach, in the way that, two decades ago, my siblings wrote their namesâ“CAIT” “CAZ” “EDDIE” “WEENA” “PRINNIE” “GEZMO” “JIMMY” “JOFISH”âin the same, not-same sand.
The third day will rainâCluedoâand the fourth rain, probably, too: the Ceredigion Museum, on Terrace Road, is Aberystwyth's old theatre, now filled with curious agricultural tools, archeological finds, stuffed animals, maritime oddities and a dinky café, all in a Womble-ish jumble. Then WasabiâAberystwyth's sushi restaurant, on Eastgateâbefore home, and the concluding round of Cluedo.
Day five is probably my favorite: full immersion in Aber. A half-hour walk takes you to the top of Constitution Hill, and Luna Parkâthe benevolently ghosty Victorian amusements on top of Aber's outcast cliff. A candled, rickety shrine to the Virgin Mary, halfway up the path, is the point where you stop to eat crisps. At the top, it's tea and Welsh cakes. Then the Funicular Railway down lands you in the center of town again, and lunch at the Treehouseâanother of Aber's jumbled, pitch-pine joints, this time selling soul-cheering local wholefood and chili hot chocolate.
You can spend hours here, on a rainy day, as the windows mist up, the smell of fenugreek and jasmine tea and goat cheese making the room pleasingly dreamy as you do the crossword, or stare out of the window at the million grays of wet, Welsh slate rooftops. And then, when the weather breaks, the Castle: a green hill overlooking the sea, with the rib bones of a fourteenth-century castle poking through. The view is the very best, the one I bone-ache for in London: Cardigan Bay from end to end; the full length of Wales visible in one, long sweep. The first time I saw itâthirteen, standing here in a wet, crocheted poncho, holding my squalling two-year-old brotherâI felt insane, wild jealousy towards Prince Charles.
“I can't believe he's the Prince of all this!” I shouted, into the wind. “I would KILL for this!”
And then I remembered that, of course, in a roundabout way, he had.
But there's a quiet, stubborn, time-biding, self-contained Welshness to Aberystwyth that makes the idea of being “ruled” over laughable. This place simply disbelieves it belongs to anyone but itself. In the playground, in the dip next to the Castleâsheltered, and lavish with white clouds of hydrangeaâthe slate gravestones from a demolished church have been laid, like purple flagstones, around the perimeter. So many are in Welshâthe stories of farmers and captains and politicians and priests who would have no idea of England's existence as they lived, and died, here: traveling no further than the mountains behind us, and the sea in front.
As the wind blows across again, and the grass sings lysergic, rain-drowned green, and the bay looks like a billion smashed fish scales, stretching all the way forever, who could ever imagine England, east of here: flat, dusty, half-colored, quiet and so, so distant?
In the car, home, I cry, like every time since 1988.