 |
On becoming an embarrassment
Tim Healey writes...
It was last July and I was standing with my son Charlie, 15, at Truck 99, a local rock festival held at Steventon in Oxfordshire. It was a blazing hot day, and the music was pumping. Suddenly Charlie tensed, his face a mask of horror and disbelief . "Dad - you’re dancing."
Was I dancing? Well maybe I was. I’ve been dancing for more than 30 years. I’m a child of the Sixties. I danced to the Beatles in the aisles of the Finsbury Park Astoria. I danced at college parties and office parties and I’ve even danced in the dance tent at Glastonbury. Dancing? Of course I was dancing. I’m a dancing fool. But that wasn’t what Charlie meant. What he meant was, I was dancing in front of his mates. For all I knew, his hard mates. And the light suddenly dawned. I’ve become an embarrassment - a cringe-making, conspicuous Dad.
Incredible really. It’s my own Dad who I’ve always cast in that role. I remember Open Days at school when he’d turn up and put on a funny voice, maybe, or come wearing a snazzy jumper or daft shoes. How the mouth would go dry and stark terror grip the soul when someone breathed, Oh look, there’s your dad. O no don’t look, there’s my Dad. I could feel my face flush bright red - or orange actually, on and off like a Belisha beacon. It was Agony. So now I imagined my dad at that Open Day - dancing. Dancing! It’s a fair cop, Charlie. You were right. I was dancing. Unforgiveable.
Since that day at Truck 99 the teenage cringe has come to fascinate me. It’s a big, largely unexplored medical phenomenon. Is it something that affects other animal species? Does the adolescent baboon squirm as a whiskery arm snakes forward and pinches its cheek; "look how you’ve grown. And so thin! You used to be such a chubby little chap!" What was the evolutionary purpose of teenage embarrassment? Did our cave-dwelling ancestors 2 million years ago look for clues to a partner’s suitability in the behaviour of their parents. "See child, the father dances. There is madness in the family."
I don’t think so. Probably what it is: teenagers are establishing a new identity, and biological programming is telling them they mustn’t bond with us any more. In fact, they need quite specifically to break their family bonds so they can function as independent adults. So it’s no good trying to ingratiate yourself with them by saying things like er, "yo, whassup homeboy, or, heard any good speed garage recently? A familiarity with youthspeak is actually a special torment.
Parents - forgive them for shrinking from you. They are after all carrying your gene pack. They are The Future, even if their claims to self-reliance are ludicrous. They still need you: to feed them and clothe them and house them. And pick them up in the car after late night parties.
The pick-up, yes, this is a real flashpoint. Most of the time, the kids can keep you quarantined from their friends. But in the late-night pick-up you’re all horribly intimate. There should be rules posted on the dashboard. Kids, write em out for your Dad, so he remembers:
- As we, The Future, enter the car you, the Old Guy, will stare straight ahead. You will not look round.
- You will not join in any conversation that passes across the back seat.
- You will not initiate any conversation. You will not speak.
- Nor will you hum or whistle.
- You will not move, actually, unless it be to change gear or apply the handbrake.
- On arrival at our destination you, the Old Guy, will remain at the wheel, staring speechlessly ahead, while we, the Future, get out and go indoors. Only then may you follow - maybe checking first down the street that none of our hard mates are about.
- Remember, Old Guy. Keep shtum. Put stickers on the windscreen: Silence is Golden. Think Trappist."
The trouble is, you can never quite tell what’s going to set them off. Even silence is no guarantee of safety. I asked my daughter Susie who’s older than Charlie whether I had been a huge embarrassment and she said no, not really, except once. Was that the time I spoke airily in public of (God forgive me) ’Bass’n’Drum’ music? No. no. That was OK. The catastrophe, apparently, was some time when I had broken my spectacles and I came to pick her up from school, with the glasses (which had snapped at the bridge across the nose) sticky-taped up the middle with elastoplast. Like some geeky bloke off a comedy programme. I waved to her, apparently, from the car park. Mortal embarrassment. And a tragic scene when you think about it: there’s Susie absolutely asphyxiated with shame and me wholly unaware of her discomfort. 'Oh look Susie, there’s your dad, waving. Doesn’t he look sweet in those specs.' Apparently she’d wake up in a sweat afterwards for nights in succession, going no, no, no... plucking at her blanket.
Well, summer’s coming round again and with it the Steventon rock festival, Truck 2000. I’ll be there but you won’t notice me. This year I’ll be wearing camouflage colours and thinking Trappist. Will I dance? Well if the sun is shining and the music is pumping, you never know. I can’t absolutely promise not to. The thing is, it doesn’t matter so much now, does it? Charlie’s 16. And this year you won’t find him within half a mile of me.
Ìý |
|
