Advice for parents, apparently. (PHOTO: trix0r)
“A parent
is a caretaker of the offspring in their own species.”
A lot is made of living with “teenagers”, living with animals, living with partners etc. I have noticed, however, that not many people are sharing their stories about living with their parents. Now, this might be because it is painfully ‘uncool’ to be in this position or maybe it’s just because parents don’t say the “funniest things”, right? WRONG.
You see, there comes a moment is everybody’s life where they need to fly the nest. For a lot of people this usually comes directly after finishing university but with the graduate job market being tougher than ever and opportunities being a bit thin on the ground this may not have been the case for quite as many this year.
I am one of those people. I live at home with my parents in a Victorian terrace house in the centre of a fairly large town. The combination of the better class of wine that is stocked in this kitchen and the suffocating debts I now have from higher education has lead to this situation (mainly the latter).
Last Saturday morning we had just finished brunch and the coffee was brewing. My Dad was tackling the challenging crossword in the Review portion of the Guardian, while my Mum was catching up on world affairs in the main section and I was reading about Alex Miller’s releases of the week in The Guide. As I got up to pour the coffee I laughed and explained to them that the Guardian would love the spread of demographic going on across the table. And that’s pretty much what it’s like – we get cheese from the market (wrapped in brown paper), we have a wormery, we listen to Thought For The Day, we watch Later With Jools… (Mum then buys the CDs and I take them to the gigs), we have pretty much every type of tea available (the most important of which being Yorkshire), they are enrolled in ballroom dancing lessons and we own the entire boxset of The Wire (but are yet to break the first season).
None of this seems particularly noteworthy at present but recently things have started to take a turn for the hilarious. I’m not sure what is it, whether the pressure of living with their grown-up chlid is sending them batty, whether the water in the Shropshire area has become infected or whether the “effects” of the 70s are finally catching up with them. So much so that it has become too good to keep to myself. They tell me that this is just the start of things to come – the tip of the iceberg if you will. Well, i’m fine with it, as long as they keep making me laugh.
And on that note, here is finely crafted tune about parents. My mum didn’t let me have Adidas bottoms for P.E either, Will Smith.
