According to a BBC Newsround report last week, 70 percent of children have seen their parents drunk—and, 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 night—because 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—and 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 pub—we’d like to go to Harry’s Bar in Venice, in 1951—but 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 drinking—in 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 window—saying, “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)—before 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 bonfire—“Because The Two Ronnies is on in ten minutes”— 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 whisky—the kind that, when you drink it, turns you into a pirate: closing one eye and shouting “ARGH!”—sit 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 weekend—as 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.
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 improbable—like something I dreamed of when I fell asleep in a wardrobe, looking for Narnia.
ABERYSTWYTH: THE ONLY PLACE I STOP WANTING
We 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 Boys—to block out the sounds—until it was over. Our harmonies were terrible. We were not the Wilsons.
We had a Volkswagen campervan—the greatest vehicles ever created; a cheery cupboard on wheels—and 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’s—right 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 town—Aberystwyth—but when it did, some inner room in my heart twanged; some lever was pulled. It wasn’t like falling in love—I was thirteen, and had never been in love. I just felt—not unhappy anymore. The quiet litany of pubescent frets that I counted, daily, like rosary beads—I 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 York—all 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 then—slicing the town in half like a fabulous blindness—the 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.
Twenty-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 Arrival—falling from the car on a journey that is always an hour longer than you remember, dehydrated and shrunken-legged. Aber’s magic is that—ninety miles from the nearest motorway—it 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 Aber—a 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 seafront—the sea! The sea! Sailor blue! Or else, with bad weather, as hard, thrilling and unstoppable as a sword—to 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 food—my husband is Greek, so he’s picky about these things—while 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 beach—crunchy, not clacking—and 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 emerald—we 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 Jews—hats and curls buffeted by the sea breeze. It seems right that they’d come here—Barmouth 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 down—tide 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 sunset—fire, 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 Street—a jewel-like Spanish restaurant/deli with breads, cheeses, olive oils and pastries—and 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 in—racing across the sand, throwing up instantly-doomed sand-castles, and writing our names—“MUMMY” “DADDY” “LIZZIE” “NANCY”—in meter-high letters on the beach, in the way that, two decades ago, my siblings wrote their names—“CAIT” “CAZ” “EDDIE” “WEENA” “PRINNIE” “GEZMO” “JIMMY” “JOFISH”—in the same, not-same sand.
The third day will rain—Cluedo—and 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 Wasabi—Aberystwyth’s sushi restaurant, on Eastgate—before 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 Park—the 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 Treehouse—another 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 it—thirteen, standing here in a wet, crocheted poncho, holding my squalling two-year-old brother—I 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 Castle—sheltered, and lavish with white clouds of hydrangea—the slate gravestones from a demolished church have been laid, like purple flagstones, around the perimeter. So many are in Welsh—the 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.
As me and all my siblings were taught at home, the local library was the extra room of our home: it was our schoolhouse and our playground. Oh, it was a million more things besides—not least an easily-accessible toilet if you were caught short on Warstones Drive—and so when the Coalition started closing libraries—shooting out their lights and leaving the buildings to rot—I wrote this piece, which got the biggest response of any piece I’ve ever written for The Times. It ended up being included in a very worthwhile anthology about libraries, The Library Book, whose proceeds went to a pro-library charity.
LIBRARIES: CATHEDRALS OF OUR SOULS
Home educated and, by seventeen, writing for a living, the only alma mater I have ever had is Warstones Library, Pinfold Grove, Wolverhampton.
A low, red-brick box on grass that verged on wasteland, I would be there twice a day—rocking up with all the ardor of a clubber turning up to a rave. I read every book in there—not really, of course, but as good as: when I’d read all the funny books, I moved on to the sexy ones, then the dreamy ones, the mad ones; the ones that described distant mountains, idiots, plagues, experiments. I sat at the big table and read all the papers: in public housing in Wolverhampton, the broadsheets are as incongruous and illuminating as an Eames lamp.
The shelves were supposed to be loaded with books—but they were, of course, really doors: each book-lid opened as exciting as Alice putting her gold key in the lock. I spent days running in and out of other worlds like a time bandit, or a spy. I was as excited as I’ve ever been in my life, in that library: scoring new books the minute they came in; ordering books I’d heard of—then waiting, fevered, for them to a
rrive, like they were the word Christmas. I had to wait nearly a year for Les Fleurs du Mal by Baudelaire to come: even so, I was still too young to think it anything but a bit wanky, and abandoned it twenty pages in for Jilly Cooper. But Fleurs du Mal, man! In a building overlooked by a Kwiksave where the fags and alcohol were kept in a locked, metal cage, lest they be stolen! Simply knowing I could have it in my hand was a comfort, in this place so very very far from anything extraordinary or exultant.
Everything I am is based on this ugly building on its lonely lawn—lit up during winter darkness; open in the slashing rain—which allowed a girl so poor she didn’t even own a purse to come in twice a day and experience actual magic: traveling through time, making contact with the dead—Dorothy Parker, Stella Gibbons, Charlotte Brontë, Spike Milligan.
A library in the middle of a community is a cross between an emergency exit, a life raft and a festival. They are cathedrals of the mind; hospitals of the soul; theme parks of the imagination. On a cold, rainy island, they are the only sheltered public spaces where you are not a consumer, but a citizen, instead. A human with a brain and a heart and a desire to be uplifted, rather than a customer with a credit card and an inchoate “need” for “stuff.” A mall—the shops—are places where your money makes the wealthy wealthier. But a library is where the wealthy’s taxes pay for you to become a little more extraordinary, instead. A satisfying reversal. A balancing of the power.
Last month, after protest, an injunction was granted to postpone library closures in Somerset. In September, both Somerset and Gloucestershire councils will be the subject of a full judicial review over their closure plans. As the cuts kick in, protesters and lawyers are fighting for individual libraries like villagers pushing stranded whales back into the sea. A library is such a potent symbol of a town’s values: each one closed down might as well be six thousand stickers plastered over every available surface, reading “WE CHOSE TO BECOME MORE STUPID AND DULL.”
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