RESPECT

Weird what madeleine memories come back when ones mind one is gone.

Restringing the Ibanez and I suddenly remembered a previous stringing of the Ovation. 

Car in drive, mum went out to greet, and came back with one of her blubbery fatso garden simperers.

"How about some ginger beer?"

Me: Not for me thanks, but it's certainly the weather."  

I kept on stringing.

Another memory, me explaining to Fatso that 'gardening' wasnt a hobby I had any feel or favour for.

Fatso (pointing to a vase of flowers) "What? You don't think they're beautiful?

"That is not gardening. That is not toiling on my mother's tread-mill of futility hobby. That I can come up with the right noises for."

Cut to Fatso burbling on until she made some idiot remark that cued me into, "OK. You take over stringing this guitar and I'll get you another tsitsi-birra. You do my hobby and I'll do yours."

Cut to my mother making some hoity reference to showing more respect.

I waited 'til she went in the kitchen and followed her: "You make one more reference to 'respect' and I'll have you. One. More. Mention. Of 'respect', and I'm going jury wide and putting it to everyone how much 'respect' they would give to thieving under your own roof from your own son's bedside."

Sitting there with the strings and guitar and polishing the empty frets, it came back with a clarity only allowed a crazed mind.  Vile times. 

[Respec' ~ the pity is that the girls never saw the improvèd behaviour, or do I just mean 'vocabulary'? 

I know Anna when she was out shared my puzzlement over the bandying of the R word when the place reeked of pilfering and 'porkies' ...

And I rubbed the point home by placing in prominence the beautiful jewel cabinet handed to me for the girls to "keep their jewels in", aforesaid 'jewels' having been filched April 2007 and currently residing in the distinctly un-beautiful Villa Thefti.]