Some time in the Spring (see below), I said I'd explain the origins of the title of this blog to the two people who enquired. Assuming that anybody actually checks this page for updates, here is that story.
My Mum, Pat, is seen by some to be “a character”. She takes some of the more endearing excesses of her own barmy mother and somehow makes them acceptable. She is the world’s most unreliable witness, as history is frequently re-written when she is responsible for its telling. Not even possession of the facts, or forensic evidence such as tape recordings, will make her change her story. By dogmatically repeating the words, “Excuse me,” loudly enough, she thinks her version of any story will become the accepted one, however implausible.
She’s also the world’s worst joke teller, but the knots in which she ties herself while she’s doing it are frequently funnier than the joke itself. Here’s a recent example:
Question: What’s black and sits forlornly at the top of the stairs?
Answer: Stephen Hawking after a house fire!
Not the greatest joke in the world, I grant you, and also incredibly sick.
She was told that joke at 4pm in the afternoon. At 8pm, she enthusiastically attempted to retell it to my wife thus:
“What does Stephen Hawking look like at the top of the stairs? Oh, bollocks. I’ve fucked it up, haven’t I, Mart?”
Although disabled (she has arthritis of the spine, which was misdiagnosed previously as nascent Multiple Sclerosis, the medication for which probably did her more harm than good), Mum will doggedly work herself into the ground until she is barely able to get out of bed the following day. And if she’s decided that something is good for you, you’ll end up doing it whether you want to or not.
Mum has a heart of gold and a potty mouth – she displays the former and denies the latter at every opportunity, and tuts and laughs infectiously when presented with recordings of herself swearing. (“I don’t really swear that much do I? Yes, I know it’s on the recording, but you’re a cunning little sod and could have edited it.”)
Amsterdam is my favourite city in the world. It’s a beautiful place with fascinating architecture and a refreshingly liberal outlook which, despite the odds stacked against it, seems to work. Mum, who eyes anything like this with suspicion, seems to think I have a fixation with the prostitutes in the Red Light District. I’m not sure why: I never had an interest in the prostitutes in Hanley, and Louis Barfe dined out on the story that I didn't even recognise that the lady waiting in the rain "whose lift mustn't have turned up" was, in fact, a whore. The fact is that, after having overindulged in legalised drugs a couple of times during early visits, I have been unable to sleep. As parts of Amsterdam don’t sleep, I’ve therefore gone for a walk on a couple of occasions. On revealing this to my Mum, she concluded, naturally enough, that I simply must have been to the Red Light District. (The slightly boring facts are that the first time I ended up in a bar somewhere on Prinsengracht; and I don’t know where I went the second time, but as I had no money on me I suspect I sat by a canal and contemplated my navel for a while. I can honestly say that all of my dalliances with prostitutes in Amsterdam can be thoroughly accounted for. Nice to know your parents have faith in you, isn’t it?)
A few hours after arriving in Amsterdam, we found ourselves in a Coffeeshop. Coffeeshops, for the uninitiated, are tightly controlled licensed premises that happen to sell cannabis products – hash, grass, spacecakes – along with the coffee. My favourite coffeeshop is Blues Brothers, at Nieuwendijk 89. The chocolate milkshakes are heavenly, and the orange squeezing machine is endlessly entertaining.
The plan was, after having taken Mum around the Red Light District (which she found disappointingly tame during daylight hours; she made us go back a further twice during the visit, her only faux pas being to screech, "I bet those transvestites are sore at the end of the night," in a voice that could be heard ricocheting off the walls of the Oude Kirk), we’d spend an hour in the coffeeshop, have a joint, loosen up a bit, and then meet up at 8pm with a mutual friend, Stephen Degg, who by coincidence was visiting the city and was due to fly back to England the following day.
That was the plan…
The reality was quite different. Mum now tells this story as though we, her family and friends, were forcing large quantities of drugs on her. Her protests fall down due to one incontrovertible fact: we couldn’t have physically injected them into her system, so how did she take so much without doing it voluntarily?
Mum surveyed the booty on offer. She opened the spacecake intended for her to share, and ate the whole slice, complaining that I was “stingy” for having bought two to be shared between three of us.
Something of a neophyte when it came to drugs, she then instructed us to roll her a spliff. I offered her a pre-rolled joint. She smoked half of it before declaring that it was “a bit rough”. Having been told to take it easy, her response was, “Bollocks, you. I’m chilling out.”
Daniel rolled her a spliff on condition she gave the pre-rolled one back to me. This she did. She smoked the spliff Daniel gave her, then, like a bull at a red rag, took the remaining three-quarters of mine from the ashtray (“to compare them,” she later said) and smoked most of that. She pronounced it “smooth”.
Despite my concern, and her being told regularly by all of us to slow down a bit, things seemed to be going fine. She was laughing. A lot. She denied being stoned, saying that the rest of us were off our heads. (I don’t deny this.)
Janine went to the toilet. When she returned, we’d gone.
Mum started saying that the room was swaying, and she wanted to go out and get some fresh air. She launched herself out of the shop, myself and Daniel hurriedly following her.
The cake had obviously kicked in – being digested rather than inhaled, spacecake tends to have a delayed but prolonged effect.
By the time Janine came out, Daniel and I were propping a 62-year-old, stoned granny up in the street. It was daylight, but the shops had recently closed, so there were few people around. I asked Janine to carry the bags – my concern was that, if Mum collapsed, I’d be in no fit state to help her up.
I knew there were benches on neighbouring Damrak. I also knew there were shops there which sold boiled sweets and Coca-Cola, sugar seemingly being a panacea for a bad trip. The quickest way to Damrak was down a narrow alley which smelled of stale urine and was caked in mud following a recent shower.
Ten yards down the alley, Mum stopped and announced that she wanted to lie down. Obviously, I wasn’t going to let her do this. She became quite abusive when I told her so. I held her up, her clutching onto me as though her life depended on it.
Using some force, we mauled her to Damrak, and onto the bench. I said I was going to get her something to drink. Her words to me as I walked away, still echoing in my ears to this day, were, “I don’t want anything to fucking drink. I just want to lie down in that alleyway.”
She downed a quarter-litre of Coke, and several Mentos. The colour returned to her cheeks. As quickly as the bad trip had started, it was over.
We asked her what she wanted to do. She said she wanted to return to the hotel and have a little lie down, but we could still go out and meet Steve as arranged. There was a lot of argy-bargy about this – I didn’t want to leave her, but she insisted she’d be alright. I made sure she’d got my mobile number.
Now here comes the rock ‘n’ roll granny bit. On the way to the hotel, she made us stop off at an Off-Licence, so she could buy a giant bottle of Bacardi to surreptitiously drink in the hotel room. Bessie Smith had nothing on my Mum.
On meeting Steve, he asked where Pat was. On telling him she’d got completely shitfaced by 6.30pm, had to be physically manhandled back to the hotel by two strong men, and was now having ‘a bit of a lie down' with a bottle of Bacardi, he asked how old she was. When I told him she was 62, his respect for her increased tenfold!
The Rolling Stones? She can piss ‘em!
At breakfast the following day, I asked her how she'd spent the evening. She seemed quite proud that she'd found BBC-1 on the hotel television, and had watched "the longest episode of 'EastEnders'". Having checked the schedules on returning home, I discovered that the episode transmitted that evening was a regular half-hour. Bearing this in mind, together with the fact that she actively avoids watching the programme at home, I think I can rest my case about her being stoned.
Oh, and the quote, "An insect, dropping its pollen, being frozen" was her stoned description of a televised firework display. Janine and I had the quote printed onto t-shirts for our final day in Amsterdam, and Janine is considering doing it as a cross-stitch.
