White Rabbits

This time, notwithstanding the tag, it's actually shit my Dad said. "White Rabbits," he'd say, on the first of the month, before he said anything else, allegedly for good luck. As with most things from my childhood this one has stuck with me forever.

No idea where it comes from, or how many other people are similarly afflicted, but even now - with my sane, scientific, logical, unsuperstitious head on, and happily walking under ladders and spilling salt all over the place (especially when I drop the salt grinder into my soup, but that's another story) - I still get an involuntary twinge every 1st of the month when I remember I didn't say "white rabbits."

I wasn't at all surprised to discover Wikipedia has quite a long diatribe on the subject. That entry has quite a few variations I'd never heard of, but strangely doesn't record our family variation, which declares months without an "R" in their name as rabbit-free zones.

Naturally, a common unwanted side effect of that is to ALWAYS forget to start up the rabbiting again in September, having had all of May, June, July and August off.

Soapy fish

Part of a conversation we were having the other day triggered a childhood memory illustrating an almost-forgotten art in modern households. Thrift. For your own amusement, try explaining this to one or more young people between the ages of 10 and 25, and watch their faces as the disbelief and incredulity mounts at the realisation that anyone could have gone to so much trouble to save such small sums of money.

When I was a kid, soap was - relatively - expensive. Or at least, that's what my Mum told me (hence the tag). So it was important to make it last as long as possible. Naturally, that didn't involve NOT washing - being thought dirty was a crime (or even, a SIN!) even worse than being thought a spendthrift - but it did mean hanging on to each bar of soap until it was totally used up, and we had an ingenious method of using those last tricky little slivers that could slip out of your hand and hide on bathroom floor, behind the pedestal. A soap fish. Made of synthetic sponge in the shape of a fish - it had eyes, and fins, and everything - you could shove your soapy remains up its jacksie and use it to wash in the bath. And I did. Pretty much until I started big school. I clearly remember the frustration of not being able to actually play with the damn thing in the bath - it was a fish, after all - on account of that dissolving its soapy guts too quickly for True Thrift(*). No, it was for washing, not for playing. That was made abundantly clear.

The soapy sponge fish (or was it a spongy soap fish?) fell apart eventually, and my Mum was gutted to discover she couldn't find a replacement anywhere. It was OK though, because by then I was old enough to learn the trick of "gluing" the old sliver of soap to a new bar, carefully sticking down the edges all round so you didn't accidentally knock the parasitic little piece off its bigger, younger brother. Waste not, want not, as was constantly drummed into me as soon as I was old enough to hear.

Incidentally the "importance" of not wasting soap - engraved deeply as it was on my psyche as a child - stayed with me long after it should have done. I think I was in my early forties, stood at the bathroom sink gluing some soap together when I suddenly thought "what the FUCK am I doing?"

(*) Could be a good title for a movie. What do you think?

Good morning! This is your early morning call

Sunday. 7.45am. Not the time of day (or even day of week) you'd normally expect to receive a phone call from your mother. Especially one that goes: "I tried to call you yesterday and got a message saying 'the number you have dialled is not recognised' so I thought you'd emigrated to Canada and not told me."

Closely followed by the recently popular "I thought I was going to have to change my will."

Not sure if this is deliberate, but there's been an awful lot of talk of changing wills lately. As if the spectre of the loss of my (almost certainly enormous - *koff*) inheritance will be enough to make me toe the line and behave in a more dutiful fashion (by her reckoning).

Sheesh.

Wish in one hand...

I wrote recently about shit my Mum says, and I've just remembered something else she always used to trot out regularly when I was a kid. It was a memory of her grandma - whom she called Gram - and the old lady's reply whenever, as a girl, Mum would wish for something.

This homespun philosophy was passed on to me when I in my turn would make some wish, of the sort kids are wont to do. "I wish I had a bike," or "I wish I had someone to play with," etc. Round she would spin, eyes sparkling brightly at this new-found opportunity to pass on her worldly wisdom. "Wish in one hand," she would declaim, "and shit in the other, and see which hand gets full first."

And as I've remarked many times in the past, my mother's mind often works like some kind of fleshy programmed text which is incapable of independent thought. So this Epithet of Astonishing Profundity would inevitably be followed up with the observation: "that's what my Gram used to say, and she wasn't being rude."

Which, clearly, she was. She was revelling in the chance to be slightly naughty and use the word "shit" where in fact almost any other physical activity which could possibly have resulted in the filling of a hand would have served as an alternative. She could have said spit, for instance, although admittedly it would not have had the instant memorability of the mental image of someone actually shitting into their hand.

I did wonder occasionally what effect it would've had on my Mum if I'd taken her advice literally. If I'd walked up to her with my handful of shit stretched out in front of me and said something like "look Mum! This one got full first!" I mean, she would only have had herself to blame for putting such a mad thought into a kid's head.

Incidentally, the irony of referring to this stuff as "shit my Mum says" has just hit me since, occasionally, she did say "shit." Q.E.D.

Stuff my Mum said

We've all heard of "Shit My Dad Says", right? Well, you can Google it if you haven't. What? You want me to do everything for you? Good grief. Alright: here.

Anyway, where was I? Oh, yeah. Well my Mum doesn't say much these days that's worth reporting. It's not like she's as clued up as that guy's dad. But way back when I was a kid she used to say a bunch of weird shit. I mean, I was fifteen before I discovered who "our Side" was. I thought he was some fat bloke my Mum used to know. Whenever she saw a really fat person she'd say he (or she) was as fat as our Side.

Who was he - a long lost relative or something?

No. It was me not hearing properly. What she was really saying was that they were as fat as a HOUSE side.