So, there I am last night, sitting in Alban Arena, the Mecca of light entertainment for St Albans and it’s leafy satellite villages, nursing an aching jaw for one hour 40 minutes, because when I’m not laughing out loud I am at least subject to the alien sensation of a unwavering broad smile; and the reason for this is that I have gone “out out” to see Micky Flanagan’s stand-up show.
If you don’t know him, Micky Flanagan is a 40-something, working-class Londoner now coping with all the foibles of the middle-class world in which he resides (a consequence of marriage and higher education) and this forms the basis for his observational humour. In other words, the cleverly humorous bastard has made my intended blog today almost fucking redundant. The best I can do now is fill in the gaps with the bits he left out and present them to you with humility from a darkened corner of the immense shadow that this man has cast.
I am sure many thousands of us middle-aged, middle-class men from working-class backgrounds exist. We bought Nick Hornby’s books and will one day be called upon as historical eyewitnesses to the gentrification of football and the feminisation and domestication of the British male. We’ve grimly held on to as many of the manly attitudes of our roots as our new middle-class lifestyle has failed to strip away. But for the most part, all that’s left is nostalgia, a tendency to want to fight people and a toleration of smokers and tinned fruit.
My children, now growing up in a semi in St Albans and going to a comprehensive (but nonetheless middle-class) school, are experiencing a childhood that will sadly deny them future justification for colouring their stories of youth with the same half-embarrassed, self-deprecating cynicism that I will lace this blog with. They have never trodden barefoot on pavements littered with dog shit, miles from home on summer evenings. They have been trained from an early age in post-toilet hygiene, rather than going through childhood in the belief that shaking the piss off your hands counted as washing them. And they will never have to rise to the challenge of surviving a whole day in a park playground with more health and safety risks than a ball-pit full of broken glass in a Tripoli leisure centre.
Playgrounds are defining images of many people’s childhoods. Back in the 70s and 80s playgrounds looked like playgrounds, but nowadays, near where I live, playgrounds look like woods. Everything is made of timber to blend in with the surroundings and thus avoid spoiling the ambience of the park with garish bright colours. And rather than building these child-friendly mini-assault courses on some good old-fashioned flesh-ripping, bone-breaking concrete, they use this artificial softened springy duvet-like sponge and STILL parents follow their kids round the playground with anxious outspread arms in case they fall. Fuck me, what would they have made of the medieval-designed, threat to life and limb that was a Witch’s Hat? These parents (and yes, I am one of them) would piss their pants with terror to see little Oliver or Jemima (NOT my kids names) graze their knees from carpet burn falling half a foot from a car-tyre swing onto the sponge-floor. (Sometimes its woodchip. Where I’m from the only place you’d find woodchip was in the wallpaper and the hamster’s cage.) Whereas, my mum was happy to wait for us to get home after dark and splash Dettol on our gaping wounds before picking the larger stones out of our flesh with her fingernails.
Another thing my children never experience is a complete void of ideas when they have to buy birthday or Christmas presents for a parent. Because these days, parents have “interests”. We like music and films and books and football and clothes and just about anything you can pick up from the supermarket for under a tenner. But I was never spoilt for ideas. I never knew what the fuck my mum and dad would want. Parents didn’t have “interests” in the 70s. What did they DO? Well, my mum smoked and cooked and did housework, so invariably she’d get something to aid her in these pastimes, including ashtrays, lighters and one time a drying-up rack to put next to the sink for the plates and cutlery. I got that from Argos. All on my own. I was very proud of myself. Dad liked smoking and betting on horses, so he got the same as mum but without any kitchen utensils. When we were old enough we might go into a bookies and buy him a six-horse accumulator.
To be fair, both my parents read a lot of books, but for some reason we never bought books. (Libraries gave them away for free and reminded you of that fact with 5-year overdue letters.) Being working-class didn’t mean you never read books. We weren’t fucking chavs. We might have watched a lot more ITV than what today’s middle-class parents would allow their kids (because it’s the TV channel equivalent of The Sun… which we also used to read, or at least look at.) I was a big fan of Enid Blyton, from “Noddy” when I was very young to “The Secret Seven” and “Famous Five” when I was older. I tried reading the “Famous Five” once to my own kids, but had to stop when Julian or Dick or someone started to talk about a boy at their school that they’d nicknamed “Sooty” because his skin was so black.
The casual racism of the average 1970’s working-class household tends to be swept under the carpet when people nowadays look back at that time. You’d never see “Love Thy Neighbour” on UK Gold, but even re-runs of “The Sweeney” have lines cut that I clearly remember, particularly one about a certain crook called Lee-Roy Brown. A rite of passage for us children of that time was the first time we turned round to our Dad and said, “That’s a bit racist,” after he’d told a joke about corner-shops or “blacks” (to use a milder word than most you might hear.) As a succeeding generation you have to take a higher moral ground and challenge your parents. But then your own children will do it to you. I get accused by mine of being homophobic just for suggesting that Louis Walsh might have more than a professional interest in some of the boy bands that come on X Factor. I’m only saying.
Sometimes I wonder if I am denying my children some of the joys of life that I fondly recall from my own youth. I feel that I should turf them out of the house today, without their phones or shoes on their feet (because the sun’s out) and then go to the corner shop to buy spaghetti bolognaise in a tin for dinner. We could even have it on toast.
