Calm Down Dearest // Mother Knows Best

We kind of wanted to avoid giving you a regular opinion column to read; you’ve got enough opinions of your own after all, you don’t need even more taking up brain-space. But then we read some stuff from Eddie Whittingham and realised it was like, totally hilarious. He’ll be swinging some stories up onto the site every Wednesday morning to help you laugh the way through mid-week blues. Calm down dearest…

With the “Big Freeze” well and truly under way this past week I was forced to consider something of my past that I’d long forgotten; the forever unwanted, nagging advice of a mother. They’re funny things mothers. Have I ever listened to mine? Nope. Have I ever understood her reasoning? Nope. Is she always right? Annoyingly so. Whilst you can’t help but love them, they drive you insane. She’s spent years looking after you, ironing those shirts that you bought fashionably creased, calling your latest girlfriend by your ex’s name and better still, never quite having the guts to confront you about Google history showing you visited www.boobs.com (which, incidentally you only visited because you were 12 and didn’t really know the best place to start looking for it).

Mothers have taken a lot of flack for us over the years, yet part of me hates her. Not hate in the way in which I’d like to maim Pierce Morgan using only the sharpest compass WHSmiths had in store, but just… that she always, always has to be right. She was right about my first girlfriend. She was a slag. She was right about that rash. It was from that slag. But worst of all, she was right all along about getting some practical shoes from Clarks with “plenty of grip”. As it turns out my Italian handmade designer shoes with the replica sole of a baby’s arse, aren’t the sort of practical she had in mind.

So today, when I was walking to get myself a pint of milk (she always said it would make my bones strong) I catastrophically failed by placing baby’s arse sole of shoe onto a mini pavement glacier. I fell miserably into a heap at the foot of small child smugly brandishing his pair of grip fast Clarks. I bet that child hadn’t slipped up once that day and hurt his coxis so bad that he feared he may have to go see a colorectal specialist. I might. Mind you, when I’m bent over in A&E getting my bum jabbed at to establish if I’ll ever be able to sit down again… I can look from above at my handmade Italian shoes and think, ‘You might have been right about these loafers Mum but at least I didn’t get bullied at school for having crap shoes’. That smug child will be.