Sunday, February 18, 2007

family outings

All metal heads want to be rock stars, it’s a given. I now formally pass my torch on to my children.
I do this for two reasons;1) I am getting to old and 2) I am absolutely talentless.

Why is this relevant? Even the coolest Hendrix/Cobain/Vicious wannabe has family; mums and dads can be such a drag on your street cred. How can you form the new Iron Maiden when your dad keeps telling you to cut your hair or you have to collect your little sister from the local catholic junior school, or worse still your mother is on your back about getting a job?

Before I got a full time job my mum insisted on dragging me shopping every Monday(it may have been Tuesday) to Asda’s in Tilbury, this I could handle and even after I started working I would still sometimes go with her just to try and be an embarrassment and to take the piss out of her friends. Family outings however where something different.

Only a few spring to mind though there must have been many more. There was a trip to Clacton organised by mum’s church, she made me dress fairly respectably (jeans and plain t-shirt) and I had to behave. After sitting on the beach for about half an hour I made my excuses(find a toilet) and left, my brother found me about two hours later wearing a sleeveless guns’n’roses t-shirt with “shit happens” stamped across it, some itsybitsy sunglasses and three and a half empty newky brown bottles. I had found a market stall that supplied the essentials and a shop selling bottle openers, what more do you need?
Needless to say I don’t think mum was impressed.
Another one was a trip to London zoo with my dad, brother and sisters. My dad was the last person I wanted to spend the day with but felt I had a duty to go(something to do with him paying for a tickets and us begging him to take us, seems to have forgotten we had asked him about two years earlier), my brother and I snuck off and spent ages trying to convince the lady in the shop to sell me some fags, I went all day with out a smoke, fucking great, nearly 19 and the bitch refused me, this after a lecture about not becoming a hippy and the usual haircut routine, stomping around a blazing hot stinking zoo, trying to be interested in a bunch of animals that I couldn’t give a toss about, and this was on a Saturday which I rarely got off work, I could have been somewhere else with beer.
Ditto a trip to the Southend air show, though on this occasion I bumped into my mates, left dad with the siblings (he can be quite understanding at times) and off we went to the cliffs pavilion to pay extortionate amounts of money for warm beer, seemed all the metallers had the same idea, it had an almost gig like atmosphere.

Its my turn now, I have the moody disinterested child in tow, though she has yet to discover alcohol, and it probably wont be long before child number two joins her.

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