It’s Grim up North

The Boy Child is half Italian and half British. This makes him a cultural mongrel, and a soon-to-be bullied schoolboy. But before other, more culturally-homogeneous children make his life hell, Lady V and I have decided to embrace this beautiful duality and make sure he spends as much time as possible in his ancestral lands - Italy and the Lake District - and hopefully pick up the deceiving traits of the inhabitants of the former and the bullish traits of those of the latter. This way, he’ll be better equipped to fend off the little pricks who will want to make his life hell. But our objective is not just educational: spending time with his grandparents means he’ll become familiar with them, thus enabling us to dump him onto them as much as possible when we want to go on fun, ‘adult’ escapes. Nothing pornographic, mind you. We would simply like to rediscover the ability to enjoy a dinner (at home or in a restaurant) without having to get up every 3 minutes to go calm down the screaming Boy Child who is meant to be asleep in a different room but has instead chosen to test whether he can be heard from people living in Brixton. It has only been 3 months since the Boy Child has arrived, yet I have had countless disgusting meals because I have been unable to eat them while they were still warm. This is when the Italian in me says: enough is enough. There is only one thing more sacred than a child in Italy, and that is food. Hence, my desire for the Boy Child to spend time with his grandparents, especially his maternal ones who are easier to reach, has increased tenfold in the last 3 weeks.

The opportunity to introduce the Boy Child to his Northern kindred came when Lady V’s sister, Aunty S, decided to christen her third daughter J. In many ways Aunty S is very similar to Lady V, while in others she appears to come from a different planet altogether. They share a strong physical resemblance - both have fair skin, blue-grey eyes and a below-average height - and some character similarities: open-mindedness, trustworthiness, kindness, mischief, tolerance. But while Lady V hated growing up in the Lake District and dreamed of escaping to the buzz of London and to her seedy spiritual home of Paris, something she did as soon as she was 18, Aunty S always wanted to become a mother and raise her children in the muddy fields of the Lake District. It comes as no surprise, then, that her 3 children - which she had in quick succession with her climber-husband (a lean, bespectacled figure who seems content with life insofar as he can regularly wear tight lycra shorts and haul himself up to the top of rocky mountains) - are all covered in a thick layer of mud. The Boy Child’s three little cousins - aged 5, 3 and 2 - are ashen blond, blue-eyed and have the terrifying look of kids who are being raised in the countryside and who are used to entertaining themselves by dismembering small mammals. No doubt, at some point, they will try to dismember the Boy Child too.

We left London by car on a Friday afternoon just in time to hit the interlinked rush-hours of London, Birmingham and Liverpool, which formed a long snake of immobile cars across the entire width of Britain. I was driving, while Lady V sat in the back, shoving her breasts into the Boy Child’s mouth every time he expressed dismay at the state of the country’s traffic. T. was still hiking across the Americas with his brother, but DJ S came with us, using this opportunity to lure us into Blackpool for the night - her birthplace and the mythical stomping ground of her mother’s family. I had never been to Blackpool, and I was somewhat unprepared for it. I had always thought of it as a grim northern town where people from less fortunate backgrounds who could not afford going on holiday to - say - Tuscany, spent their annual leave in pursuit of cheap thrills. As it turns out, I had overestimated Blackpool’s grimness and underestimated its thrills.

After a night spent in a lavish (and, for London’s standards, extraordinarily-cheap) hotel on the ‘sea-front’ - I never really got to see the sea, only miles of wet sand stretching into the horizon, so I am not sure Blackpool is actually built by the sea - DJ S took us to the Pleasure Beach, an amusement park that spreads over the middle of the town. It is an extraordinary sight - as if an alien spaceship had landed onto Blackpool, and had become its living heart, with pulses of blinking lights and arteries of interwoven roller-coaster tracks. It was early on Saturday morning when we got in, so the place was relatively deserted, except for a few young teenagers and eager hen and stag-night groups, who surely by the end of the day would be finding themselves drunkenly in bed with each other. DJ S and I headed for the most scary-looking rides, while Lady V sat herself into a champagne bar with the Boy Child. For her, the idea of diving 400 ft into empty space is equivalent to going to the dentist to have all your teeth pulled out. The roller-coasters did not disappoint. Indeed, they were better than I could ever hope for: shockingly well-designed and exquisitely thrilling. By lunchtime, having pumped litres of adrenaline into my bloodstream, I was primed for the northern relatives.

I had visited the Lakes before, always with Lady V, and had met her parents several times, whom I was introduced to first as a friend, then as a ‘very good friend’, and eventually as the man who was going to become the father of their second grandson. While Lady V’s mum and dad had immediately welcomed me as a long-lost son, the rest of the family, made up of a complex array of aunts, uncles, first- and second-tier cousins, had been decidedly less enthusiastic. Until the arrival of the Boy Child, no matter how polite they had all been to me, I had remained an outsider, especially in the eyes of the clan’s men. When I had turned up at family gatherings in the past, they had looked at me with mild curiosity, wondering why this dark-haired, clearly-foreign and sexually-deviant man was amongst them. Their quintessentially-English reserve had only turned into open hostility once, when one of the younger cousins, under the influence of several shots of whisky, had tried to strangle me, drunkenly accusing me of ‘disrespecting’ Lady V. How very bizarre. This time, things were going to be different. I had fathered one of their own kind, and even more importantly, I had fathered a boy. I expected more than just polite hospitality. I expected to be socially embraced and celebrated by the entire community, and to take my rightful place in the Valhalla of Northern Fathers. The opportunity was symbolically optimal: Lady V’s entire clan was coming together that very Sunday at Aunty S’s farmhouse for J’s christening.

I wore my best Prada suit and Ferragamo shoes, not because I wanted teach a fashion lesson to the northern relatives, but because I knew that would get me out of any of the compulsory outdoor activities that seem to characterise each family gathering. The idea of tossing leeks or running a one-legged race across a muddy field might have been appealing when I was 12 (in fact, it wasn’t: I have always hated competitive outdoor sports). At 35, it felt at odds with Western civilisation. People of all ages or physical conditions where forced to partake in these ‘fun’ activities, no matter how good their reason not to. On one occasion, I had seen an eight and a half-month pregnant woman being dragged - literally - by her father into a field to toss leeks, despite her pleas to be allowed to remain seated and resting. The sick, the elderly, the disabled: all were caught up in this frenzy of mud-saturated excitement. The only way to escape it, it seemed, was to be inappropriately dressed for it. Northern men seem to go to formal events with an extra set of informal clothes, and are all-too-keen to toss their jackets and ties and slip into trainers and hoodies if the word ‘games’ is uttered by someone. For this reason, I always make sure I have no change of clothes and that my attire looks fit for a royal wedding. I am thus guaranteed to be left alone.

Before lunch at Aunty S’s farmhouse, we had to endure a never-ending service in a small church up a nearby fell (the local name for an oversized hill). I am a firm atheist, and although raised a good Catholic boy I stopped going to Church for god-bothering purposes when I was 18. On the rare social occasions when I have to make an appearance, I am always surprised at what little attention people pay to the sermon, for if they did they surely should realise what a load of crap they are being told. On this occasion, the local vicar, a pink-coloured man in his early forties, had launched in a very ill-constructed argument about why free will was a bad thing for good Christians: better to trust the writings of the Bible and do what the Church tells them to do, rather than go around questioning things and thinking for themselves. I looked around expecting people to kick him out of the Church - surely free will is one of the very theological foundations of Christianity, the idea being that you will be rewarded with Heaven if you choose to renounce evil and embrace goodness, not because someone else tells you to do so. But most of those around me were too busy trying to keep their children silent to listen to the vicar’s drivel.

I had forgotten how many children populate the Lake District. Thousands. It’s like being in a developing country, where people have no television (and no sustained source of income) so the only thing left to do is make babies and then find a wealth-generating use for them - in factories, in fisheries, in fields, on the street. There were tens of them in the little church the clan had suddenly invaded, ranging from the Boy Child’s 10 weeks to a distant cousin’s 7 year-old son. Covered in various shades of mud stains - the lighter ones older, the darker ones acquired more recently - they ran up and down the aisle, pulled at the vicar’s robes, dove into the baptismal font, crawled under benches and onto the altar, pulled each other’s hair out, yelled, cried and laughed. It was like a rat infestation. Had Jesus ever spent any real time with kids, or produced any of his own, I very much doubt he would have uttered the famous lines “let the children come to me”. Rather, he would have said “make sure they stay as far as possible until they know the meaning of the words ‘ejaculation’ and ‘drug-addiction'. Only then does it make sense to start talking to them”.

Two of Lady V’s cousins had just produced offspring of their own, so, once at Aunty S’s farmhouse, there was a lot of comparing and contrasting. Lady V was thrilled to find out the Boy Child was by far the cutest of all the present babies (thanks to the aforementioned genetic mix), and I could read the ripples of satisfaction in her mouth-lines as she grinned every few seconds for yet another photograph. Like in all other matters of life, birth too seems to be about winning the race, not taking part in it. In the meantime, I was surrounded by the clan’s men, who all had kids of their own, despite at times being 10 years younger than me, and who congratulated me with firm handshakes like an old friend. They treated me like the straightest of man, even making some little jokes, of the kind that straight men tell each other when women are not there. This led me to wonder whether they had forgotten I was gay, and assumed I had shagged Lady V to produce the Boy Child. I decided to avoid any conversation on how the conception was achieved, and took with a manly grin the slaps that kept descending onto my back, and that - as the alcohol intake increased - were suddenly turning into hugs and even gropes. I was beginning to find it really hard to hide the pleasure I was deriving from all this manly bonding, especially since all of the guys were climbers, and I was being given a free ride at feeling up their muscular arms and thighs.

Then, catastrophe struck. Despite my attire, they asked me to play football with them. In hindsight, I guess this was supposed to be the ultimate male-bonding moment, but to me football is what roller-coasters are to Lady V and holy water to the devil. My first reaction is to recoil in horror, and the second one is to launch into a 10-minute long tirade about why it’s an overrated sport, why it’s socially dangerous, why the values it promotes are bad for our kids, and on and on and on. If I am drunk (like I was then), the tirade can go on until there are people willing to listed to me. At first the blokes laughed, thinking I was joking when I suggested we play volleyball instead, but as my rant continued and I started waving my right-hand index into the air - usually a sign I should be dragged out of the room - their mouths started dropping and their hands moving away from my shoulders and thighs. In just a few seconds, I had gone from total social acceptance to complete ghettoisation. They waved their hands, shrugged and moved away, leaving me standing in the middle of the room.

DJ S approached me.

“Nice one”, she said patting me on the back, “you’ve outdone yourself”.

“Well”, I replied “at least I don’t have to worry about my hardon showing when we shower together after the match”.