Today, my son is 13, four days ago my Mum was 80, and I’m smack in the middle of the organisation of both birthday parties.
This is where my parenting enters uncharted waters. For the first 13 years life was pretty good – my parents were kind, responsible people, though I became exasperated with their snobbery and formality; and although school involved steering a course between sadistic paedophiles and achievement-obsessed failed adults, I had a close bunch of friends and enjoyed many of the sports and lessons.
I wasn’t your average boy. I had no interest in cars or football. My main pastimes were propagating my collection of cacti, solving maths puzzles, making origami models, and to my father’s undying dismay, French knitting. By 13 I had also carved out a niche in the playground as the kid who listened to other kids’ problems.
The biggest barrier to communication with my Mum remains the question over whether a child’s personality should affect decisions regarding their education. She still believes the military education I was suddenly consigned to at 13 is best, and that my inability to reconcile myself to it betrays a lack of determination. I still believe a path of creative subversion was probably the best anyone could wrest from that desperate situation.
It was a sudden, and premature, home-leaving. From 13, I hated my parents for arranging this impossible ordeal, and, of course, hated my school. Respite was to be found in the bar at Reading station on the 12-times-a-year 200 mile journey between the two.
3 long years of liminal existence, of non-belonging and self-doubt, before I realised that the whole world was bonkers, and that I, and a small group of anarchist friends, were the only sane people within it. Thirty years later, the only small adjustment I would make to this world view is that I, too, am completely bonkers.
Thus it is that I can bring myself to celebrate my Mum’s 80th birthday, as a fellow bonkers traveller in a world of bonkers travellers.
Another thing I gained from my schooling was a love of the outdoors. Initially as a refuge from the general bonkers-ness, later for the sheer joy, beauty and euphoria of the wilderness.
Over Easter I took time away from work and creative exploits to indulge this passion with my son. He is a keen climber already, and though I endeavour to follow wherever he goes, it is often with shaking legs and a sickening sense of imminent destruction. We managed Pen-Y-Ghent and Inglebrough in Yorkshire, and Blencathra in Cumbria, though the previously stated aim of Scafell Pike eluded us due to gales and snow.
We also took a look down Gaping Gill in the Dales, where a small river disappears down a rather large hole. In my 20s I was a keen pot-holer and had wriggled and writhed my way through the sinuous and serpentine tunnels that lead to the bottom of this underground cascade. My son, after gazing into the darkness of the Gill announced: “I’m going to make it my life’s ambition to go to the bottom of that hole …”.
I guess it’s a human thing … The Peruvian Incas sacrificed their children at the tops of mountains, or threw them down “bottomless pits” in an effort to come to terms with the extraordinary feelings such places arouse within us. And yet there is nobody else in my family history (in living memory, at least), who either went to the top of a mountain, or to the bottom of a cave.
The weekend has begun to clarify my vague intentions to bring improvised performance to mountains … and maybe also extend it to caves. It must come back to the spiritual and the ritual – the Tibetans, Amerindians, Incas and other mountain peoples who worshipped their fierce landscapes. I feel more research coming on: who else is doing this, what’s the anthropology, how does the psychology fit in? But first, I think I’ll indulge myself in a little more pure experimental, euphoric, intuitive, expressive, fervent and passionate human bonkers-ness on hillsides … and, like the ridges of the mountains, just see where it goes.
