The Home Front: Links

Accommodationally challenged after a disastrous foreign trip, CJ is forced to take refuge with his parents. It was the first time he’d lived with them since his teens, and he was surprised to find himself in a war zone. Following are CJ’s bulletins from the front line in the eternal war of age and sex...

I’m a 55-year-old-man living at home with his parents.

I’m thinking of joining one of those on-line dating websites. I’d put it up as my personal ad: “55-year-old-bachelor living at home with his Mum.”

The women will be queuing up in anticipation.

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What would John Wayne have said?

Something strong and clever, no doubt, something menacing, grinding his jaw and looking the other guy straight in the eye while he goes for his gun. But that tough guy has nothing on our Mum.

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This is what they’re like. Mum gets on the wrong bus. Dad follows her, even though he says he knows it’s the wrong bus, and then keeps them on it because he thinks it might be the right bus after all but going in the wrong direction. Both of them blaming the other and neither of them daring to ask the bus driver.

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And so it goes on, for several more days. Dad is unable to move a muscle, he feels so ill. He confines himself to his room, that persistent, niggling little cough the chief evidence of his existence, only emerging every so often to take some food or to get a drink, shuffling down the stairs and into the kitchen like a tortured ghost on its eternal wanderings through the afterlife.

“I don’t know what’s wrong with me,” he whimpers, as we pass in the hall one day.

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“Be reasonable love,” he said, before launching into a long, complex and entirely logical explanation of why it made more sense to wait a week or two. He needn’t have bothered.

It was that “be reasonable” that did it.

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Another problem is that in your desperation to get all the shopping done you go into some form of a blind frenzy. This is a bit like that battle frenzy that Viking Berserkers were said to experience, where they saw red and wanted to kill everything in sight. Only you don’t see red, you see bargains. And you don’t want to kill everything in sight, you want to buy it.

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And there it was again, that look, sharp as a razor. It was like I’d been cast back over thirty years and I was just a naughty boy again doing something of which she disapproved. I was stopped dead in my tracks, unable to move, pinned there by her forensic gaze, a child once more, busy making excuses: “No, Mum, um, it was Rusty, honest Mum, it wasn’t me.”

Who says we ever grow up?

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"Stone writes with intelligence, wit and sensitivity." Times Literary Supplement

Publications *The Guardian Weekend*The Observer*The Big Issue*The Independent*The Independent on Sunday*The New Statesman*The London Review of Books*Mixmag*The Sunday Herald*The Times Literary Supplement*Prediction*Kindred Spirit*The Whitstable Times*Saga Magazine*Kent Life*The Whitstable Gazette*

Books *The Trials of Arthur (with Arthur Pendragon: Element Books 2003)*Housing Benefit Hill (AK Press 2001)*Last of the Hippies (Faber & Faber 1999)*Fierce Dancing (Faber & Faber 1996)*

"Wry, acute, and sometimes hellishly entertaining essays in squalor and rebellion." Herald

"The best guide to the Underground since Charon ferried dead souls across the Styx." Independent on Sunday

"Passionately serious, irresistibly compelling, and hilariously good-humoured." Professor Ronald Hutton, Bristol University

"Searching, funny, intelligent and illuminating." Deborah Orr, The Independent.