Unwanted Gifts (part 1)

mooseuk89
Sep 22, 2014
3 min read

There are times when my mother’s helpfulness can have me removing my own entrails in anger at times. We've all got the same story of mothers or partners tidying up your stuff to do you a favour and then you have to turn the place upside down to find what you need. I sometimes wonder what paint thinners my mother is on at times when I allow her to make decisions for herself. Mum and I are very keen on this cereal from Asda called 'Maple & Pecan Crisp Cereal'. Many supermarkets do their own version. Many even have different varieties that contain strawberries of chocolate, and it's the latter I like the most. So one day, with mum doing another Asda run, I asked her if she could look for a chocolate version. Had Asda not sold what I wanted, I'd have been happy with that. But mum came back with Coco Pops. Her reasoning was that I asked for something chocolaty, so this was the next best thing. I'm guessing that had I asked for potato gratin, she'd have purchased oven chips. This takes me back to when I was a child in the mid 80's. Home computers were all the rage and not all computer games were licensed. Computer games weren't always designed by an assembled team of computer programmers. It's hard to believe but it wasn't uncommon for one person to be solely responsible for the coding, graphics and sound. The only thing they didn't do was the publishing. These days you wouldn't get a solitary nerd designing a computer game from the ground up in his bedroom, but in the 1980s it was very commonplace. Even monthly computer magazines would print computer code for us to type in so we could have a free game to play. They were never any good but there was a sense that we partially created this 'masterpiece'. I remember my late father trawling through a car boot sale and upon his return there was a knock on my bedroom door. My dad had bought me a computer game for my ZX Spectrum. Now this should have been a rare treat during my appalling childhood, but sadly not. My father took no interest in my childhood other than me having the joy of growing up with the cretin. With no knowledge of computer games or even what I liked, he'd bought a trilogy of computer games. This 'trilogy' was part of the same set. It was written by a man or company I'd never heard of and published by a company that could have supplied building materials for all I knew. It was bad enough that he'd bought a poorly written game that no one had heard of, even worse that there were three of them that were ganging up on me. Then dad would occasionally ask me how I was getting on with them and I would have to frequently lie to spare his feelings. I would spare his feelings a lot. My dad once bought me a 2nd hand Scaletrix, which was a racing car game made with sections of plastic track you assembled and play on your bedroom floor. He took me aside one day to show me what he bought for Christmas and whether I wanted it. Yet again my lying skills were wheeled out again. As a father of a three year old daughter, I have a lifetime of lying to look forward to. I'll be frequently taken in by that beautiful sweet smile as I spend vast sums of money trying to please her.