I live, as I have mentioned, with my son.He is a committed nudist.This is due to general teenage indolence, and possibly , I think, his half-Frenchness. The South of France, from whence his father derives, goes in for nakedness quite a bit. Cap D'Agde,where we used to spend summers, had some fairly nervewracking beaches devoted to the nudies. As a pale-skinned, red-haired Celt, raised in a swamp, I tend to keep out of the sun. If you have ever playfully set fire to one of those tissue paper Italian biscuit wrappers when off your head on Sambucca, you will have an exact template for what goes on with my skin when exposed to sunlight. My nickname at school (one of the more repeatable,come to think of it), was "Morticia". At night, you can read by me.So parading about in my pelt surrounded by giggling French nudists pointing at me and going " Regardez, elle est vachement blanche! (cowingly white)"wasn't really on. The Giant Boy, though, is a horse of another colour. He played rugby for years, until he contracted laziness, but the musculature remains, and he is now seven foot tall and rising. Sharing living space with Michaelangelo's David is trying, I can tell you, and led me to considering my own upbringing in this regard.
I have indicated that my parents had widely differing attitudes to..well..everything, really. Match.com would have been appalled at the notion of them even sharing a country. Fortunately for me, there were no such considerations in 1952, when they were firmly soldered together in the eyes of God and two sets of mutually opposed relatives. My Mother looked like Grace Kelly.My father resembled Eric Morecambe, with Philip Larkin rising. A man fond of order, reticence, dignity, and circumspect to the point of lunacy, he had married a woman who detested cooking, filled the house with dogs, dressed like Zsa Zsa Gabor, and could not resist climbing trees on her way to pick us up from school.Dad was also possessed of an uncertain temper, red hair, and a terrifying blue stare. He often reminded my brother and I that he had "Been Trained To Kill".I think we were respectively three and eight years old when he first started to say this.
So yes, we grew up with ..er.."Mixed Messages" when it came to self-exposure. My father banned us from watching my mother ironing his undergarments. There was very little on television in those days, so any diversion was welcome. He contended that the sight of his vast white Y-Fronts might provoke questions which he was unprepared to answer. He kept his "unseemly" books from Fazackerly library in a box under his bed. Of course, I spent my entire late childhood reading them in secret, lying with the dust kittens handed down to me by Mum. They were disappointingly decorous, John O' Hara, Isaac Asimov, Raymond Chandler, but considered "unsuitable" and therefore total catnip to me.
Mum, on the other hand, was at ease with her admirable body, and would trot about in her pants and pointy bra, tapdancing on the landing lino if the mood took her.
So I now oscillate wildly between appearing on stage in corsets, wearing Restoration Comedy necklines, and swathing myself in a tarpaulin on the beach.
I am hoping to get the Boy in pants in time for Year 11.Perhaps I should sew him into them in September? By Christmas he will have burst out of them like the Hulk,anyway.
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