A Family Holiday

As you know, I’m back home from University for the Easter Holidays, and having served exactly one quarter of my time here I thought I’d commemorate this auspicious occasion, invite you to ‘meet the family’, and write about my break from the Spring Break tradition, which last year took me south of a border to Mexico. This year I’m in Telford, neither north nor south, in the middle of England, and as far as possible from the sea and any immediate route of escape. Here, el mariachi play drum & bass from bloated car stereos, burritos are filled with cigarette butts and the senõritas push prams to McDonald’s. My holiday this year cannot be further, not just geographically, from Spring Break 2003. And instead of spending it with five other likely lads and their matching t-shirts, I’m with the friends you can’t choose – family. They are:

Mum

Mysteriously, neither of my parents is tall and yet at 6’3’’ I am perhaps their collective height. My mum is particularly small. Even on tip toes she struggles to slap my face, should the need arise. Her rather grand personality though adds a couple of feet, and draws more than a few laughs. Funny, overwhelmingly optimistic and tea-total from the start, my mum is an unlikely counsellor for alcoholics, and I fear would find an ample client base amongst my peers. At home her work manifests itself in the question “…and why do you think you feel like that?” which is raised at several points during the day and to a creeping feeling of unwitting analysis. She once asked me if the colour I chose to paint my bedroom represented the way I was feeling, which if true would mean that I felt white.

Dad

With a curious cross-pollination of Delhi and Wolverhampton accents, my dad is a soft and rarely speaking man, exuding a seeming wisdom from an oft-lotus position. A news junkie, dad trades political views with a Michael Moore than enough inaccuracy and a fervent distaste for people in power. Having been his own boss for a number of years with a number of businesses, dad once maintained a cartel of corner shops in my hometown. He now ironically keeps a living speaking at a call centre in Telford’s only high-rise building, barely scraping the sky, and dabbles in delegation of the YDIY sort on his days off.

The Not-So-Ugly Sisters

Being the youngest in my family there was little left in the way of good looks after my senior sisters – the Bollywood starlets – were born. First came Suman, who loved school so much she went back to be a teacher, then Uma, who, I guess, loved home so much (and her money) that she went back to be a rent free resident. She thought she was lucky to find a career that combined work with socialising, but it turns out social work is not so much that. She spends her weekends shopping for windows, while my eldest sister Suman spills over essay plans for the German class she teaches. When working in a tag-team formation they can really kick my ass, but hey – where would I be without my menstrually diverse sisters and their fit friends! (Danke Shön, Su!)