Letters to my sons.

Author: Administrator

  • A death in the familly

    Dear Son,

    tt is two weeks ago today that your Grandmother, my mother, died.

    The two of you only met once, on her birthday this year, 30th July 2005. Although you both had chats on the phone – you would gurgle, make your high-pitched bird noises and laugh while Grandma talked.

    Your grandmother was a fighter son, since I was nine years old she was having something removed, altered or irradiated. She fought cancer time after time and by the time of her birthday this year had just got her hair back from the chemotherapy she was having.

    Living with her death has been something I have been doing since I was eleven years old and in the end it wasn’t the cancer that got her. Despite it’s best efforts over the last 24 years it was her heart that gave out in the back of an ambulance on the way to hospital.

    You have kept me going this past two weeks with your spontaneous smiles. It’s as if you can sense the grief and unhappiness around you. You gorgeous smile reminds me that life goes on, that my mother wanted people to be happy and that you are my happiness. You were there to give me strength along with your mother at every turn. Even now as I’m writing this you are on the bed next to me laughing and farting and lightening my mood.

    I’m sure I will continue to cry for my mother for many years to come and I will miss her and the regular chats we used to have as she listened to my problems and offered advice. She told me on more than one occasion that life was for the living and the dead could look after themselves. With that it mind we have to look after your grand dad who is now all on his own.

    The one thing that I have learnt from this whole episode is never to put things off for the future if can do them now. The future may never happen.

    I have created a web site dedicated to your grandmother : audrey.caudle.me.uk.

    Audrey Alice Caudle 1937 - 2005

  • Two notable firsts

    Dear Son,

    This weekend was the first time in your lifetime that the Black and Whites put one over the great-unwashed Red and White filth of Wearside. Hopefully this will be the first of two for this season before they disappear from the Premier League.

    Your mother doesn’t like prejudices being taught to children although! We took your cousin Lewis to St James’ Park for his first Toon game a few years ago and when the fans started singing “Stand up if you hate Sunderland,” she was the first to her feet and then picked up Lewis and held him in the air while singing her guts out. I knew at that point that I was marrying the right woman.

    Yesterday we got a first look at your teeth, two little buds of white on the gum line. You have been chewing everything in site for a good few weeks now and your mother confirmed this morning that your teeth are through as you were being breast-fed. You seem to enjoy chewing the big toe on your left foot as well. As soon as you are naked the leg goes up and the foot goes into the mouth for a chew. Inspired by this I tried the same thing and I did manage to get my toes into my mouth but not with the same ease and panache. You don’t huff and puff as much and grumble about having a beer belly.

    I need a challenge to get me fit. Maybe another stab at the White Mountain?

  • Baptism.

    Dear Son,

    today (8th October 2005) was your baptism. Your mother is a Catholic and one of the things I (had to) agree(d) to when I married her was that any children would be brought up Catholic.

    Relationships are built on compromise and although I’m a devout atheist – I don’t go to Church every single Sunday – I agreed with your mother that you should be baptised. I, myself, haven’t been baptised and I don’t think I ever will be. In the Caudle side of the family infant baptism is not something that happens. Your Grand father on my side was a Methodist Minister and although he baptised babies he didn’t believe in it. He (and grand mother Caudle) thought that becoming a Christian was only something that could be done as an adult and that baptism would then mean something. This is a view that Uncle Phil and I also hold. Your Caudle cousins have not been baptised.

    Having said that the Catholic Church has Confirmation, which happens at an age when you will know your own mind. For your mother, having you baptised was important – a good enough reason for this atheist not to stand in the way.

    After you had been anointed with oil, had water on your head then the sign of the cross made on your forehead we all came back to the house. You and me watched some of the England game together. You sat on my knee and watched the TV. At half time as Lineker, Handson and Shearer discussed how England played and what they should do next; you joined in with your own analysis before crying for some food. In the 10 minutes that you talked you made a lot of sense although you never – along with the other pundits – predicted that Beckham would be sent off.

    England ran out 1-0 winners and with results in different groups England are now guaranteed a place at the world cup in Germany in 2006. Hopefully England can beat Poland and top the group. If England is to do well in the World Cup they need to improve big time. Don’t forget son you can always choose the Soca Warriors if you not happy with England ☺

    So today you were Baptised into the Catholic Church and had an England footballing baptism. You missed the Northern Ireland game because you were sleeping. You would have had nightmares if you’d seen it.

  • A winning smile

    Dear Son,

    you did two things of note yesterday. Firstly you had a laugh, not a giggle but a proper laugh.

    The second thing you did nearly made me cry. You fell asleep in my arms and I took you upstairs so you could sleep in your cot. I put you in your cot and as your bottom touched the mattress you opened your eyes, looked at me and smiled – as if you were thanking me for talking you upstairs and putting you in bed. As I put your head down you stretched and fell asleep.

    I’m not sure I should be telling you about the smile because in a few years, when you want some expensive trainers, you might try it on.

  • Political correctness

    Dear Son,

    I have never been a fan of political correctness. Dreamt up by a bunch of white middle class liberals it has caused more harm than good.

    They tell us that all whites are racists. When it is pointed out that they are white and therefore racist they make up all sorts of excuses why they are not white! I was told by one white man that he wasn’t white – no! He was in fact a Catholic living in Northern Ireland and an oppressed minority, therefore he couldn’t be a racist.

    I asked him to think of the following scenario:

    In a certain area black men walking alone are being attacked by a group of white men. One night a black man misses his bus home and can’t get a cab so he walks home. On the way home he spots a group of white men coming towards him. Of course he doesn’t feel afraid because he can spot from around 500 meters that the men are in fact Catholics who live in Northern Ireland and are on holiday. Therefore they can not be racist so he has nothing to fear.

    Rubbish of course.

    I was once told by a white women that all whites were racist but she wasn’t because she was in fact Romany. She wasn’t Romany at all but chose to live a lifestyle similar to Romany people. Social Services classed her and her family as Romany but this was a lifestyle choice of her own. But because Social Services classed her as Romany – she was Romany, part of an oppressed minority and therefore could not be racist.

    Well son sometimes I use your mothers Lady Velvet shampoo which is especially formulated for black woman’s hair. I make a lifestyle choice to use a black woman’s shampoo so applying the logic above – I am a black woman. Not only that, I am attracted to women, which make me a lesbian and with the problem with my calves, I’m disabled. So as a black disabled lesbian woman I can not be sexist, racist or homophobic.

    Which is rubbish of course.

    It can be argued that both ethnic Indians and Pakistanis in the UK are oppressed minorities. There are sections of each group that hate the other and regularly fight each other. These are racist attacks because the people attacked are attacked for no other reason than their ethnicity. But according to political correctness this doesn’t happen.

    If we believe the PC rubbish then as a white man I hate the black woman I am married to. The love I have for your mother is infinitely wide and twice as high and four times as deep. On this basis alone I know they are liars.

    But these white middle class liberals don’t have many non-white friends and usually feel uncomfortable in the presence of non-whites. Instead of seeing a therapist and confronting their own demons, they demonise every white person but include an exception for them selves and their ilk.

    Demonising people based on the colour of their skin is racism.

    The Politically Correct movement is inherently racist.

  • A few firsts and then a quick rant.

    Dear Son,

    we had our first bath together last Friday and on Sunday you went swimming with me for the first time. You’ve been swimming with your mother, but this was the first time that I came with you two.

    Jamesy P is in the charts with Nookie. This is an old song for you as you first heard it last February in Trinidad when you were still in the womb. Hearing it on the radio isn’t quite the same as the sound system you followed around Port of Spain or the ones that drove past when we watched from Tragarete Road.

    Hopefully we’ll be out in Trinidad for carnival on the 19th and 20th February 2007. 20th February 2007 will be Shrove Tuesday. The French name for Shrove Tuesday is “Fat Tuesday” or Mardi Gras. The next time your hear someone talking about having a “Mardi Gras” and it’s not on Shrove Tuesday, point out that they are an idiot and then explain why.

  • First word.

    Dear Son,

    you did two things today of note.

    The first was to have a rant at the TV just like your dad: is was incoherent and rambling and lasted for ages. Sunday mid day politics TV gets your goat.

    The second thing that you did today was say your first word. Me, your mother and Grand Ma Warner all heard it and we are sure it was meant and not an accident. After 16 weeks you said “hello”.

    Hello to you too son. You’ve had your first word, and if your like me you’ll want the last word.

    But you won’t get it.

    Oh no.

    I don’t think so.

    Not today.

    Or tomorrow … 🙂

  • Owen scores first home goal.

    Dear Son,

    after scoring against Blackburn last week, Owen got his first goal at Saint James’ Park today. Me and your mother are waiting for the goal to be shown on Match of the Day so I can’t comment. You are too busy on the breast to care although you have been watching UKTV History with over the last few weeks, Adam Hart-Davis being your favourite presenter.

    PS

    Just seen it. It wasn’t anything special but they all count and that’s what counts.

  • Technology

    Dear Son,

    this morning at around 6am I was changing your nappy, for the whole time you were preoccupied with the radio alarm clock. Maybe it was the red LED numbers that caught your eye as red tends to get your attention. This got me thinking about how you will view technology when you’re older.

    When I was a kid digital watches were the height of technology. When they first came out you pressed a button on the side of the watch and the face would light up and show you the time with a red LED. The LCD watches came out and I got one for Xmas 1980. It told the time, the date and had a stop watch as well so I could time events. It even had a programmable alarm. I think this was when I became obsessed with the correct time because the watch told the full time : hours, minutes and seconds. We had a teletext TV that told the exact time so I could sync my watch everyday. Around 1984 I bought another digital watch for myself. This had 24 hour display, hourly chime (it could be set to beep every hour or every 30 minutes), a count down, stop watch and you could wear it whilst diving. All over the UK on the hour various beeps would be emitted from wrists. At the time I could see no future for analogue watches.

    I got my first computer when I was 12 years old, a year after first getting a games console. Games for our Atari console cost £35 pop in 1982 when that was a lot of money, I still think it’s a lot of money now. A mobile phone is more powerful than the Sinclair Spectrum that arrived in 1982, so is an iPod. In fact my iPod Mini has a 4 gigabyte hard disk, the first Intel computer I bought in 1992 had a 40 megabyte hard disk and you couldn’t get bigger at the time.

    When your cousin Lewis was born I took the early train to Newcastle and then another up to Hexham and took some pictures using an APS camera. They were developed using a one hour service the following Monday and scanned that evening and uploaded to the web. Digital cameras existed in 1999 but were very poor quality unless you had a few grand to burn.

    Within minutes of your birth I had sent a picture of you to Uncle Phil using my phone and two hours after you were born I had published pictures of you on the Internet. When Lewis was born the one hour developing of photographs was a minor miracle and APS photo’s came back with a contact sheet which at the time was thought of as advanced.

    You live in an age where the Internet will be ubiquitous to the extent that it will disappear. For us TV got better when a fourth channel was added, cable and satellite TV were a revelation. Your Great Grand Mother Cleaver wasn’t impressed when she first saw television. They were showing tennis and the picture quality was poor. “You can’t see the ball” was her considered opinion.

    For some of us who grew up recording stuff off the radio the video recorder was a must have item. Now they are being slowly phased out as people use hard disk recording instead. That will become old hat some day soon as we have TV on demand already. Trails have started for TV on mobile phones, which also double up as MP3 players and cameras.

    What ever comes next you will find normal, you don’t know a time before the Internet, mobile phones and digital cameras and when you hear us grown up’s telling stories about these times you’ll think we are old farts. And you’ll be right.

  • MOBO’s

    Dear Son,

    last night it was the MOBO awards – music of black origin.

    This title is a load of rubbish for many reasons.

    Firstly human being as we know them started life in Africa and those people were black. Therefore everything we know from fire to the Hubble Space Telescope is of a black origin.

    Secondly they ignored the largest population of black people in the world – African’s – until 2005. They don’t seem to have a category for anything black that comes out of South America and they completely ignore the whole of the Caribbean except for Jamaica. Jamaica has given the world reggae but little else. Trinidad and Tobago has given the world Steel Pan, Calypso and given London the Nottinghill Carnival.

    You would think that Jamaicans invented carnival and brought it to London with the Windrush. Calypso came on the Windrush with Lord Kitchner, possibly the worlds greatest calypsonian. But he was born, bred and became successful in Trinidad before coming to the UK. That aside when record shops are trying to sell carnival music over the Nottinghill Carnival season they stuff an area full of Jamaican CD’s and deck the area in Jamaica flags. The Canboulay rioters spin slowly in their graves.

    But back to the MOBO’s and their other great crime – sucking up to American music. Obviously they have to keep their sponsors happy and to do that they have to have a high profile, so big American stars are invited and get their arses licked. The whole of English culture, including the input from foreign shores, is prostituted to the corporate agenda of the music business. Just like the fast food industry, they want to homogenise music so that everywhere you go you hear the same old over hyped crap. Anything original or different and unable to provide big enough returns to keep the music execs in nose candy is ignored or killed. I once watched a German music program and witnessed some German rap music. In between the German words could be heard the words “bitch” and “hoe”. How long before there is no corner of the world untouched by the culture and beliefs of the USA? There are places where children can get a carbonated soft drink with plant extracts but can’t get clean water. The MOBO’s are part and parcel of this process.

    If you are having an awards ceremony that recognises only black music and therefore mainly black artists; are these same artists then excluded from awards that don’t discriminate based on ethnic origin? The MOBO people will claim that they champion “urban” music and not black music but this falls down on two counts : why have the world “black” in the title and why then do they ignore Pan? Steel Pan is urban music, especially in Trinidad and through out the UK as well.

    But what do they mean by “urban”? Mega rich, big car and house? I’m confused son, maybe I’m too old to understand.