When I was a kid my dad would tell us to hop in the car and
we’d be off. No questions asked except for ‘Where are we going Dad?’ Often he’d
tell us ‘We’re going mad’. This was of course his little joke, made only to
himself, one you’d need to make whilst bundling four kids into an
airconditionless Ford shit box. Dad may have been behind the steering wheel but
we were the ones driving him ‘mad’. What didn’t help his cause was four bored
kids believing whole heartedly that we were indeed going to a place called Mad.
We didn’t know where Mad was but we were ready to find out. We’d even practice
our mad faces so we’d fit right in when we got there. We fell for the trip to
Mad on many occasions but not once did we get even close to its gates, gates
that we assumed were designed with fury and anger and gargoyles. Surely there’d
be gargoyles? No. We’d always arrive with fading glee to some brown building
that sold carpet or light fittings or linoleum. Buildings frequented by decaying
men in beige suits, total fun vacuums whose only excitement came in the form of
coughing blood onto a hanky because that meant it was nearly over. Ironically
us kids would be, you guessed it, mad. Dad was again right all along but for
all the wrong reasons. Countless Saturdays were ruined by trips like these. Yet
for the brief times where we were buckled up and believing that Mad was a real
and unexplored land, the times where we looked out the car windows with a sense
of wonder about our upcoming adventures into the unknown, those times were
brilliant. Nowadays I have to spend a lot of money to get those feelings back.
Is there a point to this one? If there is it’s this; lie to
your children. Lie to them but make the lies small so they can do the rest. As
for the disappointment that may follow? Well you’d be mad not to teach them how
to deal with that one.
