Thursday 28 April 2016

Going Mad

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.


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