It is the mid 1970’s and I am a late developing teen. I sport a pair of home made ‘hot pants’ made from a very racy material, denim. I am small and round, so I am inappropriately attired, but as yet unaware of this failing. I am engaged in very important teen business, the exact nature of which I cannot now recall. My mother collars me. [translation = demands my attention] “Here, taste this and see if it’s gone off?” she demands. Clearly she is quite barmy and determined to kill us all off. I baulk, pull a face and turn on my heel. As I depart she calls after me, “just smell it then, come on!” This confirms that my mother is older than Methuselah such that all her faculty are faulty.
It is the mid 1980’s as I hunch over the kitchen sink in a violently striped sweater with shoulder pads, even though I already have shoulders to rival the yoke on an ox. I scrape shaving off a lump of cheese and scoop mould off the top layer of jam. She’ll never know, I tell myself, as I present my daughter with her snack. “Did you ride a penny farthing to school when you were my age?” she asks with innocence, picking off a rogue green bloom from her sandwich.
Today my daughter is 25. I find her rummaging around in the fridge, empty containers are scattered over every available kitchen surface. She wears her latest wardrobe, gleaned from the Thrift store. She peers into a tub, pokes a finger in and licks it. I snatch it away from her, “don’t eat that, it’s well past it’s sell by date, I should have thrown it out.”
“Don’t be such an old fuddy duddy, a little bit of fur never hurt anyone,” she scoffs. She has lived in Europe and the States, traveled through Tibet and lived in China. The diet in Mozambique differs greatly from what she is familiar with.
Whilst life seems so much more complicated "now,"it would seem that some things are always changing, but other things remain exactly the same.
7 hours ago
