Mooching Around

"What are 50 fourteens?" asked d. Normally, she'd never ask; she does numbers for  living, but it'd been a long day.
Needless to say, I DON'T do numbers, either for a living or for fun, which is why I came up with the answer I did.
"Erm...90?"
"Wow," she said. We were laying in bed, here in Merthyr, at about 12.30 in the morning. We contemplated this number for a while.
"Between us then, we've lost a thirteen-year-old girl."
I blinked.
"A what-now?"
"You've lost two and a half stone, I've lost two and a half stone. That's 50 fourteens...that's equivalent to a thirteen-year-old girl...No...wait..."
We both lay there, considering our mutual manglings of mathematics and reality.
"Hold on, that's wrong," she said eventually.
"Mmmf," I said, which keen students of this blog will know how to interpret.
"I mean five fourteens," she said.
"Mm-hm..."
"Two plus two plus two-halves...that's five, times fourteen, right."
"Yes dear," I agreed.
"And it's not 90...it's 70," she explained.
"This is why I keep you around dear," I murmured. "to do math at quarter to one in the morning..."
"70 pounds between us," she said, seeming a little disappointed to have rationalied the extra twenty pounds out of existence. Mathematics is a sonofabitch sometimes when you do it right.
"That's not a teenage girl," she said sadly.
"At best it's a Backstreet Boy," she pondered. "Maybe a Justin Bieber. Yeah, that's a good thought. We've lost a Justin Bieber between us..."
I fear the only answer she received was a long, deep, sonorous buzz-saw snore.

Today has mainly been about refusing things.
My mother is unique in a dazzling sequence of ways, many of which have been previously documented in this blog. But in many other ways, she is something of the archetypal Welsh mother. So from the moment you walk in her door to the last seconds, when you say goodbye to her and get on a train, you're kept fairly busy refusing things.
"Want a cup of tea, loves?"
"No, thanks, we're good."
"Coffee - I got the de-caff in...?"
"Nah, thanks."
"Little bite of something? Toast? Got some cereal...?"
"N-"
"Fruit? Lobster Thermidore? Treasure of the Sierra Madre?"

You've heard of people who 'can't do enough for you'? Welsh mothers are like that - it's a compulsive, almost-nervous need to keep giving you things, to try and make your life on the planet (or certainly the time you share with them), as blissfully happy as they possibly can. It's like they're part of some sort of secret society, like the Masons, only with gravy-stained aprons, where they get together and compare everything they did for their offspring on a weekly basis.

Don't get me wrong, I think it's really sweet, and it's not as though I'm singling my mother out as the absolute archetype of this kind of behaviour. In fact, I happen to know her own mother was the same. You could never get away from my gran without taking a 'mooching bag' - a collection of random objects that might have come up in conversation, and of which she just happened to have one spare, and about which she wouldn't feel good about keeping, having discovered you were in need. As time went on, this became a reciprocal arrangement - we took mooching bags home from my gran, she took mooching bag home from us - and indeed from her other daughter, my aunt Cynthia. And it's absolutely true that, to some extent, the axis is extending now to our own generation; while there's little in practical terms we can bring, we try and establish a list of 'stuff to do' while we're visiting - be it intimidating staff at the local Carphone Warehouse, shifting bureaus, fixing computers, writing letters, or whatever else we can winkle out of my mother as being 'necessary' or helpful. d of course has a ready way to re-mooch - she cooks meals, joins the beverage rota, prepares snacks and so on. My stuff to do list tends to be more open-ended, and frankly sly - because it's almost like Welsh mothers lose bonus points for everything they let you do for them. So you do what you can, and every now and then you try and surprise them, like a sneaky little favour-ninja, just so you can return to your daily life feeling as though you're at least keeping the tradition of the two-way mooching bag alive.

You'll have to excuse me now...I've just been made another de-caff and some cheese and biscuits...