The Queen Regime

Disclaimer: Not my actual mother.

I was raised by four people - five if you count the Doctor from Doctor Who, but that's another story entirely.

My bio-dad had the constitution and the bloodline of a serious alcoholic - he could never stick at anything, but he was a great laugh, and for the price of a pint he'd do anything you asked him to - jump off a cliff - yes, really, and this was in the 70s, before suicidal stupidity was an extreme sport - climb up a flagpole, do a headstand on a pint glass. You name it, he'd do it, if it meant not paying for a round.

My mother was, and happily still is, five feet buggerall of demented, focused, Welsh Valleys Mother, who introduced herself to my then-fiancee (who was American and who grew up in a household headed by a second generation Italian American) with the words 'Hello love - now, don't you worry about us, we're just like the Mafia.'

When my bio-dad pulled one stunt too many (for context I always feel I should mention that the week of my birth, he quit his job and went on a massive bender, only arriving at the hospital as my mother was being wheeled down for an early-70s Caesarian. He was carrying a carrier bag of loose sherry trifle and singing Engelbert Humperdink songs at the top of his voice. Six weeks later, once my mother'd been released home, he pushed her through the glass in a 70s partition door and smashed every other bit of glass in the house, including my feeding bottles - class act, my bio-dad), we left him one night snoring on the couch and went to live with the third of my initial influences - my gran. She was a woman more or less the size, shape and overall temperament of a wardrobe, and she was endlessly inventive company, except when it came to food, where a heady combination of staggering bone-poverty throughout the 20s and 30s, and the unmitigated joy of war and post-war rationing had never quite let her go. I am grateful to this day to have escaped the serving of her brawn (essentially boiled, pressed, vaguely fermented pig-scraps) that my mother and aunt only have to mention to turn each other deathly pale, but my gran's approach to food was that there was carbohydrate, and meat, and green stuff that you stewed for hours. She raised me on rice and macaroni while we lived with her, and it was frankly fabulous for a young boy with a tendency towards simple, sedentary (or if possible, entirely unconscious) pleasures.

Then, between living with my gran and my mother meeting the fourth person to whom I owe a chunk of my fundamental personality, who I think of as my proper dad, Ma and I lived on our own for a few years. She'd never really done that before, and those years are marked by all sorts of memories - her frequent decisions to move furniture around after ten o'clock at night, 'just because.' Her sitting with big piles of bills, a pad, a pencil and no earthly way of making anything amount to a figure she liked. Her at a stove, having learned from her mother that big pots of rice filled you up for very little in the way of actual money. But the most potent mental snapshot I have of her from those days is her with a vacuum cleaner, or her with a duster and polish, with the stereo cranked up loud, cleaning her flat, or later her house, to the strains of Freddie Mercury and Queen. She would shine the bejesus out of tables to We Will Rock You, she would feather-dust to Hammer To Fall, using the duster as her guitar for the solos, and she would, inevitably, vacuum to I Want To Break Free. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, I am well and truly a second generation rocker. When we left my bio-dad to his snoring and his 70s, maudlin Elvis ("Beeecause you're alllll I have, my boy..." was sung to me many a drunken time), we took three records with us - one album and two singles. Thin Lizzy's Black Rose was the album, while the singles were Queen's We Will Rock You/We Are The Champions, and Free's All Right Now/My Brother Jake. I used to play them endlessly on a salmon pink portable record player in my gran's upstairs front bedroom. To this day, my mother would dance any one of you under a table, and the last time I went to London (where for perverse reasons, my iTunes library is held), she texted me to say 'Oh do me a favour - rip me a Guns and Roses compilation will you?'. The famous adage says 'Dance like no-one's watching.' Ma dances, still, like every eye is on her, and to be fair, every eye usually is.

All this meandering remembrance is really a long-winded way of saying that, having walked six times round the local lake (3.5 miles), and in total, walked some 6.3 miles (692 calroies burned, my phone informs me), I'm not getting on the exercise bike tonight. Today,  instead, I submitted to the Queen Regime, and, while stopping short of technically dusting or vacuuming, I have had a headful of Queen, and Blondie, and a little GnR, and I have tidied the crap out of one floor of our flat. I have reached, and stretched, and shoved, and lifted and gone up and down stairs more times than seems possible, somehow, and given that my intake today has been 200 calories of porridge, three new decaff skinny mistos (note to self - find out exact calorific values of those, for sake of own obsession), a litre and a half of water, three slices of buttered (yeah, shoot me) wholemeal toast and a smallish dollop of baked beans, I'm going to say I'm still reasonably in line with the game, if not actually ahead of it.

At no point have I felt unduly hungry, and at no point, still, have I beaten small children to death for their Easter Eggs, nor wanted to. I mentioned this to my friend Gail.
'Ah,' she texted sagely, 'you're still in diet piety mode. That'll change.'
I told her I knew it would, but that as yet, I wouldn't tear her head off for the chocolate cake she was flaunting at me. The day will come when that won't be a safe thing to do, but it's not here yet, for which I'm grateful.

Of course, as I sit here, justifying my refusal to get on the bike tonight (which to be honest is more about time than will), the bike's handles and back rest are looming at me over the top of the computer.
'Come to meeeeee,' it's singing, like some siren of sweat and pain. 'Do more Innnnnsannnnnity...'

That's really not happening. I tried to do the Insanity thing last night - twenty minutes, they say. Work insanely hard for two minutes, rest for one, and so on for just twenty minutes. What they don't tell you is it's ten minutes of working insanely hard, followed by ten mintues of laying on the floor, weeping, begging for a friendly seal clubbber to come and put you out of your misery.

'You didn't get that from the name?' asked d, my wife, when I mentioned it to her before flopping, practically dead, into bed last night. I should probably mention that most of the time, she has the family brain.

I'm not saying I won't do the Insanity thing again.
Just that I won't do it again tonight.

Tonight I'm content to have rocked in my mother's strutting, Freddie-following footsteps, to have a tidier living environment and to feel like I've worked comprehensively out. Tomorrow brings a new challenge - tomorrow is the Day of the Disappearing Sunday Dinner.