My Idea of Fun Read Online Free PDF Page A

Fish in a fabricated barrel. But their heyday had been short-lived; a fifty-year season, during which the dregs of the English middle classes had been washed against the guttering of the Channel, before finally being sluiced down it, out into the Bay of Biscay and the Med.
    Even by the time I was a child, the green-and-white picket fences, the pink-and-pebbledashed bungalows, the tea shops and other colourful amenities, all of them were in distempered decline. Psychic tumbleweeds blew down the cul-de-sacs and skittered around the crescents. It had become a landscape where everything that looked temporary was in fact permanent, and where everything that looked permanent was already scheduled for demolition.
    My mother's caravan park capped it all. Besides the bungalow cum B & B there were twenty or so fibreglass sheds for holidaymakers. But their wheels were bound to the turf by weeds and nettles, and their quaint fifties’ aerodynamicism only served to underscore the hard truth that they – and by implication we as well – were going nowhere.
    On this not-quite-Beachy head my mother made her stand. My father was grey enough but he had no eminence and my upbringing was left in my mother's more than competent hands.
    It's difficult to talk about the woman with any objectivity, especially as she's still alive. Perhaps when she's dead the Mummy smell will disperse, like mustard gas from a trench-scarred battlefield, and I will be able to see her, and smell her, for what she really was. But not now. Now I can only think of her as an assisting adept, a distaff manipulator. It was she who set it up between me and The Fat Controller. I have long suspected that they may have been lovers at some time or other. I admit, it does sound preposterous. The technical problems would be well nigh insurmountable, for a start. The Fat Controller is just too fat to have penetrative sex in the normal way. Either his penis would have to be fantastically long and flexible, or he would need a series of finely calibrated, servo-mechanised clamps. These to be positioned in the deep furrows between his belly and his pubis, so as to lever the flab interfaces apart when the crucial moment came. I digress – but not entirely. This matter of the potential relationship between The Fat Controller and my mother is of some importance in what follows, and were I intent on constructing a defence for myself its actuality might well be at the core.
    But I am blocked from further investigations, for The Fat Controller has thrown up some kind of numinous barrier or force field around his nether regions, and I cannot – with the best will in the world – get inside his trousers. So the above is only speculation.
    Mother hailed from a Yorkshire family, the Hepplewhites. But although their name sounds authentically white rose, the truth is that they were fringe people. There was more than a dash of Romany blood in the Hepplewhites, Irish too. When my mother was a child the family lived in an extended, clannish sort of ménage which my grandfather, Old Sidney Hepplewhite, had established in a gaggle of dilapidated farm buildings outside Leeds.
    The Hepplewhites lived by costermongering, car and caravan trading, scrap-metal dealing and worse. They were reluctant to go to law, preferring to settle their disputes themselves. They were the sort of family who nowadays would have their children placed automatically on the ‘at risk’ register. Their lifestyle might have been affected on purpose, to inflame the suspicions of social workers. According to my mother, Old Sidney always carried a double-barrelled shot-gun, dangling from the poacher's hook inside his jacket, just in case a dispute should arise.
    She wasn't embroidering. When I finally met Old Sidney, some five years ago, he still carried a gun. He threatened me with it when, wandering around Erith Marsh, I came upon his raggle-taggle encampment. I like to think that he had no idea that I was his kin when he