7 Signs Of Ageing: "Huge Bloody Claws of Satan"

My dad will be 65 this year, which you would think is excuse enough for his occasional ultra-grumpiness. However, my mother sees it with perplexing suspicion. I’ve heard her comment many times that my dad has changed fundamentally somehow over the years. One theory is some brain injury/disease that affects his personality like some bloke on a programme she watched once. Other hypotheses include him being possessed by Satan, due to him not liking things related to death, along with his avoidance of churches and cemeteries. Although I would expect Satan to like dead stuff and cemeteries, but she makes the rules. However fucked up she sounds you can tell she's not joking. Especially when she says things like, “I’m not joking!”.

I agree with her fully about one change. Apparently he used to shower her with gifts when he was younger. Compare that with this Christmas. When I went over on Christmas Eve to see what he'd bought my mother and to inspect how he'd wrapped them, I found him asleep on his bed at 3pm having not bought a frickin' thing. We tried to sneak out of the back door and pretend he'd not just bought presents hours before the shops closed. But my mother knew what was going on even better than my dad did and just as he was going through the door called him and said, “you may as well use my boots advantage card while you're there”. He did.

I've heard a few odd explanations from my mother about all this. No one else sees the changes other than him simply getting older. But all her previous comments paled in comparison to what she revealed the other week. She was probably talking ghosts and general bollocks at the time, when she confessed, “I’ve never told anyone this but...” Considering the total shit she does openly tell me, I was apprehensively curious about what the fuck could it be!

It was the 1970’s and even though he denied it was him, my dad was pictured on the front page of the local newspaper with then prime minister Ted Heath. Even her friends at work asked what he was doing with the prime minister. She didn’t dare press the issue with him, but she says that’s when she starting thinking he’s got some dark secret side to him. She also found it unnerving that he wasn’t wearing his usual work clothes but a suit!...
She genuinely thinks there was some weird shit going on with that photo. Neither of us have brought it up with my dad, just in case it encourages him to burst out of his human host and smash us together with his huge bloody claws of Satan.

So, playing it safe, rather unbelievably, I'm going to visit the newspaper archives and search the early 1970's for a photo of my father with prime minister Edward fucking Heath. The results either certifies my mother mega craaazzzzy paranoid or my dad possibly the most evil entity in the universe or worse still, a secret Tory fanatic.


[I’ve checked with the authorities and having the shits really bad is a legitimate reason for going to bed early and posting this late. Unfortunately I have to serve 140 hours community service, because having the shits is not a legitimate reason watching some of Jonathan Creek just because you're comfy, feel ill and don't want to get up and look for the remote.
The magician and the bathtub did it.]