Meandering with Star Trek and addictive TV

Last Sunday

It’s a strange day, weather-wise, outside and inside.

Outside its properly pouring with rain one minute, and now – this minute – very sunny, suddenly dry, and there’s an unidentified lovely tiny brown bird hopping out of the borage at the side of the garden hedge.

Inside, there’s the very distracting original Star Trek theme  from the living room, and lil’ Tetchyhead being awkward about having lunch.  I don’t need to be in there to know he’s twisted his way out of both of the straps holding his shoulders in place in the high chair, that his mouth is very orange and possibly so too is one cheek and the fingers of one hand.  My partner, Alias Stanley Kubrick is no doubt squinting between the TV and Tetchyhead, which won’t help the food distribution pattern. 

I feel guilty at not being in there, doing it myself, or just being with them, even though now is my time off.  And you really do need time off from whatever it is that you do all day (and all night, if its babies or small children), if you want to remember who you are and why you do that thing all day (and night).

When I was pregnant with Son Number one[1], his father and I used to watch original Star Trek every night on satellite.  We would come home from work (he as a printer, I was doing inventory in a warehouse for a now defunct Japanese designer goods shop in Bruton Street), and I would plop my immensely fat self down on the sofa bed in our box room we shared.  He would make a massive jug of chocolate Ovaltine (which I was very addicted to during the pregnancy), and we would curl up and watch that night’s double bill.  You know when you really really get into something?  I had seen Star Trek all through my childhood, but it wasn’t till I watched it whilst pregnant for that first time that I came to live for it every evening.  That I realised that All That Is Good And Right In Our Western Culture can in fact be found here, in original Star Trek.  It’s like a bible, a manual, for How To Behave In Every Situation.  Now – this clearly needs some backing up, as a massively daft statement.  (I can’t actually do that now – I’ll do it in a later post, I promise – I’d need to re-watch them all, which will take a bit of time; and my opinion will likely have changed – hell, its been 20 years since I watched them that closely.)

The weird thing is, I get that degree of total addiction to many TV shows (without being convinced they are also a manual for life).  Most of them can be blamed on Son Number One.  He’s an absolute connoisseur of finding addictive TV I will like:

Ø      24 (how to live life by running about and shouting a lot, being very definitive and consistently maverick) 

Ø      PrisonBreak (how to live life by running about and shouting a lot, whilst also making very good far thought out plans and giving Robert Knepper  the best role he’s had in ages) 

Ø      Big Bang Theory (I have always thought being a nerd was big and clever, and here is some very funny proof; and here is the actual big bang theory)

Ø      Two and a Half Men (its very scary that Charlie Sheen’s character is mild compared to his recently interviewed actual self – let no man say he cannot act) 

Ø      Buffy (one of the ultimate classics of teenage female empowerment and incredibly well-written) 

Ø      Angel (strangely more grown-up cousin of Buffy, also very well written) and

Ø      Lost (excellent long-running premise including unlikely polar bears, one of the world’s most handsome blonde men and an annoying ending) 

It goes back way further though.  As a rather miserable child who was bullied in two out of her three schools (the exception was the progressive school Prior Weston, where I happily did weaving with different shades of green suede and wool), I remember living for TV shows, or films, simply as a place to be instead of my world.  Flambards (recently re-released by the good people at Network ) I have yet to re-watch.  I almost don’t want to.  How can I find it as mesmerising as I did watching it as a dreamy and lonely child, wishing I lived in the countryside; wishing I had a weedy but brainy boyfriend into planes, and a brawnier love interest into horses?  Most importantly, that I was older and had some sort of control over my life and where I spent my time. 

Much obsessive time was spent watching and re-watching videos, when I hit my teens (which was notably the brilliant era of video-nasties and parents just not being quite aware what you were watching; or weirder, watching unsuitable things with you, like my dad did – later post on these).  I watched Grease, the marvellous Aussie Puberty Blues and Picnic at Hanging Rock with my Jodie Foster triple bill (The Little Girl Who Lives Down The Lane [yes, ‘school is stultifying’], Foxes  [and ever since have wanted a tattoo on my shoulder of an apple with a bite taken out of it], and Svengali [Peter O’Toole is always magnificent, I feel]) endlessly.  From each one I got ingredients to a world I liked better; or directions round this world that I understood more than interactions with anybody here.

Now see, we could go in so many directions now: about the fact that when you get older, quite often you still have very little real control over where you spend your time – for most of us, who didn’t study triumphantly to become marine biologists[2] and are well-mapped out and wealthy enough to grease our own pathways – the phrase ‘wage-slave’ means something. 

Or it would be interesting to see exactly what I got from each of those films, why I felt the need to escape so much.  (Not that I’m so incredibly interesting – just that many children in this situation do similar things, and it’s an interesting mechanism to look at – and how what they pick to disappear into influences their growth as a person.)

Or why so many parents of bullied children don’t change their schools?  Or try to help the children deal with the issues in any real way….Or why teachers used to accept it as just a normal thing that happens?  (A false understanding of the phrase ‘survival of the fittest’ as an idea Out There In The Ether underpins a lot of that last).

But none of these will happen this post, as I hear the small Tetchyhead crying bullishly and no doubt very fat tears in the living room, and its been a long day for excellent Stanley K with him. I can feel my need to go and take the baby from him; partly as an act of partnery niceness, and partly as I can’t stand to hear him crying this way (its one of the worst parts of motherhood, listening to this noise of upsetness, it drills my brain and makes me want to cry as well; I often do).  So I’m going to have to go.   We’ll have to call this meander, the one that could have gone somewhere interesting, but really never got there.  I shall have to come back to it all later. (Welcome to Motherhood: Land of Interruption.)

PS - I f any of these links go wonky, tell me, and I shall fix or find new ones, or remove.

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[1] …who I used to call Pumpkinhead, purely because I liked the way the sounds of the words went together – he has a head nothing like a pumpkin in shape.  I had this pointed out to me so many times (by other people, not Son) I stopped doing it.  Likewise, ex-hub really hated being called Belovéd Pea Hen…Because the pea hen was the female of the species, was his reason.  He really liked being male.  Again, it just popped into my head and I loved the sound of the words.  I stopped doing that too.

[2] I know a nice girl from school who became a marine biologist; all down to the influence of our geography teacher.  So no offence to marine biologists – I was just trying to think of a specialised and highly trained profession that I actually respected (unlike lawyering, say).