For sheer unpleasant grimy filth
My mother truly takes the biscuit. In fact, she not only takes the biscuit, but then leaves it half eaten on the side for 48 hours, before wrapping it in a piece of dogeared clingfilm and sticking it in the back of the fridge for 3 months or so. When you drag out the shrivelled, mouldy thing and play the ‘can we guess what the hell this is’ game, you’ll likely realise that they were the biscuits that went out of date, say, I don’t know…last year. She is, in the words of the excellent Bill Bailey, ‘a filth wizard’.

I shit you not. I wish I did shit you. The last time I was home (last month) I unearthed something in the breadbin that had a use-by of july 2009. I can only assume it was bread, but couldn’t really tell as it had liquefied. Mum denied all knowledge and refused to go near it, leaving me to deal with it. Which was fun, you know, despite my general distrust of mould due to a tendency to keel over in the presence of penicillin.

‘Come now,’ I can imagine you saying. ‘That could just be a one off. Don’t be so churlish!’. It’s not. It’s really not. It’s gotten so bad that I won’t eat anything that’s been in my parents fridge unless I’ve seen my mum buy it and open it. Every time I go home I have to empty out the fridge of various disgusting goop, mould and things so horrendously rancid even your average Labrador wouldn’t roll in it. she’s not senile or decrepit – she’s 50. and she’s been that way for as long as I can remember.

I lived in the same house from 10 months old to 16 years old. I only remember it being cleaned properly once, perhaps twice in all that time. My dad started to re-tile the downstairs bathroom in 1987. he still hadn’t finished in 2001, and it had never been cleaned in all that time. In fairness, it was rarely used due to his tendency to come in pissed out of his skull and take massive kamikaze style shits in there, leaving a malingering odour that not only made your eyes water and your stomach clench, but quite possibly melted your earwax too. When we moved out in 2001, I found a poo in there that clearly hadn’t been flushed for 3 or 4 months, and was attempting to climb out of the bowl and conquer the wild savannah of the bathtub…

Anyway, I digress. Our house was infested with mice. Fair enough, we did live next to a farm, but none of the other houses in our little block of 12 terraces had a problem. Just us – I wonder why. Mum was disgusting in the kitchen. Apart from the aforementioned fridge, she would also leave washing up to go mouldy, spill things and not mop them up, decant stuff in to jars for culinary experiments then leave them to go off – it was astonishingly gross. Of course, I grew up with it, so I didn’t really ‘see’ it, it’s only when we were clearing the house to move out that I got a sense of how bad it was. I mean, I was 10 years old before I discovered that we actually had lino in the kitchen. Most of it was just bare floorboards – the grime had long since etched through the lino – but I remember a genuine sense of wonderment as I prised a piece of green paisley pattern from the dirt, revealing a comparatively Caucasian piece of floorboard underneath.

It was truly so disgusting that I could well have been the worlds first levitating child – shoes weren’t allowed to be worn in the house (fuck knows why, it couldn’t have gotten anything any dirtier) so I would walk around on the outsides of my soles, trying to keep minimal contact between my feet and the floor.
I recall once, at the age of 12 with a cast on a broken leg having to crawl maybe 15 metres from the kitchen to the living room as I couldn’t carry a plate and hop. My knees were black from the shite on the carpet. I remember the ‘bin corner’ (handily situated next to the cooker, for all your hygiene needs!) which my mum would flick bin-bound remnants at willy nilly, leading to a lovely pebble-dashed effect on the wall behind and floor around. (never cleaned, naturally). I remember a layer of greasy fudge so thick on the cooker that it enveloped my curious 8 year old index finger to the second knuckle.

I remember going through the laundry basket/heap at the top of the stairs aged 14, and finding some of my baby clothes in the bottom of it. It honestly to god had not been emptied in all that time. I remember our yard filling up with sewage twice because my mum blocked the toilet with torn up sanitary towels, despite being told repeatedly that they needed to be put in the bin, not flushed. Then having to wait til payday to get it fixed, tiptoeing through the garden in wellies and hoping the smell didn’t cling to my school clothes. I remember parental bedclothes that weren’t changed despite period leakage or cumstains, or my fathers disgusting habit of wiping his fingers on the duvet cover when he’d finished cleaning his pipe. I think their record was 18 months of the same sheets, and they had faded so badly from all the sweat and disgustingness that they had to be thrown away. I remember a spare room that was knee deep in crap – I don’t even remember what crap now, boxes of stuff and dirty clothes most likely – that when I cleared out I found no fewer than 11 mummified mouse carcasses. I remember our dining table was one of those extendable ones, the extension only ever used on special occasions, such as one Christmas when the extra bits were pulled out and I spotted mouldy bits of food between the wood partitions from the last time it was used.

She’s not *quite* as bad now she’s remarried and lives in my stepdads place – although god knows she probably would be if he let her. My now stepdad was a friend of the family long before he and my mum got together, and I recall the house as it was before she moved in – a little shabby, Spartan even, but neat. Now it’s full of shit, 90% of it hers. (ans 75% of that is minging useless junk. Including the FUCKING FRIDGE. Can you tell it bothers me?)

Still though. By and large I’ve got a belting immune system from being exposed to essentially germ warefare for my entire childhood…
(berk, Thu 1 Apr 2010, 1:44, 4 replies)

Fucking hell
O_o
(Professor Kenny Martin Hmm? What?, Thu 1 Apr 2010, 9:54, closed)

Yeah
this QOTW has made me remember things I'd repressed. My childhood home bore a distinct resemblance to fucking Calcutta...
(berk, Thu 1 Apr 2010, 10:51, closed)

I read ALL of that and I clicked.
Horrendous.

Mind you, I bet you have a fantastic set of foot arches after walking like that through your childhood.
( Michael Ellis contributes nothing, Thu 1 Apr 2010, 11:24, closed)

Great read.
I was going to say, I bet you have the immune system of a cockroach.
( Rookie You'll have to speak up, I'm wearing a towel, Thu 1 Apr 2010, 11:50, closed)