Evil Thatcher is gonna get ya!
I was an odious little shit when I was small. My parents had to cope with a superabundance of energy and the fact that I stayed awake 20 hours a day from the ages of 3 to 7 (insomnia still affects me now and then). Practically the only thing that could get me to sleep was my mother doing the hoovering or playing Bob Marley records.

Anyway, as I have shown I was an unpleasant child to deal with, at least from the sleep acquisition aspect of parentage.

Naturally as I was awake I would try to stay up watching TV on our old black and white set (my father refused to buy a colour TV as the black and white one he had bought in c1965 still worked fine. Ish.). This annoyed my parents immensely.

Bringing to bear all their combined parenting skills, and growing alcoholism, they tried various ways to get me to go to bed and at least pretend to be asleep. Screaming at me didn't work. Smacking me until I was exhausted from crying didn't work. All it would elicit was a temporary, and tactical, withdrawal to my room from whence I would inevitably sneak downstairs again.

They got novel. Spiking my milk with vodka worked for a while, but got too expensive. Calpol... well lets just say it almost go to the stage where I was prising the hubcaps off my dad's shitty car and selling them in the playground to buy more toddler smack.

Then, one day, a revelation came to them. They remembered that during the miners strike I had been quite interested in what was going on. Not only did Arthur Scargill scare me (thoroughly approved of by my parents), but Maggie Thatcher did too (less thoroughly approved of).

Realising that Thatcher scared the shit out of me gave my dad the germ of an idea. Whenever I asked if I could stay up later (I was about 6 or 7 at time) the Old Man would go to the phone and pretend to call Thatcher, asking if I could stay up later. Invariably the answer was no and that if I did stay up, she would come and punish me. Result, from their point of view, and I would dutifully trudge upstairs to spend several hours staring at the wall and trying to sleep.

The only problem was, that after several weeks my childish cockiness asserted itself and I began to creep downstairs again. This exercised my dad no end, and I became adept at dodging blows and running from the fag smoke wreathed monster that he became when he caught me downstairs.

Until one day. I swear that the Old Man had had a flash of inspiration and that the evil fairy had firmly planted herself on his shoulder.

Picture the scene. There I am, up after bed time, having ignored the now standard call to Thatcher, sitting in the living room staring at the TV, secure in the knowledge that I was being bad.

The Old Man came in, a panicked look on his face. "Well Zapiola", he said, "you've fucking torn it now... Mrs. Thatcher has come to punish you for not going to bed on time." Outwardly I sniggered... but inside my bladder gave a slight lurch. "No", he said, "I'm telling the truth... look outside".

I went to the window and looked out through the curtains... there was a car. A big car. And getting out of the car, in the dusky light, was an elderly lady.

My heart leapt to my mouth, my knees started trembling, and tears started running from my eyes. The ogre was here to take me and punish me.

Crying I turned and fled from the room, frantically trying to rush upstairs to bed before she could get inside and see that I was not in bed.

I must've made it two or three steps up the stairs before my bladder voided itself and I became a sodden, urine smelling, crying mass. My dad was at the bottom of the stairs quite literally curled up on the floor crying with laughter.

I didn't know what to do. I was covered in piss and Thatcher would get me. I fled to the airing cupboard and hid in there, crying, for what must've been 30 minutes until my mother prised me out, put me in the bath and then put me to bed.

It turned out the lady I had seen was our next door neighbour coming back from going to the cinema in York. I never really trusted her again.

So yes, I was gullible, but in my defence I was 6 or 7 and naively believe that the people who had squirted me out would never resort to underhand psychological warfare in the ongoing bed time battle.

When they get old, they're going straight in a home. Preferably a draughty, unheated home which has a ban on alcohol. The ultimate irony is that Gordon Brown now scares my dad almost as much as Thatcher scared me.

Length, meh... I was 7!
(Zapiola zip-zap-zop, Sat 23 Aug 2008, 19:00, Reply)