Many, many reasons...
1:When I was a baby, my dad managed to stick a safety pin in my belly button whilst changing my nappy, resulting (or at least contributing) in me having a bizarre phobia of people touching my belly button which isn't even listed on any phobia websites or anything (even though belly button fetishes are listed)

2:At the age of about two, my presumably stoned ma and pa left their bedroom window open, along with what must have been an easy climbing route - my mother has described it to me like this "I came in wondering where you were, and saw you dangling out of the window - to this day I don't remember how I got you down".
(oh, and that story has been told to me in an attempt to describe how troublesome I was)

3:In the council estate in which I grew up, me and friends put up a tent one summer's day on a miniscule patch of grass, whilst my mum was at work and my dad was indoors. As we played football, my dad came down pissed on pernod, passed out in the tent, and woke up to have a screaming row with my mum resulting in him throwing something at her, and my sister, my mum and me having to spend the night at my grandmothers.
(with everything being forgotten about afterwards, with no explanatin, and it being completely taboo to ever mention that anything was ever wrong)

4: looking back, I probably didn't eat a single healthy meal until I was about 17 - beans, chips and microwaveable ready meals were the order of the day (a notable exception being the occasional sunday roast, in which they would both get as drunk as possible before noon, my dad - either Kestrel lager or a crate of tiny bottle of cheap lager, my mum - large bottle of Lambrini, and spend the best part of 10 hours staggering round the kitchen, talking inanely with a vaguely racist slant, before emerging with what would actually be a rather nice roast, if it wasn't for the fact that your sesne of smell and taste was so overpowered by marijuana and tobacco smoke)


5:(I actually tried to join the board in an attempt to get this one in on the family holidays question) Camping. I've done my best so far in adult life to be able to associate camping with live music, the company of friends, being away from London. Even the smell of Glastonbury toilets would be a more welcome thing to associate with camping than my family holidys.
This is what would happen, completely at random, at anytime between the end of January and the end of October when I was between the ages of 8-13:
I would arrive home from school to a wall of extremely loud noise, blaring distortedly from my father's ancient stereo (usually it'd be something quite good, but rendered annoying by how all-encompasssing it was) as well as the usual fog of pot smoke.
I'd tend to make my way upstairs to either play with transformers, or do something geeky like that, and be called down "'ERE A MINUTE!"
I'd venture downstairs to find that both parents were "merry", and looking rather pleased with themselves
"we're going camping - get your stuff together"
We would then all pile in to my dad's work van and start the journey to the campsite.
"that's outrageous!", I'm sure you're thinking,
"how could someone drive a family on a long journey while inebriated?"
Well, it's not quite so bad - it wasn't exactly a long journey.
We would drive all the way from East London to...Debden.
Debden being, for those that don't know, a particularly horrible area of essex, completely nondescript, and certainly with no natural beauty. We would pitch up tent on a campsite that was apparently free to people that were unemployed (though my parents were'nt unemployed at the time) and then my dad would excitedly say "we're on holiday", repeatedly,or would start singing holiday themed songs, then laughing at how funny he was. I can only guess that this was because otherwise we would have no way of telling that we were on holiday and not on the run from the police or something.
we would then eat those sausage and beans in a tin type things as meals for the next few days, and me and my sister would be taken to the local woolworths and pound shop for a treat.
The days would be separated not by sleep, but by the sound of my father snoring in a drunken stupor, louder than you can possibly imagine.
(not even in a separate compartment of the tent - all four of us in the same small tent, lying next to each other in seperate sleeping bags)

That Father Ted episode? I would have LOVED the luxury of a holilday like that.
(clinteastwoodbradfield, Fri 17 Aug 2007, 9:37, Reply)