They fuck you up, your mum and dad.

A British Poet Phillip Larkin once wrote a poem that said:

They fuck you up, your mum and dad. They may not mean to, but they do.

And this flashed into my mind as I was once again driving around visiting various schools (that’s why my blogs are a bit thin at the moment). And the reason that I had this retro brain flash was that the DJ on the radio was playing Tobacco Road by the Nashville Teens.

Now this was the first record that turned me on, not sexually you understand, but turned me on to ‘pop’ music and I had to have it. So being a mere child (being about 10) and not having any money I asked my parents for a copy of the single. They said yes they would get it for me.

On the Saturday they went out shopping and I was aquiver with excitement, soon the disc would be in my hands and blaring out of the radiogram! (loud I WAS BORN IN A BUNK, BY MY DADDY AND MY DADDY GOT DRUNK) (or according to the (so-called) lyric sheets: I was born in a trunk. Mama died and my daddy got drunk) (I think I’m right and that’s how I’ve sung it for the last 30 odd yrs! So there!)

How disappointed was I when they returned home and gave me a copy of Tobacco Rd, not by the Nashville Teens but by a bunch of cover artists on a record that had 5 other top hits on it all cruelly mangled by various session musicians. I can’t even remember its name but I think it came from Woolworth’s. That’s probably why the lyrics I sang were wrong, they were probably all stoned on LSD and stuff and were singing the wrong words, or maybe for copyright reasons they had to sing the wrong words!

Isn’t that just the way with parents? My next let down was when I wanted a pair of jeans. Of course I wanted Levi’s and having forgotten the earlier humiliation I expected that the parents would once again fulfil my request. Once again I was disappointed. Jeans from Woolworth’s do not have the same cachet as Levi’s. I would have even been happy with Wranglers, Lee’s or even Lee Coopers, but Woolworth’s I could hardly bear to wear them feeling the cheap, thin and nasty denim next to my skin!

But these minor upsets of our youth are lost in the mists of time, only tripped over occasionally when some noise, smell, taste or sound seems to stimulate those forgotten recesses of our brains to remind us, like Tobacco Rd did to me of the need for that particular recording.

And this is when the Larkin effect kicks in:

His full poem is this:

They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.

But they were fucked up in their turn
By fools in old-style hats and coats,
Who half the time were soppy-stern A
nd half at one another's throats.

Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
And don't have any kids yourself.
--Philip Larkin (1974)


The key here is the line ‘Man Hands on Misery to Man.

So we find ourselves, now as parents, doing the same to our kids as was done to us. Maybe not exactly the same but in much more subtle ways. Of course our kids are probably much more demanding and our excuses much more complicated as to why we didn’t see the need to buy those Reebok trainers for £150 for them when the ones on the market for £25 are just as good and anyway you’ll wreck them skateboarding/football or just being careless.

And what’s wrong with the CD player we just bought you, you ungrateful wretch, Alba is a perfectly good make and it’s probably made in the same factory as Sony anyway!

No I don’t think that the quality of Quiksilver baggies at £45 are any better than these I bought you at Woolworth’s! You’re only swimming in them and no one will see them underwater.

Maybe it’s a universal truth that parents do these things and it’s the poet’s job to make us see and understand – but he can’t make me buy expensive trainers when they’re cheaper down the road!