CALL ME MISTER.

A while back, mrs ishmael was blessed with her first and so far only grandchild.  Bad enough, that, I suppose; who wants to be married to a grandmother? Or, I hasten to add, for fear of being stabbed with a knitting needle, a grandfather.  

Do not age gentle into that good night, fuck no, and being one of those Saga Consumerist Grandthings, wanting the best for their grandchildren is, in my raucous, overactive imagination, the equivalent of starting to take small doses of Paraquat in your organic green tea.  My dear, late friend, Dick, loved being a grandad, it wasn't that which killed him so young, but never mind, I am convinced that over-enthusiastic grandparenting can be lethal. You start off doing  a few days babysitting so's the parents can both go out to work to pay for some mad, illusory  lifestyle mortgage and the next thing you know is you're in a box on that conveyor belt down the crematorium and Frank fucking Sinatra singing My Way, the repulsive little spic arsehole, over your head.  That's where Grandfathering leads you.


The first, briefly mrs ishmael is many grandmothers and that's bad enough, too, even  having a former wife who resembles an old woman who lived in a shoe, Gosh, it does make a bloke feel his age. But there are worse things to be borne than births, such as the burdensome and vexatious  problem of  what, when you are saddled with him, for the rest of your days, does the little bugger call you? And, just as tricky, how do you stop the new parent or parents naming their poor unfortnate Beckam or Chardonnay.


I am perhaps unduly harsh on the subject of grandparenthood because though I had some -  obviously, as many as anyone else -  my own conception was a brief re-flowering of a younger passion, either that or an unaccustomed  and thus unprotected drunken tumble - Oh, to think of one's parents in lust,  the horror -  and they were long dead before I was born,  the grandparents, the parents lasted a bit longer. But not much. 


There were photographs on my childhood wall of stern-looking Edwardian gentlemen with white moustaches, dressed in waistcoats  with fobwatches, but they had disappeared from the wall long before I was old enough to identify them.  My paternal grandfather was a professional classical musician, a clarinettist and the other one, the Jock one, was a shoemaker.  That's all I know.  And probably more than I want to.  I mean, where do you stop, with that stuff, how far back do you go?


The lasting mrs ishmael's grandfolks were Belgian diplomats to the Chinese Court,  and we have some bits of porcelain, some pots, vases - some visiting Chines students looked at the mark underneath one of them and said Waaahhhh, fock me, in Beijing can buy focking Bentley for this poh, Chinee person cannoh even focking own this poh, is fohbidden to Chinee fella to own this poh, can buy focking RollRoyce with this poh;  and this jug, can buy focking JumbohJeh, seven-foh-seven - and that's probably something worth researching, but it's also something that, aside from the money,  is utterly irrelevant. So they were diplomats, so what, they might have been mass murderers, cannibals, don't make no never mind.


  If I could see a photo of my own personal ancestor, M'Ishmael, in Africa, or wherever we kicked off, from a hundred thousand years ago, scribbling satire on a  cliff face,  perhaps pictograming the legend Up against the cavewall motherfuckers, I might get excited but otherwise the reality is that whatever-it- is thing, six degrees of separation, nearly  every bastard on Earth is my cousin. What's the point of singling-out a few, for special reverence  So, emotionally and rationally I don't give a fuck about grandparents or great grandparents or any other bastard who fought at Waterloo or with the Roundheads or came over from France with the Norman Frogs, themselves descendants of the Norsemen, from whom I know, on irrefutable medical evidence, I am descended. I saw a neurologist in Aberdeen a few years back about a twisting nerve in my hand, a De Putrens Contracture.  Only people of Norse extraction have this condition, he said, you are descended from the Vikings. Oh, and Mrs Thatcher has this problem, too.  Enraptured, I dwelt for a while on the idea of changing my name to Sven.  Or Erik.  But only for a while, To Hell, anyway, with ancestors and grandparents, probably a right shower of bastards. Coming over here and raping the Venerable Bede and his brothers. I don't care about grandparents, having them or being one of them.  That's not to say though that someone can  just come along and call me their grandfather. Not  when I'm fucking well not..


 And that was the rub when mrs ishmael the everlasting's grandchild was born. What's he gonna call me?  He's obvioulsy gonna call his grandma grandma or nana or nanny or granny, one of those,  and since his maternal grandfather is long, determinedly  dead from embraced cirhossis the easy choice would be for him to call me grandad.  Bur since I'm not his grandfather I didn't want to fuck his head up any more than it's going to be fucked up by Michael Gove and company by pretending, for the sake of  convenience, that I was.  I had his best interest at heart.  

You know that stepladder axiom, you're not my real ladder, you're only my stepladder?  Well I didn't want him, in years to come, maybe researching his own ancestry online - which will probably be compulsory by then - and finding that the old bloke he called granddad wasn't really his granddad but just allowed himself to be called granddad for the sake of an easy life, I didn't want him to discover that the bloke he called granddad was, in fact,  just a luvmykidstobits,me fuckwit, because I'm not, I'm not   fearful of the truth about relationships.
 
(It is a big, big heartache to me, this Ruinous phoniness at which people clutch,  this emotional contraband, passing between witless generations, adults blinding childen to the truth, for the sake of some counterfeit, unquiet status.  My one daughter visited one Christmas  with her son,  to whom I was a real grandfather, and her new,  three-months vintage bloke.  Christmas morning and 'neath the tree was an ostentatious  and clearly extravagant pile of presents for the boy from Granma Hazel and Grandad Tony.  What the fuck is this, I flashed silently at my daughter;  who are these people who,  on three months acquaintanceship, adopt themselves as grandparents.  Who is this Tony, who assumes the same relationship as you have with me, me, from whom your life sprung?  And what of your loving mother, and what of your  generous and supportive stepmother of twenty years, what dreadful cheap bogus parity  do you here deploy,  is this your world?  Do not let me detain you, here,  with arcane notions of blood and family;  go, invent your own.)

But at the same time, although I am happy for visitors to CallMeIshmael to  call me ishmael, I didn't want a two year old calling me ishmael, or a ten year old, for that matter.  And Uncle is just too horrid;  long before Mr Peter Nose of the 'oo wrote what he grandly called his rockopera, Tommy, about some child-molesting uncle, the word Uncle already had connotations of noncehood about it, an uncle was any drunken bum to whom you would present your infant for kisses and cuddles, thus legitimising if not encouraging the idea of inappropriate physical contact beteen stranger adults and children. Uncle  makes one think of Uncle Kelvin McKenzie orchestrating the national countdown to Charlotte Church losing her virginity,  a foul, repulsive, shit-eatung bastard.  So I wasn't prepared to be called uncle and probably go on the sex offenders register for life.  I don't mind being called Uncle when I am Uncle;  in fact I am at least nine Uncles but being a pretend Uncle wasn't acceptable.

Can't be Sir, said baby's mum, can it ? Well, I don't think so, Sir's OK but I think it needs to be voluntary. I just don't want him talking to me on first name terms, like I was his mate, when what I am is his significant  Male Elder,  the Dude of Last resort.  Not his Dad, not his Granddad and definitely not his mate.  What's it to be then?  How about Nana and Mister.  Mister? Yeah, Nana and Mister,  that'll do, he doesn't have to stand up when I come in the room or anything, or salute me,  just as long as he knows that older people are different people.  I hope to live long enough to teach him how to make Molotov Cocktails and other tools of liberation.

It has worked out well, the boy calls me Mr quite happily, sometimes My Mr, and he knows that here, silently, is some differentiation, some status thing, which may yet be to his advantage.

On the other hand, this was all about four years ago, this mister-naming and what's happened is that what few friends I have, here,  now also call me mr, even those who are older than me.  Best laid plans of mice and misters, gang aft aglay.