Me: Do you want me to make you some scrambled eggs and smoked salmon again?
Cancer Dad: No… I’ll make… myself… some poached eggs.
Me and my mother: BWWWAHAAHAAHAHAHAHAHAHAH
Cancer Dad: [indignant] I’m… serious.
SMASHCUT TO:
[My mother making him poached eggs while he slowly zimmers to the table.]
FIN
For the record, my scrambled eggs are astoundingly good.
It’s been such a class-A shitfuck of a day today, please just imagine me biting my lip so hard to keep from Saying The Things About The People that blood is gushing from between my gnashing jaws.
And with that magical image in place, come closer to me around the fire, sweet children, and let me tell you about my regrets. I’ve been thinking about this all recently anyway, while I was astride my poor, worn out, but never-to-be-spared hobby horse of Constant Feminism and occasionally switching to its tiny mule sidekick, Jesus But I Wish I’d Had Any Kind Of Feminist Education As A Young Woman At All, after a particularly dire piece in the Guardian the other week about Feminist Weddings (I’m not linking).
I’ve tried to be nice about it, but if you’ve changed your name on marriage, I think less of you. And I always will. I know that’s my problem, not yours, but there it is. This fantastic piece about a woman giving her child her surname, not her partner’s, made me delighted again that I’d kept mine after the wedding (Why doesn’t everyone? I just don’t get that. Can someone please explain it to me in slow, simple English so even I can understand why you would *change your name* to this guy’s? *waggles thumb at some dude over my shoulder*) but disappointed I’d not given more thought to the kids having mine as a surname. It took three weeks after getting the birth certificate for us to go back and request M to have my name even as a middle name, a naming pattern we’ve continued with the other two, but why just a middle name? Why would I do that? And so my mind travels back to our wedding: Why at our wedding would I not do a speech (although at least my bridesmaid did)? Why would my *dad* do a speech, but not my mother? Why would our tables all be named after Great Men in comedy, literature, exploration and more? I JUST CAN’T EVEN *claws face off, marries the four winds*
Anyway, I’m furious tonight, and this appears to be my punching bag. Bon soir, mes amis.
As this bug continues, I’m still sofa-bound and forced to watch all the films I’ve had taped for millennia (tiny violins play). Today’s: Beginners. I loved it so much more than I thought I would (CAVEAT: I still think Vanilla Sky is an excellent film and EVERYONE ELSE IS WRONG), considering I usually find Ew-Mac pretty much unwatchable, but he’s good, Melanie Laurent manages to avoid MPDG, and Christopher Plummer (who won a Best Supporting Actor Oscar for this role) is just fantastic. Achingly so.
Was it the right film for me to watch today? Maybe not. This is Ewan MacGregor’s character (Oliver Fields) with his father in the kitchen at a party, shortly after the father (Plummer, as Hal Fields) has been told he’s terminal.
OF in VO: He started telling everyone he was getting better.
OF: Why are you telling them you’re turning the corner?
HF: Oh, well…
OF: You have *stage 4* cancer.
HF: [sighs] It’s not as bad as it sounds.
OF: Pop. There is no stage 5.
HF: [chuckles] That’s not what it means!
OF: Well then what does it mean?
HF: It just means that it’s been through three other stages.
Yup. We well know that game. And later on, when Plummer is completely discharged from hospital care, referred instead to hospice care - we had that treat the other day. The final goodbye from the oncologist we liked so much. The hospital bed brought in. The rounds of medicine lined up by my mother in pill boxes ordered specially.
I know Hollywood illnesses are nothing to base a life on, but so much here echoes. But it was the stuff which doesn’t echo which makes me the most sad. Oliver Fields says of his father, ‘For the first time, I saw him really in love.’ Hal Fields’s final years, after he finally comes out in his seventies, are filled with activism, passion, singing, movie nights, parties, food, and love. Now, I’m not saying someone with three types of cancer plus a galloping case of PSP has any responsibility to show us what a whale of a time he’s having, but my god. If you don’t count contentment with sitting in an armchair reading the Daily Mail, I don’t remember the last time I ever thought my father was happy.
It was supposed to be a lovely day at my parents’ yesterday, me and J and the kids, enjoying my mother’s cooking (side-eye to camera), sitting in the garden, hanging out with my dad. Unfortunately, I’ve either developed Crohn’s Disease from nowhere in a matter of hours, or I’ve caught a stomach bug (My mother: “How can you have caught a bug?” Me: [stares meaningfully at our three sticky children who socialise daily with other sticky children]) which meant not only did I sleep our entire visit, but when I was awake on arrival and at departure, I did a fair impression of someone who was mocking Cancer Dad and his terminal bowel cancer (shuffled step, hunched over, swollen stomach). Real cool.
But it does mean that today, while the children are off picking up new bugs to bring home to us like dogs with a dead bird, I’ve been forced to do nothing but catch up with stuff on the telly recorder box. Hurray! Sadly it’s not on iPlayer anymore, but I’m sure you wizards could find some functioning link to The Battle of the Sexes, from the BBC’s Storyville strand (always excellent), about Billie Jean King and her match with professional troll and proud “male chauvinist pig” Bobby Riggs.
Although the match is the framing device, naturally it’s about so much more than that. From how tiny the women’s prizes were compared to the men’s, to how few their competitions were - plenty of events were men’s tennis only - to how Billie Jean King along with eight others signed up for a dollar each to start their own pro tennis tour (boo, Virginia Wade) - right through to the match with Riggs, and beyond: to the excellent, incredible Venus Williams finally getting equal pay for women at Wimbledon.
But just to remind ourselves why a weary, ‘Sometimes, it’s not about feminism’ is bullshit: the film finishes with the reminder that tennis is still the only sport in which women and men are paid the same. Jesus.