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While our family photo's are rare, we would have put the Addams Family to shame, not that we all wore weird black outfits and my Dad certainly didn't rock a pinstripe suit and pencil, moustache.  The thought of my Mum and Dad doing the tango is just so far out of my experience it boggles my mind.  No, we looked, to the outside World as perfectly normal, however, the things we got up to when we were bored is a little odd.

Sunday afternoons, especially rainy day ones, usually saw us all bored.  We had stuffed our faces on dinner and pudding, dishes done and a bag of sweets for us all,  The afternoon film was usually left unwatched while me and my dad sat doing the broadsheet crossword, me doing the checking for answers in the encyclopedia, I mean, who really knows names of obscure lakes and rivers in the Andes?  No Google then, just heaps of books everywhere, including a really old medical one that had graphic pictures of smallpox that I had written Trevor by the side of in a nod to his teenage acne.  My brother is 10 years older than me and I am sure he wished for a more normal little sister and not one that held funerals for the smallest dead thing.

So, we would sit in the living room and inevitable my Mum would nod off.  At some point one of us would stick pegs on her clothes and put feathers or anything to hand in her hair.  often we would write 'kick me' and pin it on the back of her coat, but one afternoon, my Dad, having temporary lost his marbles, decided that putting matches between her toes, lighting them and us singing Happy Birthday was a good idea.  Mum woke up yelling as her little toes burned and we all sat about all but peeing our pants laughing while she jumped about trying to put the matches out.  it was really funny, not your usual Sunday afternoon family activity, most went for a walk down the beach, but pretty normal for our house.  We got my dad back by setting fire to his newspaper while he was reading it. Now that was funny, though it almost burned the rug and him along with it.

Christmas time and Dad did the checking the lights the day before getting the tree, this was always on the 17th December.  He would plug the light strings in and if a bulb was blown he would first try stuffing the light socket with tin foil, when that failed he would eventually replace the light.  One day the plug needed a fuse,  instead of replacing the fuse he decided that taking the plug off and putting the wires directly into the plug socket on the wall, a burnt match stuffed in the earth.  When he started to shake and eyes bulging stuttered, turn the electricity off we realised thing weren't going too well.  me and Mum dashed about, mainly in circles before turning the power off.  he ended up with a burned hand and a bit of a crazy Marty Feldman look on his face.  Health and Safety had no place in our house.

I can vividly remember waking up in the middle of the night to hear my Granny Rawly screaming the house down.  We all got up and found that, for a laugh, he had put a live crab down the toilet, it was a very big live crab, my Granny having got up for a pee in the middle of the night said she hadn't peed on him as she felt his pincher's as he waved them about when she sat on the toilet.  My dad convinced her that it was because there had been a high tide that night.  Poor woman, for a very long while she wouldn't use the toilet unless the tide was out, going as far as to check tide times.

My Mum, when she went through the menopause or 'the change' (said in a stage whisper), her bonkerness increased, her temper increased 10 fold and, as the one who was at home most of the time with her, I felt the brunt of it.  One particularly bonkers day saw her and my Dad having one of their spectacular rows,  this one wasn't fixed by her getting the sewing machine out, but by telling me to get my coat on.  Off we went toward the beach, I thought I was in for one of our marathon walks, instead she said we were going to Ilfracombe.  Now, Ilfracombe was across the sea from us, you could see it on a sunny day and I knew boats went from Porthcawl, but couldn't ever remember a boat going from Port Talbot.  Instead Mum decided we were going to just go from it and head off in the general direction in the sea. I sort of went along with it until the cold sea hit my knickers before realising this wasn't what normal people did and put a whole new meaning to the word paddling.  I remember shouting at her, Mammy, Mammy, my knickers are wet and I don't really want to go to Ilfracombe, lets go home and have a cup of tea and a piece of cake.  Something stopped her crazy attempt at walking on water, or actually drowning the pair of us.  Home we went, splashing water behind us, my Dad looked up from his paper and said to me, is it raining that bad? and off they went again, My Dad getting it in the neck for not actually recognising that we were wet because we were walking to Ilfracombe through the sea, I mean, why would he think that?

I look back on it now with a smile and a head shake at the sheer madness of it all.  I have loads of memories of bonkers things we just did as a family, accepting that this was who we were.  Other families normal stuff looked lovely and safe, but I don't know that my particular brand of weird would have fit in. I also think that back in the day they both struggled to fit in themselves, they had lived through exciting times during the War, Dad as a fighter pilot, how dull it must have seemed for him to have to go back to the 9 till 5.  He stayed in after the War leaving my Mam to try to fit in living with his mother in the Rhondda.  My Mam always said that she couldn't believe how people lived in Wales when she first saw it.  My Mam had come from Cheshire, lived in a lovely house with an inside toilet, hot water a cooker and electricity.  Imagine going from that to an outside toilet with newspaper, gas lighting, no electricity, an old range that sent out swarms of black pat beetles when it was lit, one cold tap, po's under the bed and my strict Gran who spoke Welsh in front of her and her alone with my brother who was a baby.  No wonder she went a bit crazy.  It made for a very interesting time and may account for my own brand of eccentricity.  Thank Goodness for that.

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