I’m sure every family has its own traditions, good and bad, banal and weird, incomprehensible to outsiders. When these foibles gain a wider audience they’re easy to mock, so I’m a little nervous about sharing some of ours. Also, we have so many! My children, Sam and Rachel, are 27 and 25 but, as is often the way nowadays, especially in London, property prices being what they are, they both still live at home. A generation ago they’d have been gone for a good few years by now, and the accumulated rituals of their childhoods would have started to gather dust. As it is, those rituals are alive and kicking.
And being added to all the time. I got a bottle of ginger dosing liquid recently. When Sam, Rachel and I have a shot of it, we have to line up three glasses on the kitchen counter and growl “hit me”, like cowboys.
The 1997 Volvo we keep at our holiday home in France is known as “the Party Wagon”. Why? Because I drive it ever so slightly too fast along the local back roads. And because it has a tape deck on which I play old Motown and disco compilations. While having a harmlessly affectionate nickname for a much loved old banger is probably widespread throughout the English middle class, some of our other habits are, I suspect, more recondite.
I have mentioned before that whenever the splendid city of Barcelona comes up in conversation, one or other of us is duty bound instantly to echo “Barcelona” with “Bar-ce-lo-NA!”, mimicking the portentous style of the ridiculous 1987 Freddie Mercury-Montserrat Caballé number.
It’s important to understand that there is no real enthusiasm behind declaiming the word “Barcelona” in cod-operatic fashion every time Spain’s second city crops up. The extravagant repetition is usually performed with an air of weary acceptance that this is what needs to be done. This surrender to the inevitable is, I think, what makes the tradition endearing.
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We all know most of our customs would sound utterly lame to the ears of non-believers. And yet all are nonetheless religiously observed by the faithful. Call it loyalty, call it fraternity, call it — probably most accurately — superstition. But as and when any entirely pointless ritual is required to be honoured, it feels like tempting fate not to do so.
For example, Sam, Rachel and I are members of an exclusive triumvirate called the Spro Bros. This refers to the fact that the three of us enjoy espresso coffee. (Nicola, my wife, is excluded. She prefers cappuccino.) The Spro Bro club has no meaning, identity or indeed existence other than when, on some rare random occasion (once a month, if that), one member “calls” the other two to perform the Spro Bro ceremony.
This involves the instigator crouching over, arms extended, fists clenched, silent. The other two, having resignedly noticed what’s going on, must then assemble either side of the lead bro, touch fists with him or her and enact the requisite moves.
Moves which, you will appreciate, I cannot on pain of death reveal in detail.
My point is that not long ago, late at night, Sam called one. Up on the half-landing he crouched, he stretched, he curled. Down in the hall, about to put the house to bed (blinds, locks, lights, cat), as is my habit, I grimly noted my son’s posture.
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I sighed. It had been a long old day. Cooking, clearing, hosting. I was truly knackered. Totally ready to assume the horizontal and embrace oblivion.
Yet even as I sighed and cursed, I yelled to my daughter, “Sam’s called a Spro Bro.”
Fully jimjammed, three quarters unconscious, rubbing sleep from her eyes, my daughter turned up present on parade within seconds. Respect.
And then last week, the Bros found themselves in a local café enjoying a mid-afternoon refreshment. One of us recalled it was the first anniversary of the death of our treasured cat Tiger. Naturally we have invented a tradition in memoriam to mark the late, great Tiggsy.
You first cross yourself solemnly in the approved Christian way, and then you raise your arms and your face skywards, evangelical-style, while cupping your hands into loose claws and intoning “leathery paw pads”, Tiger’s pads having assumed this texture towards the end of his long and noble life.
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In performing this sacrament, Rachel hooked a finger into her lime and tonic, tipping the entire glass into her lap. Major flood. Proper saturation.
She didn’t bat an eyelid. Bearing witness to St Tiger, and his ongoing associated obsequies, far outweighed the soaking.
I’m going way out on a limb here, but perhaps all this nonsense tells us something about the nature and strength of familial solidarity.
