Have you been to Teddington?
As a youth, the words "We are going to Teddington" would instil in me the sort of enthusiastic response one typically reserves for a colonoscopy, or being locked in a room with four Ainsley Harriotts all competing for the same job.
When told that we were going to Teddington, I knew that what lay ahead would be a series of seemingly endless, tooth-grinding hours, spent at the house of my dad's cousin and her family, as I slowly suffocated in a sea of vapid adult conversation.
Those evenings would feel like they stretched on for weeks. And those weeks would become months, and those months would become years, and yet - while my spirit perished beneath the weight of the blather - I would never die. I was cursed to experience every painful second as they continued their glacial crawl towards infinity, soundtracked by the idle drone about wallpaper, and petrol prices, and football.
This being the years before smartphones, Kindles, or even Game Boys, I'd just sit there, an afterthought in the corner, praying for a plastic bag to thumb down my oesophagus.
One time I was given a Matchbox roadroller to play with. I must've been ten or eleven years old; I defy any ten year-old to get four-to-six hours play out of a toy car without wanting to bludgeon themselves to death with it.
As a youth, the words "We are going to Teddington" would instil in me the sort of enthusiastic response one typically reserves for a colonoscopy, or being locked in a room with four Ainsley Harriotts all competing for the same job.
When told that we were going to Teddington, I knew that what lay ahead would be a series of seemingly endless, tooth-grinding hours, spent at the house of my dad's cousin and her family, as I slowly suffocated in a sea of vapid adult conversation.
Those evenings would feel like they stretched on for weeks. And those weeks would become months, and those months would become years, and yet - while my spirit perished beneath the weight of the blather - I would never die. I was cursed to experience every painful second as they continued their glacial crawl towards infinity, soundtracked by the idle drone about wallpaper, and petrol prices, and football.
This being the years before smartphones, Kindles, or even Game Boys, I'd just sit there, an afterthought in the corner, praying for a plastic bag to thumb down my oesophagus.
One time I was given a Matchbox roadroller to play with. I must've been ten or eleven years old; I defy any ten year-old to get four-to-six hours play out of a toy car without wanting to bludgeon themselves to death with it.
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