Shame

I never thought I felt ashamed. Then I remembered the incident with the baked beans.

Hello everyone. How’s your week been? Nice to see a bit of sunshine, ain’t it? I had a Magnum yesterday. Anyway, that’s enough small talk. This week I have written about shame, my handsome mate Joe, parrots, someone chucking my dinner at the wall in 1986 and a really weird recurring dream.

PLUS! For subscribers I reveal my fail safe productivity hacks, reflect on football and friendship and celebrate a childhood spent in council housing. Want to get the whole lot? Then click the button below to subscribe today!

---

The Night My Dinner Ended Up On The Wall

I have been mates with Joe since September 1986. That was the month I started secondary school - he was the first new pal I made there. Even at that tender age, Joe had chiselled good-looks and a charming personality that had the girls in our year craving his attention. He was funny and, crucially, not in any sense a wanker (which, as we all know, is rare among the attractive and popular folk at school). So when he picked me out to be his mate I felt honoured, as if I were being touched by stardom.

Another thing about Joe was that his mum was head of the Parent Teacher Association. In my world, this was like having a mum who was the Queen. My mum, lovely and attentive as she was, had a strangely intense cynicism towards the PTA, seeing it as an organisation for uptight snobs and hectoring poshies. She would use PTA as a term of abuse: in traffic she would shout things like ‘Look at her in her fucking Volvo – typical PTA wanker.’

This meant that I felt intimidated by anyone who had a mum in the PTA. Like they were from a higher social order who looked down upon the rest of us. So, while it was quite exciting, being mates with Joe also felt quite pressurised. In short, I wasn’t entirely sure I was good enough to exist in the thrilling glow of his orbit.

One day after school he came over to mine for tea. Our house was quite a long way from school – a humble gaff in a scruffy road. It was always messy because my mum worked full time and my brothers and I were disgusting, lazy slobs. So I felt a little bit ashamed welcoming mates round there, especially glamorous new ones like Joe.

But, like I say, he wasn’t a wanker and didn’t give me the slightest hint that he was appalled by the cheap furniture, dirty dishes or dog piss on the kitchen lino that greeted us when we walked through the door. Still, I couldn’t shake the idea that he was just really good at hiding how horrified he was at my living conditions.

Nevertheless, he stayed for tea, met my mum and everything was going swimmingly. Until my brother Dom got in from his shift at the Post Office and started arguing with my mum about money. He’d left school and got a job as a postman. He was supposed to be paying my mum housekeeping money but kept ‘forgetting.’  Anyway, the argument escalated extremely quickly – as arguments in our household tended to. Voices were raised, accusations were thrown, profanities were exchanged. Judging by the look on Joe’s face as this all unfolded before him, I felt certain that he had never heard a mum call her son ‘a lying little wanker’ before.

Dinner that night was baked potato with beans and cheese. I was half way through mine when Dom snatched it from the table and lobbed it across the room in rage. It smashed against the wall, orangey Heinz sauce splattering everywhere.

Then he stormed out of the house, got on his motorbike and disappeared. My mum, obviously needing a bit of a cool-down, followed him out the door and had a stomp round the block.

Alone in the house, Joe and I responded to the deeply awkward situation in the way that all young lads tend to: by completely ignoring it. I shut the front door and suggested we watched a bit of telly. He politely acted like nothing had happened. It was better that way. But then there was a knock at the door. It was Joe’s mum – Joe’s Head Of the PTA mum! – come to pick him up.

FUUUCK! It was the stuff of farce. Like the vicar turning up for tea just as the dog has run off with your trousers. I tried to usher Joe out of the front door quickly so his mum wouldn’t be exposed to the barmy innards of my home. But then she asked to meet my mum. “Sorry, my mum’s not here,” I muttered. She asked to meet my dad. “My dad doesn’t live here,” I said.

-       Are there any adults here?

“No…there were some. But, erm, they’ve all gone.”

I blushed. Joe looked at his feet. She was in the hallway now, peering into the kitchen where the broken plate lay in pieces all over the floor and the colourful components of my dinner clung to the walls.

She asked if I wanted her to wait with me until my mum got back. The gentle concern in her voice burnt my cheeks with shame. I told her I was fine and that my mum would be back any minute. So they put me out of my misery and left. I started cleaning the kitchen. Soon my mum returned.

I have this recurring dream where I’m doing a shit in public. It’s plagued me for years. A while back I told my therapist about it and she said it was probably associated with shame. I was confused at first because, amidst the plethora of irritating mental irritations that seem to bother me daily, shame was not one I was ever aware of. But then I dug a bit deeper and remembered the way I felt on the first time Joe came round my house. Beansgate, I call it. It was not an unusual feeling for me back then. And I realised that the discomfort I sometimes felt about myself in adulthood – those feelings I tried to numb with booze, drugs or whatever other distraction I could find – might have been a continuation of that. A mild disgust at myself that I was always trying to hide from.

I often felt ashamed of myself and of how and where I lived. I shouldn’t have done because it was mostly a fun and happy place that was full of love. But I had plenty of mates who lived in bigger, smarter homes than mine with polite well-spoken parents and siblings who seemed to get along and never throw their dinner at each other. It wasn’t just mates I felt ashamed in front of. When my dad came to pick me up at weekends I would want to get away quickly before he was exposed to the mess and mayhem of our house. He drove a flash car and lived in a smart flat with his new family; I had this sense that he looked down his nose at us – the awkward, raggedy first draft of a family he’d left behind.

Looking back, I’m certain he didn’t feel that way. If anything, he probably just felt guilty. I don’t think anyone was trying to make me feel ashamed. The feeling just existed in my head. An insecurity, a sense that I was less than other people, a desire to hide the parts of myself that were ugly or messy because I assumed that they would make people dislike me.

I was wrong about that when I was an awkward kid and I was still wrong about it when I was a drunken adult. Sobriety taught me that I was able to be my complete self – with the shit bits, the awkward bits, the ugly bits and the insecure bits all on display – and that people would still like me. Often they liked me even more because I carried myself with greater honesty. Not everyone, of course. Some people still think I’m a cunt. But that’s okay. At least now they can make that judgement based on all the facts.

By the way, I went round to Joe’s house a week after Beansgate. Turns out, it was just as messy as mine. They weren’t posh at all. Joe might have been implausibly good looking and his mum a high flier in the PTA but they were about as kind and down-to-earth as any family I’ve met before or since. They had loads of pets, including two talking parrots that shat everywhere. Plus, Joe argued non-stop with his siblings and his mum and step-dad shouted at them constantly. It was a right laugh. Their house was chaotic, noisy, fun and full of love. I felt right at home there.