Читать книгу The Men Commandments - Christian O’Connell - Страница 9

Whether it’s informing you that eating apple core will make trees grow out of your ears or that playing with yourself will turn you blind, these people shape us into what we become. Be it a serial killer or an MP – it’s all their fault.

Actually, it’s our dad who gives us the first impression of what a man is and does. My dad was very loving and he instilled a great sense of ‘you can do anything in life if you work hard enough’ in me. He was and still is nuts.

The best story to illustrate this is how we dealt with the death of my younger sister’s cat. Well, actually, it was the second cat death in our family. The first died after my dad accidentally left it out one night. In the snow. Sadly this was before Ray Mears and Bear Grylls so poor Henry didn’t know how to construct a rudimentary bivouac for shelter.

The second one, a beloved tabby cat called Pepper, passed away in less extreme circumstances. My sister was understandably upset but my dad assured her that he would be on his way to Cat Heaven and he would take care of his burial. What I’m about to tell you is beyond belief – but please don’t judge my dad as he is made from the same man genes as us all. Having been promised a decent cat send-off for poor beloved Pepper, my sister came running into the house in floods of tears. Hysterical. She claimed in her emotional state to have seen ‘my Pepper on a skip’.

Now it’s not unknown for the grief-stricken to see visions of the recently departed. That’s what must have happened here. Or so I thought. My dad calmed her down and asked me to help him with something. He quietly told me we needed to move the body.

Sorry, Dad? The body?

You see, my dad had deposited poor old Pepper, the family cat, on the neighbour’s skip. Hey, who hasn’t dumped some carpet underlay or old paint tins in a neighbour’s skip late at night? But a dead pet? He hadn’t even made an attempt to cover it with anything! So now he was getting his son in on his deception, and I was loving it. Both father and son bonded and giggled as poor old Pepper was lifted off the skip and taken elsewhere. Then my dad calmly told my sister we had just checked the skip and there was no cat body. Go see for yourself, he urged her. She checked it and agreed. I had learnt a valuable lesson: men lie.

Then there was the time he tried to landscape the garden on the cheap by doing it himself. He hired this beast of a thing called a rotavator. He tried to steer it one way and it flung him over the neighbour’s fence. All I saw was this runaway rotavator, Dad-less, and then I heard a word I hadn’t heard before – ‘FUCKER!’ – as my dad popped up the other side of our neighbour’s fence, leapt back over and began to chase after it. Shirtless, wearing only, of course, his magical Dad Pants.

I learnt another valuable lesson. Men are funny. Funny peculiar. Oh, and another lesson: always hire a rotavator with an automatic cut-off switch.