Читать книгу The Moaning of Life - Karl Pilkington - Страница 16

LIFE WITHOUT KIDS

We were in Tokyo to go to a fertility festival, and Richard said we had to get a move on. So I had to leave Tony the turtle in the bath for a few more hours and deal with him when we got back. We put the ‘Do Not Disturb’ sign on the door and headed off.

The Kanamara Matsuri festival happens once a year at the Kanayama shrine in Kawasaki. It’s an event couples go to together to receive a kind of fertility blessing if they want to have kids. It was set up back in the Edo period in Japan (1600–1868), which made me think it was going to be a really traditional kind of affair, so I was surprised to be greeted by a man wearing a nob on his head. It didn’t look like part of any kind of ancient tradition to me, he just looked like a dodgy low-rent Doctor Who character with a pink centre parting. He was waving a plastic penis about in his hand too. I wasn’t sure if he was some kind of official at the festival or just a local nutter. There used to be a man on our estate called Mad John who did this sort of thing on the back of the 261 bus into Manchester, and he got put away for it.

There were loads of stalls selling all sorts of merchandise, all with the same theme – everything featured a nob on it in some way. Pens with nobs on the end, nob-shaped ice lollies, nob balloons and nob ornaments. It was great for the guy selling hot dogs, as he didn’t have to make any extra effort. I bought a pack of Kama Sutra playing cards. Each card featured one of the Kama Sutra positions so they were ideal for playing ‘poke her’ with (good pun that).

You’d think we were at some kind of bachelor party, but this festival was supposed to be a celebration of fertility and procreation. I don’t believe in things like this. I think staying at home eating asparagus would improve your chances of having a kid more than buying a novelty tea towel with a nob drawn on it. The reason they have all these nobs on things is down to a local legend. An old story goes that there was a sharp-toothed demon who fell in love with a beautiful young woman. She wasn’t interested in him, and when she married another man the demon became so jealous he decided to move into her vagina (squatters’ rights and all that). The night before her wedding, the demon got his revenge by biting off the penis of her husband when they were having sex. Everybody in the village was upset, so the story goes, and the local blacksmith decided to forge a steel phallus that they could trick the demon with. The demon bit into the steel phallus, broke his teeth and moved out of the girl’s vagina for good. You could say she had an STD – a Sharp-Toothed Demon.

I met a local woman called Ai, who was hoping to have a kid soon and was at the festival to get a blessing. She told me she wanted a child as she didn’t want to be alone in the future and was worried she was running out of time. Everyone always says you’ll regret it if you don’t have children, but what about regretting it if you do have them? If you decide to have kids, there is no guarantee that they will be there for you when you get older, especially since people don’t tend to stay in the same city as their family any more. Another reason people give for wanting kids is to carry on the family name, but that doesn’t interest me at all. I’m not bothered about it because no one seems to be able to get my name right anyway. My post is always wrongly addressed to Mr Pillington, Mr Dilkington, Mr Pillinglington or Mr Tilkinson.

The only good thing about it is that it makes it harder for someone to steal my identity, as they couldn’t be sure which name goes with the address. Anyway, there are loads of Karl Pilkingtons out there in the world. I know this, as when I tried signing up to Skype recently I couldn’t use my own name as it was already taken.

Ai told me that I would be getting involved in the festival by helping to carry one of the giant nobs in the phallic procession. The nob I was to help carry was a black one made of steel that was about four foot tall. It sat in a wooden shrine, which I had to carry on my shoulder through the town with the help of about twenty other men. The streets were crowded with the thousands of people who had turned up to the event, and Ai was pushed up so close against me there was a chance she’d end up carrying my child if we weren’t careful. The crowd whooped as the shrine was lifted and we headed out onto the road. As the men chanted, the shiny phallus bobbed up and down, and thousands of onlookers took photos. I don’t know who was guiding us but they weren’t doing a very good job of it, and we must have looked like the Chuckle Brothers carrying a ladder, as we were moving around all over the place. It was like we were trying to do the hokey-cokey (more like the hokey-cocky) as we kept taking three steps forward and then two back. I got stubble burn on my face from the shaved head of the bloke in front of me who kept stumbling back. I was not enjoying the experience at all. I didn’t see why I was carrying the bloody thing when it was Ai who wanted a kid, not me. Seeing as I don’t want kids, carrying my bollocks around with me all the time seems a bit like unnecessary luggage, never mind the four-foot steel nob I had on my back.

As we walked I took it upon myself to try and explain to Ai how much her life would change if she had a kid. The cost of it all, the fact that she’d have no more free time and wouldn’t be able to get a good night’s sleep. Having kids is just like having some kind of disability, in a way, as things you could do before are suddenly no longer possible without a lot more messing around. In fact supermarket car parks are evidence that having kids is a disability, as they always have special parking spaces allocated for shoppers with kids. It’s hard to find a parking space anywhere these days unless your legs are knackered or you have kids. You could say having a disability isn’t really a disability at all any more, as it can also be an advantage. I wish they’d go one step further and allocate space for parents and their kids everywhere. On trains they could have their own carriage, so all the screaming and kicking of chairs could be contained within one area. Ai agreed with me that having kids was a bit of a gamble and that it wasn’t an easy decision for her to make.