saturday rethink

I have always hated breakfast TV on the BBC. It has never seemed to be able to find its niche, pitching itself in an uneasy muddle ground between the fluffy, no-brain-required level of GMTV and the harder edge of a proper 24 hour news channel. This morning, however, it excelled itself, when it showed an item on the goal keeper David James in training. After a few conventional saves against a ball-launcher, they blindfolded the lad and, to my utter amazement, continued to perform pretty effective blocks acting purely on instinct, like some old episode of "Kung Fu". Marvellous stuff!

Last week I reported my disgust with my mother for her overly dramatic displays of grief over her dead cat. But then a close friend sent me a wonderfully humane and insightful email where he reminded me that this probably represented, less her feelings over the deceased pussy than previously suppressed feelings about the humans she had lost. This morning my wife found herself firmly agreeing with these sentiments and I am forced to concede they may have a point.

It may be that the whole incident spoke more about my own deep feelings of hostility towards my mother, which go back to my earliest infancy. When I was a year old, my mum unable to cope with my severe asthma and eczema, I was admitted to hospital for more than year (yes, that's how they used to manage it in the early 50s) Later, when I was 8, my conditions still out of control, a Harley Street psychiatrist concluded it was all about some sort of pathological attachment problem between me and my mother, and I was duly dispatched to a boarding school in the Isle of Wight for the next 2 years. Talk about issues of abandonment...