Friday, June 12

For today's writing group I chose the topic 'Dont Ask" I should say, from the outset that no member of my family, dead or alive, is depicted in the following piece of fiction.

Do you find, like me, that some people seem to have been born with the ability to irritate everyone around them without really trying, or meaning to?  I had an uncle like that.  Whenever he was around I could feel the hairs on the back of my neck start to bristle, obviously some sort of primitive warning that it was time for me to run away.  To be fair, he never did me any physical harm but he had a terrible effect on my state of mind. I’ve often wondered what it was about my uncle that attracted my aunt but she often spoke dreamily about Richard Gere and Harrison Ford so clearly she wasn’t looking for subtlety or depth in her ideal man.

I also tried to analyse what it was about my uncle that irritated me so much and there were several things which sprang to mind.  He had a perpetual smirk: an expression which seemed to signify that he had an innate sense of superiority.  I know you can’t choose the face you are born with but surely you can control to some extent the expression you put on it.  

To go with his smirk, he was what we used to call a smart-aleck.  No matter what the topic of conversation, he always claimed to have special insider knowledge not available to the rest of us.  And he used cutting expressions like: “Didn’t you know that?” and “What did they teach you at that University you spent so many years at?”  

His name was Lancelot. Yes, I know it’s bizarre but perhaps his mother had a romantic yearning for the days of King Arthur, and her husband was happy just to let her have her way, but it was an unusual name for someone living in a middle-class Australian suburb.  I would have thought it would make sense for him to use his middle name (William) or shorten his first name to Lance but, no, he clung to the incongruity of the name as if using it as a weapon to beat all the rest of us plebs.

Another of the things which irritated me most about Uncle Lancelot was his speech. He had a whiny voice, like a querulous bank manager complaining to a junior clerk about taking an extra five minutes for his lunch hour.  When he began one of his lengthy monologues about what the government should be doing about the current fiscal downturn or the pitfalls of our immigration policy, I had to use all of my willpower to stop myself from screaming.

And on the top of my list of things I hated about my uncle was his habit of turning any polite inquiry about his state of health or a throwaway remark about how he was going into a tirade about the extraordinary trials he was dealing with and the unfairness of life.  I confess, I didn’t have a comprehensive vocabulary of conversation starters but my tentative “How are you?” or How are things?” would invariably be met with a “Don’t ask!” and my heart would sink as I knew what was coming.