Birthday Blues No.1 #8 - Ian Dury and the Blockheads - Hit Me With Your Rhythm Stick

 

(HIT ME WITH YOUR RHYTHM STICKERS)

I am eight, Ian Dury is number one.

I was recently telling a friend that looking back I realised more that I was an unhappy child than someone who had had an unhappy childhood. I didn’t fit in. I found comfort in books and films and pop music from an early age. But then, not long before my eighth birthday, Death entered my world. He didn’t come to Pemberley. He came to my beloved grandmother, Nanny Cuckoo.

My Dad had been gone all day. He’d left early even though he didn’t work Saturdays. Mum didn’t seem to know where he was, just out. But he’d left a present for me and one for my sister. My sister had some sort of doll, and I had a football sticker book. This was just before Thatcher came into power and traditional gender roles were still in vogue, even in my parents socialist/republican/broke household.

I didn’t know anything about football except it was what my friends now did at playtime. There'd been a World Cup that summer and my parents hated sport so it didn't trickle down. 

We didn’t play superheroes or Top Trumps anymore, all my mates played with a bright orange ball that belonged to Graham Broad who hated losing and had his initials painted on the ball. I used to read comics in the corner instead. Occasionally the ball would ping its way towards me, and I’d try to join in, but I was rubbish. 

If it was raining and we had to stay inside, then football still dominated proceedings – all the boys bar me had a sticker book and spoke dementedly of swapsies and gots and needs. 

Now I had a sticker book with loads of teams in it and ten packets of stickers to start me off. When I’d finished putting all the stickers in, my Mum sat us down on the sofa and said she had something to tell us. I knew what she was going to say because she was crying. It was the first time I’d ever seen her upset. People only cried on television when people died. 

It was my first dead person, and it was my Nan. My Nan who looked after me at weekends and gave me 10p to spend on sweets every time she came down and said “Presently” instead of “In a minute” and always smelt of parma violets.

In the deserts of Sudan, lies the body of my Nan…

My sister was five. And now she was asking my Mum if that meant she might die or Dad, or her.

From Milan to Yucatan, every woman, every man…

I was going to try to write more about Hit Me With Your Rhythm Stick itself. It’s a wonderful, rasping, snaking, cheeky, come and fuck me of a song. Life affirming, funky and silly. I doubt very much it was my grandmother’s cup of tea, I suspect she might have found it a bit suggestive, a bit smutty. 

I don’t associate the song with my grandmother’s death at all, I might even have appeared to be over it by the time old Mr D was shaking his broken body with glee on ToTP. But kids are resilient, though they really shouldn’t have to be. Listening to this song now, I’m amazed at how much joy it still has. 

Sadly, you always have to go back to school in the end. There’s always something slightly better than death.

I had my sticker book and my swapsies in my little satchel ready for playtime. Graham Broad had forgotten to bring his football and so the two of us and some other boys formed a circle like Chinese gamblers do in racist films. The names being read in some solemn incantation as the swapsies were announced.  

Joe Jordan. Ray Wilkins. Bristol City. John Wile. 

And along with the incantation came a mumbling chorus of declarations from the marketplace. Got. Got. Need. Need. 

My eyes stung as I looked down at my stickers and realised the things I needed and would never have.

Current Ranking of Birthday no. 1 – 2

Final Ranking of Birthday no. 1 –  N/A

What Should Have Been Number 1 instead that week - this.