the battle of britain in miniature

Chef Teri Louise Kelly has memoirs running hot | Courier Mail

Well, I don't know, it just seems to be one dumb decision after another in my house. First, my dad let me have a catapault, then after I'd all but lobotomized my younger brother, they wouldn't let me have anything, not even a decent pair of scissors to cut pieces about Georgie Best from the newspapers, and, there's a lot of stuff about Georgie that needs cutting out. Now, I see, they are buying my younger brother model aircraft kits, and, the paint and model affixative (glue), that he needs to assemble these WWII planes of mass destruction. Will I never be free of the damned war? I don't know, it strikes me as hypocritical that I can't use scissors, or, even paste glue, yet my younger brother can use razor knives, adhesive, metallic paints and turpentine, as is his wont. He is a spoilt child and just because he almost died when he was six-months old, doesn't mean he should be treated like the next-in-line to the throne, even if he is always second to use our lavatorial family seat after my father – and believe me, he is more than welcome to that place in the queue.
It stinks, all of it, the can after my dad's sat on it for an hour contemplating the electricity bill, the uneven treatment in respect of the use of weapons of destruction, and all that glue and paint my brother has splashed all over his bedroom and himself. I feel as if I am living right next door to some insane creature - constantly giggling to himself as he tries to unpeel his fingers from his bedroom furniture, or, bedding. This cannot be right, why can't he use the shed like a normal geek boy?
Your brother cannot use the shed dear, my mother explains to me as she rips a strip of wallpaper from the kitchen wall with more deftness than any interior decorator you could hire, including Laura Ashley - because as you well know, in winter the it's too cold out there for his chest and in summer it's too cloying for his sinuses, now, pass me that scraper there, will you? there's a darling. Uh, yeah, okay, I think as I skulk off, but obviously solvents and adhesives in his bedroom don't affect his chest? only mine? What a scam the little womble has got going.

They say that familarity breeds contempt, well what's more contemptible is that it breeds familiarity too! There might be four of us in our familiar family unit, only, we aren't the fab four but if we were, I'd most likely be John - the one looking to jump ship first. As things stand at the moment, I have to sleep with one eye, both ears, and a window open. Not simply in an attempt to be rid of this passive solvent inhalling, but in case Madame Cholet next door to me, somehow sparks that chemical cloud hanging over his bed into combustion. It is not fun, and to be honest, it is parentally reckless, and if there were a children's court, I would haul both of my parent's arses into it on the grounds of wilfull endangement of a sibling caused by making said sibling sleep alongside what is obviously a pyromaniac-in-waiting. I can see the signs, and sometimes, I can smell them too. What I really need is third party fire and theft coverage, mainly for the fire element of the policy . . .

Then there is food. Food is a constant bane in my life, or the lack of it. I have a fast metabolism, too fast actually, I burn my calories quick as I'm always running (from assailants), cycling (from assailants) or playing football (where I regularly get assailed both inside, and outside the rules of the game), and when you have that much assailment to contend with, you need a good level of fitness, oh and food able to maintain that standard, like say protein, and not, as is the common English mentality on nutrition; starch.
A continual diet of suet puddings, mashed potato, and animal extremities stuffed into condoms makes me ponder (when I'm not dozing off), how on earth the English won any war, let alone march into Scotland and then fight those high and lowlanders. Maybe it's a good job we've been colonized by more intellectual and food-savvy races than ourselves, at least there's hope. I train three nights a week for the school football team in my year, it is a big squad, and the football coach, Mr. Shankley, doesn't really appreciate my lip. I am too mouthy for his liking, and I have a tendency to not play as a part of the 'team'. Which is easy for him to say, given that he has the whistle and the clipboard. Mr. Shankley will hate me later and then dote on me later on, and then fully despise me much later – although he doesn't know it yet. I am dogged by problems, being me is not easy, but I have no option but to soldier on, little christian defector that I am. At least I have been picked for the upcoming away 'friendly' game against some other school in some other galaxy, and that at least, gets me a day off school and a bus trip. I like bus trips. I liked the school excursion to Longleat where they had lions and baboons running wild, although it seemed to me that there were more baboons inside the bus than out. I got into big trouble anyway, after that trip, because before it I stole out of the house at four in the morning taking five pounds from my mum's purse. It's a big debt to have to re-pay, especially from seventy-five pence a week paper round money. I will never be free of war, debt, or assailants. This is what it is like to be born English; you start with a clean slate and by the time you're nudging twelve, you are so far in debt that volunteering for the next war looks like a damned good idea, if that is, we can find anyone to fight, which is highly unlikely on all fronts, even the cold ones.

Anyhow I go on the bus trip and we go to a posh school where the pupils wear blazers and bowler hats and carry umbrellas and shooting sticks. They have track suits, new balls, a Brazilian-looking coach, and water bottles. A school with facilities as good as these ought to be playing in the football league each weekend against some bunch of losers like Charlton Athletic. Still, good facilities and Carlos Alberto or not, we soon have the better of them - especially physically. Our defense is about as solid as they come at this level, and despite Carlos's pre-match gesticulations of a Latin bent, birth certificates adequately prove that while our two central defenders might look twenty-five, they are in fact within the legal age parameters for this level. So what if they shave?
With that kind of brawn behind you, punting stray balls up into their six-yard box, we don't even require a midfield, all we need are goal hangers; enter me. With eighteen-minutes of the second half expired and us already six goals to the good. I love it when we trounce private schools, and I love it even more when we not only trounce them, but verbalize them too. There is no such thing as sportsmenship in the kingdom, well, queendom, not after we won the world cup in sixty-six, Sir Alf Ramsey or not. Those days, days of gentlemen managers, deerstalkers, pipes, and smoking jackets, are long gone. Mr. Shankley is no Alf Ramsey, and when you've already scored half a dozen, he expects a baker's dozen, or you walk home. I go on full of my usual bravado, and within mere seconds, find the ball at my feet and an empty net smiling beguilingly at me, like taking candy from your invalid aunt. Six-minutes later, I jink in from the left wing looking for my right foot and then curl a peach of a shot into the top corner of their net with such aplomb, that it would have graced the River Plate stadium. Mr. Shankley obviously concurs, as he is on the sidelines shouting loudly about Attack! Attack! Attack!, Mr. Shankley missed the war. Well, we fly forward again, only this time, as I shoot through their lumbering central defenders like an artillery shell, my trajectory is abruptly halted by a stray arm straight across my face. I act up the incident, worth a BAFTA, obviously I have watched too many South American teams. The referee, a balding man with effacious malignancy, tells me in no uncertain terms to get up, or he's sending me off. Me? I get up, spit on the ground (like they do on the Big Match), then, without thinking, pinch the nearest private schoolboy on the nipple. He screams in pain (or maybe ecstacy), then promptly falls to the ground and does a better rendition than me of overacting - because they have their own theatre at his school and he is in the repertory company as understudy to the lead boy, or girl, or whatever. As he rolls around like Hamlet, I spit on him, because I'm both English and unimpressed with his theatrics. And besides, wasn't Hamlet, Scottish anyhow?

The referee then tells me to 'sod off'. I think he means to go away, like my dad means when he says it, but no, as I saunter off, up field, he runs after me much like that bull had once done, only unlike the bull, the referee actually catches me, and then unbelievably, throws me to the ground. At that, out manly central defenders, and Mr. Shankley, all pile on top of the referee while I still stand there totally confused as to what is happening, has happened, or will, happen next. The match is abandoned and we shuffle onto our chariot having been denied a hot shower or after match nibbles. We smell pretty ripe being caked in good quality mud, and are all starving. I get back home at four the following morning and climb into bed with my pyjamas pulled over my mud-caked skin and football kit, whereafter, I realize I can smell smoke . . .
I get up, go next door, switch my brother's bedroom light on, where I see, smouldering in his rubbish bin, a twisted and charred piece of plastic model aircraft. Above his rubbish bin is a hand basin, funny that, so I tip the bin into the basin and turn on the cold tap, which wakes up my brother who sits up in bed and looks at me blankly and before he can say anything, I slap him around the face, turn off his light, and then go climb back into my own bed. I have parental control.
Then my father wrests it back. He is pulling into the driveway in his chocolate brown Mercedes, listening to Bach, when, glancing up, he sees a flaming model of one of Wilhelm Messerschmitt's designs hurtling from an open window, rapidly followed by another blazing fireball, and then what remains of a Wellington bomber - maybe a Lancaster - trailing thick black smoke as it spirals onto our front lawn. I hear my father yell Shizer! Later, after my brother has been made to stand outside and watch all of his models, kits and plastic accoutrements burned to a cinder in the back yard, his fiendish eyes aglow with delight, I am wondering what it must have felt like for my dad, seeing that battle of Britain in miniature. He had after all, been a runny-nosed oik during the real thing and was one of the blitz babies evacuated to North Wales. Even the Nazi's didn't care about North Wales apparently. I'm thinking that maybe my brother should be evacuated there too, permanently.