(Not much left now!)
Family
This “holiday” has taught me something which I had’nt noticed before, mostly because on the previous trips with everyone I had Amy with me. My family pick fights. Seriously! Even though these squabbles make everyone grumpy, hate (or making it seem like hating) one another and generally very fatigued, everyone does it.
D and K, and to a lesser extent R, fight or try to attack one another almost constantly. If it isn’t D playing with his PSP all day and calling K “Fatty” from time to time while striving to irritate everyone in the room, its K with continuous moaning and nagging at D. Its like they are already married! R has mastered the art of taming her mother. On one particular occasion we travelled to the Buffalo Grill for dinner. On the way back R asked D to sit in the back with her, and seemed quite happy. She then started to say “Mummy” as D strapped her in and K asked her what she wanted. It was at this moment that R began screaming, forcing K to sit in the back and D in the front of the car (much against his will as he wanted to spend some time with his little girl). And so the fight begun.
As for my dad (C) and L, their attacks are quite a lot more obvious. Dad takes pride in being able to irritate her and frequently takes great measure to do so. In the process of doing this he regularly irritates the fuck out of the rest of us as well. Metal against floor tiles does NOT sound good, and he made sure he scratched the two surfaces together as often as he could, as loud as he could. Starting many fights in the process. L isn’t innocent in the least either. She has some medical issues which mean that she has good days and bad days. Catch her on a bad day and she will constantly snap at you, and anyone around her. I am not sure how often these occur in the UK but it was honestly every bloody day in France. She snapped at everyone for the smallest possible thing.
There is a heck of a lot of competition in the family too. I find myself regularly competing with my Dad, D and L in mostly everything. Who can eat the quickest/most. Who gets to the ferry port first (haha!). And that gets on my tits pretty quickly.
Yet…
Would I trade them in? Would i bugger! Thing is, I can see so many of my personality traits in my dad, it kind of scares me. L and D have definately picked a load of these up from him, and K picked them up from D while adding her traits into the pot. The only problem that we have that I can see, other than the continuous in-fighting, is the dis-organisation. All this Drama and competitive nature means that we all think we are right, all of the time. Things are rarely organised satisfactorily, and if they are, you can be assured that something will kick off at some point.
What this means is that I am much more relaxed being in my busy work environment, than i was around them. Its very stressful!
We do have our good moments though cause we are all fond of each other, and in the good moments it is simply familial bliss. Ill share a couple of the good times here.
Its like being in a sitcom…
