A Time Of Reflection On A Colourful Past Of Pain And Pleasure With A Sexy Surprise

A story of a working class snob and two shilling millionaire.

Far be it from me to laugh out loud at other peoples misfortunes, but in the case of one of my ex mother's in law I was more then prepared to make an exception.

Now this was a woman who from the very get go, got on the wrong side of me.The very first time I met her I realised what a piece of work she was. Her daughter, who was just my girlfriend at that time, was a very good fine artist.Doreen had painted an exceptional portrait of me and was proudly showing her mother her work. Her mother, Flossy as we used to call her, said out loud...

"Oh well, Doreen, you can always change the head later, no point wasting an otherwise good work of art." Needless to say I was not impressed. However, it could have been a lot worse.

Doreen once told me how her mother had aspirations that her daughter would meet and marry somebody with status, like a solicitor, an accountant or a bank manager. This was just so Flossy could lord it over the lower middle class neighbours about how her daughter was a cut above their children. The problem was that, in the end, her daughter was little more than an equally pretentious alley cat. But it took me many years to discover that little gem of information. In the meantime, I was besotted with Doreen's apparent good breeding. I should have known better I suppose, but I was very young at the time and not as great at reading people as I am now.

Doreen also told me that whenever she took a prospective life partner home, if Flossy didn't approve, she would openly pick her nose in front of the poor boy. Many a future marriage partner went scurrying never to return. Of course, Doreen was mortified and stopped taking any boy home to meet her mother.

The truth be told, Flossy was one of those people with her head well and truly wedged up her own backside and had the unfortunate habit of stepping on banana skins. It really would have served her well to keep her loose mouth tightly closed if only so as not to make such an absolute fool of herself.

There was a time when my wife's sister went to visit her mother only to be told that her visit would have to be short as Flossy had accepted an invite from some neighbour down the street to go and see a blue movie. Flossy didn't have the slightest idea what a blue movie was. She actually thought it was a movie that was tinted blue, or maybe even a sad movie. It was only her daughter's intervention that saved Flossy from acute embarrassment.

One of my favourite recollections was when Flossy and Bert her husband had bought their son Justin a second hand Volkswagen Beetle for his upcoming birthday. During the preceding two months Bert spent a great deal of his free time doing up the VW to get it ready for the big day. In the meantime, Justin took driving lessons and managed to pass his driving test first time.

Shortly before the big day Doreen and I had been invited to a leaving do at Bert's place of work. The problem was we had no car and it was a three bus journey halfway across the county to get there. So I asked Doreen to ask her mother if we could use the VW Beetle just for that one night. Flossy's reply came back to haunt her in spades.

"Oh no, we couldn't possibly do that, Liam might crash the car. I'm sure Liam is really not that good a driver." Said she who had never ever driven a car in her miserable mis-spent life.

In fact I was an excellent driver qualified to drive forty ton trucks. And believe me, a HGV driving test is not in any way a piece of cake. Anyway, in the end we hired a car to go to the event and all passed off reasonably well with not the slightest sign of me crashing the car.

Come Justin's birthday he was duly handed the keys to a now pristine example of a Beetle and was told in no uncertain terms to take good care of the car. What happened next was nothing less than hilarious.

Justin went out for the night of his birthday with some friends all crowded into the Beetle and got a tad drunk. Now I have driven VW Beetles a lot and I know all too well what a handful they can be, especially in the wet. The problem is that with the engine at the back and nothing up front it is very easy to lose control. I once aquaplaned in one and it scared the living daylights out of me. Fortunately nothing bad happened.

The night of Justin's birthday was a wet one. On the way home with his rowdy friends all aboard, Justin's Beetle approached a roundabout and aquaplaned out of control. The car mounted the pavement and crashed through a wall straight into an electricity sub-station. Not only was the car a total and utter write off, but the sub-station needed a complete re-build too. What's more, half the neighbourhood was now without electricity. Fortunately apart from a few cuts and bruises nobody was hurt. When my father-in-law Bert called us the next day to explain what had happened, Doreen and I peed ourselves laughing and Doreen had to quickly cut the call.

I suppose Flossy's problem was that no matter how much she put on her airs and graces, with her false laaa dee dah accent, complemented with what can only be called an over abundance of innate stupidity, her three children let her down appallingly and Flossy got all she deserved.

When Justin got married Flossy and Bert gifted him their old house to make sure he got a good start in life. The problem was that Justin was never anything less than an unmitigated disaster in life as well as in work. A big part of Justin's problem was he had become something of an alcoholic, and at just twenty five years old that is not what you would call a healthy option in life.

In the end Justin's alcohol problem led to the breakdown of his marriage to a lovely girl. Jane went back to live with her parents who lived nearby, leaving Justin to his own devices.

One day my sister-in-law Victoria went to check on Justin only to find him in what had been a beautiful kitchen. Justin was in what was now a kitchen devoid of any furnishings whatsoever. No cooker, no fridge, no cupboards, nothing! There were just two water taps sticking out of the wall and nothing else. Everything had been sold, lock stock and barrel to feed his out of control drinking habit.

Justin was crouched over two house bricks stood on end. Bridging the two bricks was a Huntley and Palmer biscuit tin with a pat of butter and an egg inside being fried by a candle from underneath. I truly could not make this up.

Had Flossy not been so habitually horrible towards me I might have had some sympathy. But I thought of all the times she had tried to put me down on the basis that in her ridiculous opinion I was just not good enough and all I could do was laugh out loud.

I have many a tale of Justin's misdemeanours, but I will regale you with just one more if I may.

After Justin's separation, his mother used to pop in sometimes and let herself into a house which was no longer hers. At first it appeared that nobody was home. Flossy went upstairs and entered Justin's room only to find him and some one-night-stand, who most certainly was not his ex wife, totally stark naked on the bed.

Flossy went ballistic and woke the poor girl up and chased her out of the house. Then she asked who the girl was and Justin made one of his bigger mistakes, he told his mother that the girl was a barmaid from the local pub, the Waggon and Horses. Flossy did no more than tell her husband Bert to go with her to the pub.

On entering the pub Flossy demanded to see the manger. When the manager came out to see what she wanted, Flossy launched into a very loud and vexatious attack on the poor girl, who by now was behind the bar serving Sunday lunch customers.

"Right, that brazen harlot right there, that dirty little common prostitute who spent the night in my house with my son, a married man, sack her right now."

Of course the poor girl crumbled with embarrassment and had to leave the bar. The manager, quite rightfully in my view, told Flossy and Bert in no uncertain terms to get out of the pub before he called the police.

The last I ever heard anything about Justin was when his father passed away and Justin, now living aboard, fleeced his mother out of twenty thousand pounds! It seems that Flossy and Bert had done nothing less than breed a monster as equally monstrous as they were.

Flossy was nothing more than a shop assistant, and not a very good one at that, who seemed to be on a mission to put down anybody who seemed to amount to anything more than her.

After I graduated from University Flossy told me "Well it's not like it's a proper degree, is it Liam?"

"Really? Why's that Floss?"

"Well, it's not as if it's from Oxford or Cambridge is it?" said she who didn't have so much as an 'O' Level in getting herself dressed in the morning.

The only thing Flossy was half good at was cleaning. She had a fifty year old fridge that looked brand spanking new! However, even with that the fool of a woman sometimes went too far.

At one time I was making my own apple wine and had a demijohn full of the stuff. It was only a matter of a week until that lovely smelling brew was ready to enjoy. I had spent weeks waiting for the moment of truth, whether what I had made was nothing more than crude tasting rocket fuel or a deliciously fruity home made apple wine to die for. Going off the smell of the stuff, it was promising to be the latter. Alas, thanks to Flossy and her stupidity and over interference in my house I was to never get to taste a single drop!

I came home from work one day and there was Flossy on a cleaning spree without even being asked. I went to the kitchen only to see a sparklingly clean demijohn.

"Floss, what happened to the demijohn?" I asked timorously, more or less already knowing exactly what had happened.

"Oh, that stinky stuff? Well I had a smell of it and to be honest it smelt awful, so I poured it all down the drain and washed the jar out for you. Why?"

At that point I could have willingly strangled the stupid woman. Instead I just told Doreen to get her ridiculous mother out of our house as soon as possible. Thankfully, for her mother's sake, Doreen did as I asked.

Flossy was such an arch cleaner that when she called round to our house the spiders scurried from under the furniture and ran out to the field opposite to feed themselves to the snakes in the long grass. I would have been happy to feed Flossy to the snakes if I could have gotten away with it.

Over the years Flossy and Bert's attacks against me continued on the basis of nothing more than the belief that I simply wasn't good enough for their daughter. And all they, and Doreen for that matter, proved was in fact quite the opposite!

Even during the break up of my marriage to Doreen Flossy and Bert stuck their unwelcome noses in. One day when I went home it was only to discover that Flossy and Bert were there, cleaning as usual. The only other person there was my five year old daughter who held on tightly to my hand. As I entered the kitchen Bert quickly picked up a very large and sharp kitchen bread knife and started to wave it around in my face as he held me by the throat against the kitchen wall.

"Right, what are you doing here?" Bert snarled angrily.

"Excuse me, I live here, it's my house if you don't mind Bert."

"Not for long is it your house. Our Doreen is getting it AND all three children and you can go to hell. From where we are standing you have not been pulling your weight."

Now this was a very strange thing to say since Flossy and Bert had retired to the south of Spain and very seldomly returned to the UK. Clearly Bert and Flossy had been told a pack of lies about me by a daughter who had been caught out leading a double life. I had discovered that their little miss sweet and innocent was having an affair with her boss and instead of going out to work was galavanting all over the place.

Having been found out Doreen needed to show her parents that she had some just cause. For a whole year she had been painting me as a lazy layabout loser (which couldn't have been further from the truth) and a lot more besides. I have to say, it worked a treat.

After the breakup, as is usually the case, Doreen got custody of the children. A year or so afterwards one of my daughter's was sat with Flossy and Bert in their house and Flossy asked my daughter "So, what do you want to do when you grow up?" My daughter replied that she wanted to go into the performing arts. Flossy's response was....

"Well I don't know why, fat lot of good it did your father."

As a matter of fact, I had quite a successful career in the performing arts which included theatre, radio, film, and tv as an actor and live performances and my own albums as a singer songwriter. I guess the fact that it wasn't me being a pen pusher in a bank that so disappointed Flossy. Oh well, how sad, never mind.

Flossy and Bert are now both deceased and the least I say about that the better. They really did do me a great deal of harm and damage and, with their help, my children disowned me. To this day I have no contact with any of them. In later years I did try to explain to my children the truth of what had happened all those years ago, all to no avail.

They do not want to know the truth, no doubt as it is too painful to realise that they have been fed and accepted a bucket full of lies about me. They are quite happy to live in a bubble of lies about their past. I am philosophical about it. It is what it is. My youngest daughter got married and didn't even tell me. My son, who was a very successful athlete, dedicated his success to his grandfather. I simply do not exist. Except.....

I am now passing the time of my life far, far away from those awful days and the people who gave the time of day to my snake of an ex wife. I know nothing of any of them and to be honest, it's better that way. I feel calm and relaxed, loved and fulfilled. I truly could not ask for more.

However, I do have health related problems which I indirectly attribute to what I was put through all those years ago by people who quite frankly were not good enough to lick my hairy bum. At least I came out of it, a little scathed, battered and bruised, but I lived to tell the tale, which is more than I can say for them.

CR Mandler MAT Dr Mehmet Yildiz Dr John Rose Dr Michael Heng Dr. Manishi Pallavi Dr. Preeti Singh Terry Mansfield Tony Young, Jr. Britni Pepper Geetika Sethi Agnes Laurens Stuart Englander Thewriteyard Concierge Jo-Anna~Communications Connector Rebecca Stevens A. Tree Langdon, CPA, CGA Aldric Chen Rick Chen Haimish Mead Matt Lillywhite Henery X

The link below will take you to an explanation of some of what I was put through all those years ago by a bitter and twisted little miss sweet and innocent. Looking back I am truly amazed how I ever got through it.

It was not a pleasant experience, indeed it drove me to the very edge of committing suicide. Somehow I did get through it and now live happily ever after.