Rites of Passage.

Somebody recently commented that I should feel freer to make reference to ‘intimate details’ in my blog. All right then, I remembered this tonight.

Back when I was a teenager, my mother was trying to give me a lecture on the dangers of adolescence. She’d spotted a ‘weakness’ in my nature, you see. (It shouldn’t have surprised her, since the same weakness was evident on both sides of my parentage. Can’t be held responsible for my genes, can I?) She wasn’t very good at that sort of thing – too reserved – and so she had to wrap it up in cryptic language while struggling to be sure that the meaning was clear. I just found the whole thing excruciatingly embarrassing! She used a phrase that used to be common in Britain: ‘There’s many a slip twixt cup and lip.’ It’s used to refer to unplanned pregnancies, of course, and I remember being quite horrified. Disturbed, even. I didn’t know mothers said things like that, and what illusions I’d held on the purity of motherhood disappeared forever.

It wasn’t the only illusion to be shattered on the road to being where I am now, however. Can you believe that I was twenty eight before I knew that women shaved their legs? The first two live-ins had always done it in private. I suppose they must have hidden their razors too, because I don’t recall ever seeing a second one in the bathroom.

And I was the ripe old age of fifteen before I discovered that women’s breasts don’t have bones in them. Imagine that these days! I think my surprise at the sight of the supine young woman before me must have showed on that occasion, since I recall a reference being made to pancakes. She was older than me, and evidently disposed to take pity.

‘I wouldn’t go any further, lad,’ she said soothingly. ‘The other bit looks like a pig with its throat cut.’

How romantic! She was from Wigan, though, so maybe that explains it.