The shit blog of Paul Chris Jones

I always wished I had a normal family. My mom claimed we were normal, but we clearly weren't.

My dad

My dad hasn't always been grumpy and tired. There must have been a time, as a youth, when he was carefree and happy. He drove cars and the wind blew in his hair. He went out to bars and chased women. There are even photos - and I swear this is true - where he's smiling.

But then came the children. First, Corryn, a six-year-old from one of my mom's previous relationships. Then I was born. Then my sister Lisa. Then my brother Adam.

My dad was overwhelmed. If he'd only had one kid to look after, he might have been able to cope. He might have even enjoyed being a parent. But instead, he was shocked as four children ran around him and crawled over his shoes, knocking over plant pots and drawing on the walls. With four kids, he had no chance.

When I look back through the home videos, I don't think there was a single moment when he enjoyed being a parent. In those videos, he sounds tired and annoyed.

My dad was a tired, grumpy man. He started balding at an early age and as a result, by the time I was born, he had no hair left on top of his head.

My dad's headaches

My dad often complained of headaches. "My head's killing me!" he'd cry out.

He took aspirin on a daily basis for his headaches. He kept it in a letter rack in the kitchen. God help us if he couldn't find his aspirin. "WHERE'S THE ASPIRIN?!" he'd shout. "WHERE'S THE FUCKING ASPIRIN?"

My mom would come and help him find the aspirin. It was invariably usually under a pile of papers and old receipts.

He took aspirin every day. I don't think you're supposed to take aspirin on a permanent basis, not without a doctor's approval. But he didn't care. He just wanted to get rid of his headaches. When one packet of aspirin wasn't enough, he started taking two packets, and then three packets a day. In the end, he was probably taking enough aspirin to kill a baby elephant. But his body had built up a resilence.

I blame his headaches on dehydration. If he had simply drunk more water, his headaches would have gone away. But never once did my dad drink a glass of water. He didn't drink water. All he drank was tea.

For hours, my dad would drink nothing. He'd simply forget what water was. He was usually busy with something and his brain couldn't It was out of his thoughts. All the while, he'd get more and more dehydrated. Then at some point, someone would say the word 'tea' and my dad's face would suddenly light up. "Did someone say tea?" he'd say. "I'll have a cup of tea." He would then expect you to make him a cup of tea, even if you'd been talking about teaching or teargas instead of tea. And if you didn't make a cup of tea, he'd get sour and angry, like a stroppy teenager.

He rarely, if ever, urinated. Also, he'll never turn down a cup of tea. If you ask him, "Do you want a cup of tea?", he'll always say yes. This also works with high-fat junk food such as chips and crisps. He will never turn down chips or a bag of crisps. Whereas if you ask him, "Do you want to play frisbee in the garden?" he'll mutter some dark obscenity and ignore you.

The factory

My dad worked at a factory for ten years. I don't know what kind of factory. I once asked my dad and he gave such a boring answer that I immediately forgot it. I think it was a brass lighting factory? Whatever that is.

The wages at the factory weren't great and my dad had a family to feed, so he had to find a way to supplement his income. Now, most people in this situation would have asked for extra hours. More aspirational people would have asked for a raise or a promotion. But my dad decided to steal things from the factory. He'd steal the brass light fittings and anything else he could get his hands on. Then he'd sell the metal for a pittance at the local scrap metal yard. (He took me there once. There were mountains of metal. Huge dirty heaps of trash.)

We had a candelabra hanging from our ceiling and one day I asked my dad where it was from. He replied he'd stolen it. He'd stolen the lamps that were in our living too.

My dad went nuts over nuts

There was a newsagent's nearby. One day, my brother Adam bought a packet of nuts. He took them home. My mom was about to try one but she stopped as she read the packet. The packet said, "MAY CONTAIN LACTOSE". My mom had a lactose allergy so she couldn't eat them. My dad went back to the shop to get a refund. The exchange must have gone something like this:

"These nuts have LACTOSE in them and my wife has a LACTOSE ALLERGY. I want my MONEY BACK."

"I'm sorry sir, but I can't give you a refund."

"WHAT? Why's that?"

"Because you've already opened the packet."

"WHAT? That doesn't matter. I'm entitled, BY LAW, to A FULL REFUND."

"I'm sorry sir, but you're wrong."

"WHAT??!! You're saying I'm WRONG? Your shop is a bloody DISGRACE. Run by bloody IMMIGRANTS. YOU'RE what's WRONG with this country."

"Sir, I'm going to have to ask you to leave."

Enraged, my dad threw the packet of nuts at the man's head. The nuts missed his head narrowly and hit the shelf behind me. The packet exploded. Pistachios, cashews, peanuts, walnuts: they went everywhere: behind the bottles of alcohol, under the shelves.

"Right," said the man. "I'm banning you for life." Then he added: "You and your whole family."

"See if I fucking care!" said my dad. "Fuck you and fuck your shop! I'm never coming here again anyway!"

My dad was a man of his word: he never went there again. My brother tried to go back five years later but the man at the till said, "Hey, I remember you. You're the son of that lunatic who threw nuts at my head five years ago. You're banned for life. You can't come in." So Adam had to use the other newsagent's across the road instead.

My mom

My mom was a housewife. As far I could tell, this just meant cooking meals, doing laundry, and talking on the phone to her family for hours on end. If I can be a housewife, then sign me up.

Yet her chores were a never-ending source of gripes and complaints. She always complained that she hated cooking. "I hate cooking and I'm no good at it." She boiled all vegetables - broccoli, carrots, potatoes - and she boiled them so long that all the flavour went out of them.

One day she was stirring vegetables in a pan. Adam asked what she was doing. She said, "I'm doing something called a stirfry? I saw in on TV." Up to that point she hadn't know what a stirfry was.

Some days she threw her hands up in exasperation and exclaimed, "I can't do it! I can't cook anymore!" Then she'd sob in the corner. On these days, it was up to my dad to make dinner, but of course, his cooking skills were even worse than my mom's. But he found a solution: instead of cooking, he'd just simply pull stuff out of the fridge and present it to us on a chopping board. Ham, cheese, grapes, bread, Jacob's cream crackers, margarine. He sold it to us as a "farmer's dinner". My mom would cast a spiteful look at the chopping board and say, "You can't serve them that for dinner!" but honestly, my dad's dinners were far better than anything my mom ever served. At least it was edible.

My brother Adam

From an early age, it was clear that something was wrong with Adam. He had speech problems to the point where people couldn't understand him. He had a form of OCD where he would wash his hands over and over until his hands were red.

Then he'd touch the tap over and over. Why the tap, I don't know. I'm guessing he was worried about germs, but doesn't he know that an average tap contains more germs than a toilet seat?

He would touch the tap once, turn to walk away, but then some invisible anxiety would draw him back and he would touch the tap again. And again. And again. And again and again and again. I once counted how many times he would turn back to touch the tap again, and it was twelve times.

Then there were his obsessive interests. At the age of seven, he became obsessed with Pokemon. At the age of eight, he knew the name of every Pokemon but didn't know the alphabet. He was like an autistic savant, except without any useful skills like counting cards.

Other obsessions included:

• The Horrible History Books
• Books in general

Autism diagnosis

At the age of seven (?) my parents became convinced that Adam's behaviour was abnormal and so they took him to a doctor. Whoever that doctor was, he deserves a fucking medal, because he figured out exactly what was wrong with my brother: Asperger's syndrome.

Asperger's syndrome is a light form of autism. The fact that Adam got a diagnosis back in the 1990s astonishes me, considering Asperger's syndrome was only formally recognised as a disorder in 1994. Most doctors wouldn't even have heard about it. It's lucky that my brother went to see the only doctor who not only knew about Asperger's syndrome but could also recognise the signs and symptoms.

Unfortunately, there's no cure for Asperger's syndrome. So even though we knew what was wrong with Adam, we couldn't do anything to make him normal.

Curiously, in 2001, a film called Adam was released, about a man with Asperger's Syndrome. As far as I can tell, it's a coincidence that my brother is also called Adam and also had Asperger's Syndrome. But if it's not a coincidence, then I believe my family is owed royalties. I accept cheque or PayPal.

Wiggling

Something else my brother did was rub his crotch on the floor through his pants and trousers. He'd lay there, fully clothed, face down in the living room, and hump the carpet. He was basically masturbating in full view of everyone in the family. My family called it "wiggling".

"Adam's wiggling again," my dad would say, as Adam rubbed his crotch on the floor right there, in the middle of the living room.

"Stop yer wigglin'!" my mom would tell Adam.

But Adam would just grin and carry on. He enjoyed it too much to stop. He was a little sex addict.

He would rub his crotch on the floor for an hour, sometimes. He'd even talk to us while he did this. "Paul, what are you doing?"

"I'm playing Age of Mythology."

"Oh." Wiggle wiggle wiggle. "Are you going to play as the Egyptians or the Vikings?" Wiggle wiggle wiggle.

One day, my nan saw Adam on the carpet. He was vigorously rubbing away. She gave a knowing smile and said, "I know what's he doing."

Retard class

One day, Adam's school thought he was retarded and so they put him in a special retard class. The class was called CoPE (Certificate of Personal Effectiveness), which is a course for kids who find GCSEs difficult, and also find tying their shoelaces difficult and probably can't even spell their own names. A lot of kids at Adam's school did CoPE (and probably smoked DoPE as well) and for a short while, Adam was one of these kids.

But the difference between Adam and the other kids is that Adam was actually smart. Okay, in many ways he's a spastic (even to this day he still can't recite the alphabet, nor can he name the twelve months of the year), but he's also intelligent. My brother's autistic, not retarded. There's a difference.

So just like in One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest, Adam was put into a group of retarded people even though he wasn't retarded. It was like the episode of the Simpsons where Bart's test results get mixed up with Martin's, and Bart ends up going to a school for extremely smart kids, except Adam went to a class for extremely dumb kids instead.

Adam got bored in the class and at one point, he started making a paper plane out of the worksheet they gave him. Then he walked out of the class halfway through and refused to go back. For this, he got detention, the only detention he ever got at school. Eventually, the school stopped trying to make him go to go to CoPE and they let him take real GCSEs instead. He went on to get 3 A*s and 7 As in GCSEs.

My younger sister, Lisa

If you think my brother was mentally damaged, then you should have seen my younger sister! Wowee! Lisa was a complete mental nutcase. Some parents complain of the terrible twos, but in my sister's case, it was the terrible teens. As a teenager, she would throw extreme tantrums, usually directed at my dad. She'd spit at him: she would prepare a great big gobful of saliva and spit it out at my dad, and it would land on his face, his clothes or the carpet, depending on her aim that day. Even worse, she would throw things at my dad: shoes, keys, anything that was within her reach. The things she threw became more and more dangerous. Once in a while, she would pick up a knife and threatened to throw it at him. If my memory serves me well, then she did throw a knife at him, but it landed on the carpet.

My older sister, Corryn

My older sister, Corryn, left the house as soon as she turned sixteen. That's what I would have done, if I'd had any money. She cited my dad as the reason, claiming that he bullied her. He was fond of giving out cruel insults and taunts to Corryn, perhaps because she wasn't his daughter, or perhaps because she was just annoying. Anyway, moving out was the best thing she could have done. It was good for Corryn because it prevented our family from inflicting further psychological damage on her. And it was good for Lisa because she suddenly had a bedroom to herself. It was the biggest bedroom in the house, too. Out of fairness, Lisa moved into my bedroom and Adam and I moved into the big bedroom, so suddenly Adam and I had a bigger bedroom. We were still in bunkbeds but now we had space for a sofa.