My mother hates sentimentality of any sort, but especially the mandated, socially coordinated kind: Christmas (yuck, families); Halloween (American consumerist trash); don’t get her started on jubilees and coronations; and none more than Mother’s Day, the coarse schmaltz of its message, which to save her being a little bit sick in her mouth, I’ll just summarise as: “You’ve been OK, I guess, and I don’t hate you.”
When I was a kid, I bought her a brass vase in a junk shop, and stole some tulips from a neighbour’s garden. I’d never put my hand in my own pocket to buy anyone a present before, and I was so excited by my ingenuity and largesse that I sounded her out in advance: how did she feel about flowers? “Hate cut flowers. Flowers should be in the ground.” Purple ones? “Even purple ones.” What if you’ve stolen them? “It’s better if you don’t steal.” What about an intricately carved, probably by a factory, brass vase? “Well, if you don’t like cut flowers,” she said archly, “then you don’t have very much need for a vase.” Someone had to intervene quietly and say: “She’s bought you a Mother’s Day present, you idiot.”
