'Blueys'

I often get airmail letters from my mum. Aerograms - what my dad used to call 'blueys', a bit of 'Vera Lynn' style nostalgia there. I suspect he used to write 'blueys' fluently to a whole raft of women and I partly inherited this tendency and used to write fluently to women too but somehow I never got the hang of the "whole raft of" aspect of it. Sad! However that isn't what I meant to write about.

I groan a bit when I see these 'blueys' in the mail box. I'm surprised some of them get here her handwriting is so shaky and I suspect some of them don't but as I'm the only Englishman within about 15 kilometres I guess if it has the right zip code on they know who a letter from England is for. Whenever one arrives I know I'm a) going to puzzle over its contents for about an hour (a bit like reading Egyptian scripts) and b) find myself inundated with a list of demands along the lines of "don't bother buying me a digital camera for Christmas I need a new TV" and "You need to take back those blue vests to Fleetwood Market I need a larger/smaller size". For my mum my being 'out East' is simply a temporary hiatus in the crucial business of getting supplied with new underwear.

It isn't that I don't ring her about once a week. On those occasions she seldom mentions this kind of stuff, though there is always a "there was something I wanted to ask you but I've forgotten" lurking sinisterly somewhere in the conversation. I feel like I'm living n an Alan Bennett play. Come to think of it when she was younger and fitter she did visit tearooms in Harrogate excessively. And maybe I got too much like one of his sad 'only son' characters, say 'Yes mum!' too often eh? Sat in my sad little room looking at my collection of cigarette cards on wet afternoons.

Buts she can't ring me, she doesn't have a land line in her room since the "Great 999 Incident of 2007". ('999' is the UK equivalent of '911' in the USA or '110' in Japan). This autumn in a moment of weakness I relented and bought her a 'pay-as-you-go' mobile. But it doesn't reach as far as Japan, it is only for UK pestering, only a first step to world domination in the telephonic scheme of things. Sometimes in England early in the morning the phone goes and you can hear her breathing heavily as she presses all the buttons in turn but forgets to hold it to her ear. And of course I don't dial her on the mobile from Japan, it would cost a fortune, she has to pad down to the phone on the wall in the hairdressing room, get a bit of fresh air, have some social interaction on her travels.

So that is where the 'blueys' come in. Kind of 'memo to son' technology. About 95% of it gets forgotten as soon as the letter is in the post but you can't rely on it, you have to be quick on your feet.