Mr Chalk and I enjoyed a great night out this week in Cambridge seeing the wonderful David Baddiel show ‘My Family – not the sitcom’. In essence it was a very honest and open ‘celebration’ of the eccentric characters of his mum and dad.

As David is roughly the same age as me I couldn’t help but make comparisons with my own upbringing. Parenting has definitely changed since the 60s and 70s, when children were very much left to their own devices and the grown-ups followed their own interests. Helicopter parenting was not invented.

Sadly David’s dad is now suffering with dementia and his mother passed away in 2014. He was unerringly honest about how his dad’s disease (Pick’s disease, a form of dementia) has caused him to become even more like his real self, a foul-mouthed, rude and uninhibited man who he constantly has to apologise for! He was also very honest in describing his mother’s long-standing affair, whilst remaining married, with a golfer and her very open attitude to sex. David did not hold back in the often very funny anecdotes and stories he told about his parents. What was the most surprising was that his father seemed to have no clue about his mother’s affair, even though David and his brothers all knew. They were even sent emails about the affair.

He did admit to having suffered with depression, perhaps due in some part to his parents’ influence. However, what was very clear in all of the strangeness and eccentricity of his parents, they loved him and were incredibly proud of him. They also seemed as though they loved each other too, in spite of the affair.

David celebrated them as people who had had interesting and challenging lives – his mother had escaped with her family from the Nazis and his father had a successful career as a chemist with Unilever. They undoubtedly were – in the main – a happy family and this came across in David’s show.

Whatever flaws our parents have, it is important that we make our peace with them. David’s way of doing this is using comedy to tell his parents’ story in a really frank and honest way.

You may not like your parents all the time but acceptance of them with all their very human faults is the best way.

Best wishes,
Wendy xx