I don’t want this to come across as a weird ‘my parents are better than yours’ humblebrag, by the way. Similarly, if you missed the irony draped over the whole ‘I’m the greatest kids’ TV presenter of all time’, then that is solely down to my limited writing abilities. I know I’m not the best. I’ve met Phillip Schofield, Tim Vincent, Dick and Dom, Zoë Ball, Angellica Bell and Otis the Aardvark – I’m fully aware of the tough competition I’m up against. Let’s just say I’m top 10 and move on.
An important factor in becoming an adult is to avoid constantly internalising and comparing other people’s lives with your own. As a kid that sort of behaviour used to do you all manner of good: ‘But Ahir’s parents let him stay up until nine on a Friday.’ Boom! Next thing you know you’re watching the ‘late’ film on a Friday night like a proper fucking gangster! Isn’t parental guilt a brilliant thing?
Perhaps all our parents did was try to give us the best life possible, and it was us constantly comparing and contrasting with others that created this illusion that we are smothered and over-protected. Parents can’t protect their children for ever. I mean, I know eight-year-olds that have been told to go fuck themselves. You need to do your own thing, let others do theirs and hope for the best. I can’t beat Otis the Aardvark – he’s a talking anteater, for God’s sake. I’m merely a talking man. In the hearts of British children I’m always coming off second best in that exchange.
Now that I am an adult, or at least trying my bloody best, I think quite a bit about what was going through my mum’s head when she was bringing me up. I’m nearly the same age as she was when she had me. Fuck, I couldn’t imagine having a kid right now. Chances are I’d drop it. But she managed it and I’ve never really asked her how. I had been meaning to interview my mum for ages for this book. I had always managed to find a reason to put it off: it was too late, we were too drunk, my equipment wasn’t working properly. I’ve never actually thought, until right now, why I was so scared to sit my mum down in the podcast chair. I guess it’s the intimacy of it that was the real kicker. We’d never talked about anything like that in real detail, and now, like a true millennial, I had decided not only to have the conversation after three decades of my life, but also to record the whole thing. Freud would have had a field day (and not the type where you purchase a caravan). Sure, the microphones are somewhat phallic, but that sick Austrian quack needn’t know that.
So despite my reservations and fears about what might be said, I decided to sit down and speak to the main woman herself – Alison Stirling, my mother.
Interview with My Mum –
‘I will never make my children old before their time’
ALISON STIRLING
I intended to go back to work, but once I had you I thought, ‘No, there is no way. I don’t want to do that.’ I was kind of brought up in a nursery, and I didn’t think we were going to have a family. I was more shocked than anybody that I would want to give up work for it, but that’s what I wanted to do and so that’s what your dad and I did. That halved the money that came in.
IAIN STIRLING
Yeah, that’s why we had to go on caravan holidays.
ALISON STIRLING
Then Kirsten, your sister, came along 18 months later. The theory was that during the week I would get everything ready so that at the weekend we had family time. People used to say, ‘Oh, I can’t stand this,’ but I used to say, ‘Boring is as boring does.’ And we did a lot. I have to say I felt I loved it, but –
IAIN STIRLING
And you were brill, this is what I’m saying.
ALISON STIRLING
But at the end of the day there is a danger that I sometimes think maybe I didn’t allow you to develop, and, you know, there’s always that ‘If I’d done this, had I done that’ …
IAIN STIRLING
Develop in terms of, like, independently be able to do my own stuff?
ALISON STIRLING
Yeah, get up in the morning. That sort of thing.
IAIN STIRLING
Yeah, this is exactly the point I was going to make. It’s not a bad thing. What I mean is my childhood was amazing and you’re an amazing mum and Dad’s an amazing dad – parents that you know would lie down in traffic for you – but then it also means that when someone says, ‘This deadline was due a week ago,’ I’m now the sort of person to say, ‘It will be fine, someone will sort it out.’ Because in my head I’m going, ‘Mummy and Daddy will sort it out.’ And I think if I were to have kids I would get them to do more. But what I’m saying is that’s not bad. The point I’m making is what was it about? What aspects of your upbringing affected how you were as a parent?
ALISON STIRLING
My dad died when I was 17 days old, and there was my brother, 14 years older than me, and then there were three stepchildren and they were older as well, so, you know, my mother had a lot to do. She needed money, so she went out and worked. So from an early age I was in the nursery, and then when I went to school that’s when she said, ‘Well, we’ll get people in.’ And I hated it. I absolutely hated it. And she was trying her absolute best but it got to the stage that she got me a blackboard. I wanted a bike but we couldn’t afford one for Christmas so I got a blackboard.
IAIN STIRLING
Same letter. It’s still a ‘B’, Alison. It begins with ‘B’.
ALISON STIRLING
So I used to write notes to my mum on the blackboard, things that I would remember from school.
IAIN STIRLING
What, notes like you need to buy milk or like I learned that the sky is blue?
ALISON STIRLING
No, no. About something that happened that day – by the time she came in I might have forgotten about it. So I would write that down and then my mother would write something on the blackboard and it became a wee thing with us, and it was great. But it doesn’t beat coming in to your mum and saying, ‘You know what happened at school today?’ And then your nanna got ill. She got cancer when I was 12 and that kind of turned everything round. She had 18 months to live and it turned her absolutely wild. So she basically started giving things away because she wanted things to be in order and it was a hellish time to go through, and I realise now that I was a carer, but at that point I wouldn’t have known I was. We got a new washing machine and Mum couldn’t use it – I was doing it. So I think that’s what made me think I will never make my children old before their time.
IAIN STIRLING
I mean, I’m 30 years old and still wouldn’t know how to use a dishwasher.
ALISON STIRLING
What is it you said to me when I said, ‘Put that in the washing machine’? You said, ‘Is that the one with the round door or the square door?’
IAIN STIRLING
When was that?
ALISON