Sexy by comparison

At some point tomorrow, I am going to head into our loft and literally start throwing things wildly into a dustbin. Anyone with a loft will attest to the fact that piles and piles of stuff that would otherwise have been properly processed by those without a loft, get shoved into a loft by those of us with one! There will be boxes of CDs up there. Video cassettes. Tapes. Bags filled with cables which only fit items which were made in the 1990s. Years of tax receipts. Picnic hampers. Ten rounders bats (don’t ask). Old carpets. Cupboards Nathan made at school. Televisions. Tattered curtains. There will be things up there I don’t even recognise and can’t for the life of me work out how they got there. A lot of it will be water damaged. All will be covered in layer upon layer of brick dust. We have a mattress up there which friends used to sleep on. When the workmen ripped the roof off, they threw the old dormer windows onto the top of it. We’re not even going to attempt to rescue the bedding underneath...

There’s a little corner where we keep the soft toys from our childhood. I only have three: Panda, Horsey and Jemima. I will never throw them away because they played such an important role in my childhood. The first two belonged to my brother but Jemima was mine. She’s a rabbit and was once a lovely fluffy thing with beautiful white fur and a charming dress and pantaloon set made from an early ‘70s printed fabric.

These days she looks utterly horrifying. Anyone who sees her gasps. Her fur is matted. Her clothes are threadbare. At one stage in my childhood I thought she’d look considerably prettier with makeup. Obviously the horrific concept of testing makeup on animals was entirely lost on me, so I tried to make her look like Agnetha from ABBA, with great dollops of bright blue eye shadow, some fetching blusher and blood red lipstick. The effect was dazzlingly awful. Over the years, she’s got quite grimy, and her legs look like they’ve been broken in several places, so she resembles a murdered leporine prostitute, whose body has been dumped in a wheelie bin.

Sadly, the soft toy from our childhood which seems to have vanished without trace is a giant lump of a soft sheep. I suspect any jokes anyone reading this will be tempted to make about the son of a Welshman being given a sheep to play with, will be exacerbated by the knowledge that we named said sheep, “Sexy.” I kid you not.

I know, I know! How were we allowed? How did we even know that word? To make matters considerably worse, I had a chronic lisp as a kid, so he was actually called “Thecthy”. To my retrospective great relief, I was never tempted to make Sexy sexier by daubing him with makeup, like I did Jemima, but I do remember at one stage Brother Edward and I being encouraged to changed Sexy’s name to George. But George never stuck. Sexy wasn’t a George. Sexy was Sexy.

But then, one terrible day, Sexy the Sheep simply vanished...

Now, if I didn’t know that my parents were fine, upstanding, decent human beings, I might suspect that they’d played a part in Sexy’s disappearance. They had, after all, given us the chance to change Sexy’s inappropriate name, and we had singlehandedly failed.

I suppose it could have been worse. Some parents name their children the most awful things. Sarah Cox’ son is called Issac, for example. Brad Pitt’s son, Shiloh, is perfect for a Spoonerism. I went to school with a girl called Hoo Flung Dung, my godson has a classmate called Shittage and there was a girl in my mate Matt’s class called Fuquenisha. Her name was banned by teachers and everyone had to call her Nisha.

...Sexy, by comparison, seems rather tame!