flossing the cat

Did I tell you the one about the werewolf, the cul-de-sac in suburbia, and the courting couple? Well, the story starts one weekday evening, back in the Eighties, with my mother furiously attempting to rid the lounge window of the coating of dust produced by the crematorium opposite. “Ych a fi” she says, her face like a cat's bum. “No self-respect.” I follow her gaze to the lay-by outside the cemetery gates, where two teenagers are busy sucking each other’s faces off in the front seat of a green Ford Cortina. I am almost fourteen at the time – but my experience of open mouth kissing is limited to the time Great Auntie Maud launched her tongue into my mouth thinking I was her dead husband, the great big lezzer - so  I lean into the window to get a better view. “They’re only snogging”, I conclude. For my mother, however, there is no such thing as “only snogging”. Snogging involves EXACTLY the same level of risk as eating your dinner straight off the toilet seats ...

Everyone remembers their first kiss, right? For me, the story involves a widowed second cousin-in-law, twice-removed, who lived in Carmarthenshire with some other cousins, who went by the name of Great Auntie Maud. (Fuck knows why I’m specifying the exact degree of kinship of those involved.) Suffice it to say that Great Auntie Maud was as old as Methuselah, and may have even been a childhood friend of his. Anyhoo, one day, during one particular visit to our cousins’ home, Great Auntie Maud shot up from her armchair as we were leaving, and stood in the doorway, blocking our exit. “Give Auntie Maud a kiss goodbye then”, she said, turning to me. I was thirteen and three-quarters at the time. And although kissing somebody was on my bucket list, Great Auntie Maud looked nothing like a) Andrew Ridgeley from Wham, b) John Taylor, the bass guitarist from Duran Duran, or c) Stephen Jones from Form 3C, who were the usual objects of my kissing fantasies. “What you waiting fo...