Bad Behavior Thanksgiving

After Bad Bob's description of the insane weekend with my former husband and in laws, I can only refer to the quote in your last email. It's something my mother would have loved, even though she always betrayed her own advice. She once said to me, after the first time she met the whole lot of them at Thanksgiving,

"How can people that poor be that fucked up?" She was shit faced at the time and certainly not a snob given her predilection for stable hands, plumbers and drug dealers but it was absolutely dead on accurate because that family, every last one of them, is completely whacked and not in a ha ha, amusing way.

We invite people like that to tea, but we don't marry them.

Lady Chetwode on her future son-in-law, John Betjeman. Slough
Come friendly bombs and fall on Slough!
It isn't fit for humans now,
There isn't grass to graze a cow.
Swarm over, Death!
Come, bombs and blow to smithereens
Those air -conditioned, bright canteens,
Tinned fruit, tinned meat, tinned milk, tinned beans,
Tinned minds, tinned breath.

Mess up the mess they call a town-
A house for ninety-seven down
And once a week a half a crown
For twenty years.

And get that man with double chin
Who'll always cheat and always win,
Who washes his repulsive skin
In women's tears:

And smash his desk of polished oak
And smash his hands so used to stroke
And stop his boring dirty joke
And make him yell.

But spare the bald young clerks who add The profits of the stinking cad; It's not their fault that they are mad, They've tasted Hell.

It's not their fault they do not know
The birdsong from the radio,
It's not their fault they often go
To Maidenhead

And talk of sport and makes of cars
In various bogus-Tudor bars
And daren't look up and see the stars
But belch instead.

In labour-saving homes, with care
Their wives frizz out peroxide hair
And dry it in synthetic air
And paint their nails.

Come, friendly bombs and fall on Slough
To get it ready for the plough.
The cabbages are coming now;
The earth exhales.

Lady Penelope Chetwode, the poet's wife and grand Indian explorer of Himal Pradesh