Cooper Brown: Mom's visit

Drove the Quattroporte to Heathrow to pick up Mom. She waddles out, looking like everybody’s worst nightmare of an American.

She’s all tie-dyed and looks like Jerry Garcia’s fat elder sister. Somebody has to go to break it to her that the Seventies are over, but it’s not going to be me, as any conversation turns immediately to Jesus and the “godless”life that I lead (thank God). Since she was last here, she now apparently refuses to travel in anything that “pollutes the Earth”. The Quattroporte is very much in that category and she flat refuses to get into it. She says that the only way she will get into town will be by electric bus or walking. I tell her that there are no electric buses and that the walk will probably take two days, even if she wasn’t morbidly obese. We have a huge row and she ends up waddling towards the motorway with me driving really slowly behind her screaming stuff.

I then get pulled up by a police car who tells me that I’m driving dangerously slowly – this is a total first for me, I promise you. I assure them I normally drive very fast and that this won’t happen again if I can only get my mother into the car. They drive up to her and tell her that it’s illegal to walk along the motorways. She starts going on about her “rights”and behaves like it’s Kent State all over again. The long and short of it is they arrest her and drive her into town which solves my (first) problem of the week. Sometimes, just sometimes, the police are useful. Cooper Out.