Mum's the Word!

Whether it’s road-rage, shopping trolley rage, insurance claim rage (yes - well they lost my car!) or pushchair rage (OK, I hold my hands up to that one too), someone somewhere is puce with fury and losing control. Usually me.

We are led to believe by the experts, who obviously never get cross, that this is purely a symptom of our compound fractured society with its near-death respect levels for everything and everyone.

Only today, as I strolled happily (I lie, it was a torment) round the Harlequin shopping centre, I saw a young woman verbally attack another woman. I think it was her mum - so let’s call it 'offspring rage' just in case any experts are reading.

Julia resorts to a more basic phone!

Anyway I stood open-mouthed as the young lady in question suggested her mother perform self-impregnation and then stormed off towards Top Shop. Thanks to the unusual acoustic qualities of the precinct, lots of us watched this sorry spectacle and then we all tutted, congratulated ourselves on having balanced kids and carried on with the pitiful business of Sunday shopping.

This girl wasn’t just a 'bit moody', she was wild with rage. Her face was like a half-mashed beetroot and she meant business. Had I been her mother, who incidentally looked petrified, I would have chucked her down the escalator but thankfully for her and me I am not.

However it made me nostalgic, if that’s the right word, about the memorable rows I had with my mother during those Top Shop years.

They fall broadly into four main categories: the big shouting and door slamming one, the chasing round the house and jumping out of the window one, (me, not Mum, and no it wasn’t second floor), the being ejected from Mum’s Chevette in the middle of nowhere one, and of course the packing my bag with make-up and school uniform and hitching to Grantham one.

I think the only reason Mum drove the 40 miles to Grantham to pick me up was her fear that I might turn into a Tory. Anyway these rows would take place fairly often, usually triggered by her looking at me in a way I deemed offensive, and we would behave like a pair of hormonal banshees until something else distracted us.

I recall one particular humdinger that was brewing up to another trip to Grantham when a large spider shot out from somewhere under my mother’s sofa rendering her mouth and mine quite paralysed.

Teenagers have always abused their parents, it’s just that thanks to an interminable diet of Jeremy Kyle and Rikki Lake, they now vent their rage in a pseudo Bronx patois, waving their arms around like any gangsta rapper you care to mention.

Not surprisingly they are far more terrifying than I was, spitting and lisping through my brace and steaming my glasses up with indignation. So I have concluded that it’s not that we are angrier, it’s just that we do it more aggressively, publicly and theatrically.

As the girl in the precinct hit boiling point, she probably believed she had been interviewed by a researcher and was in close-up on a pine and stained glass stage somewhere. I’m surprised she didn’t demand a lie-detector test, or a DNA test or both just to add to her performance.

I think she was hoping a minder might separate her from the target of her anger but disappointingly for her there was just me trundling past with my pushchair trying to look disinterested.

And it’s not just teenagers either, I saw a woman ram another with her shopping trolley during a fracas about bacon a few months back. So do we really believe that our ancestors with their ration books didn’t get just as het up in the banana queues of ‘43? I doubt it. They just didn’t worry about camera angles and selecting the biggest hoopy earrings that earlobes can sustain before going into battle.