I'm on familiar grounds with this slim volume of Robert Dessaix's incomparable writing, best-known to me by his wonderfully thoughtful and witty book "The Pleasures of Leisure" and his inimitable prose in the remarkable book "The Time of Our Lives".
Unlike Robert Dessaix, I didn't become my mother's disgrace because of any doubt about my sexuality, but because of my choice - or, rather, non-choice - of religion. You see, it was then (and perhaps still is) the German custom to turn a boy on the Easter weekend nearest to his fourteenth birthday into an adherent of his parents' religion. This coming-of-age at the tender age of fourteen - at least under canon law which goes back to the medieval days when people were lucky to live to thirty - was celebrated in a special section of the local rag which listed the names of those who had become fee-paying members of the church.
I had visited their gothic showroom regularly for the past twelve months' Sunday School, had read all their sales literature, and studied all the fine print - and in the case of the Bible, it's all fine print - but felt that none of it convinced me to have a faith lift. Instead, I attended a simple ceremony, held in a local cinema, by the Deutsche Freidenker-Verband, who handed me a scroll attesting to my conviction that god is not great.
Neither was my reception at home where friends and neighbours had gathered to congratulate me despite not having seen my name listed in the local rag. An oversight, surely! What, it wasn't? You are a free what?
I was indeed a mother's disgrace (my father couldn't have cared less) which made my departure from home soon afterwards so much easier.
