This week, I listened to a podcast I’d been putting off for the longest time. The title isn’t exactly alluring, to be honest. Just like those unlikely rock formations you see in nature books, there are some word arrangements you never thought to put together, for fear of your brain short-circuiting.
The podcast is called My Dad Wrote A Porno, and it is precisely what it says on the tin. The book in question is Belinda Blinked, a work of erotic literature by the pseudonymous Rocky Flintstone, and it is read aloud and dissected on a chapter-per-episode basis by Flintstone’s son, Jamie Morton, and two of his friends. Think Jackanory, but in a twisted alternate universe. It is mortifying, awful, stupefying and completely hilarious. I have cried laughing at least five times.
The idea of our parents as people with their own lives is jarring. I remember someone asking me, when I was about five, what my mother’s name was. My confident answer? “Her name’s Mum.” As we get older, there are inklings, of course, that our parents were people before they decided to enhance their lives by creating us. There are photos, full of perfectly spherical afros and absurdly large lapels. There are the intimacies parents share that come as a surprise to you, a full 30 years after your birth. Finding out, as Morton did, that your dad has an obsession with breasts. Our parents are multifaceted, and this is a beautiful, sometimes awkward, thing.
Morton’s podcast is also a welcome reminder that whatever your own dad is doing with his retirement, at least he’s not writing terrible erotic fiction. Probably.
