Half the World Away by Derek Owusu
the padded throne held a man in wash-averse blue jeans, expecting cigarettes you’d never see him smoke. He had a penchant for dad jokes that sometimes bordered on cruel. To his right sat Barb, ciggie like a sceptre, pink fluffy slippers teetering on her toes, prickly when she needed to be. Occasionally frequenting the cushions to Barbara’s left was her mother, Norma, aka Nana, with her eyes on the king’s seat. Along the sofa was Denise, a constant variable, waiting for her fiancé Dave to drop in. The youngest of the family was Antony, aka Lurch, the last in line, content in his corner, happy to be displaced from the settee.
For a few weeks this past winter, The Royle Family stood in for mine. The sitcom characters
created by the late Caroline Aherne, who played Denise, and Craig Cash, who played Dave, kept each other company from 1998 to 2012, elbow to elbow in the living room of the house belonging to Jim (Ricky Tomlinson) and Barbara (Sue Johnston), joking, bickering and watching TV together. As 2020 gave way to 2021, they kept me company too. The carefully observed tics, frustrating idiosyncrasies and affectionate injustices meted out by people who know each other too well turned out to be what I needed during months that grew dark too quickly.
I spent my lockdown in the house I grew up in, in Tottenham, my parents and brother there, but we hardly crossed paths. Outside of my bedroom, where I passed most of my time, the world continued to move. My mum and dad still worked. My brother, furloughed, spent most of his time driving around to see friends, leaning out his car window shouting towards one doorstop or another, when he could have whispered just a few words to me across our corridor. I was working three days a week, a marketing job and planning podcasts. My desk was my lap and my lower back grew stiff. Days seemed to have no beginning or end, so who cared what time I walked to the shop for a mixer? Who cared if I went to bed on days off? Who cared if I cried with the sun shining?
When the sun began to recede, seeming to have a curfew before the rest of us, I would sit on my bed, feet stretched out, laptop balanced on my crossed shins, and hope that some movie could see me through the night. Once, I ended up watching Oasis: Supersonic, a documentary about the band. I didn’t take much from it — except a sudden desire for a parka — but I also decided to listen to their back catalogue. Hearing “Half the World Away”, I felt a shot of nostalgia that siphoned my breath. It was the theme tune to The Royle Family, a Google search reminded me, though I hadn’t watched it since I was a teenager, sitting with my dad only so I could stay up longer than I was supposed to. It was like the passing scent of someone you’ve known and lost.
I spent two months watching The Royle Family again, completely unconcerned with the world beyond my bedroom voile, which let so much light in. It was just as Noel had sung it. It was hard to imagine that I was locked down when there was so much family in front of me, even if my own was largely absent. Instead of the suffocating miasma of fear and dread outside, there were pork scratchings and Turkish delight. I’d laugh, fight for breath and then crack the foil on a couple of Rennies. Having to stay home no longer felt imposed. Like the Royles, I was a hardline homebody now.
When I was growing up, my parents were not like Jim and Barb, but sometimes, in some ways, they were. On the nights when my mum was back from her job at the civic centre, and my dad was working mornings as a security guard instead of his usual evenings, we would sit together. My dad, feet on a stool I imagined I could replace, would recline in front of the thick-backed Grundig TV, a black pestle bowl resting in front of him, filled with soup drowning his fufu, the meat and bones floating like limbs and pieces of a shipwreck. My mum would make comments she knew were irrelevant, or ask questions she knew the answer to, satisfied she had irritated my dad by talking through his favourite shows. I watched the clock and made sure I anticipated any sex scenes by standing to go to the toilet.
The Royles knew nothing of Covid-19. Through four series, I watched and re-watched all their milestones: Antony turning 18; Dave and Denise getting married; Barbara struggling with the menopause; the birth of baby David; Nana’s funeral. And I savoured all the stuff in between that could seem so small but held so much weight: like Jim, fearful of losing “Bar-bera”, deciding to make everyone a cup of tea, or getting out his banjo to hold a night recital with the family after a bust-up. Jim, Barb, Denise, Dave and Antony turned out to be the companions I needed, not just in lockdown, perhaps my entire adult life.
I worked my way through all kinds of classic British sitcoms that winter, on my own, in my room. Porridge, Open All Hours, Blackadder (my favourite), Fawlty Towers and Only Fools and Horses (my dad’s favourite, going so far as to name me after the oldest Trotter). My ritual of glasses of light brown was replaced by hot drinks in white mugs.
When it was so easy to feel like you were nothing but a potential percentage, or a source of contagion, my body never felt as animated or valued, family never seemed so priceless, as when I watched Jim Royle leading his underlings towards the sofa in a chorus line to the theme tune of Antiques Roadshow like it was “Onward, Christian Soldiers”. I’d tap my tracksuit bottoms to hear the coins rattle inside.
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