Home is where the heartburn is

You know the warm, loving feeling of contentment you get when you’re surrounded by a close-knit herd of family, eating and laughing and generally amusing each other with personal jokes? Me neither. My favourite member of the family is our Golden Labrador Rover, who would have been for real had my parents allowed me to get one. 

American actor and comedian George Burns has gone on record saying that his idea of happiness is having a large, loving, caring, close-knit family – in another city. But he probably got away with it because he gets paid to offend people. I agree with his statement wholeheartedly; there ought to be something to it, because all good jokes have a modicum of truth in it. Seriously, haven’t you seen all those people at the arrival gate hugging their family member(s) who probably live in another city/country? And the farther they live, the happier they look.

No, I don’t want to sound cynical. I would be the first person to advocate HUFs and it’s not just because it helps save taxes. Families are a good support system more than anything else, which means that they can help delay dementia. But I wouldn’t advise it if it acts as a quickening agent.

Unfortunately, family is too complicated; its a bittersour symphony. The good part is that you don’t have to get along with each other because you’re family. You can take each other for granted and not really worry about it, and you can fight like PMS-ing cats and forget about it the next minute without anyone thinking that you’ve lost your centre of gravity.

   

A famous first line from Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina envelopes a universal truth in a single pithy sentence: ‘Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.’ (See, that’s why they’re called timeless classics!) I haven’t read the book but I’m guessing it’s partly about Anna’s messed up family and how one can achieve happiness at home. I don’t know whether it ends happily for the heroine of the novel – I’m told it doesn’t – but it’s only fair that every family should get its own happy ending. I’m sure I will get mine. Too bad, the title My Family and Other Animals is already taken. So is The War of the Worlds.