What are WhatsApp Groups (for) and do my family wish we'd never met?

I think the title's enough

What are WhatsApp Groups (for) and do my family wish we'd never met?

It all got a bit intense in lockdown. Do you remember? It's an odd thing that, how easy it is to block it out, despite the fact we are still yet traumatised by the pandemic in the way that people are when there's a war or civil breakdown and everyone gathers at the same time of day round the radio/TV to listen to Churchill/watch Dear Professor Whitty counting cadavers and pointing at something that looks very much like one of those scales you find outside churches in rural England showing you how much the stock-broker belt has coughed up (sorry) to repair the roof. The WhatsApp groups mushroomed.

My elder family had one for their bridge groups; one for the hospital relay service; another for their gardening clubs and it all seemed suddenly very worthy. My 'Creatives' fessed up to some quite intense internet-dating and rule breaking but otherwise it seemed that drugs and rocking and rolling on your own had done away with sex altogether. My theatre group formed a WhatsApp group that spawned no end of daft creations (one week I nearly drowned while losing an iPhone trying to photograph the mock up I'd made of John Everett's Millais' poor Ophelia in the bath) and finally, locked in alone and having replaced most of my blood with vodka infused with skunk, I decided to create a group called something sensitive like, 'before it's too late,' for an arm of my family's displaced and disgusted. Guess how many 'fuck-you' texts I got that day?

The pandemic didn't make all that much difference to the relationship I have with my children and in fact I lucked-out on refunds for long-distance travel. Stalkers and others who look forward to my weekly and jaded view of life as a retired serial monogamist will already know that my pigeon pair, then in their mid thirties, live thousands of miles from me and from each other. But my son did make his feelings understood when, leaving a WhatsApp group set up expressly because we couldn't travel, he wrote, 'I don't really understand the need for all this annoying communication'. Since he'd already signed out I don't suppose he ever got my 'all respect,' a stock phrase I fell upon to resolve the matter of all the 'before it's too late' fuck-yous.

When the hackers got into my account my sister in law sent me a letter. (She's alright for money. An aside: I posted two letters today; one of them was too 'thick' according to the postmaster; 'like me' I quipped but he just said, '£4.56 please' and I remembered that when I told the guy who sold me some fish and chips last night for £11.50 that the price had actually doubled, he said, 'yeah, since 1982 Grandma,' making a fair enough observation in truth, so I kept my clever gob shut.) My sister in law's letter explained that a lad in Croatia with more time than sense had been sitting around biding his time and had hijacked my name, profile and identity in order to send her annoying messages and thus we would no longer be friends. I had no stamps in so I texted her to say that actually we'd never been friends in the first place. We'd been relatives by marriage. I'm pretty sure that in the normal run of things she would think she had bitten off quite a lot more than she wanted to chew when she married my brother, but needs must and she's dutiful so I get invited along in person now, since the Croatian invasion of our much less demanding exchanges. She has also saved my life more than once, causing the ruination of quite a few parties and a couple of holidays she had to cancel, so I do understand that my toast lands butter-side up in this relationship. I am not without grace and gratitude. But. What is it with family dos?

I have of course studied this: the only role left in the family once I rolled up was the one for someone 'analytical'. Being 'analytical' is considered almost as awful as being doubly incontinent, by my much appreciated and quite straightforward family on my father's side. I'm a halfy halfy you see. I have some with the same father, one with the same mother and the only thing the two sides have in common is a resistance to examining the bowels of life. Particularly death. Two of them will be well past 80 by New Year's Day; the other's got a portrait in the attic. But talking things through with people who had to start work in school uniforms because of the proximity of their births to Hitler's invasion of Poland isn't a thing. It's a non-starter and leads usually to nothing but quite a lot of, 'Cherry, can we just'-ing. 'Can we just?' comes with a parallel swipe of the right hand across the air between us. 'Do we have to? Why don't you think before you speak? No, no, no you're quite wrong'. So I studied it.

There are books about it under the general banner of 'Social Constructivism’, which explain that even if you've a PhD in Philosophy, or you're top of the trapeze in the Circus, if your family consider you daft and clumsy, so you'll ever be in their company. It's bourn out. I managed, somehow, despite all the reading and intonation of mantras on the way to the last Sunday 'do' to rock an entire table of drinks into my sister's lap while getting into a pantomime with my brother about who it was and why it was and if it was or wasn't, and if it was at all, when someone said, 'it's behind you' and I wished it really was. It was in the end, by evening and we got on the recently re-born family group-chat to remind each other that it's always a pleasure, of course.