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My mum hated the cops as her brother had been beaten to death while in custody. And after my big sister died my mum became highly strung and closed. So as soon as I was trusted to come home, I was chucked out of the house. The kids were rough and there was dereliction all around, still it was my playground. My dad worked for the city as a caretaker and was also a union rep. My mum and dad were chalk and cheese most of the time I knew them. The politics of my mum were basically work to live; money not love. My dad had the ethic the boss is always wrong, always a bastard and never let yourself get bullied by anyone.

Though politics wasn't really discussed, it was overtly implied in the conversations I heard regarding the characters he was dealing with. It was always Labour! Fuck the Tories and liberals...

The first time he opened up to me about the ins-and-outs of what he stood for was after five union/company stooges threatened my 8-year-old well-being as an attempt to coerce him into not representing a colleague. My dad reacted to the threat and made a mess of them with his hammer. After witnessing that, he thought I desrved a little deeper explanation beyond don't let yourself be bullied. I took it on. My dad eventually got stuffed by the union and blacklisted.

All while this was happening and before was an easy capitalist criminality. Things "fell off the backs of lorries" and everyone I knew was there to catch them and sell them on at a fraction of the cost. This was probably one of my biggest cultural stumbling blocks as I began to develop my critique of capitalism. I was a good and proud thief.

My extended family had a big part in growing up. There's a hackneyed conception of the culture in the East End when I was a child. A culture of families as tribes. A large family who stuck together had social capital. I played with and knew my cousins as I did my friends. Everyone knew my name. And though at the time I never recognised them as such, I knew their deprivations and they knew mine.

Though we never spoke much, my grandfather was a war-wreck and an alcoholic who hated Winston Churchill and was haunted by the cruelties inflicted upon the Indians under the British Empire. His hair had whitened from shock before he was thirty. I was close to my grandmother who was the matriarch of the family. She was a strong, stern and joyful woman who I miss dearly.

Things changed when Margaret Thatcher sold the social housing stock to the tenants. All of a sudden, there were terrible snobs in my family. The renters who the bank manager once wouldn't have entertained had suddenly got mortgages. The camaraderie disappeared. My uncle bought my grandmother's house. My aunts and uncles, my mum and dad eventually sold up and disappeared as the prices went up as gentrification and finance took hold of the Isle of Dogs and the rest of East London. All sold to landlords, with no new houses on the horizon.

Without critique, my cousins turned into little Englanders, sycophants, bigots and racists. My little sister has become a sucker to the middle-class malaise. My parents are now old, pilled up and stuck in front of the TV. They have given up the fight and become wisps of who they once were. I saw the hustle happening. I still harbour a resentment for them, their fallibility and participation.

I'll joyfully undermine their capitalist festival and cook the dinner. No presents other than myself and the seeds of rebellion.