Monthly Archives: July 2020

Kids: A Walk in the Park

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It was a nice day on Sunday so I walked the boys to the park. My eldest cycled, the youngest walked, and I use ‘walk’ in its loosest possible sense. The scenic route that winds from our house to the park would take an average adult, walking at a brisk pace, about twenty minutes. It takes my children about as long as it took the three little girls in Rabbit Proof Fence to walk from the top of Australia to the bottom. My kids – even on bikes – dawdle like tourists. They sniff and search like dogs. Not a blade of grass or a fallen crisp packet is left un-investigated. Not a single opportunity to bicker or fight is squandered.

My eldest, Jack, 6 (almost), kept cycling off round corners as I hollered after him like a damsel in a horror film, as my youngest pestered me every few minutes to be lifted onto my back or shoulders, on the grounds that his legs were about to fall off. In the end he was more backpack than boy; a land-mine-lacerated soldier in NAM being rushed to the EVAC point. When we eventually made it to the park, we had just over an hour left to enjoy its delights before we would have to gather up the sherpas for the long hike back home, and to dinner –  you know, that meal where it’s a fifty/fifty shot whether the kids will eat anything, or just drop it on the ground and lobby for cake.

Time (and the coronavirus) has both brought the boys much closer together, and made them fight more viciously and frequently than ever before, but for all their shared ground and similarities each new day seems to bring a fresh divergence between their respective wants and needs.

Jack wanted to cycle round the bike circuit at the park – paved and lined to look like a town in microcosm, with park benches and bored parents standing in as buildings. Christopher wanted to run riot in the play-park itself. Naturally, I had to accompany Chris, on the grounds that he’s three, and more likely to attempt a daring escape. Luckily – for both my legs and my aversion to child social services – the two areas are only separated from each other by a hip-high metal fence.

I positioned myself inside the play-park so I was loosely equidistant from the two boys, with a clear line of sight to both. Whenever I put my focus on one of them I had to quickly crane my neck and spin around like a giant, agitated meerkat, only allowing myself to relax once I’d locked on to their manic movements. I had to remember to occasionally wave or smile recognition at my kids once I spotted them, so the people in the park didn’t think I was a particularly brazen paedophile.

Jack quickly struck up a friendship with a slightly older kid who was in the bike-park on a skateboard. At first I had to scrutinise their body language from afar to make sure Jack wasn’t being bullied by a human Bart Simpson. But, no. They were thick as thieves, in that enviable, you-had-me-at-hello way in which kids bond with their peers. I could see that Jack had assumed a leadership role, and was taking charge of their play, in that enthusiastically demanding but wild-eyed and creative way of his. Minutes later, Jack ran up to the hip-high fence, and I walked backwards to meet him, keeping my eyes trained on Chris as he flew down the chute for the fifty-billionth time (with just as much glee as he had the first time).

‘What is it, buddy?’ I asked Jack.

‘Daddy, will you come and play with us? I need some ideas for games.’

I was touched by the request, which probably spoke to the size of my inner child, but I told him I could neither abandon his little brother to fate nor drag him out of his perma-plastic wonderland against his will. ‘Besides,’ I said, ‘You’ve got tonnes of great ideas. I’m sure you’ll think of plenty of things to do.’

Just as Jack ran back to his new best friend, Christopher called me over to the chute, next to which was a little ground-bolted circular table complete with circular-table-bolted stools. He invited me to sit down, then scooped up some bark from the ground. He dropped two equal-sized piles of it on the table, one for me, one for him. ‘Your dinner, daddy,’ he said.

I pretended to eat some.

‘You want some chips?’ he asked. I nodded. Another pile of bark.

‘Tomato ketchup?’ he asked. I nodded, but I was a bit worried about that one. Thankfully he just mimed it.

As we were ‘eating’, a wee girl of similar age to Christopher arrived at my side, watching the proceedings with an expectant look. I offered her my seat. ‘Go on, sweetheart, you two can have dinner together.’

I moved back towards the hip-high fence and watched them with a smile as they played out their teeny-tiny, obliviously-cute approximation of a first date (excuse my heteronormativeness and projections of sexual power structures there). Once they were finished with their ‘meal’, they went off into the park together; spontaneously, wordlessly, operating by a mixture of instinct and telepathy, one following the other, then the other following the one, doing a fleet-footed, whistle-stop tour of the play-park, ninety-nine per cent glee, one per cent attention span. I, of course, had to follow them at a distance; a grumbling chaperone.

Neither of my kids needed me. Sure, they needed me to be physically present, to protect them from the formless dangers that lurked on the periphery of their seemingly safe spaces; to get them home again. But for the first time they didn’t need me to prop up their play, go on the roundabout with them, or join them as they threw sand in the air like confetti. I was pleased for them, but I was also, you know, kind of devastated. I knew this was just a blip. It’s not as though they were about to go off on a gap year or start working at IBM or something. But still. Being a parent is absorbing loss by degree, each new chunk of knowledge they acquire or glimmer of independence they gain taking them further away from you. This felt like one of those moments, and standing inside of it I imagined I could see all the way through to that final moment, when the house is empty of children.

Jack came running towards me, shaking me from my angst. ‘Daaaddddeeeeee!’ he shouted. ‘I need a peeeeeeeeee!’

I helped vault him over two hip-high fences, and stood guard at the side of a tree while he peed, breaking off half-way through to dash back to the park, because Christopher had been abandoned by his new friend (after he’d just cooked her his signature bark dish, too) and was running free and wild down the length of the play-park. Walking back to Jack with Chris in my arms, I thought to myself: ‘Maybe today isn’t one of these moments.’ My kids need me.

And I need them

The celebrities of the cigarette warning world

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A moment of stress-clouded weakness earlier in the year led me to take up smoking again after a three-year break. I think God must have learned there was a 39-year-old Scotsman out there who’d marginally increased his life expectancy, and He wasn’t having any of it.

I always find the best time to start smoking again is just before a global pandemic that attacks the human respiratory system.

A lot’s changed since I’ve been away from the heady world of smoking, but unfortunately not the bit about cigarettes killing you. Apparently that’s still a thing. But the packaging has changed. The ante has been well and truly upped. The uncle, too. Hell, the whole fucking family. Lung surgery. Dead guys. Babies having a fly fag. I wouldn’t be surprised to pick up a packet of baccy one day to see it emblazoned with the elevator of blood from The Shining, along with the caption, ‘All smoke and no vape makes Jack a dead boy.’

My favourite warning picture is the one where a woman is sporting a mighty cough face while holding out a blood-spattered hanky. It made me laugh. Not because I find the thought of mouth and lung cancer hilarious – although if we’re all being honest with ourselves it’s probably still slightly funnier than Mrs Browns’ Boys – but because it got me to thinking about the woman in the photograph.

Some of the people featured on fag and baccy packets are real, especially the ones with sunken faces and tubes coming out of them. Sometimes these images have been used without permission. But cough lady is almost certainly an actress/model. How do I know this?

Let me set the scene.

RING RING, RING RING

“Hello?”

“Hi, I’m a photographer. I heard smoking gave you cancer. Mind if I come round and snap a picture of you having a bit of a big cough?”

“Sure. Come over. My baby smokes too if you want to get a few snaps of him at the same time?”

The photographer has been in the woman’s house for thirty minutes…

“Sure you don’t feel a wee cough coming on, ma’am?”

“Nope. Not at the moment.”

“…Want me to get you a packet of Salt and Vinegar Squares from the car; they’re pretty sharp, might help gee it along?”

“No thanks.”

(looks at watch) “It’s just I’ve got a bum cancer shoot in about forty minutes… maybe if you smoked a cigarette?”

“How dare you come in here an…CRU CRU HU HUUU HUU OHH HO HO HUH!”

(grabs camera) “Oh, brilliant, love, that’s it. Spew that lung for daddy! FANTASTIC, is that blood? Just hold it up there, yep, oh, that’s it, red like a rose. Red like Santa’s toilet paper after a bumpy sleigh ride. Just tilt it to me, love – maybe look a bit more horrified? PERFECT! The camera loves you, baby!”

That’s a photo shoot I couldn’t see even the world’s most ethically compromised photographer taking part in, much less the ‘model’. So the woman must have been hired from an agency. Specialising in what, exactly?

“Darling, I’m waiting on my agent calling, don’t use the phone!”

“It’s 2020, though, everyone’s got mobiles?”

“I know, darling, but the guy writing this blog used RING RING a few paragraphs back, he’s clearly something of a throwback, can we please just go with this?”

RING RING, RING RING

“Hello? (lowers receiver, covers mouthpiece) DARLING, IT’S MY AGENT! DON’T GO ON THE INTERNET, EITHER, I NEED THIS PHONE LINE TO STAY FREE. YOU CAN GO ON FRIENDS REUNITED LATER!”

“….”

“Sorry, hi. Thanks for phoning. You got me an audition? Oh I knew this moment would come! My big moment. My parents will finally be proud of me. What have you got for me? Cinema ad? Shakespeare play? Small part in a movie? Recurring role in Eastenders?

(silence)

You want me to pretend to have cancer in a photo?”

(husband sneaks up the hall with a bunch of flowers)

(she waves him away, shakes her head solemnly, lowers receiver again)

“Darling, you’d better cancel that Mini-Disc player we ordered through Littlewoods.”

Some strange things go through my head, they really do. Then I got to thinking, is there an awards’ night for people in this niche of the industry?

“Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the sixth annual awards gala for ‘People Whose Images Are Used in Terrifying and Embarrassing Ways’. And the nominations are… Barbara Findlayson, for ‘Woman pulling her mouth into an ‘O’ shape due to severe vaginal itching’. (polite applause) Jacob Graham for ‘Old man pishes himself at the bowling’. (polite applause)  Gloria Fonko, for ‘Woman screams because a spider bit her on the tit’. (polite applause) And Karen Globenstein, for ‘Woman who coughs blood and little bits of Salt & Vinegar Squares crisps into her favourite hanky because she’s got the cancer’. (whoops and cheers) Karen, get on up here, you son of a bitch!”

(Karen jumps to her feet and starts screaming with excitement) “TOMMY, CALL ARGOS AND GET THAT MINI-DISC PLAYER BACK ON THE GO. THROW IN A LASERDISC! FUCK IT, GET A FURBY AND A STEP-MASTER, TOO!”

Good on you, Karen.

Who says smoking is bad for you?

Supermarkets + Coronavirus = Hell on Earth

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Social distancing has been something of a boon for me. In recent years I’ve discovered the depths of my anti-social inclinations. All it took was for the turbulent sea of my personality to be drained of alcohol. Turns out I didn’t like people: I liked alcohol. People make me anxious, you see, as much as my behaviour around people may suggest the very opposite. I need them, but they make me uneasy.

I can’t tell you, then, how grateful I am to have been afforded the chance to excuse myself from social engagements, not on the grounds of a fabricated child’s illness or an inexplicably dead aunty, but for bona fide ‘old people might die in their millions’ reasons.

Whether corona’s genesis can be traced to a secret Chinese lab, the skull of a delicious wee bat or just blind bad luck, I extend my heart-, and lung-, felt thanks. Obviously, my glee comes at a hefty price, and, of course, given the choice – and the power – I would undo all the death and suffering, and have it so that none of this had ever happened. I’m not so anti-social that I’d welcome genocide for the sake of being able to read a few extra books in a year.

Am I?

(looks at bookshelf)

(looks in mirror)

No, no, of course I’m not.

But it’s happened and I’m happy, so here we are.

One thing I’m not happy about in this new Corona Nation of ours – besides not being able to see certain people properly, or being able to take the kids to museums, libraries, cinemas, restaurants, swimming pools and big, long halls filled with bouncy castles – is supermarkets: places I hated to begin with, long before Satan donned a Mrs Browns’ Boys facemask and started moulding them to his evil specifications.

This year I’ve learned that Hell isn’t some hot furnace where a red guy with horns burns your genitals off once every ten seconds for eternity. It’s an arrow-littered labyrinth filled with shuffling hordes of dead-eyed zombies and coughing, fleet-footed gargoyles. It’s a place where you have to dance like a mariachi band-leader, and pivot and pirouette like an NBA player to avoid entering the spit-space of any one of the mass of grey-faced malcontents for whom the concepts of ‘social distancing’, ‘directions’ and ‘not being a total c***’ mean nothing.

Why is it just me who’s diving out of the way? Seriously, I’m like a one-man Morris dancing troupe, and everyone else appears to be playing rugby. On meth. And do you know who I’ve found the worst culprits to be? The most devil-may-care, stick-your-arrows-up-your-arse, I-won’t-be-told-what-to-do-by-the-likes-of-you, bunch of knuckle-headed harridans? Women in late middle-age. They’re dangerous with this shit. And they’re out in force, no matter which supermarket you choose, there they are, hordes and fleets of Karens and Brendas, sporting their requisite older-lady short-bobs, their faces like mountain crags that have been permanently chiselled into baleful frowns. Even now when I close my eyes I can see them coming at me against the flow of the arrows, with the faintest wisp of a Cruella de Ville smile tugging at the edges of their mouths; seeing me without looking directly at me, but knowing full well that I’m looking at them; a look of reply resting in their eyes that seems to say, well… it seems to say simply this:

Fuck you!

I don’t think it would be an unreasonable move on my part to modify a mobility scooter into a wheat-thresher and plough down the aisles mincing these rebellious wretches into so much leathery spaghetti. LET’S SEE HOW YOU FOLLOW THE ARROWS IN HELL, YOU SUPPORT-SOCK-WEARING, BIG-EARRINGED DOBBERS!

What a species we are, though. We built the pyramids, invented mathematics, harnessed electricity, split the atom, sent men to the moon, but apparently we can’t get our shit together to decide between two different flavours of juice. How long does it take, seriously? How long do I have to stand fidgeting in an invisible prison cell two metres away from some gormless git who’s hogging the fridges, watching with mounting irritation and disbelief as they stare intently at a bottle of orange juice like it was a new car or a lost book from the Bible? “You’ve seen juice before, right? I mean, this isn’t Sophie’s Choice; just put it in your fucking basket before I club you to death with a rectangle of Anchor butter, you inexcusably indecisive, walking spunk-bubble!’

Worse still – much like the c***s who overtake you when you pull over to let an ambulance past – there’s always some wide boy who swans into the aisle and nabs the space for which you were waiting. And then they, too, proceed to spend an obscene amount of time scrutinising each and every bottle of juice, on each and every fucking row, picking them up one by one and staring at them the way an evangelical minister stares at your wallet, presumably in case a miniature T-Rex emerges from the pulpy mixture to slam its teeth against the plastic shell, and they can put the bottle back down again and go, ‘Phew, that was a close one. Almost chose the one with the angry dinosaur inside of it there, good job I spent TWENTY FUCKING MINUTES LOOKING AT IT FIRST!’

This week everyone who enters a supermarket will be required to wear a mask, which should level the playing field somewhat. In recent weeks, mask-wearers have become the warrior class of the shopping world. Mask wearers increasingly believe that their face coverings are invincibility shields blessed by God Himself, or little sheets of cure. They’re like ninjas, these smother-mouthed assholes. You’re reaching out for a tin of soup, and then some little reject from The Chemical Brothers is suddenly ducking under you to grab a Fray Bentos pie. Get BACK, you shelf-sharing shit-bag. Wait your turn!

Yeah, I think I’m going to start doing an online shop. Or give up eating, one of the two.