Tag Archives: childhood

Old Ladies Have a Song for Everything

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My gran, born in the 1920s, had a song for everything. There wasn’t a question you could ask or a line of conversation you could open up that wouldn’t trigger some long-entrenched musical memory and spur her on to do a bit of loosely-related warbling.

‘Cup of tea, gran?’

(starts warbling) ‘Oh, a tea in the morning, a tea in the evening, a tea around suppertime…’

‘You need me to take you to the shops, gran?’

(starts warbling) ‘Oh, and when we start shopping, we all start bopping, it’s off to the shops we go…’

‘You got the tests back from your anal scan yet, gran?’

(starts wabbling) ‘Ohhh, first you had a look, and then you took a snap, oh, you captured me deep inside…’

I think at least part of the reason for this habit was that singers in her day tended to sing about a greater range of life experiences, which gave music a sort of blanket relevance to daily life. Let’s face it, most songs these days are about shagging. And money. And how money can best help us with our shagging. But back then? Anything went. They wrote songs about the maddest and most inconsequential of shit.

‘Ladies and gentlemen, live from The Apollo Theatre in London, I urge you to turn your radios up as loud as they can go for the smooth, sensational stylings of Jimmy Foster and his Underwater Stockinged Turtle Band, performing their latest hit song, “The Blue Umbrella is My Favourite One, But I Guess the Yellow One is Sort of Alright, Too”.

Singers back in the 30s and 40s seemed to get their inspiration from the most banal of places. They would wake up, see a fallen cornflake half-crushed into the kitchen floor, rush to their phone, call up one of their band-mates and say, ‘Dave: get the guitar pronto, I’ve got a belter on my hands here!’

‘I mean it, Dave, this one has potential to be bigger than “Tuesday is Haircut Day, But Only Once I’ve Been to the Butcher’s”.’

Part of my gran’s habit was an age thing, of course. I’ve noticed similar behaviour in my mother in recent years, especially when she’s talking to her grandkids. She’ll start singing some old-timey song about biscuits, and they’ll just stare up at her in timid, slightly bemused silence until she stops, and then carry on blathering away as if it never happened, like the aural oddity was nothing more than a waitress dropping plates in a restaurant, or the cat farting.

Maybe they think their gran is sometimes possessed by the spirit of a deceased musical nutcase, but if they do their faces never show it. Kids are cool that way.

It’s all got me to wondering… What songs that are only tangentially related to the reality around me will I be singing to my grandkids in years to come (if luck should spare me long enough for that to happen)? I dread to think, given the amount of awful pop and dance music, and good but explicit rock and rap music to which I’ve been exposed in my life.

‘Grandpa, is there a time limit on us playing this virtual reality game?’

(starts warbling) ‘No, no, no, no, no, no – no, no, no, no – no, no THERE’S NO LIMIT!’

‘Grandpa, I don’t understand this riddle.’

(starts warbling) ‘Here is something you can’t understand (makes fist into a microphone). HOW I COULD JUST KILL A MAN!’

‘Grandpa, will you come through to the living room for a moment, please?’

(starts warbling) ‘FUCK YOU I WON’T DO WHAT YOU TELL ME!’

But, here’s the thing: I’ve already started riffing out songs to the young uns. Not my grandchildren, either. My own infant children of 3 and 5. The disease has kicked in a generation early for me. And here’s the other thing: none of the songs I sing to them – spurred on by the things they say or the questions they ask – are actually real songs. I make them all up.

‘Dad, can I have some toast?’

(starts rocking out) ‘Woooahooo, toast, toast, the way it feels, the way it feels when it’s in my mouth, I said TOAST, woooahooo, crunchy sometimes but buttery too, oooooooh hooo hooo, you gotta get that ratio RIGHT, girl!’

Only the other day I went off into a big number about the importance of putting your dishes in the sink, and my eldest son, Jack, said to me, very earnestly: ‘Who sings that one, dad? That’s a good one.’

He looked visibly impressed when I revealed that lying behind the surprise smash-hit of the season was his own father’s noble artistic vision.

I’ve got a theory: because my sister and I identified quite early in our lives this tendency in our elders to free associate the minutiae of life with music, it’s quite possible that I have internalised the jokes we used to make about it so completely that they’ve been written into my subconscious as code, and now the joke has become the reality.

But here’s another, rather more unsettling theory: If I’ve been making up all of these songs for my kids, then maybe my gran was doing the same. Maybe none of those songs about sugar, or bacon, or shirts, or daffodils actually existed, and she was just fucking mental?

Like I am.

I’m scared to look back at Frank Sinatra’s or Sidney Divine’s discography in case there’s a Kaiser Soze moment, and I discover that all of the old crooners’ songs were actually about money and shagging, and not biscuits and cups of tea like I was led to believe?

The truth is out there, people.

I think I know a song about that.

(starts warbling the theme tune for the X-Files)

What not to watch with kids: a guide

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Half the joy of raising children is in reconnecting with your own childhood. Not for its own sake – which would be regressive, selfish and honestly a bit weird; a few steps removed from strapping on a nappy and supping from a giant milk-bottle as a prostitute becalms you – but in order to sieve out the things that gave you the most joy; your best and happiest memories, so you can pass them down the generational chain: places you went, games you played, movies you watched, books you read.

If you’re as hellishly impatient as I am you’ll want to hit your kids in the hippocampus with a megaton of memories all at once – every magical experience or mystical moment you ever experienced from the age of zero to fifteen – but you can’t. You really can’t. Nor should you. Not only because your kids are entitled to a childhood as free as can be from the benevolent dictatorship of your nostalgia, but also because four really isn’t a great age to be watching the Evil Dead movies.

Let’s keep things focused on classics and pop culture (and classics of pop culture).

What criteria should be used to judge how age-appropriate a cherished movie or TV show is for your little cherubs? After all, each kid has different triggers, thresholds and tolerances. Some kids might quiver at the mere mention of a monster; others might welcome a harrowing disembowelling scene with little more than a yawn (I swear Peppa Pig just keeps getting edgier).

Obviously, there are some lines that should never be crossed: for instance, it’s probably best to leave your extensive VHS collection of porn up the loft where it belongs. Arrange to have it donated posthumously to the ‘Museum of Vintage Depravity’ or something. But keep it away.

And it’s probably best to avoid movies that feature rape, torture, murder, abuse and realistically rendered sex scenes, unless you’re purposely trying to play chicken with social services (or preparing your children for life in Airdrie).

I think the trick is to temper your own selfish desire to fill your kids’ heads with the pop culture that shaped you, with the very real possibility that, seen too soon, some of that shit could have them reaching for the citalopram, or sharpening a set of steak knives in anticipation of a long career carving up the corpses of hitch-hikers.

I can understand the urgency, though. The longer you wait to introduce them to those dorky B-movies or old sci-fi and action series you enjoyed as a nipper, with sets as ropey as the dialogue, the more you risk your kid collapsing in fits of laughter at the sight of a polystyrene man having a fight with a rubber dinosaur, instead of cowering behind the sofa like they’re supposed to. The farther your kids drift from your parental tether, the more they’re exposed to the shiny and the new, and the less they need you and your hoary old ideas. One day you, and everything you represent, will be consigned to the bottomless chasm of uncoolness inside your kids’ heads. Best to watch episodes of old Doctor Who and The A-Team while you still can, as quickly as you can.

Obsolescence isn’t the only problem. Sometimes it’s tone. I’ve introduced my little guys to fondly-remembered, family-friendly classics from the 1980s only to find myself lost in a whirlwind of misogyny, violence, swearing, gun-play and smoking. I’m not a fan of the revisionist zeal that’s sweeping through our society at present, ‘cancelling’ those beloved old shows and movies that don’t conform to the strict dictates of our ‘enlightened’ new age, but, equally, I’m not a huge fan of having to contextualise casual domestic violence for a four-year-old child mid-way through a kids’ film. Thanks, Short Circuit.

Early on in Short Circuit a female character’s abusive ex-partner throws her down a hill and threatens to kill her dog, after which she just gets up, gives a goofy little smile and gets on with her day. It’s never mentioned again. Life lessons, huh?

There’s a tremendous amount of gun-play in Harry and the Hendersons, but that’s okay, because the movie smuggles a pretty hefty anti-hunting message across the finish line. A little harder to deal with Ray Stantz and Peter Venkman constantly smoking in Ghostbusters, though, and I don’t mean their over-heating proton packs.

‘But, Daddy, I thought you said that smoking was dirty and bad, but the Ghostbusters are goodies, aren’t they, so why are they smoking?’

‘…THE GHOSTS ARE FORCING THEM TO DO IT!’

I watched the Hellboy movies with Jack (5 now, 4 then), the Ron Perlman ones. Not exactly typical family-friendly fare, sure, but I figured that since ‘crap’ was the strongest swear word I could recall featuring, and the violence was mostly cartoonish, it would be okay. Regrettably, there was significantly more stabbing than I’d remembered. In fact, Hellboy’s surrogate father is stabbed to death by a hideous clockwork Nazi assassin. That doesn’t happen in The Fox and the Hound.

Despite the occasional flashes of inappropriateness, Hellboy was a good gamble. Jack emerged from the two movies with a magnified sense of wonder. He admired the tough-talking demon’s nobility, fragility, honour, and willingness to sacrifice his needs, even himself, for love and friendship. We talked about the motivations of the characters, and touched upon themes of sadness, loss, and when it’s acceptable to use physical force to defend yourself or others.

In any case, there’s a clear difference between movies like Hellboy, and movies like A Nightmare on Elm Street or Hamburger Hill, the latter types I’d never dream of showing him until he’s at least eight… I’m joking, you turds (Ten). Common sense, and an honest and sensitive appraisal of your kids’ mental acuity and emotional maturity should serve as your guide. Within limits, of course. I refer you back to the porn in the loft, and the movies containing hard-core sex and violence. Even if your kid’s sitting there in a reclining chair at the age of seven smoking cigarillos and quaffing brandy, discussing interest rates for first-time buyers, you should still resist the temptation to show them the French movie ‘Irreversible.’

Sex vs Violence

For some reason, violence is a lot more palatable to parental sensibilities than sex. Well, to this parent anyway. Perhaps it’s simply a lot less awkward to explain why someone might feel moved to punch another person in the face versus why that woman keeps shouting ‘Jesus oh Jesus’ as the man behind her pulls an angry, sweaty grin and shouts ‘That’s what I’m talking about!’

Both Jack and Christopher loved Kindergarten Cop, but the movie had the rather unfortunate – and undeniably hilarious – side-effect of introducing Jack to the line, uttered by one of the kids in the movie: ‘My daddy spends all day looking at vaginas’ which he still occasionally quotes (though I counsel him never to repeat it outside the home). I’m readying a telegram of thanks to big Arnie S if Jack grows up to be a rich and successful gynaecologist.

My kids have also watched all three Austin Powers’ movies. Well, that’s not strictly true. They’ve watched all three Austin Powers’ movies minus the bits that feature coded and explicit sexual references, which I either fast-forwarded or babbled loudly over. ‘Daddy, what does horny mean?’ isn’t a question I’m ready to tackle, even though I already know the answer will be ‘ask your mother’.

Fat Bastard was quite a problematic character. I had to counsel Jack only to use the word ‘bastard’ in the context of this specific character’s name, and never to use that word outwith, or indeed inside, the home. Just don’t say ‘Fat Bastard’ is a pretty great rule, especially since he might one day use it on me. Still, both kids can do a mean impression of the fat bastard, and there aren’t many things funnier in this world than a 2-year-old angrily shouting, ‘I’M GOING TO EAT YER BAY-BEH!’ Ditto Dr Evil, whose ‘zip-it- and ‘shhhhhh’ shenanigans are always quoted whenever we want each other to shut up.

Both my kids have watched Drop Dead Fred, and both of them love it, especially our two-year-old, who’s probably watched Rik Mayall strut and sneer his way through Phoebe Cates’ second childhood/first breakdown about thirty times and counting. I don’t know how many times he’s pretend-wiped bogies down my cheek and called me ‘Snotface’, but I do know it’ll be a long, long time before I explain to them why the ‘Cobwebs’ line is funny.

Throw the book at them

If sex is worse than violence in terms of its visceral impact upon a child’s brain, then I’ve found that books are worse than movies. Words have more power than pictures, moving or otherwise, because words can burrow into your brain and conjure their own, darker and unbound, pictures. Books have a greater power to terrify and disturb than even the scariest and most shocking of movies – for those blessed with powerful imaginations, in any case.

My primary four teacher recognised that within my pigeon breast fluttered the soaring heart of a story-teller, so loaned me a book on Greek myths and legends to help my imagination take flight. It was a great honour, and I remember feeling very special indeed. The book definitely boosted my imagination, mainly because I had to completely invent and imagine every aspect of the Greek myths and legends from looking at the picture on the front cover. I never read the fucker, you see. The book itself has now passed into legend; I was supposed to return it, or pass it on to another clued-up kid, but it went missing. Maybe a three-headed dog ate it, along with my homework.

As parents, my wife and I read to our kids every day. They’ve got enough books between them to open their own library, but we still manage to come home from the actual library laden with teetering towers of books and comics. The more, the better, I’ve always thought, when it comes to books. You can overdose on a lot of things, but not words. Books aren’t just stories: they’re hives of information on how language works; how the world works; how people think and talk and behave; how different people see the world; the multiplicity of creatures, places and cultures on the planet past and present (and future, if it’s sci-fi). They teach us the benefits of pushing the boundaries of both the permissible and the possible.

Books expose. Books challenge. Books enrich and enliven. If you want to see the dangers of a world without books or, worse, a world with only one, then look at any society ruled by the iron-fisted acolytes of any of the world’s monotheistic religions (perhaps one in particular). Books are freedom, which is why they’re the first thing to burn when fascist, theocratic or totalitarian rulers seize control of a people or nation.

I saw a book on Greek Myths and Legends in the library a few weeks ago (toned down for children, of course). Let’s right those past wrongs, I thought. Let’s take home a book on this worthy subject and actually read it this time….

The next day I had to return it to the library. I’d only read ten or so of its pages to the kids. The casual violence, matter-of-fact savagery and brutal decapitation of the Minotaur story was more than their sensitive little souls could handle. And mine, for that matter.

I think we’ll just stick to Austin Powers and Hellboy for now.

We Haunt Our Own Lives

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The first house I lived in after I was born. My parents were together then. My sister – eight years older than me – went to school just along the road. I can’t remember living here. I only know it from old photographs and stories.

We can go anywhere: soar above the earth; dive beneath the ocean; drift off into the deep and silent void of space. But there’s one place we can’t go.

Back.

And sometimes that’s the only place we want to go.

We all lived together in this street – my sister and parents – until I was four. I remember it. But not too well, obviously, because mum says the house we’re looking at here wasn’t our house. Ours was next door. It was the last time we were all a family. The house we moved to next – in which the original family blew itself apart – is the house my mother still lives in with my stepfather. It’s still open and alive to us, so it won’t feature here.

We keep moving forwards, but something keeps pulling us back to the portals of our pasts, where we stand peering through the misted glass, trying to make sense of the shapes that shift before our eyes like shadows. We haunt our own lives, along with the ghosts of those gone from us, both the living and the dead, their marks passing over us like dust in the moonlight.

Then darkness.

We can never go back.

But we can’t stop trying.

My uncle and aunty lived here, with my 3 cousins. There was always laughter here, and jokes, and chaos, and copies of 2000AD.

Have you ever stood outside a place that used to mean something to you and tried to will it back to life: a place that now stands forever beyond your reach; a locked vault swollen with memories?

It’s bitter-sweet. You know that the only thing lying in wait behind that door is the erasure of the memories held in such precarious balance by the bowed and twisting column of your imagination. Someone else lives there now. Another person. Another you. Another life that’s swallowing yours, until theirs is swallowed in turn. Before everything’s swallowed.

I took my kids with me to some of these sacred places in my life. I asked my partner to photograph us. My kids and I gazed dead ahead at the past – my past – keeping our backs to the here and now. I know my kids will never get a chance to go through those doors with me, or feel what I used to feel every time I’d reach out a hand to knock on them. I know they’ll never get to meet the people who once stood behind those doors (most of them are either estranged from me or long since dead).

But I wanted to stand there with them by my side. It made me feel content, somehow. Like a circuit had been completed.

My maternal grandparents’ house. The wall used to be a hedge, and we’d vault it – my cousins and I – much to gran’s mild displeasure. I’d play Countdown with my grandparents, and listen to my papa tut at the soaps and chat shows that followed, which I suspected he secretly loved. My gran had names for every person who walked past in the street. She called her window ‘Channel 5’. We only had 4 TV channels then.

The kids, of course, felt nothing.

They were, after all, just staring at old, unfamiliar houses, no different from a thousand they’d seen before. Piles of brick and mortar, nothing more or less.

But as I stood there clutching their hands, or holding their tiny bodies against my own, for a moment I was there. We were all there. I’d taken them back with me. My brain had breathed life into the poetry of the ordinary, and turned those doors into time machines, reconstructing the things and people on the other side of that thin skin of wood with almost perfect clarity.

I could hear the shuffling of slippers down hallways, and the faint ticking of a clock on a mantelpiece; I could smell lentil soup wafting in from the kitchen; I could see ring-marks left behind by a favourite mug, and pictures hanging askew on the wall. I could see myself – younger, leaner, less corrupted – standing on the precipice of a life that would be at once more terrible and more precious and wonderful than I ever could have imagined. I could see and feel it all. The dead were alive, and the miserable were happy.

The top floor flat where my partner and I started our family. One kid was born here, but we moved to our current – much more peaceful and sanguine – home a few weeks before our second arrived in the world. Neither kid has any memory of this home. We’ve come full circle. Their story – and trail of pixelated breadcrumbs – begins here.

I think we have a hunger for our kids to know us, to feel what it is to be us. But they can’t. We’re ‘we’ and they’re ‘them’. Our lives are gone, or at least shifted, and theirs are just beginning.

But in those moments as the camera clicked, for one blessed, frozen second, we were there… actually there. And we would always be there. All of us.

In the eternal past.

Together.

It’s awful when your kids fight; it’s worse when they don’t

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When Christopher, our second child, was still wibbling about in his mother’s yolk, a fish-faced lump of stubby proto-limbs, our first-born, Jack, was already manifesting signs of fraternal protectiveness. He’d rub his mummy’s tummy and tell us how much he was looking forward to his baby brother joining the family. This reassured us, even though he was clearly just parroting back at us the many words of enthusiasm and encouragement we’d chirped into his ears.

In the beginning, things were great. Jack doted on his baby brother, and seemed to harbour zero resentment towards the little guy for jumping on his being-born bandwagon. I know ill feelings and jealous reactions don’t always manifest themselves straight away, but I know they can because of my sister. When I was born, my then eight-year-old sister didn’t shit for a month. The child psychologist said her wildly conflicting feelings of love, anger and jealousy were playing havoc with her insides. She was bottling things up, physically as well as mentally. In a weird sort of a way, the shit she stubbornly refused to release represented her love for me. Love won, in the end. As it always does. I guess you could say I literally loved the shit out of her.

My partner and I realised, as Christopher developed more and more autonomy, that it had probably been easy for Jack to love his brother when he was nothing more than a tiny creature who spent his days either asleep or variously shitting and screaming, because there was no competition between them. Sure, there was competition for time and attention at a basic level, but we always strived to mitigate Jack’s ill-feelings as best we could by giving him plenty of one-on-one time with each of us, not to mention oodles of cuddles with his brother. We wanted Jack to see his brother as a part of him, and a part of the family. An addition, an enhancement, not a replacement.

And it was a success. Maybe Jack wasn’t considered the cutest kid on the block any more, and maybe the greatest share of the ooos, aaaaaaaas and cooooooos now went to Christopher, but Jack was still king. A ruler of absolute power, at least as far as the Kingdom of Little People was concerned. And if the going got rough? If Jack grew tired of this wide-eyed, swaddled little jester? He could simply walk away, go someplace else, be by himself… with brother, no brother, with brother, no brother, as quick and easy as an optician replacing lenses in those weird Meccano glasses they put on your face at the eye test… better with, better without, with brother, no brother. The best of both worlds.

Unfortunately for Jack, Christopher became mobile, and discovered that he didn’t have to live life passively like a leaf on a river. He could be the river. At least until he learned how to be a boat… I’ve really lost the thread of this multi-part metaphor, haven’t I? And why didn’t I say ‘flow’ instead of ‘thread’? This is what happens to your mind when you spend the better part of a year shouting endless variations of ‘LEAVE HIM ALONE!’, ‘LEAVE EACH OTHER ALONE’ and ‘STOP FIGHTING’ at the future WWE stars your children have become.

Christopher, although absolutely bloody adorable, is fearless for his size. He’s always ready and able with a hoarse rebuke or a swinging slap. Thanks to Jack’s campaign of brutal dominance, Christopher learned to fight back at an incredibly early age. He’s a honed, toned battle-machine in a way that Jack never was, or needed to be. If Christopher is occasionally a little monster, then he’s a monster of Jack’s creation [nothing to do with us, you understand, we’re just the parents].

That’s not to make the mistake of assuming that Jack is now the helpless victim in the face of his brother’s revenge-based brutality. Just the other month we heard Christopher screaming, and ran upstairs to find a chunk of his hair matted with blood. Jack had clonked Chrissy over the head with a bulky Chief Wiggum toy, not realising that the sharp points of the policeman’s hat made him more of a blade than a chib.

Different numbers of siblings, and different combinations of genders and ages, make for wildly different sibling relationships. A young girl rounding off a squad of elder brothers might become a tomboy (I hope it isn’t now considered a hate crime to use that word); a young boy at the end of a big litter of sisters might find himself traumatised for all the rest of his days, god help him.

My sister’s role and status as related to me shifted with age, mood and circumstance. Sometimes she was my protector, sometimes my aggressor. Sometimes she was a second-mother, sometimes she was a mother-fucker. But everything was built on a bedrock of love. For every act of torment there came a larger act of kindness. She may have told me there were dead flies in my sandwich to make me hand it over to her, or occasionally bent my legs over my stomach and attempted to pin them behind my head, causing pain that was suggestive of a particularly gruesome interrogation by the Spanish Inquisition, but she also took the rap for me. Hid things for me. Stood up for me. Absorbed the strikes of lightning for me.

When I threw a pillow and broke a bendy, retractable ceiling light of which my mum was especially proud, Alison took the blame. When I was struck with the crippling fear of death, frightened and sobbing, it was her bed I crawled into for peace and reassurance. So I can forgive her for teaching me how to do the fingers and then sending me off to show mum, who went predictably apoplectic.

Siblings fight, siblings grass, sneer and prank, but they love. At least in my experience. (Love you, sis)

Jack and Christopher’s age gap isn’t sufficient to make a second-tier father out of Jack, but their relationship is definitely changing, evolving, growing – away from violence and towards something else entirely. Something great, but something terrible, too. Our greatest hopes for a loving, peaceful union between the two brothers are in the process of being made reality, but it’s a boon that carries barbs. What I’m trying to say is: they’re joining forces.

While whirlwinds of fists and kicks still occasionally erupt from them with the barest of warnings increasingly they’re a team – though not always one where its members enjoy equal standing. Predictably, Jack is the puppet-master. He’s realised the esteem he’s held in by his brother, and the influence this affords him. The fine-print of their accord is less like ‘Why fight, when we can embrace fraternal harmony?’ and more like ‘Why fight, when this pliant young whippersnapper can be the willing and able instrument for my evil bidding?’ They’re like Batman and Robin… if Batman was a total shit.

Jack now wants his little brother to share bedtime stories with him, to lie like best buds and greet the world of sleep together. We often walk past to find Jack whispering in his brother’s ear, usually thinks like ‘Get the pencil and draw on that wall’ or ‘Go slap mummy’s bum’, but, you know, as far as conspiracies go, it’s incredibly sweet.

Last week we’d asked the boys to go upstairs and tidy their room. We knew the chances of them actually tidying their room were a million to one, but – cards on the table – we just wanted ten minutes’ peace. While I expected the room to be actually slightly messier at the end of those ten short minutes, what I didn’t expect when I went to check on their progress was to find water pooling on the floors and carpets, dripping down the walls, and running down the light-bulb and lampshade of the hall light. Christopher stood in the upstairs hall with a giant pump-action water-pistol, his clothes soaking wet, as Jack retreated from his ear with a big goofy grin on his face.

What happens when an unstoppable force meets an immovable object, and they decide to be best pals? I’m sure we’re going to spend the next fifteen years praying for a return to war.

The Madness of Greenclaws

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In the late 1980s children in the UK were introduced to the eponymous Greenclaws, a king-sized, waddling worm-beast, with – it probably won’t surprise you to discover – green skin and claws. Physically, he was a monstrous medley of Jabba the Hutt, the Azorbaloff from Doctor Who, and Penn Jillette; psychologically, he was a creepy co-mingling of Norman Bates and Alan Titchmarsh.

He lumbered around his house with the wide, unblinking eyes of a man who’d been pumped full of psychotropic chemicals and then forcibly mutated into a gigantic maggot as part of some failed government experiment. He wore dainty little SS-style spectacles, and dragged behind him both a ponytail and an actual tail, between which two points of protrusion sat enough body-fat to make a week’s worth of jumbo fry-ups for King Kong, and still have enough left over to sculpt a life-sized chess-set made entirely of saggy-titted, puffy-faced Piers Morgans.

Of course, Greenclaws wasn’t called Greenclaws simply because he was green and had claws; his name was also a monstery spin on ‘greenfingers’, the phrase we humans use to describe people with a love of plants and horticulture. That’s why greenclaws had a greenhouse and loved plants, see? Do you see? Do you understand? DOES IT MAKE SENSE TO YOU NOW? It’s layered, see. Oh, the layers. The exquisite layers. I can feel a dissertation coming on. Once I’ve finished my current thesis, of course. The world shouldn’t be made to wait any longer for my bold masterpiece: Jess and Feminism: Postman Pat and the Patriarchy’s Last Parcel.

Greenclaws lived in a cluttered house that looked as though a messy pensioner had lain dead in it for sixteen years. Appended to the house was a greenhouse, inside of which lived Greenclaws’ best pal, a robot owl called, I don’t know, owl-face or something. Owly? Mrs Owl? Owlma? Yes, Owlma, that was it. Pretty poor effort, if you ask me. I would’ve opted for something a bit funkier, like Owl-abama, Owling Wolf, or Owlmageddon. Or gone completely left-field and blended hip-hop and scat chat to bring the world ‘Owl Movement’, a rapping robot owl with a talent for free-style shitting. A wasted opportunity.

Most episodes began with Greenclaws getting excited about taking part in some human ritual or milestone – going on holiday, taking a trip to the supermarket, learning how to synthesise meth – and then not actually doing it, because doing it would entail going outside, which Greenclaws couldn’t do, presumably because he suffered from some description of serious anxiety disorder and agoraphobia. Or perhaps he couldn’t go outside because he was prohibited from leaving his property under the terms of a recent court order. That seems the most likely explanation, given that Greenclaws had the soft drawl of John Wayne Gacy and the same terrifying, bulging eyes as Ted-Bundy.

So instead of venturing out into the world, Greenclaws would recreate inside of his greenhouse whatever it was he’d been day-dreaming or fussing about at the start of the episode, usually with the help of some obscene plant he’d spent the episode growing inside of a magical tree, which he’d only be permitted to harvest if his robot owl was satisfied that he’d correctly answered three arbitrary general knowledge questions…. erm… It seems a bit crazy when I write it all down like that, doesn’t it? No wonder I’m so fucked up. Kids’ TV was an acid-trip back then, wasn’t it? A nightmare factory. Where was Paw Patrol when I needed it? A bunch of dogs driving police cars and recycling trucks seems positively normal when set against the bug-eyed, botany-based insanity of Greenclaws.

Greenclaws had a human pal called Iris, who was always dropping in to keep an eye on Greenclaws and… Wow, wow, wow. Back up. Wait a minute… Iris. Iris… Iris? An eye. Keeping an eye on him. Iris. The woman who teaches Greenclaws all about the real world; a teacher, so that makes Greenclaws her… pupil. Iris, eye, pupil…. Wow. I mean…

THAT MEANS GREENCLAWS WAS KEYSER SOZE ALL ALONG, RIGHT?!

See what I mean about layers? When I get around to writing this thesis it’s going to make my last paper, Mopatop’s Shop and the Rise of Capitalism in the Communist East, look like something Bodger scrawled in mashed potato with his dying hand.

Anyway, Iris certainly made you wish that you didn’t have any eyes. She was a walking showcase for every horrific fashion faux pas and wardrobe atrocity that was ever spat forth from the dying womb of the 1980s. Her look was more of a clothes-based virus than a style: imagine, if you will, an amorphous, multi-dimensional denim beast enveloping the Sixth Doctor Who’s legs, and then booting him into one of Gayle and Gillian Blakeney’s music videos.

Iris was guilty of the crime of being over-. ‘Over-what?’ you may ask. Over- everything, I say to you. She was over-board, over-enthusiastic, over-enunciating, and, if Greenclaws’ ample bosom was anything to go by, over-feeding. The big beast never left the house, so it figures that someone must’ve been helping him maintain his corpulent physique. Perhaps it’s not fair to lay the blame for Greenclaws’ poor diet squarely at Iris’s feet. That owl was a bit of a wrong ‘un, too, what with it constantly growing things lke beef-burger trees, cake plants, and the like. I guess everyone in that poor monster’s life wanted him dead.

It’s become something of a running joke for those of us who grew up watching children’s television in the 70s and 80s to say that the shows we so enjoyed and accepted as pure and innocent were actually, unbeknownst to us, swimming in sleazy subtext and scandalous filth. Thus, when we look back on them through adult eyes we see their true horror laid bare. This belief, however, is mostly apocryphal: Captain Pugwash didn’t have a crew composed entirely of double-entendres; that episode of Rainbow where Zippy peels a banana and makes a foreskin joke was only made to amuse the programme’s makers and was never actually broadcast. It’s our own developed brains that are the real perverts here. The kids’ shows were fine.

All that being said, Greenclaws is the clear exception to that rule, the dirty fat green bastard. What the hell was going on in that glasshouse of sin? For example, when Iris came round to visit she always asked Greenclaws to ‘plant one of his fabulous seeds in the secret groin place’. ARE YOU KIDDING ME, IRIS? Ah, you might counter, what she actually said was ‘secret growing place’, but I would counter your counter by saying, a) SILENCE! I HAVE SPOKEN! and b) even if she did say ‘secret growing place’… that’s just as bad! I’ve been a little unfair to Owlma in this article. I should’ve acknowledged the fact that the poor beast was witness to years of horrendous sexual abuse. I’m going to start a #meTooTooToToToo movement on her behalf.

Let’s talk Owlma, the owl who replies to every question with the answer ‘Doo Doo Doo-do Doo’. To be fair, every statement she makes is also ‘Doo Doo Doo-do Doo’. That’s literally all she’s able to say, like some backing singer from a 1980s pop group stuck in an infinite time loop.

‘Doo Doo Doo-do Doo’, however, can carry an infinite range of meanings, and be used to convey questions and statements of every length imaginable. When Owlma says ‘Doo Doo Doo-do Doo’ she could be saying ‘yes’, ‘no’, ‘this’, ‘that’, or ‘maybe’. But she could also be saying: ‘My agent got me THIS gig? I made it explicitly clear that I wanted to be in Rainbow. This weird, greenhouse-based bollocks is probably going to get cancelled after two seasons, leaving yours truly here up a tree without a hoot. And then what? Casualty? Coronation Street? I’m a fucking robot owl! I should’ve listened to dad and followed him into the accountancy firm. I’m finished. FINISHED!’

In the end, it’s probably best not to interpret Greenclaws literally, but to see it as the story of Iris, the care-worker for a fat drug addict, one day discovering his naked, unconscious body on the floor of the greenhouse following a bad trip, next to a tree with beef-burgers selotaped to it, and an owl nailed to one of the branches, hoo-ing in agony.

The Blunder Years: Toddlers and Friendship

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06 Oct 2005 — Babies Crying — Image by © Royalty-Free/Corbis

“I miss my friends.”

I felt a thud in the lumpy mattress of my heart. I looked at my son, Jack, in the car’s rear-view mirror, and saw that his little features were being weighed down by an achingly adult expression.

At that point he wasn’t much older than two, but here was a face already conveying levels of pain, regret and sadness seldom seen outwith the confines of the video for Johnny Cash’s version of Hurt. Surely toddlers can’t wear faces like that, I thought to myself. It was the sort of face you would imagine could only appear after the brain had been bombarded with nuclear-strength nostalgia: images of long ago summers spent running through the cornfields and dancing over lawn sprinklers, smiling and laughing and holding hands with friends, perhaps in slow motion as a wistful soundtrack scored the action, or an elderly Fred Savage added his pseudo-philosophical tuppence-worth. “We were happy. We were toddlers. We were the best of friends. Somehow we knew that this was it. That after this we were going to be on the long road to becoming the people we weren’t; the people that we didn’t know how to be. Our lives would never be this carefree again. So what else could we do? We joined hands, counted to ten… and violently shat ourselves.”

[Incidentally, in the commission of this throw-away gag that won’t be appreciated by anyone under the age of too-fucking-old I visited The Wonder Years’ IMDB page and discovered something cool. Do you know who provided the disembodied voice of future-Kevin? Only bloody Marv the burglar from Home Alone!]

I was driving Jack to a park and woodland above which loomed an old building that had as its centre-piece a giant stone pineapple, figuring the incongruity would give a pleasant jolt to the ever-knitting neurons of his burgeoning brain. Given his sudden shift in mood, I figured he could do with a jolt.

“I’m sorry, little buddy. You’ll see your friends again real soon, I promise.” It had been a great many weeks since he’d last seen his best pal – a little kid called Noah who shares a birthday with Jack, whose mothers met and became close friends after fate placed them in adjacent hospital beds post-partum – or any of his other toddler chums.

Jack’s sadness was total. Complete. We’re talking ‘Van Gogh running after the bus in the rain when he’s already late for his appointment to sign-on at the job centre’ sad. But much like the sadness of every other toddler on earth, it lasted for about three seconds before morphing into inexplicable euphoria; in fact, the only feeling to endure beyond the confines of the car that day was my sadness about his sadness – a sadness so fleeting that it wouldn’t even have outlasted your average mayfly’s awkward teenage phase.

Questions abounded. What could I do to make my son feel better? How on earth could he possess such a deep sense of the concept of friendship at this stage of his development? Especially since most of the time he was with his friends he either a) completely ignored them, or b) threw things at their heads. The questions kept coming – not all of them Jack-related. For instance: why is there a giant stone pineapple perched above a long-dead rich man’s house in a woodland in Central Scotland? Is there a reciprocal sculpture of a humungous alabaster square sausage above a cathedral somewhere in Costa Rica? Why do we Scots consider a square to be the best shape into which to chop our dead pigs? Do other countries venerate the man-made geometry of their foodstuffs? “Ah, Tecwin, pass me another slice of our world-famous triangular lamb, boyo.”

I discussed the ‘friend’ situation with my partner at home later on that day. It was heart-breaking for us to discover just how hard he was pining for his friends. At that point he hadn’t started attending playgroup, so we fretted that he wasn’t getting enough interaction with his peers and pals.

A week or so later, Jack and I were walking past the local play-park on our way to the shop when Jack suddenly got super-excited and started gesticulating in the direction of the park.

“My friends, my friends!” he cried, pointing at the gaggle of kids beyond the maximum-security cage that encircled the play-park. I peered in, expecting to see a familiar face or two. There wasn’t one to be found. They were all strangers. Every single one of them. Plus, they were all around twelve. “I want to play with my friends, daddy!” he hollered, as that same sadness from the Pineapple trip sank into his eyes, quickly joined by a hefty dollop of indignation. He started crying: “My friends, my friends!” he said, “Oh, father, I beseech you, my friends, I must have leave to speak with my friends! Monster! Gaoler! Oh heaven save me from this tyranny!”

I’m paraphrasing ever so slightly.

And so, the penny had dropped. In Jack’s brain the word ‘friend’ was synonymous with ‘other kid’. Or maybe he preferred his friendship Mayfly-style: e.g., “I like my friends like I like my coffee: instant.”

I love watching kids who’ve never met before interacting with each other. It’s refreshing. There’s no awkwardness, preamble, or ‘getting-to-know-you’ period. “So, are you from around here?” “What do you do for a living?” “Adjusting for inflation, how much do you reckon your toys are worth in the current economic climate?” Blah blah blah. Kids don’t care who you are, where you’re from, or what you do, so long as you know your way around a chute.

“Hi boy!” one of them shouts. “Hi girl!” the other one shouts back. And then they’re off: holding hands, bossing each other about, and running into the sunset in a birdsong of shrieks and giggles. One time at our local country park I and another dad – with whom I’d exchanged the grand total of one word – had to pursue our respective sons across a field, because the two of them had formed such an intense bond in the four minutes since they’d met that we oldies had ceased to exist, and presumably they were off to start a new life together in the forest.

“JACK! JAAAACCCCKKKKK! STOOPPPP!”

“JACK IS DEAD, DADDY, MY NEW NAME IS TREE McPLANTINGTON!”

I envy that. Single people will moan about how hard it is to meet a viable partner, but it’s even more difficult to find and make new friends – especially following the advent of parenthood when you discover that your social-life has choked and died like a fat, asthmatic pit-canary. It would be wonderful if we adults could emulate our young kids’ social interactions. Making friends would be a cinch. I could walk down the street and pass some guy who was wearing a ‘Sopranos’ T-shirt, and think to myself, ‘I bloody love The Sopranos; I’ll bet that guy’s on my wavelength’, and feel emboldened to grab his hand, swish it to and fro like a skipping rope, and say, ‘Hey, man, wanna go bowling with me?’ before pulling him down the street like a reluctant cow on market day. What do you think would happen next? Do you think we would giggle and skip down the street together, or do you think I would find myself sitting on the pavement coughing up my own teeth?

Jack – now a little over two-and-a-half – possesses an enviable, fearless confidence. He’ll talk to any kid, but he’ll also talk to any adult stranger. He has a deep and boundless curiosity about people in general, and it’s my sworn duty, my solemn responsibility as a father, to snuff that out of him immediately. Here there be monsters. The world isn’t safe. He doesn’t yet know that most people who walk the face of the earth are, to use the accepted psychological term, absolute fucking cunts.

It is cute, though: how he’ll introduce himself to literally any adult he encounters, usually with a weird bow, in the manner of some 17th century courtesan; how he’ll wordlessly insinuate himself into the middle of whatever activity an adult or a whole family happens to be engaged. I wish I could change the world… but I can’t, so I’ve got to change him (and his younger brother, Christopher, once he’s old enough to do anything other than laugh and shite himself). I need to guide Jack’s behaviour so that he’s aware of the potential dangers of strangers, but not so sternly or over-the-top that he becomes some jaded, fearful, feral dog of a boy, or loses his sense of wonder and self-confidence. I find that subtlety is always the key. For instance, if I’m out with Jack for a walk in the park, and he walks over to a man he’s never met before and starts blabbering about cartoon characters, showing off his new shoes or telling the man his name, I might just casually funnel my hands over my mouth and shout, ‘LOOK OUT, JACK, HE’S A PAEODOPHILE!’

We, as parents, will remain the be-all-and-end-all (Or Baaea, as the youth of today would probably call it) in our kids’ lives until our dying days… just so long as they don’t find out our secret. The secret that we’re shit. Laughably shit. Shit people, and even worse parents. We’re winging it. Completely and totally winging it. We don’t have a bloody clue. Half of our life has been spent getting it all wrong. And the other half has been spent lying about getting it all wrong, which we’ll continue to do, especially once our kids become teenagers and start calling us out on our hypocrisy, at which point we can open the emergency envelopes and draw out the sacred argument-winning cards that say things like: ‘WHILE YOU’RE LIVING UNDER MY ROOF, YOUNG LADY…’; ‘WHEN YOU MAKE YOUR OWN MONEY YOU CAN SPEND IT ON WHAT YOU LIKE’, and ‘YOU CAN JUDGE ME WHEN YOU WASH THE SKIDS FROM YOUR OWN PANTS, BOY.’  

I guess that life is a slow and constant retreat from the people who gave you life, into the bosom of your peer group, into the arms (and other parts) of a significant other, until finally you’re ready to repeat the pattern, and you too can raise children who will one day leave you in a corner to die: salivating and beshitted, half-mental and muttering about mayflies, giant pineapples and square sausage.

“Yep, that’s right, Dad, there was a giant pineapple. Could you see that through the window of the UFO you were abducted by? … Yes, doctor, if he shits himself one more time, just pull the plug.”

Existential nightmare at the soft-play warehouse

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softplay

Last week we took our son to soft-play, or The Hunger Games with rubber-foam-ladders as I like to call it. We entered the reception area and were buzzed through a security door into a giant warehouse filled with bright primary colours and screams. It felt like we were visiting a criminally insane toddler on death row. Those screams. Those… screams. I closed my eyes and imagined the thudding din of helicopter blades alongside the cacophony of piercing shrieks. This could be a war movie, I thought; ‘Nam, only more brutal. Why was this happening to us?

It was mid-week. The schools in our area were all in session, which we thought would guarantee us a quiet afternoon with a low kid-count: silence of the bambinos. Unfortunately, we hadn’t known that a neighbouring town’s schools were closed for in-service days (or Teachers’ Gin Days if you like), and that, as a consequence, the soft-play would be the site of a full-scale osmotic invasion of hyperactive, psychopathic Stirling kids. Sartre was bang on when he said that ‘Hell is other people’, but his aphoristic aim should’ve been more precise: hell is other people’s kids.

I wasn’t alone in my pain. I could see it etched into the weather-beaten faces of the parents who fringed the perimeter of the play-area, their wearied flesh pressed and wedged into the cheap plastic seats. We walked past a succession of toothless, sunken-cheeked grannies, who were all wearing the same expression, one that silently screamed: ‘I WISH YOU COULD STILL FUCKING SMOKE IN PLACES LIKE THESE… YOUNG LUNGS BE DAMNED!’ Their dark, haunted eyes evoked the horror of a holocaust. I smiled faintly at them, and steeled myself for the nightmare to come.

Kids are crazy little bastards (apart from my kid, of course, who’s clearly an exceptional human being, and nothing at all like your shitty little disease-ridden mental cases), propelled by sugar and selfishness. They lack both the developmental capacity to credit other people with having selves distinct from their own, and the ability to show compassion and regard for the well-being of others. Helping our son safely navigate the tunnels, ladders, ball-pits and climbing platforms of each of the three mini-fortresses was a hazardous and stressful endeavour. Kids careened about with the frenetic zeal of angry dwarf Gladiators, as they pushed, shoved, kicked, and thudded their way through the mazes. Our son became a tiny Indiana Jones, dodging four-limbed-boulders here, ducking roof-bound punch-bags there, all the while cooing and smiling, oblivious to the great danger that threatened to engulf him from every direction.

My fear was focused at the microbial level, on the shiny surfaces that were slick with sweat and saliva and piss and Christ knows what else. I was sure that my hands carried the traces of the bogeys and bum-kernels of a thousand wet-nosed, shat-nappied children, and every disease, from swine-flu to AIDS, was busy gleefully replicating itself in my blood. Who cleans this place? Do they get down on their hands and knees and scrub every inch of every surface, or do they shrug their shoulders and think to themselves, ‘Screw it, kids are ill all the time anyway, and I only get paid £5 an hour, so fuck this, I’m going to spray some Febreeze over this ball-pit and then go out for a smoke.’

ballpit

Despite all that, the three of us soon found ourselves in the ball-pit, doing the back-stroke through the multi-coloured sea of circular-filth-nuggets. Our son was delighted with the ball tsunami his thrashing and splashing created. A few other kids jumped in just as we were beginning a ball-fight, and before long all fire was concentrated on my face. I retaliated, of course, because where else are you going to get the chance to throw things at children and get away with it? Once the blood-lust abated, I fished my son out of the balls, sat him upright and said, with a great deal of enthusiasm: “WHO WANTS TO GET OUT OF HERE AND GO DOWN THE CHUTE?” Three random kids thrust their arms into the air, shouting “ME!”

“Well, I wasn’t actually talking to you guys, but, what the hell, I guess you can come along.”

And so we dragged a comet’s tail of kids behind us as we clambered out of the ball-pit and began the long, slow journey to the top of the fortress. One little boy, slightly older than our son, went out of his way to help little Jack navigate the climbing platforms, pulling him up at each level and making sure he was safe and steady. Once we reached the higher levels, he stuck to Jack like glue, protecting him from the hordes of wayward children as they sped towards us on their savage and singular trajectories. I figured I would have to re-evaluate my stance on the inherent psychopathy of children. Here was a noble and nurturing boy, a credit to his sub-species. I guess I was wrong, I thought. Kids are sweet and caring and kind after all.

I quickly re-re-evaluated, though, and come to the conclusion that he was the fucking worst of the lot. Clearly he was responding to me as the alpha of the pack, and keeping Jack safe was his way of appeasing me and showing due deference. If I’d ordered him to pick up Jack and hurl him from the battlements, the sick little bastard would have done it without hesitation. I guess that’s why I felt completely justified when I kicked the little boy in the stomach and hurled him down the chute backwards.

When I told my partner I was going to write about our experience at the soft-play area, she said: “Just remember to write that we all had a nice, fun time, because we did. Don’t do what you usually do and make our perfectly normal, happy family times sound nightmarish and horrible. And for Christ’s sake, don’t say something sick like you kicked that nice little boy in the stomach and then hurled him down a chute backwards.”

“Oh, and please try to call it something nice like, ‘Family Fun Times’ or ‘Super Soft-play Day’. Don’t call it something awful like, oh, I dunno, ‘Existential Nightmare at the Soft-Play Warehouse.'”

Folks, I did have a really, really nice time, it’s just that ‘nice’ isn’t all that funny or interesting to anyone except us, and – most importantly – this is Jamie Andrew With Hands, not fucking Mumsnet.

A FEW FINAL THOUGHTS

  • Do. Not. Eat. The. Food. I waited an hour for Nachos that cost me a fiver, and when I say Nachos, I mean half a bag of Doritos that somebody had blown snot over and then shoved in a microwave for twelve seconds.
  • Do check your socks before leaving. I was lucky this time, having by chance selected the one pair of socks I own that doesn’t have a gaping hole in the toe. You don’t want to be prancing around a plastic fortress looking like Albert Steptoe.
  • Finding a parking place at these day-glo hell-holes is perhaps the most heart-busting part of the saga. You won’t find one. Even though these soft-plays are usually inside giant warehouses, there are only ever about six parking spaces. You’ll find yourself driving round and around like The Hulk on steroids, unleashing torrents of vile, paranoia-themed bile at your fellow space-seekers, shouting at families for not waddling back to their cars quickly enough, and trying to manoeuvre your car into a four-inch gap before finally screaming ‘FUCK IT’ and angrily mounting the kerb to park on the pavement.

More family-related articles for you to enjoy:

A celebration of public breastfeeding

Baby talk: Baby’s first workplace visit

Happy Fathers’ Day to me

Weighting it all up