Tag Archives: children

When your children’s beds lie empty

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When my kids go to live with their mother my house becomes a museum. I walk through it with hushed steps, bowing in quiet reverence before the many delicate proofs of their existence. It’s like they’ve always been here; it’s like they’re never coming back. The quiet – the unnatural, empty quiet – entombs the house. It’s heavy; dark; like night falling in daytime. I could say it’s as quiet as a library, but my boys paint even libraries in bright, bold textures of laughter and mischief. Their noise can make your ears ache, but it’s nothing compared to the dull, hollow ache its absence leaves behind.

I wander into their bedroom and look around. Their room is the dinner table on the Mary Celeste; it’s the perfectly preserved plaster shapes of children in the petrified ash of Pompeii; it’s a vault that contains the world’s most sacred and irreplaceable treasures: there, on the floor, a tiny pair of jeans is the Turin shroud; on the cabinet, a blank vista planted with stick figures is the Mona Lisa. I touch the exhibits, and in so doing make conductive elements of my hands, completing the circuit between tactility and memory. A flood of sentiment flows through me, rushing to fill the empty basin of my heart. Everything I touch contains a message: Braille only I can decipher in the soft contours of a teddy bear, or the hard spine of a picture book.

If their room really were a museum the placard on the wall would read: ‘This is a faithful reproduction of a child’s bedroom circa 2021, accurate right down to the details of the gently unmade beds and the arc of toys curling out like a tail from an upturned perspex box. If you look closely, you might still see the imprints of their heads on the pillows; soft, ephemeral mementoes of little lives suddenly frozen by circumstance; theirs to continue elsewhere, their father’s to stop. At least until they return.’

Parenthood can be a perpetual source of guilt and commiseration – the fear of never knowing how the threads you pluck and pull might shape the tapestry of your children’s lives, and whether for good or ill – but it’s also a source of light and warmth so fierce and brilliant it can plunge the rest of your world into shadow. I never realised quite how much of my identity was wrapped in my children until I couldn’t see them every day; until I felt how cold and helpless and rudderless I was shorn of their auras. I’m half of their template for making sense of the world, but it’s become abundantly clear to me that they’re 100 per cent of mine. I need my children like Tony Stark needs his artificial heart.

I know in some respects I’m privileged. Very few separated or divorced dads enjoy a fifty-fifty split on custody. Hell, some married dads with jobs abroad or offshore don’t see their children for weeks or even months at a time. But these comparisons only provide intellectual perspective. It makes no difference to the heart. Other people may suffer more, but their suffering, though deeply regretted, is abstract to me. I suppose, like everything in life, it takes time. A skeletal platitude, perhaps, but the only one I have to hold on to.

My wife and I separated just before the dawning of Covid. We were forced to co-habit in the same house for a year, living together but separately. In retrospect, this period of transition, as tough as it was for the adults in the house, probably helped the kids to come to terms with the changed dynamic and their new reality. Thus, when their mother did move out, it seemed less of a short, sharp shock to them, and more of a logical culmination of the process.

As parents we sometimes wish for a break from our kids – hell, sometimes we need it – but we’re safe to wish such things because we know – and not even deep down but right there on the surface – that we couldn’t exist without them. These are fleeting thoughts, situational, with no real substance to them. And they can be tamed or quelled, usually by something as simple as coffee with a friend, a long walk up the hills, or an occasional evening in the company of good friends and fine wine. I’m a highly-strung person, or else can be when faced with the possibilities of either failure or letting someone down. My anxiety goes into overload. One such occasion came back to haunt me as I sat thinking about the kids after they’d gone.

Years back I’d had a writing deadline, and was feeling overwhelmed. I paced around the house, and though the kids were asleep and didn’t hear me, I said, in a fit of rising adrenalin: “Do you know what, I’d get a whole hell of a lot more fucking writing done and wouldn’t find myself in these positions if I lived alone and could just focus entirely on it.” I didn’t mean it any more than a young child having a tantrum means it when they tell their parents they hate them. But those words still lodge in my heart like an arrow, one fired by my own hand. I said those things because I was stressed, and my body was using my mouth as a vent. I said those things safe in the belief that not for a second would there ever come a time when I might be living alone; that I wouldn’t be able to see them first thing every morning, and last thing every night.

That first night the kids went to stay at their mother’s, I wandered through the house, which was by then half-empty of furniture and possessions, and fully empty of other people. I sat in my former bedroom (now mine again and mine alone) on the bare floor, surrounded by emptiness, and I cried. I’m a sentimental fool, so I leak often – every time a movie tugs at my heart-strings – but I rarely cry, not the kind that shakes your shoulders, and makes your face a mute mask of anguish. I called my mum. I didn’t know what else to do. I sobbed like an infant. “I’ve lost my family,” I told her. It hit me then. It all hit me. A dam of worry and stress and recrimination and irritation and anger broke , and from it rushed waves of sadness that completely engulfed me. I didn’t want my wife back. I knew that would never happen. But that room held the weight of all that had been, could have been and should have been, and I was now trapped and drowning inside of it.

Throughout my adult life, thoughts of suicide have occasionally flitted through my head. It comes with the territory when depression and anxiety are your life-long bed-fellows; when your coping skills operate on the cross-roads of ‘fuck it’ and ‘fuck that’. Fortunately, both the frequency of such desperate, morbid thoughts and the ferocity with which my body responds to anxiety have lessened over the decades, perhaps a case of my brain learning how not to be an asshole, perhaps down to something as simple as a decrease in testosterone production. In any case, such thoughts were always abstract in character, like visits from Scrooge’s three ghosts. I was mired in ideation, not channelling intent. Ultimately, my thoughts were a mechanism to help me identify and explore a problem in my soul or psyche; a reminder that beyond that hot fog of adrenalin or the empty scorch it leaves behind are the pillars of peace and hope, however much time it may take to reach them. My malaise was always curable, or at the very least manageable, and the courses of treatment I recommended for myself – though often far from salubrious – were always less extreme than self-extermination.

But a short while after my children left, I felt possessed by something far less abstract. I never acted, or tried to act, on any impulses, but they were disconcertingly strong. Suicidal ideation has sometimes felt, for me at least, cinematic; a looped narrative of flashbacks and angry what-ifs, accompanied by a rollicking roller-coaster of blood and adrenalin – other times an extreme manifestation of grief or sadness that blocks out all else. But it was never cold.

This feeling was cold. Clinical. Precise. Like all else had been stripped away: all feeling, all options – leaving only suicide’s inarguable truth. I couldn’t see a happy ending. All of my actions would lead to disappointment. I couldn’t safeguard my children from the intra-familial tussles, battles and wars that might be ahead – the very conditions in my own past that made me at least half the basket-case I am today. I didn’t want them to be like me. I didn’t want them to be burdened by my inevitable failures. I didn’t think I could give them the life they needed: spiritually or materially. I didn’t think I was good enough for them.

At once I understood two things. One: that all of my ideas about suicide being a selfish act had been wrong. When those thoughts took over my brain, the world seemed distant to me. Alien. I felt emotionless. Devoid. I knew that my non-existence would be a mercy not just to me, but to everyone else, because I wouldn’t be the wild card that might make things worse. I clearly wasn’t in my right mind. And two: that if I’d been American I probably would have blown my own head off (an act that would have suited my impulsivity, and removed that period of regret, and desire to undo, that undoubtedly falls upon even the most committed of self-exterminators).

Whatever configuration my mind fell into during those dark days has been reset. I pushed through the fog. Started seeing things clearly. I can see that my kids are happy. They don’t cry when they leave their mother to come to me, and they don’t cry when they leave me to go to their mother. While they undoubtedly miss whichever one of us they aren’t with, they’ve always got one of us by their side, and I’m happy that the bulk of the burden of loss is upon my shoulders, and not theirs. I feel like a good dad again; someone who can make a positive impact on their lives.

Outside of my boys I haven’t achieved much in this life that’s truly good – practically, morally, or spiritually – but those incredible little people make me feel as accomplished as Leonardo Da Vinci and Michaelangelo rolled into one. While it’s hard to divest one’s self-interest and ego from the things and people to which and to whom you’ve given life, my love for my children isn’t the same as that which a painter feels upon finishing a masterpiece, or an author feels when their worlds start to gather and bloom inside other people’s heads. It’s greater. Infinitely so. But it’s also restrained; tempered with respect and a sense of duty. I care about the little people they are, and the big people they’re destined to become. I don’t want them to be little carbon copies stomping robotically in my wake; I only wish for them to be inspired by me: to be free to take my triumphs and eject my miseries, and make for themselves a life that’s been shaped, but never moulded by my presence in their lives. And where they are like me, I want them to be better: to leave me in the dust, both figuratively and literally. I never want them to forget that they were and always will be loved. Fiercely. By me, and by their mother.

I’m going to indulge myself to quite a horrendous extent by ending on a particularly twee cliché: that what happened to our family wasn’t an ending, but a new beginning. And one that’s going to work because all the love that matters is flowing through our children.

That I believe.

Breaking Fast: Dad’s in the Stress Business

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Breakfast is the little chunk of free-time/me-time enjoyed in the gap between stirring from bed and stumbling out the door for another soul-crushing day performing menial tasks for minuscule pay that will barely cover your overheads, but make fat-cats and shareholders significantly richer. How do I like my coffee in the morning? Bitter, thanks. Very bitter.

‘Break fast’ is also a description of what happens to your sanity and self-control when you’re trying to work through the breakfast routine with your children. I’ve always been a morning person, but no longer. I’m now a mourning person – in mourning for the times when I could be a morning person without the happy whistles being ripped from my lips by two children going to war over a fucking waffle or something.

Not all breakfasts, of course. Some of them can be a blessed victory. It’s the law of averages. If you stood forty-feet away from a basketball net with your back to it and lobbed basketballs behind you like a human trebuchet, you’d get the odd three-pointer from time to time. Some mornings we bound down the stairs singing and dancing like the hosts of a 1970s variety show. We have cutesy conversations, play practical jokes and stop just short of shooting rainbows from our eyes. Most mornings, though, breakfast feels like the basketball’s rebounded off the backboard, come bouncing back towards me at great speed, and knocked me unconscious.

My two boys, 3 and 5, are a close-knit team: they cuddle; they play; they laugh; they have each other’s backs. But closeness isn’t all sunshine and lollipops. Sometimes that closeness brings out the worst in them, triggers some genetic or chemical imperative deep inside them to fight to the death over scant resources in the cramped conditions of our cave… I mean house. I swear sometimes those two boys go to bed bickering, proceed to bicker with each other inside their dreams, and then wake up to recommence bickering immediately, a seamless chain of ten-hour-long bickering that surely qualifies for inclusion in the Guinness Book of World Records.

They bicker about everything: who’s first to use the toilet; who’s first to go down the stairs; who gets to be carried down the stairs, or gets to hold my hand; who gets the first cup of juice – ‘I WANT THE GREEN CUP, I SAID I WANTED THE GREEN CUP!’ ‘THEY’RE BOTH GREEN, YOU BASTARDS!’ – who gets a vitamin tablet first… everything. Bicker, bicker, bicker. I sometimes feel like calling in the UN. Or getting the Knesset and the Palestinian Authority to arbitrate.

Here’s a typical scene for you. Let me take you into the dark heart of our kitchen (by this point, the boys have already fought over who gets to squeeze the jelly-meat sachets into the cats’ bowls):

I put two plastic breakfast bowls on the counter-top. Jack walks into the kitchen first. I ask him what he wants. He asks for a type of cereal we don’t have at the moment. I tell him we don’t have it. He takes a strop. I talk him down. He relents. I ask him to choose again. He chooses another brand of breakfast cereal we don’t currently have. I imagine myself drowning in a giant vat of Rice Krispies. Finally, he chooses Cheerios, which I pour into a bowl.

Chris the Younger walks in. What’ll it be, Christopher? Cheerios, he says. Jack loses his shit. ‘I don’t want Cheerios if he’s having Cheerios. I want Chocolate Hoops instead.’

‘Me want Chocolate Hoops!’ shouts Christopher, his face contorting into a half-cry.

I imagine myself being the little boy inside the hooped cereal almost eaten by Rick Moranis in ‘Honey I Shrunk the Kids’, but this time I’m eaten. I can feel Rick Moranis crunching through my bones like candy, and it feels good.

The odds are high that one of the kids will either spill their juice, or spill their milk and cereal all over the living room table and floor. I prepare myself for the possibility, but I’m never really prepared. Whenever it happens I still contemplate trying to choke myself to death with rolls of kitchen-towels.

We watch an episode of classic Doctor Who with breakfast. We do it every morning. It’s nice. Twenty minutes of calm and curiosity, of imagination and inspired questions. Half-way through the episode they finish their food, put down their spoons and canter over to the couch, ready to fight over who gets to sit on the left-hand side of me, and who gets to sit on the right-hand side.

The TV goes off, and I ascend the stairs to complete my morning ritual of shit and shower. Again, flip a coin. Will my peaceful poo-poo be interrupted? Will these little poo-surpers of the throne oust me naked and annoyed into the hallway? Yes. It’s 50/50 to be honest. Last week we formed a vast Mexican Wave of evacuated effluent. I sat first, Jack hammered on the door, I yielded to him (you sacrifice for your children – plus, I didn’t want to have to clean up his shitted pants), then no sooner had Jack plopped the first dollop than his mini-me was throwing open the door and angrily demanding that he, quite literally, move his ass.

It’s chaos.

But I wouldn’t have it any other way.

(Yes I would, but I didn’t want to end this with you thinking I was a bad person)

DISCLAIMER: Some aspects of the breakfast routine may have been exaggerated for comedic effect. Real breakfasts may be 20 to 40 per cent more blissful than listed herein. Any similarity to persons living or dead is wholly intended, as I’m writing about me and my children, you arse.

Lying to Your Kids: Your Questions About Santa (Part 2 of 6)

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I wrote a mostly serious think-piece called ‘Why the Santa Myth is Bad for Your Children’s Elf’, which you can read by clicking on the highlighted link. The article inspired a set of questions, challenges and accusations, which I’m going to address in bite-sized pieces, day-by-day (well, every other day), in the run-up to Christmas. I hope it makes you laugh if we’re sympatico on the subject, and still makes you laugh even if you think I’m a monster (even though it’s clearly you who are the monster).

What have you got against kids using their imaginations and believing in magic, Jamie? Don’t you realise that without Santa the world would be a grey, dull and empty place?

Of course, you’re right.

It’s only at Christmas-time that we permit our kids to exercise their imaginations in glorious, ambulatory 4D instead of just forcing them to mainline TV through their eyes, absorbing hour after hour of YouTube videos of kids opening plastic egg-cases (for some inexplicable reason, this is considered entertainment).

Our kids spend eleven months of every year shuffling around the house like robot butlers haunted by the souls of civil service middle-managers, daring only to imagine that the next day and the next day and the day after that will be exactly the same as it was today.

Until, that is, the igniting spark of Christmas arrives! Huzzah! ‘Tis yuletime, so come to life, my children. Come to life! It’s time to play, to dare, to dream. Let your thoughts have substance, for ’tis the season of magic (‘Tis also the season that teaches kids that it’s okay for fat old men to break into houses in the dead of night as children sleep).

It’s the time of year where parents everywhere say to their spawn: “Come on, kids, let’s begin your officially-mandated month of very strictly regulated imaginative role-play. I’m going to channel all of my dead-eyed vapidity into regurgitating the same old stock-phrases about Santa that I trot out every year, and pretend that I’m taking you on some unforgettable, mind-bending journey to the very periphery of the knowable universe, when in reality I’m just lazy and deeply unimaginative, and SANTA’S NICE, AND I LIKE NICE THINGS, THINGS THAT MAKE PEOPLE GO AWWWWWW, AND YOU WILL NOT TAKE THAT AWAY FROM ME, YOU LITTLE FUCK-STAIN! Plus, I really like accessorising trees, and making my house look like a John Lewis catalogue, so when I take pictures of my decorations and put them on-line it makes everyone question their sad little lives, and how they’ll never match up to me so they might as well convert to Islam next year.”

Magic is for life, not just for Christmas. Santa is nothing more than a template, a suggestion, a Shutter-stock photo. Kids should be creating their own mental mischief all the time, every day. And you, as a parent or a big person in their lives, should be running around the house with them pretending to be fifty-foot-high hedgehogs on the run from the Intergalactic Council of Sentient Jelly Cakes, or bears with the heads of dolphins, or screaming at each other in made-up languages. Kids need magic. It sustains them. They just don’t need their magic accompanied by a side-order of lies.

Why is it so important to deceive them as we enchant them? Wouldn’t Santa still be a lark if the kids knew he wasn’t really ‘real’? Of course he would. Harry Potter isn’t real, Star Wars isn’t real, and people have become multi-millionaires a million times over on the back of that shit.

Do you want to go ‘all in’? Is that what you want? You want to go all in? Let’s do it then! Let’s tell our kids that EVERY fictional character is real: Ronald McDonald, the Honey Monster, the Gruffalo, Mr Hankey, Death, dragons, Scooby Doo, Muttley, Garfield, Jesus, Danny Dyer. ALL of them. You want magic? HERE’S your fucking magic!! Check out this world: kids who can’t eat their Rice Krispies because they’re frightened that Snap and Crackle are going to burst out of the packet and kick the fuck out of them; kids who think Voldermort is going to pick them up from school and then turn into a giant spider and eat them. Let your mentally-exhausted children live in that world. Let them run THAT gauntlet, you sickos.

Scotland’s Smacking Ban: a Hit?

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‘Smacking’ sounds really nice, doesn’t it? The word, I mean. If you’re hungry for a snack, your lips might smack; if your gran comes to visit she might ask you to pucker up and give her a big old smacker on the kisser. Onomatopeiacally, a smack is rather like a crack, but much less forceful: sharper, cleaner, kinder.

It’s the sort of sound that makes you nostalgic for the good old days, when men were men, women were women, and botties were smacked. By golly we miss those halcyon, smoke-hazed days, before the cultural assassins in the Stalinist SNP tried to rob us of our right to smack: a right that is as sacred to us Scots as is the right to bear arms to the Americans, by God! And we will fight to defend that right!

I’ll tell you what we’ll do. We’ll organise a protest outside the Scottish parliament: six-thousand angry parents and their six-thousand passive, blank-faced children. We’ll march them up to the front door, whip their trousers down, bend them over our knees and show Nicola Sturgeon that we mean business by unveiling the world’s biggest, six-hour-long, six-thousand-bum synchronised arse-smacking, the sound of which will fill the air like revolutionary gun-fire! Smack, smack, smack! Read our bums, Nicola! We won’t be turning the other cheek on this one. Well… we will be, as a matter of fact, but only so we can bloody well smack it, too!

…Language is a funny old thing, isn’t it? Time and again we bend and smash and smush and twist our words as though they were putty and paste, making paper machier towers that we let ourselves believe are permanent, solid, unbreakable. We build words around us like ramparts, and take up sniper positions behind them; we try on words like we’re shopping for clothes, seeking out dazzling combinations that accentuate our wealth, power, sex appeal, or contrition – does my guilt look thinner in this sentence? – or else use them to reinvent ourselves entirely; sometimes we use words as shields to protect us from the force of the truth: the truth of who we are and what we do: enemy combatant; extraordinary rendition; my honourable friend; friendly fire; constructive dismissal; it’s not you it’s me; McDonalds’ Happy Meal.

What I’m trying to say is that ‘smacking’ isn’t really smacking, you see: it’s hitting. Why don’t you try saying that instead? ‘Smacking’ is hitting a small, defenceless child, and that’s true regardless of the strength of the hit, or whether the point of impact is a bottie, a thigh, an arm, a face or a chest.

If you’re defending what you perceive as your universal human right to smack a child, then at least be honest about it. Rip the mask from the face of that word to reveal its true identity, and lay bare your own sub-Lecter-ish lust for pain and power. Spell out your intentions both to yourself and to the world at large. Shout it from the rooftops: ‘I demand the right to hit and inflict pain on the fruits of my loin without consequence or interference, whenever I see fit and however spurious the reason.’

In terms of self-delusion there’s very little difference between ‘I don’t beat my children, for goodness sake, I just give them a light corrective smack’ and ‘I’m not an alcoholic, for goodness sake, I wait until at least lunchtime before having my first drink!’

‘Yea, yea, yeah, you ponce!’ you might cry. ‘But I got smacked, and it never did me any harm!’

Ah, that familiar cry, countered so many times by the now-equally familiar cry, ‘Yes it did, because you believe that it’s okay to hit children.’ I’ve noticed that the most ardent supporters of ‘smacking’ are usually those upon whose faces you can see the tragic consequences of a life lived through shortcuts, a life lived in a world of permanent present tense: crumbling teeth; unkempt hair; blotched and bloodshot eyes that reveal a map of impulse forever left unchecked.

Probably best to eschew parenting advice from someone who’s lazy and blinkered enough to hit first and ask questions later.

Plus, if smacking is your go-to punishment of choice, how do you punish your child for hitting somebody? By hitting them? What message does that send? Especially since they may be hitting other people precisely because you’ve taught them that hitting is permissible.

‘But how else will children learn right from wrong?’

Take violence from our toolbox, and we’re powerless! It’s true. That’s why we still beat children in schools, and our boss is legally entitled to smash us in the face with a tyre iron. That’s why when the judge is about to pronounce sentence in the courtroom he might say something like: ‘The defendant has been found guilty on all counts of his robbery charges. Now bring him here so I can kick the fuck out of him.’

I can understand the impulse to hit. Of course I can, I’m a human being, and I live in a world that contains Piers Morgan. I can even understand the impulse to hit a child. No creature on earth can inspire such anger, and scream-inducing helplessness and frustration as your own child. But I would never – and could never – do it. I don’t think I could ever look my kids in the eye again, and I’d feel like an irredeemable failure as a father.

In no other sphere of life do we condone hitting as a solution. Even savagely violent, hopelessly recidivistic killers are spared violence as a behaviour modification tool. Looking for another reason not to hit your child? Let reason itself be your reason. Behold the maxim below that’s been floating around cyberspace in meme form for quite some time now:

When our eldest son, Jack, approached the age of reason, we started using a sticker-based system that recognised, rewarded and re-inforced good behaviour, and helped us circumnavigate bad behaviour. It wasn’t a perfect system, granted, but it seemed to achieve its aims without causing major psychological damage. I remember once Jack was trying to pilfer a biscuit before bedtime; he had a hand inside the bag with a biscuit held between his fingers in a vice-like pincer grip. When I calmly advised that his current course of action would result in the immediate loss of a sticker, he couldn’t have dropped that biscuit any quicker if I’d been an armed New York cop shouting ‘Freeze, dirtbag!’

On a few occasions, thanks to the child’s method of learning and evolving through mimicry, he put on his best faux-cross-face and told me he was going to take a sticker away from ME.

Replay that scene again, mimicry and all, but this time imagine that I’d hit him.

Plus, yah boo and sucks to the ‘How do you teach young kids not to touch hot surfaces without even a gentle smack?’ Because the answer is: ‘Very easily.’ You watch them like a hawk. You make yourself responsible for not exposing them to any danger. And if you do see your kid about to touch something dangerous, a loud warning shout is an effective deterrent (provided you aren’t the sort of person who shouts all the time, thereby lessening the impact).

‘Kids will run wild if you don’t show them who’s boss.’

It’s hard to believe that we once allowed teachers to belt our children up and down the schoolyard, making our own flesh-and-blood handy scapegoats for everything wrong in a teacher’s life from sexual frustration to really bad hangovers.

But there are still those who would give a wildly disingenuous defence of smacking, both private and corporal. They’ll tell you that there’s a direct correlation between the ban on corporal punishment, and a decline of discipline, order and respect in today’s society. That somehow if we were to take the next logical step and ban smacking entirely then discipline would cease to exist. Instead of there being negative consequences for misbehaviour, kids would instead be disproportionately rewarded for their breaches: “Ah, I see you’ve thrown a television through the window of the old folks’ home, Timmy. What would you say to a lovely new Playstation 4, slugger?” (PS: If anyone should be beaten for their transgressions, it should be me for splitting an infinitive in the previous sentence)

You want to be disingenuous? I can be disingenuous too. My friends, there’s a direct link between corporal punishment and child beatings, and the advent of both world wars. Violence begets violence, you see.

The children you see or hear about running amok, showing disrespect or engaging in violent acts (which never happened in ‘your’ day, oh no, bloody utopia, so it was) are more likely to come from homes where violence, abuse and/or neglect are the norm. They’re certainly more likely to come from an environment characterised by deprivation or poverty. So the next time you feel moved to trot out the old, ‘All these kids need is a bloody smack’, remember that it’s likely a smack, or a complete absence of care or touch, that’s made them the way they are in the first place.

We can’t live in the past. We have to move forward. Learn from our mistakes. As has become abundantly clear in recent months and years, there are many among us content to hark back to the good old days, which weren’t really all that good anyway. They wish they still lived in a world where they could be thirty-thousand feet in the air in an aeroplane piloted by a shit-faced captain, knocking back whiskeys, maniacally chain-smoking, free to punch their child in the face should they have the temerity to cough, and occasionally stopping to hurl sexually-charged racial abuse at one of the stewardesses: ‘Phwoar, you’re alright for a darkie, sweetheart!’

The last strike

‘Tradition’ is a huge sticking point. A lot of people who decry the loss of smacking as a correctional tool cite the influence of their parents, grandparents, great-grandparents, a long line of smackers reaching back to the dark ages. It’s hard to advocate against something that’s so established in your family’s history. If you turn against it, then that means that you were wrong for hitting your children, or that your parents were wrong for hitting you. That’s a hard thing to admit.

Does it mean that as a smackee/smacker you were abused/an abuser? No, most probably. Or not necessarily. Although smacking is wrong, and proven to point towards serious negative outcomes, it was once the prevailing parental philosophy. Going forwards, why don’t we just say: ‘My parents hit me, I hit my kids, and I’m sorry about that, but we genuinely thought it was the right thing to do. We did it because that’s how we were taught to show love and bestow discipline. I’m not going to feel too bad or guilty about that now. It happened. It’s done. But from this point forth, no more. Just like when we used to smoke in the house with our kids, or put whisky in our babies’ bottles, we know better now. And we can do better.’

I don’t think the smacking ban has a realistic chance of being properly policed or enforced, but it might just open up the issue to public scrutiny – as it’s doing right now – and perhaps dissuade parents from adding smacking to their parental repertoire. The ban, however symbolic its application, will at least amplify the message, loud and clear, that we don’t live in that world anymore.

Movie Review – The Queen’s Corgi

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The Queen’s Corgi is such a tonally discordant movie that watching it risks dislocating your amygdala. Its ideas, scenarios and moods ping across the screen like balls in a haunted pinball machine, careening into the flashing, dinging pads of plot, theme and character with such vicious speed that it’s hard to know whether you should be laughing, wincing, praying or reporting yourself to Childline for letting your kids watch it in the first place.

The movie begins with the kindly and considerate Prince Phillip gifting a Corgi puppy to the cooing and gushingly maternal Queen Elizabeth. There’s your first note of discordance. Everything’s predicated upon the falsehood that Prince Phillip and Queen Elizabeth are nice, regular, normal people just like you and me, and not, respectively, a maniacal, fox-blasting, dead-eyed, colonial throwback and a bejewelled joyless void who delivers her annual Christmas message to the nation with all the warmth and conviviality of a statue being held at gun-point.

It’s a strange time to be putting a soft sheen on one of the world’s most prolific hoarders of hereditary wealth. The United Kingdom is on the cusp of a no-deal Brexit, a potentially seismic event with the power to unite the lower and middle-classes in an orgy of hardship and poverty; consequently, I found it pretty tough to empathise with a character who, towards the end of the movie, greets a fire in her palace with the merest of shrugs. To put things in perspective: I almost had a rage-related stroke when I found out the price of the family-sized tub of popcorn. Mind you, the creative forces behind this movie are Belgian, so maybe rubbing the UK’s face in the truth of its own fawning subservience in the run-up to Brexit was a deliberate and, on balance, very funny thing to do.

The opening portion of the movie shows us Rex’s life as the Queen’s most adored Corgi and wearer of the coveted Top Dog collar [In the UK, Rex is voiced by Jack Whitehall, about whom the kindest thing I can say is, ‘At least he’s not James Corden.’].

If Rex is high on the Queen’s pedestal, then he’s positively subterranean in the considerations of everyone else at the palace: Prince Phillip resents the pampered pooch for supplanting him in the Queen’s hierarchy of affections; the Queen’s head servant is disgusted at having to demean himself in the service of a bolshy dog [at one point the poor little man has to follow the dog around the garden holding an umbrella over its head so it doesn’t get wet, only to be deliberately pissed on for his trouble – and that, to me, is a perfect allegory for the Royal Family’s feelings towards its supposed subjects]; but no person or group in Buckingham Palace hates the prissy little pillock as much as his canine bunk-mates, who variously bemoan him, despair of him and, eventually, actively try to murder him.

Things start to go wrong for Rex – as it does for most people – as soon as President Donald Trump arrives. Trump comes to the palace as part of a state visit along with his First Lady, Melania, and their First Dog, Mitzi, the latter a preening, pampered, cossetted little bitch who’s only in it for the money [hush now, be nice].

While Trump is the butt of many jokes during his short time on-screen – about his hands, his hair, his tone-deaf braggadocio and, obscenely for a kids’ film, his rape allegations – he’ll almost certainly come across to kids as a lovable, eccentric oaf, a far cry from the hateful, narcissistic demagogue we big people know and loathe from the almost daily deluge of unhinged pronouncements we’re exposed to through the media. Making Trump cuddly again is a strange creative choice, on a par with putting a cartoon Hitler in a kids’ film, and making him a smiling, jazz-loving juggler who cares for sick cats.

In the spirit of re-cementing the so-called special relationship, the Queen agrees to marry off Rex to the Trumps’ beloved Mitzi, precipitating a highly unsettling sequence in which Mitzi chases a terrified Rex around the palace ostensibly attempting to rape him; an X-rated, reverse Pepe le Pew, if you will.

It’s genuinely upsetting, and not something to which I was comfortable exposing my young children, aged 2 and 5. I’m no lily-livered snowflake, folks. I’ve let my kids watch Watership Down, the original Hellboy Movies and Shazam. I believe that while movie violence can be downplayed and even laughed at when it’s cartoonish in tone, and death is a sad and irreducible part of life to which kids are inevitably introduced through movies – and usually kids’ movies at that – their first grapples with the idea of sex and romance shouldn’t be filtered through the prism of a terrifying sexual assault, regardless of which gender is leading the charge. Another reason why Trump’s inclusion in the movie, given both his history and Mitzi’s behaviour, is weirdly inappropriate.

After Rex accidentally bites Trump in the cock [OK, I enjoyed that bit], resulting in Trump and his hellish entourage roaring off in a huff, Rex finds himself out of favour with The Queen. Although quite why Rex would still exalt her after she sanctioned him for a raping is anybody’s guess, and just another of the movie’s myriad baffling character motivations. Rex ends up banished and betrayed by fellow Corgi, Duke, who leads him away from the palace and tries to drown him in a freezing river, thereafter fabricating a blood-and-fur crime scene in the palace grounds so that none of the humans are moved to look for him.

Rex ends up at the local pound, and quickly falls for Wanda, a dog of regular stock who only reciprocates his feelings once she see’s able to confirm Rex’s identity as property of the palace, aka absolutely minted. Strike two against my children’s burgeoning psycho-sexual development. Thanks, movie.

Unfortunately for Rex, winning Wanda’s heart and escaping back to the palace won’t be easy, because the pound cum prison functions by night as a vicious doggy fight-club, and Wanda is the main squeeze of a raging pile of working-class muscle called Tyson (voiced, somewhat inevitably, by Ray Winstone), the pound’s top dog.

The power of friendship doesn’t quite triumph over the power of violence, given that it’s Rex’s growing friendships within the pound that give him access to the violence he needs in order to defeat Tyson, but at this point I don’t think anyone – least of all me – was expecting any sanguine, family-friendly messages. Generally, though, when the movie isn’t busy being tonally inappropriate, it’s busy being incredibly formulaic.

Rex, along with Wanda and an assortment of dogs of all creeds, shapes and sizes, return to the palace to teach Duke a lesson, namely in allowing him to be crowned Top Dog so that the Queen will send him off to America to get repeatedly raped by Donald Trump’s dog. Em… great, I guess. Yep. That’s… that’s fine. The Queen, in another uncharacteristic bout of woman-of-the-people-ness decides to let Rex’s low-class friends and girlfriend remain at the palace with him to live happily ever after, which it’s just possible is a reference to Meghan Markle joining the Royal Household, but might just be an attempt to salvage some sort of a happy ending from the rather horrible rape coda.

I’ve had a stab at condensing the movie’s moral message. Here goes… What the film appears to be saying is, if ever you let your privilege go to your head and become callous and arrogant and unpopular with your peers, you might just need the humbling experience of almost being raped as part of an arranged marriage scheme to show you the error of your ways. And if you do end up in a prison fight-club for poor people owing to the actions of a jealous peer, then never forget that you can get your revenge on them by seeing to it that they’re raped and deported in your place.

Did you get all that, kids? Lovely, isn’t it?

All told, this movie might make your kids laugh in some places, and gasp in others, and the animation is certainly bright, clean and fluid enough to hold their interest, but if you’re looking for a warm and fuzzy classic to watch with your kids, you’d be better off considering full-blown grown-up movies like The Shining or Reservoir Dogs. At least they don’t pretend to be nice or wholesome.

And, perhaps crucially, neither of them have Donald Trump in them.

THE VERDICT

out of a possible

What to tell your little ones about death

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I envy young children what is either their brief assumption of immortality, or complete disinterest in the whole question of life and death. For the first few years of their lives, death is nothing more than a fantastical abstract; something that happens to baddies in games of make-believe, not to real people. It’s an empty word that carries no weight, as hollow and alien to them as the concepts of time, space and Blippi being the most irritating man alive.

Nothing lasts forever. The state of Eden into which children are born is fragile and ephemeral, lasting only until they solve the puzzle of death at the age of around three or four. Once revealed to them, death’s truth can never be removed or reasoned with. It becomes a darkness that casts a shadow over everything that’s ever been or ever will be.

There’s a cruel joke coded into our species’ DNA, and its punchline is that none of us ever remembers our Eden; those years spent at our mother’s teat and our father’s feet, or within whatever configuration of love it was that swirled around us in those blissful, blank-slate years. As we progress through childhood our brains bulge and morph into ever-fresher, ever-larger configurations of flesh and neurons, and all memory of our lives before the idea of death became a buzzing constant in them are erased forever.

Our kids’ memories, then, like ours before them, only start to gain permanence, it seems, at the exact same moment as the hooded figure of Death first flicks open his blood-red eyes and glares at them in the whispering half-light of their imaginations. That fear, that dread, will haunt our children ever after, coming for them in the dark and quiet of their beds when their minds are unbolstered by the protective amulets of sugar and adrenaline. They’ll lie there, alone, tiny, tear-stained clusters shrouded in the endless, swallowing darkness, beneath the unseeing eyes of an empty, Godless universe.

Thanks, Death. As if bedtimes weren’t an horrific enough time for parents as it is.

The respective bedtimes of our sons, aged 4 and 2, are an exercise in contrasts: a Tale of Two Bedtimes, if you want to get Dickensian about it. While the act of getting the recalcitrant rotters into their pyjamas and into the bathroom for their pre-sleep deep-clean has always been harrowing – Benny Hill meets Nightmare on Elm Street – once in bed, Jack, the elder of the two, is usually compliant. More than that, he’s happy. It’s a sweet, peaceful and occasionally magical time, where my wife and I can bond with him over a book, and indulge in conversations from the sublime to the ridiculous; from the philosophical to the farcical. Or else, it always used to be…

Christopher, on the other hand, from the moment we flop him onto the bed, screams like a tired and emotional Weigy woman being forcibly ejected from a nightclub and into a drunk-tank. Christopher resists every tactic to coax him into unconsciousness, from nursery rhymes to gentle whispers to tender strokes of his hair. His mum usually has to bear-hug him to stop him from thrashing his way off the bed and on to the floor and the make-or-break freedom beyond. The ideal scenario is for Christopher to fall asleep unbidden in the car or on the couch well in advance of his scheduled bedtime. The only snag is that the earlier in the evening this happens, the earlier he’ll awake the next day. Peace now, with the promise of chaos later. It’s a deal we always accept. What the hell: it’s pretty much the definition of parenting.

Christopher is still very firmly in his Eden phase. Death is an ‘unknown unknown’ to him; i.e. he doesn’t know that he doesn’t know about it. Jack, on the other hand, is occasionally gripped by the cold and bony knuckles of Death, who visits him every once in a while to breathe terror and sadness into his tiny little lungs (I know that’s tautological, but I’m all about the rhythm, baby).

Last week, I was reading Jack his bedtime stories when he told me that he wasn’t feeling very well. He said that earlier that night, as we were sitting on the couch watching Doctor Who, it had felt as though his body was moving from side to side, even though he was sitting still. I asked him how he was feeling at that exact moment. Not in any pain, he said. Not feeling sick. Just strange. He said that every now and again he felt like he was on an elevator.

I canvassed Facebook for a consensus, where everyone from laymen, fellow parents, a nurse and a doctor offered a diagnosis. Labyrinthitis was the most frequent suggestion, followed by good, old-fashioned exhaustion and dehydration (it had been a very hot and humid day, and he’d had an active few hours at the park with his mum, his brother and his friends). I was worried about him, but his heart was beating at a steady pace, and he didn’t feel particularly hot or clammy. Besides, his reported symptoms seemed too mild and infrequent to be labyrinthitis… but what did I know?

We got talking about other things, and before long, with a big smile on his face, he said, ‘Now it feels like I’m on snowboard, going down a big hill.’

‘Have you been having me on about feeling strange, you wee gonk?’ I said, tickling him.

‘No,’ he said, giggling.

Though he might have been riffing now, I had no reason to doubt what he’d reported. Anyway, it was good to see him laughing. We got on to talking about his day at the park, and how fast he’d been running.

‘I’m the fastest,’ he said, ‘I’m like the Flash. Candy is faster than Chris, but I’m faster than Candy.’

Candy was our cat. We’d had to have her put to sleep last year after a short illness, the poor old girl. It’s funny, but whenever Death is on Jack’s mind, it usually rides into our conversations saddled on our old cat’s back. Right on cue:

‘I don’t want to die one day,’ he said, his eyes becoming filmy pools, ‘Even if it’s a long, long time away, when I’m really old, I don’t want to do it.’

What can you say to that? I wasn’t sure. This wasn’t our first rodeo. But I knew what I definitely couldn’t say:

‘How do you think I feel? I’m probably going to go first.’

You want to protect your kids from every threat and evil in the world, but you can’t protect them from death. There’s nothing you can do to prevent it. All you can do is prepare your children for its reality.

So how was I going to do that? And was this really the best juncture in his life at which to do it?

I knew that if I didn’t pick my words carefully I risked inflicting grave psychological trauma, and he seemed to be finding the concept of oblivion troubling enough already. I worried a little. If I said the wrong thing would I turn him into some animal-sacrificing maniac who sleeps in a coffin? Would I propel him into some weird sexual kink involving zombies?

I reached out and stroked his face. ‘You don’t have to worry about that.’

His bottom lip started quivering. ‘But I’ll have to worry about it on the last day. The last day ever.’ A few tears dropped from his eyes, which I gently smushed away. I felt like someone had stabbed me in the heart.

I remembered being around Jack’s age, perhaps a little older, and bumbling through to my sister’s bedroom, my hair wispy and wild like Boris Johnson’s, my face a crumpled mess of tears, looking for some comfort as I flailed under the anvil of death. I wanted a cuddle. I wanted a cure: some loophole mankind hadn’t yet uncovered, the secret of which was somehow held by my sister alone. I climbed into bed next to her and bubbled like a bag of gently boiling milk, weeping in the warm darkness. I don’t know what my sister said to me, or how she managed to sooth me, but it worked, because my sister became my go-to gal whenever the grim inevitability of death was weighing me down.

As a child, my mother’s go-to person when the fear of death gripped her was her big brother. He chose to allay her fears by telling her that we all had to die, because if we didn’t die, there wouldn’t be any room on earth for any new people. That always struck me as rather unsatisfactory. True, no doubt, but scant comfort; rather like receiving an eviction notice because your landlord wants to move three random strangers into your home the next day. Still, my sister is eight years older than me, and thus almost a second-tier mum. My uncle was only a handful of years older than my mother, more of a peer, and doubtless grappling with his own unease about his one-way ticket to the other side.

Whatever comfort had been offered to my relatives or my younger self, I had to find my own path with Jack. I tried again to capitalise on his anchorless concept of time, and emphasise something of its vastness.

‘If it happens,’ I said with a smile, ‘then it’ll be so, so far in the future that it’ll almost feel like forever. So what I’m saying is, in a way, you’ll live forever.’

The sniffling dropped a gear, but he was still uncertain, uneasy. Then I recalled the old cliché about laughter being the best medicine, and so decided to pour a little of the medicine onto the spoon, throw away the spoon and let him glug down the whole bottle.

‘Anyway, you won’t be scared of dying when you’re an old man. You’ll be sitting there in your big chair, and you won’t be able to walk…’

At this point I scrunched my face up into a curmudgeonly gurn, and put on a croaky, rasping, old man’s voice. “I’m sitting here in this chair, I can’t walk, and I’ve just bloody pooped myself. There’s poop all in my pants. It’s going down my leg. They’ll call me Old Mr Poop Leg. I’ve had enough of this! Bloody can’t wait to die.”

Tears were running down Jack’s face… of laughter this time. I was laughing too. Jack’s laughter is trilling and melodious, a Mexican wave that sweeps you along with it. I resumed channelling the old man, by now completely beshitted: ‘That’s the cat coming in now. It’s trying to bite my willy. It’s trying to bite my willy and I can’t move! I’m too old! I’m too old for this! It’s biting my willy and there’s poo everywhere! Ooooooh!’

Jack started freestyling a few scenarios of his own. ‘A bird,’ he said, his chest convulsing with laughter, ‘A bird flies in… and it poops in his hair, and he can’t get away, and it goes down his face like an egg.’

‘Then he poops himself again,’ he added.

Take THAT Death. I guess we can’t beat you, but we can take the piss out of you, you ridiculous son-of-a-bitch. Human laughter, human resilience. That’s the key. The power of distraction: it’s the only one of life’s problems where burying your head in the sand is the only effective strategy. What’s the alternative? Turning to serial murder? Jumping off a cliff? Drink and drugs? Better just to laugh.

The last few days started to make sense to me. We’d been talking about getting a new cat a few day’s earlier, while Jack was in the room jabbing and prodding away at a computer game. Naturally, Candy’s death had cropped up, and we’d discussed how sad and harrowing it had been. He must have absorbed every word. We’re still getting used to the fact that Jack has the ability to hear and retain information, and be affected by it. And then, in the episode of Doctor Who that we’d watched earlier that night, a few characters had been killed off, and the main baddy had allowed himself to be blown up rather than wallow in the wake of his failed plan. Jack saw it all. Death had been joining dots across the days, between a cat and a Time Lord, with a little boy in the middle.

Is that what had made Jack feel ‘strange’ on the couch and in his bed that night? A double-whammy of death?

There was no way to know for sure.

But I’ll tell you one thing: the next time the hooded harvester shows his face around here, I’m going to kosh him over the skull with a funny bone. And then Jack’s going to poo on his shoulder.

Giving Santa the Sack: Your Questions Answered

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I’ve already written a mostly serious think-piece about ‘Why the Santa Myth is Bad for Your Children’s Elf’, which you can read by clicking on the highlighted link. I found that the article inspired the same sets of questions, challenges and accusations, which I’ve tried to address here, but this time with a little less of a serious head on. In fact, I’ve gone full-on bonkers in some places. Hope it makes you laugh if we’re sympatico on the subject, and still makes you laugh even if you think I’m the monster (even though it’s clearly you, you monster).

Why are you trying to rubbish Santa? It’s tradition. We’ve always had Santa, elves and reindeer at Christmas time. ALWAYS.

Yes, you’re right, indeed we have. Who can forget the famous cave paintings depicting early man clubbing a bear to death as Donner and Blitzen whizz above his head on a coke-fuelled adventure, pooping down gift-wrapped bones and Christmas cards made from human skin? Or Jesus sitting on Santa’s lap asking for a camel that can go through the eye of a needle, and Santa shaking his head and asking, “Is that on the Pray-station 4?”

The Santa we know today – big red coat, bushy white beard, jelly belly and jolly disposition – has had more origin stories than all of the heroes and villains at Marvel and DC combined. He’s an ever-shifting mish-mash of Christian saints, pagan history and alpine folklore who’s been constantly co-opted and re-packaged by ad-men, marketers and movie moguls the world over, to the point where he’d be almost unrecognisable to those long-ago mountain children who grew up hearing tales of the petty, vengeful old bastard who partnered up with a half-goat, half-demon called Krampus to go around the countryside stuffing kids into a sack. Ho-Ho-Hosef Fritzl.

Shall we bring Krampus back? Shall we? After all, horny old Krampus is far more traditional than the Coca-Cola-coated old coot who shimmies down our chimneys at present. I’m all for it, incidentally. I think Christmas would be improved immeasurably by the introduction of blood-curdling terror (which would also be a perfect complement to Brussels Sprouts).

On second thoughts, let’s not get too hung up on tradition. We used to do a lot of things back in the day: burn witches; stone adulterers; smoke on aeroplanes; vote Liberal Democrat. There’s always room for change. We don’t need to preserve the status quo (and by ‘status quo’ I mean ‘any established or prevailing world-order’ just as much as I do the 1970s rock band, who were fucking terrible).

We already took Jesus out of Christmas.

What’s one more fictional bearded character?

Why can’t you let your kids use their imaginations and believe in magic? Without Santa the world would be a greyer, duller place for kids.

Of course, you’re right. It’s only at Christmas-time that we permit our kids to exercise their imaginations in glorious, ambulatory 4D instead of just making them ingest imaginative content through the TV; making them sit there like old ladies attached to morphine drips, with nary a blink shared between them, as they impassively absorb hour after hour of cartoon dogs or videos of kids on YouTube opening plastic egg-cases (for some inexplicable reason, this is considered entertainment), while we sit there by their sides, occasionally force-feeding them lumps of sugar and chunks of fried pig.

Our kids spend eleven months of every year shuffling around the house like robot-butlers haunted by the souls of civil service middle-managers, daring to imagine only that the next day and the next day and the day after that will be exactly the same as it was today.

Until, that is, the igniting spark of Christmas arrives! Huzzah! ‘Tis yuletime, so come to life, my children. Come to life! It’s time to play, to dare, to dream. Let your thoughts have substance, for ’tis the season of magic. ‘Tis also the season that teaches kids that it’s okay for fat old men to break into houses in the dead of night that have children sleeping in them.

It’s the time of year where parents everywhere will say to their spawn: “Come on, kids, it’s time for your annual, officially-mandated month of very strictly regulated within firmly set parameters imaginative role-play! I know I’ve spent the past year shouting things at you like, ‘Why don’t you live in the real world and stop being silly?’ and ‘No, Kevin, you’re not a magical koala bear on a spaceship with a guitar made of stars, and if you say that one more time I’m going to smash your X-Box into little pieces and feed it to grandma in a sandwich’, and ‘I wish I’d had time to pretend I was a flying postman called Kite Pete AS MY MUM WAS PUNCHING ME IN THE FACE AND TELLING ME SHE WISHED I’D BEEN ABORTED‘, but now – I promise – I’m going to channel all of my dead-eyed vapidity into regurgitating the same old stock-phrases about Santa that I trot out every year, and pretend that I’m taking you on some unforgettable, mind-bending journey to the very periphery of the knowable universe, when in reality I’m just lazy and deeply unimaginative, and SANTA’S NICE, AND I LIKE NICE THINGS, THINGS THAT MAKE PEOPLE GO AWWWWWW, AND YOU WILL NOT TAKE THAT AWAY FROM ME, plus I really like accessorising trees, and making my house look like a John Lewis catalogue.’

Magic is for life, not just for Christmas. Santa is nothing more than a template, a suggestion, a Shutter-stock photo. Kids should be creating their own mental mischief all the time, every day. And you, as a parent or a big person in their lives, should be running around the house with them pretending to be fifty-foot-high hedgehogs on the run from the Intergalactic Council of Sentient Jelly Cakes, or bears with the heads of dolphins, or screaming at each other in made-up languages. Kids need magic. It sustains them. They just don’t need their magic accompanied by a side-order of lies.

Why is it so important to deceive them as we enchant them? Wouldn’t Santa still be a lark if the kids knew he wasn’t really ‘real’? Of course he would. Harry Potter isn’t real, Star Wars isn’t real, and people have become multi-millionaires a million times over on the back of that shit.

Do you want to go ‘all in’? Is that what you want? You want to go all in? Let’s do it then! Let’s tell our kids that EVERY fictional character is real: Ronald McDonald, the Honey Monster, the Gruffalo, Mr Hankey, Death, dragons, Scooby Doo, Muttley, Garfield, Jesus, Danny Dyer. ALL of them. You want magic? HERE’S your fucking magic!! Check out this world: kids who can’t eat their Rice Krispies because they’re frightened that Snap and Crackle are going to burst out of the packet and kick the fuck out of them; kids who think Ned Flanders is their real next door neighbour; kids who think Voldermort is coming to pick them up from school and then turn into a giant spider and eat them. Let your mentally-exhausted children live in that world. Let them run THAT gauntlet, you sickos.

Or… we could just declassify Santa.

Oh, come on, you believed in Santa as a child, and I’ll bet YOU liked it, you big spoil-sport

It’s simple, really. Nothing should be done to inhibit a child’s burgeoning critical faculties, or to corrupt their very sense of the world as an observable, rational and comprehensible place. But don’t get me wrong. You’re right. I myself used to believe wholeheartedly in Santa Claus. I used to get letters from him, in very ornate handwriting. And I thought, this could only be the work of a magical being, he writes like a bloody pro. This guy’s the real deal. I also used to get plenty of Valentine’s cards. I don’t think I can properly express the horror I felt on the day I was old enough to realise that the letters from Santa and the Valentine’s cards were all in the same handwriting. That was a shock to me. “Well, Santa. I see last year’s presents have come with a few strings attached. I’m not that sort of boy. But maybe throw in a few Easter eggs and we’ll talk.”

The truth was even more horrible. I cross-referenced the Santa letters and the valentine’s cards with the handwriting on my birthday cards. Turns out the Santa letters and the VD cards were from my gran.

“Roses are red, I’m your mum’s mummy, and I’m going to stuff you, back up in my tummy.”

I know she was just trying to boost my fragile little-boy ego around Valentine’s Day, but I really bought in to the whole romantic fantasy. And all that time the unrequited love of my young life was a bloated septuagenarian who smelled of cabbage. I was cat-fished by own gran before it was even a thing.

Yee-Haw! It’s Sharkmas!

Imagine if you heard about a culture where the kids were told that every June the 15th a cowboy called Finn Clintson hurtled around the world on a great white flying shark, stopping off to eat air fresheners out of people’s cars, and delivering boxes of rice only to those houses where the kids were managing to play darts at a professional standard.

Families start putting neon sharks in their windows at the end of May. They take their kids to aquariums where they sit on Finn Clintson’s great white shark (a stuffed one, of course) and tell Finn what kind of rice they’d like for Sharkmas. On Sharkmas Eve, all the dads put fresh stacks of air fresheners in their cars, and leave the doors unlocked so Finn Clintson doesn’t have to break through a window. The cries of ONE HUNDRED AND EIIIIIIIGGGHTTTYY can be heard bellowing from every window, down every street, between May and June, as kids everywhere almost break themselves trying to emulate their Sharkmas hero, Les ‘Danger’ Wallace. Listen carefully and you’ll hear: “DO YOU EVEN WANT TEMPURA RICE THIS YEAR, ABIGAIL?” and “YOU MISSED DOUBLE-TOP? IT’S LIKE YOU WANT TO MAKE FINN CLINTSON’S SHARK DIE OF SADNESS!!”

And no-one’s allowed to tell their kids that Finn Clintson isn’t real, or where the rice really comes from, or that sharks can’t fly. Even the schools keep up the charade, bringing Finn Clintsons into the school and having the kids make little wooden great white shark decorations to dangle from their Sharkmas Hat Rack. Ten year old kids are walking around literally believing in flying sharks and cowboys dropping rice-boxes in people’s houses at night.

What would you think of that culture?

You’d think they were all cruel and mental, right?

Happy Sharkmas, you cunts.

What’s wrong with the whole Santa thing? Why can’t you let kids have their innocence a little longer, when this world is such a terrible, horrible, disgusting, nightmarish place?

The sort of people who trot this one out are usually the sort of people who spend more on their Christmas decorations than the GDPs of most small countries. While the poor line up on Christmas Eve to get tinned turkey from their local food banks, they’re busy spunking out £50-a-pop on individual strings of ethically-sourced tinsel from John Lewis and £600-a-go on tree baubles designed by John Paul Gaultier that have been pain-stakingly moulded from impressions taken of Paul Hollywood’s balls, all in the name of erecting a festive art installation in their homes that’s as close to the anti-septic perfection of a snap in an upmarket catalogue that a person can get their house to look and feel before it tips over into becoming a modern-day emperor’s mausoleum.

“We need Santa as a bulwark against this horrible world,” they say, as their kids open up a parcel containing a functioning, sentient robot and a watch that can tell the time in other galaxies. “They need to keep their innocence,” they say, as they drive their kids to Jenners’ Boxing Day sale, passing housing schemes along the way where the kids had out-of-date toothpaste for breakfast and dog-food for dinner, and had to take their siblings on in hand-to-hand combat for the privilege.

“Why is this world such a big, cruel, savage toilet?” they ask, as they fill out forms to send their kids to schools with wrought-iron gates and ivy creeping up the balustrades.

Santa doesn’t visit the schemes and estates where the red on the Aquafresh is actually blood. He just flies over them, as high above the ground as possible, tutting and shaking his head. Maybe he ejects the odd teddy bear with an eye missing, or a spoon without a handle, just to feel festive, but he daren’t land. “They’d have the fucking runners off my sleigh in a heartbeat,” he says, with a nervous laugh. “And they’d have the reindeer fighting to the death in an underground betting shop.”

Believing in Santa never did YOU any harm though, did it?

First of all, how do you know? How do any of us know? Millions upon millions of Americans think it’s normal to want school teachers to carry guns, or for poor people to die in agony because they can’t afford hospital treatment. That’s only crazy from the outside looking in.

Am I right, Finn Clintson?

Anyway, I’m not sure that exposure to organised religion at a young age did me any lasting harm (I’m an ardent atheist these days), but that doesn’t mean that I consider organised religion to be harmless. It’s incredibly dangerous, but in the wrong hands, and heads, it’s incalculably so.

My gran smoked for about nine decades and didn’t die directly from smoking-related illnesses, but that doesn’t mean that smoking is safe.

I once lathered my naked body in liquid LSD and then tried to recreate the classic arcade game Frogger by repeatedly running backwards and forwards across the motorway, but I was killed by a truck and came back as a High Priest of the Gnome people, so maybe that’s not such a great example.

In any case, whatever supernatural stories you need to tell yourself to make you feel better about your own actions, or less afraid of your own inevitable death, and whatever all-powerful entities you need to create in order to give those stories life, are all absolutely fine. They are. Really. They’re great. More power to you. Just so long as they don’t bring harm to any other living being – yourself included.

But the second you start seeking out other like-minded ‘souls’ with similar beliefs and supernatural figureheads to yours, with a view to forming a club, one which quickly moves to multiply, standardise, immortalise and spread its rules and beliefs in the form of some irrevocable holy manifesto, the contents of which are destined to be poured down the throats of ‘heathens’ and children everywhere, then that’s not so fine. Then it becomes political. But worse. Because while political leaders and political ideas can change and evolve with time (in theory, at least), religious leaders and ideas – in the main – do not. Otherwise, what’s the point? Either your God has all the power and all the answers, or he’s a pretty shit God, right? Religion is nothing more than politics preached from the cloud and the pulpit, as opposed to the podium and the press conference.

The big difference is, though – again in theory, and specific to this place and time – I’ve got at least some say over whether or not my kids are proselytised into a religion, or indeed a political party. I don’t seem to have any power over whether or not my kids have a belief in Santa inculcated in them.

Even if the Santa myth had no ill effects, and didn’t constitute a massive breach of trust between child and parent/guardian, even then… why are people who don’t want their kids to believe in Santa forced to go along with it? What makes this relatively new and dangerously commercialised myth more important and sacred than a person’s right to raise their children the way they want to?

I’ve tried various things to gently shake my eldest son from his belief (I’m part of a team, remember, so I can’t just scream ‘SANTA IS A HOAX’ in his face fifty times a day, as much as I may want to). Just a few weeks ago I interrogated his belief in Santa. He’s 4. “How do you know it’s Santa and not just me and your mum going downstairs and putting presents out?”

He thought for a moment.

“Because he comes at night. And YOU’LL be asleep too. So it can’t be you.”

Such quick-thinking, such mental gymnastics, but all employed in the service of doing somersaults over ghosts. What damage are these falsehoods doing to his brain? Imagination is fine. Lies are not.

I stroked his hair and looked him dead in the eyes. “I just want you to remember, when you’re older, that there was one man in this world who didn’t lie to you.” And I pointed to myself.

That’ll come in handy if I need him to avenge me in the future…

Can you believe it’ll be Sharkmas again in just six months? Where has this year gone.

Why the Santa myth is bad for your children’s elf

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We live in a time of great freedom, however illusory or temporary that freedom might yet prove.

For instance, I could sit in a circle of peers and announce that I don’t believe in Yahweh, God, Vishnu, Allah, or a giant turtle that holds the known world atop its back as it crawls through the cosmos, and most of the people in that circle would probably accept this declaration with a silent nod or a shrug of the shoulders. Never mind that in certain countries, among certain people and cultures, such a vow would earn me a spell in prison, a steak knife to the stomach or death. Here in the modern, secular west, I can profess belief or its lack in whatsoever I choose and be almost certain of a tolerant reception.

But try to tell people that I don’t want to play along with the Santa myth? Well, let’s just say that most culturally dominant orthodoxies seem benign until you try to opt out of them. I think a steak-knife to the stomach would be easier to take. Take it from me: being a Santa-truther gets you treated like a scar-faced leper with a vest of grenades and a public masturbation problem.

The sprawling Santa conspiracy, global in its reach, in which we entangle our children raises a multitude of uncomfortable questions, and comes at a terrible price: not least of which is the spirit of shattered trust in which it’s perpetuated.

It seems that all other western cultural norms are fluid, except for this one. Never this one. The only things powerful enough to grant you a Santa exemption are deeply-held fundamentalist Christian beliefs or adherence to a non-Christian faith, and even then there’s a chance you’ll still be regarded as a destroyer of children’s dreams.

I baulk at the presumptuousness, the unthinkingness of it all. Really, would a Christian parent ever in a month of Sundays approach a Muslim family and knowingly ask them if they’re looking forward to the birthday of our Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ? A religious person might very well try to preach to or proselytise my children, but I’d be well within my rights to do everything possible to counter their supernaturally-motivated manoeuvrings, from taking expert advice to punching them in the teeth, and I’d enjoy broad moral – if not exactly legal – support. Santa’s cult of commercialism, however, has carte blanche, and few would ever support me in a bid to tear it down.

It’s clear that there’s something about this little red-and-white lie that’s seen as integral to and inextricable from a hearty and wholesome childhood. There’s a concomitant notion that somehow the act of debunking Santa holds the potential to obliterate a child’s capacity for innocence and imagination, and quite possibly leave them with the dull, jaded outlook of a middle-aged chartered accountant on the eve of his second divorce. Or else turn them into a fleet of joyless androids each wearing the scowling face of Richard Dawkins.

This pre-supposes that in the pre-Santa days of Shakespeare and Dumas the kids of the world were witless dullards, and every visionary, artist and poet worth their salt only emerged post-Pole.

Santa began as a folk-tale that many believe morphed out of the legends of a Saint. He was a rather different, certainly less sanguine, figure in his early days, one that children were more inclined to fear than keenly anticipate. The Santa we know and love today – the darling of TV adverts, movies and billboards – has only existed in his current form – big-bearded, red-jacketed and jolly – for a comparatively short time (the same is true for his retinue: Rudolph the Red Nose Reindeer only arrived in 1939); but yet we are encouraged to believe that something as malleable and arbitrary as the historical idea of Santa should be considered unchallengeable, unchangeable and eternal.

Santa is but one fictional character in a cast of thousands. Why does he get special dispensation when it comes to the laws of reality? I regularly read my sons stories about alien encounters, magical beanstalks, sentient robots and talking horses, without ever feeling the need to hoodwink them into accepting that all of these things can be found in reality. No-one would consider it heresy for me to explain to my son that horses can’t really talk; knowing this fact doesn’t in any way limit his imagination or detract from his very real enjoyment of the story. Penguins don’t have jobs, dogs can’t moonlight as policemen, aliens can’t travel through time in a physics-defying police box, there’s no such thing as ghosts, and people can’t turn green and smash buildings when they’re angry. My eldest certainly knows that, or at least these things have been explained to him. He doesn’t care. He still mimics these characters and scenarios, and riffs on them in his own unique, imaginative way when he’s running about the house lost in make-believe or play-acting with his toys.

Strange old ladies don’t stop him in the street to ask if he’s excited about a visit from the talking horse. He doesn’t see a million adverts on TV featuring a talking horse trying to convince him to buy things. He isn’t taken to The Talking Horse’s Grotto every year. In no other sphere of life is there such a zealous attempt to systematically cement children’s fantastical notions into fact.

Perhaps in the past the Santa fantasy was more innocent and fleeting in nature: a little tale or poem wheeled out every Christmas Eve; a single evening of merry make-believe. These days Santa is everywhere. Literally everywhere: he’s like a God who’s tired of subtlety and enigma. You can write to him, email him, watch him, read him, visit him, Skype him, tag him in your friends’ Facebook posts. He appears every year at the stroke of November, and doesn’t stop assailing kids with his maniacal mirth-making until the very last slice of turkey’s been fed to the dog.

Your motivations may be pure. You may only wish to indulge in a little heart-warming festive fantasy. But you don’t have the luxury of raising your children unplugged from the Matrix. Santa is perpetuated by businesses, not by you.

Money. It’s all about money.

Just like everything else in life, I suppose.

The power of Santa compels him… to do very little

Here’s a question for you: why does Santa deliver unequal amounts of toys to the children of the world? Why does he deliver more toys to affluent families than he does to poor families? Because he does. SO clearly, then, on the great sliding scale of political ideology, the red-jacketed sleigh-racer is more tightly aligned to conservative notions of capitalism than he is to communism, or socialism. If your kid goes back to school after the winter break with a new pair of cheap shoes and a toy laser gun, and has to listen to another kid bragging about his £1000 home entertainment system and surprise trip to Disneyland, what is he to infer about his worth in Santa’s eyes? Should he castigate himself for being too naughty, placing the blame for his poor festive haul upon his own tiny shoulders? Or should he just conclude that Santa doesn’t really like him all that much?

Remove Santa from this equation, and you’ve still got a problem with unequal distribution of wealth and resources in society, married to an unslakable thirst for goods and gadgets that’s only heightened and reinforced by our media, but that’s an argument for another time (besides, there are more learned, original and eloquent thinkers out there with better and more important things to say on the topic than little old me).

Consider also this point: Santa is an omniscient being who has mastered time itself, can travel around the globe and back in one evening, and can apparently conjure an endless supply of toys from thin air. Santa uses these powers not to alleviate suffering, lift people out of hunger and poverty, cure the sick and the lame or to usher in a new era of world peace, but to drop toy robots down chimneys. What a role model. He’s no better than Sooty. Or Jesus.

You can emphasise the magical, imagination-stretching benefits of a child’s belief in Santa as a rationale for deceiving your children, but when I hear Santa’s name mentioned by parents, more often than not his name is employed as a correctional tool rather than as an instrument of wonder. Be nice, behave, go to bed, tidy your room, eat your dinner or Santa will cross you off his list, and you won’t get any toys. By weaponising Santa in this way, parents have created a bearded boogeyman to scare or bribe their children into behaving the way they want them to. This may be an instantly effective, no-nonsense behavioural control technique, but then so is smashing them in the face with a cricket bat.

The sad truth is that parents are conditioning their children to be good not for goodness’ sake – as the old snowman song goes – but to be good so they can get a new TV or pony. They’re being encouraged to equate virtue with financial reward. Part of being a happy, successful and fully-socialised human being necessitates a degree of sacrifice, negotiation, humility and deference. These are qualities – and modes of conflict resolution – that shouldn’t need a chuckling demigod, or the dangled carrot of a PlayStation 4, to be fully realised.

Sometimes people will say: “You believed in Santa, and YOU weren’t traumatised.”

You could put forward exactly the same argument for religion. Come on, you sang songs, you listened to some nice little stories, you went on coach trips. What’s your problem? I’ll tell you what my problem is: consent.

Even if the whole Santa myth is benign and beautiful, why do I have to participate in it if I don’t want to, when I can opt out of almost every other cultural or religious convention without raising an eyebrow? Why should I allow fat old strangers to peer down at my children every November and fill their heads with bullshit, when if they were peddling any other lie I’d be well within my rights to tell them to fuck off?

Whose interest does Santa really serve?

I’m conscious that I’m probably coming across as even more of a misery guts and world-class humbug than Scrooge himself. Believe me, I’ve analysed my opposition to Santa endlessly. Was I lied to as a child? Did I have promises broken? Is this what’s driving my dissection: are my trust issues bleeding on to the hem of Santa’s coat? I’m pretty sure that isn’t the case. I just like asking questions, and don’t like lying.

And, this may shock you, but I love Christmas. I love the ceremony and expectation of it all. I love the tree, the twinkling lights, the cosy mugs of cocoa on the cold and windy nights. I’m probably more excited about my kids opening their presents than they are. My partner and I – as I’m sure you do, too – always choose presents perfectly suited to their personalities, presents that will help them play and learn and laugh and grow.

Maybe I just don’t want Santa to muscle in on that. But, more than that, I find it almost impossible to lie to my kids. Santa is a secret I’ve had no say in, that I have no need for. You don’t need Santa to make Christmas magical, but you do require his absence to maintain an honest and healthy stance on both society and the universe itself. My silence is being demanded not to preserve the mystery and magic of the festive season, but to stop me from blowing the whistle on the millions of other families who have chosen to deceive their children. Families who want to keep using Santa as a four-month-long carrot-and-stick combo. This only makes me want to blow the whistle all the more; to send my sons into their schools with information bombs strapped to their brains, ready to blast your children in their faces with the bright light of truth.

But I won’t.

Well, I would give them the information, but I would counsel them not to share it with other kids, and I certainly wouldn’t take the liberty of telling anyone else’s children the truth about Santa. While some people may see it as their inalienable right to warp the world-view of my children, I don’t see it as my right to do the same to theirs. And what my kids do with any information they may or may not get from me is on YOU, not ME. If you want to lie to your kids, don’t fucking rope me into it.

That being said, I’m as much a sheep as the rest of you. I took them to Santa’s Grotto last year. Me. Wilfully. Well, accidentally (I didn’t know the garden centre I was taking them to had a grotto), but certainly of my own volition. I stood like a statue as pseudo-Santa spewed out his nonsense into my kids’ brains, which makes me a Christmas quisling. A hypocrite. A man who fears the zeal of his festive partner. A man who has more and more respect for apostates and cult-breakers (if I can’t even wriggle my kids free of Santa’s soft grip, what hope would I have had as a doubting Scientologist?).

Besides, in many ways the web of lies has already been shot too far and spun too tightly for me to take corrective action. We were at a barbecue this summer past, and my eldest boy, Jack (then 3 on the cusp of 4), and I were sitting at the top of the garden, looking down on the house. It had a sloped, peaked roof.

Jack asked thoughtfully, “How does Santa land on that roof?”

I took this as my chance to gently guide him towards the truth of Santa’s non-existence, asking him to state if people like Doctor Who or Captain Underpants were real people, or characters.

“Characters.”

“And what about Santa?”

“Real.”

“What if I told you he wasn’t real, and that big people just made him up?”

He laughed and shook his head. The more I protested, the harder he laughed. I even just flat out resorted to saying: ‘”There is no Santa. He’s not real.”

How did that go? you may ask.

He wouldn’t accept it. Furthermore, he now thinks I’m a fucking mental case.

THANKS, society.

I guess you win.

Your Crazy Kids Will Always Beat You

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A scene from The Sopranos always springs to mind when I think about disciplinary strategies for parents. Tony and Carmella Soprano are in bed discussing their teenage daughter’s latest infraction and how they’re going to handle it. Carmella says: “There has to be consequences.” Tony says: “And there will be. I hear you, ok? Let’s just not overplay our hand, because if she figures out we’re powerless, we’re fucked.” Lest you forget, Tony Soprano is a mob boss. That pretty much sums it up for me.

My partner and I have made a conscious decision not to smack or hit our children, ostensibly because we’re not cunts. I’m sure this makes it more difficult to keep them in line or steer their behaviour, but any form of obedience that comes from a big creature inflicting pain on a tiny creature is by necessity achieved through fear, and why would you want your own children to be afraid of you? Unless you’re raising a child army for a fight to the death with another child army, it’s probably best not to teach them to be angry bullies or anxious supplicants.

I can, however, understand the impulse to hit your children. No creature on earth will test the limits of your compassion or patience more than your own child. Once you’ve repeated their name, or the phrase ‘Don’t do that please’, for the eightieth time in a row, it’s hard to fight the impulse to turn green, burst through your clothes and bench-press your child through a wall. It’s worse when you’re in public or polite company, and can’t use your ‘shit just got real’ tone of voice in case everybody thinks you’re a fucking psychopath, and you have to pretend you think it’s all a bit funny and absurd, and call them wee scamps, even though you’re imagining taking them in a cage fight.

Gentle parenting is easy in theory, hard in practice, especially when you’re juggling kids with life’s other pressures, and usually trying to function with less than the recommended minimum of sleep.

It’s hard to disconnect from all of the things that hitherto have made you ‘you’, and view your children’s behaviour both dispassionately and compassionately. It’s hard to over-ride the rule book of cause-and-effect-justice that’s been imprinted on your brain, perhaps passed down for countless generations, whose main edicts could be anything from ‘spare the rod, spoil the child’ to ‘you’ve only got yourself to blame’ – views that arrogantly disregard whole swathes of teaching in the fields of psychology and sociology.

A fallacy that sticks with us through childhood and contaminates our adult thinking is the belief that our parents have a single fucking clue about what they’re doing. As much as we might kick back against their strictures, at one stage in our lives we believed that their pronouncements came from a set of immutable, universally-agreed child-rearing laws, and weren’t just made up on the hoof and unreliably drawn from their own arbitrary life experiences.

I’m a parent now, and the Wizard’s curtain has been well and truly thrown back (please don’t titter at that as if it’s some sort of vulgar euphemism – you’re better than that). I’m now poised to take the Wizard’s place and perpetuate the myth of parental Godhood, certainty and competence. Except I’m not. I may be an imperfect parent – and, really, is there any other kind? – but I want to be perfectly open and honest with my kids about this very fact. I still have to modulate my responses, of course. It probably wouldn’t be acceptable for me to smash all of their toys with a mallet and then tell them, ‘Isn’t this great? What an awesome teachable moment we’re having!’ I want them to understand the arbitrary nature of my decision-making processes and how these processes can be influenced by the vagaries of my moods.

That will be my greatest gift to them: the admission that big people can get it spectacularly wrong, too: that sometimes big people need to say sorry. If I feel I’ve done my eldest son wrong, treated him unfairly or perhaps shouted a little too loudly, I’ll always apologise, and tell him why I was wrong. I’ll do the same for my youngest once he’s attained a modicum of reason and the ability to communicate through language. I can’t think of a better way to teach them to account for their own mistakes and shortcomings.

Beats the hell out of hitting.

THE END

Just a little aside: we consider the human body and mind to be in a constant state of development up until the age of 16, 18, or 21 (25 in some cases), and then we just stop bothering to hail milestones. After these ages you’re an adult, whether you’re 28 or 78. I know we make distinctions between people who are comparatively young and old, and we have loose markers to denote middle age and senior citizenship, but essentially there’s a vast adult plain populated by everyone from 18 to 80, with everyone on that plain largely expected to uphold the same norms of behaviour. Just once I’d like to overhear a conversation like this:

“Blimey, Janet’s fair playing up this weekend. That’s terrible behaviour.”

“You’ve got to remember she’s only 52.”

“Ahhhh… well, we were all young once. I’m sure she’ll grow out of it.”

Kids’ Birthday Parties: This is Your Life Now

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What can I say about birthday parties for the under-5s?

Well, it’s nice for them to get a chance to let their hair down and hang out with their friends. After all, they spend the majority of their time within the bosoms of their families, and what time they don’t is spent trapped within institutions; institutions that will carry them to their graves.

I’m talking about the parents, of course. Poor bastards: walking about with baby puke patches on their best jumpers, sporting big black panda eyes and stress lines like seismographs on their foreheads, and grinning at each other like frightened chimps as they desperately fight to stave off the twin horrors of sleep and full mental breakdown, all while trying to pretend that somehow it was all worth it.I guess the old saying’s true: a moment on the hips, a lifetime of IKEA trips.

Remember when your social calendar was measured in weekly increments rather than bi-annually? Remember when you used to gaze across the horizon of your life and see nothing but unfettered fun and wine-tinged sunsets? Remember when you used to hit the town in a loudly-laughing posse of posers, and then stay out drinking and dancing till dawn, leaping the next day’s hangovers like they were half-foot-high hurdles? Well, forget it, because that part of your life is gone.

The multi-coloured nightmare of kids’ birthday parties is your only social life now: coffee and cake at the soft play surrounded by a thousand screaming kids. You’ve all got so much to talk about and catch up on, you and your friends, but good luck talking about anything other than your kids. Your brain may cycle through a database of potential topics – politics, entertainment, nutrition, religion – but whatever it is you think you’re going to talk about, you can’t open your mouth without saying something like: ‘Apparently Skye’s in the ninetieth centile for weight’ or ‘What Jason lacks in language skills he certainly makes up for in spatial awareness.’

If you do manage to kick-start a non-parenting related conversation it will inevitably be cut short by one of your children running up to you either screaming as their face drips with blood (‘Daddy, I tried to put my head through the wall like a ghost but it hurt me!’) or loudly agitating for a shit.

Mind you, I find that kids are handy to have around in these sorts of situations, especially since I discovered just how bad I am at mingling. There’s nothing quite like quitting drinking to reveal how socially awkward you are at root. I’m really ferociously bad at shooting the breeze or shooting the shit, or whatever shooting-based analogy you care to use. I’m bloody awful at it. After a few minutes of dribbling out the kind of small talk an old tramp at a bus-stop would be ashamed to show off, it’s nice to be able to go:

‘WHAT’S THAT, JACK? YOU WANT ME TO GO DOWN THE CHUTE WITH YOU?’

‘Jamie, I don’t think he said anyth…’

‘I’LL BE RIGHT THERE, SON! Hold my miniature box of Smarties, will you.’

I usually swagger into these parties desperately sucking in my stomach muscles (what exists of them) in a vain attempt to fool old acquaintances into thinking that I play squash every now and again, or occasionally eat lettuce. It’s a fragile illusion, almost impossible to maintain. I can’t emphasise how hard it is to bend a fat torso into the shape of a capital ‘C’ for more than twenty minutes without getting severe stomach cramps.

Towards the end of these soft-play parties the kids are typically ushered into a side-compartment to have a spot of grub. Invariably, their eating-space is fenced in and cordoned off like the canteen in a maximum-security prison, an association only lent more substance by the fact that they can get tattoos done after their snacks. Seeing my eldest son standing in his vest later that night looking like a grizzled lifer always makes me regret not having asked the resident face-painter to daub a little blue tear-drop beneath one of his eyes. In preparation for the next party I’m teaching him to say: ‘Hey esse! Do we got a fuckin’ problem here?’

Whether the party is held at a soft-play or in a house it always ends with gifts being handed out to the attendees; wee bags of ‘fuck off’ as I like to call them. What an ingeniously polite way to get rid of people. If you give people a treat as you start to shoo them off, suddenly it doesn’t seem so harsh. ‘It’s been a fun two hours, but please take your toy helicopters and little whistles, and get the fuck out of my house.’ Adult parties often drag on without any clear or definite end, so I think we would benefit enormously from introducing some sort of gift bag system:

‘So my Sally’s language skills may not be the best, but, I’ll tell you, her spatial awaren… oh, what’s this?’

‘It’s a bag of marshmallows and vodka miniatures. Now fuck off.’

Party on, dudes. Party on.

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READ MORE ABOUT THE NIGHTMARE OF SOFT-PLAYS BY CLICKING HERE

Twelve things I’ve learned being a Dad to two under four (PART 1)

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1.) Buggies suck.

You know the old proverb. “Fold or unfold a buggy for a man, and he’ll be able to push the baby for a day. But teach him how to fold or unfold the buggy, and you’ll still have to do it for him every fucking day.”

The operation of most modern buggies is remarkably simple. Click, clunk, push. Press, pull, fold. So why then do I find myself, every single time – and I do mean every  single time – jumping up and down in a car park, my arms flailing like a possessed, pissed semaphorist trying to marshal an airplane, loudly threatening an inanimate hunk of cloth and plastic with death and destruction? I’ve been shown how to operate the infernal contraption time and again, on an almost daily basis, and each time I say, ‘Ah, of course, now I remember. Next time will be easy’. But next time isn’t easy. Next time is another angry wrestling match betwixt man and plastic. It’s like Groundhog Day, but by the end of the movie Phil can’t play the piano and he’s still having eighty doughnuts for breakfast. Why aren’t kids born with wheels?

2.) Never use the ‘Bad Man’ to deter your kids from disobeying, or running off.

He’s a demonic boogey-man routinely conjured by lazy parents to strike an easy jolt of fear into their children, when the same result could easily be achieved through gentler, less traumatising means, namely by employing the twin powers of reason and imagination.

(Starts with a snicker, builds to a convulsing laugh, ends with me in hysterics, hardly able to breathe and slapping my thigh like a coke-fueled cowboy) Yeah, right. Fuck that. The ‘Bad Man’ practically has his own room in our house, en-suite and everything. He gets breakfast in bed, and even gets to leave the toilet seat up after a piss. At first we used him sparingly. ‘Don’t run off round that corner. The bad man might be there.’ Then we started riffing, really having fun fleshing out the character:

‘He’s got an electrified glove that will burn you like toast,’

‘He’s got a time-grenade that’ll blow you back to the prehistoric era and your head will be crunched off by a T-Rex,’

‘He likes to melt children down and make them into candles, and then he farts on the candles, and then he pees them out.’

We started pretend-calling him for the most minor of infractions. ‘Hello, is that the bad man? Yeah, he won’t blow his nose. You’ll what? You’ll skin him alive?’ (lowering phone and whispering to son) ‘I can’t negotiate with this guy, he’s a fucking lunatic, you’d better just do what he says.’

Reason doesn’t work on young children. That’s why you need to get yourself your very own on-call behavioural terrorist. Long live the bad man.

3.) A bacon sandwich tastes so much sweeter after you’ve suffered through 3,000 episodes of Peppa Pig.

Not 3000 new episodes of Peppa Pig. The same episode 3000 times. Each staccato plink of that risible theme song starts to feel like a knife to the spine. I hate that my three-year-old loves it so much. It’s horrible. Not only does it make you feel like you’re watching TV through a spy-hole, but the kids are insolent, disobedient little shits and the father is a marginalised moron who’d be more use to the world inside a BLT. I’ve largely cut meat from my diet and don’t eat pork anymore, but I’d make an exception for Daddy, the snorting imbecile.

Don’t let your kids watch it. If none of that convinces you then never forget that the pigs are clearly walking, talking big balls-and-cocks. Look at them! It’s undeniable. Peppa Pig? Peppa BIG Nutsack more like.

4.) Toilets will never be the same again.

A week or so ago I had to make a hurried journey to the bathroom, with just enough time for a brisk detour to pick up a book. I perched in comfort, readying myself to begin the expulsion not just of my internal waste, but also of the day’s worries and frustrations. I was happy. I was safe. Nothing out there in that noisy, calamitous universe could touch me, at least for the next five minutes.

I was perched on the toilet, enjoying my brief reprieve from life, when from downstairs came the screams of my second-born, Christopher. He’d been placed atop a soft blanket of toys by his mother as she bravely attempted to start cooking dinner. Christopher’s not a kid usually prone to screaming, but when he feels the need he makes sure to broadcast those screams at just the right frequency to pierce steel, skull and concrete. ‘Daddy! Daddy!’ came the cries from my eldest boy, Jack, accompanying his baby brother’s fervent WAH WAH WAHs.

Jack kept wailing as he staggered and trudged up the stairs like a mustard-gassed soldier: ‘DADDY, DADDY, MY EYES!!! MY EYES!!!’

He’d found a bottle of his mother’s perfume and naturally had decided to spray himself directly in the eyes with it, the bold little scientist that he is. ‘MY EYEEEEESSSSSSSSSSSS!’

That’s what most trips to the toilet are like these days. Remember that old Dad-centric cliché about a bathroom being a man’s last bastion of peace in a chaotic household? It’s full of shit. The bathroom door may as well be spun from spider-silk or constructed by a mime artist. If your kid needs to get through that door, locked or not, and no matter what you’re doing in there, then you’re opening up. They’ll rap and tap and chap and bang until you’re forced to waddle towards it like an all-penguin John Wayne. They’ll then make you stand there by the sink in hellish, bowed-leg silence, like a naughty dog – squidgy poo-parcel half-nipped and glistening – as they take the longest piss in the world. Or even a particularly savage shit, just to rub some salt into the wound.

It’s toilet Top Trumps, and your kid will always win, principally because it reflects rather badly on you as a parent if you force your kid to stand outside in the hall and shit themselves.

THANK YOU FOR READING, YOU ADORABLE BASTARDS.

ANOTHER FOUR NEXT WEEK.

Why it’s time to bid farewell to Santa (or: Why Santa is bad for your kids’ elf)

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I could sit in a circle of peers and announce that I don’t believe in Yahweh, God, Vishnu, Allah or a giant turtle that holds the known world atop its back as it crawls through the cosmos, and most of them would probably accept this declaration with a silent nod or a shrug of the shoulders. Never mind that in certain countries, among certain people and cultures, such a vow would earn me a spell in prison, a steak knife to the stomach or death. Here in the modern, secular west, I can profess belief, or its lack, in whatsoever I choose and be almost certain of a tolerant reception. But try to tell people that I don’t want to play along with the Santa myth we force upon our kids, and I’m treated like a scar-faced leper with a vest of grenades and a public masturbation problem.

The sprawling Santa conspiracy, global in its reach, in which we entangle our children raises a multitude of uncomfortable questions, and comes at a terrible price: not least of which is the spirit of shattered trust in which it’s perpetuated.

All other western cultural norms are fluid, it seems, except for this one. Never this one. The only things that will grant you an exemption from Santa are deeply-held fundamentalist Christian beliefs or adherence to a non-Christian faith, and even then you’ll probably still be regarded as a destroyer of children’s dreams.

It’s clear that there’s something about this little red-and-white lie that’s seen as integral to and inextricable from a hearty and wholesome childhood. There’s a concomitant notion that somehow the act of debunking Santa holds the potential to obliterate a child’s capacity for innocence and imagination, and quite possibly leave them with the dull, jaded outlook of a middle-aged chartered accountant on the eve of his second divorce. Or else turn them into a fleet of joyless androids each with the face of Richard Dawkins.

Santa is but one fictional character in a cast of thousands. Why should he get special dispensation when it comes to the laws of reality? I regularly read my son stories about alien encounters, magical beanstalks, sentient robots and talking horses, without ever feeling the need to perpetuate the entertaining fallacies inherent in the source material. No-one would consider it heresy for me to explain to my son that horses can’t really talk; knowing this fact doesn’t in any way limit his imagination or detract from his very real enjoyment of the story. Penguins don’t have jobs, dogs can’t moonlight as policemen, there’s no such thing as ghosts, people can’t turn green and smash buildings when they’re angry. He knows that, or at least these things have been explained to him. He doesn’t care. He still mimics these characters and scenarios, and riffs on them in his own unique, imaginative way when he’s running about the house or play-acting with his toys.

The power of Santa compels him… to do very little

Here’s a question for you: why does Santa deliver unequal amounts of toys to the children of the world? Why does he deliver more toys to affluent families than he does to poor families? Clearly, on the great sliding scale of political ideology, the red-jacketed sleigh-racer is more tightly aligned to conservative notions of capitalism than he is to communism, or socialism. If your kid goes back to school after the winter break with a new pair of cheap shoes and a toy laser gun, and has to listen to another kid bragging about his £1000 home entertainment system and surprise trip to Disneyland, what is he to infer about his worth in Santa’s eyes? Should he castigate himself for being too naughty, placing the blame for his poor festive haul upon his own tiny shoulders? Or should he just conclude that Santa doesn’t really like him all that much?

Remove Santa from this equation, and you’ve still got a problem with unequal distribution of wealth and resources in society, married to an unslakable thirst for goods and gadgets that’s only heightened and reinforced by our media, but that’s an argument for another time (besides, there are more learned, original and eloquent thinkers out there with better and more important things to say on the topic than little old me).

Consider also this point: Santa is an omniscient being who has mastered time itself, can travel around the globe and back in one evening, and can apparently conjure an endless supply of toys from thin air, much as another bearded magician once did with water, wine, loaves and fish. Santa uses these powers not to alleviate suffering, lift people out of hunger and poverty, cure the sick and the lame or to usher in a new era of world peace, but to drop toy robots down chimneys. What a role model. He’s no better than Sooty, or Jesus.

You can emphasise the magical, imagination-stretching benefits of a child’s belief in Santa as a rationale for deceiving your children, but when I hear Santa’s name mentioned by parents, more often than not his name is evoked as a correctional tool rather than as an instrument of wonder. Be nice, behave, go to bed, tidy your room, eat your dinner, or Santa will cross you off his list, and you won’t get any toys. By weaponising Santa in this way, parents have created a bearded boogeyman to scare or bribe their children into behaving the way they want them to. This may be an instantly effective, no-nonsense behavioural control technique, but then so is smashing them in the face with a cricket bat.

The sad truth is that parents are conditioning their children to be good not for goodness’ sake – as the old snowman song goes – but to be good so they can get a new TV. They’re being encouraged to equate virtue with financial reward. Part of being a happy, successful and fully-socialised human being necessitates a degree of sacrifice, negotiation, humility and deference. These are qualities – and modes of conflict resolution – that shouldn’t need a chuckling demigod, or the dangled carrot of a PlayStation 4, to be fully realised.

My family and I were in a shopping mall at the weekend, and passed by a Santa’s grotto. I couldn’t help feeling that there was something deeply sinister and ritualistic about the line of dead-eyed kids shuffling up to receive their gifts. They were like a cult. Ho ho ho. Here’s your new church, kids, here’s your new Jesus: roll up, roll up, as we inculcate you into the wholesale religion of consumer greed.

We experience rather enough problems with the religions we already have, thank you very much, without adding Santaism to the list. While belief in Santa may be the ‘Temporary Profile Picture’ of quasi-religious micro-faiths, it worries me tremendously that a belief in the supernaturalness of Santa might serve as a gateway drug to harder fictional beings, like Jesus or Moroni.

Imagine the scene in a household where a child who has been raised in a pro-Santa Christian family finally discovers that Santa isn’t real.

CHILD: “Ah, so Santa was all a big lie, was he? That’s hilarious. You had me, you did, you really had me, you got me hook, line and sinker with that one. So, come on, put me out of my misery. Jesus, right? Come on, the cat’s out of the bag. You made him up too, right? Miracles, walking on water, rising from the dead. I knew there was something iffy about that. I’ve got to hand it to you, though, you’ve created a genius fictional character there.”

PARENT: “Em… nope. Nope. That’s all true. Em… Jesus is real.”

CHILD: “…”

(Actually, the more I think about it, the more I’m convinced that Santa – employed properly – could be the antidote to Jesus: the great flicking wrist to bring down the whole house of cards.)

Parents and guardians are the people that children listen to and look up to above all others, whose word is gospel for a significant proportion of their young lives. For them to distort a child’s understanding of the laws of time, physics and the universe is an unforgivable crime. Nothing should be done to inhibit a child’s burgeoning critical faculties, or to corrupt their very sense of the world as an observable, rational and comprehensible place.

Don’t get me wrong. I myself used to believe wholeheartedly in Santa Claus. I used to get letters from him, in this very ornate handwriting. I thought, this could only be the work of a magical being, he writes like a bloody pro. This guy’s the real deal. I also used to get plenty of Valentine’s cards. I don’t think I can properly express the horror I felt on the day I was old enough to realise that the letters from Santa and the Valentine’s cards were all in the same handwriting. That was a shock to me. “Well, Santa. I see last year’s presents have come with a few strings attached. I’m not that sort of boy. But maybe throw in a few easter eggs and we’ll talk.”

The truth was even more horrible. I cross-referenced the Santa letters and the valentine’s cards with the handwriting on my birthday cards. They were from my gran. “Roses are red, I’m your mum’s mummy, I am going to put you, back up in my tummy.” I know she was just trying to boost my fragile little-boy ego, but I really bought in to the whole romantic fantasy. And all that time the unrequited love of my young life was a bloated septugenarian who smelled of cabbage. I was cat-fished by own gran before it was even a thing.

I guess what really irks me about this time of year is the fact that Santa is a secret I’ve had no say in. You don’t need Santa to make Christmas magical, but you do require his absence to maintain an honest and healthy stance on both our society and the universe itself. My silence is being demanded, not to preserve the mystery and magic of the festive season, but to stop me from blowing the whistle on the millions of other families who have chosen to deceive their children. Families who want to keep using Santa as a four-month-long carrot-and-stick combo. This only makes me want to blow the whistle all the more; to send my sons into their future schools with information bombs strapped to their brains, ready to blast your children in their faces with the bright light of truth.

I always want to be truthful with my children.

“Daddy… what happens to grandma and grandpa now that they’re dead? Have they just disappeared? Will I ever see them again?”

“…”

“Daddy?”

“TWO MONTHS UNTIL SANTA COMES, WEE GUY, ARE YOU AS EXCITED AS I AM??!!”

I think I do, anyway.

Admit it: you prefer one child over the other

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birthy1When my son Jack was born, I was filled with an almost cosmic feeling. I took to the keyboard and rattled off an effusive essay that encapsulated my feelings of fatherly pride and love, factoring in a rejection of God and religion along the way. I saw myself in Jack. He was me, I was him. I understood something of the universe, and my place within it. I poured all of my hopes and dreams into the tiny vessel of his wailing, reddened body. He was my world. He was the world. He was everything.

We were a family.

The problem I now find myself facing, following the birth of my second son, Christopher, is how can I write such a thing twice? How can I feel all of that twice? Look at it this way, through the prism of another variety of human love: if you write a book of poetry for your first wife, what the hell do you give your second wife? Two books of poetry? A Ferrari? A dismembered ear? And given how passionately you articulated your undying love the first time around, how can you convince your second wife that your present feelings are to be believed without cheapening the memory of the just-as-genuine feelings you experienced with your first wife?

It goes without saying that I felt a great rush of relief and happiness when Christopher emerged alive and intact from his maternal cocoon; an explosion of love and affection and an urge to safeguard and protect that was only amplified when I held his fluttering, mewling, helpless little body against my skin for the first time. But I also have this guilty, soul-curdling feeling that, this time around, I didn’t feel as much, or as strongly.

Some of it’s the novelty factor (but imagine that I’ve used a word other than ‘novelty’, which usually conjures up images of an electronic singing fish you’re given for Christmas, laugh at once and then throw in the bin). What I mean is, the whole event and its after-shocks the first time around were unmapped, mysterious and terrifying. Now we know what we’re doing, and we know what to expect. For instance, during the first two weeks of Jack’s existence there wasn’t a single moment where both my partner and I were asleep at the same time. We took it in shifts to sit awake with him, all through the day, all through the night, in a bid to ward off surprise attacks from all manner of unwelcome scenarios. A watched kettle never boils, we reasoned: a watched child never dies.

It’s a gruelling time, as all first-time parents know. Each and every sound Jack made acted upon our nervous systems like a fire alarm. Dangers lurked around every corner, and between each of his miniscule breaths. That fear, which can never fully be exorcised, has now been dampened, and with it, I’m sure, some of the spikes of over-powering relief and devotion that follow in fear’s wake. Christopher can now enjoy a set of new, improved and fully desensitised parents. He could scream like a banshee as a giant mutant hawk splintered in through the living room window, and our response would most likely be some species of Parisian shrug.

I guess some of my more subdued feelings can be attributed to my partner’s style of mothering. She breast-feeds and co-sleeps, meaning that my part in proceedings is necessarily limited. Yes, it’s important that I form a bond with Christopher; it’s important that he knows who I am and comes to recognise me as one of the core people sworn to love and protect him, but nothing is more vital – in these early stages at least – than his bond with his mother. If he’s hungry, she feeds him. If he’s frightened, she soothes him. If he soils himself, she… well, okay, I should probably be doing that, too.

birthy3My partner and I decided that the best use of my time during my absence from work would be to concentrate my attentions on Jack; help out the team by occupying its most vocal and demanding member. Take him places and busy him to soften the blow of his mother’s attention being refocused on his little brother. There’s an element of strategy at play, but it’s certainly not an imposition. Jack, at his present stage of development, is endlessly fascinating: his capacity for joy, jokes and affection grows visibly each day; likewise his intelligence, vocabulary and curiosity, the outer-limits of which are increasing exponentially, like a universe expanding. I love being around him, seeing what he does, seeing how he thinks, watching him laugh, coo, cry and dash about, all the while helping to give his critical and emotional faculties a leg-up. He’s fully-formed and ready made, and I can see the difference I make to his life in real-time.

Of course we’ve also been careful to ensure that Jack spends as much time as possible with his mother, both within the wider family and one-on-one; to remind him that although his little brother requires the lion’s share of his mother’s time, he’s not any less important, loved or valued. It’s important for my partner, too, who dearly misses the closeness of the bond she once shared with Jack. In some sense, the baton’s been passed to me. I’ve been privileged these past few weeks to share the bulk of my time with him, and for a long time now I’ve been the one who’s there with him at bed-and-bath times; the one he crawls next to in bed when he toddles through from his bedroom in the dead of night, wrapping his arms around my neck, burrowing into my chest as his body resigns peacefully to sleep.

birthy2You’re not allowed to prefer one child over the other. But how can you avoid it? At least initially. How can I feel equal affection for a living toddler and a cluster of cells in my partner’s womb? (Should I feel love for my nutsack, being as it is a site of potential future Jamie and Jemima Juniors?) Or even a living toddler and a screaming, half-blind purple baby who does nothing but gurn, yelp and poo? Imagine you had two mates: one you could sit and watch Ghostbusters with, and then take on an imaginary ghost hunt around your house; and one who just sat there saying nothing and shitting himself all day? Be honest with yourself.

Who you gonna call?

It’s a taboo thought. You’re not supposed to express a preference for one child over the other, under any circumstances. Before I was a parent, I’d hear people talk about sibling rivalries and jealousies, and the parental imbalances that fuelled them, and I’d say, ‘That’s horrendous. A parent should love their kids equally, no matter how many they have, or how different they are. I think it goes without saying.’ And now, as I get older, and especially since becoming a parent, I’ve found myself thinking… hmmmmmm. I’m looking at other people’s families, at their brothers and sisters, and aunties and uncles, and mums and dads, and I’m thinking, ‘Actually, I can see why they might prefer the other one…’

What worries me most is what will happen in a year or two when Jack is much more self-reliant, and his little brother is hitting the same bench-marks that he’s hitting now; when Jack begins his long, slow journey to becoming a responsible and free-thinking boy, shedding his adorableness along the way as the air rings out with a chorus of ‘nos’, ‘whys’ and ‘why nots’, all accompanied by the percussive beat of stamping, tantrum-tapping feet? Will I find myself secretly, perhaps even subconsciously, preferring Christopher? How do I stop myself from feeling this stuff, and if I can’t stop myself from feeling it, then how do I counter the effects of these feelings – how they manifest in my behaviour – to ensure that I screw my kids up as little as humanly possible? Because some element of screwing them up is inevitable. Over to Philip Larkin, who can offer us some concise, brutal and eloquent words on the subject:

This Be The Verse

   By Philip Larkin

They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
    They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
    And add some extra, just for you.
                            ~
But they were fucked up in their turn
    By fools in old-style hats and coats,
Who half the time were soppy-stern
    And half at one another’s throats.
                            ~
Man hands on misery to man.
    It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
    And don’t have any kids yourself.
                            ~

familyAll of this has got me to thinking about my grandparents, who came from broods ten and twelve strong. If we accept the proposition that the continuation of our genes is the only real point of existence – biologically-speaking of course – then it figures that the bigger the family, the more perfect the expression of this point. But how are we to square this in-built desire to sire with our modern Western notion of parenthood? A notion that holds at its core the idea that we should be able and willing to devote not just time but ‘quality time’ to our children; to be able to guide them and closely oversee their development as loved and loving, free-thinking individuals? After all, smaller class sizes are better, right? Or, in the context of the family unit, will having multiple siblings actually help promote intelligence and language skills? Anyway, never mind the question ‘How can you love twelve children equally?’: how can you even remember their bloody names?

I genuinely believe that much of Osama bin Laden’s thirst for chaos, death and domination was a direct result of having to share his parents’ presence and affections with literally scores of siblings. Forget ‘middle-child syndrome’. What the hell would you have to do to get noticed in that family? I wonder if young Osama began his mission for attention in the traditional manner, perhaps by riding his bike up the street shouting, ‘Look, papa, look at me, no hands!’ (Although that’s probably a phrase you’d be more likely to hear from a Saudi kid after they’ve stolen a bike) Look, Papa, look, I’ve got an ear-ring! I’ve got a tattoo! I’m living in a cave, a real-ass cave, Dad, look, look at me, look at my beard, it’s so long, and my minions, I’ve got minions, Dad, thousands of minions!!! Do any of my other brothers have minions, hmmmm? Hmmmm? I’m even on TV. Dad!! Dad!!!?? Dad!!!!!? Won’t you look at me? Can’t you see what… Oh, fuck it. [launches terrorist attack on the US mainland]. NOW YOU’LL NOTICE ME, DAD!

Osama’s Dad: [sighs] Why couldn’t you have just been a painter and decorator like your brother, Barry bin Laden?

birthy4

It seems that I’m so loathe to engage with my feelings on this subject that I’ve taken us down a highway of distraction to 9/11 itself. Sorry about that. Here’s both an update and a coda, though. While I’ve been writing this article, Christopher has been changing and growing. Yes, he still lists his favourite hobbies as pooing and drinking milk, but the more he’s in my life, and the more times I hold him in my arms and see my reflection in the milky black of his tiny feral eyes, the greater the power he exerts over my heart. I was cradling him in my arms a few days ago, and caught sight of us both in the mirror. I know he’s tiny, and helplessly delicate, but something about that moment, about seeing it and feeling it, caused a sharp surge, like a shock of electricity, to zap down my spine. My little boy.

Yesterday, as I lay Christopher down to change his nappy, he looked up at me, little limbs flailing like a penguin who’s really bad at dancing, and his face contorted into a smile. I know he’s too young for real smiles, and this was just a wind-sponsored facsimile. Try telling that to my heart. He made a wee cooing noise too. We’re a bit far from ‘Daddy’ at this stage of his linguistic development, but never-the-less: I heard Daddy anyway.

I think we’re going to be okay.

[But, just to be clear, Jack’s still in the lead so far!]

[PS: Hi, Christopher-of-the-future. Thanks for reading this. This is the reason you’re a heroin addict today. Love you!]

READ MORE ARTICLES ABOUT PARENTING BELOW

Co-sleeping kids: banished from the bed

Being at the birth

Happy Father’s Day… to me?

On the horror of taking your child to hospital

A Celebration of Public Breastfeeding

Existential Nightmare at the Soft-play Warehouse

Parent and child parking spaces: the dos and don’ts of not being a dick

Flies, Lies and Crime-fighting Dogs

The (not-so) hidden horror of your children’s fairy tales

Reflections on school days, bullying and the bad bus

When people take pictures of your kids

When people take pictures of your kids

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snapWe went on a family trip to Glasgow last week to visit the Glasgow Transport Museum (now housed within the Riverside Museum at Pointhouse Quay) and the Tall Ship (which is moored behind the museum).

The Transport Museum is great if you love having exactly sixteen seconds to admire each display before being surrounded by a crowd of feral, elbowing families, who envelop you like something out of World War Z. Probably best to avoid the museum unless you happen to be a nostalgic, history-loving giraffe. Especially since a large proportion of the exhibits are displayed on shelves fifty feet in the air (I mean, I know Glasgow has a few issues with car theft, but surely that’s excessive).

car3The Transport Museum has a penny-pressing machine. We can never pass one without taking home a souvenir. You place a pound coin and a penny into the slot, and turn a wheel to press the penny into a flat oval embossed with a little picture, and description, of the place you’re visiting. Yes, they’re tacky little pier-side trinkets, but time’s fast march will transform them into priceless treasures, especially once my partner and I are in the ground being pressed into flat ovals of dust and gloop by the inescapable might of bio-chemistry. Depending on how good a job we do raising our children to be sensitive, sentimental beings, there’s every chance they might try to flog them on Ebay the second we’re dead.

I sat in an old tram with my young son as my partner busied off to the machine. As she stood fishing in her purse for coins, a jolly German giant approached her and asked if he could trouble her for a penny. He was a stout, rotund fella with a perma-smile and a big beard, whose giganticness was more horizontal than vertical. Imagine a Tolkein dwarf who’s red-cheeked and merry after his first four vodkas of the night.

I didn’t know the gent was German at the time, you understand. He wasn’t kitted out in lederhosen and loudly apologising for the war or anything like that. I inferred his nationality later in the timeline of this story, information I could’ve imparted to you in a more natural and fluid manner, but doing so would’ve robbed me of the use of the deliciously alliterative phrase ‘jolly German giant’.

tramsThe jolly German giant took the wheel of the machine straight after my partner had picked up her flattened knickknack. Before placing his money in the slot he spent a full two minutes staring into the mechanism with wide-eyed wonder, spinning the wheel around and around, and acting for all the world like a child who’d been turned into a man by a haunted speak-your-future machine at a Coney Island fairground.

“What the hell is wrong with that guy?” I asked my partner as she joined us on the old tram.

“He’s happy.”

I shook my head. “Fucking lunatic.”

I noticed he had a high-tech camera fastened to a strap around his neck. He lifted it up and snapped a picture of the machine, before peppering the wall-of-high-shelved cars with a barrage of clicks.

maxresdefaultWe walked outside and boarded the tall ship. On the decks there were four little barrels filled with water, each with a tiny brush sticking out of them. As my son seems to have inherited my partner’s mild OCD and love of cleaning, he was more than happy to lift out a brush and start swabbing the decks pirate-style, a task he would’ve doubtless spent the whole day engaged in had we let him. I could feel my partner’s eyes boring into me and sending me a stern, unspoken message: ‘See? That’s how you pick up a brush, you big swine.’

The wee guy looked adorable in his shorts, sandals and jaunty bunnet, as he attacked the grime of the deck with a single-minded zeal. I was felled by his cuteness. “We’ve got to get a picture of this,” I said. I wasn’t the only one who thought so. The jolly German giant appeared at our side, his camera raised like a rifle. Before we knew what was happening he’d snipered off a shot. Click! He gave us a wide, beaming grin. “He looks like a little sailor,” he said, shaking his head at the adorableness of it all before bounding off down the deck. He wasn’t whistling, but he was walking like he should have been.

I stood frozen to the spot, certain that something awful had happened but unable for the moment to articulate it.

“Did he…?”

My partner nodded.

“I mean, should we be bothered by that?” I asked.

“I don’t know…” she said.

“He should’ve asked our permission,” I said, the sound of my son’s swishing adding a staccato rhythm to my thoughts. “Which we wouldn’t have given.”

My partner winced. Then tilted her head back and forth. Then shrugged. “I guess it’s okay. I mean, I don’t think he meant any harm.”

I felt uneasy. At worst, I’d failed to act to protect my son’s safety and interests. At best, I’d allowed my authority as a parent to be usurped by a stranger. My own social conditioning had rendered me static and mute: wanting to preserve the status quo, not wanting to cause a fuss, always aiming to be cordial and polite.  Irritation twitched in my toes, sparking a chain-reaction of nerve-signals that rocketed up my leg and culminated in a controlled explosion of anger in my belly. My chest tightened. A lump formed in my throat. My brain had bees dancing across it. My lip curled into a snarl, and before I could make a rational and considered assessment of the situation and calmly decide my next course of action, I was already striding down the ship in the direction of the departed German.

“I’m going to find that guy,” I called back.

“Oh, Christ, Jamie, not again!”

“Keep the wee guy safe,” I said, suddenly wishing I’d had a pair of shades to hand. It felt somehow very cinematic, despite the fact that I was a red-faced, disgruntled, pot-bellied lanky-pants, and not Arnold Schwarzenegger.

decksWe don’t put pictures of our son on-line. Obviously, there’s a stranger-danger element. Once a photo hits cyberspace, even if it’s only shared with people you know on Facebook, you lose custody of it. Facebook is like a many-tentacled space octopus, its connections and degrees-of-separation almost impossible to chart or quantify. You never really know who’s watching, or why.

And then there’s the old-fashioned argument: that if tens, hundreds or thousands of people have ready access to your memories then those memories cease to feel as special. Better to have complete ownership of, and the exclusive distribution rights to, the unfolding storybook of your children’s lives. Better to have sets of physical photobooks to flick through as a family in the years to come, in the knowledge that only the people closest to you have been privileged enough to see them (‘But wait, Jamie, aren’t you ceaselessly blogging about your son’s life as it unfolds, I mean, isn’t that even more of an intimate thing to share than a set of photographs; don’t you think that makes you a bit of a hypocr…[imaginary opponent struggles against the onset of a chloroform knock-out, as I press the soaked rag to their mouth]’ “Shhhhh, shhhhh. Sleep now, shhhhhhh.”).

Lastly, look at how celebrity impacts on celebrities: the paparazzi, the flash photography, the front-page scoops and four-page spreads. It turns a lot of them into arrogant, conceited assholes. Facebook is doing a good job of donating a big box of celebrity-lite crowns to the masses; it’s like an on-line Hello magazine for the less significant, allowing people to become pseudo-stars in their own social circles, if not society at large. Look how narcissistic we’ve become. CHALLENGE ACCEPTED! What challenge? The challenge to post even more pictures of yourself on-line than you did yesterday? Yeah, but SOCIAL ISSUES, SOCIAL AWARENESS, SOCIAL JUSTICE, stop pooing on our parades, you meanie, we’re trying to save the world with these pictures of ourselves… and if we happen to look kind and successful – and smoking hot, incidentally, if we do say so ourselves – while doing it, then all the better!

trumanThere’s no way to know exactly what effect being displayed to the world from the moment of birth will have on our kids. In any case, I’m pretty sure The Truman Show was meant as a cautionary tale. We’re out. When he’s old enough to consent to having his picture disseminated to the world at large, then he can make that decision for himself. Although if some movie producer were to offer us £1m for our son to have a starring role in a Hollywood blockbuster, we might have to re-evaluate our stance on the matter.

Back to the boat.

I scoured every inch of it: my nostrils flared out, my swagger in full swing. Up stairs, down stairs, through dark and noisy lower decks, behind this, in front of that, here, there and everywhere.

Just as I was about to give up and resign myself to failure, I spied the jolly German giant sitting upon a bench on the shore, just about to tuck into a sandwich. I crossed the gang-plank and strode towards him, all of the possible scenarios of our imminent meeting playing out in my mind: me calling the police, me punching him, me throwing his expensive camera into the sea, me throwing the German into the sea.

imagesI sat down next to him, and stared ahead, like a spymaster about to pass details of a top-secret mission to his agent.

“I know you’re an amateur photographer, and you didn’t mean any harm, but I’m going to have to ask you to delete the picture you took of my son.”

I turned and looked him in the eyes. His jolly grin was gone. “Of course, of course,” he said, setting down his sandwich and groping for his camera. My anger was gone. I was reasonably certain that the sandwich-gobbling snapper wasn’t a nonce, but at this point it didn’t matter. Still, even with right on my side, it was an immensely awkward conversation. I had to reassure this guy that I didn’t think he was a paedophile while at the same time making it clear that I thought he might just be a paedophile. Schrodinger’s paedophile?

“You understand, we don’t even post pictures of our own son on Facebook.”

“It’s your choice, I’m sorry, I should have asked you first. I did not mean to cause distress. I will of course delete it,” he said, fiddling with the buttons on the camera.

He was cordial, sincere and deferent. All the same…

“I don’t want to sound like an asshole here, but could I watch you do it? Could you show me?”

He showed me. I had sounded like an asshole. Buto nly because I was a Scottish guy using the word ‘asshole’ and not the more colloquially appropriate ‘arsehole’ or even ‘bawbag’.

“Thank you,” I said as I got up and walked off towards the boat again. I patted my pockets. Still no shades.

As I re-boarded the boat, I realised something important: I’d spent so long scouring the decks for the jolly German giant that I had no idea where my partner and young son were.

What a fine job I did of protecting them.

PS: The picture the German took wasn’t very good. It was snapped at a weird diagonal angle. That proves one of two things: 1) he really was a paedophile, or 2) he was just a really shite photographer.

Or both I suppose.

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When your kid goes from angel… to Hell’s Angel

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behaveangelImagine the scene. Your kid is on the cusp of becoming a toddler. They spend their days teetering around, swishing behind them a rainbow of babbles, innocence and light. They seem to tip-toe across rooms like a lady at an etiquette school balancing books on her bonce, their little head wobbling gently in the manner of an acquiescent Indian’s, but holding firm and steady, their gaze fixed on some far-off and unseen horizon.

There are, however, no books resting atop that diminutive dome, only a single, solitary halo, round and bright and smooth and solid, a perfect crown for a perfect kid. The halo will stay, of that you’re certain, permanent proof of your supremacy as parents. The concept of sharing? Tick. A sweet, happy and loving disposition? Tick. Absence of tantrums? Tick. You’ve done everything right, in fact you’ve re-written the rule book, and made right look positively, prehistorically left. Hundreds of thousands of years of child-rearing distilled and crystalised into the body of that zen-like little creature you’ve gifted to the world. If you had a mic you’d drop it, walk past a billion-strong crowd of parents with a sneer on your lips and a swagger in your step: “Suck our block-rocking cocks, Doctor Spock! Mum and dad out! ”

I remember the days well. When our little boy was very small, my partner and I would find ourselves in restaurants, or soft-plays, or attending children’s parties, surveying the raft of shrieking, wailing, kicking, screaming, biting, slapping demon spawn around us; we’d observe the scarlet-faced, coarse-voiced frustration of their parents, and we’d each raise a silent furry eyebrow in the other’s direction. Our eyebrows would receive such regular and herculian workouts that it’s a wonder the juts of our brows weren’t rendered cro-magnan with the extra layers of muscle.

Afterwards, in the car or safely back home, we’d dissect the scenes, two Glasgow tenament women gossiping over a fence, arrogance and self-righteousness flooding from our mouths like bile-flavoured milkshakes: “Did you see it when that kid hit that other kid? Oh, I know, and then when he… yeah, and then that little girl, you know the one, the one with the messy big face, when she kicked that boy in the… oh, I know, I know. And when that kid stole that sandwich from the smaller kid and shoved it in his mouth, and the mother just… well, she just sat there… I mean, our kid would never do that, never, and even if he did, well, I mean, we simply wouldn’t stand for it, would we?” No, of course that wouldn’t happen to us. Impossible. I mean, that’s a halo on his head, not a hoopla. It’s fixed. It’s everlasting. We’ve won at parenting, that’s what that halo means.

It’s the age-old tale. Just as you’re busy awarding yourself with a machine-gun volley of self-congratulatory slaps on the back, a funny thing happens…

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Your kid turns into a fucking asshole.

That’s right, people. A beautiful, wonderful, magnificent asshole, sure, but an asshole none-the-less. They push kids. They snatch toys. They hurtle down the aisles of the supermarket whooping and laughing, their ears closed to your hollers of protestation. They lob their dinner at the cat. They lob the cat at their dinner. They start ritually sacrificing goats and glugging the blood like wine.

The transformation doesn’t happen overnight. At least it didn’t for us. I still remember the day when the bubble of our hubris was loudly and decisively popped, in public, during a trip to the safari park. The lion’s share of the day (forgive me) had passed without incident; our darling boy had cooed at the elephants, stood enthralled by the giraffes, and laughed his little ass off at the meerkats. It was a time of great joy, and peace, just like all the rest of our times. Why should this day be any different? In retrospect, it was the most apposite time for the universe to send this particular piano of truth crashing down atop our heads.

My son, as we learned that day – and have never forgotten – is highly skilled at perfectly timing his tantrums and manic episodes to coincide with those moments where we find ourselves trapped and unable to pull free from the orbit of his naughtiness. Like, for example, when we’re crammed into a small boat with twenty-five strangers en route to Chimp Island.

chimp boat

I had been excited. “I wonder what those chimps are going to get up to,” I said to my partner. “The reason these boats have cages around them isn’t simply to protect us from an audacious chimp attack or prevent us from falling overboard. They’re there to protect us from the rocks and sticks the chimps like to hurl at the boats. Not to mention clumps of their own shite. God, I’ll bet they’re going to go absolutely mental, and jump around and throw shite at us. Oh please say that they’ll do all that, please, I can’t wait to see them go crazy!”

Disappointingly, and perhaps unsurprisingly, they did nothing. They just stood there on the shore, staring mutely at us, bored and weary looks weighing down their ancient hairy faces. My son instantly siezed the opportunity to show his lesser cousins how boisterousness was done, homo sapien-style, claiming centre stage for himself. He writhed and flailed in my arms, shrieking like a banshee in a house-fire, his little limbs pumping like pistons oiled by evil. He occasionally ceased his shrieks to sink his tiny little teeth into the soft flesh of my shoulder. I had to hold him back, and aloft, like he was some psychopathically recalcitrant zombie Scrappy Doo. All eyes on the boat turned to us: the hairless missing links that were infinitely more interesting to behold than the sluggish, half-arsed primates across the water.

Water, I thought. I’ll give him a drink of his water; that’ll distract him. Well, it did, and it didn’t. He started loading it into his mouth like liquid ammunition and spitting it everywhere, raining down globs of watery child saliva upon the shoulders of those poor souls  unfortunate enough to find themselves in our immediate vicinity. Never have so many sorries been uttered in such a short a space of time to so many by so few. I could already hear the judgements and condemnations forming in their minds, as they prepared to engage in the same sorts of conversations that we’d always enjoyed having about other people’s naughty children. It’s funny how you find yourself playing to the gallery during those moments, loudly spelling out the extenuating circumstances behind your child’s behaviour for all to hear. “He’s not normally like this… I SAID HE’S NOT NORMALLY LIKE THIS, CAN YOU HEAR ME AT THE BACK UP THERE?! I’LL SAY IT MORE LOUDLY, I SAID HE’S NOT NORMALLY LIKE THIS!”

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A few weeks ago we attended an American friend’s fourth of July barbecue. Naturally, we dressed Jack in a Captain America costume, complete with superhero shield. I had been very close to ordering my partner and I Uncle Sam hats and Obama masks for the occasion. Thank Christ I didn’t, because when we arrived there was nothing identifiably American about the occasion, save for the host herself. I blame my misconceptions on Rocky IV, which I’ve obviously interpreted as some sort of cultural documentary. I dread to think how we would have dressed our kid had we been invited to a Hindu celebration.

Anyway, our wee guy was five to eight months older than most of the kids at the barbecue, and was long overdue a nap. As a consequence, his ‘well-developed concept of sharing’ was buried deep within a fog of pissiness. He snatched books and toys from the smaller kids, and knocked them over like pins at a bowling arcade. You feel paralysed at times like this. People who have no frame of reference for your kid’s behaviour will naturally assume that you’ve raised an asshole. You want to chide your kid, to show that you’re not a passive parent who tolerates unruly behaviour, but at the same time you feel you have to hold back your sterner inclinations because you also don’t want to come across as the boom-voiced, authoritarian dick you are at home. I just ended up sounding like Hooks from Police Academy, with an apologetic, wobbly whisper escaping from my mouth in the mould of ‘Don’t move… dirtbag,’ followed by a muttered string of, ‘He’s not normally like this-es’ and ‘He’s a wee sweetheart at home-s.’

Don’t misunderstand. Our boy isn’t the devil. He’s still a sweet, bright, caring and loving little person, and thoroughly well-behaved the vast majority of the time, which is one way of saying that the beatings are working. He’s never surly or aggressive or violent, he just occasionally likes to flaunt his moxy, and wear a look on his face that says: ‘There hasn’t been a naughty step built that can hold me, motherfuckers.’

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I guess the occasional bout of bad behaviour is par for the course at certain stages of a child’s development. And sometimes what we class as bad behaviour is a by-product of limits being tested or the flexing some new found muscle of freedom or experience. It’s our job to introduce him to consequences and responsiblity, certainly, and to socialise him, and protect him from the unfiltered excesses of his own ego and the punishments he might face from those outside the family with a less forgiving eye, but it’s also our job to understand what he’s thinking and how he’s feeling, and ask ourselves why he might be behaving in a certain way. We owe him that. Sometimes he’s hungry, sometimes he’s tired, sometimes he lacks the language skills to convey his feelings and communicate his desires, which can lead to frustration. Sometimes, when we make an effort to trace the genesis of a particular action or behaviour, we’ll discover that we, the parents, are the unwitting Kaiser Szozes.

For instance, we’ll chase him around the house telling him we’re going to eat his legs off, and then react with shock and anger when he later runs up to us and sinks his teeth into our leg. Or we’ll make the experience of teeth-brushing more fun by preceding it with a round-the-house, laughter-filled chase, and then lose our shit when he decides it would be funny to replicate the chase in a busy supermarket when we’re lugging heavy baskets of fresh produce. This is one reason we’ll never smack or strike him. What will you then do if your child hits someone? Hit them harder? To teach them about the abuse of power and hypocrisy?

We’re learning that the toddler years, especially as we prepare to enter the infamous ‘terrible twos’, are a period of constant adjustment and correction, of our behaviour as much as his.

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It’s reasonably easy to predict what a baby will do. But as a baby becomes a toddler becomes a child becomes a teenager becomes an adult, the range of possibilities stretched before them – of thought, of action, of mood, of mind, of experience – increases a million-fold, transforming the relationship between cause and effect into a dizzying, ever-multiplying web of connections. They’re exposed to other kids, other family members, other adults in your friend circle, strangers, the TV, a multitude of new sounds and smells and toys and concepts. Life is complex, and complicated, and so’s your kid.

What I’m saying is, should ever see our little boy dashing around a supermarket with a mischevious glint in his eye as we lumber after him like angry dog-catchers, or hear me roaring in pain because my darling son has just sprinted towards me and sunk his teeth into my crotch, please reserve your judgement. I promise to do the same for you. And keep your eyes trained on the empty space above his skull. If you screw up your eyes and strain really hard, you’ll still be able to see the faint outline of a halo. Not quite as bright as it once was. Maybe not as perfectly round. But it’s there.

I promise you it’s still there.

MORE ARTICLES ON PARENTHOOD

Co-sleeping kids: banished from the bed

Happy Father’s Day… to me?

On the horror of taking your child to hospital

A Celebration of Public Breastfeeding

Existential Nightmare at the Soft-play Warehouse

Flies, Lies and Crime-fighting Dogs