Tag Archives: dinner

The Jobs of the Future, Today

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The jobs people have and the work they do can tell us a lot about what it was like to live during different times in human history. The technologies and philosophies. The hopes and dreams. The haves and have-nots. But what about the UK now, today, in our machine-led age of brands, connectivity, the internet, and social media? What kind of work is out there, and what does it tell us about the experience of living and working in 2019?

Roving reporter Jamie Andrew waded into the workforce to find out.

Davey Johnson, 46, Salt-of-the-Earth Compliance Officer, Alloa, Scotland

I’m a no-nonsense, tells-it-like-it-is, salt-of-the-earth type, and my job is to make sure that the rest of the world knows it. I carry out most of my work on the threads underneath articles shared on social media by local news organisations.

It’s exhausting work. I’m there, first thing in the morning, desperately trying to find ways to put a right-wing spin on the more gentle and whimsical articles with which these outlets tend to start the day. It can be tough. You know, I might have to find something militant to say about, say, a wee boy winning a prize for drawing a nice picture of a rabbit at his school. I’ll do it in baby steps, start off with a, ‘Wisnae like that in my day’, maybe follow it up with a, ‘These snowflakes and their pictures – I was shooting rabbits at his age’, and before I know it, I’ve slam-dunked it with a ‘Wonder if they’ll still let us draw rabbits come the Muslim caliphate, eh?’

By lunch-time it’s easy. Me, I’m feeling like Neo fae the Matrix: whoosh, bam, kaplow! Everything’s just happening, like magic. I’m skimming the headlines or the wee prompts by the page admin, and the replies are just boomin’ out of me…

‘Should kids start school at 10am instead of 8am?’ BOOM! Should they FUCK! ‘What do you think about smacking children?’ BLAM! Dae it as hard as possible. Never did me ony harm! ‘Breast-feeding in public?’ SLAP! Tits oot for the lads, absolutely NOT tits oot at my dinner table, ya manky bastards. ‘What do you think about the government’s initiative to lower the murder rate in our cities? ‘BASH! Bloody pansies! My grandfather murdered me when I was 12. And it never did me ony harm!’

The trick is to sound a bit like you’re in that Monty Python’s Yorkshireman sketch, but eighty per cent more racist.

I’m bloody good at my job. Science, solidarity and compassion are no match for the angry, knee-jerk opinions of working-class, salt-of-the-earth types like me.

Randall McCallum, 31 Dinner Photographer, Bangor, NI

Not everyone can afford a new car or a dream home to rub in their followers faces on Facebook or Twitter. You don’t need that. These days, the battle to win over hearts and minds – well, the battle to make hearts and minds seethe with rage and envy – is being fought at the dinner table. That’s where I come in.

Forget fortune. You don’t need a new car to make Elspeth who used to be in your class at school jealous as fuck. The new signifier of social sophistication is food. Or, as I like to say, Duck L’Orange is the new hatchback.

All you need is a really snobby meal slapped on a dinner plate and snapped artistically, perhaps with some augmentation filter added in so the food looks like it’s glowing or glistening – just as long as you don’t use the wrong filter and end up accidentally attaching donkey ears to your Colombian goat-loin curry.

I’m so good at what I do I can make waffles look like a meal Gordon Ramsay might one day demand to impregnate. I drape parsley over them, sexily – so bloody sexy that it seems like Leo Di Caprio might paint it – then I tag it with something like #FreshPotatoGriddles, maybe even translate it to French first, because French makes everything shit sound really good, you know, with the possible exception of Citreon and Renault.

Before I got in to dinner-plate photography, I was in the wine business. I used to snap pictures of women’s hands clutching wine glasses, and then I’d add captions in post-production like, ‘WINE O’CLOCK’, ‘BEEN THINKING ABOUT THIS ALL DAY’, and ‘OBLIGATORY AIRPORT PHOTO’, you know. The work dried up, though, mainly because my clients didn’t. They all died of cirrhosis.

For the future, I’m thinking about going into business with my cousin, Tristan, the world-famous ‘Dick-Pic Stylist’. Super talented guy, he used to have Wayne Rooney and Leslie Grantham on retainer.

Jeremy Phillipston, 23 Professional Netflix Content Absorber, Cardiff, Wales

The best part about my job is when I’m talking to someone, and they’re telling me that they’ve heard about this great new series that’s just arrived on Netflix, and I get to cut them off with, ‘Yeah, I finished it last night, it’s great, you should watch it.’ I love that.I love watching their little smiles become hyphens.

The Haunting of Hill House, the Ted Bundy Tapes, the new season of Daredevil, sixteen new films that were only dropped on Netflix last night – before you’ve even had a chance to hear about them, I’ve fucking seen them. All of them.

Not everyone appreciates what I do. Parents with young children, people who work, people who don’t sit in their pyjamas for entire days at a time eating nothing but crisps – they all resent me. It’s not my fault they’re lazy, though. They should get their priorities straight. Problem they have is, they’re spending too much time playing with their children. Too much time talking to their partners. In short, too much chilling, not enough Netflix. If I can make people feel inadequate and excluded enough that they feel driven to binge-watch television to the exclusion of all else in their lives, then job done.You’re welcome, society.

This job was recommended to me because of my interest in my grandfather’s career. He was a Full-time Plot Spoiler, and he was bloody good at it. He’d walk out of elevators with a big mobile phone clamped to his ear shouting things like, ‘YEAH, YEAH, BRUCE WILLIS WAS DEAD THE WHOLE TIME, I KNOW, I KNOW, WHAT A FUCKING TWIST.’ He once took out a full-page ad in The Times that said, YOU KNOW THAT MOVIE ‘SAW’? WELL, THE DEAD GUY IN THE MIDDLE OF THE ROOM IS THE BADDIE. PS: STONE ME, DARTH VADER IS LUKE’S FATHER.

They’re making the story of his life into a 12-part series on Netflix next year, which I’ve already seen last week.You should watch it.

Sharon Grantham, 35 Worker in a GIF factory, Huddersfield, England

Me mam worked in a factory supplying funny pictures of cats and husbands to Bella and That’s Life magazines from 1969 to 1998, so I guess this sort of thing’s in me blood – along with the diabetes.

I started off in the Meme Warehouse, but most of me friends ,last few years, said the money was in GIFs – well, they pay more, in them GIF factories, ’cause it’s more dangerous an’ that. Some of them GIFs – they don’t look big on the screen, or, like, when you use them on your phone, do they? – but some of them are, like, the size of cardboard boxes, you know, them great big ones. The big boxes you’d use if you were movin’ house and that. And heavy. I knew a lass who got crushed to death by a GIF of a dancing beaver, just splatted her face off, it did. Bits of her brains all over me shoe. Worse, though, them that ordered the GIF deleted it almost as soon as they put it on Facebook, cause what they wanted was actually a GIF of a dancing Diva, but the predictive thingy put the wrong word, so me friend died for fook all, which is a shame. Still, the boss donated a nice GIF for her funeral, it was a flower all growing fast in fast motion, like it were speeded up, so the flower started off hanging down then jumped up and out, you know. I thought it were nice, but Jimmy who works the line with me was like, Christ, Sharon, that’s the GIF me and me mates use if we wanna say a woman’s given us a stiffy, and I said oh my God, and he’s like, well, I guess she is a stiffy now, so maybe it’s alright?

It’s dead hard in the GIF factory. We can be on the production line, and the big horn’ll go off, and the boss will say over the loudspeaker, he’ll shout something like: ”ERE, YOU, YOU LAZY BITCHES, THERE A WOMAN ON A GROUP IN FACEBOOK WHO’S NOT ‘APPY ABOUT SOMETHING, SO SHE NEEDS A GIF OF A BIG BLACK LADY WAGGLIN’ ‘ER FINGER. NOT TOO SASSY IN THE FACE CAUSE SHE’S ANGRY, BUT SHE’S NOT ‘ANGRY’ ANGRY, IF YOU KNOW WHAT AH MEAN. ALSO, ‘OW WE GETTIN’ ON WITH THE BATCH OF GIFS OF ALL DIFFERENT PEOPLE BEING SICK? NEED IT FAST, PIERS MORGAN’S ABOUT TO GO ON AIR.”

I’m proud of it, cause the boss says most folk just talk in GIFs now anyway, like, cause it’s easier and more fun, and you can say lots more than you can with words, and there won’t be any words left by this time next year cause of Brexit, cause once we run out of words we won’t be able to get any more sent in from Sweden or wherever they come from. Where is it we get words from again?

READ MORE OF JAMIE’S ROVING REPORTS BELOW

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Is the billionaire superhero ‘fake news’?

 

Parents vs Kids: The War for Dinner

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My mum says I was a bad eater as a child. The eating itself wasn’t a problem, you understand. I could eat things. I just put them in my mouth, chewed them and swallowed them in the traditional way. It was the range of things that I ate, or rather didn’t eat, that seemed to be the problem. It was all actual food, mind you. I wasn’t wolfing down a nightly feast of cardboard boxes, tungsten drill-heads and Tupperware, like some ravenous pregnant woman with the world’s weirdest case of cravings. As I understand it, I would choose one or two foods, and then eat nothing but that thing or those things for months at a time, to the exclusion of all other foods and food groups. One month it might be sweetcorn, another corned beef, another it might be, oh, I don’t know, Monster Munch on toast in a sardine marinade sprinkled with hundreds of thousands.

My mum worried about me because I wasn’t getting enough nutrients, or vitamins, or Mega Threes, or Flava-flavins, or frogs’ eyes, or whatever magic constituents lurk inside our food to make it wholesome and worthy. Her worry drove her to war, a war of attrition fought nightly on the battlefield of our dinner table, over which hallowed ground she would deliver her valiant war cry: “And if you think you’re leaving that bloody table before you’ve eaten every last piece of your dinner, you’ve got another bloody thing coming!”

Ed Sheeran? Haven’t these people fucking suffered enough?

Or she’d reference the Africans, and try to make me feel guilty for having food to waste. I always wondered why – if she cared so much – she didn’t donate money and tins of food to Africa on a weekly basis, but I was too young – and in any case too smart – to articulate this sense of hypocrisy. I always imagined slopping my mum’s mince and tatties into a big envelope with ‘C/O The Africans’ written on it and then posting it to them, only to find it returning weeks later because the Africans weren’t up for eating it either.

[as I got older I took to wondering why it was always the Africans who were starving. Weren’t the Vanuatuans or the Malaysians or the Peruvians ever hungry? I came to the conclusion that the Africans must’ve had a better PR guy]

“Any leftovers and I’ll take this knife to your blazers, you couple of poxy knobs.”

I spent my childhood as a political prisoner, and that dinner table was my Robben Island. I’d go on hunger strike after hunger strike, fighting an endlessly raging war for sovereignty over my own stomach. Every fifteen minutes or so my mother’s scowl would appear through a crack in the kitchen door, and she’d snarl, ‘I MEAN IT’ or ‘YOU’D BETTER START EATING’, and I’d stare at the cooling meal on the table before me and wonder if I was going to buckle; wondered if it would be better just to swallow my pride, along with some freezing cold chips.

Turns out, though, I was really, really good at being stubborn. Really good. This came as a shock to my mother, who’d always considered herself the most stubborn person who’d ever lived; the sort of woman who’d hesitate to swerve first in a game of chicken with a train being propelled along the track by a nuclear missile. I’d sit there at that dinner table for hours and endless hours, bored yet determined. I’d wait for the force and frequency of the ‘I MEAN Its’ to wither and wain, which they always did (if only because mum liked to sit in the kitchen at night, and didn’t want to share her sacred space with a belligerent mute).

Stick your mince and potatoes up your arse!

Gradually her anger and determination would sputter and fade, like a fire starved of oxygen, and eventually she’d walk into the kitchen, eyes downcast, her face a stoic mask, and she’d say, softly but sternly, ‘Go – get out of my sight’, and I’d try to hiss my ‘yessssss’ of victory as quietly as possible so as not to breach the terms of my release.

Sometimes she’d say, “And you’d better not grow up to be the sort of person who compares himself to Nelson Mandela in a blog about being a fussy eater as a child, because if I catch you devaluing or trivialising the political, racial and racist turmoil in South Africa in the late 20th century, you’ll hear me, boy!”

Sometimes I’d have a schedule to keep – a game to play, a comic to write, I dunno, a nose to pick or something – and couldn’t afford to lose my precious leisure time staring at a plate of cold fish fingers. I’d eschew potentially lengthy direct action for an altogether sneakier tactic of pretending that I’d cleared the plate by surreptitiously disposing of the food. I always needed a meticulously thought-out, fool-proof plan; my mother was an almost omniscient opponent. She considered every eventuality and side-effect, like some human distillation of the Breaking Bad writers’ room.

This picture’s creepy as shit. It’s like a still from Hannibal or something.

The most seemingly obvious course of action was feeding the unwanted food to our dog, but that, I quickly learned, was the surest route to discovery. The dog wasn’t a wily co-conspirator: he was just a greedy beast. He’d dive-bomb the bowl with his nose, nudging and smacking and chomping and grunting, attacking it with the single-minded ferocity of a shark feasting on a lacerated leg, until his bowl was clattering like a man-hole cover a giant had spun like a penny and was now noisily losing momentum. The activity couldn’t have been more conspicuous had our parrot started screeching ‘HE’S FEEDING THE DOG HIS MINCE AND TATTIES! HE’S FEEDING THE DOG HIS MINCE AND TATTIES!’ – especially considering that we didn’t even have a parrot.

I couldn’t instead choose to hand-feed the leftovers to the dog piece by piece from the comfort of my chair, as one bite would’ve had the dog camped next to me salivating and wagging his tail long after the food was finished, certainly long enough for his proximity and excitement to betray my actions.

Emu: I stuffed him good

I’d have to get creative. Sometimes I’d smuggle mounds and scraps of food out of the room up my sleeve or down my sock, taking little pieces at a time, and in the process transforming mealtimes into a lower-stakes version of The Great Escape. My mum’s ears were ever alert to the flushing of the toilet – she was always one step ahead – so I’d have to get creative when disposing of the evidence. I’d hide food down the back of my bed, inside cupboards and sock-drawers, with a view to properly disposing of it later. Sometimes, amateur that I am, I neglected that last part. Once, I completely forgot that I’d stuffed six Richmond sausages inside my Emu hand-puppet. Rotting pig meat tends to signal its presence somewhat. Naturally, my stinking stash was discovered, and I was hauled before our cottage’s kangaroo court. I should’ve claimed that my Emu was a hyper-realistic bird, with semi-functional intestines and everything, but I was assigned a thoroughly uncreative and shit lawyer: myself.

And so the war raged on.

I’ve been thinking about these tea-time sieges more and more since becoming a parent: now that the terrorised has become the terrorist, if you like. I know how difficult it is to get kids to eat food that’s good for them; hell, sometimes you can’t even get them to eat the beige stuff that’s really bad for them. When our eldest was a baby and a toddler – even up until very recently – he would eat anything that was presented to him, from the ridiculous to the sublime, the exotic to the execrable, the delicious to the … not quite so delicious.

While other parents might’ve fretted about their young ‘uns forsaking the son-of-a-bitch broccoli, the mother-effing manges tout and the C-word cauliflower, we were hard-pressed to stop our child from eating. It’s definitely a family trait. His younger brother, now almost two, is exactly the same, but perhaps times a billion. He eats everything in his path. He’s a plague given human shape; a bipedal shark. He’ll eat his dinner, then beg and scream for his brother’s, then ours, then the cat’s. He’ll follow us around the house making munching noises and nodding his head in vigorous agreement with himself, thinking his nods are strong enough to open the fridge and cupboard doors and cause food to fly out of them and straight into his mouth.

His big brother is four, and for a while now he’s been threatening to enlist full-time in the same child-army regiment I fought in during the great dinner-table wars of the 1980s and 90s. Now it’s my turn to fret. You worry when your child starts to become fussy about their food, or starts eating less, you do. You can’t help it. You worry they’ll get rickets or scurvy, or that child services will eventually send a SWAT TEAM to infiltrate your house armed with lentils and quinoa. You panic that a judge will throw the book at you for mis-feeding and starving your kids, and sentence you to waddle naked through the streets as morbidly obese people whip your exposed back with strawberry laces.

So how do you make them eat, while managing to keep on the right side of the UN conventions on torture?

When they’re very young you can do the aeroplane thing with their food. You know what I mean. You pick up the spoon, shovel some food onto it, look them straight in the eye, bring the spoon up into the air, and say, ‘Eat this, you son of a bitch, or you’ll be on the first fucking plane to Mexico!’

But that only works for so long.

If they absolutely refuse to try a new food, especially if it’s some hitherto undiscovered vegetable, you can trick them into thinking they’re missing out on the tastiest food in the universe by shoving a piece of it in your mouth and being as overly demonstrative about how delicious it is as you can, to the point where you’re having PG-rated orgasms right there before their very eyes (even though you think it’s horrendous, too).

“Oh my God, GOD, what IS this? Mummy, have you TRIED this? OH MY GOD! OH MY GOD! OH, I NEED THIS! I NEED THIS EVERY NIGHT! OH JESUS CHRIST! I need a cigarette…”

In your determination to see them eat good food you’re forced to become an expert negotiator, carving up meals like they’re mineral rights; or pacing up and down next to the dinner table like a frazzled detective trying to nail a confession from a killer.

“OK, how about you eat all of this chicken breast, half of the carrots and two potatoes, and then we can all walk away happy? How about you do that?”

“You trying to insult me? How about I spit on your offer? How about I do that?”

“You wanna play hard-ball, huh? OK, wiseguy, a quarter of the carrots and one potato. But that’s my FINAL offer.”

“Well here’s MY final offer: suck my balls!”

“That’s cute. You want I should take my offer off the table?”

“I want you to take EVERYTHING off the table. Literally, take it, get it the fuck off the table, I won’t eat it, ANY of it.”

“YOU STUPID SON OF A BITCH, YOU’RE KILLING ME HERE, YOU KNOW THAT? [slams table with palm of hand] HERE IT IS! THREE BITES OF CHICKEN. AND A CARROT!”

“NO!”

“TWO BITES OF CHICKEN AND HALF A CARROT!!!”

“I want my lawyer.”

“EAT IT! EAT IT, DAMN YOU, OR I’LL JAM IT DOWN YOUR GOD DAMNED THROAT.”

[folds arms, stares straight ahead, shakes head]

“Tough guy, eh? [leans in dead close] Well let me tell you something, here, tough guy. It’s going to be a long… long… long… hungry night for you, boy. I’ll SEE to that.”

[thinks] [checks watch] “Can I have a biscuit to tide me over?”

“CAN YOU FUCK!!”

Sorry about that. I got a bit carried away there.

So, in a nut-shell (they probably won’t eat that either) your options are limited. If your child won’t eat x amount of x, y or z, sure you can threaten to take away their toy, TV or game time – or else flip it and offer to reward them these things if they eat – but then you risk linking their feelings of reward and gratification with food, and potentially giving them some sort of sexual hang-up, eating disorder, or hideous combination of both, in later life.

When our eldest son was a toddler and new to the concepts of speech and reality we employed a rather surreal tactic in our bid to make him clear his plate, one that miraculously worked. He wanted to be a Ghostbuster, so we told him that there were ghosts outside in the hallway that he could only bust once he’d eaten enough food to give him ghost-power. Yes it worked; but it worked precisely twice. Kids adapt more quickly than the Borg.

Still, most children seem to go through a few strange eating cycles as they grow, and most emerge into adolescence and adulthood with a healthy, balanced diet – even the Scottish ones. It’s certainly tough balancing your children’s burgeoning sense of their own independence and autonomy against your responsibility for maintaining their well-being and looking out for their best interests. Left to their own ids and devices, most kids would happily wave away a healthy meal in favour of an artery-busting snack-a-thon of six packets of crisps, twelve Jaffa Cakes and a triple-chocolate mousse washed down with 6 litres of Cola, and not regret a second of it until they were a 36-year-old fat, diabetic, toothless maniac about to take you to court for food-based child abuse.

You don’t want to send your kids to bed hungry, chain them to the dinner table or literally shove green beans down their throats, but you don’t want to cede total control, either. Even if your efforts ultimately prove futile, it’s always a good idea to keep flying the flag for Team Green.

Or at least Team Not Beige.

Maybe there won’t be a dinner-table war between us and our children; maybe we’ll just have a series of skirmishes, or the odd memorable battle.

But one thing’s for sure: whatever forms of culinary conflict lie ahead, my partner and I very much look forward to losing at all of them.

Thanks for reading, you beautiful specimen of humanity. What memories do you have of being locked in battle with your parents over the dinner plate? What strategies have you used with your own kids to get them to eat?

Leave a comment below this article, or on the Jamie Andrew With Hands Facebook page. Let’s talk.

Twelve things I’ve learned being a Dad to two under four (PART 3)

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Thank you for returning to read the rest of my far from comprehensive, barely instructional list of twelve things I’ve learned so far as a parent. May it strike a chord, or make you feel smug and superior, you hubris-filled wanker. Either way, I hope you enjoy it. You can read PART 1 here and PART 2 here.

9.) Dinner time ‘aint what it used to be.

Dinner time used to be a time for… well, eating dinner? I think that’s what I used to do at the dinner table, anyway; I might even have regarded it as a sacred space; a place for joyous reflection, vigorous discussion or occasionally just silent bliss. A bit like the toilet, but slightly more sanitary. I’m wiser now. I know that mealtimes shared with young children at the dinner table have the same grim uncertainty as urban warfare; the mess, the thuds, the shouts; the hunks of chicken strewn over the floor like innards; the Dexter-style ketchup splatter.

The more kids you have, the worse it is; the more it becomes like some almost impossible late-80s video game. You have to work fast to plug the correct mouth with the correct piece of food at exactly the right moment, or else it’s screamdemonium. To achieve this near-impossible feat you have to ignore your fallible human brain-body-interface, and turn yourself into either some sort of psychopathic, epileptic octopus; a Hindu God on fast-forward; or a demonic incarnation of one of those big shaky tube things that flails around outside American car dealerships.

It’s Hell. As you slither and dart around the dinner table, plugging half-escaped screams with chicken nuggets, and begging older children to eat something, God damn it, ANYTHING AT ALL, your own dinner will grow cold as the grave; cold enough to attract polar bears to the table, who’ll burrow their weary bulks into the uneaten snow-dune that your mashed potatoes have become. You’ll spend long minutes shouting terrifying proclamations at your children through a megaphone: “Stop trying to knock your little brother unconscious with hunks of lamb! Eat that bloody sausage, don’t just push it around your plate! Eat a pea at least? One measly pea?! You won’t eat a pea?? Do you hate me? You must really hate me if you won’t eat a pea. Maybe I’ll just choke myself to death on those peas, would you like that?? Don’t care about that, do you? Well maybe you’ll care about the fact that your stomach is so hungry it’s gained sentience, and is in the process of trying to escape through your mouth so it can eat your face off. SCREAM MORE QUIETLY, WILL YOU, YOU’RE WAKING UP THE BLOODY POLAR BEARS!!!”

10.) Discipline is like its own science

When we were assembling our parental toolkit we decided not to include vicious punishment beatings; after a fierce debate, we also ruled out the construction of a medieval dungeon in the cupboard under the stairs. This left us with rather limited options for our stratagem to civilise our eldest son.

We couldn’t use reason, because reason doesn’t work on toddlers and very young children, the absolute fucking psychopaths that they are. Seriously, you’d have better luck teaching a pigeon to do maths.

We couldn’t ignore his behaviour or use undiluted bribery to subvert it, because unless you’re born into a disgustingly rich family dynasty whose destiny it is to rule the world through golf and evil, it’s probably best not to turn your kid into a fat, scheming, morally-vacant sex maniac.

So we used stickers. Not to cover his mouth or eyes or anything: no, to build a reward system that would encourage positive behaviour and discourage negative behaviour. I say ‘we’. I wasn’t allowed an opinion on the new discipline system, on the grounds that I hadn’t accrued enough good behaviour stickers. She’ll train me to put the toilet seat down, and open packets of cold meat without tearing them into eighty different pieces yet.

Jack has to hit five stickers to get a reward, which could be anything from a mini-adventure to a small toy he plucks raffle-like from a cardboard bucket we keep hanging from the wall. He gains stickers for doing things like being polite and well-mannered for long periods of time, listening well, being kind to other kids and to his little brother, and helping out with chores. He loses them for things like smashing his baby brother in the face with a toy helicopter.

I had a few reservations with the system initially. I worried that we were teaching him to jump through hoops to get trinkets, rather than encouraging him to be good for goodness’ sake. I quickly moved past that when I remembered my realisation from a few paragraphs ago that all kids are psychos, and if you aren’t going to hit them, then you’re sure as shit going to have to bribe them. I guess it’s a good idea to erect a moral framework around your kids as early as possible, one that will hopefully make deeper sense to them once they get older and start thinking beyond rituals and commands: stabilisers for the soul, if you like.

My other fear was that the justice underpinning the system would be dispensed arbitrarily, based more upon what mood we happened to be in at any given moment than on solid ethical principles. For instance: ‘I DON’T WANT TO HEAR ANY PROLONGED VOWEL SOUNDS TODAY! YOU LOSE A STICKER!’ or ‘WILL YOU SHUT UP? I’M TRYING TO WRITE THIS BLOG ABOUT WHAT AN AWESOME DAD I AM. THAT’LL COST YOU TWO STICKERS, MY FRIEND.’ 

But, we found a groove, ironed out the kinks, and discovered rather quickly that the sticker system works well, both as a deterrent for naughtiness and as a skill-and-confidence builder. There’s a dark, ceremonial joy to be harvested from de-stickering a child. I find myself adopting the tone, voice and poise of the horror character Pinhead on those rare occasions when I have to take one away. “Ah, human goodness, so delicate and ephemeral, so easily lost or moulded. Did you feel pride when you earned this sticker, boy? Pride is a sin of which I’m happy to divest you even as yet blacker sin pours from you like a faucet. There are no stickers in Hell. Only pain.”

By this point in the speech, he’s usually smashed his little brother in the face with a helicopter again.

11.) Being a stay-at-home parent is not easy – especially if you’ve got more than one child.

Stay-at-home parents shouldn’t be devalued or denigrated. I’m jealous that my partner gets to spend every day with our kids, but at the same time I’m absolutely fucking relieved that I don’t have to, because giving your mind, body and soul to your kids 24/7 is exhausting. Beautiful, enriching, incomparable, yes. But absolutely draining. I love and respect my partner immeasurably for what she does.

The only people who think that looking after babies and kids at home during the day is a piece of piss, and not as challenging or important as a ‘proper job’, are a) people who have had their amygdala surgically removed and replaced by a bag of morphine; b) the dead; c) super-advanced Japanese butler robots; d) the sort of loud-mouthed, blathering troglodyte who still says the word ‘Phwoar’ out loud when he sees a set of breasts, and who spends his days doling out sage nuggets of wisdom like, ‘Birds love it when you whistle at them from up high, makes their fucking day it does’ and ‘Course, I don’t know what the world’s coming to when those poofs in the courts won’t even let you call them darkies anymore,’ and e) blinkered, bitter or judgemental working mothers who subscribe to the ‘I’m not doing that so it must be wrong’ mentality.

Unfortunately c) doesn’t exist.

Unfortunately d) and e) do.

12.) Being a Dad is amazing.

I originally planned to go down the cop-out route for thing number 12. I was going to  entitle it, ‘Having kids means not having the time to write the twelfth entry on a list of twelve things’, but upon reflection I think I’m going to take my tongue out of my cheek, temporarily remove my scatological-hat (I was going to shorten that to ‘scat-hat’ in the interests of snappiness, but I didn’t want people to get the wrong idea and picture me in the closing minutes of some ungodly German porn flick taking off a hat that only minutes before had been squatted over by two dead-eyed, loose-stooled lunkers, and then proceeding to wipe a waterfall of effluent from my stinging eyes.So rest assured there won’t be any scatology anywhere in this entry, none at all: and if there is, I’ll eat my hat) and show some honest-to-goodness heartfelt humanity.

Being a Dad has handed me happiness and focus in a way that I wouldn’t have imagined possible. Every sentimental and groan-worthy cliche about parenthood is true. Though each member of my nuclear family may occasionally irritate every atom and fiber of my being, they – individually and collectively – are everything to me. And without them I’d be nothing.

Nothing else matters.