When Spiders Attack

When my youngest, Christopher, toddled out of nursery with the bearing of a cool-headed bomb disposal technician, concentrating deeply on the concaved plastic receptacle in his hands, I assumed he’d nicked it. Little kids are magpies, this one more than most. His pockets are museums to all manner of misappropriated treasures. It wasn’t until I got closer to him that I noticed a spider shuffling up and sliding down the bottom of the bowl, a pointless ritual undertaken beneath the disinterested gaze of its new God.

He’s called Timmy,” Christopher told me.

Hi Timmy,” I said.

He’s big,” I said. And hairy. And kind of ‘hard’ looking. The sort of spider who’d walk up and punch you for looking at him funny.

Christopher is going through a creepy-crawly phase. Whether he’s just out of the shower or freshly donned in white or cream clothes, there’s nothing he likes better than to find a big mound of dirt and thrust as much of himself into it as possible, his hands retreating from that brown treasure chest laden with muck and worms and snails and woodlice. He’s like Steve Irwin meets Indiana Jones, a collector of living totems. Timmy belonged to Christopher now, whether he liked it or not. At least until Christopher got bored.

I’m not a great fan of spiders, but I hate flies with an even greater passion, so following the logic of the old proverb that ‘the enemy of my enemy is my friend’ I was content to regard Timmy as at least an acquaintance, if not exactly a pal.

Christopher carried that spider all the way home, never letting his gaze stray from it. When his older brother, Jack, met us coming out of his class he regarded the spider jealously, like it was a new 3D TV or a Playstation 5.

Maybe check it out for a wee while then let it go in the garden,” I said. I left them in the house with their gran and aunty, then drove back to work. When I returned a few hours later the spider had been forgotten, by me as much as by the kids. That was a mistake. Like the bit in Jaws where everyone thought it was safe to go back into the water again – though I’m not suggesting for a second that sharks are anywhere near as terrifying as spiders. At least a shark won’t crawl across your face while you’re sleeping, or crawl up your toilet bowl to get up your bum.

I was in the kitchen cooking a stir-fry (the meal is irrelevant, I just wanted there to be documentary evidence that a) I cooked occasionally, and b) I didn’t just eat pizzas all the time) when I heard an almighty scream from the living room. Screams are so ubiquitous in my house that they’re almost a background thrum, like the low-level buzz of the TV or the clinky-gur-gur of the fridge, so I hot-footed rather than fled to the living room. Chris is a clumsy wee fella and I reasoned he’d probably mis-timed a daredevil stunt betwixt foot-rest and couch, or simply suddenly and randomly tripped over his own feet, as he’s prone to do.

What happened?” I asked my mum as I moved in to wrest him from his granny and wrap my arms around the red-faced little cherub.

Bloody thing bit him,” said my mum.

What bit him?” I asked incredulously, forgetting that the spider had ever existed, my brain refusing to even consider it as a suspect. It’s like if you were in a house with two men and a penguin, and you walked into the room, and one of the men was lying dead on the floor and the other man turned to you and said: ‘It bloody killed him!’ You’d whirl your head around 360 degrees looking for a human assailant, even if you clocked the penguin standing at your feet clutching a bloodied knife and shouting ‘I’LL KILL AGAIN! I’LL KILL THEM ALL!’ before laughing maniacally.

Penguin!” you’d shout. “Do you know who did this?”

A spider bit him? Really? Sure, it was a tough-looking spider, but surely it wasn’t ‘pick-a-fight-with-a-tiny-giant’ tough? It was still a garden spider… wasn’t it? Oh please God let it be a garden spider, and not some diminutive banana-box refugee from the Isle of Biteos, somewhere off the Dominican coast.

It latched on to his finger and he had to shake it a few times to get it off,” said my mum, shock and concern impaling her words.

Timmy was standing nonchalantly, nay, defiantly, on the floor in the centre of the room. I upturned the receptacle he’d arrived in and placed it over him like a Perspex prison. I could imagine him in there giving himself makeshift tattoos with a match-stick, and playing eight harmonicas at once.

The tip of Christopher’s index finger was swollen. He cried for a few minutes, but managed, through his huffing sobs, to ask if he was going to turn into Spiderman. I knew I had to keep the spider until I could be certain it was a benign specimen, and Christopher wasn’t going to have a bad reaction to its bite. But I had to let my little lad know that justice would be done, and would be as swift as it was brutal.

No-one bites my little boy,” I told Christopher, as he cuddled into his gran. He looked up at me with a grimly serious face. “I’m going to splat it for what it did to you. Does that sound good?”

He locked eyes with me, and gave a grave, mob boss’s nod. Timmy’s fate was sealed. Eight concrete boots coming up. The perspex prison in which the condemned arachnid languished had been upgraded from Super-Max to Death Row.

Thankfully, hours later, Christopher seemed to be suffering no ill effects, beyond a sudden reappraisal of his relationship to spiders. Even still, I phoned the NHS for advice, and courted public opinion on Facebook (which ranged from ‘He’ll be fine’ to ‘I’m not being funny, but a house spider bit me once and my tits and legs fell off and a piece of my spleen exploded’). And all the while Timmy sat there, alone, trapped, perhaps as a fly priest buzzed by and read him his last rites through the plastic.

But Timmy was lucky to have bitten a merciful human. The little spider’s stay of execution came as I was cuddling Christopher in his bed, trying to coax him to sleep with the usual mixture of soothing and seething.

I don’t think we should kill the spider, daddy,” he said thoughtfully. “I’m bigger than him and maybe he thought I was going to kill him.”

I nodded. “Then I’ll let him go. And he can start a new life somewhere else.”

Maybe get a wife,” he said.

Now, come on, Christopher, don’t wish that on him. I thought we were being merciful. We’d be better off killing him.”

OK, I didn’t say that last part.

After he’d gone to sleep I paid a visit to Timmy. I lifted the lid of his prison a crack and slid a few pieces of cucumber and a tiny crumb of chicken nugget in next to him.

You’re lucky this wasn’t your last meal, you eight-legged dick,” I told Timmy. He just sort of stared at me. I could’ve sworn he said something about fava beans and a nice chianti, but maybe I just imagined it.

All things considered?

I think we should get a tarantula.

Halloween, and the Art of Psychologically Scarring Your Children

We love to be scared. It’s why we love horror movies, roller-coasters and day-trips to Alloa. It’s thrilling to experience the excitement of peril without the threat of consequences (with the exception of a day-trip to Alloa, which really can be fatal).

There’s a long tradition of horror-based pranks in my family, most of them emanating from my older cousins. I say pranks. Many of them skirted the edges of full-blown psychological torture, but I guess they were character-building in their own way: people dressed as vampires, complete with cloak and fangs, waking you up in the dark of night; legends of a creature living beneath the bottom step of my aunt’s and uncle’s staircase, ready to grab you and drag you down into the sub-dimensional depths of the universe that lurked just beneath the carpet; being locked in a room with a particularly gruesome horror movie playing on the TV without any means to turn it off.

Later in life, my older brother-in-law took up the mischievous mantle. Once when I was at his house, when my nephew was a baby, he tied a string to a bedroom door and tugged on it hard, delighted to see me vault my nephew’s baby-gate in terror at the sight of the suddenly and inexplicably animate door. Another time he collaborated with my sister to make it seem like my mother’s house was encircled by intruders then took me out round the garden with an air rifle in the pitch black, organising a few jump scares along the way.  It was family time with a sprinkling of Guantanamo Bay and a garnish of Resident Evil.

Still, possibly as a consequence of all this, I became a life-long horror fan. As a young teenager I watched movies like Hellraiser and Candyman with my older cousin; gorged on his brutal and bloody 2000AD comics. I started collecting horror posters from video rental places like Blockbuster and my local shop to put on my bedroom wall (Dannii Minogue and Pinhead made strange wall-fellows indeed). I’m not as prolific a fan of horror as I used to be, but I appreciate a bit of gore-bite-bleed-kersplat as much as the next man, especially if the next man is Freddy Krueger.

Being scared is cathartic. It sparks the mind and the imagination. It reminds you a little of what it is to be alive. I couldn’t wait to pass the torch on to my kids, albeit not in such a way that would risk leaving them quivering mental wrecks.

Or so I thought…

It’s apt that I should have used a torch-based analogy, because a torch was at the root of the misjudgement to come.

We visited my mother and father (he’s my step-dad, but I’m going to call him father, because it’s less clunky, and there’s something reductive about the ‘step’ prefix) in their cottage in the countryside. The kids were messing about with a torch. They eventually found themselves in the only room in my mother’s house capable of encapsulating day-time darkness, a little box room with no windows that was at one time a bedroom, then a wine cupboard (my father always called it a ‘cellar’ in a bid to lend it some sophistication), and now a pantry and general junk-room. Swinging a ray of light around a wee dark room apropos of nothing holds enough fascination on its own to enrapture a child for weeks at a time, but I thought I’d help diversify and enrich their beam-based shenanigans, starting with shadow puppetry. After a few minutes of rabbits and raptors – about the only creatures we were capable of conjuring, besides hands – we moved on to ghost stories, each taking turns with the torch held under our chins, illuminating our faces like haunted pumpkins.

I went first, spinning a simple but atmospheric yarn about a concerned neighbour chapping on the door of a musty old house. The house’s equally musty old occupant hadn’t been seen around the village for a while, and people were worried. So the man knocks, shouts, and gets no answer, so he moves around the house trying to peer through the windows. He notes the grime on the insides of the windows, so thick he can hardly see through them. He notices a flicker through the gloom on the pane, figures it’s the old lady. Goes back to the front door, tries it, and discovers it’s unlocked, though there’s something blocking the way forwards. He barges it and it gives, ripping through thick swirls and strands of cobwebs. How long has she been stuck in here? he wonders. It’s dark in the house, suffocatingly dark, so he brings out a torch, swinging it this way and that through the murk. Gets to the door that leads into the lady’s living room, pushes it open. Calls her name again. Uses the torch beam to survey the dank and dingy room, finds the old lady. She’s stuck up on the wall, her mouth hanging open, quite dead, her body wrapped in place with spider webs. Before he can even scream, a giant spider – much bigger than a man – emerges from the shadows in the corner of the room, and barrels towards him as fast as a jungle cat. He realises it’s too late to run. More than that, he can’t move. The torch drops from his hand into the springy, clinging carpet of cobwebs woven at his feet.

They were spooked, but smiling. I’d given them the general idea of how to build tension in a scary story; how to weaponise the ordinary; use the tone and pitch of your voice to lull, unnerve and shock. Little Chris, 3, took the next turn. He nailed the tense poise and grave whisper, peppered his story with lots of husky ‘and thennnnn’s. His plot also revolved around a seemingly deserted house, but lacked an ending. Or a middle. People – a daddy and two boys – crept into a cottage, reacting to noises, sensing danger all around them, and thennnnn, and thennnnn, AND THENNNNN… a monster came and ate them all up. It was an amusingly perfunctory ending, one that had me chuckling. At least it was decisive. None of this ambiguous, ‘you write your own ending’ shit. BOOM. Eaten by a monster. THE END.

I had another turn, inadvertently ripping off the basic plot of Jeepers Creepers 2. Then Jack used the abandoned house template to tell a tale of toys that came to life – animatronic Santas, toy soldiers – and pursued the plucky protagonists through and out of the house, and down deserted country roads in a spooky night-time chase. Both boys were good at this, and seemed to really enjoy our time telling terrifying tales around the virtual campfire we’d created inside the tiny room. But I wanted the session to go out with a bang. So I started a new story, a story within a story, a meta story, about a dad and his two sons who were swapping spooky stories in a darkened box room by torch-light, while above them, through the open loft-hatch, sat a swarm of hungry creatures just waiting for their chance to jump down and feast. But they couldn’t. Because they were allergic to light. So as long as the torch stayed on, so long as the batteries held, they were safe. But at any moment… if their torch was to run out of batteries… if that light was to go of….

Click.

You see what I did there, right? This was a miscalculation on my part. I knew it as soon as my eldest son, Jack, threw open the door behind him and fled for his life down the bright corridor, screaming in terror. My youngest, brave little Chris, looked up at me in the half-light cast from the suddenly opened door with a look on his face that seemed to say, ‘What the fuck was that all about?’ Jack had locked himself in the bathroom, and wouldn’t let me in. His fright had given way to anger. A flood of Diet Adrenalin was thundering its way through his little circulatory system, breaking his rational thoughts against the rocks of his temper. I kept knocking. ‘Come on, buddy, I’m sorry, if I’d known it would scare you that much I would never have told that story. I thought you’d laugh!’

I felt as I’d felt when my nephew was a nipper and I’d granted a piece of burnt toast sentience before dropping it into the fiery clutches of my mum’s coal-fuelled central heating system. ‘Noooo, please don’t burn me, mister, I’m burnt enough, I don’t deserve this!’ I thought he’d laugh. Instead he’d screamed.

After a few minutes Jack padded through to the kitchen and sat down at the table, completely recovered from his traumatic experience. Since the little fella has evidenced a burgeoning talent for both creative writing and thinking I decided to turn his terror into a teachable moment.

‘You know ghosts and monsters and things like that aren’t real, right?’

I’ve always stressed this, because I know how much kids worry about ghosts and monsters even when they’re sure they don’t exist, never mind where there’s doubt.

‘Yeah.’

‘And you know the creatures I created in the story weren’t real either, right? They were just words out of my mouth.’

‘Yeah.’

‘But you were still scared of them, right?’

He nodded.

‘That’s the power of stories,’ I told him. ‘You can use stories to make people think and feel real things about things that aren’t real. And you can’t just make them scared. You can make them happy, you can make them laugh, you can change their minds about things. Stories are powerful.’

He nodded sagely.

It must have got through to him, because later that day, back at home, he started writing his magnum opus, The Abandoned House, its front cover dotted with monsters and spider-webs.

It’ll assuage my guilt at terrifying him somewhat if he becomes the next Stephen King.

Plus, a premium retirement home would be nice, too.

A Tale of Two Bedtimes: Peaceful and P***ed Off

I smell.

That’s not news to some, I’m sure. But I’m not talking about the smell of sweat or failure. I’m talking about my particular scent, that reassuring mix of aftershave, lotions and pheromones that’s as unique an identifier to those who love me as the dangly hairs that sprout from my nose, my rapidly receding hairline or my incredibly disappointing penis.

Smell is an overlooked and perhaps under-rated sense, especially given how intimately associated it is with memory. One whiff of a gently-boiling pan of lentil soup, or a long-ago loved perfume on the neck of a passer-by, or the reassuring aroma of a house loaded with the wet tang of dogs can be enough to whisk us away on a nostril-based leap through time, to a place where we were happy; to a place where we felt loved.

My scent is apparently music to my eldest son’s ears  – or a freshly-baked cookie to his nose, if you’d prefer. The other week at bedtime – after a) the stories had been read, b) his younger brother was asleep and c) we’d exhausted our pre-sleep chit-chat – Jack, 6, asked me to leave my jumper behind so he could sleep with it next to his face. He wanted to be able to smell me.

It’s perhaps the sweetest request I’ve ever received. In few other spheres of life could another human being ask to smell your clothes without you calling the police or backing away really, really slowly. I took it off and handed it to him, and he pulled it close to his face and huffed it like it was a bag of glue. He lay there for a second, the jumper pressed against his cheek, his eyes closed and a dreamy little smile resting on his features. Then he put my jumper on, sitting there half-buried in it, two long trunks dangling from his shoulders where arms should be. And he went to sleep like that, too. I checked on him later in the night. He’d thrown the covers off himself, content to lie there wrapped in the warmth of my massively over-sized jumper.  I walked away in the half-darkness with a lump in my throat and a swelling in my breast.

What a difference a day makes.

Remember that old song? I think it was meant to convey the wonderful capacity of time to change things for the better. Well, I’m not using it in that sense. Think of the difference a day makes to a forest fire during a windy drought season. That’s where I’m coming from.

Here comes bedtime number two. The scene, this time, is rather less inspirational.

Intergenerational relations were already strained from the twenty-odd minutes it took for me to convince (see also; harangue) the kids to change into their pyjamas; lots of glassy stares, sudden attention shifts, oodles of wilful defiance, brotherly scrapping and hyperactive mayhem had overthrown what weak little slip of sanity still reigned over my war-torn brain.  Negotiations finally broke down over tooth-brushing timescales, although to describe them as negotiations rather over-estimates my status as an equal partner in them.

I was in a miffed sort of a mood anyway. It wasn’t supposed to be my night doing their stories, and they were both supposed to have been pre-occupied earlier that evening with a family visit. Thus, I’d portioned my evening into productive/recreational segments, which began with an hour of tidying (mostly tackling the cluttered hell-hole of the children’s toy-room), which I duly completed, then an hour of TV, then a couple of hours of writing. Half-way through my hour of TV, the kids ran into the bedroom and bounced on me like I was an airbed, signalling that my R&R was RIP. I didn’t mind. Happy kids trump TV every time. But when the story time flipped to accommodate an unexpected supermarket trip their mother was taking, my writing time – with a deadline looming – was DOA.

I carried that irritation with me, amplified by the reality of co-existing in a house with a person from whom I’m in the process of separating, and it seeped into my interactions with the kids.

And they were already being plenty objectively irritating independently of my soured mood.

Inevitably, they rebelled against brushing their teeth. They dithered, dallied, dillied and defied. I’d already knocked their story allocation down from three to one (they love story time, as do I, so it hurt us all) as punishment for their tardiness and cheek-tongued ebullience.

For his next trick, Jack stood in the hallway with his toothbrush clamped between his teeth like one of Hannibal’s cigars, readying himself to snark off like Murdoch (if you’re too old or too young to share my pop culture references here, feel free to google the A-Team – I pity the fool who doesn’t).

‘I’m going to sleep in the big bed tonight,’ he garbled. That’s the big double-bed his mum currently sleeps in.

‘No you’re not.’

‘Yes I am.’

‘Then you won’t be playing Spiderman on the PS4 tomorrow.’

‘We won’t be home tomorrow, so that’s okay, I’ll play it the next day.’

‘Then you won’t be playing it the next day…’

The tit for tat continued like this until a crucial keystone of my patience suddenly plummeted earthwards.

Though I stood three metres or more away from him, the force with which my temper broke free might’ve caused an earthquake. ‘Then I’ll take your Spiderman game and smash it into a million pieces, how would you like that?’ I instantly regretted saying it, but sometimes you start dancing to your anger before you’ve even had time to hear its song.

It was a very tense and emotionally fraught bedroom to which we retired. Christopher was in his bed – his mood really rather chirpy – I sat in the reclining chair between the two beds, and Jack was on his bed, sufficiently recovered from his bollocking to lobby for the reinstatement of at least one of the discontinued stories.

‘Nope,’ I said. ‘I can’t tell you I’m going to do something then go back on it. That won’t teach you a lesson.’

‘But you told mummy you’d sit with us and watch Star Trek with us until she got back from the shops.’

‘I said maybe I would, Jack, and at that point I didn’t know exactly when she’d be going or when she’d be back.’

‘I heard you say it.’

Maybe that’s why he’d been pushing for the big bed. Because he’d overheard me debating whether or not I should just cuddle up watching TV with them until their mum got back from the shops. I had to be a man of my word. Plus, I relished an opportunity to do something nice for them that wouldn’t look like a capitulation, even though it most definitely was.

‘OK,’ I said. ‘You’re right, I did say that. Let’s go to the big bed and watch Star Trek for a wee bit. OK?’

I’d no sooner pushed my arse half-a-foot above the chair than Jack decided to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.

‘Well, I’ll tell you this, I’ll never sit next to you again, not on the couch, not anywhere, for the rest of my life.’

My arse clattered back down on the chair. A frayed and bitter part of me was close to spitting back: ‘Well you’ll get the chance when your mum moves out, then we’ll see how much you like it’, but I snuffed it out. It’s never wise or right to respond to your child’s molten anger with further hurt or anger.

He’s said hurtful things before, ‘I hate you’, ‘You’re not my friend any more’ etc. and I have always, without fail, recognised the outbursts as being the byproduct of the big feelings that kids sometimes feel. I usually just smile, shake my head, and say something like, ‘No you don’t. You’re just angry. You won’t feel that way when the anger leaves. You love me and I love you.’ And I always get an ‘I’m sorry’ cuddle very soon afterwards.

I realised that I was just extra tired and pissed off that night, and it was frazzling my judgement.

Jack’s outburst called for consequences, certainly, but above it called all a cool head. So I sat back in the seat – nice and aloof – and said: ‘Congratulations, son, you’ve just blown it.’

This – perhaps predictably – provoked a partial meltdown. Jack sat up in bed, tears of frustration clouding his eyes. He waved his hands around, bringing them together and then stretching them apart as though he were playing an accordion. ‘THIS is how unfair this is. THIS MUCH.’

‘Jack, how can you say you want to snuggle next to me in the big bed when you’ve just told me you don’t ever want to sit next to me again?’

‘THIS MUCH!’ he screamed.

‘You did this to yourself, son,’ I said, coolly staring ahead. His tear-soaked temper eventually abated, and he curled up on the bed. By this point Christopher was restless, so I slid in next to him in his bed. After a minute or so, I pulled the lever on the reclining chair. It popped up and sprang out, revealing a boy-shaped space, if only the little boy in question wasn’t too defiant to occupy it. I slapped the leather.

‘Come on, Jack, let’s be pals again. Come sit next to me.’

He hesitated for a moment, perhaps contemplating digging in, but he quickly relented. He skulked over to lie on the outstretched seat, but kept himself as far away from me as possible, and with his back turned to me. He was playing hard to get. I knew he wanted more than anything to come in for a cuddle, but he didn’t want to lose face, or let go of the righteous anger that swirled in his belly. I could relate.

‘Come into the bed with me and your brother,’ I said. ‘Come on, let’s not be silly, let’s just say sorry and be pals again.’

He clambered over the seat, quick as a flash. I budged up and somehow, miraculously, we sat three abreast in that tiny single bed, me with my toes almost bursting through the bookcase at the foot of it.

‘Sometimes, Jack,’ I said as he snuggled into me, ‘when people are angry, they say things that they don’t mean. Like when I said I would smash Spiderman.’

He looked up at me. ‘Or when I said I’d never sit next to you again.’

‘Exactly. I never have and never would break any of your toys or games. I was just really frustrated that you weren’t listening to me and I got desperate. I didn’t know what else to do. Plus I was already annoyed about something else and I took a little of that out on you. So I’m not sorry about being cross when you wouldn’t listen to me – you did wrong, and I hope you know that – but I’m sorry for losing my temper and saying that nasty thing. That was wrong of me.’

I used to be a lot more hot-headed in my younger days, to the point of psychopathology. I think a combination of time, dwindling testosterone, self-improvement and bitter experience has taught me the folly of that kind of stinking thinking.

Jack cuddled into me more tightly.

As a parent, I’ve got a very loud bark but a very soft bite. More of a nuzzle than a bite, really. Most of my anger comes from frustration at not being listened to, which only really serves to make me angry with myself for getting so angry. It’s quite the feedback loop.

But when I do fuck up or do something wrong, I always apologise for it, and try to explain why it happened. The parents of my mother’s generation were better at letting their kids peak behind the curtain of their supposed perfection than their own parents, but sorry was still a word largely absent from the Boomers’ lexicon. I’m bucking that trend: this Generation X’er is one sorry motherfucker.

‘No big person does the right thing all of the time, Jack. Not me, not your mum, not your teachers, not policemen, not doctors, not strangers in the street. We all make mistakes, son, sometimes we do things wrong, even as adults. None of us is perfect.’

What Jack said next is one of those things that’s bound to illicit the reaction, ‘Yeah, did he fuck say that, you liar.’ And if you do say that, I can certainly see where you’re coming from. We’ve all seen posts on-line where a parent will say something like, “I was discussing the situation in Palestine with my two-year-old daughter the other day, and do you know what, she fixed me with such a knowing little look, and she said, ‘Mummy? Sometimes I think humanity is locked in a perpetual, spiralling cycle of blindness, rage and violence from which it will never escape.”

But Jack did say this next line, word for word. And it made me smile.

‘There’s one thing you are perfect at, dad… Being yourself.’

I tousled his hair, and landed a kiss on that wise wee bonce of his. ‘I guess you’re right.’

What a lad. What a perfect boy.

‘Now go to sleep,’ I told him, ‘Or I’ll smash that fucking bed to pieces.’

 

…I didn’t say that.

Kids: A Walk in the Park

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘What is it, buddy?’ I asked Jack.

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

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

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

I pretended to eat some.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And I need them

Breaking Fast: Dad’s in the Stress Business

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.

Horror at the Edinburgh Christmas Market

In the dead-zone between Christmas and New Year I took a trip to Edinburgh’s Christmas Market, which proved to be both absolutely great and utterly terrible at the same time. I went with my two kids, 5 and 3, and my friend and his two kids, 6 and 4. We’ll call my friend ‘Iain’, mainly because that’s his name. Our kids have names, too. I promise we haven’t just assigned them numbers.

Regular readers will know that my two are called Jack and Christopher. Iain’s kids are called Girl Child and Boy Child.

The train ride into the city was surprisingly stress-free considering that we were two hapless fathers herding four excitable, potentially unruly children into a claustrophobic environment crammed with disapproving strangers for thirty long minutes. For some reason that bit was fine. It was the arriving that reeked of failure, and that was entirely down to the tardiness of our initial departure.

We’d arrived at our home station with mere seconds to spare, so weren’t able to buy tickets prior to boarding. The six of us had had to sprint towards the train like something out of Home Alone, and then dash through the rapidly closing doors like something out of Indiana Jones. There were no ticket collectors/dispensers on-board the train, so we had to queue to buy them at Edinburgh before we could pass through the barriers.

We were slow to realise why everyone else disembarking the train was moving so quickly up the platform – the queue-savvy sons-of-bitches – and so found ourselves at the very back of the ticket-line.

Iain detests the traditional ticketing system. He prefers to deal with automata, which is why he spent the whole duration of our time in the queue frantically trying to buy digital tickets through an app on his phone. He failed. We reached the front before he mastered it. If it had been the Crystal Maze, he would’ve been left behind in the Train Zone as we went on to collect bits of shiny paper in the Crystal Dome.

I don’t know exactly why Iain hates tickets so much. It’s something to do with feeling beholden; of having to bow down for inspection to a haughty stranger. I think he just doesn’t like talking to people, something to which I can definitely relate.

We ascended into Edinburgh proper, fighting our way through a teeming crowd of thousands.

Edinburgh’s Christmas market stretches across two levels of Princess Street Gardens, with a giant, blindingly-bright Big Wheel dominating the event and the city skyline. This year it was crushingly busy and bustling, a clog of people being pushed up, down and along thin arteries flanked by coffee houses, portable pubs and assorted trinket-hawkers. The air – cold and sharp – smelled of irritation and fried onions; alive to boot with the sounds of a thousand ‘excuse me’s’ intermingling with the same six or seven Christmas songs everyone had been listening to on a loop for a solid month already. I haven’t visited the Xmas market since I was about 23, but I don’t ever remember it being this hectic, this brazenly commercialised, this soulless. The kids didn’t give a shit, though. The city was loud and colourful, there were chocolate-covered churros, and there was a mini-rollercoaster. What more could they want?

Iain was overjoyed to learn that we had to pre-purchase a big wad of tickets before the kids could go on any of the fairground rides. He again tried to enlist me in his one-man war against ticket inspections, but I just couldn’t share his anger. Normally I’m something of an anger connoisseur. I get angry over a great many inconsequential and pointless things, and I felt sad that I couldn’t add this one to the collection.

The big, bespectacled lady at the ticket desk asked Iain if he lived in an EH postcode area (i.e. within Edinburgh or its immediate environs). He said no. Because he doesn’t.

‘That’s a shame,’ she said, ‘You would’ve got a 10 per cent discount if you did.’

Iain didn’t miss a beat. ‘I don’t, but he does,’ he said, pointing a thumb back at me.

This was Iain’s chance to stick it to the man, and he was enlisting my help. His old friend wouldn’t let him down. Whom else could he count on in his hour of need?

‘No I don’t,’ I said.

Iain looked at me with disappoint in his eyes, while the ticket lady, in turn, looked at Iain with disappointment in hers. She looked visibly wounded, like her tenuous grip on hope had been wrested from her hands and cast to the gutter by Iain’s treachery. I just sort of laughed, and unashamedly bought my full-price tickets.

‘What did you do that for?’ asked Iain, unable to conceal how miffed he was. I explained that I had a vision of the future, the immediate future, and it was one in which I looked like a complete twat

The woman’s next question, I explained, undoubtedly would’ve been: ‘Oh, so what’s your post code?’ and I would’ve been forced to stutter out something like, ‘ah, E…H… 1… em, 1… 1…. em, 1?’

And she would’ve said: ‘And what street is that?’

And I would’ve said: ‘Em, I think it’s Street… Avenue?…’

‘Are you sure that’s a real street, sir?’ she would’ve asked.

And I would’ve said: ‘Em…could be Crescent… Place?’

‘Crescent Place? Sounds fake to me, sir.’

‘I LIVE IN A FUCKING BIN, OKAY? BEHIND A TOILET.’

So it’s lucky I avoided that, really.

The kids first went on the mini roller-coaster. I think it always helps when you’re trying to promote an atmosphere of happiness and magic for wide-eyed, excited children to have your fairground rides staffed by dead-eyed teenagers who look like they wouldn’t even blink if the ride suddenly derailed, sending your children catapulting into the night sky at 180mph.

We spent an hour or so at the market, going on some more rides with the kids; treating them to the rickety, rocket-shaped death-trap that was the Helter Skelter; feeding them chocolate; trying to get them to stop running in circles like dogs on a beach. Eventually, time took its toll on their manic dispositions and we realised it was time to head home, via McDonalds, naturally, because we’re bad parents.

We thought about going on the big wheel, but thought better of it when we realised it would cost us about £25 each. That’s a lot of money for the kids to decide they were bored after half a revolution, or for the younger kids to violently shit themselves at 100ft.

We made our way to the McDonalds inside the food court in the busy shopping mall that borders Waverley train station for the last – and the worst – leg of our journey. Horror awaited us. Great streams and chunks of it.

I scouted for a table and chairs in the busy food-court with my two boys and Iain’s Girl Child while he went into McDonalds with his little Boy Child to order the food. We hadn’t been sitting for thirty seconds when little Christopher announced that he needed a pee, elongating the vowels so the word lasted almost as long as an actual peeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee.

What the hell was I going to do? Iain was lost in a crowd of people inside McDonalds. I had a unisex group of kids in my care, only two of them mine, so it wasn’t practical to take all of them to the male toilet with me at once. The clock was ticking: Christopher wasn’t renowned for his ball-control. The wife from a couple sitting at the table next to us with their two kids overheard my dilemma and offered to keep an eye on two of the kids so I could whisk Chrissy off for a pissy. I thanked her, but politely declined. Tick tock. I had to make a snap decision. Off we went. All of us. Not ideal, but necessary.

I led the kids around the lower level of the mall as we hunted for the toilets, keeping them close to me and tight together like a comet’s tail lest they get swallowed up by the throng of people. We eventually found the toilets, but the queue leading up to the turnstiles that you had to pass through before you even got a shot at relieving yourself was about 18 people strong, and I didn’t have that kind of time.

I hurried and herded the kids back to the table, hoping Iain’s journey into the dark heart of McDonalds would be completed. It wasn’t. What was I going to do now? Chris kept shuffling, jiggling and loudly complaining. I spied the main doors that led out of the mall and joined with the stone steps outside. Ah-HA! All being well – if I could find a place out there for a surreptitious piss – I’d be back at the table in less than a minute.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said to the couple from earlier. ‘Would you be kind enough to watch these two after all?’

‘Stay still, don’t talk, don’t move,’ I said to Jack and Girl Child.

I lifted Christopher up under his arms and rushed him towards the sliding doors like a bomb. Once outside we dashed dead ahead into an alcove where Chris unleashed a long, flowing piss you wouldn’t have credited to a creature of his size; back we dashed and waddled, just in time for a young goth at the table behind us – who’d been sitting with her head on a table receiving worried back rubs from her friends for the past ten minutes – to projectile vomit everywhere. I saw it cascading from her mouth and through her hands like potatoey Vimto, an image that stayed with me for the rest of the day (and haunts me even now). Iain arrived seconds later with our food, and we had to wolf it down with the sharp tang of vomit still lingering in the air.

As we began to eat, Iain’s Girl Child loudly announced that she needed the toilet. Off Iain went, back he came and then, yep, this time Jack needed a poo. Off I went, back I came, and then Iain’s Boy Child had to go. No sooner had they left than Chris announced that he was desperate for yet another peeeeeeeeeee. Why was this happening to me?

Here I had the same dilemma again, and the same split of kids. Emboldened by my earlier success, I bomb-waddled Chris out of the mall’s sliding doors (‘Stay there, kids, and don’t move, okay?’) and back to the same reservoir of piss from before, still wet and plentiful, so he could add more to it. I rushed back, Iain returned and then, guess what?

‘Daddy, I need a pooooooo!’

‘Fuck sake!’ I barked, unable to stop the swear word from leaping out my throat.

Iain grinned. ‘I’ll be honest, the only thing that’s making this more bearable for me is seeing how awful it is for you.’

I laughed. ‘I’m glad to be of service.’

We finally got out of there and boarded our return train, where yet another round of pee-pees sent me up and down the carriage like an angry kangaroo. Iain found this, and my exasperated reactions, a continuing source of amusement. I silently wished for a ticket collector to come along the carriage and re-kindle his rage.

It had been a good day.

…most of it anyway.

But we both agreed that for now, and possibly forever, Christmas could definitely, absolutely, incontrovertibly…

…piss off.

Christmas: A One-Star Review

If the Christmas season was an Amazon product I’d give it four stars. Not because it’s all that good, but because I’m nice, you see. I wouldn’t want to hurt Christmas’s feelings.

If the Christmas season was a place of interest, or a restaurant or something, I’d give it four stars on Trip Advisor, and I’d probably write something like, ‘Loved the bit where the little people opened the presents and smiled, and couldn’t fault the bit where everybody ate the bitter-tasting green Maltesers and the dead bird with Bovril poured all over it, but if I’ve any mild criticism to offer – and it seems churlish even to mention it – and, really, it’s very, very mild criticism indeed – mild as an Amish curry – it’s that for well over ninety per cent of that small handful of festive weeks I felt like I wanted to raid a private scorpion breeder’s aquarium and stab myself to death with their collection, and then run over a cliff onto a field of landmines screaming, ‘Why? WHY won’t you JUST let me DIE, God?’

‘Apart from that though… excellent.’

The kids were fuelled by a cocktail of excitement and chocolate, making them psychotic whirling scarecrows of tears, screams and laughter, their behaviour made all the worse by them being unbound from routine and purpose. We tried to take them out and about, and occupy their time as much as possible, but bad weather, worse finances and a dearth of places to go in the middle of a winter holiday didn’t make that easy. If they weren’t fighting over each other’s new toys, they were fighting over each other’s old toys; sometimes they just fought because of muscle memory. Separately they were fine, angelic even, and together they could be wurlitzers of warmth and unity, but most of the time they squabbled like pigeons on meth, pecking at each other over the smallest of injustices and infractions. ‘I WANTED THE BLUE SPOON!’ ‘THAT’S MY ONE!’ ‘BUT I ALWAYS HAVE THE BLUE ONE!’ ‘IT’S MINE!’ ‘YOU’RE NAUGHTY!’ ‘I’M NOT NAUGHTY, YOU’RE NAUGHTY!’

Standing there amid the screams and recriminations, I could feel my blood pressure rising like a thermometer inside the sun’s arse. Even on otherwise tranquil trips away, the ghost of Stressmas was never too far from my heart. I took our eldest, 5, to the local country park so we could don our wellies on, trudge through the mud and shout borderline abuse at farm animals, but on the road there some geriatric jerk-off in a gleaming BMW decided to dangerously tailgate me in the rain and wet on a dangerous stretch of road, with my little boy buckled helplessly into the site of impact like a tiny Crash Test Dummy.

In my usual calm manner, I gesticulated wildly and hammered the horn, calling him a murderer and a few other choice names besides, before totally losing it and punching the rear-view mirror off its perch and down onto the floor. The old man gunned his engine and revved past me at high speed, staring straight ahead to avoid my furious glare, which begs the question: why was he tailgating me in the first place? Anyway, I wasn’t proud of my little outburst, and I apologised to the boy for losing my temper, telling him that big people made mistakes sometimes, too. I asked if we could keep this little outburst between the two of us so I’d have time to replace the cracked glass in the mirror, so naturally he grassed me up to his mum the next time he had a chance. I guess I’m proud. I’ve taught him well by instruction, if not always by example.

The festive season had genuine highlights, of course, with Christmas Day being the obvious top dog. What’s not to love? Looks of surprise, delight and gratitude on our children’s faces; getting to spend the day with close family; eating well,  laughing, being merry and beating those sons of bitches at every parlour game, board game and quiz game brought to the table. Budge over, Jesus. There’s a new God in town.

So there’s no point writing about how lovely the loveliest bits were, because I want to make you laugh and/or nod in shamed recognition, not start cooing and ooing and aahing.

My second favourite part of the season was our eldest kid’s nativity play, which I enjoyed enormously, mostly because our lad was the star of the segment. He played the grumpy, boom-voiced inn keeper around whom the well-worn story of baby Jesus revolved. Although he was natural and confident in his poise and delivery, I can’t deny it hurt my feelings a little that he disobeyed my instruction to holler out ‘ALL HAIL LORD SATAN’ at the end of the big musical number. I’ll remember that, you little (Peter O’) tool!

The nativity was merely the opening act of a two-hour long extravaganza. We watched each of the remaining six classes perform their medleys of music and madness. I took particular delight in spotting those kids who were hating every agonising second of the experience; the ones who’d rather be out in the playground being smashed in the face with a lead pipe than standing on stage in full view of their community wearing a silly hat and dancing awkwardly to an old Boyzone song from 1992. Around 95 per cent of these squirming, dead-eyed children were boys. It may surprise you, but the overwhelmingly hyper-masculine, working class culture of this part of Central Scotland doesn’t always lend itself well to theatrical exuberance.

My kid’s performance aside, the best –the absolute best – bit of the show was definitely when they brought out the cardboard Twin Towers. OH NO THEY DIDN’T! Oh YES they did. Each class’s segment was built around the theme of a particular decade in the school’s history. Primary 2 had the 2000s, which covered 9/11, an atrocity that not for one second I thought they’d cover. When the curtains opened, I even whispered jokingly in my wife’s ear, ‘2000s? What are they going to do here: recreate 9/11?’ Then out came those two big pieces of cardboard with lots of little windows drawn on them in black marker, and down fell my jaw. What the hell was coming next?: two six-year-olds running out from the wings of the stage wearing pantomime airplanes and screaming ALLAHU AKHBAR?

Mercifully, the action segued from mention of the deadliest terrorist attack on US soil, to the many sporting successes of 2002. Tonally, it was like flicking through a classic women’s magazine. (’10 SECRETS TO A MORE LOVING YOU’ ‘KIDS SAY THE FUNNIEST THINGS’ ‘MY UNCLE CHOPPED OFF MY MUM’S HEAD AND USED IT AS A COCK WARMER’) There was no mention of the second Iraq War, but I figured the teacher’s main goal probably wasn’t to stage a live, theatrical documentary worthy of John Pilger.

Before the morning’s entertainment was over we’d had the wedding of Princess Di and Prince Charles (thankfully they omitted the Paris-based sequel: Di Hard); a nine-year-old girl stomping out on stage in character as Margaret Thatcher, and a ten-year-old Joey from Friends repeatedly shouting out ‘How YOU doin’?’. It was surreal as merry shit, and of course, for that reason, I loved every ridiculous second. I prayed that the finale would be JR Ewing and Jimmy Savile conveying the Iran Contra affair through the medium of Michael Jackson’s Thriller video, but, alas, they just sang a Christmas song. I hereby offer my writing services for next year’s Chrimbo concert. I’m thinking ‘Miracle on 34th Street’ meets ‘The Hills Have Eyes’. Get your people to call my people. I think we might have a hit on our hands…

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JOIN ME LATER IN THE WEEK FOR A TALE OF TICKETS, TERROR, PISS AND VOMIT AT THE EDINBURGH CHRISTMAS MARKET

Dreamtime: Night-time Convos with your Kids

Trying to get our nursery and early-primary age kids to sleep can take its toll on our sanity. We sit there in the dark with them for what feels like days as they pick at the wall, drum on the side of the bed, flick the buttons on plug sockets, and contort themselves into shapes Russian gymnasts would baulk at – doing anything and everything, really, except closing their eyes – all the while fighting the rising tide of irritation that’s pushing us ever closer to Hulking-the-fuck-out. Inexplicably, despite our best and most desperate efforts, we’re usually the ones who end up falling asleep. The indignity of it: drummed to sleep by our own over-tired kids.

It’s not only easier just to give up and go with it: it’s better. After all, we have some of the most marvellous conversations of all with our kids inside that limbo-land between hyperactivity and unconsciousness. Daft, sweet conversations full of warmth, whimsy, lunacy and laughter: Twin Peaks meets Mr Tumble with a dash of Austin Powers – with banter that sings, zings and pops like dialogue from an Aaron Sorkin show written exclusively for kids.

On those nights you’d gladly sit in the half-dark chatting nonsense with them forever.

My kids sleep in single beds on opposite sides of their bedroom. The space between the two beds is small, but large enough to house a black leather reclining chair, upon which my wife or I will sit, depending upon whose turn it is to do the stories. Our youngest, Christopher, who’s now three, always falls asleep first. He insists on cuddling your arm, which he pulls into his bed and yanks close to his chest like a favourite teddy bear. Jack, freshly five, is a different story. He’s almost always still awake by the end of the last story, and will do everything in his power to repel sleep. The other night, after about the five millionth shush, I decided to indulge him.

‘Daddy,’ he said. ‘Did I tell you I saw Santa at school today?’

Regular readers of this blog will be well aware of my opposition to the Santa myth. They’ll also know that I was over-ruled and out-gunned on the matter, hence why Jack fully believes in Santa, knows I don’t, and feels deeply sorry for me as a consequence. Never-the-less, I decided to indulge in a dance of devilment around the periphery of his belief.

‘How many Santas have you seen this year in total, do you reckon?’ I asked him.

He pursed his lips. ‘Two.’

‘I think it’s three.’

He nodded, as if to say, ‘Yeah, what’s your fucking point?’

I pressed on, adopting the air of a smug prosecutor about to snare him in a Columbo-esque trap: ‘Was it the same Santa each time, do you think – the same guy just moving around – or were they all different Santas, like there was more than one of them?’

I could see him processing this. ‘They were… different, I think,’ he admitted.

‘A-HA!’ I said, leaping to my feet, and rhythmically slapping him about his cheeks. ‘IN YOUR FACE, YOU GULLIBLE LOSER! THAT’S IT! THAT’S BLOWN THIS CASE WIDE OPEN! HOW DO YOU FEEL NOW, YOU DUPE? YOU DORK? YOU HOPELESS MORON?’

OK, I didn’t say that. I’m not a complete monster. What I said was: ‘Is there only one Santa in the world, do you think? One real Santa?’

He squidged up his mouth in thought. ‘Yes,’ he said earnestly.

Time to wave your cigar, Columbo. ‘So if only one of the three Santas you met this year was the real Santa… then what are the other two?’

‘Robots,’ he said, without any hesitation, and with considerable authority.

So much for Columbo. All credit to him, that’s a bloody brilliant answer. It’s just a shame his quick mind and powerful imagination has to be employed in the service of a vast conspiracy perpetuated annually by millions of quasi-Stalinist Santanistas [And, yes, I am tremendous fun at parties].

‘Do you still not believe in Santa, daddy?’

He looked like a little puppy dog, and I suddenly felt like an angry miser with my foot drawn back for a kick. Now that the Santa myth was entrenched in his psyche – thanks to the endless reinforcement of it by everyone around him – his happiness was indivisible from its shape. I held his hopes and dreams in my hands. My truth – the actual, literal truth – would only make him cry now, even though he’d already heard it from me during previous discussions on the topic. The lie’s roots were now too deep to be extracted without killing the host.

‘I’m still not convinced he exists,’ I told him, softening my stance in order to preserve it, all while taking care not to break his tiny little heart. You bloody monsters. I wasn’t done with this line of reasoning yet, though. I still entertained hopes of helping him to a breakthrough; hand him the key to cast off the shackles himself.

I stroked my chin. ‘What do you think Santa does for the rest of the year when he isn’t out delivering presents?’

‘Well, he tells the elves to get things ready.’

Ah, that’s healthy, isn’t it? In Jack’s eyes Santa is some Victorian-era factory owner, cracking the whip to get those marginalised ethnics working their tiny green butts off. I shook my head. ‘But that won’t take up too much of his time.  What does he do all the rest of the time? The other eleven months of his year?’

Jack batted my question back like it was a slow-moving ping-pong ball. ‘He just sits on his bum. On a chair.’

I had to run with this. Best case scenario, I kill Santa. Worst case scenario, I coax some laughs from that little mouth of his. Hopefully both. ‘So Santa’s got magical powers. He can travel all over the world in one night, delivering hundreds of millions of presents, but he doesn’t use that power the rest of the year? Like, to stop robberies? Or to help put out fires? “SANTA, HELP ME, I’M BURNING!” “Sorry, son, I’m too busy just sitting in my chair.”’

Jack laughed. ‘No. He just sits there.’

‘That lazy fat git.’

Jack laughed again.

‘”SANTA, HELP ME, MY SHOP IS BEING ROBBED!” “Bugger off, it’s June! Can’t you see I’m sitting in my chair, for Christ sake?’”

I left Jack with the imprint of a kiss on his forehead, and a room ricocheting with giggles. Success. Just as long as he stayed asleep now.

There are limits to this whimsy lark.

A little while later I was in my own bed watching TV. This is still something of a novelty, as we only became a two-TV household relatively recently. Jack appeared at the doorway revealing first a foot, then a shoulder, and finishing off with the big reveal of his bed-mussed head.

‘Daddy,’ he said, his face downcast. ‘I keep trying to get to sleep, but I keep thinking of zombies, and I don’t want to go to sleep because then I’ll dream of zombies.’

I paused the TV. I was watching Vikings. Probably best not to add rape and decapitation to his list of nightmares. He watched me for a moment or two, wondering if I was going to order him back to his bed or make room next to me. I smiled.

At times like this I always think about the episode of Cracker where Fitz delivers his mother’s eulogy. He tearfully recounts how as children he and his brother crept up to their living room to watch a boxing match on TV through a crack in the door. Long past their bedtime, Fitz somehow just knew if he pushed open the door his mother would let them both into the warmth of the room to watch the match with them. Fitz’s brother later tells him that he had no interest in the boxing match. He’d only wanted to watch his mum and dad.

‘Come here,’ I said to Jack. All thoughts of zombies must have staggered from his thoughts, else they were never there to begin with, because he bounded over to my side of the bed with a massive grin on his face. I budged over and let him snuggle in.

‘Zombies, huh?’ I said.

‘Every time I try to think of something nice, it turns into a zombie.’

I considered it for a moment. ‘Well have you tried thinking of something that’s a zombie first and then turning it into something nice?’

He looked up at the ceiling and a little smile appeared on his face.

‘It’s your brain. You tell it what to think, not the other way around.’

He seemed happy with this.

‘Hey,’ I said, tousling his head. ‘Do you think there’s a little zombie boy out there somewhere creeping into his dad’s bed because he woke up having a nightmare about a normal little boy?’

I could feel Jack’s grin creeping against my bicep. He fell asleep soon after, just as his little brother burst into the room, eyes aflame, hair a mess. He fell asleep on the other bicep.

I didn’t press play on the TV for a long time afterward. I had no need of it. All I wanted to do was watch my two boys. While I still could.

Time is precious.

Lying to Your Kids: Your Questions About Santa (Part 1 of 6)

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, 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).

Why are you trying to rubbish Santa, Jamie? It’s tradition. We’ve always had Santa and 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 myth 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-Ho(sef Fritzl).

Shall we bring Krampus back then? If it’s tradition you’re thirsty for? After all, horny old Krampus is far more traditional than the Coca-Cola-becoated old coot who shimmies down our chimneys when our kids are sleeping. I’m all for it a Krampus comeback, 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 Status Quo, who were fucking terrible).

We already took Jesus out of Christmas.

What’s one more fictional bearded character?

Off to fuck you go, Santa, my good fellow.

Ten More Things I’ve Learned as a Dad (2019)

^^^ That’s not me, by the way. I’m a lot less handsome than that.

Anyway, without any further ado, welcome to the sequel to my 2017 blog ’12 Things I’ve Learned as a Dad’.

Supermarkets can be the site of your greatest successes, and your greatest defeats

Supermarkets can morph from ethereal paradises into branded hell-scapes in the blink of an eye. Lots of things can influence this: your children’s mood and tiredness; their sugar intake; the ascendancy of Jupiter in Mars; black magic; the Hong Kong technology markets; how much caffeine/codeine/cocaine/morphine you’ve had in the past 24-hours, and how many times that day you’ve found yourself fantasising about jumping into a Ferrari and then immediately driving off a cliff.

What contrasts. One visit, you could be wheeling your children up and down the aisles like something out of ‘Well-Behaved Victorian Family Monthly’. They’ll be helping you put things in the trolley while sticking close to it, flanking it like undertakers accompanying a hearse. They’ll be smiling beatifically at old ladies and saying things like, ‘Mother, I do hope you’ll permit me to help fold all the washing tonight.’ Text-book.

The next visit, your kids are like Gremlins who’ve been fed after midnight. You’ll be trailing a Godzilla’s tail of destruction behind you as they duel their way up and down the aisles like Sith Lords armed with French baguettes instead of light sabres. They’ll be running for the exit like Olympic sprinters (necessitating a dangerous, high-speed chase throughout the supermarket); they’ll be jumping out at old ladies from behind off-brand boxes of Bran Flakes; throwing down police stingers to immobilise people’s trolleys; wearing raw chickens as hats; substituting live grenades for kiwi fruits in the fruit aisle; staging riots and taking people hostages. NEVER take more than one kid to the supermarket on your own. EVER. Unless you’ve got a ready supply of analgesics or hallucinogens. Because you have a lot of weapons in your parenting arsenal, but out in public, there’s one thing you don’t have, which leads us very neatly into the next ‘Thing I’ve Learned’…

Your kids know you can’t use your ‘smash glass in case of emergency’ voice in public

My wife and I have never, and would never, strike our children, ostensibly because we’re not cunts, but that doesn’t mean that our house swells with the sounds of holy silence. Sometimes we have to shout. Sometimes we don’t have to shout, but we do it anyway, because we’re over-tired, because we’re human, because our sanity’s been worn down to a nub through having to ask the kids to put their socks on seventy-five-thousand times when we’re already half-an-hour late for something.

Shouting is always – well, usually – a last resort, though. You don’t want to use it so often that it either replaces smacking as a cruel and debilitating psychological punishment or loses its short-term effectiveness. Once that seal’s broken, though, it’s hard to put the red-faced genie back in the bottle. Especially since the genie might smash the bottle and attempt to stab you with the broken end.

But there’s a particular shout that all parents have: the ‘I Mean Business’ voice; the ‘Shit Just Got Real’ voice. It’s a shout that doesn’t last long, and need only be deployed once. It’s kind of like Jesse Custer’s Genesis power in Preacher. One boom, one screech, and the kids’ blood freezes in their veins, and they petrify like statues.

And you can’t use it in public. Your kids know this. Well, you COULD use it in public, but you’d look like a maniac, or the sort of person who beats and body-slams children. So you do the only other thing you can: grit your teeth into a smile and issue vague threats at your children in a high-pitched, passive-aggressive tone of voice, while occasionally turning to shoot an ‘aw shucks’ shrug at watching strangers, thinking to yourself: ‘I’m going to kill these little fuckers when we get home.’

Say it again, Sam

There are many aphorisms and clichés that sum up the experience of parenting, but there’s one that towers above all the others. No, it isn’t “F*** this, I’m going to max out my credit card and book a one-way trip to Mexico”. Good guess, though. It’s: “You can say that again!”

Because you can. You can say that again. You can say that again about 40,000 times at a bare minimum. And not just some things. All things. Every thing.

Being a parent makes you feel like a robot with its dial endlessly alternating between ‘emotionally dead’ and ‘rage’, and its speech circuits stuck on repeat. Or the composer of the world’s worst, most repetitive rave song – 2 Unlimited for the next generation: ‘Put, put. Put put put put. Put put put put. Put put PUT YOUR PANTS ON!’

Don’t fear a din

When it comes to kids, the loudness of the noise they make is actually in inverse proportion to the size of the calamity that noise signifies. I’ll explain. When I’m downstairs in the living room I can sometimes hear a noise coming from my kids’ room above me that sounds like Thor and Godzilla wrestling in the heart of a neutron bomb. I’ll immediately dash upstairs in a fit of fear and fury, but when I arrive at their doorway, I’ll find that not a single thing is out of place. The room is perfect, save for a toy box that has been turned at a forty-five degree angle towards the window. Both kids are happy and unscathed. They turn to look at me like I’m Chicken Licken after licking eleven tabs of acid. A worry-wart. A nutcase.

The time to worry, I’ve learned, is when it’s deathly quiet up there. Silence means that they’re up to something. Something awful. Young kids can barely concentrate on a single toy or a task for more than a few moments at a time (unless they’re being hypnotised by our good old pal, the TV). Just about the only thing that can focus their minds is evil. Pure, unwashed evil.

So if you find yourself momentarily apart from your kids enjoying a few rare moments of peace, and you can hear nothing from the room in which they’re playing, get the fuck up there without delay. Run. Sprint. Teleport if you can. You’re about to be greeted by a rich cavalcade of danger and debauchery, the likes of which even the ferryman on the banks of the River Styx has never seen: the cat wearing lipstick; an ungodly amount of tampons glued to the ceiling; a ten-foot blue peeing willy painted onto the wall accompanied by the word BOOB in blood-red nail varnish; a duffel bag filled with unmarked fifties; a human turd sprinkled with sequins; a cow marrying a goat in an unofficial ceremony in your bedroom; a dead shark (also sprinkled with sequins); and a working prison complex made entirely out of wooden blocks and cardboard boxes housing some of the worst serial killers this country has ever seen.

Silence is your enemy.

Kids are weirdos

My kids often use me as a climbing frame, usually with little warning or provocation. I only have to bend down to pick up a plate or squat down to tie my shoelaces and there’s a two-person stampede up my spine and across my head, the pair of them swinging off my neck like monkeys.

A few weeks ago, one of my eldest’s mighty gymnastic leaps onto my torso failed, and he accidentally kicked me in the balls. As I cautioned him about the delicacy of the flesh sacks it’s our burden to bear and the care that must be taken around them, my two-year old, who was standing next to us, suddenly shouted out: ‘LIKE THIS?’ before proceeding to whip his trousers down to his ankles and shuffle around the room screaming, ‘I’m an old man, I’m an old man!’ The eldest kid responded by laughing, and slapping his own face with both hands.

Yes, kids are weirdos. And, no, I don’t need a DNA test to prove their lineage.

Food, not so glorious food: kids are fussy

Kids have the same fickle, mercurial relationship with food as Roman emperors did with gladiators. A favourite can quickly get the thumbs down for absolutely no reason at all, and you could find the fires and fury of hell thrown in your face for daring to advocate it in the first place.

Kids are insane. A child could eat potatoes, and only potatoes, every day for six weeks while wearing a T-shirt that says ‘I LOVE POTATOES’; they could sleep with potatoes instead of teddy bears; compose sonnets, odes and epic poems to the potato; they could even lobby to have their name legally changed to Kid Who Things Potatoes are the Greatest, and you still might put a plate of potatoes down in front of them at dinner time to find those potatoes come soaring at your head accompanied by the scream of: ‘POTATOES? WHAT GAVE YOU THE IDEA THAT I LIKED TO EAT SWOLLEN GROUND-TUMOURS? GET THEM OUT OF MY BLOODY SIGHT!’

I’ve witnessed my 2-year-old violently changing his mind about his own choice of breakfast cereal literally within seconds. Cheerios he said. You’re sure, I asked? Yes, he said. Positive? I asked. Yep, he said. Absolutely water-tight on the cereal front there? I asked. Uh-huh, he replied. Cool, I said. Here’s some Cheerios.

And then there was some Cheerios all over the living room table. ‘I WANT CHOCOLATE HOOPS!’

It’s madness incarnate. I’ve always found it funny that a kid can go off eating a particular kind of meat, plant, vegetable, fruit or pulse, but never seems to lose the taste for crisps or chocolate. You’d never hear them exclaiming: ‘A MILKY WAY?! JESUS CHRIST, DO I LOOK LIKE A FUCKING MILKY WAY KIND OF A KID TO YOU? WHERE DO THEY GET THESE PEOPLE?’

Sleep is not a foregone conclusion

The pattern to keep in mind when thinking about your own children’s sleeping patterns is the kind of pattern made by a spider that’s trying to make a web while off its tits on a cocktail of sulph and crack. The end result is less a web and more a Dr’s signature scribbled on the back of a spinning washing machine during an earthquake. By all means try to discern shape and meaning in that pattern, but be prepared for that sulphed-up spider to leap from one of the 957 points of its web and sink its fangs into each of your eyes.

Right. Hang on just a second. [disengages ludicrous analogy mode]

Maybe you’re one of those people whose child sleeps all the way through the night without rouse or rancour from the very first day of its life, and if you’re one of those people then I hate you and wish you an agonising death, ideally involving mentally-deranged ostriches with PTSD. My advice to you is to stop reading this amusing article immediately and proceed directly to ‘Big Malky’s Ostrich Death Arena’ just off the M8 at Cumbernauld. See how long you can bury your head in the sand before your arse is kicked off by seventeen angry flightless birds.

For the rest of you mere mortals, you need to know that lack of sleep – or a torturous and broken drip-feed of sleep – isn’t something that’s necessarily confined to the first year or so of your child’s life.

You could be a caffeine-infused wreck – more eyelid than human – for anything up to five years. It’s worse if you have two or more children. You could very well have one child who sleeps through the night, but any gain in hours spent blissfully unconscious garnered from that cherubic child could be wiped out by the other, or others. My kids are 5 and (almost) 3 now. We co-slept with both of them when they were babies, which was beautiful and magical and reassuring, but the co-sleeping, once started, never ends. Even though both boys go to sleep in their own beds in their own room, I still wake up every morning with seven-eighths of my body dangling from the edge of the bed, and a child’s foot up my nose. And our 3-year-old still wakes up at least once through the night, usually to have a good cry to himself.

We know the feeling.

If you’ve got a partner, hug them tight

None of us parent in a vacuum. We bring our own tiredness, moods, worries, hurries and anxieties to the job. Great. So do our kids.

Their little brains are still growing and changing, overloading their minds and bodies with impulses, emotions and information-flows they aren’t yet equipped to process. They feel things, but they don’t often understand why they feel them, or know how to deal with those feelings. This broth of feelings, this contest of emotions, is a recipe for mental breakdown, depending upon what ingredients are in the mix at any one moment.

That broth can bubble over at any moment. You can wake up in the morning, skip down the stairs and greet your children with a sunny smile, have that undiluted love beamed right back at you, wrap your arms around them and squeeze them tight, and bound over to the breakfast table ready to start the day with a clear head and an open heart, but within three minutes you could be balled up on the floor smashing it with your fists and wailing like a bereaved Middle Eastern mother, as fire and rubble and regret erupt all around you.

There’ll be one kid in the corner covered in milk and wallpaper paste screaming ‘NOOOOOOOO’, while the other one’s on the table sacrificing a goat while aggressively chanting ‘IMHOTEP! IMHOTEP’ over and over. ‘Why?’ you sob, as a swirling inter-dimensional portal opens up next to you and demons crawl out and start eating the house. ‘Why??….’

Ten minutes later you’ll all be under a blanket on the couch cuddling and eating crisps, watching Paw Patrol, and the demons will be complaining because they’ve seen that one eighty-five times before.

I’ve often came home from work at lunchtime to find my wife staring through a wall, with the ashen, dead-eyed countenance of a woman who’s just witnessed a multiple murder – or else is planning one.

Frayed and frazzled nerves, especially when shared and subjected to the same child-shaped stresses, make arguments more likely by a factor of ninety-one… THOUSAND MILLION. While stress-fights are difficult to avoid, I’ve learned that it’s best to try. Just hug them. That’s the best thing to do. Hug them and have them hug you back. Hold each other. Close your eyes tight and hope for the best.

If you’re raising kids alone, then hug yourself. In fact, give yourself a medal, you brave, mental bastards.

An unhealthy obsession with serial killers comes in handy

I’ve long been fascinated by serial killers and violent criminals. I’ve read scores upon scores of books about them, watched countless interviews with convicted wrong-uns on YouTube, and devoured a whack of drama series and documentaries on the subject. I was a fan of sick, murderous bastards long before Netflix made it fashionable. As a consequence I feel I’m armed with enough specialist knowledge to spot the early warning signs of having a psychopath on my hands.

When he was three, Ted Bundy surrounded a sleeping female relative with sharp knives, all pointed towards her body. It was a most unsubtle augur of the young man’s future hobbies. The worst my wife and I have woken up to is a cough in the eye, or a shat bed, so we’ve already aced the Bundy Test.

We’ve always had pets, too, and in a house with trainee serial killers, the pets are the first to go. Our current cats, then, are rather like pit canaries. Mercifully, both boys are very loving and gentle with our furry lodgers, beyond the very occasional bit of monster-roaring in their direction, so that’s another test passed. Phew. And we haven’t yet found the disembodied head of a hitch-hiker in our fridge, so that’s also reassuring.

Keeping an eye on those matches, though.

Despite all the headaches, heartaches and lack of sleep, having kids is still the best thing in the entire world

It really is. And I think that speaks for itself. My kids are absolutely bloody fantastic, and they make me smile and cry with happiness, and beam with love and pride, more times a week than I could count. It makes all the murderous rage worth it.

The Pain (and Joy) of Sending Your Kid to School

Jack’s last day of nursery was melancholic. For me. Not for him. He ran out with a smile on his face and a spring in his step, just like he had every other day. I alone was left to feel the weight of time pressing upon both our shoulders, leaving Jack free to dance between sunbeams in the soft summer breeze. As it should be. That’s part of a your job as a parent: to absorb life’s upsets and irreconcilable truths on behalf of your children so that in later life their existential horrors can be all their own.

When that nursery door slammed shut behind Jack on that last day, he had no idea it would stay shut forever. It sounded like a gun-shot to me, but he didn’t even flinch. Future, past, and present run together in his thoughts like an artist’s palette in the rain. His life – time itself – isn’t portioned or partitioned, and so existence simply is, and things simply are. There’s nothing to fret about; no subtext to analyse. Christ, I envy him. [gulps down another Citalopram]

My wife and I took Jack out of nursery on a Thursday, a week before term officially ended, because we were flying out for a family holiday/honeymoon combo that very afternoon. I collected him at mid-day, a few hours before take-off. As we left the building his classmates were still whooping and dashing and laughing, business as usual, so Jack had no sense of something momentous having happened. There were no cues around him to tell him how to feel. It made me wonder just how much of our sadness is ceremony, a ritual learned like the steps of some lugubrious waltz. It is sad, though. The best, happiest and most innocent days of his life are now behind him, and, in a cruel twist of fate and biology, he probably won’t ever remember them.

Us on Jacks first day of school. His crazy little brother his doing his Gollum thing in the background

The end of nursery and the beginning of primary education can be a tough transition for children and parents alike. Walking through your kid’s nursery class as a parent or guardian is like walking through some wonderful dream. It’s a magical, toy-filled living room you never have to tidy up, with grubby, screaming kids in it that you never have to endure for any longer than you absolutely need to. You can spend as little or as much time in there as you like. When you drop your kid off in the morning you can spend twenty minutes helping them to settle, feigning wonderment at their ten thousand identical pictures of stick men, and variously tripping over other people’s children; when you pick them up at the end of the day you can spend another twenty minutes in hovering about, hoping that the nursery teacher isn’t going to pull you aside to tell you that your little cherub has stabbed a fork into another kid’s eye, or started reciting grandpa’s favourite racist rhyme about Chinese people.

During the day you can pop in to drop off egg cartons, or bits of pasta with googly eyes drawn on them, or a bag of Y-Fronts, or illuminous hymn books, or whatever crazy shit they’ve asked you to donate this month. You can stick around for the bulk of the day helping them to make fairy cakes with bogies baked into them, or build towers out of tea-bags, tea-spoons and tubs of butter. You can turn up in the middle of the day and take your kid out of class to attend a Mongolian throat singing lesson, if that’s what tickles your fancy. Nursery is an amorphous, collective experience.

School isn’t, and by necessity it can’t be, because part of school’s function is to prepare children for the hellish institutions in which they’ll find themselves trapped as adults, and you can’t take your favourite aunty, rolls of sticky-back plastic, coloured paper and a stuffed parrot to work with you as an adult, unless, that is, your favourite aunty has a massive stroke and you’re employed as her carer.

When you drop your child off for their first regular day of school, you’re bundling them into a fortress. This isn’t your world anymore. YOU… SHALL NOT PASS! The military discipline starts aproper. The kids are organised into quiet, at-heel little lines, awaiting the clanging-ding of the school bell and the Pavlovian rigours of the education system… although with rather more of an emphasis on gluing things and drawing pictures of cats than that last sentence implies.

Jack jumped into his first day with happiness and curiosity. As we all sat in the gymnasium receiving our talk from the headmistress, teachers started calling out kids’ names so they could be grouped together for the walk to class. When Jack heard his name, you’d have thought he’d won an Academy Award. ‘That’s me! That’s my name!’ he said, jumping out of his seat.

I have only vague recollections of my early years at primary school, little flutters of memory, like magic cuts of video-reel blown in the wind: pipe cleaners; that glue that sets on your hand like a second gooey skin; the smell of chalk and sadness; little desks arranged like rows of square islands at which our tiny forms were marooned, adrift in a sea of quiet and boredom; dusters the size of 100-year-old tortoises.

Things are different for Jack (and will be for his brother, Chris, who’s still got a few blissful years of googly-eyed pasta in-front of him). They’re better. The powers that be have closed the gulf between nursery and the early years of primary school. They now all bleed into each other, making the transition between the two a lot smoother, and a lot less daunting. We’ve finally cottoned on to the fact that little kids are better taught through play, fun, and tactile learning. There’s plenty of time for them to sit deathly still in a suffocatingly quiet room bored shitless and wishing they could escape once they join the work-force.

I remember my primary one teacher, Miss Donaldson, a thin, teetering waif of a woman whose head looked altogether too delicate to rest upon her stick-like shoulders. She was like Popeye’s Olive Oil but with big 80s glasses, and the personality of an awkward and squirrelly church organist who didn’t really like children. Her skin was a waxy alabaster, her cheeks a bright rosy red, like they’d just been pinched by a crab. She once shouted at me for opening my packed lunch about a minute before the lunch bell, and my mum came to school to shout at her. I had some of my first sexual thoughts about Miss Donaldson. They were wholly PG in flavour, of course, because no 18-rated input had yet reached my eyes (and glands). I had a dream where she gently rebuked me while parading about in white underwear. This tells me that I must’ve studied the lingerie section of the Argos catalogue in some detail at some point in my very formative years.

Luckily – or perhaps unluckily – for Jack, most primary school teachers these days are young, attractive urban professionals in their mid-twenties, so any burgeoning romantic and sexual fantasies he goes on to develop around the authority figures in his life will be a little less Dickensian in character.

It scares and excites me in equal measure that Jack is now a few notches removed from the sphere of our parental influence, and will continue to move further away with each passing year. Our input, once absolute, will now be diluted, and sometimes overwhelmed by the data and cues he receives from other sources: peers, teachers, other authority figures. I’m excited to see him learn new skills and information, uncover hidden talents and barter with exciting ideas and concepts, but I’m terrified of that inevitable day when some wee git in his class tells him what a dildo is.

I was largely a good little guy when I was a nipper, although I was undeniably off-kilter. At home, when I was 4, the local farmer had to chap my mum’s door to tell her I was in his field ‘yaa-ing’ at the half-wild horses like I was a cowboy. When I was 5, at the height of my parents’ divorce, amid the uncertainty and confusion, I blagged my way out of the class at day’s end and walked 2 miles home on my own. A few years later I tried to get our headteacher to sign off on distributing a comic I’d co-produced with a classmate, a request she denied on the grounds that the strip on the front cover showed a man boiling a baby. FASCIST!

I wonder what stories and memories my kids will have to share once they’re looking back on their school days, Wonder Years-style, like I am now.

God bless technology, is all I can say. It’s a modern scourge, certainly, but also an indispensable window on Jack’s learning. We, as parents, may be physically blocked from the classroom (except on play-days and parents’ nights), but social media grants us full access to their daily activities and highlights. We need this, because Jack has already become a teenager.

‘How was school?’

‘Good.’

‘What did you learn about?’

‘Stuff.’

[sigh]

[consults phone]

It’s going to be an interesting twelve years.

What to tell your little ones about death

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.

We Haunt Our Own Lives

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

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

Back.

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

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

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

Then darkness.

We can never go back.

But we can’t stop trying.

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

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

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

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

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

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

The kids, of course, felt nothing.

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

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

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

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

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

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

In the eternal past.

Together.

Roy, Boy of Earth

A free, funny story for you and your kids to enjoy together at bed-time.

 

An alien boy had grown sick of the sight,

Of the food he was served every day, every night.

His tummy would rumble and grumble and churn.

Couldn’t they give a new chef a wee turn?

 

The things that he ate on his planet of Munch,

For breakfast, and dinner, and supper and lunch,

Were mushy black nuggets that tasted like sand.

All crunchy and gooey and horribly bland.

 

I won’t eat these nuggets,” he shouted one day.

Then jumped in a spaceship and went on his way,

Heading to Earth, where the eating was good

And he’d heard boys in jammies made wonderful food.

 

 

He zoomed into orbit, then dived to the planet,

Not even stopping to survey and scan it.

Crashed down on a roof like a hungry green Santa,

Dreaming of human washed down with cold Fanta.

 

He leapt in a window, he followed the snore,

(Which meant there was one boy, he’d hoped there’d be four).

The room smelled like sneezes, old socks and a fart,

Delicious, in other words: food for the heart.

 

In his hurry he tripped over toys on the ground,

Which hurled him, and bumped him, oh boy, what a sound!

The little boy woke, and rubbed hard at his eyes,

Which grew wide and excited and full of surprise.

 

Hello there, strange creature, well, my name is Roy.”

The alien scowled, “You’re my food, stupid boy.

I don’t need to know what your name is, you see,

You’re nothing to me but a new recipe.”

 

 

Are you from space?!” the young chappy exclaimed,

From which planet? And won’t you please tell me your name?”

There’s no point in that, boy, because humans can’t say it,

But if you really must know it’s Frass-Jassa-Mump-Frayvit.”

 

I’ll just call you, Frass, then, it’s so nice to meet you.”

The alien laughed, “Boy, I’m going to eat you.

I’ll chop you all up like a tasty risotto!

Don’t greet ’em, just eat ’em: that’s my planet’s motto.”

 

Roy let out a laugh, it soon filled up the room,

And hit Frass’s ears like a big sonic boom.

You’re laughing,” growled Frass, “I don’t think that you get it,

When I make you a sandwich you’re going to regret it.”

 

You’ll make me a sandwich?” said Roy, “Thank you, please,

My favourite is tuna, or pickle with cheese.”

No, no,” said the alien, ready to crack.

YOU’LL be my sandwich, my tummy’s next snack!”

 

 

Roy smiled a big smile, asked: “Why can’t we be friends?”

The alien prayed for this moment to end.

I feel like my words are all stuck in a loop,

But perhaps that will end when I make you some soup.”

 

You’ll make me some soup? Oh Frass that would be great.

Can you butter some bread up; I often have eight?”

No, no,” said the alien, “My soup will be YOU,

And I’ll mop you all up, with a slurp, bite and chew!”

 

Roy reached out behind him, and scooped up a bear,

And handed it over, while saying “There, there”,

Which made Frass so angry he wanted to squawk.

He’d never expected his supper to talk.

 

Now look, boy,” said Frass, “Let’s just make something clear,

I need you to listen, I need you to hear.

I’m not your best pal, not your mucker or mate.

I’m going to cook you; you’ll be on my plate.”

 

 

I’ll start with your cheek, oh my, c’est magnifique!

I’ll heat it up nice, with a fat plate of rice.

I’ll use a big wok… no a pan, no a skillet.

I’m drooling already… I want my cheek fillet!

 

I look at your nose, and my appetite grows!

I’ll make a big pie with your fingers and toes,

Then garnish it all with a sprinkling of lips,

Maybe throw in some ankles, some thigh-bones and hips!

 

One leg or two? Well, I’m going to have both.

I’ll carve them like turkeys, I give you my oath.

Your eyes can be sprouts, then you won’t see you’re thinner,

Once I’ve gobbled you up like a hot Christmas dinner.

 

What to do with your teeth? Why, I’ll stuff them with cheese,

Then I’ll grill them with mushrooms and one of your knees.

I’ll fry you like bacon, I’ll braise you like steak,

And your eyebrows and eyelids I’ll bake in a cake.

 

 

I’ve said all I can, I can’t say any more,

All of this talking’s an arduous chore.

I hope that my meaning is clear on this day,

I say what I mean: and I mean fricassee!

 

Prepare to be eaten…

Roy, boy of Earth!”

 

Roy started laughing, he just couldn’t stop,

He thought that his tummy was going to pop.

And Frass stamped his feet, like a paw-thumping bunny,

And jumped up and down, shouting, “Why is that funny?”

 

Frass tried his best to stay fierce and defiant,

Even when Roy scooped him up like a giant,

And held him right up to the ball of an eye,

Saying: “How will you eat me, you’re two inches high?”

 

 

Oh… Erm…”, said Frass-Jassa-Mump-Frayvit of Munch,

Suddenly losing his hunger for lunch.

He wondered, with fear, what his wee life was worth.

And he said, “…please don’t eat me, kind Roy… boy of Earth.”

 

Roy didn’t eat him, he fed him instead,

Fetched him some honey and small bits of bread.

Which Frass gobbled up with the greatest of ease,

Before reaching his main course, some hot mushy peas.

 

Those peas were the best food that Frass ever tasted,

And finding them meant that his trip wasn’t wasted.

These things are sand nuggets, but tasty and green,

I’ll take a load home in my flying machine.”

 

 

So Frass said goodbye, and then loaded his ship,

Thanking his friend for a wonderful trip,

Roy said, “You’re welcome, and hurry back soon,

I’ll find you more peas than can fit on the moon.”

 

Frass was delighted, he’d found a new food,

On a lovely new planet where people were good.

He smiled to himself, feeling happy and fine,

I’ve done it,” he shouted. “It’s peas in our time.”


Thank you for reading ‘Roy, Boy of Earth’. Hard to believe the pictures were drawn by me and not a professional artist, right? RIGHT??  If you and your kids enjoyed reading my story, all I ask is that you donate a minimum of £2-4 to CHAS (Children’s Hospices Across Scotland). You can do this by calling 0141 779 6180 or visiting www.chas.org.uk/donate.

This isn’t an official CHAS campaign. CHAS isn’t affiliated with me or this website in any way. I just wanted to help the best way I knew how: by writing something silly. CHAS does such important, admirable work for people and children in heart-breaking situations that I’m sure none of you will grudge digging deep for donations – even a shallow dig for £2-4 is a tremendous help. Every penny counts.

A Rave for Kids?

© Photography by Khristopher Morgan for Here & Now (fb.com/weareherenandow)

Falkirk nightclub ‘Temple’ recently applied for a variation to its license to allow it to operate as a venue for children’s ‘rave’ events during the day. Councillor Robert Bisset, sitting on the Licensing Board, said he wanted to delay a ruling until more and better lighting had been installed in the club.

I understand the health-and-safety implications of a horde of hyperactive kids jumping around in a dark room, but it’s obvious that not one single member of that board has ever been to a rave, else they would have known that darkness is something of a prerequisite, not to mention a necessity.

If adults were to have a rave in a brightly-lit room, the cumulative effect of all those illuminous togs, jutting limbs and sweating, gurning faces bouncing up and down to a thumping, whizz-bang beat would be too disgusting and absurd for its participants to bear, and they’d all have to go home and sit in a corner for three days, rocking back and forth while trying to peel the skin from their faces.

Light burns; darkness salves.

Do we really need to inculcate our kids into raves, anyway? I understand that the ravers of yesterday want their kids to follow in their footsteps, but so soon? I did a lot of things in the late 1990s, most of them entirely unsavoury. I wasn’t once inspired to think, ‘You know what, I hope my kids get the chance to go hunting for drugs one day, too. But, you know: when they’re six!’

Surely the adult world can wait. What are we going to do to them next? Put them in little suits and see if they can blag mortgages for their Wendy houses? Make them sit through an awkward-as-fuck dinner party? Send them to the vet and force them to witness a series of increasingly harrowing hamster euthanasias?

What would a rave for the under 6’s look like anyway?

Let’s just imagine that for a moment or two…

Come regress with me.

At the kids’ rave

The beat drops for Baby Shark. There’s a scream and everyone starts juddering like crazy across the dance-floor, except for one boy sitting cross-legged at the side of the hall, who rolls his eyes and mutters something about Baby Shark being ‘soooo 2018’ and a ‘passing fad’.

‘It’s too commercialised now,’ says Felicia, a little girl wearing an ‘In the Night Garden’ T-shirt. She squats down next to him in solidarity.

He rips open his buttoned cardigan to show her his ‘Teletubbies’ T-shirt, and then gives her a disgusted look.

‘Don’t try to rave with me, newbie. I’m old school. I busted moves to Pingu, shufflin’ it penguin-style, when you were still swimming in your dad’s nut-sack. I watched Postman Pat before the pube-headed, speccy twat went airborne. OLD school. You feel it?’

‘I’ve seen Rugrats,’ she says haughtily.

‘Bitch, I’m wearing Rugrats mother***ing Y-fronts.’

He gets up and starts strutting away, shouting back over his shoulder:

‘I can’t be seen with you. You’re a fraud. I’m going home to listen to DJ Peppa Pig’s Sick Licks. ON FUCKING VINYL!’

He struts away, his finger held aloft behind him. ‘BYE Felicia.’

It’s the wrong finger, but she gets the idea.

A new tune bangs out across the room. The crowd are going wild, joining hands and jumping up and down, side to side, like one massive conjoined entity: a ska-beast, its veins pulsing pink-and-green on the dimly-lit dance-floor. “PAW PATROL, PAW PATROL, BE THERE ON THE DOUBLE! PAW PATROL, PAW PATROL…YEAH, LEMME HEAR Y’ALL MOTHERFUCKERS SING IT! YEAH, THAT’S RIGHT, SAVE THAT MOTHERFUCKING CHICKEN, Y’ALL, DOGGY-STYLE!”

Wayne, a stocky five-year-old, is out on the dance-floor in the middle of the throng, dancing like a boy possessed. Mainly because he’s absolutely off his tits on E-numbers. He’s had a line of Sherbet, a pure rock of Twix, and a half-bar of Milky Way that’s been cut with Smarties. Not to mention shit-loads of Coke. He’s throwing some shapes. Literally. He’s throwing squares, triangles, circles, rectangles, right at the other kids’ heads. Big thick Fisher Price plastic shapes.

A few feet away from him is Kade, a nursery kid with rhythm in his bones. The crowd’s created some distance between itself and Kade, not because Kade’s such a good dancer that he deserves space to ply his art, but because Kade’s shat himself. Violently. He’s flicking grotty smears of butt-gravy each time he shakes his hips. It’s splatting out of the sides of his nappy like Beethoven’s drool. A little girl a few feet away from him gets a splat of it on her dress, but because her parents are hippies, it goes with the pattern and she doesn’t notice. And still Kade dances, his arms thundering like pistons, his head bobbing like a Churchill dog in the back windscreen of a race-car.

‘CROWD SURF!’ he shouts, and everyone edges further away from him.

Back over at the side of the hall is Isaac, who’s been trying to blend into the wall. He’s wearing designer sandals, khaki cut-offs and a long face. He sees Felicia looking sad, and shuffles over to her. He’s no gentleboy, though; no knight in shining armour. He just knows a captive audience when he sees one.

Isaac sits down next to Felicia and tries to introduce himself over the din. ‘I’m Isaac, yeah? I’m 4 and a quarter. I love these things. You can’t just feel the music, sometimes it feels like you ARE the music, yeah?’

Felicia picks at one of her nostrils and stares at him through one heavy-lidded eye, sighing audibly. Undeterred, Isaac continues: ‘Yeah, you probably haven’t seen me around. I’m actually taking a gap year from nursery this year. It was sapping my shakra, man, I needed some room to grow, you know?’

She jams her finger up the other nostril, and plucks out a runny dollop of squidgy bogey. She grinds it into Iggle Piggle’s eye, all the while staring dead ahead at Isaac, who hasn’t noticed a thing. In fact, he isn’t even looking at her anymore.

‘Yeah, I’m working on a novel, actually, it’s a conceptual piece, my Dad says it’s the best thing he’s ever read, it’s all about how school doesn’t actually exist, yeah, and there’s this dog, but it can talk, yeah, and you find out it represents the main character’s grief at his gran dying, man, but really it’s a love story for our age, yeah?’

‘PSSSSSSST,’ hisses a boy standing over them. He opens his jacket to reveal a row of lollies above a row of packets of sherbet.

‘How much for the jacket?’ asks Felicia.

In a perfect turn of events, the 2017 club remix of ‘Johnny Johnny Yes Papa’ thumps into life around them.

The dealer looks down at Isaac’s shorts and sandals with a sneer. ‘Who buys your clothes? Your mum?’

‘Em, yeah,’ he says. ‘I’m four. Our mums… all our mums buy our clothes. Who… who buys your clothes?’

The dealer smiles. ‘Good point, son. Want to get fucked up before our mums come to pick us up?’

Isaac shoots to his feet. ‘Let’s party like it’s … well, right now.’


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Herding Sharks: Dealing with Warring Kids

When you get a tinge of diarrhoea you know what you’re in for: frequent trips back and forth to the toilet (often with little or no warning); skid-marks ahoy; the feeling of being drained, dehydrated and defeated, and the involuntary commitment to time spent nursing a thoroughly grotty botty. It’s okay, though. After a day or two of discomfort your poor, stinging bum-hole and over-worked digestive system will return to normal. You know this. You accept it.

But knowing this and accepting it doesn’t mean that diarrhoea suddenly becomes an enjoyable activity. ‘Ooh, a gurgle in my stomach. Is it a fart or is it a jet-stream of shit? I just can’t tell. I LOVE THIS, IT’S SO EXCITING!’

And so it is with our off-spring (Yes, Doctor Spock, I’ve just compared my children to a messy bout of shitting – what does your book say about that?)

When our children hit a developmental milestone and begin exhibiting a new set of challenging behaviours you know that before too long (it always feels too long, however long it takes) their brain will knit itself into a different pattern and their capacity for reason, empathy and self-awareness will alter, increase, and evolve, ultimately leaving you with happy, likeable kids who don’t make you want to leap out of an airplane using only a bottle of vodka as a parachute.

While you’re dealing with the worst that your kids have to throw at you, it pays to remember that those tiny beings who push our buttons so expertly aren’t wise agents with full control over their own minds and destinies, but frightened, foolish, fun-loving little proto-people, who spend their days rushing and rocketing between sensations, agonies and epiphanies, all the while as their fragile bodies morph and spin and sprout and change, seemingly at the speed of a Tasmanian devil that’s perpetually stuck on fast-forward.

Unfortunately – as with the squits – realising all of this doesn’t make the minutiae of their madness any easier to handle, no matter how many times you count to ten through gritted teeth, or chant ‘gentle parenting, gentle parenting’ to yourself as you crush a Pyrex jug to dust with your bare hands.

If you’ve got two kids of roughly similar age, then God help you (If you’ve got more than two, you absolute psycho, then I can’t help you. No-one can. You’re doomed… DOOOOOMED). Just as one child is coming out of a developmental cycle – new and improved, perhaps even temporarily tamed – the other one’s usually just about to enter one – at the new end, the bad end – their challenging behaviour rubbing off on the other one, the bigger one, who had looked for one precious, fleeting second as if they’d actually turned over a new leaf.

Nope.

And round they both go, around and around, again and again, shitting their destruction over your soul like a pair of possessed muck-spreaders.

It’s incredibly difficult to negotiate with these tiny terrorists. They want different things from you, and from each other. By way of example, our boys are 4 and 2. Their communications arrays are at very different stages of construction. Our eldest can pick up and decode most of the transmissions we send to him, but there are some that transmit on too low a frequency for him to catch. And, distressingly, a high proportion of the signals that do manage to get through to him are drowned out by a rogue signal being beamed from within his own brain, which appears to be amplified by tiny and invisible but none-the-less immensely powerful loud-speakers dotted around his skull. This is the message:

‘AAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRGGGHHHHH!’

Our youngest picks up very little of the instructions we transmit to him. If he obeys, it’s mostly just luck. Next to negotiating with a two-year-old, herding cats is easy. Trying to reason with small children is more like herding hungry sharks.

The signals the two kids broadcast to each other are always scrambled. They spend most of their time scrutinising each other like drunk submarine commanders from rival warring countries, bunkered down under the sea and cut off from their respective governments, both with their fingers poised over the Nuclear Destruct button, unsure whether the other one has already pressed theirs.

Looking after two is tough. Hell, looking after one is tough. The bad news is, you can’t always seek strength in numbers. Sometimes you can be outnumbered by your off-spring even if there’s a balanced ratio between adult and child. The chaotic unpredictability of a child enhances its destructive power far out of proportion to its size. For some kids, you might need as many as twelve adults to keep them in check, and quite possibly a Hannibal Lecter-style prison-trolley and muzzle.

My two bonnie boys – Jamie

Last autumn, my partner and I took our two boisterous boys to the Museum of Scotland, in Edinburgh; by the end of the excursion their mother bore a striking physical resemblance to many of the angry jungle cats whose mouths were frozen in fury along the walls. The kids fought, they fled, they fought some more; they bashed, they bickered, and bounced; they hurled food on the floor, and hurled themselves at strangers, nearly knocking over a multitude of exhibits in the process. They shrieked and yelled and leaked and raged, fighting to the death for a spot on my high shoulders.

Having to shout the same clutch of stock phrases over and over tends to take the fizz out of a day of fun and cultural enrichment. Towards the end of the day I genuinely shouted the following at my four-year-old son: ‘You walk one more step away from me and I swear you can kiss the car we’re saving up to get you when you’re 17 goodbye!’ Now that’s some next-level consequencing.

I’ve been driving my partner to the gym two nights a week, and, brave fool that I am, spending the hour between drop-off and pick-up entertaining the kids in town: one evening taking them to the pet shop (or ‘The Free Zoo’, as I like to call it), the next evening to McDonalds, another evening to the furniture shop (or the Free Funfair, as I like to call it), where we can bounce on the display beds and ride up and down on the escalators.

Sometimes necessity dictates that we go shopping, a prospect I rarely relish in tandem with my partner, never mind alone. If you’re a lone parent taking multiple children with you to the supermarket to do the shopping, you’re either a little bit crazy or really, really, really fucking crazy.

There’s a double-decker shopping trolley in the big Tesco in town that’s trolley on top, plastic toy-car on bottom. Naturally, my kids fight over who gets to sit behind the wheel of the car. Yet again, the myriad faults in our shared communication matrix make negotiation almost impossible. Even when the intellectual conditions are ripe for striking a deal with my eldest – “If you sacrifice this for your brother, I promise I’ll reward you with x,”; “Remember, he doesn’t understand things as well as you do, and gets a lot more upset at things, so we have to help him a lot more,” – if his sleep/mood/sugar balance is off by even twenty minutes or a lolly-pop then, shit, I might as well try to mediate the Israel-Palestine conflict dressed as a naked Hindu God, covered in makeshift Hitler and Allah tattoos.

During a particularly memorable trip a few weeks ago I almost voluntarily committed myself to (not a mental institution, but) the sea. The mighty ocean. The younger kid screamed for the car at the base of the trolley. The eldest kid screamed because he wanted the car. I figured the screams of the eldest would be easier to bear, so gave the youngest kid the car. The eldest kid wouldn’t stop screaming, so I wheeled the trolley back to where it came from, and ordered them both out. Then I had two screaming kids. But at least their misery had been equalised, even if it was at the cost of doubling mine.

The screaming died down. Eventually. But the screams weren’t gone, merely dormant, lurking just beneath the surface of reality waiting for the smallest of ‘nos’ or ‘stop its’ to invite them back into the world. The youngest wanted to run rampant round the store. Very understandably, I didn’t want him to do that. He objected, in very strong terms, which he conveyed through an electrified flood of tears and tantrums. I had to jog through the shop holding him under my arm, a horizontal lump wriggling and shouting to get free as my eldest kid jogged by our side. We must have looked like a fractured squad of injured soldiers running through a battlefield to the evac point.

Upon reaching the check-out and loading the conveyor, my eldest announced he was desperate for the toilet. I angrily threw the groceries back into the basket, and rushed us off to the bathroom, whereupon my youngest splashed and patted his hands in a dirty urinal as I was holding his brother up to pee in the urinal next to it.

That was a dark day.

But the next week, something magical happened in that supermarket: nothing. Absolutely nothing. Nothing stressful, in any case. The kids were little miracles of civility: polite, responsive, calm, cute and courteous. My youngest took the car, but the eldest didn’t mind. He rode in the trolley above, helping to pack the groceries, and proving an able navigator. I wanted to show them off to the world. Behold! Look what models of citizenhood shot from my loins! High-five me, peasants, for I am surely the greatest Dad in the world.

Bouyed by this experience, the next week, apropos of nothing, I decided to take them both out for dinner at a restaurant that DIDN’T have a soft-play. Such arrogance deserved to be punished. But it wasn’t. They were a dream. At one point they even sat on the same chair peacefully feeding each other. I couldn’t quite believe it myself.

So does that mean that the cycles are complete? That the worst is over, and they’re now running in concert with each other, working together as a beautiful, harmonious unit?

I got this text from my partner during the week:

You’d think that the extra half hour in bed would make them better people! Normally Chris just putters about doing his own thing and is generally pleasant but even he was a bit of a dick today. He kept throwing his hat into people’s gardens. I visualised throwing him over the wall after it.”

And I’m writing this post you’re reading now while sitting in my local coffee shop, half-frazzled and surely suffering from mild PTSD after shouting ‘Don’t hit your brother, don’t hit your brother’ at least 60,000 times this morning alone. I’m on my second large coffee of the day. It won’t be the last.

The cycle never ends, my friends. It just mutates.

Different shit, different day.

Just keep dashing, wiping and washing. That’s all you can do.

But don’t forget – if you’ll allow me to refer back to the diarrhoea analogy with which we began – to enjoy the moments between the gurgles and the rumbles and the worried checking of your pants.

Those moments make all the shit worthwhile.

When Kids Compete

‘As long as you enjoy yourself, it doesn’t matter if you win or lose. You’re a winner just for trying.’

You say it. You mean it. You believe it. You want your kid to believe it, too. Hell, it’s true. Winning isn’t everything. Life is a rich tapestry of experiences that it’s an honour to… well, experience, I suppose. Reducing everything to a cross in a box robs us of the chance simply to enjoy being: to think, to feel, to explore: to get something out of existence that’s spiritual and inspirational rather than fleeting and relational. Sometimes talent and genius marches to the beat of its own drum. It’s true, all true.

But it’s also true that when a four-year-old girl beat my four-year-old son in a poetry competition, there was a small part of me that wanted to pick her up by her pigtails and drop-kick her through a fucking window.

Or at the very least pursue a Larry David-esque vendetta against her: a campaign of harassment culminating in the whole audience pointing at her and singing ‘Happy birthday to you, you live in a zoo, you look like a poo poo, and you smell like one, too’ – as the little girl cries so hard that she actually falls over.

Just joking, of course…(coughs)

Winning isn’t everything.

Jack did very well. His first public speaking engagement, and he strode up to that podium and its waiting microphone with the speed and zeal of a seagull closing in on an unattended sandwich. He stood with his upper torso bent forwards, his legs anchored a small way behind his hips, his hands at his back, like a rock-star of the poetry world; a little Liam Gallagher, minus the recreational drugs (unless cocoa counts as a drug, which in kids, it probably does).

His delivery was clear and confident, only faltering at the very last line, which he rushed through a little too quickly, the rhythm speeding then halting as if met by a sudden traffic jam. Still, he’s only four, bless him. Most four-year-olds can’t even say disestablishmentarianism properly, the stupid little idiots. With that in mind, we decided not to issue too severe a punishment beating this time around. Rest assured, though, if he fluffs next year’s poem the tooth-fairy’s going to be leaving a cheque under his pillow.

By default, Jack was first up to bat (if you’ll permit the jazzy Americanism), which hadn’t been the original plan. A sullen, curly-haired boy had trudged up to the podium first, but had quickly left without saying a word after he was overcome with shyness. He’d stood with his lips almost engulfing the mic, a noise like a desperately upset Darth Vader emanating from his mouth. The poor wee fella came back for a second attempt a little later, managed a few lines this time, but was again overcome with nerves. We felt really sorry for him, and later took pains to explain to Jack that what they were all doing was exceptionally brave. Nobody was a loser today. Nobody had failed. The little boy had tried his best, and that’s a cause for celebration and camaraderie, not condemnation. Jack nodded his approval.

It was a lesson, however, that wasn’t to stick. A little later in the show, a boy who was a year or so older than Jack – and not half as steely – took to the podium. He kept fluffing his lines, and each time his mother would whisper prompts into his ear, and he’d shrug or shake his head. Occasionally he’d step away from the microphone and have a soundless argument with his mother, bordering on comic mime, no doubt appealing for release from his poem-shaped nightmare. When he finally got to the end, after more than a few stutter-steps, he received a huge and heart-felt round of applause. It was a sweet, funny and tragic spectacle that elicited waves of empathy from everyone in the audience.

From everyone, that is, except our son, who sat cackling away like The Joker.

‘He gets that from you,’ I told my partner, as I continued to imagine the little girl from Jack’s heat getting chewing-gum stuck in her hair during an important family occasion.

We teach Jack to frame his experiences in a compassionate and zen-like manner, and always try to help him manage his expectations without knocking himself or others. That doesn’t always work. One: because he’s a kid, and the world of kids is lawless and savage, like the old Wild West. And two: because he spends a lot of time around us, his parents, and most of the time our defences are down and our filters are off. He learns much more from us by way of osmosis than he does by rote, meaning that it’s one thing for us to coach him to be compassionate and to repeatedly remind him that it’s the taking part that counts, quite another for him to witness me or his mother losing at a computer game, and cursing everyone from God on down to the smallest louse on the back of a mouse. Deep down, he must know that we’re hypocrites and assholes, despite how much we pretend otherwise.

Imperfect assholes. Assholes who love him. Assholes who will protect him and his little brother and any future sprogs from the very real assholes out there in the world, and will keep doing so until the day we die, hoping against hope that we don’t turn them into assholes in the process, even though it’s almost inevitable. We’re all assholes, when it comes right down to it. Every one of us. There’s a poem in there somewhere. Actually, there’s a hundred thousand poems, a million movies and TV shows, and the entire field of psychoanalysis in there. They fuck you up, your mum and dad, as Philip Larkin once opined.

The little girl who bested him (more ‘pipped’, I’d say, yes, pipped) was a little more demonstrative with her hands, and slightly more poised and expressive in her delivery, which my partner and I figured was probably down to her being a NASCENT NARCISSIST WHO ATE BOGEY SANDWICHES AND SMELLED OF POO POO.

Jack didn’t appear too bothered not to have come first, until he saw the gift basket – filled with sweeties and the like – awarded to and held aloft by his nemesis. That he wanted. It’s tempting to feel sorry for him, until you discover his Darwinian perspective on non-merit-based rewards for participation.

Remember the wee curly-headed boy who was supposed to have gone first? Well, he was called forward to receive a certificate – all of the kids got certificates, you see. Even if they didn’t win, they’d been chosen to represent their nursery or school-year, and thus they were already winners by default. The wee boy started walking towards the stage to receive his recognition, and as he did so Jack leaned back in his chair with a disgusted look on his face.

‘Why is that boy getting that? He wasn’t even good.’

‘Shhhhhh,’ said his mother.

‘He gets that from you,’ I told her, a smug smile dancing across my lips.

I imagined the wee girl tripping over her own dress on the way to collect her first Oscar in 2045.

My partner scowled.

‘Shut it, you loser,’ she said with a smile.


Read ‘This Be The Verse’, Philip Larkin’s short and visceral poem on parenting and the human condition.

Giving Santa the Sack: Your Questions Answered

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.

Drag me to IKEA: The seventh circle of Scandinavian Hell

My partner and I took a trip to IKEA a few weeks ago.

I know, right?

IKEA.

No doubt as that acronym-disguised-as-a-word starts to settle into your consciousness you’ll feel first a prickling of the hairs on the back of your neck, followed by a wave of dread whooshing down your spine, and finally the taste of your own frantic, frenzied heart leaping and thumping in your mouth. You might even let loose a brown torpedo of terror down the back of your trousers. Who could blame you?

Next, the lightning, the thunder, the very earth shaking beneath your feet, as the sun turns black, the sky turns white, birds fly backwards, mice become accountants, clouds come alive and start eating people, monkeys marry elephants, custard invades Norway, all sounds on earth become the sound of Rolf Harris crying, petrol stations declare war on delicatessens, old people start exploding, and Theresa May’s head turns into a sandcastle of jelly that’s swiftly leapt upon by a suddenly tiny Jeremy Corbyn, who bounces up and down on it whilst dressed as a lion and playing the hits of Bruno Mars on the kazoo – which of course all sound like Rolf crying.

IKEA. We don’t say I.K.E.A. We say IKEA. There’s very little precedent for this. We don’t say banqyoo. We don’t say himv, bihhs, tisbi or hisbic. But we say IKEA. Not I.K.E.A, and not Ingvar Kamprad Elmtaryd Agunnaryd. But IKEA. Why? I’ll tell you why. BECAUSE WE’RE SCARED.

IKEA!

Say its name five times into the mirror and a Swedish demon arrives, splits you into 600 different sections and hides the Allen key. IKEA doesn’t sell furniture: it sells brimstone-studded time-bombs. It sells cursed artefacts. It sells evil.

The whole process from getting your new furniture home to having a massive mental breakdown to eventually filing for divorce is so vein-poppingly predictable that you could turn it into a gameshow. “OK, so Jamie’s opened the box and started unpacking his new wardrobe; he’s dropped a few heavy slats onto his fingers, some mild swearing there, but otherwise he’s doing okay. They’re off to a good start. He’s only growled malevolently at his partner, Chelsea, once, and she’s only imitated his speech but in the process changed his voice so he sounds disabled twice, so that’s all very encouraging. Jamie hasn’t started accusing the instruction manual of being part of a global Jewish conspiracy yet, and Chelsea hasn’t suggested that his incompetence at DIY might be connected with his small penis, so there’s still all to play for. OK, round one. How long before Chelsea chides him for being just like his mother, leading to Jamie smashing the wardrobe into pieces with the heel of his shoe while screaming racist abuse about the Swedes? Shall we start the bid at 15 seconds?”

The horror; the horror.

IKEA: those hallowed halls in which relationships come to die; that vast maze of uncertainty that herds its terrified consumers through endless iterations of eerie facsimiles of happy homes until their sanity starts scraping at the edge of their perceptions with sharpened claws, and causes their souls to bleed out through their eyes.

Nothing there is ever as it seems. It’s the Overlook Hotel from The Shining, but every last bit of it is room 237. It’s the labyrinth from Hellraiser 2, but with scented candles. It’s the labyrinth from Labyrinth, but with more goblins. You’ll find yourself falling to your knees and screaming things like: ‘A TOTTVIRSK SKAR-KOLSHEN FRIGIN?! WHY DON’T THEY JUST CALL IT A FUCKING PILLOW?’ and ‘WHY ARE THERE OVER 8000 EVER-SO-SLIGHTLY DIFFERENT LOOKING BED FRAMES THAT SHARE THEIR NAMES WITH THE CHARACTERS FROM THE TV SHOW VIKINGS?’

You’ll find yourself pushing against a mewling herd of zombies as they coo and stare and drool and moan at configurations of furniture so bizarre it’s like their piles and patterns have been precisely arranged and interlocked to open a portal to Hell itself. If pain and despair suddenly became currency, you’d be a multi-millionaire. The worst is yet to come. You’ll catch sight of yourself in one of the many mirrors placed strategically around the store, and you’ll see yourself looking longingly at a set of brackets on a pine bunk-bed – an enraptured look in your eyes that should only really be directed at other humans, and only then during foreplay – and you’ll realise, with horror and helplessness, that you too are a zombie, no better than the wretches shuffling by your side, perhaps even worse, because you’re the one that’s nursing a boner over a hinge bracket.

And a little part of you will die, right there in that store, a little part of you that’s lost forever in the anti-septic graveyard of Scandinavian lifestyle consumerism. And you’ll cry. You’ll cry for your mummy and your daddy, for God and Jesus and Santa and Satan, and angels and demons, and lawyers and doctors, and even aliens from the planet Quanabongo Fattafafaloop. But it’ll do no good. A series of tiny little words will fall softly from your mouth, gliding to the ground as if carried there on the wind by parachutes. “I…want…to….go….

Home.”

But you can’t go home.

You can’t go home ever again…

Never.

Ever.

Never ever.

Yes, my partner and I took a trip to IKEA a few weeks ago.

And do you know what?

We loved it! It was fucking great! Seriously. I’m not messing with you here. It’s one of the best few hours we’ve spent together in recent memory.

How is that even possible? I’ll tell you how: because we didn’t bring the boys.

That’s what we realised in IKEA that morning – that blissful, peaceful, wonderful morning – that IKEA itself wasn’t the culprit; that there was nothing intrinsically evil about IKEA. OK, the furniture itself is still demonic, and expertly designed to throw the hearts of men into anguish and chaos, I won’t be swayed on that, but the place itself – the building, the people, the displays – all of that is absolutely, one-hundred per cent fine.

To paraphrase Doc from Back to the Future: ‘It’s your kids, Marty. Something’s got to be done about your kids.’

Our trip was like a million great dates rolled into one. We strolled hand in hand, turning to smile at each other every ten seconds or so like we couldn’t quite believe what was happening. No little hands were reaching up to bat our fingers apart; we weren’t running through fake kitchens shouting ‘COME BACK! THE BAD MAN IS AT HIS MOST PROLIFIC IN SWEDISH KITCHENS!’ and ‘WHAT DID I TELL YOU ABOUT SMASHING YOUR BROTHER IN THE FACE WITH AN OUMBÄRLIG FRYING PAN?!’; we weren’t standing prostrate with frustration and helplessness, our faces growing redder and deader by the second as the kids devised a million ways to test our patience and diminishing sense of human decency; we weren’t apologising to a succession of half-crippled old ladies rendered ever-so-slightly more crippled by our children ramming tiny trolleys into their ancient limbs.

We were free.

We cracked jokes, we talked, we laughed, we lay next to each other on a hundred beds in a hundred different softly-lit little stage-rooms. We even disappeared up the back of an aisle in the warehouse section to do something a bit naughty, so overtaken were we with the freedom of the moment. We ate those disgusting hot-dogs that everyone convinces themselves are the best thing they’ve ever eaten because they’re really cheap, and we ate them in happy, contented silence, still looking up to smile at each other every ten seconds or so, this time through globs of onions and dead pig (and turkey, and horse, probably); her wearing a ketchup moustache, and my beard so enriched with ketchup and mustard it looked like an English soldier from 1745.

At one point I started missing the kids terribly. I thought, maybe it wouldn’t have been so bad. They would’ve been giggling and laughing and playing make-believe in the little pretend houses, and asking things like, ‘What language do the polar bears speak in Sweden, daddy?’ and ‘Do there really have to be this many fucking different types of coffee table?’ Maybe it would’ve been great.

Then we spied a mother standing in the kids’ section, rooted to the spot on IKEA’s Hell-o Brick Road with a look of horror, fear, defeat and anguish scrawled across her features. Her kids were rampaging through the section like solid poltergeists, rattling toys, hurling teddy bears and bursting in and out of tents, an orchestra of high-pitched screams accompanying their chaos. Chelsea and I squeezed each other’s hands together all the tighter, and walked up to this poor, tragic woman, smiling beatifically at her like we were monks.

“We understand what you’re going through,” we said.

She smiled weakly at us.

“We left the kids with their aunty.”

I feel we were rubbing it in, ever so slightly. But do you know what? It felt good. We were winners. For once, we were the winners. That woman was like the Jesus of IKEA, suffering so that we didn’t have to. Reminding us that although we loved the ever-loving shit out of our kids, and couldn’t face the thought of an existence without them, we shouldn’t feel guilty about enjoying three blissful hours away from their weaponised enthusiasm.

We skipped, we smiled, we laughed.

Thank you, IKEA.

It was heavenly.

Quitting at Quitting: The Life of a Secret Smoker

When my partner, Chelsea, discovered that she was pregnant with our first child, the first thing she did was lay on the bathroom floor bawling her eyes out as she clutched the pregnancy test to her chest like a dagger. The next thing she did was have a cigarette to steady her nerves while she processed the life-changing news. That cigarette proved to be her last ever. She never smoked again. Ever. Just like that. Done.

Chelsea didn’t consider that she’d done anything particularly selfless or courageous. To her, it was simply something that needed to be done, because the alternative – continuing to smoke with a baby growing inside of her – was unconscionable. But she’s brave and selfless both, because quitting cigarettes is a bloody hard thing to do.

Chelsea went on to become something of an evangelical figure in the massive anti-smoking campaign that kicked off in our flat that very same day. She spent her days promising eternal damnation – or at least eternal nagging and chastising – to all those stupid enough not to heed the warnings that were whirling in her hellfire. But it wasn’t really directed at ‘all those stupid enough’, ladies and gentlemen. It was primarily directed at me, the ‘all those stupid enough’ with whom she lived.

I knew that I couldn’t smoke indefinitely. The odds were already stacked against me as a non-exercising, crisp-munching Scotsman, and I figured I owed it to my kids to survive at least to the end of my forties. They’d be teenagers by then, and a dead Dad might play well with the ladies.

I also knew that for however long my habit prevailed I didn’t want my kids to see me smoking, or even to know that smoking was a thing. Kids use big people as templates for the things they do and the people they might become, and that’s especially true of the people they love and look up to, so it’s always best to avoid doing anything that might one day inspire them to, for instance, pick up a stick of dried leaves, set fire to it and suck smoke and tar into their little lungs until they can’t even run for a bus without passing out.

So I obviously realised that I’d have to stop smoking, too, but I decided to use a slightly different smoking cessation technique to Chelsea’s: I decided to keep on smoking, but to do it secretly.

This story has a happy ending. As at the time of writing this very sentence I’ve been a non-smoker (or a non-practising smoker, if you like) for almost two years, barring two regrettable and mercifully temporary re-uptake incidents that were – perhaps unsurprisingly – sponsored by alcohol. I’ve also been tee-total, or whatever you call it when you only have a drink on average once every twenty months, for the past few years, which certainly helps with the not smoking thing. My bad habits tend to operate on a chain reaction basis, and the trigger is almost always alcohol.

But back then, at the exact moment when my partner and I learned that we’d been accepted into the ‘Ageless, endlessly-perpetuating cycle of life and death’ club, I was still in the iron grip of a 15-year-long chemical addiction, not to mention under the spell of the lunatic delusion that if I stopped smoking I’d lose the ability to write (so inextricably linked in my mind were cigarettes and creativity).

Chelsea was merciful. She was happy for the process to be more of a transition than an emergency stop (obviously, my days of smoking in the house and the car were over, a realisation I’d already arrived at myself without prompting). I was extended the good grace of three months’ smoking, during which time I was urged to cut down my intake so the cessation, when it came, wouldn’t be quite so jarring and unpleasant. Naturally, being an impulsive sort of a fellow, I resolved to waive the transition and quit at precisely three minutes to midnight approximately three months’ later.

When the promised time came, I made a half-hearted stab at stopping, and fell at the four-day hurdle. Rather than admit my weakness – and thus have to hear constant reminders and admonishments – I decided I would continue to proclaim myself a non-smoker at home, but smoke during working hours. One cigarette in the morning, one at break, one before the end of lunch, one at break, one at home-time. Never-the-less, I kept trying to stop. I tried, and tried again, always failing, because I never really tried all that hard. For a while I vowed that I would only smoke when I was drinking. Guess what happened? I started drinking more often.

It got to the point where my surfeit of day-time smoking was leaving me with major night-time nicotine withdrawals, so I had to keep popping out for random, often unnecessary things, at random times of the night so I could satisfy my cravings.

‘We’ve only got twelve slices of bread left.’

‘I’m on it.’

‘It’s okay for now.’

‘I’ll go to the shop.’

‘No, we don’t need it right now, I’m just sayi…’

‘BYE!’

Often it was more ridiculous than that…


INT. LIVING ROOM. MIDNIGHT.

A couple snuggles on the couch.

CHELSEA

I’ll need to get remember to get some swimming goggles.

The front door slams shut.

Jamie??


Everyone in the family heard I’d stopped smoking, too, and most of them lived locally, so I had to be very selective in choosing my secret smoking spots. An army of spies was around every corner. I parked up side-streets and down back alleys, in strange car parks and cul-de-sacs on the far side of town, smoking in the moonlight and under the murk of street-lights. I drove around with mouth-wash, hand sanitiser and aftershave stuffed down the side of my seat, and my smoking paraphernalia – tobacco, filters, papers, a lighter, gum – stashed in the back of the car, under the spare wheel in the boot. Always skulking, searching, and waiting. Watching and brooding. Like the Yorkshire Ripper of smoking.

There came a time during the whole sorry saga when I had to confess. The mouth-wash, the aftershave, the evasiveness, the increased temper and irritability due to cravings, the stepping out at strange times of the night. She half-thought I was having an affair. I suppose I was, in a way. I was cheating on her with cigarettes. So we talked and I stopped. Then I started again, resolving to be more crafty about it this time; have better staying power, do it less, remove all traces. Ultimately, I would’ve made a lousy secret agent. Chelsea later told me that I couldn’t have been any less subtle had I whipped out a roll-up in front of her and started blowing the smoke in her face.

I think at least some of the time she just shook her head and thought, okay, I’m tired, let’s just do this dance for a while. And in my gymnastic imaginations, I figured that being cloak-and-dagger about it was actually a good thing, because it stopped me from smoking as much as I would have smoked had I just been openly smoking. I could never convince Chelsea of the logic of that one, I guess because I was missing the point. Try substituting ‘screwing other women’ for ‘smoking’ and see how far you get on with that line of reasoning.

I felt guilty for sneaking around, but I really believed I was being selfless and heroic in my own limited way, and I really was genuinely worried about losing my writing mojo. That’s what kept me smoking the longest; my biggest obstacle. I’d go out to a local hotel with my lap-top, where I’d glug lattes, and write and write, and smoke and smoke. I felt at home at the hotel, too. I was becoming like a non-alcoholic version of Norm from Cheers. I knew if I quit smoking, I’d have to quit that place (and so it proved – but they’ve increased the price of their lattes by about £1.50 since my heyday, so fuck them).

The times at which I was most ashamed of my smoking was on those (thankfully) few occasions when I had my eldest son in the back of the car, and pulled over to have a quick smoke next to the car. This was a shit enough thing to do on its own, but remember: I couldn’t smoke anywhere familiar, and I couldn’t let my son see me smoking. This meant I would find myself in strange neighbourhoods, squatting against the back bumper of a car, that clearly had a young child inside of it, smoking nervously. How the fuck do you explain that? One time a mother and her kids walked past, and the mother looked at me with an expression somewhere between alarm and disgust, so I just put on my best winning smile and waved. I don’t think it salved her horror.

The few times I chanced it I of course had to keep popping up at the window every few puffs to make sure my child was still alive, and to reassure him that I was still alive, too; that I hadn’t crawled off into the distance or down a manhole into the sewer. I couldn’t let him see me smoking, for the reasons I’ve already outlined, but there was another reason, too. He was articulate enough to grass me up to his mum, and let’s not forget, that’s the real reason I had to squat behind parked cars and drive down strange streets in strange neighbourhoods: fear. Not fear of my partner, per se. She isn’t exactly an MMA fighter (although speaking as someone who’s triggered her reflexes by jumping out from doorways and shouting boo at her, she packs one hell of a punch) or a mafia don. But she’s tenacious and persistent. She would’ve hissed and snarled at me almost every hour on the hour until I did the right thing.

In the end, I did the right thing. My triumph over cigarettes wasn’t quite as heroic as Chelsea’s. I got tonsillitis, and such a bad dose of it that I could barely drink water. I felt wretched, and weak, and sore, and even began to hallucinate through lack of proper sleep and sustenance. After a week of that, smoking was the last thing on my agenda. And the desire just left me. Now and again, every once in a while, I’ll see a character smoking in a TV show, or someone leaning back outside a cafe luxuriating with a cigarette, and a pang will hit me. But I know I’ll never go back.

So thank you, Chelsea, and thank you, tonsillitis. I couldn’t have done it without you.

I look forward to the next stage of my smoking evolution: becoming a fucking hypocrite.