Memory and the Mum-Bum Conundrum

My partner Kate and I were discussing parenting and parental influence, and segued off into how our reading habits had been shaped by our families. As for me, I’ve been a big reader for the entirety of my adult life, but I only really became a voracious reader in my late teens, despite growing up in a house literally festooned with books. My lack of enthusiasm for the family library, though, was entirely explainable by its content, all of which was a reflection of my step-dad’s passions for ornithology and antique trains. These were subjects too arcane and remote to be of any interest to my pre-pubescent self, and my teenage self leaned towards rather different iterations of birds and steaming (and having much more success with the latter than with the former) (and, yes, I know that using ‘birds’ in that context in 2023 basically constitutes a hate crime, but I’m hoping that I’ll get off with it on the grounds that I’m a big sexy Himbo with eyes that could slacken even Anne Widdecombe’s iron-fortressed loins).

So how come I liked reading fiction so much? How come I was so fascinated by stories? Where did that passion come from? When I was reunited with my father, after being apart from him between the ages of 4 and 21, I was delighted and amazed to discover not only that he was as big a reader as I was, but also that he enjoyed most of the same authors and genres. This was no lightning-in-a-bottle similarity, either. The coincidences just kept coming: I spoke just like him; we shared the same wry, but twinkle-eyed sense of humour, with a very similar style of delivery; we looked at religion in the same way (equal parts suspicion to derision); we both thought The Sopranos was the greatest TV show ever made. How could we have so much in common when we’d spent so long apart, and after only such a short time together? If none of these things were coincidences, then it began to make sense that I must have absorbed a great deal of information at an incredibly young age that had managed to shape the person I was at my core, before slithering down into the abyss at the edge of my consciousness, never to be seen again. That’s the cruel paradox, I think, at the very heart of our existence: that if only we could retrieve that treasure trove of memories from the abyss then we would be within touching distance of finally understanding both who we are as individuals, and who we are as a species. But those memories are forever lost to us, leaving part of us forever unsolvable. A little unsolvable person trapped inside a giant unsolvable puzzle just waiting for the random anvil of death to crush them into oblivion. Still, you’ve got to laugh, haven’t you?

I called my eight-year-old son, Jack, through to the kitchen, and asked him what memories of me stood out from his formative years. What a boon it was for my self-esteem to hear him utter those four most beautiful words ever to be delivered sequentially: “Um… I don’t know?” I consoled myself that his memory, along with all other mental processing systems, had probably ceased functioning at the very second I’d interrupted his game of Minecraft to call him into into kitchen.  Jack funnelled all CPU run-time into solving the one problem he had in life: of getting the fuck out that kitchen, and back to building an underwater palace for his pet goats, or whatever bollocks he was up to. Sensing his reluctance to talk, I did what any compassionate and understanding father would do: I just kept on talking. And then talking some more. See how he likes it, eh? I talked right over that non-plussed little face until it was so non-plussed it was basically The Anti-Pluss.

I recounted to Jack what I could remember of my own father, a twofer I hoped would tell him more about me as a person, and give him a snapshot of the grandfather he’d never meet. I shared a few memories with him, but one of the most vivid in my thoughts and in the re-telling was the time my father took me to my first football match. It wasn’t quite the father-and-son bonding experience he’d been expecting. In fact it stands as proof that our relationship was far from a happy hotbed of coincidences and parallels.

Football bored -and still largely bores – me on a primal level. For this reason I spent the duration of that long-ago match amusing myself – and irritating others – by crafting a narrative around my own hands, and then acting it out. I turned those hands into two Punch-and-Judy-style characters, and wasted no time setting them in conflict.

I gave my performance my all – The Guardian said of it in its review: ‘A brave, raw and powerful experience. You will want to put yourself in Jamie Andrew’s hands time and again’. Coincidentally, I also used this as the intro for my Tinder profile.

Anyway, the giant bearded man sitting immediately to my left turned out to be something of a philistine, and gave my performance zero stars. His ratings system was his own face, which he kept swivelling round to, well, face me, adorned with tightly pursed lips and a grave stare. It was a face that seemed to say: ‘How dare you bring live theatre into the middle of my football game, tiny Frasier Crane!’ I remember seeing pleas bobbing like boats in the eddying whirlpools of his eyes, as he jabbed urgently in the direction of the pitch with his immense sausage finger, perhaps hoping that the motion of his quick-swishing digit would be powerful enough to make me suddenly give a shit about football. Like his finger was a magic wand, or I was an imbecile. “Perhaps the laddie hasn’t noticed the grass out there and all the people running on it and kicking that ball. Maybe if I keep pointing and pointing at the pitch, it’ll eventually sink in and he’ll ken he’s at a football match. He’s probably one of those daft wee weins from the yellow bus.”

Big Beardy’s efforts were in vain. In the end, he saw a lot more of my puppet show than I saw of his poxy football match. Needless to say, though, at the end of the day, and while it was a game of two halves, and the boys done well, my football fan of a father wasn’t much impressed by my snub of the beautiful game, either. He vowed angrily to my mother that he would never, ever again take me to a football match. There was very little need for righteous anger. Mainly because that’s not really a punishment when the person you’re supposedly punishing doesn’t like football, is it?

So you don’t like doing your homework do you, boy? Well, how do you feel about NO HOMEWORK AT ALL?!!”

That’s… that’s great actually.”

Oh. I…eh… didn’t really think that one through, did I?”

No. No you didn’t.”

So, Jack could bring very few memories of our time together to the forefront of his mind, and I only write ‘very few’ because it’s less hurtful to me than writing ‘no’ – NO memories –even though it’s the truth. The petty side of me wanted to bring out all the physical photo albums, and the digital photos on Facebook, and make him sift through every damn one of them. “Ah, now. See this day here? That was a bloody expensive day, son. All that money, do you remember? Just to put a bloody smile on your ungrateful little face. Mind you said it was the best day you’d ever had in your life? Well, it must’ve been a real belter, son. A proper belter. So good you cannae remember a thing about it. It’s like it never even happened. Well, if it never happened, THEN I’D LIKE MY FUCKING MONEY BACK.”

Jack could remember my mum, though. Instantly. Vividly. His exact words to me were: “I remember something about Granny two-cats.”

My kids have three grandmothers. One they call gran, one they call grandma, and one they called granny – my mum. I added a further layer of clarification to this Grandmama Da Vinci Code by referring to my mum as ‘granny two-cats and a flag’, on account of her having a flag-pole in the back garden, and two cats in the house. We continued to call her ‘granny two-cats and a flag’ even after the flag had been taken down, and one of the cats had perished in a drive-by; the main reason being that ‘Granny one-cat and a flag-pole’ sounds like something a pervert would type into Pornhub.

Granny two-cats and a flag died more than a year ago. She loved her grandchildren – all of them – and it was more than mutual. She left a big, big hole in their hearts when she went.

What do you remember about her?”

That she’d get her bum out,” he said, with a big, big grin.

And I started to cry. Not big wracking sobs, mind. Just a single solitary tear, like the one cried by Rutger Hauer at the end of Blade Runner. “Your gran would have loved to have heard you say that,” I said, my eyes now properly misting over, the lump in my throat throttling the final few words of the sentence. “For that to be your memory of her.” It’s a strange thing to be brought to tears over an arse.

But I think it speaks to something at my mum’s core. Something I sometimes missed because I was too blinded by the machinery of our historic and ongoing conflicts, the big booms and crashes that formed the percussive rhythm of our fiercely loving but heated relationship. Her inner child. Her need to entertain, her need to be noticed, yes, but also her need to set people at ease. To make them laugh. To make them feel good.

When I think of my own grandparents, I think of loving but emotionally distant people dressed in greys and beiges, sitting in chairs drinking tea, or sitting in seats eating soup. When Jack and his brother think of their granny, they’ll think of an old woman in a pink fluffy oodie pressing her septuagenarian arse-cheeks up against the glass door of the hall, chuckling as she does it. And they’ll smile. And they’ll nod. Because they’ll remember that they live in a world where you don’t have to lay down and die when you get to a certain age. That you can retain a connection to your inner child, no matter how old you are. That you have permission to poke your tongue out at the world. At least every once in a while. Embrace life’s oddities and weirdnesses and weirdos and absurdities. Make them a part of you. Hell, throw your head back and laugh once in a while. One day you won’t be able to.

And forget books, forget football, forget fathers. That’s a real legacy right there: my mum’s legacy. That it’s a bum is immaterial. It’s a legacy that each and every one of us would count ourselves lucky to leave behind. Because life, my dear friends, is over in a flash, and we can’t ever allow ourselves to forget the most important about it: living the fucking thing.

And doing it with both an unflinching glint in your eye, and your fingers ever-ready at your waistband.

When your children’s beds lie empty

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That I believe.

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

Old Ladies Have a Song for Everything

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

‘Cup of tea, gran?’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Dad, can I have some toast?’

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

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

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

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

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

Like I am.

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

The truth is out there, people.

I think I know a song about that.

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

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

Lying to Your Kids: Your Questions About Santa (Parts 5&6 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’ve been addressing in bite-sized pieces, day-by-day (well, every other day), in the run-up to Christmas. I hope this final section 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). If it makes you think, it’s a mere side-effect, I assure you.

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, the ‘oh-it’s-nice’ brigade is 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 picture 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 wrist-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.

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, and in the wrong hands and heads 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 and immortalise 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 for time immemorial, 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 should have a belief in Santa foisted upon 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). When my eldest kid was four I asked him: “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…

Merry Christmas/Sharkmas one and all.

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 4 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’ve been addressing in bite-sized pieces, day-by-day (well, day-by-every-other-day), in the run-up to Christmas. I hope it makes you laugh if we’re sympatico on the subject, and still makes you laugh even if you think I’m a monster (even though it’s clearly you who are the monster). No questions this time. I just want you to imagine an alternate universe where Christmas was never celebrated, and instead…

Yee-Haw! It’s Sharkmas!

Imagine if you heard about a culture where every June the 15th a fat cowboy called Finn Clintson sped around the world on the back of a flying great white shark, stopping off along the way to eat piles of air fresheners from people’s cars, his mission to deliver millions of boxes of rice to the kids of the world, but only those who can play darts to a professional standard.

As early as May, families start putting neon sharks in their windows. 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 go out to their cars and lay fresh stacks of air fresheners on the passenger seats. They leave the doors unlocked so Finn Clintson doesn’t have to break through a window.

Between April and June the cries of ONE HUNDRED AND EIIIIIIIGGGHTTTYY can be heard bellowing from every window, and down every street, as kids everywhere pepper their houses with dart-holes in their zeal to emulate their Sharkmas hero, Les ‘Danger’ Wallace. Listen carefully at any window behind which a pushy parent is coaching a kid to be the best darts’ player they can be, and you’ll hear things like: “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. Churches teach how the world was created by a giant basking shark called Tony.

What would you think of that culture? Absolutely bloody mental, right?

Happy Sharkmas, you douchebags.

Lying to Your Kids: Your Questions About Santa (Part 2 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 (well, every other day), in the run-up to Christmas. I hope it makes you laugh if we’re sympatico on the subject, and still makes you laugh even if you think I’m a monster (even though it’s clearly you who are the monster).

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

Of course, you’re right.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

What not to watch with kids: a guide

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sex vs Violence

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

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

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

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

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

Throw the book at them

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Scotland’s Smacking Ban: a Hit?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The last strike

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

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

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

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.

Movie Review – The Queen’s Corgi

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

THE VERDICT

out of a possible