From Poo to Pregnancy

Posted on August 8, 2019 by Jamie Andrew

If you ever fancy a lesson in cause and effect, or the insidious evil of cosmic ordering, just try sitting on a bucket swing in a play-park ten minutes’ walk from home, lazily rocking back and forth in the hazy summer sunshine as your kids run and skip and jump from chute to chute, and dare to utter the words ‘Well, this is nice.’ See how quickly one of your grown kids waddles towards you shouting, ‘I need a poo!’

This happened to us last week. The play-park suddenly transformed into the US retreat that preceded the Fall of Saigon; there were screams, children being slung over shoulders, people running in terror and confusion. Operation Frequent Wind indeed. This time, though, it was an evacuation in order to prevent an evacuation.

We intermittently dashed and quick-marched our way back home through a warren of paths and streets. To speed things along my wife and I carried a kid each, but those little suckers are heavy, so we had to keep putting them down on the ground and herding them along like ducks to allow our backs time to recover.

I was in charge of airlifting Jack, 4, our eldest, the kid whose words had precipitated our urgent and perilous journey. I could’ve gotten him home in a fraction of the time, but for obvious reasons I wasn’t terrifically keen on carrying him on my shoulders…

When we were still a few minutes from home, Jack won a crucial battle against his brain and body, and was able to charm the snake back into the basket. This bought us some precious time. He was still tottering along like a penguin, but no longer whining and groaning like a soldier who’d lost his legs to napalm.

‘We still need to hurry, though, Jack,’ said his mum. ‘You don’t want to poo yourself, do you?’

‘No,’ replied Jack, very enthusiastically. ‘But you can poo yourself, mummy, because you’ve got that plastic thing on your butt. It’s just like a nappy.’

Plastic thing on her bu… ah. The penny dropped.

‘No, that’s not a nappy,’ said his mum. ‘That’s for… well, sometimes mummy… bleeds…. out of her bum.’

I could see the cogs turning behind Jack’s eyes, threatening to turn those two viscous blobs into a matching pair of question marks, a slot-machine jackpot where the prize was unending confusion and psychological scarring. ‘Don’t lie to him,’ I said to my wife through one side of my mouth, but loud enough so that everyone could hear it, therefore rendering the whole side-mouth thing completely irrelevant.

There was a moment’s silence as we mulled over a way to be truthful to him without inviting ever more difficult questions. ‘Well,’ said my wife, taking my cue and advancing cautiously, ‘I sometimes bleed through my…well, through the bit at the front.’

‘The hole,’ I chipped in. I quickly remembered we’d settled on ‘vagina’ during a previous discussion on a related topic, so attempted a course correction. ‘Vagina. The vagina hole.’

My wife shook her head at me. I had to redeem myself here.

‘Well,’ I began, ‘you know how ladies can carry babies, but men can’t? It’s because ladies and men have got different bits on the outside and the inside.’

Jack nodded. I shot my wife a searching look that seemed to ask, ‘Have I just committed a transgender hate crime?’

I’d started so I’d finish. ‘Ladies make eggs inside of their bodies, but not every egg turns into a baby. The ladies bodies make an egg once every month, see, just to the lady is always ready to have a baby if she wants to. And if the lady isn’t ready to have a baby, then the body gets rid of the egg, and that’s why the lady bleeds from her… you know. But if she’s ready, she can use the egg to grow a baby.’

Jack nodded thoughtfully. There were more questions bobbing beneath his consciousness like icebergs. ‘How does a lady get the egg ready to make into a baby?’

‘Well, the lady needs an, em, it’s like… it’s like when you started growing inside mummy. Mummy first needed a seed from daddy to make her egg grow into you, into a wee baby.’

Jack nodded again, up and down, very fast: like a shotgun being re-loaded.

Here it comes…the kill shot… CHIK-CHIK…

BOOM!

‘How did your seed get into mummy so it could make the egg grow into a baby?’

[The reckless old man drops down to his knees, and prostrates himself before the universe, rocking backwards and forwards shouting, ‘WHAT HAVE I DONE? OH GOD WHAT HAVE I DONE??!’]

The way I see it, you’ve got two choices at this point.

Choice 1: go down the whimsical route. Skip along the Yellow Brick Road tipping your hat to Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy, while flinging out lies like rose petals. What’s that you ask? By what mechanism did my seed reach your mother’s egg? Why, by magic of course, young man! I shoved on a top hat and white gloves, shouted out Abracadabra, tapped your mummy’s tummy ten times with my wand, and then pulled you out by the ears. Don’t like that answer, eh? In that case, I shrunk myself down to the size of an ant, shimmied through your mummy’s belly button into the tummy beyond, drilled my way into the egg you were hiding inside using a tiny corkscrew, spat through the shell with a straw, and then sat on your egg until it hatched, at which point your mummy gave birth to both of us at the same time. Em, what else have I got here? Em… babies are from space? I planted some tomato seeds in a tub of soil and made your mummy eat it? [wipes sweat from brow] We won you in a raffle? BABIES DON’T EXIST I MADE IT ALL UP?

Choice 2: HBO meets X-Hamster. Give a harrowing, biologically- and sexually-accurate blow-by-blow account of the entire process from start to finish: all four, grueling minutes of it. ‘Let me tell you about your conception, Jack. First thing’s first, your mum is a fucking live wire. Jesus, she makes my balls feel like they’re in an earthquake. So, anyway, one minute we’re watching Gogglebox, and the next minute I’m gobbling her box. She’s got one leg dangling over the back of the couch, and the other one kicking out like a Go-Go dancer, I’m certain she’s going to split down the middle, and of course I’ve got a face like a man who’s fallen in a vat of vaseline. I’m brick-hard too; the wee fella can’t wait to go spelunking in that hole – the same one you were going to come out of about nine months later… Jack… Jack? HONEY, THE KID’S BEEN SICK AND FAINTED!!! Poor little fella, he must have a bug or something.’

In the end I opted for a third way. Parental choice isn’t a two-party state. There’s no either/or. You’ve got to think on your feet; riff like a jazz musician. Option three: be both honest and highly obstructive at the same time.

‘There’s more to this, son,’ I told him. ‘Things you’re not ready to know yet, and believe me, there are things you don’t want to know yet. For now, it’s enough to know that mummies make eggs, and daddies can help make those eggs into babies.’

He seemed satisfied with that answer. Either that or he was so busy trying not to shit himself that he no longer cared about the tummies and big bleeding bummies of the world’s mummies. I vow, though, that when the day comes for Jack to know more about the finer points of this subject I will boldly, and without hesitation, immediately, and without delay, tell him to ask his mother.

When we got home – just in the nick of time, I hasten to add – Jack merrily plopped out his poo, leaving his mother and me to poke the turtle’s head of sexual knowledge back up into our guts until we were good and ready to let the stink out.

I guess what I’m saying is: smell ya later.

What to tell your little ones about death

Posted on July 31, 2019 by Jamie Andrew

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘No,’ he said, giggling.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Then he poops himself again,’ he added.

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

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

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

There was no way to know for sure.

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

Roosters and Religion: An Attack

Posted on July 6, 2019 by Jamie Andrew

I’ve always considered myself a Jesus of the animals; or at the very least a cut-price Steve Irwin. I’ve got a special way with animals, a belief to which I stubbornly cling even though I once ended up with the beak of an African grey parrot crunched over my finger like a bear-trap, a painful occurrence that followed numerous warnings not to prod my finger into its cage. “It’s okay,” I remember saying, only seconds before. “Animals love me.”

I’m something of a mental case when it comes to our non-human friends. I like nothing better than to sit by the loch with seagulls perched on my head, and swans encircling me like long-necked disciples. I’ve never yet been able to walk past a dog without patting it, always holding out my hand to be sniffed like the Pope’s ring. When my eldest was two and dropped his favourite hat into the African boar enclosure at Edinburgh zoo, I was straight in there like a fleet-footed Doctor Doolittle to retrieve it, danger (and life-time ban from the zoo) be damned. If I was Noah, I would’ve had two arks.

Yes, I love all animals, except…

Well. Until recently, I’ve never had particularly strong feelings about roosters. Barely any feelings at all, truth be told, beyond the faint glimmer of recognition that accompanies the sight of a box of Kellogg’s’ Cornflakes or an old re-run of Foghorn Leghorn. I’ve never considered roosters to be particularly cuddly, but then neither have I considered them to be especially dangerous.

There’s a family who lives just off the main road on the outskirts of the next town over. They’re smallholders, with a little smattering of chickens, and a rooster to, well… rule the roost, I suppose, in a quite literal sense. Although the chickens have the run of the small public space next to their owners’ property, it’s not a stretch of land that anyone would ever pass through or arrive at if not specifically to come see the chickens, or visit the family. We’ve often stopped there with the kids. It’s nice to have a little oasis of nature on-hand among the urban squalor. The lady of the house once came out to say hello, and introduced my kids to her little grand-daughter, before letting them all feed the chickens together. Our two loved it.

Generic picture. Our two are boys, and we’d never be cruel enough to put them in dungarees

Earlier this spring I took my eldest, Jack, on a jaunt in the car. We were heading to the next town over to grab some lunch, walk by the shore, and visit a second-hand book-store for a re-up of kids’ stories. As it was a bright and sunny-ish day, I thought it would be nice to stop and say a quick how-do-you-cock-a-doodle-doo to the chickens.

We crossed the road and strolled up to the chickens, greeting them like they were old friends. The rooster, rather a big bugger as far as roosters go, came strutting over to us as we advanced up the grass, its head bopping up and down in a gesture that I interpreted as a nod of recognition – mano-a-chickano. The closest human translation is probably: ‘Alright mate?’ In any case, the rooster seemed unconcerned with our presence. It made past us and continued to strut about and peck at the ground.

At this point Jack’s ebullience got the better of him, as ebullience tends to do in four-year-olds. ‘Not so close, Jack,’ I chided him gently, as he skipped around the fringes of a flower-bed that housed a squad of squatting chickens. He skipped around a little more, and then made his way back towards me. He was less than fifteen feet away, and closing, when the rooster decided to re-announce itself.

It was coming towards us. Specifically, it was coming towards Jack. A little faster this time, but still with no obvious malicious intent. It’s hard to tell with a rooster. They don’t start belting out menacing renditions of football chants, or take to whipping out flick knives. Their angry strut is remarkably similar to their regular strut. If instead of a rooster it had been a bear, a dog, or even a parrot (shakes fist at the heavens) coming towards us I would’ve thrown myself in-front of Jack in the manner of a presidential bodyguard. I would’ve ran at it with the zeal of a star quarterback, or thrown Jack over my shoulders and rushed him towards the car like I was a human rickshaw. But I did nothing. Except, that is, laugh good-naturedly at the quasi-comical beast as it bobbed and strutted ever closer.

When the rooster caught up with Jack I was still a few feet away. Jack turned to face it, a smile smoothing its way across his face. Unbeknownst to both of us, a split-second later the bird would punish Jack for his sense of pleasant expectation, and teach me a hard lesson in child guardianship. It all happened in a flurry. The rooster jerked and flapped about at Jack’s waist, then whipped itself into the air, its wings spread wide in shrieking fury. In the slipstream of distraction, it swiped out with its feet, leaving a scratch like a tram-line on Jack’s face from cheek to chin. There was blood dripping from Jack’s lip. It happened in a flash; a finger-click of time. I grabbed Jack by his shoulders, spun him out of the way, and pirouetted myself in front of the near-rabid rooster.

It leapt towards me like something out of a 2-player beat-em-up, using its wings to steady itself before unleashing a mighty two-footed kick to my stomach. It bounced back to its starting point like some demented little Mr Miagi, ready to strike again. And it did. It struck again, and again, and again, and again. I wasn’t the main target, though. Just a lumpy obstacle. It was obvious the maniac bird was trying to bypass me in order to take another bite and a scratch at Jack. I couldn’t let that happen. I had to keep angling myself and jumping from side to side to keep its gut-booting focus on me. Thankfully, it had no interest in my ball-sack, else I might’ve been forced to consider more extreme tactics.

At one point I hunkered down in a coiled squat like Chris Pratt when he was herding velociraptors in Jurassic World. I waved a hand behind me to direct Jack to safety. “Go, and keep moving,” I told him. “Go slowly, get to the pavement and wait for me.”

Poor Jack was still crying, but I couldn’t offer him much in the way of comfort without breaking my defensive pose, which would have put him at the mercy of more butts and scratches, more vicious ones this time for sure. What if its talons caught Jack’s eye this time? When the spirit of Chris Pratt didn’t prove effective I switched to Begbie from Trainspotting, spitting, swearing and kicking at the bastard beast.

All the while this scene was unfolding the rooster’s elderly and infirm owner sat on the porch on the stoop of his house about thirty or forty feet away, looking increasingly concerned, especially when he saw me booting the rooster’s chest, kicking at its face and calling it a ‘f***ing c***’ at the top of my voice. Eventually, the bird backed off, but not because of the sound and fury I’d subjected it to. No. It looked like it had just grown bored. What the hell was the old guy feeding these chickens? Cocaine?

As I was buckling my bloodied son into the back seat of the car, the rooster’s pyjama-clad owner shuffled over with his stick, swift as a ninja in his canvas slippers, and began offering heart-felt apologies. I told him not to worry about it, and apologised for turning the air a few thousand shades of blue. He insisted we come back to his house with him so Jack could have some juice and crisps and play with his grand-daughter; you know, spin a positive out of the negative. I said that was a kind offer, but thought that Jack would probably appreciate some distance between him and the rooster, at least for now. Besides, we had to clean his scratches.

Jack was understandably shaken, and shy to boot, but the old man’s persistence – his zeal to make amends – wore us both down. We got out of the car and started heading back towards the house – and the chickens. The old man clasped Jack’s hand tightly as we walked, a gesture of affection and restraint. I could tell Jack still wasn’t entirely sold on the new course of events. He looked like he was being arrested.

I kept telling Jack how brave he was, and explained that the rooster – though I was still quite angry at it – had only acted aggressively because it had perceived us as a threat. It wasn’t Jack’s fault, and it wasn’t strictly the rooster’s fault, either. It was just an awful accident, and, really, daddy should’ve been more careful.

But I promised him that the rooster probably wouldn’t attack again, but if it did, I’d be ready for it. Moments later, Jack and the rooster passed within twenty feet of each other, and I was relieved to see that they were wholly indifferent to each other’s existence. Some juice, crisps, and anti-septic wipes later, and it was as if none of it had ever happened.

The old man’s grand-daughter, of similar age to Jack, came outside to play. As Jack and the little girl ran around the garden laughing and conspiring, jumping this, leaping that, investigating here, applying their imaginations there, I spoke with the old man. I asked him about his life, his family. He’d come from Pakistan to the south of England, living there for a time, before branching off from his brothers and settling in Scotland. He’d raised his family here, three generations and counting.

I found him a pleasant, cordial and earnest man, measured in his speech, warm in his sentiments. He looked at his grand-daughter and my son laughing together, and he smiled. He told me how important it was for this sort of thing to happen, these sorts of friendships, especially these days. I knew what he was getting at. I agreed with him. I’m an atheist, and the old man was a Muslim, but the children in our lives were oblivious to the cosmetic and cultural differences that might exist between them and us. As it should be. They were having fun. They were happy.

They were children.

And we were all human beings, after all.

I’ve discussed grand topics like God, creation and evolution with Jack, but so briefly that I’m sure he doesn’t remember a thing about them. He certainly doesn’t know what Muslims, Jews, Christians, Buddhists, or even atheists are, or what they believe (or don’t). He’s never once remarked upon the skin colour, make-up or ethnicity of another human being – black, white, brown, Chinese, Japanese, Lebanese – not because he hasn’t noticed, which surely he has, but because he’s never been encouraged to care. My views and those of his mother’s on religion and politics will undoubtedly filter through to Jack and his brother, but it would be unfair of us to implant any of these notions in either of them at such crucial stages of their mental and social development.

I’m pro-people, but anti-religion. To co-opt and twist an infamous saying from Christianity: hate the sin, not the sinner. I always try to keep in mind that most people – especially in global Islam, but also in Scientology, Mormonism and Christianity in the US – are hostages to the religions into which they’re born. I was able to enjoy being around the old man and his family (more of whom came to visit later in the afternoon), because irrespective of the differing spiritual beliefs we each may have held, I recognised them as good, kind, and decent people.

The question I find myself contending with increasingly often these days is: how do I square my fondness for people, in all their multifarious, individual forms, with a wariness for organised religion? How can I square the reality of having liked, respected and loved friends, acquaintances and colleagues who were Muslim with my fear and distrust of Islam as a global political, cultural and religious force? I’m an atheist with two gay sisters. Show me any Muslim-majority country in the world where I’d be tolerated, or where Muslims within those counties would be free to advocate atheism or live their lives as gay.

I think we here in the British Isles can sometimes have a rather twee view of religion that springs from watching too many tea-sipping parsons on the TV, or inspired by the remembrance of a kindly grandmother’s sweet smile during Songs of Praise, when the reality is that we might yet have had the firm fingers of Christianity wrapped around our throats if not for several hundreds of years of protest, dissent, bloodshed, revolutions, reformations, refusals and the eventual triumph of enlightenment over darkness. Although it hasn’t been without its fair share of schisms and inter-denominational blood feuds, the Muslim world has yet to have its reformation. Attempts to soften or modify the religion’s shape and substance are usually met with banishment at best, and wars and murder at worst. While there has certainly been progress in some quarters, it is slow and uncertain.

Global Islam doesn’t appear to compromise very often.

Muslims don’t seem to express something so simple as solidarity; it’s rather as if Islam is one unbroken entity, a sheath of (thin) skin covering the planet, where pain in one part of the body is felt in every other part of the body. Touch ane, touch aw. Islam first, family and nation second.

The cycles of suffering, rage and retribution roaring in Islam’s heartlands – some of the most politically and economically fraught regions of the world – are felt in Birmingham and Berlin as much as they are in Jakarta and Lahore. Part of this connection is spiritual and ideological, but there is a physical component, too, in that rather than allow communities to settle and integrate into new host countries, the links to the heartlands are kept alive through immigration, and the importation of wives and husbands. That’s a worry when many of the countries from which the blood-lines are preserved and topped-up play host to brutal repression of women, and murderous intolerance of gay people and the irreligious.

That’s not to downplay the corrosive influence of Christianity – from creationists supplanting scientists in US public schools; to money-grubbing evangelists spewing out endless torrents of hypocrisy and hatred to the vulnerable and the uneducated; to arguments surrounding abortion, end of life and bodily autonomy; to discussions about sex, sexuality and equality across the ecumenical spectrum – but people here in Britain and across the West know that Christianity, particularly here in the UK, is a toothless force. I could dress up as the Pope and drop a less-than congratulatory rap about Jesus, I could draw a picture of God with a big pair of comedy breasts, or collaborate on a raunchy comedy movie about the life and times of Jesus, and at worst the blow-back would be a snotty letter sent into the Radio Times by disgusted of Tunbridge Wells.

But if I was to depict the Muslim’s prophet on paper, or write about him in unflattering or critical terms, I – like Salman Rushdie, and Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and other less lucky people like Theo van Gogh – would have to prepare myself for the possibility of either a short life with a brutal end or a long life spent looking over my shoulder.

But who am I to talk of fear when bombs continue to rain down on places like Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan? I didn’t ask for those bombs, I didn’t put them there, but in the eyes of countless millions around the world I’m culpable and complicit in their destruction. I’m a part of the oppressive, racist, imperialist and expansionist system that sees something it wants in the Arab and Muslim world, and snatches it by force. How much of Islam’s fire, fury and ire is attributable to its holy book, and how much of it was enflamed and fanned by centuries of brutal exploitation and subjugation of Muslims by people like me? How much of what we hear about Islam and Muslims is wilfully distorted by our right-wing media and far-right assholes like Nigel Farage and ‘Tommy Robinson’?

Can the circle ever be squared? In the end, it all comes down to family. Always. Everything we do.

A loud and rousing cock-a-doodle-doo blares above the reverie. It reminds me that it’s probably time to head home. Jack is running and laughing with his new friend. It’s like they’ve known each other all of their lives. He doesn’t want to go now. He’s having too much fun.

I shake the old man’s hand. ‘It was really nice to meet you,’ I tell him.

I mean it.

Here’s another question that history might have to answer, sooner or later:

Which of us is the rooster?

We Haunt Our Own Lives

Posted on June 30, 2019 by Jamie Andrew

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

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

Back.

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

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

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

Then darkness.

We can never go back.

But we can’t stop trying.

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

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

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

: My paternal grandparents moved countless times in my lifetime. This is just a small selection. In this house, my gran and papa slept upstairs. My papa used to let me throw his hat down the stairs and fetch it again.

: I was estranged from them for a time. I loved them both very much. When I reconnected with them at the age of 12, my father disowned them. My papa died estranged from his son.

: I watched my grandfather die. Then later I made a mess of my life. I got mired in my own shit and left my grandmother to die alone. Or at least without me. I ran out of time to explain. To say sorry.

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

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

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

The kids, of course, felt nothing.

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

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

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

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

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

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

In the eternal past.

Together.

On being a Dad who sucks at sports

Posted on May 8, 2019 by Jamie Andrew

My son can throw a ball. Big whoop, right? Well, it’s a big whoop for me, you poo-pooing, party-pooping, poopy-pants, because it’s a god damned miracle that I’ve managed to sire a child who can run more than 100 yards without falling over and smashing his teeth out, much less demonstrate a modicum of sporting prowess.

I was – and very much still am – a handless, footless bastard: as graceful as a new-born calf trying to roller-skate on unset jelly; as co-ordinated as a one-armed man with a dagger jammed in each eye. My playground contemporaries oft remarked that I ‘threw like a girl’. If only I’d been born a couple of decades later, I could’ve had the little bastards prosecuted for gender-based hate-crimes. As it stands, I had to follow the old sticks-and-stones adage, and throw sticks and stones at them, which of course missed them, because I threw like a girl.

Most Scottish dads are expected to inculcate their sons into the ancient, dark arts of football, readying them for an adult life of meat-pies of dubious origin, strong lager, weak bladders and soul-shredding disappointment. Well, I don’t have any football-related skills or passion for the so-called beautiful game to pass on to my two boys. The reason? There are many factors, but I suppose the key ones are that a) I’m shite at football, and b) I think football is shite.

These things usually reach you by osmosis. My father was a football fanatic, but he was largely absent from my childhood, so he couldn’t pass on or light the torch. My uncle was a football fanatic, too, but he lived quite far away, and worked abroad most of the time. My grandfathers were both footballing men, but their footballing days were far behind them by the time I came along, and they certainly didn’t go to any matches. What avenues did that leave? Outwith the ball-kicking bosom of their families, Scottish kids tend to learn the bulk of their fleet-footed craft in the streets and parks of their neighbourhoods, playing kerbie, keepie-uppy, and world cuppy with their friends – jumpers for goal-posts and all that jazz – but I grew up in a semi-rural area, far outside the comfortable door-knocking range of my peers.

I was always picked last when football teams were being assembled in the playground. I was usually put in goal, the rationale being: ‘He’s tall. That’ll make it easier for him to stop things going past him.’ Well, the joke was on them, because everything got past me. Well, everything except their cruel – though admittedly accurate – jibes about how shite I was at football.

But was I bad at football because I never played it, or did I never play football because I was so bad at it? Nobody cared, least of all me. After a while I stopped lining up for draft, and went off to play ‘Japs and Commandos’ instead. Js & Cs is one of the many playground games we Scottish school-boys loved to play in the days before we realised just how massively racist we all were. PC notwithstanding, I was pretty good at the old Js & Cs: miming machine-guns, diving about, doing commando rolls. Perhaps I shouldn’t be too proud of that, though, given that the only real skill involved in the ‘game’ is the ability to mimic the noise of an old, fat Englishman with a stammer having an asthma attack as he falls down a hill.

The power of the ‘He’s tall’ principle extended beyond football into other ball-based sports. It was also responsible for encouraging the belief that I might be good at basketball. Unfortunately, height alone is no indicator of prowess, otherwise an electricity pylon and the Eiffel Tower would be among the best basketball players of our time. That being said, I’m painfully aware that both of those inanimate structures are almost definitely better at basketball than me.

The ineptitude doesn’t stop there. In my early twenties I went with a group of friends to the local pitch and putt. The pros went first, whacking their balls with poise and precision (settle down!), sending them arcing and speeding into the grey sky like reverse hailstones. I decided to go last. You know what they say about saving the best, right? (coughs)

I was a little apprehensive, but only a very little, because – seriously – how wrong could it go? Swinging a bit of metal behind your head and thwacking a ball? Easy. My confidence reigned supreme, even when I adopted a teeing off stance that was so low to the ground it looked like I was about to take a shit. I concentrated hard, and started to swing. Just as the club reached its apex above my shoulder, a chorus of laughs erupted behind me. I froze mid-swing, like a statue of a really bad golfer. ‘Fuck it,’ I said, dropping the club to the ground. ‘I’ll just watch.’

Christ I’m awful. I even suck at darts. Not much of a tiddlywink player, either.

Sport was never my thing, but that’s okay, because growing up I had plenty of other things in my life to occupy my time. I would explore the countryside: roaming through forests, chasing badgers with sticks, jumping over burns and streams pretending I was some famous Peruvian explorer. I would stroll into the middle of farmers’ fields and sit down in the grass, waiting to be encircled by a herd of cows, who’d come up and sniff and lick my shoes as I sang to them, usually a song by the Righteous Brothers (good job I never chose Phil Collins else they might have stampeded me to death). I grew into an almost evangelical atheist, but as a young nipper I’d stick a sign on my door that said ‘Do not disturb – playing for God’, and I’d spend long hours entertaining the big man with snippets of off-the-cuff theatre. I wasn’t religious. Just lonely. I’d write comics and stories; I’d record little sketches on my cassette player. I guess what I’m trying to say is: I was an absolute fucking weirdo.

I don’t want my sons to be weirdos like me. Well, not entirely. Perhaps just weird enough to be compelling; just weird enough to be able to peer through a dark mirror of imagination into a world of beautiful and terrible possibilities. Weird, but not cows-licking-your-shoes weird. I want them to be ‘regular’ to the degree that they participate in physical pursuits that will help them stay happy and healthy throughout their lives.They’re Scottish. They need all the help they can get.

I’d rather they side-swiped football, though. Sectarianism and tribalism are potent forces in Central and western Scotland; states of mind and ways of life that football often serves to magnify. That’s why I bought my eldest son, Jack, a baseball when he turned two. And it’s why both brothers will be encouraged to take up sports like badminton, skiing, swimming and Taekwondo. In the time honoured tradition of contrary children, this probably means they’ll become world-class footballers.

Jack’s four now, and after a few years of playing catch with his baseball he’s got pretty sharp hand-eye co-ordination. He hasn’t quite mastered the catching part yet, but when it comes to pitching he’s consistent, powerful and accurate. Pitch perfect, if you like. From near, from far, he sends that ball spinning straight to your hands like a spherical homing missile, time, after time, after time.

I guess you could say he throws like a girl. Because that’s a compliment now.

I hope they continue to be more girl-like as they get older, mainly because their mother likes to run and work-out, and I like to sit down and write about how awful I am at not getting any exercise.

I’m probably going to die a fat, awkward bastard, but I’m glad my kids have got a sporting chance.

Still… it could be worse…

Roy, Boy of Earth

Posted on April 20, 2019 by Jamie Andrew

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

An alien boy had grown sick of the sight,

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

His tummy would rumble and grumble and churn.

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

The things that he ate on his planet of Munch,

For breakfast, and dinner, and supper and lunch,

Were mushy black nuggets that tasted like sand.

All crunchy and gooey and horribly bland.

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

Then jumped in a spaceship and went on his way,

Heading to Earth, where the eating was good

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

He zoomed into orbit, then dived to the planet,

Not even stopping to survey and scan it.

Crashed down on a roof like a hungry green Santa,

Dreaming of human washed down with cold Fanta.

He leapt in a window, he followed the snore,

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

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

Delicious, in other words: food for the heart.

In his hurry he tripped over toys on the ground,

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

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

Which grew wide and excited and full of surprise.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My favourite is tuna, or pickle with cheese.”

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

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

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

The alien prayed for this moment to end.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Which made Frass so angry he wanted to squawk.

He’d never expected his supper to talk.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I look at your nose, and my appetite grows!

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

Then garnish it all with a sprinkling of lips,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

All of this talking’s an arduous chore.

I hope that my meaning is clear on this day,

I say what I mean: and I mean fricassee!

Prepare to be eaten…

…Roy, boy of Earth!”

Roy started laughing, he just couldn’t stop,

He thought that his tummy was going to pop.

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

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

Frass tried his best to stay fierce and defiant,

Even when Roy scooped him up like a giant,

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

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

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

Suddenly losing his hunger for lunch.

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

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

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

Fetched him some honey and small bits of bread.

Which Frass gobbled up with the greatest of ease,

Before reaching his main course, some hot mushy peas.

Those peas were the best food that Frass ever tasted,

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

“These things are sand nuggets, but tasty and green,

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

So Frass said goodbye, and then loaded his ship,

Thanking his friend for a wonderful trip,

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

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

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

On a lovely new planet where people were good.

He smiled to himself, feeling happy and fine,

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

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

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

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

Posted on April 13, 2019 by Jamie Andrew

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sunshine Over Dalkeith, Dark Clouds Over Jamie

Posted on March 30, 2019 by Jamie Andrew

If, like me, you’ve got young kids, and little money for exotic travel and indoor pursuits, the winter weather can act as your jailer. Although we’ve ventured out as a family to local parks and lochs over the last few months, it’s been a long time since we’ve been on any of our customary mid-to-long-range adventures.

In the fairer months we try to visit a brand new place at least once every couple of weeks. It doesn’t have to be hours away. Scotland is a small country, but you could still comfortably spend a lifetime exploring its nooks and crannies (although if you want to free up a little of your precious time, you won’t be missing much if you skip Airdrie. Spoiler alert: everybody dies).

I’ve been feeling stir crazy. Yearning for the wide skies and the open road. Recently, each drop of the seemingly never-ending rain has fallen from the sky like a punch; each and every dicky tummy or runny nose that’s kept us housebound has felt like a personal affront. It’s a conspiracy, that’s what I came to believe, a conspiracy to keep me away from the wider world. What’s out there, hmmmm?? What are THEY hiding, hmmmm? Why don’t THEY want me to go out there?? I’ll show them… I’ll show ALL of them. Fetch me my tin-foil!

Last weekend, my weather forecast app showed me a jackpot of yellow suns. It almost rained from my eyes. I was so happy. Finally. We were free. Free to explore new and exotic places like… em, er… Dalkeith.

I’d been having a wee Google to myself. Dalkeith had a big country park, on the grounds of which was an old estate house, miles of forests, trails and tracks, beaten and otherwise, and a giant adventure playground styled after a fort that looked like it was absolutely terrific fun to run around in, and climb, and explore… for …the kids, of course.

The mid-range adventure was locked in. On the morning of the trip I could feel the stress lifting from my body like mist rising over the mountains. I knew the faster and farther we traveled along the motorway, the more the winds of change would blow that mist away, scattering it to the vast, swallowing jaw of the heavens. I was looking forward to testing out my new beatific smile in a car full of shiny, happy people.

We first had to make a stop at Asda, though, so I knew my new monk-like demeanour was going to be put to the test. Supermarkets are places where stress goes to shop and peace comes to die. I kept telling myself it was going to be OK, though. For starters, my partner, Chelsea, would be running the grocery gauntlet, venturing in for a low-carb, pre-pack salad while I stayed in the car with the kids.

But a car makes for a fragile cocoon, and the clenched fist of irritation soon smashed its way inside, hell-bent on pummeling my heart into action. My blood started dancing the moment we pulled into the car-park.

I surveyed the scene, and it was war-like in its horror and intensity: cars scuttled across the tarmac like giant dung-beetles; pedestrians infested the walk-ways like hordes of angry zombies, sniffing for the warm blood of their next kill. My fingers clenched the wheel. Reality had elbowed optimism out of its way and straight into the path of an oncoming shop-mobility vehicle.

I rolled the car to a stop at the front of the building to let Chelsea leap out. It was a swift, slick operation, necessitating the car being stationary for less than three seconds. Even still, just as I was driving off, PARP PARRRRRRPPPP! The mist of stress, which had been drifting cloudward, turned into a mountaineer, and slammed a pick-axe into the base of my amygdala.

I looked in my rear-view mirror. A fat, middle-aged woman in the rickety-old car behind me stared ahead with a look of wide-mouthed ferocity. Three seconds was an unacceptable amount of time for me to have made her wait. I summoned all of my powers of diplomacy and restraint. The kids were in the car with me, after all.

‘COW!’ I shouted, balling my hand into a fist and extending my middle-finger into the mirror. ‘FAT COW!’

I drove off as slowly as possible, relishing her continued anger. If only mine had abated, I could’ve claimed the moral high-ground, but I was just as angry as she was, with an added rainbow of righteousness rushing through my snarls.

I was still fuming about it long after she’d gone, even once Chelsea was back in the car cradling her low-fat salad. ‘Well, we know she’s impatient. She clearly can’t wait to shovel the next cake into her fucking mouth.’

‘Jamie, the kids!’

‘Well,’ I said, in a tone of voice that suggested I’d just crafted a profound and eloquent justification for my ongoing rage.

Soon enough we were on the motorway, and my stress was hovering somewhere above the car, never able to lift entirely on account of the tail-gaters haunting my back-bumper like towed ghosts. A few hundred near-miss heart-attacks fluttered by. After an ice-age of irritation, the SatNav announced that our destination was a little ahead of us, just off the main road.

I drove through a stone archway, and down a long, single-track road fringed by tall grass and trees on either side. Far down the track the road bent out of sight, so far down, and under a wide expanse of blue sky to boot, that we might as well have been in some remote segment of the highlands, instead of a mere minute from a busy dual carriage-way. There were no other cars or people in-front or behind. Bliss. Sheer bliss. About half-way up the track, I trundled the car to a stop. There, at the side of the road, was a young buck, nibbling leaves from a tree, its big antlers perched incongruously atop its little head, like he’d just picked them up from a joke-shop.

‘Look, kids,’ I whispered, even though the windows were all up.

We gazed in wonder at the innocent and obliviouslittle creature for a few seconds. Well, I gazed in wonder, anyway. Chelsea’s eyes were centred on her phone, and the kids didn’t really seem to give a monkey’s. It’s not like it was a monkey, after all.

‘It’s a wee stag, and it’s eating some leaves,’ I said with a smile, very much stating the obvious.

‘Let’s get a picture,’ I decided, because of course get a picture. This is 2019.

The stress was gone, whirling high above us on an unstoppable trajectory to Mars. And all it took was the simple sight of a tiny animal, nonchalantly munching some greenery.
I edged the electric window down an inch or so. The nyee-whir-thud made the buck flinch, but after a few seconds of consideration it went back to munching the leaves. I edged it down some more, figuring that the buck was inured to the noise. I was right. Nyee-whir-thud. Munch, munch, munch.

‘Use your phone,’ I said to Chelsea through gritted teeth, careful to trap as much sound as possible inside my mouth. I wanted to capture this beautiful, peaceful moment. To preserve it for all eternity.

PARRRPPPP! Went the car behind us. WHOOOOSH! Went the buck, disappearing into the trees. PARRRPPPPPPPPP! Went the car behind us again. I looked in the rear-view mirror to see a fat, middle-aged woman glaring angrily ahead, her vast white monster of a car trundling and revving beneath the impress of her impatient fat foot.

I instinctively, and rather bizarrely, made the wanker gesture in my rear-view mirror, as I ranted like a maniac. ‘ANOTHER IMPATIENT FAT COW! WHAT, ARE YOU IN A RUSH TO GET TO THE COUNTRY PARK? IS THERE AN EMERGENCY WITH A FUCKING SPARROW OR SOMETHING, YOU FAT COW? WE. WERE. TRYING. TO. TAKE. SOME. TIME. OUT. TO. SMELL. THE. ROSES.’

Chelsea shook her head, and glanced back at the kids. ‘We do NOT say that someone IS fat. We say that someone HAS fat. We don’t teach our children to judge people like that.’
I nodded. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said to Chelsea. ‘I’m sorry, kids,’ I said to them. ‘Daddy gets angry sometimes, and he says things he shouldn’t.’ I let that percolate before adding. ‘She shouldn’t have peeped though.’

I rolled on, as slowly as possible, so slow I was almost going in reverse. This time, my anger had turned to wicked delight. I could see the woman behind’s anger mounting and mounting the more slowly we trundled up the long, long single-track.

‘Boy,’ I said, grinning at myself in the rear-view mirror. ‘That cow sure has a lot of fat.’
‘JAMIE!’

I laughed.

Maybe it isn’t the great outdoors and the wide open skies that bring me peace. Maybe it’s something more primal than that.

Maybe I just like being a dick.

I’m pretty good at it.

And that makes me happy.

A Rave for Kids?

Posted on March 23, 2019 by Jamie Andrew

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

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

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

Light burns; darkness salves.

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

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

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

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

Come regress with me.

At the kids’ rave

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘How much for the jacket?’ asks Felicia.

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

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

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

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

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

Click here for the news story

Herding Sharks: Dealing with Warring Kids

Posted on February 10, 2019 by Jamie Andrew

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nope.

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

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

‘AAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRGGGHHHHH!’

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

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

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

My two bonnie boys – Jamie

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That was a dark day.

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

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

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

I got this text from my partner during the week:

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

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

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

Different shit, different day.

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

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

Those moments make all the shit worthwhile.

When Kids Compete

Posted on January 30, 2019 by Jamie Andrew

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

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

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

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

Just joking, of course…(coughs)

Winning isn’t everything.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Shhhhhh,’ said his mother.

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

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

My partner scowled.

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

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

Giving Santa the Sack: Your Questions Answered

Posted on December 13, 2018 by Jamie Andrew

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

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

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

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

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

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

We already took Jesus out of Christmas.

What’s one more fictional bearded character?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Or… we could just declassify Santa.

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

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

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

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

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

Yee-Haw! It’s Sharkmas!

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

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

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

What would you think of that culture?

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

Happy Sharkmas, you cunts.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Am I right, Finn Clintson?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He thought for a moment.

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

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

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

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

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

Drag me to IKEA: The seventh circle of Scandinavian Hell

Posted on December 1, 2018 by Jamie Andrew

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

I know, right?

IKEA.

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

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

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

IKEA!

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

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

The horror; the horror.

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

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

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

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

Home.”

But you can’t go home.

You can’t go home ever again…

Never.

Ever.

Never ever.

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

And do you know what?

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

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

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

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

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

We were free.

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

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

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

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

She smiled weakly at us.

“We left the kids with their aunty.”

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

We skipped, we smiled, we laughed.

Thank you, IKEA.

It was heavenly.

Quitting at Quitting: The Life of a Secret Smoker

Posted on October 13, 2018 by Jamie Andrew

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘I’m on it.’

‘It’s okay for now.’

‘I’ll go to the shop.’

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

‘BYE!’

Often it was more ridiculous than that…

INT. LIVING ROOM. MIDNIGHT.

A couple snuggles on the couch.

CHELSEA

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

The front door slams shut.

Jamie??

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

See ya, pal: What our pets teach us about life and death

Posted on September 23, 2018 by Jamie Andrew

My elderly cat is the singularly most irritating creature who ever padded on four paws.

She lies at the top of the stairs outside our bedroom every morning waiting for the first faint sounds of my stirring so she can burst into the room miaowing like an accordion possessed by the spirit of a dying elk, waking both of our kids before I have even half-a-chance to ninja-slide the hell out of there.

She always tries to trip me up as soon as I enter the kitchen, perpetually circling her food-bowl with her tail held aloft like a hairy shark’s fin. A few times she’s almost sent me flying down the stairs to my doom in the exaggerated manner of an A-Team stunt-man.

She licks my hand whenever I pat her, which sounds like it might be kind of cute, but not when it happens every single time I pat her, and certainly not when her tongue is as sharp as sand-paper and her breath is as foul as a hundred decomposing chickens.

She does night-time shits in the litter-tray outside our bedroom so foul that they snap me awake, forcing me to stagger out of bed to snatch up the poo-encrusted cat-spatula as fast as my sleep-leaden legs can carry me. I inevitably spill six tonnes of kitty-litter over the carpet in my haste to reach the toilet with the boufing, scooped-up jobby.

I’m mad at her at least once a day, and dream of a time when I’ll no longer be a slave to her licks, trips, mews and poos. She’s a broccoli-scented, past-her-prime grandma who for some reason I’m not allowed to shove in a home. And she stubbornly refuses to fucking die.

Until yesterday morning.

When she fucking died.

Our cat, Candy – inexplicably named after a 20-year-old Las Vegas stripper – was already middle-aged when we invited her into our home, which was the third she’d lived in. She’s always been a sweet, gentle and affectionate little creature – a cat who never once in her life yowled, hissed or clawed – so she wasn’t constantly re-homed because she was slashing people’s cheeks like some low-level drug-enforcer or anything like that. People loved her.

She was just unlucky.

In home number one her owner fell pregnant and developed serious pet allergies; in home number two she was bullied by the cats who already lived there; and in home number three she was our little baby, at least until our human babies came along, at which point she was relegated to the position of a suddenly inconvenient foster-child. Despite us having to shift the lion’s share (or the cat’s share, if you like) of our attention to the kids, Candy was always loved and looked after. One of the team.

She was the perfect cat to have around our kids, whether they were inside or outside the womb. Both times Chelsea fell pregnant, Candy stuck so close to her middle that she was practically gestating along with the fetuses.

Once they’d been born, Candy was unceasingly tolerant of the children; she was the sort of cat you could grab by the ears, squeeze by the tail and chase round the house without risk of counter-strike, which is a good job, because the kids grabbed her by the ears, squeezed her by the tail and chased her round the house. At least to begin with. Over time, Candy taught them how to be kind, soft and gentle. Well, okay, she didn’t teach them that at all. It was us. We taught them that. By shouting at them. A lot. But having a pet around the house undoubtedly helped our kids learn how to love things unconditionally.

Candy had been poorly for a while, but we chalked most of it down to her advanced years. Besides, she might have been less nimble, pickier with her food, and skinnier and scragglier, but she still purred away like a motorbike riding pillion on a motorbike that inexplicably was being ridden by another motorbike.

But this past week, though the purring continued apace, it became clearer and clearer to us that a battle was raging inside of Candy’s body, and one that she was losing. Her breathing became more laboured, to the point where we could hear the clanking mechanics of her failing respiratory system; see her sides puff out and collapse back sharply, like someone was operating a stiff set of bellows inside her rib-cage. The evening before last, one of her front legs and both of her back legs became swollen, lending her the appearance of mild gigantism. Walking became a serious effort for her.

I called the out-of-hour vet service. I gave my partner the phone. The vet told her that Candy was most likely suffering from an over-active thyroid that was putting strain on her heart, hence the struggle to breathe and the fluid retention. Although it might be possible to limit any further damage and lessen the severity of her symptoms, the vet went on to say, her prolonged life-span would probably be measured in weeks rather than months or years, and there was no guarantee that her condition would improve. I heard the inflection rise in Chelsea’s voice as she parroted the words ‘a thousand pounds or more’, which caused me to parrot her words, six times louder, and completely involuntarily, this time adding my own little flourish to ‘a thousand pounds or more’, which was: ‘Fuck off!’

It was an instant and honest reaction, but it still made me feel ashamed. We don’t know how lucky we are in this country not to have to take fiscal factors into account when deciding whether or not to treat adult relatives for serious or chronic illnesses… else more of them might end up in the ground a lot sooner.

“There’s nothing I wouldn’t do for grandma. NOTHING.”

“It’ll cost ten-thousand pounds to treat her.”

“…to be honest her soup was starting to lose its zest.”

Children are a different proposition altogether, though. If either of our kids needed tens of thousands of pounds for medical treatment, and we didn’t have it, we’d wrench appliances from the wall and flog them on the street, list everything we owned on Ebay. I’d put the car on the market, the house on the market, mySELF on the market – kidneys, liver, lungs, the lot – hell, I’d rob a bank, borrow from the mafia, rob from the mafia, anything. Everything.

But – with mercy set at a thousand pounds minimum – the cat was clearly on borrowed time. Besides, even if we had a thousand pounds or more, she was in pain, and our actions might only serve to prolong that pain, even escalate it. We knew which way the wind was blowing. And you can’t fight the wind. We decided we’d phone the regular vet’s first thing the next morning.

I tried to prepare my eldest son, Jack, freshly-turned four, for the inevitable. I lay in bed next to him after I’d finished reading his night-time stories, and shot the breeze for a while. I told him Candy was sick. Very sick. We had to take her to see the vet, but the vet might not be able to help her. Sometimes a cat is too sick and too old for a vet to help. Animal hospitals aren’t always as good at helping animals as human hospitals are at helping humans (because I didn’t want him to think that hospitals were just giant white death-factories). Out of nowhere Jack asked if there were cities in the jungle. No, I told him.

“So there are no vets,” he said. “Then the animals will just die.”

Bloody hell, I thought. This is going to be easier to explain than I thought. But possibly a million times more traumatic. Why can’t he just go around saying ‘Daaaattt’ all the time like his little brother?

“We might have to get Candy put…” I began to say, and then steered away from the cowardly euphemism. Probably best not to Freddy Krueger the kid. It wasn’t a great idea to make him scared of going to sleep.

“She might not come back,” I told him.

His aunt’s dog died recently. His mother didn’t sugar-coat it for him, or wrap it up in euphemisms, but neither did she labour the point. She just let him be sad, because death is very sad, especially when someone or something we love dies. Once he’d recovered his composure, he asked her, “Dogs die… but cat’s don’t die, do they?” He was getting nearer to completing the puzzle. He keeps finding new pieces. He almost found another one as I was talking to him about Candy.

“Candy’s a girl cat,” he said with a smile, “But she’s also an old, old cat. She’s like a granny.”

OK, I thought, I’m all for a good dose of the truth, but let’s gun up the engine and back the fuck out of Dead Grandmother Cul-de-sac before things get too grizzly.

The following morning, yesterday morning, was as sombre and heart-wrenching as you’d expect. I’d slept on the couch that night and Candy had slept on the foot-rest next to me. When I opened my eyes, she was looking at me. And she was purring. I’m glad I got that. It kind of made up for all the times I’d yelled at her.

I called the vet first thing and we were booked in for eleven am. We were filled with denial. And hope. Chelsea and I threw ourselves into the minutiae of family life: wiping butts, cleaning dishes, picking up clothes, all at a frantic pace. We focused on anything except what was about to happen. Even though Candy still picked and licked at her food, miaowing for more but eating very little of it, we kept filling and re-filling her dish. Anything you need, old lady. Anything you want.

It all happened so fast. Within ten minutes of arriving at the vet’s, Candy was gone. The anesthetic took her in less than a second. Chelsea had brought Candy’s favourite cat treat, which she was still licking as she nudged forward, and gently and silently left the world. Chelsea cried. What surprised me is that I cried, too. I’d spent the morning intellectualising, and dispensing little parcels of clinical rationalism like a Scottish Spock. I didn’t cry when my grandparents died, I didn’t cry when my children were born. But yet there I was. Crying like a bitch.

In later years the cat had become more of an adversary to me than a treasured pet. Never-the-less, my tears were pure and unsentimental. I loved her. I didn’t want her to die.

I deal with pain by leaning heavily into black humour. I looked at the vet – who’d been unspeakably patient, human and kind – and pointed at the table behind her, where another few needles loaded with anesthetic still sat. Earnestly, with tears flooding my eyes, I said: “Can I take one of those away for my mum?”

The vet turned round and reached for it, before turning back with a smile. We all laughed.

Little Candy’s body was released to us. I was going to bury her in my parent’s back garden. While it’s undeniable that the £40 price tag was a definite factor in burial’s favour, we owed it to Candy to lay her to rest alongside our three rats, and my mother’s dog, Zoe, all of whom I’d buried myself. It was an honour. A mark of respect. A sign they mattered and meant something.

Me, Candy and the bump

In the car as Chelsea cradled Candy’s body in a shroud made from her favourite blanket, I reflected on the feelings that were stirring inside me. My sense of humour sometimes hides a burning anger; behind that, sadness. That was what lay at my core. Sadness. Great, unfiltered sadness. As I got ready to bury our beloved little cat, something in me was being unearthed.

We told Jack. His first reaction was, “My friend Cory can still come today, right?” The entry for death in his internal lexicon is yet to be shaded with feeling. His second reaction was tears, a plaintive moan. He said he’d draw a picture of Candy. So we could remember her.

I told my mum about Jack’s reaction when I got to her house with Candy. A little gallows humour crept into the re-telling. I just couldn’t help myself. “And as he was crying, mum, I just looked him straight in the eye and told him, ‘While we’re getting it all out, son, I just need you to know that Santa Claus is definitely not real, okay?’”

I smiled. She didn’t.

I dug a hole for Candy. I burst through roots with the spade. Mulched up hard soil and clay. Laid her gently in the earth, and covered her over with soil and a slab, so the foxes wouldn’t get her. I remembered all the times she’d lain next to me in bed with a paw draped over my stomach. How happy she’d been when we’d finally got a garden and she could play outside.

This is how it always ends. With me, here, with a spade.

Why would we ever do this again?

We’ll do it again.

Want to read more about pets dying, you morbid bastard?

Here’s a long, funny and touching piece I wrote a few years ago about the deaths of the three rats and a dog mentioned in this piece

Here’s an article published a few years ago about the death of my mother’s cat, with whom I’d ‘shared’ a childhood

Jesus Christ, I write about pets carking it a lot, don’t I?

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

Posted on September 19, 2018 by Jamie Andrew

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Money. It’s all about money.

Just like everything else in life, I suppose.

The power of Santa compels him… to do very little

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Whose interest does Santa really serve?

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

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

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

But I won’t.

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

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

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

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

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

“Characters.”

“And what about Santa?”

“Real.”

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

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

How did that go? you may ask.

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

THANKS, society.

I guess you win.

Parents vs Kids: The War for Dinner

Posted on September 14, 2018 by Jamie Andrew

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Stick your mince and potatoes up your arse!

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

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

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

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

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

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

Emu: I stuffed him good

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

And so the war raged on.

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

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

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

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

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

But that only works for so long.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“NO!”

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

“I want my lawyer.”

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

[folds arms, stares straight ahead, shakes head]

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

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

“CAN YOU FUCK!!”

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

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

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

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

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

Or at least Team Not Beige.

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

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

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

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

The Hell, Hope and Hilarity of Raising Brothers

Posted on July 28, 2018 by Jamie Andrew

They say, all told, that it’s easier to raise a boy than it is a girl.

Nobody said anything about two boys though…

Nobody said anything about brothers.

I’ve scoured my memory-banks under the sub-headings of ‘real-life’, ‘literature’ and ‘pop culture’, and can only seem to find toxic examples of brotherhood: Cain and Abel, Ronnie and Reggie, Niles and Frasier.

Paul and Barry Chuckle.

About the most innocuous pairing I can think of is Bill and Ben, but even then a) I don’t know if they were even supposed to be brothers, and b) even if they were, they were bouncing plant-pot puppets who said flub-a-dub-a-dib-dob-dib – so that’s not exactly a game-changing chunk of qualitative data.

I’ve got no first-hand experience of having a brother that I can draw upon to help me as a parent. I’m in the dark. I was a brother. Well, I still am a brother, but it’s been almost thirty-years since I last lived under the same roof as my sibling. Also, Ali, my sister, is 8 years older than me, so growing up she was more like a second mother to me – albeit a much, much cooler one – than a sister.

So I guess I don’t have that much proper, conventional sibling experience at all – not in terms of growing up with one, day-to-day, in the same house; especially not with one of a similar age. I’m blind, here… and sometimes, with the things I’ve seen as a parent, I wish I was.

Don’t get me wrong, our two boys – Jack, almost 4; Christopher, 19 months – are capable of generating almost seismic levels of sweetness together; strong enough to trigger a cute-quake in even the withered, hallowed heart of a Home Counties Tory (if the idea of said person having a heart isn’t too much of an oxymoron for you).

Our eldest makes his little brother giggle like something out of a Pampers’ commercial: pulling funny faces, chasing him into and around the garden, and being chased in turn, like they’re trapped in some perpetual, ever-switching Benny Hill chase scene. The little one follows the big one around the house either tottering like a half-drunk penguin, or waddling like a half-pint cowboy who’s been riding on a too-wide horse for too long. It’s absolutely bloody adorable.

Sometimes they sit and play with action figures together, both of them waving the toys about: my eldest constructing elaborate scenarios; his little brother making koosh and badoom and arrggghhhh noises at the times he feels are most appropriate.

At a barbecue recently, Jack used his teeth to cut grapes in two so his little brother could safely eat them. That made us smile. We started to congratulate ourselves on being terrific parents, until we realised that our briefly unsupervised one-year-old could have just as easily choked to death had his brother been in a more experimental mood. That’s what 90 per cent of being a parent is, I suppose: smiling at people in a bid to conceal your very real terror at almost killing your kid again for the 800^th time.

In the main, though, they’re good brothers.

They cuddle; they giggle; they wrestle; they kiss.

Sometimes…

Sometimes they do.

…and sometimes they don’t.

Sometimes they can’t be in each other’s company inside the play-room for longer than the time it takes for you to think: ‘I’ll just sit down for five minutes while they’re busy playing, and…’. No sooner have you started to lower your cheeks to the cushion than a shriek slices through the air like a scythe, and either the big one’s thundering out baying for justice because his little brother’s stolen his orange block (and no other colour of block will do, of course. He has to have the orange block, not one of the other 70 blocks, or even another completely different orange block altogether – are you fucking crazy? – the orange one! I want THAT orange one!) or the little one’s galloping out with a blotchy red face, hands held to the heavens, snot and sadness bleeding through his nostrils because his big brother’s just smashed him in the face with a Fisher Price till.

Their behaviour with and towards each other goes from the sublime to the ridiculous almost as often as I resort to hoary old cliches in my writing. For example, the other day I came home to find them fighting over a tissue. Now, if I had a penny for every time I’d caught them fighting over something daft I’d be a millionaire. But a tissue? Well I’ll be a monkey’s uncle.

“DINE!” shouted Christopher.

“No, it’s mine!” shouted Jack, as it rained confetti over them both. “It’s mine, mine, mine!”

“GUYS!” I shouted, trying to startle them into statues. “Some perspective here, please. What if that was a kidney?”

Then I’d be walking into a sitting-room slaughterhouse, I thought.

I know we ask, and perhaps expect, too much of Jack when it comes to sibling decorum. Is it fair to expect a little boy to be the bigger man, especially when he barely comes up to my belly-button? Yes, Jack does indeed dole out a disproportionate amount of the (mild) violence, but Jack is also held to account most often – even when his little brother does indeed ‘start it’ – purely by virtue of his relative size and maturity: something that makes perfect sense to us as big people, but that Jack doubtless perceives as unfair treatment.

I try to put a positive spin on it for Jack and play to his sense of pride and burgeoning maturity by telling him that he’s almost like a second Dad to Christopher (and maybe that’s me drawing upon the only sibling dynamic of which I’ve had direct experience) and should start acting that way. He usually listens to this speech intently, and a few times I’ve felt like he’s been on the cusp of a Eureka moment, but then he’ll march off and slap his little brother across the head, or pull the cat’s tail or something, and I’ll remember that all little kids are essentially psychopaths and give up.

We were very supportive earlier in the year when little Christopher started taking his first uncertain steps as a fully-fledged member of the bipedal club, and for some reason we imagined Jack would be, too. We really are silly idiots. Christopher would run across the no-man’s land of our living room, falling as if shot first into my arms, and then into his mother’s, gaining more time and distance upright with each passing day. Our cheers filled the room like the end of a Rocky Balboa fight. One particular day Jack was observing stoically from the side-lines, when without any warning whatsoever, just at the apex of a particularly loud cheer, he walked up to his teetering brother and – calmly and perfunctorily – pushed him onto his face, whereupon Christopher’s nose exploded like a fist hammering down on a pouch of ketchup.

Both kids can be kind and sweet with other kids, Jack especially. He’s intuitive and responsive, nurturing and commanding. But then he’s not competing for resources and affection with those other kids. A little jealousy and conflict between siblings seems unavoidable, and entirely normal. The drive to compete and conquer would appear to be hardwired into us – especially us knuckle-dragging penis-wearers.

While the brothers get closer and cosier and calmer with each passing day we’ve taken to giving them a little one-on-one time with each of us a couple of times a week. They still spend the majority of their time together, but this helps them to breathe and be their own wee people – as much as they can be their own wee people while still in the orbit of our influence. Giving them one-on-one time helps us as parents, too, because the already high baseline of parental guilt tends to increase exponentially whenever you have to half or otherwise slash the attention you’re able to give one child due to the different, more immediate needs of one of the others.

Still, what Jack doesn’t realise is that every time he lashes out at Christopher or does something naughty or nasty to him just to see what will happen he’s handing his brother the tools and techniques he needs to eventually defeat him; he’s turning his little brother into the starting-field fighter he never was as a toddler, because Jack never had to contend with a Jack. The health visitors also predict that Christopher’s going to be the bigger of the two brothers.

Simply put? One day his little brother’s going to knock him the fuck out.

The signs are already there. A few months ago they were both in the hallway. Jack strolled up to Christopher with a sneer on his face, and shook him violently by the shoulders, for no reason that any rational mind could deduce. Little Christopher’s face morphed from neutral to enraged, Jack entirely oblivious to his little brother’s living mask of anger as he turned around to walk away. Christopher pulled back a full-body-fist, much like the one George McFly pulled in the seconds before hitting Biff Tannen, and released it, sending him spinning through the air at speed towards the back of his big brother’s head. He rotated 360 degrees with his fist held aloft before losing his balance and thudding bumwards to the ground like a man too drunk to fight. His tiny fist had connected with nothing. Jack was already in a different room, wreaking fresh havoc on inanimate objects. I laughed, but also felt suitably impressed by the little guy’s moxy.

Be kind, Jack, because it’s good to be kind. But also be kind because sometimes it’s the smart thing to do.

My partner and I are going to try for a third baby in the not too-distant future. Are we crazy? And what would be the best – or easiest – addition to the mix? A third boy? Or a little girl?

Maybe we’ll just get another cat.

Your Crazy Kids Will Always Beat You

Posted on June 23, 2018 by Jamie Andrew

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Beats the hell out of hitting.

THE END

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

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

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

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

“Daddy, Where Do Babies Come From?”

Posted on March 10, 2018 by Jamie Andrew

My eldest son, Jack, 3-and-a-half, has been exploring the concepts of pregnancy and parenthood, acting out a series of scenarios with the aid of toys and teddies.

A few weeks ago he was carrying around the head of a Cyberman – a big, bulky, wearable, adult-sized head – introducing it as his baby, asking us to kiss it goodnight, even strapping it into his little brother’s buggy and shooshing us incase we woke it up. Adorable, yet also pretty surreal.

He then became attached to a rather more cuddly and anthropomorphic baby-substitute, an orange, squish-faced mini Tellytubby his little brother Christopher got for Christmas. He named him Shah. Cheers for the potential fatwa, son. At least you never named him… nevermind.

Sometimes Jack carried Shah around, cuddling him, cradling, passing him to us for short bursts of time before jealously grabbing him back again, like he was the proud and overzealous parent of a newborn. Sometimes he stuffed Shah up his jumper, and pretended to be an expectant parent. Last week he told us that the baby would come out of his tummy in ten weeks’ time, before plucking it out of this jumper seconds later with the ease of a magician pulling a rabbit out of a hat, which we all felt was rather a slap in the face for those poor women forced to spend endless, agonising hours sweating and screaming in the delivery room, and then have to get their fannies and arses stitched back together.

I think we should have made this a teachable moment, and let him watch a particularly gruesome live birth on YouTube – right after we’d schooled the ignoramus on Iranian history and politics, of course.

In any case, a teachable moment presented itself a few days later. I had just finished reading him his bed-time stories, when he grabbed his bed-time teddy bear (Shah had been deposed at this point) and pushed it up his pyjama top.

“Dad did WHAT to you?”

“I’ve got a baby in my tummy again, Daddy.”

I smiled. “It’s good to pretend like this. It helps you learn things, and find out how things feel, and find out how other people feel about things.”

That being said, I made it clear that in the real world the only guys capable of giving birth are seahorses and Arnold Schwarzenegger. I went on to give him a bit more info.

“And mummies don’t carry the babies inside their actual tummy, where the food goes. There’s a special part that’s just for growing babies.”

Jack nodded vigorously. “And then they poo the babies out.”

“Not….” I began, talking more slowly and carefully as I began to realise where the conversation was almost certainly heading, “…really. They don’t… mummies don’t… poo babies out of their bum.”

I turned to look at his face. It was deathly still, though a little furrow was forming on his brow. I knew it was coming.

“So where do the babies come from, Daddy?”

Code red! Code red!

This was a pivotal moment. I knew that whatever I said next could have a profound effect on Jack’s personal and psycho-sexual development. Euphemism or truth-emism?

Do I tell him that babies come from the magical kingdom of Fluffington? That they’re emailed from heaven and printed on a 3D printer embedded in mummy’s crotch?

Or do I throw him a truth-bomb, break out charts and diagrams, and make him do join-the-dots pictures of vulvas and uteruses? Show him photos of big gaping fannies in such glaring, high-density close-up that it’s like staring into the jaws of the Predator? Do I talk him through what was happening that time he walked into the kitchen and found his mum bent over the counter in her dressing gown, and I told him she had a sore back and I was just massaging it better?

Ultimately, much like when Jack himself was conceived, I decided to have a quick, no-frills stab at it.

“Well, you know how we boys have willies? Me, you, baby Chris, all men.”

“Grandpa too, he has a willy.”

“That’s right, grandpa, too.”

“And papa. And uncle Aiden. They have willies.”

“That’s right.”

“And my other papa.”

“Yep.”

“And…”

I cut it short, so we didnt’t have to spend the whole night listing the names of anyone who’d ever possessed a penis.

“This is some hard shit to hear. Spark me one up, pops.”

“Well, ladies don’t have that.”

“What do they have?”

Good question. They have… they have a…

“Well, they have a… a vvvvvv…. a vvvvva….vvvva….vv…vvvvvaa….”

Why was this word so hard to say? I couldn’t seem to get my tongue around it (‘Stop your snickering up the back of the class there!’). I was beginning to sound like a man with a faulty chainsaw.

“Vagina!” I said with sudden force. “It’s called a vagina.”

“Fajina?”

“Vagina.”

“Vagina….” And then, inevitably, he said: “Vagina, vagina, vagina, vagina.”

At that moment, as if summoned by the magic of the word itself, a voice boomed from the hallway outside: “He’ll be running around his nursery shouting that all day tomorrow now!”

“There’s nothing wrong with vaginas!” I shouted back at his mum, conscious that the word vagina was beginning to lose all meaning through repetition. I turned back to Jack. “See, it’s called a vagina, but it’s sort of …a hole, that ladies have. Boys have willies, girls have holes. That’s how the baby gets out.”

He nodded, seemingly satisfied. I quickly changed the subject before the questions became any more technical…

A few days ago I came home from work to find Jack holding Shah again.

“Hi Shah,” I said.

“It’s not Shah. It’s Lou-lou.”

“Oh. What happened to Shah?”

Jack shrugged. “He died in a fire.”

I dare say it won’t be long before we’re having the death talk.

Vaginas have got a lot to answer for.

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