Tag Archives: Peppa Pig

Santa, My Brain, and Me

Posted on by

Those of you who’ve sampled even a small serving of my annual yuletide rantings about the rituals of Christmas will know that I’m as anti-Santa as most of you are anti-sprout. But I’m not nearly as militant as my barbed words would suggest. Whenever people broach the subject with me, they tend to regard me less as some sort of formidable intellectual opponent, and more like I’m Uncle Albert banging on about the war again.

I’m a mild Scrooge case. I’m not out there on roller-skates shouting through a megaphone into the bewildered faces of passing children that Santa’s a big fat phoney and their parents are dirty great liars – as much as I confess that the thought carries a certain appeal. I’m not trying to get mall Santas forcibly repatriated to the North Pole by phoning in bomb threats to every shopping centre blasphemous enough to employ them. I’ve got a dream, that’s all. A dream that one day we’ll be able to live in a world where parents aren’t paying five-quid a ticket so their kid can cry on the lap of some diabetic tramp for thirty seconds, before being quickly ushered out with a 15-pence jigsaw from Temu under their arm.

Santa’s nothing short of a conspiracy, a capitalist hijacking of the Christian season of worship – a festival that was itself hijacked from Pagans. And it’s a conspiracy every one of us is in on. I don’t mean a conspiracy as in the bonkers kind, the kind you’re about to experience in the following paragraph, where a noticeably wired dad I’ve just invented is having an intense heart-to-heart with his son at the breakfast table:

“Santa and the Easter Bunny bring the chocolate, son, so all of the kids’ teeth will fall out in their millions, and the tooth fairy can make a fucking killing [slams a line of ching from the table]. The tooth fairy’s Jewish, see, and she owns all of the… chocolate…. factories… [is reminded of Charlie, so slams another line]… so she’s in it to the fucking hilt. The hilt! And you’d better believe that it was Jesus who invented Halloween. He did it to kill off thousands of sweet old ladies every year just before the end of heaven’s financial year. It’s so he can get his soul quota numbers up so he gets a bigger chunk of the next budget, see? [rubs finger and thumb together] See what happens is the old ladies all keel over from heart attacks on October the 31st because every time they answer their door there’s 6-year-old kids dressed like porn stars and Jeffrey Dahmer. Quite cunning, eh? Anyway, I think Jesus is a Jew, too. Would explain a lot. [stares at son] [wipes nose] Have you heard from your mother since the court case?”

It’s a conspiracy in the respect that we’ve used Santa to give our kids starring roles in a yuletide version of The Truman Show. We perpetuate Santa Claus knowing it’s a lie, but because we think of it as a white lie, a good lie, one that brings joy to children, we let ourselves off the hook. And we never fret about our children’s inevitable dawning realisation that the first ten years of their lives have been predicated on a massive reality-warping lie perpetuated by the very people they trusted most in the world, because there’s nothing nightmarishly dystopian about that scenario at all, nothing that could possibly leave them with lingering psychological and trust issues… No. Nope. No siree. Don’t be silly billies!

Hmmm. OK, I see it, I see it. With that little dose of passive aggressive sneering it’s all starting to sound a wee bit militant after all, isn’t it? This is starting to come off like a manifesto. Can I let you in on a secret, though? One that may surprise you to hear [as you read it in your own head]? I do sometimes move back and forth on the issue. I do. I’m not immune to my humanity. I do actually enjoy seeing children being happy, you know, despite the misanthropy that runs through my writing like a fault-line. I’m not the sort of guy who sees a smile spreading across a kid’s face and thinks to himself: ‘You’ll pay for that benign innocence, child. Just you wait and see how fast I bat that ice cream cone you’re about to buy out of your stubby little hands.’

So, when I found myself at a family Christmas party at the community centre recently with my two young sons, and I saw a little girl bursting out of the main hall, quaking with excitement, shouting: ‘Santa’s on his way?’ – half in proclamation, half in excited disbelief – dear reader, I smiled. It was cute. Joyful, even. And I thought to myself: the whole Santa thing really does bring them happiness, doesn’t it? Maybe I don’t have a principled moral stance on this issue, after all. Maybe I’m just a miserable, joyless c***.’

I didn’t think that for very long, however, because, well, how could I? Jesus, I’m fucking awesome. My very next thought was: that little girl could’ve just as easily burst out of that hall and shouted, ‘Peppa Pig is on her way?’, and there would have been just as much joy on her face, and I would’ve smiled just as broadly in recognition of that joy. On one level, there’s no difference between the two scenarios here. Kid is introduced to fictional character. Kid thinks it’s real. Kid gets to exist in a larger-than-life, make-believe world of wonder and magic. So far, so standard. On another level, though, my version of the wee girl isn’t being gaslighted into believing that giant talking pigs literally exist in the real world, in defiance of all known laws governing the natural world and reality itself.

“Mummy, is Peppa Pig really eight-feet tall and real, like, real as in, like, real life? Is she actually real and not just a cartoon?”

“Of course she is! Why else would we celebrate Pigmas every year?”

“But where do they all live?”

“In the South Pole. Duh!”

“Is Daddy Pig there?”

“It’s a whole advanced pig civilisation. There’s fucking millions of them.”

“Don’t they get too cold?”

“A wee bit, but bacon lasts longer in the freezer, doesn’t it, so I expect they’ll all live for ages. And be delicious.”

“And do the pigs really bring us our presents every year?”

“You’re saying that like you think it’s ridiculous! Of course they do! I’ve told you; it’s all perfectly sensible.”

“In a big sleigh made of beef, pulled by naked humans?”

“Exactly!”

Sometimes it’s just my brain. I want to be happy, really I do, but it seems to me that so much of happiness is predicated on illusion, self-deception, and mis-direction. If I was having a feast with friends in the apocalypse, after a few months of almost starving to death, I’d be the one saying, ‘It’s human meat, isn’t it? How else would we have suddenly got so much food when there’s literally nothing out there? It’s people, isn’t it? We’re eating people!’, and they’d be angrily retorting, through globs of long-pig, ‘Yes of course it is, but shut the fuck up so we can all pretend it’s chicken and enjoy it!’

I can be smiling or lost in blissful reverie, and then my brain will saunter up to me and say: ‘Me and the boys have connected a few things up back there, and we’ve got to say, that nice thing you thought you found? It’s not looking too pretty once we shut off the reality and ignorance filters, mate. And if you connect this bit to that bit, then this bit to that bit over here, turns out your life is actually fucked, mate. Anyway, that’s tea break.’

Oh, but for a single slice of simple, sustainable, deluded joy; a suspension of reality for the sake of a smile. Just sometimes. But, no. Alas, in life, as in Santa, my brain never closes its investigations, never ceases exploring and asking, and the questions accelerate into infinity.

What does Santa do if he turns up at a house and there’s a crime in progress? Statistically, it must happen to him all of the time, if only in Glasgow alone. The dude’s got magical powers, for Christ’s sake, you’re not telling me he’s going to tip-toe into a house and say, ‘Sorry for disturbing your raping, pretend I’m not here, I’m just going to pop this Monopoly under the tree.’ Or if he climbs in as a kid is being beaten? ‘Ah, when that wee laddie regains consciousness under the Christmas tree following the vicious beating I’ve just witnessed him taking from his father, he’s going to lose his fucking mind over that Slalectrix set!’

Questions! What did Santa do during the Rwandan genocide? Just not bother his fat arse? Thanks for giving us a taste of the North Pole’s isolationist foreign policy, you fascist! Why has he never helped NASA? We could’ve been to Alpha Centauri by now, and on reindeer back. Why has no-one pulled him up for the clearly racist move of not delivering any presents to majority Muslim countries? And, most pressing of all, what did he do during the Third Reich? Especially pertinent question given that our modern aesthetic conception of Santa is at least partly based on a kindly, bearded German man who gave lots of gifts to poor children. So if Santa is German… then he would probably have been a Nazi throughout most of the 30s and 40s. He’s already snubbing brown kids the world over, small step from there to dinner with the Goebels. If he did operate as some sort of seasonal sky Nazi, then I’ve got to say kudos to him. Imagine how brave you’d have to be to emerge from the sooty fireplaces of some of the most murderously racist people in history wearing a big black face and shouting about Hos. Guy’s got balls of steel. And, to my mind, it was him who rumbled Anne Frank.

“Ho ho ho! Where do you want me to leave this gift-wrapped 1945 diary?”

“Fuck sake, Santa!”

I’m off to lie down in a darkened room, then book a brain-ectomy for the New Year.

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

Posted on by

1.) Buggies suck.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

4.) Toilets will never be the same again.

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

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

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

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

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

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

THANK YOU FOR READING, YOU ADORABLE BASTARDS.

ANOTHER FOUR NEXT WEEK.