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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Say it again, Sam

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

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

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

Don’t fear a din

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

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

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

Silence is your enemy.

Kids are weirdos

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

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

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

Food, not so glorious food: kids are fussy

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

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

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

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

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

Sleep is not a foregone conclusion

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

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

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

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

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

We know the feeling.

If you’ve got a partner, hug them tight

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

An unhealthy obsession with serial killers comes in handy

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

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

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

Keeping an eye on those matches, though.

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

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