Five New Year's Resolutions

New Year’s resolutions are the preserve of columnists and bloggers who can’t think of anything else to write as the year winds down to its sorry conclusion… So here are mine.
 
1. Iron the dish towels.
 
Might as well start with an easy win, given that I’m bound to fail on all the ensuing trickier ones. Of course, it’ll make me look like Julia Robert's weird husband in Sleeping With The Enemy. And then there are those moments when you open the dish towel drawer to retrieve something to help in mopping up the latest pint of milk which has been spilled over the kitchen table, and the last stupid thing anyone wants to see at a time like that is neatly ironed dish towels. Still, I’ve already started ironing dish towels in the last few days so I know I can do it.
 
2. Don’t shout at the kids so much.
 
Hmm… The eternal optimistic avowal of most parents. It’s not really a matter of sticking to it, as you know you won’t, but you can at least run a sweep on how far into New Year’s Day you get before breaking it.
 
I had this strange period three years ago in Belgrade, when I went five or six weeks without ever raising my voice to the kids. Nothing to do with them being well-behaved and doing everything on request. It had come from within. My biographers can call it my Zen Period. The trouble was that I had no idea where it had come from, so that when it went away and I suddenly started bellowing at the spawn for fighting and endless prevarication when haste is called for and all those other things that drive parents demented, I couldn’t get it back. My Zen turned up on a pale horse, hung around for a few weeks, then left again. My Zen was Clint Eastwood. The Calm With No Name.
 
Perhaps one day the Calm will return, but probably only after the kids have gone off to university or to fight rebels in the DRC or whatever it is they’ll do when they finally leave. Assuming they do.
                                                                                                                               
3.  Take One of Two ice-skating every week
 
We bought One of Two ice skates for Christmas. It was the perfect gift, meeting all the Five Big Criteria. 1. She wanted them. 2. It’ll get her out in the fresh air. 3. Not a computer game. 4. Not stupidly expensive. 5. Suitably old-fashioned to satisfy our Victorian aesthetic. (To accompany all those Victorian parenting methods we use on a daily basis.)
 
The downside is that one of us has to take her ice skating, which we’ve solemnly promised to do. We went this morning for the second time since Christmas. The first time, Wednesday afternoon, the place was jumping, so we threw One of Two onto the ice and let her get on with it. Today we leapt out of bed with the dustbin men, and were at the outdoor skating rink beside the wedding cake Palace of Culture and Science before the crowds. We all went on, the Gang of Four.
 
TPCKAM is moderately competent and skated off with an air of panache. One of Two kind of minces, but she can scootch round without falling on her backside too much. Two of Two was unusually game for the whole thing, and charged off, falling over every fifteen seconds, and being soaked through to his bones within minutes. Which left me, holding onto the sides and crawling round more slowly than the snail-like velocity of a receding Scandinavian glacier.
 
Only my second time, so I had some excuse. Stayed on for about forty minutes, and didn’t fall over once, although mostly just because I constantly stayed within grabbing distance of the side wall. The only time I had to edge out was when there was some complete bastard standing against the wall, making sad sacks like me drift towards the middle. I fully expected on these occasions to suddenly fall against these people, pawing at them to stay upright, probably grabbing some poor woman’s breasts as I fell. Fortunately that never happened, although I could see some of them looking at me, clearly thinking, ‘If that guy falls over and does the fake breast snatch, I’m whacking him with my handbag.’ The second great impediment was a huge ridge across one end of the rink, which was just there to make the thing more of an assault course. The third, and greatest impediment, was that the entire rink was covered in ice.
 
If I do this every week for the next fifteen years…I will still be a complete muppet.
 
4.   Read with the kids every night
 
A fine aspiration, which probably won’t happen. Maybe there are parents who read with their kids every night – and I mean, you listen while they read, rather than reading a story to them as they drift off to sleep at 11.30pm – but we just never seem to get the time. It’s not like we’re sitting with our feet up watching ‘50 Greatest Celebrity Sandwiches’ on Channel 4 while the kids are playing Scooby Doo games on CartoonNetwork.com. There are so many after-school clubs and various other activities, that by the time you’ve got them home, they’ve moaned and whined their way through other homework, you’ve sat round the table having a family dinner so that you can all talk to each other and they don’t become teenage criminals and drug addicts, and then they’ve splashed fifteen gallons of water around the bathroom and you’ve had a pitched battle over Teeth Cleaning, it’s already some time well into the depths of the evening and everyone’s ready to collapse in a giant heap. Reading’s the one that always ends up on the discard pile.
 
5.  Get the kids to eat more fruit and vegetables
 
Well….that’s just not going to happen, is it? There will, of course, be sporadic bouts of cauliflower and broccoli, with the occasional gust of peeled apple, but generally we will end up mired in a dreich overcast predomination of pasta, with constant showers of tomato ketchup.
 
Enough resolutions from the parental wish list. In the end, regardless of what you intend or what you reasonably hope for, the new year usually ends up being pretty much like the old one, and all you can do is jump in head first and hope you get to at least 8am on the first morning of the year without the house having descended into complete bedlam.
 
 

How Laundry Happens...

It’s morning. You’ve got some place to go and inevitably you’re in a time crunch. You shout at your kid, ‘We’re going out in five minutes, get dressed! Clean your teeth!’ After another couple of exhortations, your kid finally extracts itself from the television.
 
Fifteen to twenty minutes later your child appears at the bottom of the stairs, dressed but with teeth uncleaned. At this point you say/shout (depending on your stress level), ‘It’s a school day, get your uniform on!’ or ‘We’re having dinner with the Prime Minister, get the football strip off!’ or ‘It’s minus 5 outside, put on a pair of long trousers!’ (Now, I’m partial to a pair of shorts in all weather myself, but then I don’t descend into a Duracell whine when I feel cold…)
 
Child retreats back upstairs and reappears some half an hour later potentially properly dressed. (You then forget about the teeth until some undisclosed moment later on when they breath on you.) The day progresses as planned.
 
Let’s ignore the rest of the day and go back in time to the moment when the kid returns to his/her room to change out of whatever completely inappropriate clothing he/she had on in the first place. At this point the child:
 
a)   removes the clothing, folds it up neatly and puts it back in a drawer.
b)   throws off the clothing with happy abandon, leaving it in a crumpled heap on the floor.
c)   finds a toy that they completely hate and decides that they really have to play with it for fifteen minutes.
d)   fights with their brother/sister over some tiny piece of plastic crap that neither of them actually wants.
 
Pick three from four. The clothing they’ve removed inevitably gets lost under some other toy or game or such in the ensuing stramash. The next time you’re in the room, the place is such a mess that you hardly notice the clean, once-neatly pressed clothing lying in a heap.
 
This happens Every Day. When you get to the stage of not being able to see the floor, you politely enquire of them if they might clean their room, and they grudgingly mump up the stairs at the seventeenth time of asking. They pick up all the clothes lying around and put them in the laundry basket. You dump the clothes in the washing machine in a bundle, and it’s only then, when you’re hanging the things up and you are actually noticing individual items of clothing, that you start to think, ‘I don’t remember the wee man wearing that…’ and ‘He hasn’t had that on in two years…’ etc. And then you realise why it is that almost 90% of the washing you do every day belongs to one of your children.
 
And so you shout at them again and the next time they have to change five minutes after they’ve got dressed they remember to put things back in a drawer – cramming it in there in a crumpled mass – and that happens no more than once, then they go back to their old ways and you’re still having to buy a jumbo sized packet of Persil every few days at the supermarket on the corner.

And that's how laundry happens.

Next time...why you have to buy toilet paper every single day.

I, Rabbit

Christmas Eve. An uneasy calm settles over the planet… The school holidays are nine days old and have been strangely marked by a paucity of internecine warfare. Yesterday Two of Two and I had a long father/son bonding day. Played chess three times, played cricket in the morning for an hour and a half and played football in the afternoon for over an hour. The football was a tight defensive struggle, characterised by long periods of stalemate, which finished 40-35 to me. Imagine if one of the games between Craig Brown’s Scotland and those football behemoths of Estonia had been played first to 40… They would not only still be playing, it’d probably still be 0-0. Maybe having to watch that will be Craig Brown’s hell when he dies. Serve him right. Or, more likely, that’ll be his heaven, and hell for the rest of us. “Well, Brian, I thought the way we advanced briefly into the Estonian half for thirteen seconds in the seventh year showed promise, but even so I was little worried that it left us exposed at the back and so that’s why I brought on another defensive midfield player.’
 
Whilst we played cricket in the morning, One of Two was in the kitchen with her wee friend – another One of Two, so perhaps we could call her One of Two Two to avoid confusion – making gingerbread cookies. Hard to keep your eye on the oven when playing for the Ashes in the back garden. An emblematic moment in the culinary disaster that was the Saturday Morning Cookie Fiasco, was to come in to find One of Two Two having poured an entire bag of floor into the bowl, using 350g as a very rough estimate. The cookies never stood a chance. When finished, none of them were eaten, and will instead be kept safe in a bag until such times as we’re beside a body of flat water and they can be used for skimming purposes.
 
So, I more or less devoted the day to the wee lad. Late in the afternoon, not long after darkness had fallen, we trudged happily inside from the field of dreams that is the mudbowl of the back (former) lawn. Unable to face the prospect of any downtime whatsoever, the wee man said, ‘can I go on the computer?’. Well, I’d been thinking that we might nip down the Speckled Band for a packet of crisps, a pint of cider and a chat about football and women, and said ‘no’. So then, raising a blunt middle finger to the day of father/son interaction, the wee man started crying and stormed out the room in a major huff. What is it they say about devoting time to your kids and the positive effect it has on them? Still, at some point he returned to apologise and we moved on. Must be the Christmas spirit.
 
The first present of the year has already been given. I wrote a few weeks ago about One of Two’s Christmas list, which featured a rabbit. She had been asking for a rabbit for some time. At this stage there was no way she was getting a rabbit. No way, not a chance, forget it.
 
She kept talking about a rabbit. Big eyes. Big, big eyes.
 
She had to do a Christmas list in her Pet Diary at school. She wrote ‘rabbit’ at the top of the list, and then the usual War and Peace-esque length of items beneath. However, she left a note for Santa at the foot of this gargantuan list which read… ‘Dear Santa, I’ve written a lot of things here, but actually I don’t want any of them, the only thing I really want is the rabbit. A rabbit is the only thing I want. Just a rabbit. Nothing else.’
 
I cracked. Classic dad-capitulating-in-the-face-of-his-wee-girl-being-cute situation. Then it transpired that some friends of ours at work had been given a rabbit and weren’t really in a position to devote enough time to it. The planets were in alignment, fate was in full swing, the gods had made up their minds. We were getting a rabbit.
 
The particulars of the handover of the merchandise dictated that we would come into possession of Patches the Netherland Dwarf (PtND) four days before Christmas. It seemed a long time to keep the wee girl locked in a cupboard, (I mean the rabbit, not One of Two) just so that we could spring the surprise on Christmas morning. She had to be handed over on the night.
 
When we told her where we were going, One of Two reacted with immediate delight, leaping into our arms and displaying all the cute little girlness that you want from your little girl. Within minutes, however, she was facing up to the prospect of getting what she wanted.
 
We went to PtND’s apartment. She was sitting on the carpet watching CNN. One of Two and PtND regarded each other with a certain trepidation. For all her desire to have a rabbit, One of Two does have an aversion to Small Things That Move, like mice, spiders and her wee brother. She stroked her, but refused to pick her up. The discovery that PtND’s claws needed snipping as they were, under all that fur, about six inches long, did not help.
 
We went home, the whole enterprise made easier by the absence of Two of Two, who was spending the night with his wee chum, Two of Three. In fact, given the size of the rabbit cage and the associated paraphernalia, there wouldn’t have been space for Two of Two in the car anyway, and we would have been in another of those tying-him-to-the-roof situations that nearly always get us in to trouble.
 
We let PtND roam around the living room. TPCKAM held her for a while, and received a massive scratch at the top of her chest for her trouble. It had the air of an accident, but maybe PtND has a vicious streak. As another friend has just pointed out, she does resemble Monty Python's killer rabbit.

 
They say that kids are always excited about getting small animals, and then the novelty wears off after a while and the poor things get left in a corner munching a carrot. Inevitably it comes down to the parents to clean out the cage then take the beast out in the evenings while watching tv, stroking its ears while it sits in your lap. Like some parody of Ernst Stavro Blofeld, in complete control of the tv remote.
 
Well, One of Two has done her best to fly in the face of this stereotype, by not being that excited in the first place. Still, as I write, she is mucking in with TPCKAM, doing that clearing up rabbit poo thing. Perhaps, after she’s got used to the shock of actually getting something she’d asked for – and after we’ve had PtND's vicious stabbing weapons of mass scratching lopped off – she will settle into a long and happy relationship with her dwarf.
 
And so Christmas is afoot, the battle lines have been drawn, and we’re now only a few hours away from that moment when the kids wake early, cry havoc and let slip the dogs of avarice.
 
Merry Christmas, dear friends! Last man standing is the winner...

Is That A Doughnut or A Meringue?

Should you find yourself over the next week or so listening to the Bing Crosby yuletide classic, It’s Beginning To Look A Lot Like Christmas, consider this:

“There’s a tree in the Grand Hotel,
One in the Park as well
The Sturdy kind that doesn’t mind
The Snow…”

Of course it doesn’t mind the snow, it’s a flippin’ Christmas tree! What kind of Christmas tree is it which minds the snow? You can imagine the scene in the forest in the middle of Norway. The snow starts, the trees suddenly go into a panic and start running about in a torment of fear and pusillanimity. ‘Quick men!’ shouts the leader, ‘get the women and children inside. Last one in the sauna’s deciduous!’

A week to go until Christmas. School finished on Friday, which seems very early. I, of course, seem to remember school finishing on like the 24th at eight in the evening, or thereabouts, but I expect my mother remembers it differently. There’s another line in the above song, ‘And Mum and Dad can hardly wait for school to start again…’ which has a depth of perception sadly lacking in the ridiculous mince about the outrageously brave tree in the park. I remember when TPCKAM first heard that line, she thought it sounded mean, but I don’t think she does anymore.

The past week has seen the usual torrent of parties and baking and driving the kids all over the city. I had to do two bouts in the kitchen. First was nothing to do with the kids, but was as a result of having to make mince pies for the International Women’s Christmas bazaar. Every spouse in the embassy was asked to make three or four million mince pies, and they still sold out apparently.

I rose early on the Saturday morning, donned my chef’s hat and got to work. Given that I was using pastry out of a packet and mincemeat out of a jar, there wasn’t actually any real skill involved, but it didn’t mean that I wasn’t about to make a mess of it. Assembling a mince pie so that it looks like something you might buy in a shop is the kind of thing they used to do on the Generation Game. I would have been rubbish on that show, and so it proved with the mince pies. They looked, well, mince. When I put them in the oven the time on the digital clock read 9:11, a grim portent of how the mince pies would be destined to turn out.

Four days earlier I had sat in amongst the nest of vipers that is a collective of international mums, as they decided who would make what for Two of Two’s class Christmas party. By the time it got to me, sandwiches, crisps and paper plates had already been taken. I blurted out mini pavlovas for some reason, and then sat back and forgot about it for a few days.

Now, the essence of the pavlova, the meringue, I could have made days in advance. I didn’t. I left it, in fact, until the morning of the party. I rose early – 5:10am – in order to have the meringues cooked and cooling in the oven before I’d headed off to school to deposit the spawn. I addressed the kitchen at 5:15. Separated the egg whites, measured out the sugar. For some reason I thought our electric whisk wasn’t working. I don’t know why I thought that. I didn’t even check it. I think maybe some previous electric whisk burnt out, but that was about four years ago and has long since been replaced by a whisk which is fully operational. It was just after five in the morning, and there must have been some weird psychological dream-like throwback going on. So, lacking an electric whisk – and using the kind of brain-dead thought processing which would guarantee me a job in the senior Civil Service if I wanted it – I decided to go for the electric handheld blender. To be honest, I thought it was a handheld whisk. Electric blenders don’t whisk eggs. It didn’t work. I got out the industrial blender, and fitted the blender attachment rather than the whisk attachment. That didn’t work either. At some point I think I even tried in desperation to whisk it by hand, which was very early-19th century and destined to failure

At this stage I still didn’t realise that I was being a complete muppet. I blamed the eggs, binned them, and cracked open another four. I did exactly the same series of mindless acts of culinary ineptitude. It’s one thing to be idiotic, but to repeat the idiocy twice with a ninety minute period takes a special level of naïve muppetry. The second batch of eggs also refused to be whisked by a series of blenders. I stomped up the stairs in a humph, not too far off seven o’clock. TPCKAM stirred from under the covers. I reported my Morning So Far. To give her some credit, she didn’t laugh at me, she just said, ‘Why didn’t you use the whisk?’

I went back down the stairs and re-entered the battlefield. The whisk was working. I had the meringues in the oven in ten minutes. Basically I had got out of bed, at just after five in the morning, to be stupid. Days don’t start any better than that.

And you know, I don’t reckon that six year-old kids really appreciate a nice bit of pavlova. It’s just something else with a tonne of sugar in it.

So here we are a week before Christmas. Only seventeen days until the kids go back to school…although to be honest I’m not yet at Bing’s stage of not being able to wait for it. The kids have cricket fever at the moment, prompted by my watching it every morning, rather than any actual interest in the England team getting gubbed. This morning they were out in the garden at eight o’clock, temperature just above freezing, barely daylight, a dreich, bleak, damp day, big jackets and wellies, Two of Two in a balaclava, playing the summer game. Having played out there all weekend, I know that the pitch is a little slow and the ball is turning square. Heartwarming enthusiasm from the pair of them. Ten minutes later they were screaming at each other, One of Two ran into the house bringing the garden with her, and I watched from the stands as Two of Two picked up four stumps and the bat and hurled them across the pitch, his face contorted in little boy anger.

Scotland needs a Dennis Lillee.

Lost and Found

Yesterday I lost Two of Two for the best part of half an hour. That’s a long time to lose one of your kids. He, as he will no doubt say when the story is recounted in later years, knew where he was all along.
 
It was a typical post-school Monday afternoon. A mixture of school misinformation, bowling and dance class, all with a time crunch element. I arrived at 2.45, thinking we’d have plenty of time for bowling before Two of Two had to be in jazz dance at 4.30. Turned out there was a carol concert which didn’t finish until 3.20, which I’m sure the school never mentioned, although it might have been that I wasn’t paying attention.
 
We went bowling in the local shopping mall, a few hundred yards from the school. Given that time had become shorter, we took the car. We bowled. We were rubbish. By the time we left bowling we were already likely to be five minutes late. One of Two and I legged it down the escalator to the car park. Looking back I saw Two of Two ambling behind. We got to the bottom, looked round, the wee man wasn’t at the top. Waited about five seconds, legged it up the stairs… He was gone. That quick.
 
Usually in the lose-one-of-your-kids situations, the initial reaction is maybe ninety percent it’s going to be fine, mixed with a small amount of initial panic. This, for some reason, was the other way round. He had gone so quickly, and at such an easy point for someone to have nabbed the little bugger.
 
I legged it round the supermarket element of the shopping mall, because we usually go in there. Nothing. I ran up and down like a headless chicken, all the time leaving One of Two standing at the Last Known Point of Contact which didn’t seem safe either. I legged it to the other end of the mall to see if he had his wee nose pressed up against the muffin case in the coffee shop. I legged it back. I ran outside, I ran down to the car park.
 
We’ve all asked ourselves this question at some time in our lives: if we were one of the Magnificent 7, which one would we be? Steve McQueen, cool, handsome and in complete control. Yul Bryner, authoritative and smooth. Horst Buchholz perhaps, headstrong and impetuous, but brave and true with it. Well, here I was, faced with a stressful situation, and I was Robert Vaughn.
 
A passing woman who had seen me charging pointlessly about like the Rangers midfield, suggested I try the security guard. The guy considered the facts – veeeery slooooowly – and then took me into the security control room. CCTV everywhere. It was like a movie. I didn’t want to be in a movie situation, I just wanted to be in a regular, shouting-at-my-kids situation. Then he pressed a button, gave me the microphone and told me to make an announcement over the tannoy. I was so scared at this point that I didn’t even say, ‘But I don’t speak!’ I garbled some mince to the wee man, and then legged it back out into the mayhem.
 
A mum from the school had appeared, and I dispatched her to the farthest reaches of the shopping mall. I ran around like a completely different headless chicken. I was called into the guard room to make another announcement. I ran back out and legged it once more round the supermarket. TPCKAM was on her way to the school to watch the dance class, so I called to divert her and to include her in the panic. Since I was panicking, it allowed her to be calm.
 
A guard grabbed me and said that they’d located the lad. I collapsed in a heap, picked myself up and went to find him. He took me upstairs to the bowling alley, where there was a party taking place, with twenty kids from the wee man’s school, all wearing the same uniform and matching the description I’d given. He wasn’t one of them. Ran back downstairs like a headless chicken. Panicked some more.
 
TPCKAM arrived, looking much calmer than she probably felt. I went off to the guard room to do the thing that I had put off doing, which was watch the replays of CCTV footage from the time when I’d last seen him. This was about twenty-five minutes in by now. Maybe I just didn’t want to see him being led off by a stranger. Maybe watching flashing black and white pictures of a shopping mall was too much like watching a grim story on the news. You never get shown CCTV footage when something good happens. ‘And here’s footage of Joey Barton buying his favourite pizza,' or ‘Here’s tv footage of a crowd of guys watching Scotland win the World Cup on a tele in Dixons.’ It’s always CCTV footage of people just before they get murdered.
 
While I was in the guard room flicking through images of the escalators and hoping not to miss anything, searching for some sign that I didn’t really want to find, another kid arrived at the shopping mall, saw One of Two, and said, ‘Hello, One of Two. Two of Two’s at the school.’
 
Another guard came and grabbed me and gave me the news. It was over as quickly as it had started. The guards all relaxed, safe in the knowledge that a kid hadn’t been snatched on their watch. We went to school, the wee man was sitting there wondering what we’d been up to, having been happily charging around the playground playing football.
 
What I’d been thinking: ‘Oh my God, it’s been twenty minutes without me, wherever he is, he’s going to be so scared.’
 
What he’d been thinking: ‘Gooooaaaaaaal!’
 
His logic was more or less faultless. He’d known we’d been going back to school,  (he’d forgotten we’d taken the car), and he knew it was dangerous to hang around a shopping mall on his own, and safer at school. So he walked the few hundred yards in his t-shirt in temperatures barely above freezing.
 
At least it has sorted out a couple of Christmas presents. Gadgets from the new Bond movie. For Two of Two, one of those electronic tags that Bond gets in his arm – I told him it wouldn’t be any more painful than the BCG – and for me, the mobile defibrillator, for the next time it happens.

To Tell Or Not To Tell

There’s a kid in One of Two’s class called Fernando. Every time she mentions him, I say, ‘The next time you talk to him, ask him if he can hear the drums.’
 
As jokes go it’s rubbish, but it does absolutely nail the Crap Dad-Joke on the head. One of Two doesn’t get it of course, as we’ve more or less protected her from Abba. She just looks at me vaguely concerned, wondering if it’s time for the comfy armchair, slippers, cocoa and the Horse of the Year Show. TPCKAM still laughs, which is nice, but after twelve years of repeatedly hearing the same two jokes – Groucho Marx’s ‘He speaks excellent German,’ and ‘You’d never notice it unless you were looking for a bowl of soup’ from A Night in Casablanca – it’s probably just relief.
 
Three weeks until Christmas. Well into advent calendar season. The four of us have one each this year, none of which have chocolate in them. The kids don’t seem to have noticed that their tradition-loving parents haven’t produced advent calendars with additives and sugar, and are excitedly opening windows every day. Two of Two is so excited that he’s already opened the 24th. I thought of telling him that it meant he wasn’t going to get any presents, but he wouldn’t have believed me anyway. There’s not a lot you can do about your kids opening doors on their advent calendars too early. You might not want them to do it, but it’s just not that much of a crime.
 
Anyway, it’s more or less too late to tell Two of Two that any dodgy behaviour on his part will see the big fat man with the long white beard skipping our house and hoofing it for the next chimney along. Last year he observed that one of the presents he’d received couldn’t have been made at the North Pole, as it had a bar code on it and was obviously bought in a shop. Then, having heard the story of the real St Nicholas, made the fairly obvious observation that he must be dead by now. Sharp as a button.
 
We were watching Miracle on 34th Street the other day. The miracle? An old geezer of a judge goes all soppy at the end and awards Santa a hollow court case victory on technical grounds. Great kid’s entertainment. Two of Two said, ‘There’s no such thing as Santa Claus. It’s the parents, isn’t it Dad?’
 
Tricky. I fudged and stole a line from Dr Seuss. ‘Go ask your mother.’
 
Had One of Two not been there, then it might have been time to snuggle up with a bottle of ginger wine and a box of mince pies and tell the lad a few home truths about the Great Santa Claus Fraud. The Big Lie. In essence, you see, he doesn’t give a stuff. He doesn’t care where his presents come from, he just wants to get them. He believes in football, chocolate eggs, Scooby Doo, Yoda and Avril Lavigne’s Happy Ending. Tooth Fairies, Santa, monsters in Loch Ness and other such flights of whimsy are of no significance to him.
 
One of Two however, despite being two years older, still clings to The Great Myth, and will do so for some time to come. We apprised her of the truth about the Tooth Fairy some time ago, but she still talks about the Tooth Fairy in terms that imply she’s not one of her parents. She’s a wee girl, and she wants to believe. Given that so much of her behaviour is pre-teenage, bordering on complete adulthood, it’s nice that some small part of her is still a little girl. As parents, it’s something you want to hang on to as long as possible.
 
Like the Tooth Fairy business, I’m sure that when we do tell her the truth, she’ll choose not to believe it anyway. I kind of presume that she already really knows, but isn’t saying. However, if you’re going to break the news to your kid, three weeks before Christmas probably isn’t the time. ‘You know how you’re getting excited about Santa coming, and that whole bag? It’s a lie. A huge lie. In fact, a great big whopper of a fib. And although it’s been TPCKAM and I who have been perpetrating this outrageous falsification year after year, you can trust us to get you your selected gift items of the season.’
 
The right time has to be a sunny day in the middle of July, school holidays just started, the promise of beaches and ice cream and candy floss, when Christmas seems a hundred years away. ‘Sure you can have a toffee apple, but why not go on the trampolines for half an hour first? After the toffee apple you can have another ice cream. Oh, and Santa’s dead.’
 
The Santa issue is bound to be raised again and again over the next few weeks. We are entering an age of scepticism. The only certainty is that, at the end of it all, we’ll have spent more money on them than we are currently intending to do.
 
The advent calendars continue. The kids have noticed that on theirs they are getting animals every day and so have started to complain. TPCKAM and I have exciting pictures like Christmas trees and turkeys and, for some reason, cucumber and radish, and the kids are yearning after this kind of December morning thrill. This morning they had to deal with the tragedy of a snowshoe hare and a mountain lion, while their parents were greeted with the rampant excitement of a teddy bear and a lighthouse. They complained.
 
Kids. A bellyache for every occasion.

Further Dispatches From The Morning Battlefield

The pre-school battlefield is where the clash between the warring factions of parents and children is at its most heated. The statement that most accidents happen in the kitchen, can equally be applied to arguments. And for all that every school morning seems to be the same, month after month, year after year, as time passes there are subtle changes, as each side develops new tactics, meeting force with resistance, invoking counter-terrorism against espionage. Today, another new tactic from this side of the great wall.
 
One of Two thrives on painful sluggishness every morning, taking years to do things which even her brother does in seconds. Most days I end up saying the same thing to her, and I know I must sound like a really tired, boring old parent who never changes the record. ‘You’re the one who’s going to be late,’ I intone, like some ancient incantation. ‘I’m not going to be late for anything,’ I say, (albeit this morning I was hoping to be back in time to watch the last couple of overs of the Test Match), ‘Two of Two, (whose official start time is fifteen minutes later) isn’t going to be late for anything. Just you, One of Two. It’s your responsibility, I don’t care if you’re late.’
 
Blah, blah, blah. She must just instantly switch off. It’s like Gary Larson’s ‘What we say to dogs, what dogs hear’ cartoon. And then, of course, I invariably completely betray my words, by continually getting on at her until she’s actually out the door, showing that I do care if she’s late. Rubbish parenting.
 
This morning, for some reason, I decided to be true to my words. I gave her the speech, told her that Two of Two and I were ready to leave and that it was up to her to get ready in time then I walked down the stairs and left her to it.
 
She did not rush. Time passed. The clock ticked. Outside, cars whizzed by on their way to work and school. The weather changed. A couple of guys painted the Forth Bridge. Geoff Boycott ground out a double century. Civilisations rose and fell. I wondered, as she had already used up her usual morning spoiling tactic of sitting on the toilet for half an hour, what she could possibly be up to.
 
She appeared, smiling, some time later. By this time I was in such a rush that I didn’t look at her, just hustled the kids into the car and legged it out of the garage. Only then did I notice… She had absolutely clarted her face in make up. Lippy, lip gloss, mascara, God knows what else.
 
I’m a man, from the west of Scotland. I don’t know anything about mascara. Seriously. I don’t even really know what it’s for. I hate make up. It’s bad enough on women, a hideous abomination on wee girls. However, even though I’m amazingly and happily ignorant about something I see on women every day, I do know enough to sense that stabbing yourself on the eyelid with mascara, giving one eye a small black splodge so that you look like you’re in the first throes of some strange and exciting new plague that’s about to sweep the planet, probably isn’t right.
 
To be fair to the girl One of Two, she’d nailed the lippy.
 
I searched the car in vain for tissues. (Finding yourself without tissues or wet wipes is a regular, if minor, bad parenting moment.) When we arrived at school I unearthed a towel in the boot. I’ve no idea what it had previously been used for. Maybe it’s just there in a Hitchhiker’s Guide way in case of emergencies, and this certainly fitted the bill. I pounced on One of Two, and a few minutes later her face was cleared of all Max Factor products and the like. Maybe because she knew she was never going to get away with it, or maybe because I refrained from the boring ‘no daughter of mine…’ speech, she pretty much gave me free reign to towel her face away.
 
And just to further thwart my intentions, we arrived at school at the same time as two other kids in her class, who proceeded to walk slowly into the building in no great rush. She had spent hours and hours, so it seemed, applying her face, and yet we still weren’t particularly late. Another triumph for the spawn.
 
Kids dispatched, I drove home and walked back into the house, back to that wonderful silence and calm, a beautiful serenity that cannot be undermined by the clamour of unwashed breakfast cereal plates which surround the kitchen sink like native American’s around Custer’s wagons, and planked myself down in front of the television.
 
The cricket was finished. One of Two’s victory was complete. When I picked her up I told her that I’d managed to see the last five overs, but she knew I was lying.

Biker Muppet From Planet Senility

Last week I referred to the kid’s tv show, Biker Mice From Mars, which wasn’t a fault in itself. I didn’t actually slag it off, because I’ve never seen it before, but I mentioned it in the sort of way that old people talk about the internet as being this new fangled thing that most people haven’t heard of yet. Someone kindly wrote to point out that it’s currently the most popular kids show in the UK and was first aired in the 90's.

This is one of the problems with living abroad. Cultural references pass you by. You miss things. You catch most stuff on the internet, on whatever tv channels you can get, or by picking up a newspaper on your visits home, but some things end up slipping under the radar.

Not that this is all bad. For example, whilst residing in West Africa for three years – pre-internet and without tv – we missed the Spice Girls. (And if one of them hadn’t married some guy who plays football or something – apparently he’s with a Spanish team now – we might never even have known they existed.) And while I don’t care that I’ve missed Biker Mice From Mars all my life, I really ought not to mention it, because I end up sounding like some sad old loser, only one step away from writing a column in the Daily Mail, and saying, ‘Everyone is suddenly talking about e-mails these days, but I haven’t the faintest trace of an idea what they’re on about. It’ll never take off.’

Maybe I’m just hiding behind the excuse that I’ve lived overseas for ten out of the last fourteen years. Maybe I’m just really pathetic and middle-aged. We were watching tv last night and an advert came on for one of those awful CD’s of pre-Christmas mince, by Peter Andre and Katie Price. ‘Who’s Katie Price?’ I asked TPCKAM, and she choked on her coffee and put a call through to the Home for the Terminally Sad in the Trossachs that she’s got me lined up for.

It all augurs badly for my future in the family as ‘Dad’. Not yet of course, because the kids are still young enough to not care that they’re dad’s hopelessly un-cool. At the moment, if they mention something that’s entirely alien to me, they start yacking on about it with enthusiasm, rather than looking at me with complete disdain before leaning over and wiping away the drool from my chin with a tissue. Give it a few years, however, and I’m screwed.

Seven years from now, I’ll have two teenagers and be nearly fifty. I haven’t a chance. They’ll be listening to the mince music of the day, playing with the latest electronic gadgetry, and I’ll be looking at them with total horror and disgust, saying things like, ‘But can you whistle it?’ and ‘In my day we had a wooden train set, if we were lucky,’ and, ‘Bananas? They were a treat when I was young, if we could find a place in the cardboard box we called home to put them in a bowl. Not that we had a bowl.’

You want your kids to respect you and to think you’re cool, but really you haven’t a chance. You hang on to both as long as possible, make your choice, and hope you can manage at least one out of two, while reasonably anticipating neither.

The greatest inevitability of them all is that at some stage I’m going to mention Top Of The Pops, and they’re going to fall about laughing and start calling me grandad, and I’ll sulk off, thinking that my kids are from another planet. Mars for example.

Christmas...

The kids have been compiling their Christmas lists. In fact, I think they’ve been doing it since about September. Last week their work was finally deemed complete. One of Two put both lists in envelopes and addressed them to:
 
Santa Claus
1 The North Pole
House Number 1
 
I suggested she add Finland to the bottom of the address, and she wrote Findland. Then she gave them to me to take to the Post Office. Three days later, when the envelopes were still lying around the house, she gave them to the babysitter and asked him to take them to the Post Office. Such trust in her dad. Unbeknownst to her, the babysitter then gave them back to me that night. I do intend posting them, but since there’s a kind of de facto relationship between me and the mystery bearded figure known as ‘Claus’, it’s not really too important that they end up attached to a stamp.
 
One of Two’s list runs to thirty-nine items. That’s a lot of disappointment she’s setting herself up for. There are three main categories of present she’s looking for. There are the ones where she was thinking about what she would really really want in her life. e.g. a rabbit. Rabbit is number one on the list. She’s been told that Santa doesn’t do livestock, but she’s pressing ahead with the claim. Actually, with the honourable exception of mince pies, a rabbit is the only item in this particular category, until we get to number thirty-eight, where she’s asked for a rabbit cage. Santa does do rabbit cages, but that’d be pretty cruel. “Here’s your rabbit cage, sweetheart, but Santa ain’t bringin’ no stinkin’ rabbit…” Even Billy Bob wouldn’t have stooped that low in Bad Santa. Finally in item thirty-nine she seems to accept the inevitable by asking for a FurReal Rabbit, a more realistic aim. A FurReal Rabbit is more or less the same as an actual rabbit, except for the removal of the option of eating it for your dinner once the kids have got bored looking after it.
 
Category number two is for items which she thought of when she had some sort of moral ethicator fitted to her brain. This category contains things like a new school bag, pencils, school shoes, a jumper and work books. It also contains the critical entry, Vitamins, A, C, D & E. What stocking would be complete without them?
 
The third, and largest category, are toys and games which she’s seen advertised on Boomerang, and has hurriedly written down as the adverts piled quickly up, one on top of the other. Consequently there are a lot of spelling mistakes. Or, at least, one hopes there are. A sawing kit for example would seem an unlikely thing to be advertised on a kid’s channel.
 
Fed up with your Mum & Dad? Too many rules and regulations? Not enough fun? Worried that if you have to kill them you won’t be able to get rid of their bodies? With this All-New Winnie the Pooh and Tigger Too Sawing Kit, you’ll never need to worry about parental body disposal ever again.
 
I’m similarly hoping that Bratz Fukky Fashion is a slip of the pen on her part. Otherwise those dolls for the under-10’s are getting way too advanced.
 
Two of Two’s list is in two parts, one that his sister wrote with sixteen items – clearly she has a lot fewer ambitions for her brother – and the one he wrote himself with nine items. His lists are much more one dimensional, full of the kinds of things you’d expect from a little boy. Star Wars figures, a goal post, boxing gloves, Biker Mice From Mars etc. (Non-parents might just have read that and thought, Biker Mice From Mars???, but sadly Biker Mice From Mars are a thing, and while he’s written his list and proven himself unable to spell pirates, football or hot wheels, he’s nailed Biker Mice From Mars perfectly.) He’s also looking for a figure of Dr Who’s clueless cousin, Dr How. “What’s happening Doctor?” “How the **** should I know.”
 
Of course, they didn’t make a duplicate of their lists, and since they think the babysitter posted them, I can’t now take a duplicate and give it to them, so that they can crosscheck the lists against what they receive on Christmas morning. That might seem like the kind of thing that Gordon Brown will do with his kids, but when One of Two stands looking distraught at six a.m. on the morning of the 25th, clutching nothing but school shoes, pencils, work books and a bottle of vitamins, it’d be handy to be able to show her what she wrote.
 
Last year Two of Two asked Santa for a toy bat. Where are we going to find a toy bat, we thought, and then went off and made no actual effort to find a toy bat. The week before Christmas we were out without the spawn, strolling contentedly through the local shopping mall, when a ray of light suddenly shone on a toy bat sitting on a shelf on a toy stand on the floor below us. We felt some strange sense of elation at being able to get an item from the list that we hadn’t thought likely. It wasn’t that big a deal, but it was nice.
 
Christmas morning Two of Two opened up the toy bat, took one look at it and, as he threw it into the corner never to touch it again, he said, ‘Why did Santa get me a bat?’
 
We should have kept the stupid list. Not that it would have made any difference to the amount of playing time used on the toy bat.
 
And so Christmas is in full swing, slightly later than normal this year. The kids are practicing carols at home, Silent Night is being butchered on a regular basis, and Bing Crosby is already crooning his way through meal times.
 
‘Tis the season to be jolly…apparently. Pass the coffee and the pumpkin pie.

Fashion...

Yesterday we went clothes shopping. It happens around this time every year. Two of Two is in shorts from about early April, all through the summer into autumn. Then the weather starts to get a bit colder, the wee man hangs on to his pantaloons of choice as long as possible, and then some time around the beginning of November he has to capitulate and get back into the long trousers. And, of course, since he’s wellying back eight hundred bowls of breakfast cereal every morning and growing up faster than Le Beanstalk de Jacques, his long trousers are all about six inches too short for him.
 
Not being Dynamic Action Parents, we didn’t dash out at the first opportunity and buy him new trousers for the winter. The lad has been displaying a lot of sockage at school for the past two weeks. There have been mornings when some demonic members of the Mum Collective have been looking at me in dark ways, thinking that I’m a bad parent because I’m still putting my kid in shorts. Well I’ve got news for your girlfriends, if you must know, I’m a bad parent because I’m kicking my kid out the front door in last winter’s long trousers. Totally different.
 
So we’re in the local kid’s store. In Poland it’s called Smyk. Toys and clothes. There are potential downfalls to this combination, obviously, but in general it works well. You shop, they run around asking if they can buy every single toy in the store, you say no, every now and again you drag them into the changing room and forcibly stick a (insert item of clothing) on them.
 
The day was progressing normally. The shop was quite busy, the usual bustle of kids and parents, arguments and entreaties. I Wish It Could Be Christmas Every Day was being piped happily around the shopping centre. Somewhere a car screeched to a halt. On the next floor up a child wailed. A clock ticked.
 
And then, just as we were thinking that the day couldn’t be any more normal, we were looking through this year’s trouser collection for little boys when we discovered them… Trousers with in-built fake underpants.
 
[Let that sink in a second. Now, if you’ve just read that and thought, oh yeah, whatever, all trousers have in-built fake underpants these days, don’t be such a DAD, then you’d probably be best just to skip to the end. However, I’ve never seen in-built fake underpants before, so I’m still aghast and feel the need to exorcise the horror. If, like me, you are shocked by the concept of in-built fake underpants, then read on…]
 
In-built fake underpants are like those in-built fake t-shirts you get on jumpers. You know the thing, grey jumper, bit of white cotton at the top to make it look like you’re wearing a t-shirt underneath. It’s an odd enough fashion concept in itself really.
 
Someone, somewhere, probably Milan or New York, has taken this idea and applied it to trousers. Perhaps there are also trouser lines with in-built fake socks, but I didn’t see any sign of them. These trousers had fake underpants sewn in around the waist, to make it look as if the trousers themselves were hanging down below the line of the underpants, so that a uniform line of underpantage was on display.
 
I don’t want to sound old – you know, I’m only forty-two, which doesn’t seem too decrepit, not yet – but why would you do that? I’m familiar enough with the concept of letting your underpants show above your breeks, in this twisted day and age. Each to their own. If you want people to see your underpants, then on you go. But what exactly is the idea of faking the pants? With the fake white t-shirt, you’re basically saving yourself the need to wear a t-shirt. So are fake underpants supposed to stop you having to wear underpants?
 
All right, adults will as adults do, but it’s just different, isn’t it? Adults have some measure of control over their bottoms, for example, and so can probably be trusted to get through a day without underpants. But wee boys? Seriously? You’re going to stick your kid in a pair of trousers with no pants in them? Why on earth would you do that?
 
The other possibility is that you intend that your kid wears actual underpants to complement the hygiene predicament inherent in the trousers with in-built fake underpants situation. But at the start of the day, that’s just going to set up so many arguments.
 
“Put your underpants on!” you shout, in the midst of the daily Pre-School Rebellion.
 
“No!’ replies your six year-old wee nipper. “These trousers have got their own underpants! They’re in-built!”
 
‘They’re fake!”
 
“What d’you mean they’re fake? There’s no such thing as fake underpants! That’s stupid!”
 
And you know, he’d have you there.
 
And let’s say you manage to get your kid to wear his own Actual Underpants, beneath his trousers with in-built fake underpants. Like your kid is going to need help looking untidy? Give him five minutes on the hoof, his trousers will be dishevelled and probably falling down, and his Actual Underpants are going to be showing above his in-built fake ones. Older kids in school are going to be staring at him and saying, ‘Look at the dumb kid, he’s got two pairs of underpants on.’
 
But then, I’m forty-two, I know nothing of fashion. Maybe the two-pairs-of-underpants look is in, even for wee boys.
 
All this ran through my head in the first fifteen seconds after laying my eyes on the trousers with in-built fake underpants. Fortunately Two of Two was off in the games area and never saw them, so he couldn’t be tempted. I walked away from the site of the in-built fake underpant discovery, feeling old and depressed and out of touch. Life, I thought, does not get much worse than this.
 
And then Paul McCartney’s Wonderful Christmastime started up.
 
“Ah well,” I thought, “that’s another five pence for Heather.”

Stress Is As Stress Does

or A Theory On Life, Stress, Children and Robots…
 
One of Two had a sleepover the other night. TPCKAM doesn’t approve of mid-week, school night sleepovers because of their disruptive element, but I like to work to the principle that as long as it’s at someone else’s house, and they’re mad enough to make the offer, they can take the disruption.
 
Two of Two instantly changes personality when his sister is off out for the night. You can tell he loves the chance to get his parents to himself. He comes home and kind of snuggles down into the entire house, knowing that his sister isn’t going to be around to bug him and that he’s not going to have to perform his own bugging duties for another twenty-four hours. One of Two, however, hates it when her brother is on a sleepover and she’s not. Like she’s offended at having to spend time with her dull old parents by herself.
 
The minute she comes home and the wee man’s not there, she starts mooching around saying, ‘Why can’t I have a sleepover with someone? How come he has all the sleepovers. I never have a sleepover with anyone.’ Give it an hour or two, and she’ll be leaning out the window shouting at passers-by, ‘Excuse me! Can I come to yours for the night, my parents are really boring?’ One of Two would rather spend the night with a tribe of feral goatherders in sub-zero temperatures in a yurt on the Russian steppe under a cloud of chemical waste, than actually spend time alone with her parents. Sleepovers are her holy grail, and she will rarely let an occasion pass without inviting herself to someone’s house. The phrase, ‘you have to wait to be invited,’ is as alien to her as ‘do your homework early and get it out of the way.’
 
We like to think of this as a sign of how secure she is at home…
 
At the end of school on Tuesday, prior to One of Two heading off for the sleepover, I was discussing with the other mum the small print of the contract – more particularly, who would provide her snack for the next day. I was saying I’d do it, the other mum said, no bother, I’ll make her a ham sandwich. One of Two hates ham sandwiches. On those mornings when I’m foraging painfully round the kitchen trying to find something, anything, to put in their snack boxes – where’s your show about that Ray Mears? – should the words ‘ham sandwich’ pass my lips, the pair of them will immediately start hyperventilating and will allow their heads to pitch forward into their Cookie Crisp. So, the words, ‘One of Two doesn’t like ham sandwiches’ were on the very tip of my tongue, they were there poised to tumble out over the precipice, when One of Two herself, on hearing mention of a ham sandwich started leaping up and down in celebration, punching the air, crying, ‘Yes! Yes! A ham sandwich! I am emancipated and have been re-born, my path that has been dull is now aglow, as was the road to Damascus for the blessed St. Paul. At last I am free from the tyranny of Dad making my snack, even if only for one day! Rejoice! Rejoice!’
 
‘That’s great,’ I said to the mum, ‘she loves ham.’
 
The pace of life is different with one kid. Slower. Suddenly there’s not just less stress, there’s no stress. No arguments over the tv or the computer. Two of Two can do his homework without her butting in and telling him the answers, because it’s easier than doing her own homework. There are none of those ridiculous fights which begin, ‘It’s mine!’ and descend quickly into complete anarchy. Suddenly you walk around your house, aware that there is still an underage presence, just not as you know it.. One which is accompanied by choirs of angels singing soothing songs of tranquillity and calm.
 
Yesterday morning we awoke to the peaceful sounds of Two of Two playing himself at chess. I pottered around making one packed lunch, doing a few chores, enjoying the pre-school peace. Think about it…’pre-school peace’. How often can you say that without choking on your muesli? Then, for some reason, TPCKAM arrived downstairs and within thirty seconds the two of them were having a Nescafé argument. Hot, instant and not very satisfying.
 
It was a work of genius on the part of TPCKAM, plucking an argument out of thin air. Like Shane Warne conjuring up a screaming leg-break on a dead wicket, Thierry Henry producing a wonder strike with his back to the goal in a crowded penalty area, or Peyton Manning finding Marvin Harrison with an inch perfect pass through a swarm of cornerbacks while being chased to the sidelines by five 350lb behemoths, it was a sublime act of brilliance, creating anger and noise when before there had been calm. Clearly she’s been working for the British government too long.
 
However, unlike the mornings when there are two children at the breakfast table, the white squall quickly passed, and the rest of the pre-school period snuck quietly into the morning rain.
 
Sadly, of course, this is just an illustration of how everything is relative. Having one child around isn’t stress-free, not when you only ever have one child. For a while I used to look at stressed-parents-of-one and think, get a grip, for God’s sake. One kid? How hard is that, for crying out loud? Get a second, my stressed amigo, and then you’ll find out how awful it can be… And then I’d go off and be stressed with two.
 
But of course, everyone with three, four, five, six or more kids, would read my weekly stress-analysis and think the same thing. Get a life! Or more to the point, get some more kids, then you’ll know how hard it is. It’s all relative.
 
I have this theory. We were all created by robots. The robots programmed into everyone different levels of various emotions. So, for example, for me they put: Happiness 9.8/10, Gloominess 0.1/10, Stress w/o Kids 0/10, Stress w Kids 8.4/10 etc. We then just go along through our lives, applying those levels to each situation. So, with your constant levels of stress, if  you’re the type who gets stressed by kids, one kid will do it, and you won’t be that much more stressed even if you had another five. Your stress levels are what they are. If you’re not stressed by one, then more than likely you wouldn’t be stressed by having another two.
 
Being less stressed when one of your kids is away for the night, doesn’t really change the tenet, as you know that if you had just the one long term, it’d pretty quickly become stressful again.
 
It’s not a hard and fast psychological statement – particularly the bit about robots – and I’m not calling it Lindsay’s Law of Stress and looking for a mention in the New England Journal of Medicine, but I think it’s fairly accurate. If you have your doubts, then why not have another couple of children to test out the theory?
 
We got home last night after school clubs, the house back to its normal quotient of two kids. One of Two got out of the car and hid at the back of the garage. When her brother got out she jumped up and scared him. He burst into tears. She ran up stairs. He ran after her, they screamed at each other for a short burst, and then Two of Two concluded the argument in his usual manner by throwing a hard plastic toy at her and gubbing her in the face. One of Two burst into tears.
 
It had taken forty-three seconds from the time we arrived home...

A Question Of Logic

Another morning, another breakfast squabble. Jack Johnson has grown tired and old, the wheels have come off the smooth routine. The kids bickered pointlessly, somehow The Parent Currently Known As Mum (TPCKAM) and I stayed calm and negotiated our way through the morass, and we are now contemplating the children eating breakfast in shifts to put an end to the internecine warfare. However, breakfast in shifts demands more time and even more organisation.

This morning's squabble: One of Two, allegedly, took a drink from Two of Two's cup and then passed it back to him. Two of Two didn't appear to have actually witnessed this incident, but was making the assumption based on the facts known to him at the time. Therefore, he wouldn't drink the milk. It wasn't quite Not The Nine O'Clock News' John McEnroe at breakfast, but it was getting there. TPCKAM was called into the argument.

The facts of the case as presented by the Plaintive:

1. The milk was in an orange cup. He doesn't usually get the orange cup. He gets the blue or yellow, so it wasn’t even his own drink he was being asked to consume.
2. There was a spot of milk on the rim, suggesting that someone had already taken a drink from the cup.
3. One of Two was looking at him in a funny way.

A cut and dried case, more or less. You can see his point. Eschewing the possibility of bringing in high-priced legal aid, he decided to represent himself in the case, delivering his argument in a high-pitched bleating whine. The delivery grated with the judges it must be said and, as one of the judges, I have to confess that it coloured my judgement of the issue.

After a brief telepathic discussion, the judges, who were also the jury - in this case not Twelve Angry Men, just One Angry Man & An Angry Woman - decided against the plaintive and he was ordered to drink his milk.

He accepted this readily and downed the entire cup in one quick, delighted gulp.

I'm kidding, of course he didn't. He decided to appeal the verdict, and in doing so chose to disregard the fact that one of the reasons he had lost the first crucial decision was because of his choice to substitute reasoned argument with abject wailing and hysteria. So he whined even more, the high pitched constant moan interrupted by a blubbing lip, so that he sounded like a prepubescent motor boat. The appeal process was long on brevity, and once more the panel of judges found against the Plaintive.

He pushed the milk away from him across the table, thus risking the chance of spillage and disaster. I was preparing snack boxes in the background, TPCKAM was sitting at the heart of the tornado. She was getting mad. She moved the drink back towards him and repeated her instructions in the Parent About To Explode voice - the one which you hope is going to carry some weight, because you remember your parents talking to you like that and it put the fear of God in you - which only served to heighten the wail, as this grave tone which was so useful for our parents has completely lost all effectiveness. It’s as if the cellular infectious lifeform that is Children has adapted to the antibiotic.

At this point, as I sensed the impending volcanic eruption from TPCKAM, I decided to intervene. By introducing logic... I know, I know, what was I thinking?

A couple of months ago, after the first day of school, I was taking the kids along to the local shopping mall to serve up a consolatory ice cream, a kind of sugar-filled, bittersweet farewell to the summer holiday. Just outside the entrance I met a friend and stood for a brief chat. The kids meandered around bored for a few seconds and then started playing in the dirt to keep themselves amused. I looked round to see Two of Two with a cigarette butt in his mouth. I leapt upon him like an unfettered eagle pouncing on the baby lamb of stupidity, swiped the butt from his lips, and left my friend standing in the dirt as I whisked the kids off, words of censure pouring from my mouth like the crashing of water over the Reichenbach Falls. (Returning to the shopping mall the following week, I found my friend still standing there waiting to finish the conversation.)

This little incident presented the basis of my logic, which I decided to bring into play on the third hearing of the case of Two of Two v The State of Despair. 'Why is it,' I said, 'that you can't drink from the same cup as your sister - if she did even drink from it at all, which m'learned friend has yet to prove to the satisfaction of the court - when you were fully prepared to stick a cigarette butt in your gob, a cigarette butt which had been in the mouth of God knows who, and which had been lying on the ground and stepped on by people with shit and who knows what else on their shoes?'

A perfectly reasonable point. Logical. Sadly, however, Two of Two is a six year-old wee boy and he laughs in the face of logic. Or, to be more precise, whines in the face of logic.

'But this has got One of Two's germs on it!' he wailed. I suppose he had his own logic. It didn't matter what unknown viruses or bugs had been attached to that cigarette, they couldn't possibly have been as bad as those associating themselves with his sister.

Two of Two lost the re-appeal. The case was closed. TPCKAM pressed ahead, ordering him once more to drink his milk. Two of Two held firm, the bottom lip creeping out another centimetre, the protesting wail growing louder. Impasse. Under such circumstances it's hard to find a way out. One doesn't want to cave in to the kind of absurd logical tangental thinking that kids thrive upon, however it seems completely insane to start the day off having a raging fight with your kid over something as trivial as a cup of milk.

I intervened again, this time not being so stupid as to introduce logic into the equation. I turfed Two of Two out of the kitchen, dispatching him to get dressed and clean his teeth. So, of course, the result of that was that he won, but at least it hadn't been TPCKAM - the parent at the centre of the storm - who had made the final capitulation, and neither did I pack him off with a pat on the head and a quiet word of sympathy. He retreated upstairs to blub some more, because at least the tone of the parental capitulation had been so harsh that he hadn't realised he'd won.

We all have to pick our fights, but sometimes you end up in the middle of one which you know you're not going to win, wish you hadn't started, which defies all logic and which is very difficult to get out of.

Hmm...that's reminding me of something, but I can't exactly think what it is.

The Beautiful Game

Ever wonder why soccer is known as The Beautiful Game?

A few years ago FIFA were looking for a cool moniker for the sport, so they called in fifteen guys from KPMG at $300,000/day. Each. Got them to sit around a table and come up with a name. It started slowly. The first few days resulted in suggestions along the lines of: The OK Game. The Game With A Round Ball Where You Kick It A Lot. The Not Bad Game. The Game. The Funky If You’re Brazilian But Kinda Dour If You’re Scottish Game. A Game On Grass. If Star Wars Was A Game It’d Be Soccer. After several weeks, and several million dollars in consultancy fees, it looked like they were going to have to settle for I Can’t Believe It’s Not Rugby, when during the wrap-up, a small fella from Rhode Island said jokingly, “We could call it the Beautiful Game.” There was a certain amount of sniggering around the table, but these were marketing consultants, men for whom truth means nothing, where style is king and substance is immaterial. “I like it!” one of them suddenly. Then Sepp Blatter said, “We must be ballsy. Ballsy! We are in football, and if there’s anything we have a lot of, it is balls.” And then men in suits started saying The Beautiful Game in low voices until it sounded ok, because if you repeat anything often enough it begins to sound plausible. Try it, it works. For example, I bet now when you read about John Reid being a potential Prime Minister, you don’t choke on your cornflakes the way you did the first time you heard it mentioned. The Beautiful Game was born.

As you can see from the above photo, Two of Two is an expert exponent of the Beautiful Game. Every picture tells a story, and here is a boy, limbs moving fluidly, tongue out, poised to pounce on the ball and stroke a sweet shot into the corner of the net.

Saturday 7th Ocotober was a momentous footballing day. I know that already, you’re thinking. Scotland beat France 1-0, and since France had recently beaten Italy, is made us de facto World Champions. At least for four days. Now, certainly that day was momentous for that, but the principal reason it turned out to be a day of moment, was that it saw the first goal of Saturday morning football, after thirteen months of trying, by the aforementioned Two of Two.

One of Two scored two goals the previous week - she was, as her American coach pointed out, on fire - and another that Saturday. We got that warm fuzzy feeling that one gets when watching one’s kid achieve something, or in our case, as we’re not at all demanding, anything at all. ‘Yay! You ate you’re breakfast without spilling any milk! High Five!’ However, each goal was a stab from a couple of yards, in games on a small pitch, four-a-side. And One of Two does not want to be a footballer when she grows up. She wants to be a doctor or a diplomat, she wants to help people and get everyone on the planet to be nice to each other. By God, she has a lot of disillusion in front of her, but you can say that for all kids, and at least she’s going into it with a decent attitude.

Two of Two, on the other hand, wants to play the Beautiful Game. All the time. He wants to play for someone in the World Cup, although he hasn’t yet decided if it’s Scotland or England or France. (The Lindsays came from Normandy, presumably in 1066, so he’s in with a shout.) He keeps taunting me with the England thing, and if he’s not doing that, he says he wants to play for Celtic. He’s young.

So, there he is, going to football every Saturday morning. They practice skills for forty minutes, and then they play a twenty minute game. Quite a large pitch, decent sized goals, and at least twenty-five six year-old boys roving around the park in a tight bunch, like a herd of wildebeest. When the ball goes to one end, it generally takes about ten minutes to get back up to the other. This is end-to-end football in slow motion.

Goals, under these circumstances, are at a premium. When it can take quarter of the game for the ball to work its way out of a midfield scrum of twenty pint-sized Vinnie Joneses, there’s never much goalmouth action. That Saturday’s game was no different. A dour struggle, characterized by the behaviour of the herd, it was heading towards the final seconds with Two of Two’s side on the wrong end of a 1-0 mauling. The ball had finally worked its way up to the other end of the park, and all the opposition needed to do was keep the thing in the midst of the herd for another ten seconds or so.

Suddenly the ball broke loose, and rolled along the ground to Two of Two. He was about twelve yards out, on the outer rim of the scrum - it was a bit like the sun suddenly breaking loose from the centre of the solar system and finding itself next to Pluto. Twelve yards doesn’t sound too much, but these kids are six, and most of them have trouble kicking the ball twelve feet. Two of Two swivelled, smacked the ball right-footed, first time, and sent a magnificent looping shot, through the crowd and over the dwarf-like keeper’s head. The net bulged. The wee lad then took off up the park, hands aeroplane-like out at the side - he’s been watching all the right tv - and was still charging full steam in that classic goalscorer’s pose when the final whistle blew.

He’d saved the day. He’d scored his first competitive goal. It’s now two weeks later, but he’s still running up and down the park celebrating. Saturday 7th October 2006. It might be remembered as the day Scotland beat the nearly world champions 1-0. But not in this house.

Two of Two, goalscorer. It was sweet, perfectly placed and opportunistic. And you know what? It was beautiful.

A Brief Word On The Search For An Antidote To Pre-School Trauma

I’m on a mission to find new breakfast music. We are several weeks into the new school year, which means we have so far endured several weeks of pre-school stress, following two months off. (Two months of 24/7 kids on the one hand, but two months of not having to get them out the door by 8 in the morning on the other.)

I discovered at some point in the previous year, the antidote of music. Something relaxing to smooth the first traumatic hour of the day. However, the old favourite, the music which served us so well through the bleak winter months and the chill promise of spring, Jack Johnson, whose calming influence soothed many an early morning bunfight, is now sounding tired and old. Banana pancakes? ‘We don’t need no stinkin’ banana pancakes!’ cry the spawn.

It takes a particular kind of music, gentle yet not banal, to do the job. You don’t want to be making breakfast thinking you’re in an elevator, but at the same time you don’t want some raucous guitar romp which has the kids standing on the table strumming a tennis racket.

On Monday I tried out our CD with 24 versions of The Girl From Ipanema. On the upside, it felt like we were having breakfast in the Sheraton or some other top notch international chain hotel. On the downside, it felt like I was the waiter, the chef, the houseboy and the dishwasher in some top notch international chain hotel.

Wednesday I went for Bailero from Chants D’Auvergne, by Frederica von Stade. This is a lovely piece of music, although at six minutes, it does test you to try to get the kids breakfasted, dressed and teeth cleaned, lunchboxes made up, coats and shoes on, homework finished, spelling tests checked and backpacks on before the song ends. It’s the kind of music that would be used in a Brian de Palma movie while someone gets bloodily disemboweled in slow motion. I can imagine myself shouting at the kids for spilling milk all over the table - they’re currently running at 13 of 22 mornings since school started on spilled milk - and hurling a sandwich at them, the bacon and bread separating in slow motion in mid-air, as the kids dive under the table screaming silently, the operatic-style music filling the kitchen with juxtaposition.

Yesterday we went for Hoagy Carmichael. Sadly, Hoagy didn’t work. Ought to have done, he ought to have filled all the right criteria. However, the minute they started fighting over who got to read the back of the Rice Krispie packet, we were all doomed, and the airy songs of lazy rivers and buttermilk skies were damned. Screaming and shouting ensued, mayhem was no refuge, the kitchen was filled with anger, distrust and cries of betrayal, homework went undone, bowls of breakfast cereal were left unfinished, and not until the school playground at drop-off were words of conciliation finally spoken. Hoagy did not do the trick. In the first James Bond novel, Casino Royale, Bond is described as having a bit of the Hoagy Carmichael about him. Hoagy Carmichael is that cool. However, even the writer of Stardust, who looks like James Bond, cannot do the job of bringing calm to a family of four before school.

Next time, we invite Jack Johnson into our house in person, to sit in the corner and play guitar while the kids eat...

An End To Authority

A couple of weeks ago we were driving home from school. I’d taken the car because I had to pick up someone else’s kid, and so had put on hold the dicing with fate/death/stress that is the daily bike ride. It’s barely more than five minutes in the car, but barely more than five minutes is more than enough time for the conversation to get round to bad words. Which is one of their favourite conversations after all.

When they talk about this stuff, it’s always pretty mild. They never use the swear word in any sort of proper sentence structure. For example, phrases such as ‘Fuck me, my day was a complete bastard,’ are still alien to them. It’s just the words themselves, and the suggestion of them.

School days for six year-old boys are split between playing football and skulking around the playground in wee groups, the amusement coming when every now and again one of them will say ‘shit’ and the rest will dissolve into fits of giggles. The end-of-the-day report usually goes along the lines of, ‘Today we won 19-2 and Billy said fuck.’

The girls are different of course, and not just because, in our case, they’re all two years older. Girls don’t skulk around playgrounds. They stand in little collectives in corners, (they get it from their mums standing in little collectives at the school gate), wondering which one of their friends they’re going to bitchily exclude from the group for the next fifteen minutes.

So there we were sitting in the car and the conversation started up about some kid who had said the ‘sh’ word of the ‘f’ word or something, and the situation in which he’d used it, which of course is never, ‘David said Miss Peabody is a sack of shite’, but far more likely to be, ‘David was just standing there doing nothing and he said shite and we all laughed.’

It’s one of those minor but ever-tricky parental moments. The first time someone says ‘Billy said a bad word...’ you can’t jump on the conversation and tell them to stop talking about it or there will be no Boomerang for six months. So you let it go. However, you don’t want them to be still talking about it in say six hours time, which you know they will be if they get the chance. So you have to give them some leeway, and then stop them at a moment of your choosing. Or, to look at it from the kids’ perspective... you have to ignore the discussion, which makes it look like you’re condoning it, and then suddenly you tell them off at a completely random moment. Which is probably the moment that you’re getting annoyed about it, and from nowhere you sound harsh and angry. Happens all the time.

On this occasion, seeing as we had a non-family member in the car, when I made my completely random assertion that the conversation had gone too far, I didn’t pick up the hand-held flame thrower that I keep in the glove compartment. Instead I spoke sternly to them. They laughed and edged the conversation a little closer to actually saying the rude words in question, whatever they were. I said some more stern stuff, this time, so I thought, with a bit of an edge, just to imply that, although I had never done it before, this might just be the time when I press the rear seat ejector button which we’d had installed by the Peugeot garage the last time the car was in for its service. My serious, enough-is-enough tone, the one that suggests firm but reasonable authority, the tone that you hope carries weight and gravitas.

They smiled and looked cheekily at each other, but the conversation died and I thought I had triumphed. A few more smirks and then the other girl in the car, the non-family member with, more or less, freedom to say what she wanted, said...

‘You sound like Shrek.’

Giggling all round, and that, in such a small and seemingly insignificant moment, was the end of all parental authority.

Worse, my Scottish accent sounds like Mike Myers. Must be time to go home...

Scooby. Dooby. Doo.

Last weekend. A quiet Sunday afternoon in Eastern Europe. TPCKAM was in the kitchen making dinner, the kids and I settled down in front of the tv. Two of Two and I wanted to watched the football, One of Two wanted to watch cartoons. We negotiated a compromise. Football until half-time, then switch to Boomerang.

When we changed over, Scooby Doo was just starting. An episode about a guy dressed up as a scary monster, who never actually does anyone any harm. Can’t quite place it from that description? I know...

At one point, Fred and the gang are in a motor boat being chased across San Francisco Bay by a gang of thirty foot great white sharks, which are snapping ferociously at the boat. Something which I expect happens all the time in San Francisco Bay. After a scary chase, which has Scooby leaping into Shaggy’s arms in a comedy manner, they finally think they’ve evaded the sharks. Velma stands at the back of the boat and says, ‘Well, it looks like we’ve evaded those sharks.’ Two seconds later a gigantic shark appears and bites off the whole rear end of the boat, including the motor. Velma looks phlegmatically at the camera and quips, ‘Irony, my old friend, we meet again...’

A lovely line, well delivered. But you can spot the problem. IT’S NOT IRONY!!!!

What is the matter with these people? What she said was counting your chickens before they’ve hatched. It’s taking things for granted. It’s spending the money before the cheque’s cashed. It’s a myriad of things, but it’s just not irony.

Had they been going to swim, and someone had said, ‘no don’t swim, there are people-eating sharks, you’ll die’ and then they’d decided to take the boat instead, but rather than people-eating sharks, the sharks had turned out to be boat-eating sharks and therefore they’d been eaten, when if they’d swum they’d have been all right......that would have been irony.

Irony is a complex idea which generally defies one line description. That’s why some people in a certain country which we won’t mention just don’t get it. And yet they’re the one’s who mention irony more than anyone else. Irony, as William Shatner says in Airplane 2, can be pretty ironic sometimes.

Eastern Approaches II

They say there are all sorts of animals roaming wild in the primaeval forest at the border of Poland and Belarus. Bison, lynx, deer, wild boar, donkeys, Shrek. They say that if you’re quiet, and if you wander far enough into the forest, you might be lucky and get to see one of these rare creatures in the oldest untouched forest in Europe.

If you’re quiet...some chance of that, with two marauding children. There wasn’t an animal this side of the Urals which wasn’t alerted to our presence, and had legged it to the nearest cave to get away from the screaming menace of a six year-old wee nipper on the charge...

We spent a Saturday morning in Bialstok in eastern Poland, waiting for the kids to fall into a fountain. It was large, with an impressive array of displays, and it seemed inevitable that at least one of our kids would take an immediate header into the water. Amazingly, as if the benign water gods were smiling upon us, neither of them did, despite playing beside it for almost an hour.

Eventually we managed to drag them away and headed off in the direction of Bialowieza national park. We were to spend the night in a small wooden shack with dead animals on the wall and no heating, in the small town of Hajnowka.

We arrived in the peaceful country idyll, were served fantastic steaming bowls of soup made from forest mushrooms, and settled back to relax as the kids roamed free and safe in the unspoiled countryside. So we thought. Instead, they stayed about twenty yards away from us playing in a hammock strung between cherry trees, which would have been fine, except they were producing a level of noise equivalent to the whole of Italy when Fabio Grosso scored the winning penalty in the World Cup Final against France. The peaceful county idyll was shattered. We headed off into the forest in an attempt to wear them out, or distract them long enough that they forgot to keep shouting.

We wore them out, sure enough, which helped by 9pm that evening. For the time being, however, they kept up the noise levels. Had there been any kind of dramatic animal life anywhere near the spot where we entered the forest, it would have had time to pack its bags, put its house up for sale, eat some lunch, watch the first three series of The West Wing, have a bath and then catch a late train to the Black Forest, so much warning did we give them of our presence.

We walked for forty minutes, crossing numerous paths and wondering if we’d find our way back. We’d been leaving a bread crumb trail, but discovered deep into the undergrowth that Two of Two had been scoffing it, along with a light chianti he’d brought along for the trip. Soon they were agitating to turn back. You can fight that kind of thing off for a certain amount of time, and then it becomes unbearable. We caved in and marched back to the shack.

By the time we’d found our way home, Two of Two had three hundred litres of mud in his boots. The rest of the day was wet and cold, no heating, Two of Two going through clean clothing like sweets, so that by the time night fell every inch of the shack was covered in soiled/damp/washed clothing.

Sunday morning we took a horse and cart ride into the forest to an orthodox church, painted vivid blue. The perimeter was fenced off with barbed wire, the gates were locked, and we were shown to the huge hole in the fence as means of entry. Behind the church was a sacred well. We’d been told to take a bottle to fill with holy water, for those awkward child demonic-possession occasions. The area was covered with the signs of pilgrimage and prayer, accompanied by a signpost on the neighbouring fence saying that it was a military area and everyone should keep out. In four languages. That whole military-religious mix. There’s nowt more sacred than that.

We took a trip to the tourist centre at the edge of the forest in Bialowieza, mainly to get lunch and take a hike up to the top of the park tower. In the near distance we saw Belarus. There were a lot of trees. Hard to believe they beat Scotland 1-0 at Hampden last year.

When we headed home that afternoon, we stopped off at the orthodox shrine in Grabarka. The story goes...in 1770, when the town was being ravaged by the plague, the townspeople were directed by a heavenly sign to erect a cross on the nearby hill. They called in the marketing consultants, who advised them at $40,000 a day, to put the contract out to tender. Following a five month process, plagued by corruption and claims of cronyism, the contract was placed, and three years later, and miles over budget, the cross was built. The plague vanished overnight. Of course, everyone was already dead. The hill became a holy place, and is now covered in thousands of crosses. There is a burial area, a church, and large areas where visitors on pilgrimage have planted crosses to commemorate their trip. A remarkable sight. We left the kids playing in a ditch by the side of the road, as they’d had enough religion for one weekend.

And that, apart from the dreary drive back into Warsaw along with everyone else who had been in the country for the weekend, was that. We had seen and enjoyed a lot of memorable things, and yet as always, the weekend was dominated by having two spawn at every turn. One day they may thank us for having taken them to an orthodox wedding, a former Nazi death camp, a primaeval forest, a sacred well next to a military installation, and a holy orthodox shrine, all in one weekend...but they probably won’t.

Eastern Approaches I

Last month we headed east to the town of Bialstok, near the Polish border with Belarus. We’d been invited to the wedding of our child minder, who strangely hasn’t been put off the thought of marriage and the near-inevitable consequence of children by looking after our spawn for the last twelve months. The wedding was to take place in an Orthodox church, beginning at 5pm on Friday evening.

The Parent Currently Known as Mum (TPCKAM) had a day off work, the kids had a day off school - they needed it after all, after having endured the first three days of the new term following two months off - and we set off from Warsaw at ten in the morning, only an hour or so later than planned, which isn’t at all bad, given that we had two kids and hadn’t packed the night before.

It’s no more than a three hour drive, so we decided to stop off along the way at one of Poland’s Holocaust memorial sites, at the former death camp of Treblinka. Even in this day of kids being seemingly desensitised against the worst horrors of humanity, a former death camp is no place for the under-10’s, but the camp at Treblinka was destroyed by the Germans long before the end of the war, and there are no empty buildings left standing, no relics of the gruesome past. The site, in a beautiful, peaceful, secluded forest, is made of standing stones. The perimeter of the camp is marked out with large Stonehenge-like blocks, and inside there are thousands of small stones, marking the victims and the towns from which they were taken. We gave the children a brief explanation of events, they weren’t at all interested, they charged off into the forest and played.

800,000 people were killed at Treblinka, which is just too big a number for anyone to really comprehend, never mind small children. It is a beautiful memorial.

We arrived in Bialstok two hours before kick off. Checked into the hotel and discovered a children’s play area across the road. We bundled the spawn in that direction, and they charged off, shoes to the wind, and let loose the dogs of war. We settled back with a cup of joe and watched the mayhem. At the heart of the play area was a giant, pink and yellow inflatable breast. Perhaps it was intended to make small children feel comfortable, and ease any separation issues they might have when their mother tries to get fifteen seconds to herself.

High up on the wall was an advert for another children’s recreational joint in the city called Fartlandia. Extra beans optional.

At T minus 60 I returned to the hotel. At some stage, and even before I looked in the suitcase, it suddenly dawned on me that I’d forgotten my white shirt. This is the kind of thing that would have you shouting at your kids for their carelessness. Fortunately my own mother wasn’t there to shout at me, and I was at least able to contribute to the stress of the groom and his mother by asking if there was anywhere nearby that I could buy a white shirt. (Good thing I hadn’t forgotten my sporran, which might have been a bit more difficult to source at short notice in eastern Poland.) A spare white shirt was dredged up form somewhere, and I was saved. The kids told me off, but they’re not as good at it as I am.

The wedding service lasted about an hour. A choir chanted melodically almost throughout, responding to one of the many chanting priests on hand. It was a beautiful service, and One of Two and Two of Two managed to hold themselves in check for the entire time. They looked angelic, and maybe they fooled some of the people some of the time, but they weren’t fooling the parents. We were like Gregory Peck in the Omen. (I mean, we could see through the mask, not that we tried to sacrifice them on the alter with two thousand year old knives.)

The service over, they went on the charge. However, later, when the chips were down at the wedding reception, they once more behaved themselves.

This was a wedding reception like you’ve always dreamed of. No speeches. Frankly, that’s what you want out of a wedding reception, as a groom, father of the bride, or as a guest. When One of Two gets married, I now have an alternative to insisting she runs away to the Dominican Republic.

The food was brought out at a tremendous rate, one course zipping quickly into the next, so that if you didn’t get your cutlery in your hands quickly enough, the plate had gone and you were looking at something else which required a completely different set of implements. The object of fast food and no speeches was clearly to get everyone onto the dance floor with as much haste as possible. And so, within about twenty minutes of everyone sitting at the table, and after several ad hoc localised vodka-fuelled toasts, the music was on and ninety percent of those in attendance were boogieing on down to Boney M. Seriously, Boney M. There’s no escape. Resistance is futile. Despite Brown Girl In The Ring, we danced and danced into the small hours.

Ok, I danced for about ten minutes, and then only because TPCKAM pulled a machine gun on me. Soon enough, however, the long tiring day of mostly behaving himself got too much for Two of Two, and the wee fella started complaining of tiredness. We retired hurt to the bedroom, and fell into a deep sleep, only to awake to the cries of Ra-Ra-Rasputin ringing through the hotel at two in the morning...

To be continued...