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.