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.
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