Last....day....of....school....

One of Two came to me this morning about twenty minutes before leaving for school asking if I could make her a halo. It's the kind of request which one looks for as a parent in the final minutes before heading off out into the morning cold.

Last day of school, things were pretty easy going. Sure, I'd had to dispatch Two of Two to his bedroom for using the word 'fuckface', but otherwise it was all pretty smooth. (He would have pleaded his innocence had I given him the chance to defend himself, as he'd used the word in the well-known childhood phrase, 'She called me a fuckface' when in fact she'd called him an asshead or donkeybrain or something slightly more banal. It was a classic case of a kid taking the chance to swear and hoping he gets away with it. And given that I sent him to his room for fifteen minutes rather than thrashed him senseless of took away his Nintendo DS for a month, I guess he did get away with it. Usually when one of them swears I blame myself and feel bad, but I don't think I've ever said fuckface, so I was just kind of relieved not to be implicated.) Having established the principle of pre-planning packed lunches and school uniforms, mornings before school at the moment are like the last two minutes of a Hollywood movie, where everything runs smoothly, everyone is happy, and you know it's all going to work out. So I said yes, I would make a halo.

It was a rubbish halo. A few bits of wire, one of which will probably have her eye out before the day is done, and a piece of blue and gold tinsel, it looked like it had been manufactured by Opposable Thumbs 'R Not Us. I suggested she shouldn't bother with the halo and that she looked enough like an angel as it was. She took the halo. I banned her from saying that it was me who had made it.

Ten minutes after the halo request, while I was still in the middle of my ham-fisted construction, she came and asked if I had time to make her some wings... I said I'd put it out to tender, but in the end there wasn't enough time.

And so, this is it. Christmas. Only eleven days to go, but the school finishes today.

Seems very, very, very early. And all the while, Bing Crosby plays on.

Christmas With Bing Crosby

In December 1992 I bought a Christmas cd in a small music shop in a shopping mall in Belgium. Christmas with Bing Crosby, Bing smiling in his bow tie on the cover. You can't get this cd in the shops anymore, it is one of the seven or eight million Bing Christmas cds which are now out of print, replaced every year by new compilations with a different picture of Bing smiling on the cover and the songs rearranged in a slightly different order, with titles like Bing Crosby's Christmas and Bing's Christmas Shindig and Groove Armada Pimp Bing Crosby's White Christmas Feat. Rihanna and Butt Naked Bing Crosby Goes Jesus. Checking on Amazon, I found my cd - out of print - with the same cover and title, but with different songs, and a release date of 1994. Obviously in 1994 they couldn't find a different picture for that year's compilation.

Years later I bought another Bing Christmas cd in an attempt to broaden my Christmas song horizons, but as this one was entitled Winter Wonderland, with Christmas not mentioned, the compilers, while predominately filling the album with Christmas tracks, also snuck in some non-Christmas cheer, including a syrupy awful piece of mince called Children, which is a launch-a-rocket-at-the-cd-player song if ever there was one; The Way We Were, and there's just no excuse for The Way We Were under any circumstances; and Hoagy Carmichael's In The Cool, Cool, Cool of the Evening, which is a great song but a great song for a summer evening. Not winter and not Christmas. I came back to Christmas With Bing Crosby, and here we are in December and once more it is ever-present on the cd player.

So here they are, those songs on Christmas With Bing Crosby in full:

1. White Christmas: One verse, just fifty-three words. But have you ever heard a version of White Christmas that didn't go on for about six minutes? That's because it's soooo.......slooooow..... One day White Christmas is just going to explode and no one will ever be able to hear the song again.

2. Silent Night: It's not rock 'n roll, but you can't argue with Silent Night.

3. It's Beginning To Look A Lot Like Christmas: Includes the great line, "There's a tree in the Grand Hotel, one in the park as well, the sturdy kind that doesn't mind the snow..." What kind of stupid Christmas tree does mind the snow? Do you think Bing ever said, 'I'm not singing that, it's pish!" Maybe he did. He let that one by though.

4. Little Jack Frost Get Lost: A duet with Peggy Lee. The kind of song that says picture-perfect 1950's America, where nothing bad ever happens and everybody's happy. Those were the days when "the bench in the park is all alone in the dark" because it's cold, rather than because if you go into the park after dark you'll get knifed.

5. Medley: Good King Wenceslas/ We Three Kings/ Angels We Have Heard On High: We were singing the first of these songs last week. One of Two thought it was Good King Wencesclaus. I always used to think the first line was "Good King Wencas last looked out." I never got to the third and fourth verses, so I just assumed that since it was the last time he looked out, the song was about some poor do-gooding fool of a king who went out into the cold and pegged it. I think was in my 30's before I discovered the truth.

6. Sleigh Ride: "When they're passing round the coffee and the pumpkin pie..." Iconic. Songwriting at its zenith, although who is the shadowy Farmer Grey character? And the "jing jing jing" bit at the end is annoying beyond words. So, actually, it's not really songwriting at its zenith.

7. Christmas Is A-Comin': "If you haven't got a friendly cat may God bless you..."?? "Christmas is a-comin' and the egg is in the nog..."?? What is this song even about? The Christmas song equivalent of the present of cheap aftershave.

8. Deck The Halls/ Away In A Manger/ I Saw Three Ships: With Deck The Halls, there is just far too much Fa-la-laaing. Away In A Manger I've always hated. A personal thing. I Saw Three Ships... What's really happening with this song? Given that Bethlehem's got that whole, being in the middle of the desert thing going on, where, or more likely, what are the three ships? The three wise men? The Holy Trinity? Columbus's three ships? The Three Amigos? Three horsemen of the Apocalypse? We need Dan Brown to write the book.

9. I Heard The Bells On Christmas Day: A timeless tale of the struggle between good and evil. As in all the best Hollywood movies, good wins out at the end of the day. Bing as Bruce Willis.

10. I'll Be Home For Christmas: Difficult to find any Christmas album without this heartwarming tale of a psycho-stalker serial killer on Death Row writing a letter to his next victim, telling her that she better watch out and better take care because he's coming home...for...Christmas...

11. The Twelve Days of Christmas: Drugs. There's no other explanation.

12. The Snowman: Bing's sons - "Are you ready, fellas?" "Sure, Dad!" - sing this stupid tale of a snowman which can't run and warn the family about the fire on the porch... but it can throw itself on the flames to save them all. Let him melt, that's what I say.

13. Santa Claus Is Coming To Town: Well, Bing, it's ok, but once you've heard Bruce Springsteen....

14. God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen: The Bridge Over Troubled Water of Christmas carols. Bing nails it. And fortunately doesn't sing all three hundred verses.

15. The Christmas Song: This song was written to be performed in a schmoozy Brooke Benton/Luther Vandross loungebar type of way and as such deserves not to even exist. The ratio of people who listen to this song to people who have eaten chestnuts has got to be in the region of one to eight hundred gazillion.

16. Christmas in Killarny: Bing panders to the notion that there's never a bad party in Ireland.

Christmas With Bing Crosby.... as if there's any other way to spend the holiday.

the strangest thing...

This morning I was happily going about my pre-breakfast business in the kitchen. We're a smoothly oiled machine these days - if Tom Brady, Randy Moss and Wes Welker prepped two kids for school every morning they'd do it like this - so I was letting them watch a bit of tv before sitting them down to their breakfast, when the cry went up from the sitting room.

'Dad!'

I ignored it, making the reasonable assumption that they were probably having their daily 'cartoons or sport' argument.

'Dad, come and see this!' came the next cry.

So, I thought, they're not arguing about sport, they're watching an advert for some toy or game they're expecting us to fork out cash for next month. And I ignored them further. The advert was guaranteed to be over by the time I got in.

'Dad! Quick!'

Well, finally my curiosity got the better of me. They weren't fighting over tv, they weren't watching an advert. So I got in there to find them watching the shopping channel. Now, I've just written the shopping channel as if there's only one of them, and I know there are like five hundred or something. I never watch shopping channels, so I can't be specific.

They were glued to an infomercial. An infomercial for a cleaning product. An informercial for a cleaning product specifically designed to clean up pee. It was called Urine Gone. Seriously. Look it up on Google, you'll find it. Urine Gone. Someone, somewhere put a lot of chemicals in a bottle and specified that it was for the exact purpose of cleaning up pish. And then the best name they could come up with was Urine Gone.

(If you put Urine Gone into Google you find 48,300 entries. If you put Barney Thomson into Google, you get 514 entries. I know my place in the commercial world.)

What's wrong with Urine-B-Gone? Maybe that brand name is already in use. Maybe on one of the other shopping channels there are more Americans talking about Urine-B-Gone, the original and best.

The bottle of Urine Gone, which of course looks like any other bottle of cleaning fluid, with the words Urine Gone written without any noticeable embarrassment whatsoever on the side, comes with a handy UV light, so that you can walk around your house detecting all those urine patches that you never knew were there. Some poor woman was doing the rounds of her home discovering urine in just about every conceivable place. God knows who she lives with.

The kids' motivation for watching this mince was that we could now bring Budgie the Netherland dwarf in from outside, on the basis that we can just follow him around with a bottle of Urine Gone and spray the wee fellow every time he lifts his leg.
I got them to change over to a normal channel and we immediately stumbled across one of those awful M&S adverts. The strange thing was, that apparently M&S are now doing their own line of cleaning products.

"Made from the most toxic chemicals and guaranteed to burn its way through the very fabric of your house," breathed Dervla, "this isn't just any old pish stain remover, this is M&S pish stain remover...."

Attack Of The Pre-Pubescent Burger Monkeys

This is just supposition on my part, but I'm guessing that there's no word for 'queue' in Polish.

Or, if there is such a word, the direct translation into English would be 'free for all', or 'he who dares, gets served first' or 'personal space is not a concept with which we here in Poland are familiar' or 'I overtook you on the road by driving along the pavement, I've parked my car over four spaces in the carpark, now I'm barging to the front of the queue, all with no self-awareness whatsoever.'

It's very endearing.

Last day of the school holiday. Originally we had the spawn booked down for school sports camp for the autumn break. For a few magical days we envisioned six days without our kids. In nine years we've never had more than two nights alone without them. On the downside, we would probably have missed them. On the upside, we would have been FREE FOR SIX WHOLE DAYS. For such occasions did Carl Orff write music for choirs of demonic angels.

Pretty soon the bubble burst. Sports camp was cancelled due to lack of interest. I cursed all the other parents, even more than I curse them anyway.

The week has passed uneventfully, as all the best weeks do. Swimming, movies, bowling, Monopoly, Rangers versus Barcelona on the tv. We've had fun, we fell out, there have been tears, recriminations and laughter, burgers & fries and emergency surgery at the A&E. A typical week off.

Today I said that they could go to McDonald's if they used their own money, queued themselves and spoke to the burger sales assistant on their own. They were happy with splashing the cash, not so happy with having to be the face and voice behind the order. However, in the end, when the chips were down and I gave them no choice, they stood nervously in the queue, waiting with trepidation to see if their Junk Food Supply Representative would speak English.

You can see the flaw in the previous sentence. The word queue. The poor wee buggers never stood a chance. They stood, half nervous, half excited about which piece of plastic crap they were going to order, waiting in line. To begin with there were three people ahead of them in the queue. And that was about as close as they got for the next three quarters of an hour. At one point they'd been pushed back to 50th. It was like asking a baby to pick up a coin in front of a stampeding herd of wildebeest.

It was all kids who were queue-jumping, and one could immediately see where the adults get it from. Queue-blindness is obviously something they learn from an early age.

My local Post Office has a ticket system. Get your ticket when you arrive, wait for your number. It's just about the only orderly queue in Poland. Even then, you still get the ballsy few who will try it on. Last Christmas, during one particularly heady bunfight of a line, an old woman approached me and asked to see my number. On discovering that mine was considerably lower than hers and that I'd obviously been there for at least half an hour longer, she shook her head darkly, muttered 'We're not using the numbers today,' and moved ahead of me in the queue. When it came to it, I had to trip her up in order to get back in front of her.

It's dog eat dog. I finally took pity on the kids, let then sit down, and went to wait in line. As my turn approached, I was engulfed by swarms of pre-pubescent burger monkeys. Total bedlam and complete hell. You just can't give someone else's kid a clip round the ear in public.

As I neared the front of the queue and it looked like I was about to be usurped by a gang of five year-old girls, I pulled a smooth move by leaping up on top of the counter and begging desperately to get served. The little girls in the queue had never seen so much derring-do and panache allied to sheer brass neck. The Processed Crap-Food Distribution Hostess was so shocked she served me, and finally the drama was at an end.

Back to school on Monday, but maybe One of Two and Two of Two have learned a much more important lesson this week than they will ever learn in school. If you're going to pick up a coin in front of a herd of wildebeest, get your dad to do it...

Yes, We're All Individuals

Last week the kids at school were all given a poster which showed a multicoloured clay horse in amongst an army of plain grey clay horses. The strapline across the top of the poster read, DARE TO BE DIFFERENT.

Seven hundred pupils were all given exactly the same poster.

Alanis, that's another one for you.

The Pomegranate Supremecy

We had one of those mornings, the spawn and I, when we rode to school, three-a-breast across the wide pavement - the Three Amigos, The Magnificent Three, The Three Horsemen of the Apocalypse - and all the people in their cars and the many-layered pedestrians stared at us like we were insane.

It was the first really cold morning of the season. A lovely autumnal mist, a thick chill in the air, maybe two degrees. Two of Two and I were in our shorts, not a jacket between us. One of Two had a jacket, but was wearing a short skirt and no tights. Not a hat in sight, but a lot of cold ears. And we were all, to a man and child, freezing. But it wasn't because we were insane at all. It was because I was really, really stupid.

Stepped outside this morning, dressed as we were to go to school, realised that rather than just being cold in a generic cold kind of way, it was actually the type of cold that makes your fingers fall off when gripping a bike handlebar, numbs your legs, and seeps chillingly into the fibre of your id. At that point I should have said something like, 'I'll just get the hats!' or 'Another three layers for everyone!' or 'Ok, you win, we'll take the car.' Instead, aware that we were running a bit behind the curve, I said, 'Here, it's a bit chilly. Let's go.' The poor young fools followed blindly and trustingly behind.

By the time we'd arrived at school twenty-five minutes later, One of Two had lost a leg to frostbite, Two of Two had green ear and I had to get the school nurse to amputate my hands. Otherwise everything was fine.

The real issue of the morning, was why we were late in the first place. And it's all to do with the pomegranate.

What is the point of the pomegranate? And how did someone ever open one up and think, 'well that's not going to be a pain in the backside to eat'? The pomegranate, more than any other fruit or vegetable, is designed to have someone else prepare it for you. Which is why One of Two has me.

I don't know what the verb is to describe what it is you do to prepare a pomegranate. There may be another method - in fact, there may even be a particular pomegranate tool in the Lakeland catelogue - but I do it by cutting it in half, then scraping out all those little red things into a bowl. But you can't say, 'Did you scrap the pomegranate yet?' that sounds pretty gross. 'Did you scoop the pomegranate?' doesn't work either. I like the word 'shuck' but it's not at all appropriate. Perhaps an adaptation of the word shuck might work...

The thing about flucking the pomegranate is the amount of juice that sprays out as you're scraping the spoon through the eight or nine million red flesh coated seeds inside. And I did the whole thing wearing a white t-shirt. At the end of the flucking I looked like I'd gone on some wild, chainsawing bloody rampage. And not only did I have to shower, scrub with a wire brush and change, it takes a long time to fluck the pomegranate in the first place.

All the time you're thinking, 'what's wrong with a banana?' But then, in the end, you do anything to try to get your kids to eat a piece of fruit. Even fluck a pomegranate.

And so, finally, when we stepped outside to a misty morning, chilled by a cold front sweeping down from St. Petersburg, I didn't stop to consider the weather, but rode off valiantly into the day, leading my doomed troops to a freezing and bitter end, once more consumed by the endless time crunch of a pre-school morning.

Without Reason

Friday morning, the pre-school bunfight. Things had been getting too easy and well-ordered, so last week I decided to make everything a little bit harder by cooking them breakfast, and finally acquiescing to Two of Two's demands that he'd like a packed lunch, rather than a couple of quid to spend in the school canteen, because obviously my cold pasta is better than their warm stuff. "While you're at it," chipped in One of Two, "I wouldn't mind some sushi in my lunchbox. Min Hyun has sushi."

Min Hyun has sushi...Of course Min flippin' Hyun has sushi, Min Hyun's mum has been making sushi in her sleep from the age of eight. Possibly Min Hyun even makes her own sushi. I'm from the west of Scotland. I make toast.

The hell with it, I thought, I'm going to make sushi. I'm going to make a tuna pasta sweetcorn dish. I'm going to fry them up some French toast. (I'd always wondered what the French called French toast. Did they just call it 'toast'? I checked on Wikipedia. Wikipedia says that they call it 'pain perdu', which is slightly disappointing.)

So, there I was on Friday morning, doing all these things at seven a.m. Now, I'm not making myself out to be some Dad Supergenius. I'm not wearing my pre-school-sushi-pasta-French-toast-making as a badge of honour. It was just what I was doing at the time, and even though I thought I'd be nice to the kids, they don't appreciate it for a second, and never will. Even when they're older and have kids themselves, they're not going to look back and think, 'wow, how cool was dad!' They'll
look back at their mornings before school and think, "I remember there was some guy there who used to do stuff. He shouted a lot."

Two of Two, who I'd just let watch tv for half an hour, such was my general feeling of benevolence towards my spawn, came in and sat down at the table to his pain perdu. TPCKAM said, 'Let's have a quick run over your spelling words before you eat anything.' Well, by God, the wee man went bananas. Partially bananas. He didn't go the whole way of denouncing us for having the temerity to ask something of him and stepping outwith our roles of People Who Are There To Serve. He just growled and then stomped out the room with a screaming huff on.

TPCKAM and I looked at each other with a raised eyebrow or two. (TPCKAM can't raise one eyebrow without raising the other and is consequently jealous of my eyebrow abilities. On the other hand, she can do the Vulcan greeting, separating your third and fourth finger thing, which I've never been able to do, and my jealousy of that is all-consuming, but I guess it really just sets her apart as some sort of alien.) Then I thought, flippin'-hell-here-I-am-standing-in-the-kitchen-cooking-blah-blah-blah. So I went to retrieve the errant wee man. Grabbed him by the collar and hauled him into the kitchen. I started off mad, then decided I'd be better to be cold. In the ensuing five minutes, during which he bungled his way through a spelling practice, I removed his French toast, and then pitched his pasta into the bin and told him he could eat from the canteen. ('That's a waste!' cried One of Two, 'What about the starving children in Africa?!' which was a minor words-coming-back-to-haunt-you moment.) After the pasta in the bin, Two of Two, his spelling test complete, stormed out of the kitchen and cried hysterically for the next forty minutes. Then I dropped him off at school.

Skip forward to Saturday afternoon. Two of Two and I played baseball in the back garden. His idea, as a change to cricket or football. In lieu of a bat, we used a cricket stump. He insisted on playing the full rules, balls/strikes/walks etc. Two innings in and I was leading 4-0 and he was getting grumpy. He started using the cricket bat and began beaning the ball all round the garden. Going into the bottom of the third in a three-inning game, trailing 6-4, I loaded the bases (we were using an imaginary runner system), and was within one smack of the tennis ball over the garden fence of victory. In the end I lost, but not before Two of Two stomped around and got huffy and pouted and threatened to walk off because he thought he was going to lose.

We came in and sat down in the kitchen where TPCKAM was muddling around. It was time for a chat. So I settled him down, now that he was in a good mood, for the full father-son thing, with mum there for backup. Gave him the whole spiel about how wonderful he was, but that sometimes it wasn't a lot of fun to play with him. Tried to sound reasonable, even confessed to my own parenting faults. We all get mad etc etc. I think it was an ok speech. If I'd written it down, I could probably use it some time if I ever do the kind of true-life mince you get on True Movies channel or, well, True Movies 2 channel. Not too heavy handed, I hoped. A decent pitch to the wee fella, intended to insert some sort of Reason button. A new dawn, a new beginning. His sister was away for the weekend, he had his parents to himself, and this was the moment when he would realise that we all have to do things that we don't want to, and that stomping off with a bottom lip the size of Boris Johnson never does anyone any good. There are some things in life that you just have to suck up. I wasn't spinning the 'no one said life was fair' line, because life can be fair. But it can also be testicle-crushingly rubbish.

I finished my bit. To be honest, I reckon it transcended True Movie channel quality. Al Pacino would have made a decent job of it.

The wee man looked up at me and said... 'Can I have that piece of bread?...'

And I, like a million parents before me, thought of Gary Larson and his 'what dogs hear' cartoon.

Infestation

It was a warm summer's night in Warsaw. The kids were in bed and TPCKAM and I were having a classic, late-night, three-hundred-channels-and-nothing-on kind of an evening. We sat on the couch in a vegetative state, flicking endlessly through cooking, garden, real estate, reality, fashion, makeover mince, endless streams of junk tv, before searching the equally endless music channels and tagging another hour on before bed, watching 80's videos and being embarrassed for the poor souls, eternally trapped in time with their big hair and enormous collars. Finally, the spell was broken and TPCKAM announced she was off to bed. After a long night, the power struggle over the tv remote was finally at an end, and I was able to watch sport, undisturbed, for a short while.

At around midnight, I became aware of a strange noise coming from the general area of the dormant fire place. It seemed to be coming out of the walls, or the brick work, or from the piles of wood which line the walls around the fire, as an emergency precaution against any sudden 'The Day After Tomorrow' type situation.

I turned off the tv and approached the area with caution. The noise was quite clear, an odd crinkly sort of sound, like someone was inside the walls scrunching up aluminium foil. I stood staring at it for about twenty minutes, not moving. The obvious thing was to take out a couple of logs and see what was lurking in their midst. I couldn't do it. Confronted with a spider-or-cockroach-on-the-wall situation, plenty of breathing space and no pressure, I can deal with it. But happily flicking aside logs, waiting for something to chew your finger off, I'm not so good.

I decided to go and get back-up. I was aware that it would still be me involved in log removal, but thought that if I was suddenly going to be eaten, slashed or poisoned, it would be good to have help on hand. Stuck my head round the bedroom door, TPCKAM was asleep. Deciding that this was just too ridiculous to actually wake anyone up for, I went back downstairs and looked at the logs again for another twenty minutes. Then I went upstairs, turned on the light and said, 'The wood's making a funny noise, come and listen.'

TPCKAM awoke in some confusion, but was soon brought onboard. She scoffed as I put on my shoes, and we muddled downstairs, me confidently expecting that whatever had been scrunching aluminium foil, would probably now have stopped. The noise was on-going. TPCKAM stopped looking at me like I was weird, and we both sat there, intrigued, for another twenty minutes.

Eventually, and it was now three in the morning or something, the governing council of the autonomous collective which runs the house, decided that I should take the logs outside. Getting the longest piece of equipment that I could, I started lifting the individual logs out at double arms length and transporting them on the veranda. This took about twenty minutes...

We sat down by the fire and listened. Silence. We had our confirmation. The noise had definitely been coming from the logs, not the wall, and there was no remaining evidence of what had been causing it. There seemed to be only one option; some sort of radioactive Dr Who-esque alien space-slime. We sat in the lounge for a further twenty minutes, considering the radioactive Dr Who-esque alien space-slime on the vernada, when suddenly another option presented itself. But surely woodworm couldn't possibly make that much of a racket? Just after 4 a.m., as the grey light of dawn crept across Poland like the haunted groundswell of nationalistic opinion, I went outside with a torch and investigated the wood for small holes. And by God, there they were. I put woodworm into Google, and it all came together. The noise....the holes... The wood....

There is also a large pile of wood in the garage, and every day as we walk past it the noise squirms out at us, as these unseen creatures burrow away. And as the summer turned into autumn, the noise grew louder and louder, crackling and spitting, so that it sounded like we were roasting a pig in the basement. Now, at last, the weather has turned colder and we can finally start sticking the wood on the fire without turning the house into a sauna, and slowly, slowly, the woodpile is diminishing. As you pop the wood into the flames you can hear them scream, these wretched, doomed termite deathbug wood junkies.

Over the last few months, as we've lived with the noise in the garage, I've assumed that woodworm are small, almost microscopic things. But yesterday, as I took a couple of pieces of wood on the short trip to a burning hell, I disturbed one of them. He was enormous. I think he said his name was Norbert. A piece of bark came off and there he was underneath. He looked up at me and said, 'Here, piss off, can't a beetle larvae eat his supper in peace anymore?'

Norbert has since gone to a fiery grave.

Further on-line investigation has revealed that the scrunching little buggers who have inhabited our wood for so long, can grow up to be more than an inch and a half long. When that happens, they probably acquire rights of some sort, including getting to elect a member to the governing council of the autonomous collective. Consequently, the fire has been cranked up and the woodworm are being put to the sword.

The Return of Meadowbank Thistle

The weekend before last I took Two of Two back to Scotland to attend the Meadowbank Thistle reunion. Father of Two, Sucks Unwitting Seven Year-Old Into Dark Underbelly of Scottish Lower Division Football.

A brief history: Meadowbank Thistle came into the Scottish League in season 1973-74. They played in Meadowbank Stadium in Edinburgh to general disinterest for twenty years. In the early 90's they were sold down the river for commercial interests, moved town and became Livingston. Not even Livingston Thistle, just Livingston. The people who moved them didn't want anything to do with Meadowbank, and the team was dead.

The reunion was to celebrate twenty years since we won the Scottish Second Division Championship, and involved a small exhibition, a game between ex-players and a dinner afterwards. Those in attendance were divided into three categories. Players, the players' families, and supporters. Of those three categories, the latter was probably the smallest. That's how it usually was, and that was what was good about it. We supported a small team that played in a big stadium, usually outnumbered by visiting fans. When you told someone that you supported Meadowbank, they checked you for the lobotomy scar, or said, 'Ah, you're the one...'

The guy who sold them out in the end, Bill Hunter, argued that the club wasn't financially viable, and that they had to move to survive. He never seemed to understand, or didn't care, that by moving to another town and away from our incongruous stadium, the club died anyway. Maybe his business interest didn't die, but the team did. Livingston went to the Premier League, they qualified for Europe, and he probably felt justified. But that wasn't what Meadowbank was about. It was a small group of players and fans and officials with no money and a rented park in a council stadium, that won a division and came within a few games of getting promoted to the Premier League the following year. Success on the proverbial footballing shoestring, due to wonderful coaching and a good team. Livingston? Just another small team in another small town, where most of the football supporters get on a bus to Ibrox or Parkhead every week. Meadowbank were different from everyone else, that's why all the other teams thought we were weird, and that's what made it special.

After the exhibition game, Two of Two and I went onto the pitch and had a penalty shoot-out in one of the goals. This was a big moment for me. For twelve years I'd gone to watch this team with my dad and brother, and now here I was playing with my seven year-old on the green, green grass of home. Two of Two, on the other hand, didn't seem so excited or moved. He was just having a penalty shoot-out with some bloke.

One bleak and cold day in 1985, the three of us were sitting at half-time at one of those dire games that football is all about. Scottish second division, Meadowbank 0 Raith Rovers 0. No goals, no football, no excitement. The cold chilled you to the bone, and you sat there thinking, what in the name of God am I doing here? We could be at home, eating fish and chips and watching someone get murdered in Taggart. I turned to my dad and said, 'Come on, let's go home, this is stupid.' He didn't go along with the idea, not being one for that kind of random act of spontaneity. And so I snuggled down into my boots, cursing and muttering and trying to convince myself that I would never come back, and we stayed to watch the second half.

The game finished Meadowbank 6 Raith Rovers 0. A glorious half of innumerable chances at both ends, made all the more glorious by the fact that we took six of ours and they didn't take any. That is why football, if maybe not quite so much as test match cricket, is a great sporting metaphor for life. Long stretches of tedium, and then suddenly something just comes shooting unexpectedly out of nowhere and grabs you by the knackers.

Maybe one day Meadowbank Thistle will be back, but perhaps none of us would really want it to be a new club, with young players and a whole new strip sponsored by that year's Indian restaurant. It would really have to be like Michael Palin's Barnstoneworth United. The same old guys out on the field, as they were last week, with the manager standing on the sidelines in his duffle coat. A cold bleak day in Edinburgh, a muddy park, a hundred supporters surrounded by a couple of thousand opposition fans, with our guys making all the noise as we put the more celebrated opposition to the sword.

Top Ten Moments From A Two Week Holiday In The UK (In Chronological, Rather Than Horrendousness Order)

10. We arrive at Heathrow on a Saturday morning. The kids plead for the Heathrow Express to Paddington. We point out that we are about to spend the equivalent of the GDP of a small Pacific island country over the next two days in London, and that we're not starting with 60 quid for the four of us to be on a train for fifteen minutes. We get on the Tube. Piccadilly line, direct to King's Cross. Straightforward enough. The train terminates after seven stops, the passengers are invited to get off. There are another two trainloads of passengers waiting on the platform. An empty train is brought along and eight million people cram on. We all stand stoically, pressed against each other. The train stops another few stations along the line. We are advised to seek alternative routes as there are signal problems at King's Cross, although we can elect to stay on the train and sit it out if we want. We, and many others, leg it up the stairs to the District & Circle. It's a weekend in the summer, so no Circle line at all. The District line train has just stopped, the passengers have been kicked off and told to go to the Piccadilly line. We trudge down the stairs, two kids, five bags, and go looking for the bus. Two of Two announces that he needs to pee. Not a toilet to be seen...

9. We're on the bus the fellow in the station told us to get on, although he'd said we would need to change. We ask the driver which bus we should get to King's Cross. He looks in the mirror, all chirpy and cheery, and says, 'Jump off here, darlin'..' - he was speaking to TPCKAM - 'the bus directly behind us will take you to King's Cross. We clamber off the bus, two kids, five bags, and clamber on to the next bus. 'Do you go to King's Cross?' says TPCKAM. 'Nowhere near it, luv,' says the driver, and fortunately, given how we're getting on, he doesn't venture any further suggestions. We extract everything we need from the bus, and summon up a plague of warts, frogs and boils on the previous driver, who had obviously just wanted us and our kids as far away as possible. A kind, saintly figure of a man points us in the right direction. As he's not wearing a uniform we take him at his word. The next bus driver is the kindest man on planet earth, and more or less drops us at the door of the hotel, even though he was supposed to be going to Penzance. It takes longer to get from Heathrow to King's Cross than from Warsaw to Heathrow.

8. The British Museum. We had hoped the kids would be interested as there was much that they had studied in the previous year at school. Naturally, however, they were bored. This is because the British Museum is free. They notice you not handing over vast quantities of money as you enter and you can see them looking at each other and saying, 'God, it's free. Like, how boring is this place going to be?' On the other hand, the following days' visit to the Star Wars exhibition - fifty pounds for a family ticket - was greeted with much greater enthusiasm.

7. A personal highlight. I had a couple of meetings in London on the Monday. TPCKAM took off with the kids and I was left alone. No kids, sitting in a pub at lunchtime, eating fish and chips, a pint of cider, and watching the test match on the tv. Life was created for moments like that. Makes you realise that there are higher forces at work. Even having to listen to an American explain the rules of cricket to another American didn't take the gloss off. 'And these guys, like, do this almost every day, and they don't even get paid $50m a year, it's like so weird. The red thing's called the ball.'

6. The next day we bought a new car. It has seven seats in case we decide to have three more children. Before we had moved out of the showcourt, the kids clambered into the back, Christening the rear bumper with marks which we know will still be present five years from now.

5. We saw three movies. Shrek 3, the Simpsons, Harry Potter. We're nothing if not sheep. There's no excuse for Shrek 3. The Simpsons is an hour and a half episode of the Simpsons. Who knew? HP was great. The kids keep saying, 'There's a storm coming 'Arry.'

Well, Two of Two has said it once, but I thought it was funny and I think I'll encourage him to say it more often. Although if he starts saying it every time he sees me getting in a bad mood, then he'll more than likely get a clip round the ear. I should point out, that that would be a virtual clip round the ear, as obviously actual clips round the ears of your children are likely to turn them into pot-smoking, delinquent, school-skipping, dysfunctional teenage young Conservatives.

4. For years now, TPCKAM has been advocating camping as a lifestyle choice. I have countered this by advocating staying in luxury five-star hotels as a lifestyle choice. Finally, the force of nature won the day and I reluctantly acquiesced. The tent was bought, along with all the other camping paraphernalia, for an intended three day camping binge as we drove back across Europe. How we all sang in anticipation!

In our trial run, we erected the tent in the back garden, on a slope, in just under forty-five minutes, which seemed something of a triumph. That night TPCKAM slept in the garden with the kids. On the slope. The next night, with the kids still keen and their mother adamant about her non-participation in a second consecutive night of slope-sleeping camping hell, I was brought off the substitutes bench and corralled into action.

Unlike most nights which have say, eight hours between ten in the evening and six in the morning, this night had somewhere in the region of three hundred hours. The kids slept, I lay awake on a back garden which suddenly seemed to resemble the north face of Kangchenjunga. Outside people spoke on mobile phones in strange languages, cats fought, seagulls swooped and dived, their mournful ululations increasing in desperate melanchollic intensity as they realised they were nowhere near the sea, and beneath it all there was a strange, reverberating hum, presumably coming from the giant underground generator which powers the planet.

3. We arrived in Belgium a couple of days later. Got lost, drove through a variety of strange little towns in the Ardennes, then finally pitched up at our pre-booked campsite at around seven in the evening. It was a beautiful summer's day, a few insects buzzing, a lazy warmth in the air. Perfect camping weather. The campsite wasn't the most elegant, in fact it was pretty horrible, but we found a large patch of flat grass, we had the tent up in seconds, and within an hour the kids were paddling in the river and TPCKAM was sitting by her stove cooking beef stew while we sipped a fruity French white, with hints of melon, papaya and frog. Idyllic. We ate dinner, we brushed our teeth in a communal moment of good humour, and trooped into bed, happier than the Von Trapps after a quick dash across the Alps into Switzerland.

At four o'clock the following morning, the wee man clambered out of his sleeping bag to do the necessary. Upon his return, he claimed that his sleeping bag was wet around the rim. It was indeed wet around the rim. There was absolutely no explanation for why it should be wet around the rim. This is a fundamental truth about camping. Things get wet for no reason. Another fundamental truth about camping is that things frequently get wet entirely with reason. It started raining at 4.40am. Summer shower, I thought as I lay snuggled up in my mummy bag. Drifted back off to sleep. Was awoken at around six by the most fantastic crack of thunder, directly overhead. Massive, massive thunderstorm. Biblical rains, loud noises, bright flashes. Are tents safe in a thunderstorm? Well, you're lying on the ground, which is a bad start. I said to the wee man, 'stay away from the side of the tent.' He's young enough that he just did it rather than look at me like I'm a total sad sack, before making a run for the car. Keep away from the side of the tent.... that's the kind of thing you find yourself saying when you're a parent.

2. We packed up in the rain, we headed for Germany. It rained ALL DAY. At some point we abandoned the idea of camping a second night - actually for me it had been three weeks earlier when I had first acknowledged the fact that it was going to happen at all - stopped in Hannover and booked into an international chain hotel. We asked the receptionist where we could go and get dinner, this being a smallish international chain hotel without a restaurant. She pointed us in the direction of an Italian she liked two and a half blocks away, through the torrential rain. We had nearly died in our tent, and then driven for eight hours in treacherous weather with Audis and BMWs overtaking at 250kph, and while every articulated lorry in Europe drove slowly towards the Ukraine in the inside lane. We didn't want to walk two and a half blocks in a Noah-esque downpour to get something to eat. We walked fifty yards and found a Pizza Hut and realised that the receptionist was a woman without children.

1. We sat in Pizza Hut, relieved and relaxed, aware that there was still another eight hours of driving the following day. Pizza and large glasses of alcohol. The kids had a little play area, everyone was happy. It came time to leave. We said to the wee fella, 'Put on your shoes.' We said this several times. He lifted his shoes from under the table, but then dropped them to the side of the table before the putting on the shoes instruction had properly filtered in. 'Put your shoes on,' we said, another few hundred times. It wasn't like he was doing something else, but kids don't need to actually be doing something else to not do what it is they're being asked to.

The whole sequence would have made a slow motion scene in a Scorsese movie, with grand operatic music and balletic movements from all involved. The shoes lay on the floor. The wee man hurrumphed and stalled and prevaricated. The waitress walked amongst the tables carrying a tray with five pints of Coke and lemonade. We nagged the wee man. He stalled further. The waitress stood on the shoes. She stumbled, she fell forwards. The drinks flew through the air and crashed onto the carpet, ice and Coke and broken glass everywhere. This, in fact, was where it stopped being like a Scorsese movie, because in the movie one of the glasses would have been impaled in the head of a New York gang leader, and in the Pizza Hut in Hannover, the glasses just fell unexcitingly on the floor. The waitress looked embarrassed, we looked even more embarrassed, the wee man found the time to put his shoes on. In the end it was more Sofia Coppola than Scorsese. I was even making up the bit about the broken glass.

The holiday was over, we had survived the camping, we survived the drive from the German border to Warsaw, and we had survived Hannover Pizza Hut. Or, more to the point, it had survived us. And now, only three more weeks and one more trip to the UK to go, and school will once more open up its gates to the triumphant cries of the herald of angels.

Rabbits, Apricots And The Search For Architectural Competence

Into the second week of school summer holidays, and at last The Haunting of Barney Thomson is done and dusted and has been dispatched to the printers. Nine months of work, at the end of which either a very minor triumph or a wallow through the fetid sludge of literary ignominy await.

One of Two has been away on summer camp for nine days. It's obvious what this means. It has been nine days of opportunity to let the rabbit escape/eat the rabbit for lunch/shoot the rabbit and stick his head on the wall as a hunting trophy. 'Welcome home, One of Two! Guess what? We've found a new home for Budgie... above the fireplace!'

We've done none of the above. Instead, I have been Man About The House and constructed a rabbit hutch/pen type affair at the bottom of the garden. Now, I'm not the handiest. I'm more of the cerebral, literary super-genius type. At school, my woodwork teacher turned in his grave, and he wasn't even dead. However, things in the house were grim. The weather had been ugly outside, Budgie's shop-bought hutch was insubstantial, and so we'd brought him back inside. However, it wasn't long before the living room was smelling like the giraffe house at Belgrade Zoo. Something needed to be done.

(I don't mean to particularly disparage Belgrade Zoo over all others, I just happen to be very familiar with it. Giraffe houses are always minging. It's not like you ever walk into the giraffe house at a posh zoo, sniff the air, and think, 'mmm, minty...')

So on Friday Two of Two and I trooped along to the local DIY shop. I bought four planks of wood and some nails and thought I could construct a hutch. How hard can it be, I thought? I constructed the hutch. It was rubbish. It was a classic illustration of How Not To Build Anything. I could have been on tv.

'This is Douglas, he used to be a total muppet at DIY, [show scene of my house falling down and me looking rueful and/or stupid], until he started reading How To Build Stuff Without Making A Complete Knob Of Yourself, a beautiful partwork, available free every Monday morning with the Daily Mail.'

On Saturday I laid out proper architectural plans, bought screws and clips (the clips probably have a more accurate name, but I can't begin to think of what that might be, so I'll call them clips, although to be honest, they're not really clips at all, they're something else, you know a bit of metal bent at 90 degrees, and you screw one side into a plank, and the other into the other plank, and the planks join together much better than if you just nail them together which is what you do if you're a complete moron), a screwdriver, various large sheets of plastic wire type stuff, and a coil of wire to fix everything together. On Friday I was Bert and Ernie, on Saturday I was the Wolf out of Pulp Fiction. I constructed a rabbit hutch of such skill and precision, that if I built it in the centre of London it would immediately be worth in excess of seven hundred thousand pounds. I was on fire. This was rabbit hutch construction by Divine intention. The angels sang, and I had the hand of God on my shoulder throughout, as I swung the hammer, turned the screwdriver and tweaked the little bits of wire with brio, flair, elan and downright bloody-minded flamboyance. Such a shame that the new Seven Wonders of the World list has already been decided, because this would have been in there. If I could write books with the panache, verve and imagination with which I constructed that hutch, I'd be JK Rowling.

Budgie the Netherland dwarf was so excited, that he pished on me when I was carrying him to his new house. I smelled like the giraffe house at Belgrade Zoo. Unperturbed, I took my t-shirt off and put the finishing touches to Budgingham Palace, striding around in the hot afternoon sun like a bronzed god.

Now, they say pride comes before a fall, and what you would expect after such hubris would be that I came outside the following morning to find Budgie mauled and ripped to shreds by a panther, his slender, bloody leporine carcass strewn casually through the wastes of his short-lived palatial abode. Or else I would have come out to find a hole in the carefully constructed Stalag 147-esque fencing system, with Budgie waiting in someone else's garden, just so that he could flick me the bird before legging it for Freedom. Or, even more likely, the whole thing would have collapsed because I didn't screw the clips in properly, and Budgie would have been sitting in the midst of the wasted remnants of despair, greeting me with the shape of an L on his forehead.

Well, it took three days, but it was none of the above. Went out this morning to find the wee fella sitting outside his cage, casually munching grass. It wasn't entirely evident how he got out, although presumably it was by eating a hole in the one piece of the roof that came from an actual rabbit installation system. Maybe he beamed out in a Star Trek kind of a way. And he didn't seem that interested in being on the loose, perhaps remembering his previous near-death experience. But he did fix me with a look of mocking disdain as we scooped him up after a short chase round the cricket pitch.

So Budgingham Palace remains intact, and the final few holes have been sealed with 24-inch thick concrete blocks. However, since we sent him out there full time, the temperature has soared, up to the high 30's yesterday, so now I'm waiting for him to peg it through heat exhaustion before One of Two returns, and then I can face calls of 'Rabbit Killer!' for the rest of the school holidays.

You can't win, you know.

In other news... this is the time of year when I painfully await the arrival of eight or nine thousand apricots in the back garden, an event which makes this fortnight in July no less than a living Hell. Not, however, this summer. We have been blessed. Spring came early to Warsaw, as it did most of Europe. The grass began to shoot up, the trees sprang to life, the first buds of spring poked their heads tentatively out into the crisp fresh mornings. Then, however, as if encouraged by the exhortations of the gods - or, at least, the kind of gods that I'd vote for - winter snuck back up on nature and gave it a good sharp, frosty whack in the knackers. The buds died. And the ensuing, knock-on effect: the apricot season is in disarray. Instead of being Manchester United or Chelsea, it is Watford or Sheffield United, cast adrift in a sea of calumny and despair. Last year we had thousands and thousands of apricots. This year, about fifty. And they're finished. The apricots have been relegated.

Next season, should the weather not prove so willing and helpful, I'm going to sneak out one morning in April with the freezer and attach it to the base of the tree. For now I can sit back and bask in the double triumph of a rabbit hutch of unimagined magnificence - even if it isn't entirely escape-proof - and a lawn that is rich in long grass, spiders and patches of bare earth, but is mercifully clear of apricots and other diseased fruits.

Summer...it's not as bad a season as you might think.

Rabbit For Dinner

Some people think you shouldn't rename your pet. Some people think it's a legitimate manifestation of self-expression to rename your pet. Some people think that on a scale of Zero to Ten of what's important in life - where a Ten would be, for example, the destruction of the planet by global consumerism and big business - whether or not it's right to rename your pet would be a Zero.

I, while being in this latter category, have renamed the pet for no particular reason, other than the fact that since it's now me who feeds it and cleans up after it - which are just about the only two things you can do with a rabbit - I might as well be the one to choose his name. The rabbit is now called Budgie. Gradually the other members of the family have started to switch.

Budgie, for his part, thinks that the importance rating of what he's called is a Zero. For that matter he also thinks the destruction of the planet by global consumerism and big business is a Zero. Whether he gets fresh lettuce every day is a Ten. As is getting to watch Life On Mars.

In my continuing capacity as Dad, I took the decision that Budgie should be allowed to run free in the garden. The fencing around the garden looks secure, the one area that was open I blocked off. On Sunday I let him out, without consulting the full Executive Board of the governing Autonomous Collective. Budgie bounced around the garden for three hours, if he tried to escape he made a very poor job of it, and at the end we managed to round him up and get the wee fella back into his cage without too much trouble.

One of Two was stressed and unhappy throughout, nervously watching, chain-chewing her way through a pack of forty sweetie Woodbine, waiting for some evil predator to leap over the fence into the garden and tear poor wee Budgie to bloody pieces. A leopard or tiger or some other indigenous Polish beast. Yet Budgie survived, and there was no ferocious mauling at the hands of one of the big cats.

At the end of it all One of Two made me promise not to let Budgie out of his cage in the garden ever again. I didn't make the promise.

The next day, which in an unsurprising turn of events, transpired to be Monday, I let Budgie out on the loose once more. Everything seemed to be going well. It was a warm, sunny afternoon, a few light clouds flitting slowly through the sky. The kids and I played football, Scotland won the World Cup (again), and even One of Two seemed to relax into Budgie's presence roaming free in the great wilderness of the back garden.

As the afternoon rolled on, evening approached and the day started to turn grim, it came time to bring the rabbit in from the cold. The rabbit, naturally, was not too happy about this turn of events and legged it for the back fence, which is shrouded in shrubbery and trees. One of Two and I approached the area in classic pincer movement formation, with TPCKAM and Two of Two deployed in a two-man containing midfield role.

Budgie was as good as in the cage.

Suddenly the somnambulant summer's evening exploded in a cacophonous riot of adrenaline-fuelled action and noise. Budgie had escaped, and unfortunately One of Two was there to see it.

'Budgie's through the fence!' she screamed, as Budgie flew like the wind along the other side of the fence. Thing was, Budgie wasn't flying like the wind in a dramatic break for freedom, Budgie was flying like the wind because he'd just made the acquaintance of next door's dog, Hannibal. A yappy little gobshite of a terrier, may be, but a yappy little gobshite of a terrier well-trained in the arts of ripping leporine flesh into tiny constituent parts.

In a flash Hannibal had Budgie pinned up against the fence, his jaws tearing at Budgie's fur. One of Two had a front row street for the kill. Now me, I was thinking, well Budgie, if it's your time, it's your time... I couldn't give a stuff about the rabbit, and was just wondering if there would be enough left over after Hannibal had finished with him for us to have a wee helping of pappardelle with rabbit, herbs and cream for tea. But One of Two wasn't so sanguine about the impending death of her beloved pet, which she'd mostly ignored for the previous six months.

And while rabbits are of no interest to me, I'm not so cold-hearted as to be unmoved by the screams of my traumatised wee girl. Employing moves not too dissimilar to Bruce Willis's stuntman, I leapt dramatically over the fence, whipping my Kalashnikov from my gun belt as I went, lobbing a couple of hand grenades into the bushes for good measure.

Budgie had managed to escape Hannibal's jaws, had legged it one way, met another fence, turned, managed to avoid the snapping jaws of oblivion and had raced towards the shrubbery at the other side of the garden. It all happened in a flashing stramash of black and white and brown, animals racing at breakneck speed, their very existence at stake. And then, from the shrubbery, came the sound of high-pitched squealing, and then two seconds later Hannibal, the yappy little gobshite of a terrier, emerged with a smile on his face. Some guard dog, he didn't even seem bothered that there was a total stranger in his back garden, and he just walked past me, flicked me the bird, said, 'Your rabbit is stew, Bud,' and casually wandered off to find some other innocent animal to maul.

The garden was littered with rabbit fur, where Hannibal's jaws had been wrapped around Budgie's waist, and from over the fence I could still hear One of Two's wailing lament for her dead rabbit. Things looked grim. I plunged into the undergrowth, searching for signs of a twitching near-dead beast, wondering how I was going to kill it off without having to present any of the evidence to One of Two. Slightly uncomfortable about wading through the shrubbery in someone else's garden, I nevertheless marauded around for a few minutes. Unable to find anything, and fearing being picked off by sniper fire from our neighbour's bedroom window, I legged it back over the fence and faced the tears and recriminations from my eldest spawn.

TPCKAM and I did our best, telling her that Budgie might still be alive, and that there was no body yet discovered to confirm the presumed execution. Two of Two wasn't helping matters by wandering around saying excitedly, "Is he dead? Is there blood? What does his body look like? Did you hear the squealing?" Our babysitter turned up, and he and I set off in a delegation to the neighbour to try and effect officially approved entry to their garden so that we might search for Budgie without fear of being taken out by a well-placed bullet in the napper. Unfortunately I'm not the friendliest looking bloke, while our babysitter was dressed in army combats and had just had his head shaved into a Mohawk. They weren't for letting us in, although they did go and search the area themselves, setting off with the ominous words, 'If Hannibal saw a rabbit he would have killed it.'

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, TPCKAM was fearing the worst, waiting for the two emissaries of the opposition to unearth the twitching and bloodied, near-dead bunny, and so she sent One of Two and Two of Two off to search our garden to give them something to do. I was just contemplating whether or not we should do a sweep of the general neighbourhood, knocking on countless doors and asking total strangers if we might trample all over their plantlife in the hope of unearthing a wounded bunny, when the cry went up from over the fence that Budgie had been found. He had fled back through the hole in the fence with such speed that no one had seen him, and was finally found quivering and very, very scared in the spider-laden area under the stairs.

Budgie was examined for wounding and rendering of flesh, but it appears that the only scars will be psychological. Otherwise, Hannibal the ineffective rabbit-killing muppet, managed to grab a lot of hair and little else. And, in the cold and calm light of day, it was obvious that the squealing sound was Hannibal biting his squeaky toy, in a pathetic, testosterone-laden attempt to have dominion over something, seeing as the rabbit had managed to leg it.

And now, while Budgie the Netherland Dwarf is firmly back in his cage, so am I.

Next week I give the rabbit a bath beneath a dodgy light fitting.

Fleeced

It's been a few weeks. My dream of writing a blog entry every day remains insanely far-fetched. Been back at work on the upcoming blockbuster 'The Haunting of Barney Thomson', after my very own Fanny Stevenson did a Jekyll & Hyde number on the initial draft. Not that I threw the laptop on the fire after TPCKAM had trashed the last sixty pages of the novel, but only because it was late May, the weather was ferociously hot and we didn't have a fire on. Otherwise my ancient Advent 7011 would have been tossed casually into the smouldering ashes of oblivion. A few weeks later, and now The Haunting of Barney Thomson has emerged on the other side, without the eight foot spectral lizard. Some might think that's a good thing. Fortunately, having had to choose between two book covers, one of which featured lizard eyes in the finger holes on a pair of scissors, I had already chosen against it. Just as well really. The Haunting of Barney Thomson remains on track to be the bestselling book in the Barney Thomson series......this autumn.

Usually, in the real publishing world, books - particularly fiction - are finished far in advance of the publiction date. However, in the world of Barney Thomson, it seems perfectly plausible to still be writing the book and expect to get it out in less than three months' time.

We are in the final few weeks of school. There seems to have been a collective agreement amongst all the departments in the school that the pupils should be doing NO WORK WHATSOEVER for the last several weeks. Why teach them anything when they can be doing cool stuff, hopefully involving the parents, EVERY DAY? Next week - which will only feature five school days, like any other - the parents have been asked to attend/contribute to a sports day, another sports day, a performance of Anthony & Cleopatra by nine year olds - OH MY GOD! - helping to set-up for the performance of Anthony & Cleopatra, an Egyptian lunch, a piano concert and a graduation ceremony. A graduation ceremony, you're thinking, I didn't realise your kids were eighteen?? They're not. Oh, ok, I didn't realise they were eleven and going up to high school. Wrong again...

The wee man is seven. He's graduating. To become eight.

What is the matter with these people?! You don't graduate from seven to eight. You move grudgingly from seven to eight. You leave primary two, you trudge into primary three. You don't graduate. But what the hell, we're in an English system, designed by consultants to look like it's American. Why pass up the chance to parade your kids on a stage when you can celebrate mediocrity? TPCKAM can remember at the end of term singing something like 'Keep moving on, dum-de-dum, and before you know it you'll be at the bus stop' or somerthing like that, and off they walked into the next classroom along the corridor. I can't remember doing anything at the end of the school year to acknowledge the fact that it was the end of the school year, other than walk out the gate for the last time in seven weeks. Nowadays they have a ceremony. I expect Two of Two to get the "Most Likely To Play Football For Scotland" accolade in the yearbook, if only because there are no other Scots in his class.

And it's not all suddenly happening next week. We've already been at two concerts, turned down the chance to help on a variety of outings, TPCKAM has read to the class during Book Week and today I went to the geographical museum and the zoo with One of Two's class. School hell. The school ought to put us on a retainer, but they don't use money, they just use guilt. Them and the kids in cahoots.

"Please, please can you come into the school and teach us maths for a fortnight, dad? Please? Sung Hyun's dad comes to EVERYTHING, and he never shouts at him, and he buys him ice cream every day..."

"Bugger off!"

There was a concert the other day with twenty-nine different acts. Twenty-nine. When the programmes were handed out you could hear the collective groan from the parental body. The headmaster stood up and thanked the weather because it had stopped raining... He thanked the weather?... We were inside. Then the concert kicked off, and to the relief of everyone in attendance, it turned out that most of the twenty-nine acts were terrified wee kids playing the piano in public for the first time. Mostly they would race up to the instrument, then fly through one verse of Greensleeves or Like A Virgin as quickly as they could, before legging it for the safety of their mates. The whole thing was over in about fifteen minutes. (No one actually played Like A Virgin.)

We're also expected to be costumemakers for the little 'uns. One of Two needs her get-up to be Cleopatra's handmaiden. She wants to butcher one of my white t-shirts. Sure, I said, why not, it's well known that the ancient Egyptians got all their clothes from George at Asda and then cut them to their own design. Maybe you could do something with my kilt and a pair of scissors? Two of Two needs to be dressed as a simple peasant for his show the week after next. Whatever that means. His Armanis should be fake? He should have a beer bottle surgically attached to his face at seven in the morning?

Currently the simple peasant show is the last thing on the list before the school breaks up and the teachers get a well-earned rest from asking the parents to do all the work, but who knows what events will appear in the next week or two to fill up the first week in July? At the moment I should be able to meet my target attendance rate of around 60%, however should TPCKAM pull another Fanny and lob my latest draft fire-wards, then the final few days of school will be passed in a frenzy of last-minute rewrites, while my poor, wee, lonely children will scan the audience from the stage, seeing everybody else's father except theirs.

It's tough when you graduate from being seven.

Finally, I'd just like to make a warm, heartfelt vote of thanks to the weather, for turning bleak and miserable and reminding me of home.

Party, Party, Party...

We're in that time of the year, early summer, when our kids have their birthdays. The darkest of times. The tragedy of the weeks surrounding Two of Two's birthday, which was on Monday, are exacerbated by the fact that just about every kid in his class seems to have their birthday in the same month. Birthday parties round every corner. It's like some biblical plague, as a quick look at the Old Testament confirms:

Samuel 5:9 And it was so, that, after they had carried it about, the hand of the LORD was against the city with a very great destruction; and he smote the men of the city, both small and great, and declared that every first-born child would have a birthday EVERY DAY. And the Philistines declared, 'All right, enough already, take the stupid Ark back, we don't want it!'

I hate the kids' birthdays.

I don't mind them starting to ask for stuff as soon as they've ripped open their Christmas presents. I don't mind spending money. I don't mind buying them pointless pieces of crap, if they really really want a particular pointless piece of crap. And I'm quite happy to make a cake. What crawls under my skin like a malignant, creeping infestation, is the fact that they always want to include their friends in what they do. They want a party.

I start to get stressed about the birthday thing some time in April, at about the point when I realise that it's already too late to book a decent entertainer or party venue. I then spend the rest of the time leading up to their birthdays, offering them ANYTHING instead of having a party. Anything.

Me: You can have a year at Disneyland Florida with all the Coke and cheeseburgers you can eat.

Two of Two: Great, Dad! Can everyone else in my class come?

We almost succumbed to the party this year, even going along to the de rigueur party venue of the moment to establish if they had a free day. We discovered that they forced you to let them supply the food at fantastical rip-off prices, and if you wanted to make your own cake, you had to pay them for the privilege of bringing your own. YOU had to pay THEM if you made a cake... There's capitalism for you. We felt kind of bad, because obviously there are plenty of parents at the school who put up with this kind of diktat, but we told the wee man that the Party Venue was about to be sold to the Polish government and turned into a high security detention centre for suspected liberals, and that we'd have to come up with a plan Y.

Plan Y: We'd buy him a Nintendo DS, (so far we have steered well clear of the whole Nintendo/Playstation thing, instead buying presents that make him use his imagination or run about in the garden), and take him and a couple of friends to see Pirates of the Caribbean 3.

He jumped at Plan Y. In fact, we had him at the Nintendo, but thought we should at least have something involving his mates. Sadly, being a pair of complete suckers, by last Friday, the trip to the cinema with two wee friends to see Pirates 3 had become a trip with four of his friends to the cinema, followed by a mass sleepover at our place.

Anything to avoid an actual party situation.

The potential for disaster in taking five seven year-old children to see a 12-rated movie that lasts somewhere in the region of eight hours seemed huge, and the stress of that replaced the stress that had been removed by coming up with a party alternative.

And so, last Friday evening, TPCKAM and I crammed five wee boys into the car and headed off for the local shopping mall. (One of Two had sensibly gone to see her friends in New Zealand for the evening to get as far away from Dodge as possible.) On the face of it the odds don't sound too bad. Two adults, five kids. Two and a half kids each. There are plenty of parents who go out on their own with more than two and a half kids, there are teachers who take out groups of kids by the dozen, with only an underpaid classroom assistant for help.

The thing that makes it difficult in this situation is that out of the five kids, you have authority over one of them. The other four couldn't give a stuff who you are. You're just some boring parent. You are powerless, and entirely dependant on them selecting good behaviour as a lifestyle choice for the evening. The secret is to not let them know just how much power they have.

So, we pitched up at McDonald's fully expecting the entire thing to degenerate into a Die Hard-type situation, with Bruce Willis required to rescue all the other shoppers in the mall from this Rat Pack of marauding children.

Dinner - if you can call McDonald's dinner - passed uneventfully. We proceeded to the cinema and plied them with more junk food. The film eventually started and, with the exception of having to provide a bag of sweets somewhere in the middle to help them get through some of the love angst scenes, we made it to the end intact.

(We showed the wee man a picture of the Rolling Stones a couple of days later and said, that's Jack's dad from the movie, and he said, 'So he wasn't wearing make-up then?')

Having had the parental super-genius thought to buy them each a Pirates toy to play with when they got home, they happily gamboled around the house, with barely a passing glance at the carefully constructed and decorated birthday cake, finally settling down at around quarter to midnight. At the time I wondered if this was a ruse, whereby they all laid low for a few minutes to make us think they'd gone to sleep. However, they consequently proved at 0437hrs the following morning their complete inability to pretend to be quiet.

They charged into our bedroom en masse, asking if they could go and play in the back garden. At twenty-three minutes before five on a Saturday morning. We turned the tv on and manacled them to the sofa. At 0553hrs they decided to creep outside in an illicit, covert operation, intent on playing football in a surreptitious manner, a game cloaked in secrecy and subterfuge. By the time I got downstairs - around 0715hrs - they were back inside, and pretending that they'd been watching tv the whole time. It was as if nothing had happened. And if they hadn't spent forty minutes outside screaming their heads off, charging round the garden like hordes of Visigoths laying waste the armies of Rome, so that at 0612hrs the Polish Ministry of Defence declared a state of emergency, announcing that the capital was under attack by unnamed foreign forces, we might never have known they'd crossed the door.

The sleepover raced along, full-speed, to its conclusion. To be honest, when we have other people's kids over to stay I'm not that bothered if they enjoy themselves, it being of secondary importance to them NOT ENDING UP IN HOSPITAL. When the parents pitch up at the door to collect their kids, it's vital that you can hand the kid back by the scruff of the neck, unharmed. Anything else is a bonus. I'm not one to think, 'Well, your son's paralysed from the neck down, but at least he really enjoyed the movie...'

By 0930hrs on Saturday morning it was all over. The lad got his Nintendo, he'd seen the movie, he'd had four mates stay the night, none of them broke a leg... Part One of The Annual Apocalyptic Birthday Stress Disaster is over.

One down, one to go. Now we just have to deal with One of Two's expectation that she's having eight nine year-old girl's here for a sleepover at the beginning of July...

Summer...

It's been a couple of months since the last Kids, And Why You Shouldn't Eat More Than One For Breakfast. Speculation has understandably been rife as to the reason for the gap, and there have been all sorts of wild reports in the press. If you believe everything you read in the papers, here are the top five Reasons For Two Months of Inactivity From Scotland's Premier Blogging Super-Genius:

5. I had a bad motorcycle accident and have been recuperating at my farm in northern Poland.
4. I've been spending all my time finishing off the upcoming blockbuster novel, The Haunting of Barney Thomson, due for release in September 2007.
3. I had a classic rock star 'lost weekend', binge drinking with my grunge junky buddies in LA, before checking into the Betty Ford.
2. I was sent on a posting to Afghanistan, under the new Foreign Office money-saving policy, where they just send the spouse but not the officer.
1. I disappeared into the same temporal rift in space time that allowed those two mysterious crows to materialise in our attic a few months ago.

Well, some of the above is true, although it was my mobile phone which disappeared into the rift in space-time. However, the principal reason for two months of inactivity was that in the middle of March I went to Las Vegas and married Jennifer Lopez.

It didn't work out.

And so, here we all are, in Poland in May. Thirty degrees, not a breath of wind. Summer has arrived with its suffocating pillow of heat. The Gollum that I am, I spend my days in dark, shadowy corners, holding out for winter. Only seven months to go, if it comes at all.

We've done a fair bit of travelling recently. Some of the great European capitals. Berlin, London, Paris, Millport. Went to Berlin to see Bob Dylan. The family, while quite happily hopping aboard the train for the ride to Germany, all refused to attend the concert. Bob was ok. New to my Dylan addiction that I am, it was the first time I'd seen him. Stories are legion of Bob giving awful concerts, due to boredom or drink or lack of rehearsal. Equally, they say he can be mesmerizing. Sadly, in Berlin he was neither. He was ok. He stood there under his hat and croaked his way through sixteen songs, old and new. So, in the six months or so since my addiction became manifest, I've bought 18 albums, read the 750 page biography and seen him in concert. My family are regarding me strangely, but at least I have so far stopped myself writing him a letter starting, "Dear Bob, I'm not weird or anything, but I listen to your music ALL DAY. Would you like to read one of my books where lots of people get murdered?..."

The rest of the time we chalked off the sites of Berlin in three days. It took just a five minute stroll through Checkpoint Charlie to have 'Oliver's Army' in my head for the rest of the weekend. Must happen to everyone. We seemed to spend a lot of our time in Dunkin' Donuts, in that usual way that you do with kids. 'We'll trade you a trip to the Reichstag for a strawberry frosted with sprinkles...'

I took Two of Two to London to see a doctor about headaches. The wee man has suffered from migraines for a few years. Every so often it gets really bad, we get it checked out, we get told it's migraines, he lives with it. The Polish are a hypochondriac lot; that and the doctors all see the diplomatic community coming and start referring you all over the place in a self-perpetuating cycle of medical check-ups. The third guy in said, yep, probably migraines, but still, get an MRI, a catscan and a full frontal lobotomy just to make sure. And stick some leeches on his forehead for the time being just in case. So we fixed up an appointment in London to talk to someone we could take seriously. We saw a wonderful man who came straight out of the Hollywood book of English brain consultants. Grey-haired, bit of a wry laugh, glint in the eye, gentle sense of humour. He's got migraines, he said. Don't get his head opened up.

Thus comforted, we spent a classic father/son day wandering the streets of London. Ate ice cream, took a pedalo out on the lake in Regents Park, ate pizza, looked for toilets. He wanted burgers and war. So we visited Burger King and the Imperial War Museum. The burgers were fine. He walked into the Museum, immediately presented with that wonderful and eye-opening display of tanks and submarines and aircraft that whacks you in the face the minute you walk in, and said... 'I'm bored.' We never got to experience the trenches.

TPCKAM and I managed a weekend alone in Paris, to watch an amateur stage production of Il Est Toujours Minuit Pour Barney Thomson, which was great fun. That aside, we spent two days wandering the streets of Paris, enjoying being able to sit and have a coffee or wander around a small art gallery, without two wee faces looking up at us, demanding ice cream, a toilet, doughnuts or saying, 'Dad, Dad, we're bored, we want to do something mental to make you shout at us.'

Millport was Millport. It doesn't change. There didn't even seem to be any Poles there. They can't have found it yet. One of Two got sick and spent her two days sitting on the toilet. Two of Two got back to his grandmas before getting sick, and then proceeded to break all records for child vomitting in a ten hour period. Seriously, if there are records for that kind of thing, and it being a competitive world, there ought to be - the Nestle Child Vomitting Championships, brought to you in association with Domino's Pizza - he would be in with a shout. I doubt a body could physically vomit more than he managed to. And, of course, he started at ten in the evening, so he and I had a long, long sleepless night. Nowt worse than your kid being sick, and not being able to do anything about it. At two in the morning he started blaming me for his ails, because I was making him drink water every time. Perfect logic. He was throwing the water up, so if I wasn't making him drink it, then he wouldn't be being sick. It was ALL MY FAULT. So I didn't make him drink water the next time. Ten minutes later he threw up pure bile. Thereafter he drank water and removed me from his line of fire. He was still being sick the next day, and it took six days before he was back to the hundred mile and hour dervish that he usually is. Whatever it was, it was vicious. We're blaming Tony Blair.

The travels continue. Next up, a night in Krakow, a long weekend in Barcelona and two weeks at a Bhuddist paragliding retreat in Bhutan.

Only six more weeks of school before two months summer holidays, which is very exciting...

Pint Size Sporting Junkies Go Native

These are harrowing times for TPCKAM. Not only is she having to put up with my Bob Dylan addiction, but we’re also in the middle of the cricket world cup. The tournament already seems to have been going on for eons, yet just as normal competitions would be settling down to a bit of a knock-out phase and a headlong rush to the final, this tournament now slows down and extends into a long drawn-out period of almost a month, which will eliminate only half the teams left in the competition. By the time they get to the final, it’ll just about be time for next season’s football to start, the wildebeest will be heading south for the winter and Tony Blair will no longer be Prime Minister.
 
Ok, that last one was wishful thinking.
 
The kids, particularly Two of Two, have got the bug. Outside at all hours, cricket bat in hand, smacking tennis balls into the neighbour’s garden. (Since we’re not forward in ringing their doorbell, and they’re obviously waiting for the balmy days of summer to visit their back garden, there are now approximately three hundred of our tennis balls covering their lawn.) Two of Two is facing up to the kind of tough decision that faces most six year-olds at one time or another. Whether to be a professional footballer or professional cricketer when he grows up. It’s a tough call. I’ll do what I can do help him in this, although he’s starting to see through me. He had this conversation with his mother yesterday.
 
TPCKAM: When we’re rich your dad’s going to get…
Two of Two: A golf course in the back garden. I know… And a cricket net… And a full size football goal. Two of them.
(Long pause)
Two of Two (wistfully): It’s never going to happen. He needs to get a proper job. Like a footballer or a baseball player.
 
He was almost sounding mature until the line about the footballer or baseball player.
 
Saturday morning football continues, trapped indoors for one more week, despite the fully-fledged arrival of spring. The parents gather to watch in silence, the kids charge on the hoof for an hour. Thirty minutes of ball skills, followed by thirty minutes of stampeding around the hall, a herd of feral monsters, moving in packs, the ball a poor victim, the wounded antelope to the swooping vulture-fest that is the horde of first year warrior-beasts.
 
There is already ample evidence of the influence of watching the professionals at work. The dramatic fall and clutching of the leg; the quick look up and then return to the game when the referee is not forthcoming with the foul and their opponent’s yellow card; the headlong, exuberant rush back down the field after scoring a goal, airplane arms outstretched. The goal celebrations always end comically as they come face to face with equally ebullient teammates and realise that the next step in the process is to hug someone who isn’t your mum or dad. At this point the mimicry breaks down and some mysterious forcefield allows them to leap at each other without ever actually touching.
 
Not all the parents are silent. There is one mum, Mum X*, who constantly shouts at her poor son, Bumblestiltskin*, even when the ball’s out of play and he has no possible way to immediately influence proceedings. The poor kid must have a nightmare every week. Nobody else’s mum shouts at them. Clearly TPCKAM has shouting-at-her-son-while-he’s-playing-football tendencies, but I usually manage to keep her in check. Pity poor Bumblestiltskin though. ‘Come on, Bumblestiltskin!’ ‘Get stuck in, Bumblestiltskin!’ ‘Get up, Bumblestiltskin!’ On and on she goes, while the rest of the parents look embarrassed and drink their cappuccinos.
 
(*Names have been changed to protect the innocent.)
 
Meanwhile TPCKAM’s torment persists. Her life is one long sporting Hell. On Saturday she had to watch the wee man play football in the morning, a bit of Australia-South Africa in the afternoon, before switching to Scotland’s last breath triumph against Georgia. At some point in the evening, when I was switching between the England-Kenya cricket, Australian cricket, and the Israel-England footie, I looked up to see her standing in the doorway, head twitching uncontrollably, hair to the four corners, and clutching a double barrelled shotgun. ‘It’s you or the tv, I don’t care,’ she muttered darkly. Meekly I handed her the remote. That night the television showed only programmes of a gastronomic nature.
 
My strict policy of selective sport watching in order to not create fuss when really important stuff comes on, has gradually fallen by the wayside as the never-ending sporting seasons mount up. It now lies in tatters, splattered at the feet of the on-going cricket and football fest. It’s probably very common. You start out with good intentions, and before you know it you’re watching Dagenham & Redbridge versus Oxford United.
 
Men and woman. Sport. It’s just never going to work.
 
It’s interesting to watch two children grow up, a boy and a girl, and their intrinsic levels of sporting interest. Sure, One of Two was cheering with the rest of us when we scored the late winner against Georgia, but you could tell that it was just to be part of the crowd, doing what everyone else was doing. She didn’t care, not really.
 
Two of Two, however, was off round the room, aeroplane arms outstretched, bumping into furniture, a triumphant goal celebration. And, for him, a triumphant goal celebration which at last brought ultimate satisfaction, as he had his mum and dad to hug at the end of it.
 

And I looked, and behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Patches

Last summer, when One of Two started asking for a rabbit, we were advised by several people not to do it. Kids always get bored with rabbits, they said. Rabbits aren't particularly interactive. There's not a lot you can do with a rabbit other than stroke it, if it lets you, clean up its faeces, repair the wires that it chews and, if all else fails, eat it for your dinner. The kids will ignore the rabbit, and you'll be left looking after the furry wee creature the way you look after the kids. It'll be like having another, if very low-maintenance, child.

So, last summer we didn't so much talk One of Two out of getting a rabbit, we just ignored her. Seemed best. And then, as previously detailed on this page, I cracked just before Christmas, and Patches The Netherland Dwarf was brought into the family.

One of Two's relationship with Patches the Netherland Dwarf has gone through three distinct stages.

1. Regular wee girl with a pet stage. Interested, concerned, doing her duty, clearing up, feeding etc.

2. A reluctant keeper of the flame, usually indulging in three or four hour volcanic fights with her mother every time the subject of taking care of the rabbit came up.

3. Forgetting that the rabbit exists.

The sages were right. Of course. Didn't really think it would be any different, but I suppose I was sucked into trying the anthropological experiment just in case of some miracle. Hasn't happened. One of Two, while being in every other respect a marvellous and individual wee creature, has absolutely hit the nail on the head of cliche when it comes to leporine-caregiving. Couldn't give a stuff. And so, as the Parent Who Spends His Day In The House, rabbit duties have fallen to me.

It's fortunate - and I suppose there was some aforethought on my part here - that rabbits are low, low maintenance. You feed them lettuce and seeds and stuff. Rabbit food. You let them out to bounce around your living room. You clean their cage out every few days, and here is the big advantage of rabbits. Their excrement. That's why rabbits are ok pets. If they splurged out minor cow pats, if they deposited several hundred mini-splats of moist faeces every day, you'd have them in the stewing
pot before the end of the first week. But those hard pellets of crap - which could severely wound a man if fired from an airgun - present few problems in the stench and cleaning department.

And so, Patches the Netherland Dwarf and I have been thrown together, like survivors of a plane crash on a desert island.

Last week we were in the pet shop buying rabbit stuff. The kids came running up excitedly and said, 'Can we get a mouse?'

And at this point I quoted Samuel L Jackson's 'Tyrany of evil men' speech from Pulp Ficton, and chased them from the shop, pistol whipping them with pellets of rabbit shit fired from a ShinSung Career Dragon Slayer .50 Air Rifle.

A Short Note On Bob Dylan

Millions of people have been listening to Bob Dylan for very many decades. Since not long after the middle of the last century in fact. However, despite the Traveling Wilburies and the Concert for Bangla Desh, I’ve never been one of them. Never bought into the whole Bob Dylan thing. I remember a guy I worked with in Glasgow telling me about seeing him in concert; the Bobster came on, either bored or really badly needing to take a pish, played all his songs at three hundred miles an hour, a few seconds and no conversation between each one, and then he hoofed it for the exit and never returned. The guy was forgiving of this, as people seem to be when they see Bob on a bad night. He has that much of a thing about him. Me, I thought it was kind of mental to want to listen to that and went back to my Beatles albums, safe in the knowledge that they would never disappoint me in concert.
 
This was all to change one warm and bright summer’s evening last July. It had been a humid afternoon, and as the sun sank to the west of the eastern European sky, the early evening insects buzzed and swooped and bit, forcing the kids indoors. We were having dinner with our friends Jon and Emma, and as the wine flowed, the conversation turned to the fact that Jon could play the guitar and the mandolin, that I could strum a guitar and play the piano, and that maybe we should form a band. The Mabel Rankin Beat Quartet was born. (The quartet, I should add, is completed by two invisible llamas called Brian, not the women.) We agreed to perform at the embassy club ten days later, and then rushed to put together a set of some description. Like all fledging superstar beat combos, we started with cover versions, and Jon fatefully introduced a couple of Bob Dylan songs.
 
Time passed. The band stayed together – in fact, the Mabel Rankin Beat Quartet debut album, The Year Of The Kitchen, will be released later this summer – although so far there has only been one more sell-out gig and we’re still some way short of a stadium tour. Crucially however, at some point in the autumn I said to Jon, ‘Wouldn’t mind hearing those Bob Dylan songs.’
 
I was hooked, and the die had been cast. At Christmas I received my first two Dylan albums and have since bought eight more. Only thirty-four more to collect. Bob has become the fifth member of our family, a constant presence on the cd player. However, like introducing a new child at this late stage, or an unwanted pet like a warthog or a jellyfish, this has not proven popular with the other three members of the family. Every new album purchase is greeted with groans and cries of despair – and we haven’t even got close to the low point albums of the 80’s yet.
 
Every evening as we sit down to dinner, there’s a dash to the cd player to be the one who gets to choose the music. Usually some blood is spilled. Brawn normally wins out – something I’ll have in my favour for a few years yet – although sometimes craft and cunning is triumphant. Last week One of Two set up a gun emplacement, put on her goggles, and sat behind her 7.62 mm GAU-17 gatling gun. I had to back off, and that night, as we ate our spaghetti hoops and popcorn, we listened to Natasha Bedingfield.
 
(Stumbled across Natasha Bedingfield’s ‘I Wanna Have Your Babies’ video the other day… Oh my God! Couldn’t somebody have said? Eventually, I suppose, it was inevitable that someone would surpass the last thirty seconds of The Girl Is Mine for toe-curling embarrassment.)
 
A few weeks ago, while perusing Bob Dylan.com, I discovered his latest tour dates. Well, I said to the family a few minutes later, we’ve been meaning to go to Berlin anyway. Despite much cajoling, while they have all agreed quite happily to hop on a train to the German capital in the first week in May, I could persuade none of them that they wanted to come with me and spend a Thursday evening watching Bob. Not even if he plays his songs really quickly and then dashes off to the toilet.
 
So, Bob is probably here to stay, although I did hear TPCKAM on the phone the other night trying to have me booked into the Betty Ford clinic. When that failed she searched for the nearest branch of Bob Dylan Anonymous, but that turned out to be in Novosibirsk. I expect, as with all unreasonable obsessions, the madness will fade with time, and we can go back to listening to Matt Munro and Perry Como.
 
For now, Bob is King, except when the mujahaddin kids get to the heavy artillery before me, and bar my way to the cd player. And on those dark and grim evenings, we have to listen to Girls Aloud, Avril and JoJo.