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.

A Weekend Amidst The Dead Leopards

Last month we took the kids to a family hotel in the lake district of north east Poland. It’s not too far from Warsaw, but because the roads throughout Poland haven’t been upgraded since some time in the middle 18th century, it took almost four hours to get there by car. Timewise it’s the equivalent of driving north from Glasgow and getting to Helmsdale. Distance-wise it’s the equivalent of heading north from Glasgow and stopping on the A9 some way short of Aviemore.
 
A friend of ours got in our car a few weeks ago and said, ‘Look! You’ve still got tapes! I remember them.’ Our car is from the last century and still has tapes. I’m sure a lot of people still have tapes, although it’s been a while since I was in such a car. So, eschewing MP3 technology and the rest, I had made up a tape before heading off on the journey. The phrase ‘made up a tape’ has sadly become quite antediluvian. The kids don’t know that yet, but one day I’ll say excitedly ‘I’ve made up a tape’ in front of their friends, and everyone will fall about laughing and start calling me grandad. It works for now.
 
We drove to the Hotel Golebiewski in the town of Mikolajki, specifically chosen because of its enormous indoor waterpark. And therein lay the key to the next three nights and four days. It was a waterpark-fest. The days were split thus: breakfast – waterpark for two hours – talk about going back to the waterpark – lunch – talk about going back to the waterpark – waterpark for two hours – dinner – talk about going to the waterpark the following day – bed.
 
The hotel has other family amenities. Ten-pin bowling, amusement arcade, ice rink. The hotel brochure has photographs of two ice rinks in it. One is the small, claustrophobic, pillar-strewn ice rink of the hotel…the other is of a large, wonderful, spacious ice rink, which is not in the hotel. It’s not entirely clear why there’s a picture of this ice rink in the brochure, other than to display what an ice rink should look like. There are also summer sports, illustrated by a picture of golfers putting on a cow field.
 
We arrived on a Saturday along with a large chunk of the rest of the country, who all pitched up in their Audis and BMWs. Perhaps there are special roads, reserved specifically for the Audis and BMWs, with their sleek German design and their integral cd players. There were a lot of tattoos on show, much evidence of leopard print clothing. We stood out from the crowd, partly because we didn’t speak the language, but mostly due to the fact that we had not killed any fake animals in order to clothe our children. However, we didn’t stand out quite as much as the Naomi Campbell-esque thing on display with her older white boyfriend. Stick thin, with the kind of comically inflated artificial breasts which require their own seat on an aeroplane.
 
This is the kind of place where the schism between parents and kids is at its greatest. However, having made the decision to go there, you pretty much have to put up with it. They want to swim, go bowling and spend money in the amusement arcade. Occasionally they’ll agree to go and eat. As adults, you spend a couple of hours in a place like this and want to get out for a walk. Kids never want to go for a walk. At least, not when there are such alternative attractions.
 
We scheduled in a walk for the first day, and a drive to the forest the next. They both complained bitterly throughout, One of Two in particular sobbing about how we were ruining her life. Not for a second do they see reason, not for an instant will they allow themselves any thought of anyone else. ‘We’re awake for a sixteen hour day. Fifteen hours of that day we’ll do what you want, you just have to do what we want for that one hour…’
 
Seems logical, seems like it should be easy enough to agree to. Not a chance. Total selfishness. And you know, you just have to suck it up. This is the true essence of childish behaviour. In adults we tend to characterize childishness as an inane sense of humour.
 
Unmitigated self-absorption, that’s childishness.
 
But, you’ve taken them to a hotel with a waterpark so they can have a great few days, and there’s just no point in arguing over a walk and ruining the weekend. You walk, you put up with the whining, you hope they get distracted long enough by the snow or the ice to forget that they’re not supposed to be enjoying themselves, and then you crawl back inside, hit the waterpark, trust they don’t get a fungal foot infection, cry havoc! and let slips the dogs of exuberance.
 
The food was worth remarking on. Buffet breakfast. Rows and rows of food, none of which you’d actually want to eat before about five o’clock in the afternoon. I should know better by now, but I’m continually amazed by the continental European’s ability to eat stewed vegetables in jelly and boiled eggs in pink mayonnaise for breakfast. Fish in aspic, raw carrot and cucumber in yogurt, strong cheeses, cold spicy meats, chocolate biscuits, Swiss roll. Some of them might, just might, be edible, but not for breakfast.
 
At the end of one of the rows stood a lone, forlorn figure of a chef, a wee woman making scrambled egg. An actual, identifiable breakfast food. We hit the scrambled egg stall every morning.
 
The weekend passed by. The kids said that it was the best hotel they’d ever stayed in. We said goodbye to the leopard-skin contingent and drove the short distance home in four and a half hours, stopping on the way at the kind of greasy diner that would make you pine for a Pot Noodle.
 
A successful weekend, another part of Poland chalked off the list. But one day, one day soon, we’re going to have to face the seven hour drive to the beach.

The Two Crows Mystery

Some time last year we had two hooded crows in the attic. Two hooded crows in the attic? you’re thinking. Well, that doesn’t sound so strange. However, it does bare closer examination.
 
I was sitting in our spare bedroom/office/junk room, either writing with panache, or trawling through the internet looking at sport. Can’t remember which. Suddenly there came a most fearsome stramash from the attic. Thrashing, bangs and crashes, a rancorous uproar. It being broad daylight, I immediately prepared to venture up there. Having seen the Exorcist, I don’t think any of us want to hear strange noises in the attic at two o’clock in the morning. As the nominal ‘Dad’ in the family, I just can’t delegate that kind of activity. ‘There’s something strange in the attic, kids! Could be a burgler, a poltergeist or some other demonic spirit, or perhaps a psychotic serial killer. I’m staying down here with a cup of tea, you kids grab your plastic light sabers and go and investigate.’ They wouldn’t have it. TPCKAM probably wouldn’t accept it either. And there are no lights up there, but lots of windows, so the during the day thing was perfect.

Even so I was aware, as I opened the door and walked tentatively up the stairs, that malevolent possession junkies don’t just work at night. I was circumspect.
 
Up the stairs, braced for an attack, I looked into the dark corners of the attic. There are windows all round, so it is very bright during the day, but attic corners are always in shadow.
 
However, there’s obviously no tension here, because I chose to reveal what was in the attic right at the start. Calculated choice. If I had built and built, and then said, ‘IT WAS A COUPLE OF BIRDS!’ everyone would have been disappointed that it hadn’t turned out to be the evil spirit of King Ra, and that ever since I’ve been spitting green bile and indulging in constant showy displays of head spinning.
 
So, the story itself isn’t that interesting. I opened up a lot of windows and spent about an hour shooing the crows in the direction of freedom, and finally they worked it out and flew off. They didn’t speak to me, we didn’t take them on as pets, we didn’t eat them for dinner.
 
The interesting question is how they got there in the first place. Two crows in the attic. We don’t use the attic for anything other than storage and walking dusty footprints through the rest of the house, so no one had been up there to open a window. All windows locked. The only other obvious answer is under the eaves. That’s what one always says in the bird-in-the-attic situation. Under the eaves.
 
Not that I know much about architecture, but in this case I don’t think under the eaves really cuts it. We don’t really seem to have eaves, not in the classical eaves sense, and it all seems pretty solid up there. And there just don’t seem to be big holes in the roof. Two crows at the same time we’re talking about here. Crows are pretty big. In the last two years there’s not been so much as a sparrow in the attic. If there were holes under the eaves or anywhere else, with a ‘Birds, This Way’ sign, there’d have been all sorts in there. But nothing in just under two years, except two crows at the same time.
 
Wasn’t the windows, and I know I haven’t exactly scientifically proven it, but not under the eaves either. What does it leave? Only one option.
 
A fracture in the space time continuum. It’s the only alternative. In our loft. No wonder the crows were squawking and a bit upset. There they must have been, quietly flying through the blue skies, quite possibly in 15th century France, and whumpf! out of nowhere, they get plucked from some countryside idyll and dumped in a 21st century attic in an eastern European capital. You’re going to be pissed off, aren’t you?
 
So, all things considered, we were pretty lucky. We got two crows. What if we’d got a couple of diplodocus, or a pair of alligators, or David Tennant?
 
The question is, was it a temporary distortion in space-time, or is there a specific place in the corner of our loft that is a permanent time portal? I’m not that keen to find out myself, but I have tried to get the kids to go up there to see if they suddenly disappear. And, despite telling them that it could be a big adventure, like Jack and Annie or the Magic Key, neither of them has taken me up on it so far.
 
The Two Crows Mystery will possibly never be solved…