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.