The Visigoths Are back, And This Time They're A Washing-Up Liquid

The Case For The Return of Harry Potter

2008-10-13T10:34:00.001+02:00

These are grim times, with the financial world on the verge of collapse. Two years ago, when banks were handing out mortgages to anyone who asked, when credit card companies were upping limits on a whim and people were running up enormous personal debt, when house prices were skyrocketing to absurdly over-priced levels and financial companies all over the globe were trading wildly in loans and debt, who could possibly have foreseen that it was all going to come crashing to a disastrous halt?

Apart from EVERYBODY ON PLANET EARTH.

There is a solution however, and it doesn’t require huge investment in the banking world, and it doesn’t require Gordon Brown to swan around the planet, using anti-terror laws against other governments, as if he wasn’t one of the ones to blame for it all in the first place. The solution rests in the hands of one person, and one person alone.

What the world needs now is the return of Harry Potter. It needs the alternative wizarding world into which it can escape; it needs the boost to the markets and economy that would come from the knowledge that the highest grossing literary series of all time was coming back; in short, the world needs to know that there is a future.

Ask yourself this question: When did you first hear the term credit crunch? The answer: July 2007. Now, ask yourself another question. When did the Harry Potter series come to an end? Do you feel the hairs standing on the back of your neck? Yep, July 2007. The parallels are almost supernatural.

This isn’t asking some tired old group of rock stars to reform; it’s not forcing people who used to work together but who now hate each other to get back into the same room; it isn’t trying to revive some failed literary maestro who did his best work between the wars. This is asking a woman at the very peak of her creative genius to continue the work which has enthralled the planet.

The country, and the world, needs JK Rowling. What is required is for a group of men in suits from the government to rock up at JK’s Perthshire two up, two down and put the following case to her. (Well, when I say men in suits, it would probably be better if we had a group of Dumbledores rather than a collective of Cornelius Fudges.)

· In these dark days, people need the boost that would come from the news that Harry would be back.
· Even though it would be a couple of years before that first book of the next seven would appear, the knowledge that it was coming would have a remarkably positive effect on the psyche of the planet. It is fundamental to human nature to need something to look forward to.
· Markets would rise, consumer and business confidence would suddenly start to recover.
· With another series of seven books, output of original HP novels and motion picture events would be guaranteed until almost 2020. The financial markets could look forward with confidence.
· We all know that JK did not leave that Resurrection Stone lying lost in the forest for nothing. She left the possibility that the whole thing could one day be revived. She may have thought that it would be something for the future, a project for fifteen or twenty years time. But no, she must be persuaded. The time is now.
· The entire future of mankind depends on JK Rowling writing more Harry Potter books.
· No pressure.
· If she refuses, the government might like to introduce an act of Parliament - they could call it The Return Of Harry Potter Act (2008) - forcing her to write another seven books. (If the Act doesn’t work with JK, the government could tag on an anti-terrorism clause and use it to imprison small children who hadn’t brought back their library books.)

The world stands on the brink of cataclysm. One woman has the power in her hands to save civilisation from bankruptcy and moral ruin.

Bloodied, Broken And Everything Else

2008-10-09T10:01:00.001+02:00

There’s a scene in The Long Midnight of Barney Thomson where there is a large queue of customers, none of whom wish Barney to cut their hair, and they all sit and shake their heads as he desperately tries to get one of them to acquiesce. It’s a slight exaggeration of a scene I witnessed in my local barberhsop a long time ago.

In the middle of scene there is the following line: Beaten, but not yet bloodied, Barney nodded.

I noticed this yesterday whilst proof-reading. Beaten but not yet bloodied? What does that mean? That he’d had a heart attack but at least there was no blood? Obviously I’d meant to write bloodied but not yet beaten.

At first I presumed I’d copied it wrongly when I’d been transcribing the book into its current form. However, a quick check of the Piatkus edition showed that it’s been there all along. So I originally wrote the line in the summer of 1995, tucked away from the African heat in the air conditioned Arctic circle of our apartment on Boulevard de la Republique in Dakar. I read the book who knows how many times back then and never noticed. I re-wrote it a year later and never noticed. It was picked up for publication. The editor never noticed. The copy editor never noticed. The proof reader(s) never noticed. Maybe some readers noticed and thought, this guy’s an idiot... And then I converted the book back to its original state and didn’t notice. And now, on my fifth, and last, proof read, I finally noticed it.

In itself, it’s a point of little significance. The worrying thing is how many more there are out there. The Long Thomson of Barney Midnight, coming to a shop near you.

There was an item on the Yahoo news page the other day headlined, Man Reads All 59million Words Of Oxford English Dictionary. I stopped myself clicking on it. It’s the kind of story that you start reading, then halfway through you stop and think, I’m reading this... Without reading it I thought - because I was still thinking about it - that maybe there was some other remarkable feat attached to it, such as he did it underwater holding his breath the entire time, or he did it while sailing solo across the Atlantic in a sink. As headlines go it seems to be on a par with those little personal headlines that make up everyone’s life on a daily basis. Man Burns Toast. Man Goes Two Days Without Shouting At Kids. Man Falls Asleep Watching TV.

I finally cracked and read the story. It was a story about a guy who’d read the whole of the OED. The nub came at the end. He’d written a book about it... Man, 38, Reads Long Non-Narrative Book, Writes Own Book.

There’s the thing. It wasn’t actual news. It wasn’t a story about a guy who’d read the whole of the OED, had just finished it that day and wanted everyone to know. It was a story about a guy who’d written a book. Another ten seconds’ research revealed that the book had in fact first been published in July this year.

So why is it being presented as news in the second week in October? Why were some of the news stories - I ended up reading more than one - saying that he'd spent the last year reading it? The guy hadn’t just read the OED, he’d obviously read it long enough ago to write a book about it, get the book edited, copy edited, proof-read etc. (hopefully better than The Midnight of Long Barney Thomson), placed into the schedules, printed, distributed to bookbuyers and reviewers, published. The dude didn’t finish reading the OED this week.

The only answer is that this is how news works. Publicists write copy, they send it to news organisations, the news people pick stuff up and put it out as news because they’re so strapped for time that they can’t check for any actual stories, and before you know it, Bob’s your Builder.

Man Writes Blog About Man Writing Book About Reading The Whole of The OED.

1 of 800,000

2008-10-03T19:02:00.000+02:00

I was discussing blogging with one of my ethnic Polish friends (EPF) - actually, I only have one EPF - and she suggested that I could write about Poland. During the course of the discussion, I realised that in many ways I'm not cut out for blogging. I don't want to give strong opinions, to try to provoke a reaction; I'm very wary about writing a blog on a subject about which someone out there is going to know more than me. I don't have the inner spunk to cope well with someone writing to tell me I'm an idiot. It wouldn't take many e-mails like that to have me retreating to a dark cave to hide for months amongst the troglodytes of pusillanimity.

(So, for example, when I wrote my blog about how the Israeli/Palestinian conflict could be solved if America gifted Israel a large part of Texas, so that Israel could move to North America, lock stock and religious artefact, freeing the land for the the rest of the Middle East to fight over, well, I just deleted it...)

So, I always end up writing about subjects that I'm guaranteed to know better than anyone. My kids, my books, the way I work, what kind of marmalade I had on my toast that morning. Writing with a giant safety net. (Which is probably pusillanimous in itself.) Someone can still write to tell me they think my blog is mince or that I'm a fat bastard or that I can't string two sentences together. But they can't say, no way did your kid say that, or Thick Sliced Olde English, pull the other one, chief!

So, for the moment, I will probably just stick to doing what I do. I'll write about Poland one day. One day in the near future. However, back on my home planet...

Spent yesterday morning working on a reading to put up on YouTube for Lost in Juarez. However, after a lot of fruitless tinkering at the Mac, I ditched it all. A few hours down the stank or all part of the process?

I first of all created a nice introduction for it using the start of Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues, the song where the Juarez lines comes from. Managed to fade the song out and blend in a suspenseful backing track, almost like you'd get in a movie. However, the next bit, the reading, was rubbish. And of course, I couldn't use Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues anyway, because I'd get sued. If anyone ever noticed it. But it would be pointless to do it of no one noticed it, and then costly if they did. So I ditched Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues and replaced it with the ring of an old-fashioned telephone, which then blended into a creepy, suspenseful backing track. It kind of worked, but not as well as Tom Thumb. But then the reading was still rubbish, so I ditched it all anyway.

If I'd used the actual Dylan line for the title, the book would have been called Lost In The Rain In Juarez, which isn't nearly so snappy. Have just listened to the Nina Simone version, and interestingly - (well, this is probably stretching the definition of interesting) - Nina doesn't mention the rain in Juarez, she just sings When you're lost in Juarez... and changes the phrasing so it fits.

I may have another go at the reading next week, but I feel that this was a small window to do it, before an avalanche of other things require attending to, so it probably won't happen.

Off to Krakow for a long weekend, to play the How Many Drunk Brits Can You See In The Old Town Square game.

That was sort of writing about Poland.

The Laws of Gravity

2008-10-02T14:46:00.000+02:00

TPCKAM bought a magazine at the airport this week in case the chic-lit she'd taken to read on the plane was mince. She brought the magazine home last night. National Geographic Adventure. Tag-line: Dream it. Plan it. Do it.

There's an advert in the middle somewhere, a full page, at the centre of which is a photo of a mountain biker, at least thirty yards off the ground, obviously having just ridden off a mountain, with the sun setting behind him. The line at the top reads, The laws of gravity don't apply to euphoria.

Hmm, wonder what that could be an advert for. A bike? Too mundane. An adventure holiday? Not even close. Some illegal performance enhancing drug perhaps?

It's an advert for a biscuit. Well, an energy bar, but the effect is much the same. It is apparently, the energy bar nature intended. The energy bar nature intended has been registered, so you can't go using that phrase at home or you'll have an east coast lawyer on your tail.

The laws of gravity don't apply to euphoria. May be. But I bet they apply to energy bars.

Which brings me to The Final Cut. Started the long process of re-writing the book today. Didn't actually do any work on it, but I did download it onto my laptop, which will allow me to start it at some unspecified date in the very near future.

The story, first written as Limited Edition, is set amongst a firm of marketing executives in London, bright young things who come up with lines such as the laws of gravity don't apply to euphoria when they're talking about biscuits. At the start of every chapter there is a small piece of marketing copy for some imaginary product, which may or may nor be related to some product discussed in that chapter. Having read through these again, four years after I first wrote them, I'm kind of disappointed that they're not as funny as I thought they were in the first place. And certainly, there's nothing as stupid as the laws of gravity don't apply to euphoria when talking about a biscuit. I have some work to do.

Nevertheless, here's one that I still like:

Winnie The Pooh
Your kids have seen the films, they’ve watched the classic animated tv shows, they’ve watched the puppet tv shows, they’ve watched the computer generated tv shows, they’ve read the books, they’ve played with the soft toys, they’ve used the toothbrushes, they’ve worn the t-shirts and pyjamas and trousers, they’ve ruined your PC whilst using the CD-Roms, they’ve played with the gazillion or so cheap plastic toys, they’ve eaten the food, they’ve eaten off the plates, they’ve eaten with the cutlery. Now, Rolls Royce, in conjunction with the Disney Corporation, introduce the new range of Winnie The Pooh Heavy Engineering Equipment, including generators, diggers, plant machinery and power tools. Starting from the low low price of $17,000, Winnie The Pooh Heavy Engineering Equipment is all you’ll ever need around the building site.

The Edinburgh Fringe

2008-09-30T14:46:00.001+02:00

Contemplating taking Barney Thomson to the Edinburgh Fringe next year. Having said that, I've contemplated taking Barney to the Fringe on several previous occasions and have yet to do it, however it could be that the time is right.

I did the official Edinburgh Book Festival in August 2002. TPCKAM wrote to the director, Catherine Lockerbie, and asked if they'd take me. I'd been interviewed by Lockerbie for the Scotsman when the first Barney came out, and it may well have been her who wrote their review with the wonderfully quotably line "Gleefully macabre...hugely enjoyable black burlesque." I've used that one a few times since.

I appeared with Chris Brookmyre and Mark Billingham, and I was definitely the undercard, but it was fun. I didn't think I was too mince, however they haven't had me back. I ask every year, the first time they said no, but since they've just ignored me. I guess I don't blame them, it's not like they don't have a host of magnificent authors queuing up to appear. I need them a lot more than they need me. Still, it's hard not to harbour a grudge, and if ever the situation arises where I turn out to be the bad guy in a Bond movie who steals a nuclear submarine and targets somewhere populated with a nasty missile, I'll probably stick Charlotte Square on my list of potential destructees.

Anyway, in an effort to rise above petty jealousy and thoughts of reprisal, every year I contemplate doing the Fringe. Now, I don't contemplate sitting in a seat, reading from a selection of my books, while the audience - if there is one - doses quietly in the cheap seats. Although reading is obviously what I did at the Festival all those years ago, the thought of listening to an author reading his own book just seems slightly barmy to me, and really not a lot of fun.

My idea for the Fringe would be to perform The Long Midnight of Barney Thomson as a one man, one hour show. I'd narrate some bits, play all the parts when appropriate and when action was required. I think it would work as a show. Whether I'd be able to pull it off, thespianly, I'm not sure, but it's something I'd feel I'd have to try for myself.

The thought of appearing on stage for an hour doesn't scare me particularly, but it doesn't excite me too much either. I'd be doing it as a career move, to try to advance the Barney Thomson franchise, to make it more marketable. And so, every year, I talk myself out of it on the basis that if at some point in the six months between me booking the hall and actually having to perform the thing, something interesting like a movie deal or big publishing deal came up, I'd be stuck doing something that I didn't want to, and didn't need to.

There comes a time, however, when I have to give up on the big movie or publishing deal. Face the unacceptable facts. The movie might happen, but it's not around the corner. The publishing deal just isn't going to happen. If Barney's going to advance from the Lower Blue Square South 5th Division, then I'm the one who has to try to generate the interest. And so, once again, as I regularly do at this time of year, I'm contemplating the Fringe.

Contemplating spending a few months working on a stage adaptation, contemplating several months rehearsing, contemplating getting up on a stage for a week. With no people in the audience. There's a thought, and another thing to cultivate my inhibitions every year.

This time, though, I might just do it. For the moment, however, I'll probably just have a cup of tea and think about it for a bit longer.

The Long Rewrite of Barney Thomson

2008-09-29T12:54:00.000+02:00

Working through the final proof read of The Long Midnight of Barney Thomson. Have announced the publication date of the new version - 15th November 2008 - and placed the order at the printers. Now all I need to do is get the text straight and get the cover... The cover is due any day, apparently. I'm protected from writing to my cover designer and asking for an ETA by the fact that she doesn't speak much English and any e-mail would likely just lead to confusion. So I do my bit and will have to wait for the cover before I can do the high-budget promo for YouTube.

Have disconcertingly found rather a large hole in the plot, which I've never noticed previously. Well, not so much a hole in the plot. More of a goof. In the beginning everyone is talking about the serial killer who's on the loose. However, the killer has just announced him/herself by dispatching a body part of the victim to their family. With the obvious exception of the family who get their son's head returned to them, how does anyone actually know that any of the victims are dead? There are no bodies, obviously, as they're all hidden in a freezer somewhere. There might be a reasonable presumption that the victims are dead, however it's not a presumption in the book, it's taken as fact.

So, having spotted this, it would be an easy enough thing to alter for the re-release. However, despite changing the tense and the dialect, I feel that this would be going too far. Having written two film scripts based on the book and investigated all sorts of different plot threads, I could completely rewrite the entire thing.

I had this great idea of making Barney's mum much more of a Nigella type character, with a great joy in food and recipes and taste. She would get Barney to taste test all her stuff, maybe she'd even be a celebrity chef. Only with hindsight would we realise that Barney had been taste testing human flesh, and even then we wouldn't be absolutely sure that was what he'd been doing.

I love that very cinematic idea, which would also have been great for the book. The Long Midnight of Barney Thomson is a good story, but it could have been developed much more. However, I have to draw the line somewhere, and when deciding to reprint, long ago made the decision to draw that line at changing the story in any way.

And so I will treat the minor goof regarding the presumption of death on the part of the police and the media in the same way and leave it as originally written, as I will with anything else that occurs to me as I go through.

And so sadly, 'Is this your husband's penis?" the great first line of the film script that will never be made, will also not make it into print.

The Amazing Fusionman

2008-09-26T17:28:00.000+02:00

So Fusionman just flew across the Channel dressed as Buzz Lightyear. He was going to do it yesterday but had to say, 'Not today, Zurg,' because of the weather.

Fusionman. Hmm. And this guy is a grownup. As if jumping out of a plane at 8,000 feet and flying isn't cool enough. Because it is. What he is did is cool beyond words. I couldn't even do a stupid bungy jump. Millions of people wouldn't even consider doing a bungy jump. This guy jumps out of planes and flies, in a way that no one has ever flown before.

And yet, it's not enough. When someone says, 'Hey, that was incredible, who the fuck are you?' he can't just say, 'The name's Yves.' He looks them in the eye, straightens his shoulders and says, 'I'm Fusionman,' for all the world like Michael Keaton in Batman. (Apart from the fact that Michael Keaton obviously said 'I'm Batman' not 'I'm Fusionman'.)

What is he thinking?

Maybe, I'm thinking to myself on this sunny day in early autumn - (it's finally stopped raining in Warsaw. After dumping eight feet of water on the city, all in drizzle, in the last ten days, the clouds are empty.) - maybe, I'm thinking, this is what I need to get some respect. I don't mean professionally, it's too late for that. Too late for AuthorMan or The Amazing Mr Write. I mean, as a Dad.

Maybe the kids would have more respect if, rather than just being plain old Dad, or Daddy, or Oi You, Can I Have Another Sandwich, maybe if I had a supercool name everything would be better. There might be some respect around the house, rather than disdain, discord, accusation and war.

DadMan probably won't cut it. Neither will Mr Dad or Major MiddleAged. The Incredible Captain Dad stands a better chance. I might go for that one, if I can get it all on a t-shirt. I could try a few out, see which one works best. I could be BreakfastMan before school, Commander Lift Home after school, and The Amazing GetToBedAndStopTalkingGuy after dinner.

And then there's the outfit. I'll be turning up at the school with a big pair of red y-fronts over my trousers. Well, that'll get me the respect of my kids.

Fusionman, at least, kept his y-fronts in their rightful place.

Gel Scissors Quaff Perm

2008-09-25T10:23:00.001+02:00

As I wrote last week, the original title of The Long Midnight of Barney Thomson was The Barber’s Surgeon’s Hairshirt. I confess that I arrived at the title The Barber Surgeon’s Hairshirt by going through the dictionary, writing down every word that I could find that related in any way whatsoever to hair or barbershops, threw them up into the air and picked the ones that looked the most interesting when they landed. (In the end it was between The Barber Surgeon's Hairshirt and Gel Scissors Quaff Perm, and I went for the former.)

The entirely arbitrary nature of its conception aside, it’s a pretty good title, which I only ditched as I was sending the book to publishers who had already rejected it, and I wanted the manuscript to pass the initial check against a database of Rejected Mince From the Slushpile. (Actually, I don’t know if publishers keep a database of Rejected Mince From The Slushpile, but I was working on the basis that they did.)

So when the second Barney Thomson book came around I used the title again. This time it actually had some relevance, given that Barney ended up in a monastery, he was consumed by remorse, and the subject of hairshirts even came up without it being a stretch. Piatkus didn’t like it however, and asked for a new title.

The obvious title would have been A Prayer For Barney Thomson. Unfortunately I didn’t think of that as a title until the third book in the series, which was odd given that the reason I thought of it was because I had read, years earlier, A Prayer For Owen Meany and really enjoyed it.

Piatkus asked for a title that included Barney Thomson and referenced hairdressing in some way. Oh for God’s sake, I thought at the time, you don’t have to treat the audience like they’re that stupid. But I didn’t say that. I went away and thought up twenty other titles and sent them an e-mail. I can’t remember most of those titles, although I knew that they were all rubbish. Thirty-Three Murders and A Funeral I think was one of them. Genocide of the Monks, that was another. They would have been terrible titles. In the middle of all this mince, I threw in The Cutting Edge of Barney Thomson. I thought it was terrible as well, but I knew they’d take it, as it met the conditions. Which they did.

Should I ever need to publish another edition of Barney no.2, I think I'll go back to my original intention and call it The Barber Surgeon’s Hairshirt. That’s a title worth keeping.

For that second book someone at Piatkus did actually suggest the name The Final Cut. We rejected this, as The Final Cut seemed a bit premature for the second book in the series. I’m now using it for the seventh book, which makes more sense. This book, when I originally wrote it for the German market, was known as Limited Edition, as the story is set amongst marketing executives in London.

I thought of all this today when I saw in the shop just along the road from our house in the Warsaw suburb where we live, a packet of beer flavoured crisps, marked Edycja Limitowana.

Beer flavoured crisps. The culmination of thousands of years of civilisation. Must be time for First Contact.

Another Wet Day in Warsaw

2008-09-24T10:30:00.001+02:00

Do you think the guy who invented the phrase ‘credit crunch’ gets paid royalties every time someone says the words ‘credit crunch’ on tv? Every night he sits in front of the news and as soon as the newsreader or correspondent says ‘credit crunch’, he turns to his family and says, ‘I came up with that. Yep, that baby’s all mine, I don’t mind telling you.’ And his wife and kids all roll their eyes and make vomiting noises and curse the day their dad invented the phrase.

I remain, and always will, a novice at the Bob Dylan game. I listen to the music and that’s about it. Don’t read the books, don’t travel the world watching the concerts, don’t collect unofficial bootlegs. I’ve seen him twice in concert and have 430 Dylan songs on my iPod. Since it’s the case that two years ago I had no Dylan songs on my iPod - well, to be honest, I didn’t even have an iPod two years ago, but if I'd had an iPod, it would’ve had no Dylan songs on it - it’s slightly freakish to have so many now, but not that freakish.

When I was making the lead character of Lost in Juarez a Dylan addict, I exaggerated my own Dylan obsession. Turned the 430 iPod songs into 1256, and the two concerts I’ve been to into 157. This seemed freakish enough for someone who was supposed to be genuinely addicted to Dylan, in the way that people are addicted to alcohol or fish suppers. Typically for me, at the time I didn’t really do much research. I didn’t check out how often your average Dylan freak goes to see him in concert, or how many Dylan songs it was possible to have on your iPod if you were a ferocious bootleg hunter, much in the way that I’m not. Typical authorial laziness on my part.

(The spellchecker on my laptop says that authorial isn't a word, but it is. The spellchecker on the Mac acknowledges this.)

There’s a strand running on the Dylan message board All Along The Watchtower at the moment, discussing how many times people have been to see the man. There’s someone on there who has seen Dylan over three hundred and fifty times. Another guy says that he met a bloke at a recent gig who had been close to 500 times. To see Dylan. Live.

Holy crap! Those are scary numbers. And it’s made me realise how un-addicted to Dylan Lake Weston must appear to any Dylan fans who read the book. Non-Dylan fans, of course, would read it and think, ‘Wow, a character who’s seen Dylan 157 times, that’s freakish, what a weirdo.’ Of course, however, real life is much, much weirder.

For the second edition - which at current rate of sales will be due some time in the third millennium - I’ll be sure to alter the text so that Lake can have a gazillion Dylan tracks on his iPod and have seen the man in at least one thousand concerts. As Dylan has averaged over a hundred a year for the past eighteen years or so, this isn’t impossible.

There’s probably a lesson in all this about properly researching a subject before writing about it....but I just can’t work out what it is...

The Low End Of The Quarterback Rating

2008-09-23T11:54:00.001+02:00

I’ve been wondering how to make the website more statistical. Men need statistics. They need things ordered and numbered. They need league tables. They need averages. Batting averages, bowling averages. Number of goals scored. Strike rate. Quarterback rating.

The NFL quarterback rating is a great one. The calculation itself is some ancient algorithm combining all the definite stats they can take on a player in a game, throwing them into a computer and then arriving at a completely useless arbitrary number. You can’t just look at the way a guy played and decide if he was any good or not, you need it quantified. They can’t be too far off introducing the same thing to our football. Number of passes on target, shots on goal, strength of shot, quality of faked facial injuries, head butts, number of occasions caught mouthing fuck on tv.

It’s probably the main reason why soccer has never challenged baseball and American football in the US. It just doesn’t lend itself so easily to statistics.

The obvious way to quantify a website is to have a counter off to the side somewhere. This site has a counter facility, but on its own it seems pointless, so I’ve never turned it on. At the moment the invisible counter is running at 35,495 hits since last October. On one level that doesn’t seem so bad. On another, it averages out at just over a hundred a day, which seems rubbish. Then again, even if it was 350,495 or 3,500,495, unless it was being quantified against other sites, as a figure it’s completely useless.

There would need to be a crime writer’s league table, but then I’d probably be embarrassed. Rankin and all that lot probably get that number of hits in a day. I’d be near the bottom, or in the equivalent of the Blue Square South Lower Fifth Division. I’d have other crime writers calling me and taunting me with chants of what a shitey home support.

I could have a table of the number of books I sell each month, but that would only be adjusted twelve times a year, so wouldn’t exactly make for enthralling, end-to-end statistical fun. And I’d also have to admit how many books I sell each month...

The Amazon rankings are the great, instant writing statistic of our time. Constantly changing and an inescapable draw for the desperate author and publisher. A worthless task transferring that information to the website, however, and it’s not as if Barney Thomson ever troubles the top 100. Hard to get excited about moving up 1,345 places to number 4,312. Briefly, last week, however, The Long Midnight of Barney Thomson was ranked one place above the last Rebus novel, Exit Music. I know this because they were both in the top 100 Mysteries chart. I immediately sent Rankin an e-mail saying, ‘you fat bastard, you fat bastard...’

(There are two explanations for that last statement. One is that Rankin and I are great buddies and are always having a bit of a laugh. The other is that I’ve never met Rankin in my puff, he will likely never even have heard of me, and of course I didn’t send him that e-mail... And yes, it’s the latter...)

So, all in all, for the moment the site will probably remain a statistical desert, unencumbered by ratings, counters, charts or numerical analysis. And even if sales and number of hits were worth reading, I still wouldn’t put them on. No, I need to find something more insubstantial, like quantifying my mood or the weather or the quality of the toast that I’ve just eaten with my first cup of tea of the day.

Don't Mess With You Don't Mess With The Zohan

2008-09-22T15:34:00.001+02:00

Rubbish Parents Take Kids To Completely Inappropriate Film Shock. I’m no stranger to taking the kids to the cinema to see something they probably ought not to at their age. When all the kids films are dubbed into the local language, generally you have to stretch the parameters. I draw the line at Saw IV and Hostel perhaps, but anything with a 12 certificate is usually fair game. I am also occasionally suckered in by the trailer.

Nearly happened with Wanted. From the trailer Wanted looked like any old action movie, not unlike Jumper perhaps, from earlier in the year, which the kids had been to and enjoyed. As it turned out, Wanted was only similar to Jumper in that it was total mince. Fortunately we checked it out first, realised it was an 18 with more blood than Terry Butcher had on his face in that game against Tunisia, and the kids never got anywhere near it. A load of utter nonsense, anyway. All that loom stuff. A loom? And Angelina Jolie? What were you doing making a film that encourages young men who are bored at work and who haven’t achieved anything with their life, to pick up a gun and start shooting people? That’ll be the UN Ambassador in you.

So this weekend’s disaster was You Don’t Mess With The Zohan. The most cringe-inducing hour TPCKAM and I have sat through in parenthood. We left long before the end of the movie, but long after we ought to have done. Kept thinking/hoping that the scenes of outrageous sexual innuendo would end shortly and they’d get back to the Israeli/Palestinian gags. (Like you take your kids to the cinema for the cutting edge Middle Eastern humour.) But you know you’re in the wrong movie with your kids when you’re hoping that the terrorists are going to turn up and start shooting, just to get away from the sex.

However, the innuendo kept going. I think we were both probably embarrassed walking past a packed cinema, our kids in tow. Here we were, the obviously rubbish parents, with the eyes of the audience on our backs, judging us for being irresponsible enough to have taken them there in the first place. Finally, however, we put the innocence of our kids ahead of our own mortification and left. Not before time.

Fortunately, conversations since have indicated that they didn’t really get any of it. That would be conversations which they started. TPCKAM and I instantly went into denial and pretended that we’d never been to the cinema. No way were we starting any conversations. "So kids, when the white shampoo dribbled out the bottle onto the woman’s tongue, you know what that meant?" No, heads in the sand from now on, and get in the queue for Bambi 3. "Zohan? Don’t know what you mean. Nope, don’t remember any film with no stinkin’ Zohan."

So there are two things about You Don’t Mess With The Zohan. The first is that it’s my own dumb-witted stupidity that we took the kids. That wasn’t Adam Sandler’s fault. The second thing, which is attributable to Adam Sandler, is that the film is really, really dreadful.

I suppose it takes balls the size of Zohan’s to make a puerile comedy about the Arab/Israeli conflict, but good movies are not made by large balls alone.

Not any more.

Bob Dylan #45

2008-09-19T17:38:00.002+02:00

I think it's fair to say that Bob Dylan is like Marmite. (I mean that you either love him or hate him, rather than that he's gooey brown slime that tastes strongly of faeces.)

Despite the similarity, there are many differences, and here's the most crucial. If the person across the table from you is eating Marmite, you just have to sit and watch them eat Marmite. You don't have to taste it, you can't smell it, all you have to do is look at them like they're weird.

On the other hand, if while the weirdo across the table is eating Marmite, you happen to be listening to Bob on the cd player without headphones on, they also have to listen to Bob. They have no choice.

That's why it's better to like Bob Dylan than Marmite.

I've added a Dylan Song of the Week page to my website. I acknowledge that this is entirely gratuitous Dylanism. In all likelihood I will update the Song of the Week much more regularly than once a week, but I thought Song of the Day might be pushing it a bit and Song of Every Three or Four Days seems clumsy. As did Song of this 72 Hour Period or Song of the Half-Week or Song Of An Indeterminate Period Which Is Likely To Be In The Region Of Every So Often But Not Quite As Much As Really Regularly.

I've started with You Ain't Goin' Nowhere because, I reckon, even people who like Marmite like this song.

The Long Midnight of Barney Thomson (10th Anniversary Edition)

2008-09-18T13:29:00.005+02:00

Having delayed the release of The Final Cut until next year, I really ought to be getting on with the task of turning the original manuscript - which was known as Limited Edition, then published in Germany as Der Herr Der Klinge - into the last book in the Barney series. Before that, however, The Long Midnight of Barney Thomson needs to be reprinted, as the previous print run is almost over.

When I first wrote the book in the summer of 1995, the prose was in the past tense, there wasn't too much Glasgow dialect and the book was entitled The Barber Surgeon's Hairshirt. Sent it around every publisher on the planet, got some decent reaction, but it wasn't picked up. However, I was encouraged enough to give it another go, so repackaged the whole thing. Changed the title, changed the tense to the present tense - because I had just read a book in the present tense, no recollection of which one, and had enjoyed it - and upped the dialect content.

The tense and dialect stayed for the next two books, although I grew to dislike them. For the fourth, I returned to little dialect and the past tense. Not sure if anyone really notices other than me. Anyway, I have wanted for several years to get the first three into the same shape as the remainder of the series. With the reprint of Long Midnight, the chance has come to start the process.

I have already rewritten the book, converting it back to its original form. Everything is more or less the same, except most of the verbs, of course. And the gonnae and dinnae and wisnae, they are mostly gone. I hope that the dialogue still has the flow and feel of Glasgow chat, that's what I'm looking to achieve. So I've left in the heid the ba's and dunderheids and bampots.

There will be a new cover too, although it has yet to be produced. This is the original new cover idea, but it's not really bold enough.

Noticed that Brookmyre and Bateman and the like have a particular type of cover at the moment, which is obviously in vogue. As an illustration, this is the cover of Brookmyre's latest.

My cover designer took a look at them, hated them and thought she could do better. So, we wait and see.

The new/old version of The Long Midnight of Barney Thomson should be released before Christmas, that's the plan. It will more or less be the tenth anniversary of it's initial publication, but I just can't bring myself - despite the heading on the blog - to do the marketing and call it the Tenth Anniversary Limited Edition, or add in a new chapter and call it the Writer's Cut or Long Midnight Redux.

It just is, as Bill Belichick likes to say, what it is.

I won't be reverting to the original title. However, having not used the title with the first book, I then used it for the second book, only for the publisher to refuse it and insist on the much blander Cutting Edge of Barney Thomson. Possibly, I may revert to The Barber Surgeon's Hairshirt for the monastery book - as it's appropriate after all - if and when the time comes.

The Loneliness Of The Part-Time Football Manager

2008-06-18T09:24:00.006+02:00

Sunday afternoon football has taken over our lives, and I don't mean slumped in front of the television, drinking Carlsberg and watching whatever game happens to be on at that moment. Two of Two is playing in a league for the school team. Three twenty-minute games every Sunday, stretched over three to four hours. Different time every week. No more planning what to do on Sunday, not for the moment. You hunker down in the bomb shelter of expediency and wait to discover what time the first game is going to kick off.

There are twelve teams, each of which has been given the name of a country which they are nominally representing. Sadly Two of Two's team was landed with England. On the plus side, the strip doesn't particularly look like England's. (On the negative side, his grandparents just bought him an England strip for his birthday, and he wears it all the time. We call it the Strip of Shame.)

The kids enjoy the Sunday afternoon football league, the parents have far more angst. Now I had a small moment of epiphany a few months ago when watching One of Two playing a mini soccer tournament on a Saturday morning. The following day was the NFL AFC Championship game between the New England Patriots and the San Diego Chargers. I've followed the Patriots religiously for the past twenty-two years. I've travelled to Boston several times to watch them; I sit up through the European night when they're playing an evening game in the States; when their games aren't on tv I following this absurd little helmet graphic online, as the helmet moves up and down the pitch with every play. I'm that sad: I watch an online helmet graphic for three and a half hours, starting at 2.30am. However, that epiphanic morning - I was bound to get to the moment of epiphany eventually - I realised that despite my obsession with the Patriots, I cared far more about my kid playing in a pointless soccer tournament than in my sporting obsession playing in the NFL semi-finals. And it was more fun to watch. And I don't just mean more fun to watch than the helmet - because there are a whole host of things which are more fun to watch than the helmet - but just plain more fun to watch.

One of Two's team won the tournament, but that wasn't the thing that made it so great for me watching in my position as Dad. It was just getting involved in watching a game that really mattered to my kid, and realising that that was far more important than a bunch of absurdly overpaid sports stars who I'll never meet.

If that's not an epiphany, then I don't know what is. Well, apart from the manifestation of Christ to the Wise Men of the east...

The drawback of caring this much about your kids' sports teams, is that it's equally and oppositely rubbish when they lose. Last Sunday Two of Two's team lost their first game 4-0, to a bunch of giant Polish kids who are obviously stretching the age-limit to breaking point and cheating horribly. I mean, some of those kids have beards. Not wanting to be an Angry Soccer Dad, I kept my Soccer Dad Rage to myself and stopped myself sticking a leg out onto the park and tripping up one of the six foot behemoth "eight year-olds" who were holding my kid at arms' length away from the ball.

For the second game we were up against the other team from our school, so really just playing against their mates. This was a no-stress game, as generally both sides - and both sets of parents - root for either team. For this game, the coach had to go off somewhere, and for some reason I was placed in charge. I seemed to be bestowed with this honour by a committee of soccer mums. Maybe they thought, Ah, he's Scottish, he'll know about football....

I really, really, really didn't want to do it. If it happens again I'm going to pull the classic faking an aneurysm manoeuvre so beloved of dads in this situation. I hate being in charge of other people's kids. Never know what to do with them. Can't shout at them, can't order them around, can't whack them, so what's left? I just get the feeling that they're looking at me, thinking who are you and why are you giving me orders? Where's the coach? Have you actually got anything to do with this team or are you just some strange man who's wandered in off the street? My mum told me about people like you. So, no, I'm not going in defence, and you can bugger off!

Well, that's what I presume they're thinking.

In that type of situation, you have to hope that you don't have too many players. Unfortunately I was two to the good, so had to have two kids on the sideline, looking pathetic and constantly tugging my sleeve asking when they were going to get on. I rotated of course, but kids don't care about rotation, they just want to be playing football NOW. I didn't shout instructions at them either, just let them wander aimlessly around the park, kicking the ball in whatever direction they were facing. They were rudderless, an even more random collection of wandering wildebeest than normal. Fortunately they escaped with a 1-0 win and I didn't have to face the opprobrium of other parents for my weak and pathetic managerial style.

That said, I have been informed by the Parental Collective that the next time the coach is forced to leave early, I will be relieved of my deputy managerial duties and placed in charge of the socks. As long as it doesn't involve having to interact with Other People's Children, I don't care.

Bob

2008-06-17T14:22:00.003+02:00

On our recent family holiday to New Zealand, there was one clear standout moment above all others. We were on the shores of Lake Tekapo in central South Island. The weather is typically so clear here, that it is the location of the Mount John Observatory, which sits on the hill just above the town. It was a gorgeous early evening. The lake is a most wonderful and incredible blue, we were booked to go on a sightseeing tour of the southern night sky that evening at the observatory, after a day when we had driven up from Queenstown, past azurine lakes, over incredible moon-like plains, with a stop for lunch at a vineyard, the mountains of the Southern Alps in the near distance, and a stop at Lake Pukaki to take photos of Mount Cook. A breathtaking day, and you're thinking, it can't get any better than this.

And then it happened, the defining moment of the entire trip. We got a text from a friend in Warsaw saying that Bob Dylan was coming to town in June. To be honest, I just got on the plane that night back to Poland and set up camp outside the venue, where I have lived for the past three months.

There was a bit of a stramash over the tickets. My friend ordered them, they got lost in the post, she had to turn up at the ticket office and stand before them armed with several pieces of heavy artillery and a battalion of paratroopers before they would issue replacements. And much to her chagrin, she couldn't go to the concert and instead I took TPCKAM. About which TPCKAM was also fairly chagrined 'n all.

Dylan tours all the time, playing over a hundred gigs every year for the best part of the last twenty years. Always on the move. Saturday in Warsaw, Monday in Prague, Tuesday in Vienna, Wednesday in Salzburg, Friday on to Croatia. The guy was sixty-seven last month, but you can't really say that he's worn it like Mick Jagger. There's no leaping around the stage, no grabbing microphones, nothing athletic. He shuffles on, he stands at his keyboard, he shuffles around in the dark between songs, he shuffled off at the end. You wonder if he'd fall over if he didn't have the keyboard to lean on, but presumably if it was that bad, he'd be sitting at it. His voice is kind of shot, but you know, the guy was never Elvis, so it still works. He does a lot of songs from his most recent studio album - Modern Times - mixed with a random collection from the back catalogue. He tends to reinvent songs, either to suit his mood or the state of his voice.

He played a small venue for an international rock icon. An audience of 1500 or so. The concert was great, but what else am I going to say? Even TPCKAM enjoyed it, and she hates listening to Dylan. A few too many songs which are basically twelve-bar numbers and which blend into one another - The Levee's Gonna Break and Summer Days, that kind of thing - but more than enough other great stuff to compensate.

He has a different set-list every night, someone who would reward following around on tour. I said to TPCKAM that we could up sticks, bung the kids into the back of a winnebago and follow Bob around the world. In the past year we would have been to Uruguay and Canada, America and Russia, Australia and Argentina, Estonia, Iceland... An endless list. He's in Andorra this weekend. TPCKAM is still considering this as a life plan. We probably won't do it. Maybe when the kids have left school. But by then Bob might be in a old people's home in Saratoga Springs, and all we'd be doing was parking the winnebago at the bottom of the driveway.

A Grand Day Out

2008-06-12T10:16:00.002+02:00

It's school trip time of the year. One of Two has had two in the last few weeks. Parental volunteers called for. I went both times, sucked in by the expectations of my daughter. I wonder if other parents are expected to attend by their kids, or whether the kids don't even think for a second that their mum or dad will pitch up and spend their day with twenty other rampant spawn. I think by going once, whenever the first time was, I set the standard, and now I meekly acquiesce and troop miserably along to the school bus.

A few weeks ago we went to the local Big Park in Warsaw, to look at squirrels and the old royal palace. Two days ago we went on a much more fundamental school trip, sitting for hours on a bus to go somewhere for a few minutes, before hopping on the bus again to sit for hours on the way back. There were two other mums on the trip. At the start of the day one of them said to me, "I thought you were the only other parent coming, so I brought my iPod..." They sat next to each other, and I made One of Two sit next to me, so that I didn't have to sit next to another adult I wouldn't be able to speak to, or a kid that I'd want to give a skelp round the ear.

We didn't come prepared for a long trip, and had to talk to each other and play I-spy and the like. Eventually I produced my phone and we played eight hundred games of bowling. Other kids were much better equipped. iPods, portable DVD players... one of them even had his own iPhone. Is that normal? A ten year old kid with an iPhone? Whatever happened to endless choruses of The back of the bus they cannae sing, and every third kid throwing up into a poly bag? Happy days...

The purpose of the trip was to see life in Poland in the old days, a neat contrast with the plethora of new technology evident on the way down. Making rope, bread, butter, washing clothes, old windmills that kind of thing. The collective seemed interested and milled around in the sun sending text messages about how 200-years-ago they were being. They trooped off to lunch, to eat rolls which had been freshly baked in the 18th century. I sat outside, far away from the madding crowd. The chap who was showing the kids around the low-tech facility, wandered over for a chat. He asked me if I was the guard. I said I was a parent. You look very tired, he said. He was going all out to strike up a warm friendship. He offered me a sandwich. I said yes, but was dubious. We were in the heart of ethnic Poland, and the chances of me liking the cheese, sausage or ham that was likely to be in the sandwich were virtually nil. Ten minutes later the bread appeared, fortunately not delivered by my new friend, which meant I didn't have to eat it. It was covered in smalec. Smalec is a classic peasant food, lard, filled with bits of bacon and any other bits of the pig and maybe a bit of onion. But basically it's lard. There was a lot of lard. A giant, open-faced, square-cut lard sandwich.

I went and beat up one of the rich kids with an expensive phone and raided his lunchbox.

The trip home was about five minutes shorter than the trip out there, possibly because one of the kids had brought along their own satnav and told the driver a quicker route to take. We made it back safely which, on Polish roads, is no small achievement. About half an hour at the low-tech detention facility, six hours on the bus. A grand day out.

As the kids played on the grass after school, I wandered down to the changing rooms to collect all their things that they'd forgotten. i.e. everything. I became aware that there was a mum from the PTA walking behind me carrying a large box. She didn't seem to be having too much trouble, so I didn't rush to help her, but eventually, since we were approaching a couple of doors, I thought I'd better make an offer of some sort of assistance. She handed me a couple of keys, and I led her through to the room at the back, in the very bowels of the school, where the PTA keep their stuff. Suddenly she said, 'I have the leaving presents for the headmaster and the head of Key Stage 2, would you like to see them?'

Well, no, not really....

'Sure!' I said, hoping I hadn't overdone the faked enthusiasm. She put the box down on a table and started slowly unwrapping cups and saucers. There I was, thinking that the worst part of the day was over, and suddenly I was in the bowels of the school, alone with a mum from the PTA, looking at crockery. And if I was not mistaken, she was after my opinion.

I stared gobsmacked, as cup after cup, saucer after painfully unwrapped saucer was placed on the table. I thought, what on earth am I going to say? I'm from the west of Scotland. I don't have an eye for crockery. I couldn't care less about crockery. I can tell when it needs washed, and I can tell if there's something in it that I can drink or eat, but as for patterns and styles and designs... Eventually I found the words, several cups in. 'They're lovely,' I said. The PTA mum smiled. 'Oh, I'm really pleased you like them, because we weren't sure what people would think.' It appeared I was the voice of the parents.

I could imagine her later, when other bitchy mums were scowling at the cups and being brutally and frankly honest, saying, 'Well that miserable Scottish bloke liked them.'

She continued to unpack cups and saucers. I wondered if she was doing it all for my benefit, or whether she was unpacking them anyway. So I stood there in silence with the mum from the PTA in the bowels of the school wondering whether or not I could leave.

That was two days ago. And I'm still there. And she's still unpacking cups and saucers.

Bungy

2008-04-15T10:38:00.002+02:00

When you go to the bungy jump site and then decide that you just can't throw yourself off that bridge, you have to choose your moment to make the call.

You can't do it when you're standing there on the precipice, that would be too humiliating. You can't really do it after you've bought the ticket but before you've stepped onto the bridge, because then you'd have to stand in the queue to ask for your money back, which would also be humiliating. You can fake an aneurysm, but that's going to attract a lot of unneccesary attention. And most of the staff have probably seen it before and would just be standing around saying, 'Too scared, going down the aneurysm route...'

There is always, of course, not going to the bungy site in the first place. Just getting up in the morning and doing something else, like watching tv, painting still life or eating prunes. But then you will never have looked at the scale of what's before you, you will never have faced your fear.

It's perfectly sensible to never face your fear. Me, I'm scared of heights, and decided I needed to face my fear. I went to the bungy site. Back to paragraph two.

We were in Queenstown, New Zealand. Home of the bungy. Ever since watching the LOTR trilogy and then completely over-reacting to being bored at the February holiday by deciding to travel to Middle Earth itself for the Easter break, I had been thinking that I ought to make the jump. To do something adventurous, that would absolutely scare my pants off, but which would have the advantage of lasting just under five seconds.

There are three bungy sites around Queenstown. The one where you jump from a platform one hundred and thirty-four metres above a river. Just looking at the photograph makes my insides curl. The one where you jump off a platform over solid rock, the whole of Queenstown in front of you. It's only forty-seven metres, but the solid rock thing has a strong psychological effect. And then there's the original bungy, the forty-three metres over - and into - the river. That was the one for me.

I thought about it for a while, didn't mention it to anyone else. Then, as we were mincing around Queenstown, I casually tossed the idea into conversation, as casual as leaping into thin air. This, sadly, caused much excitement with our children, who loved the idea of their father plummeting off a bridge. The day before we left Queenstown we were watching the solid rock bungy, when a company man called Shane came for a chat, to ask why we were watching and not jumping. He asked me a few marketing questions, during which it seemed to become established fact that the following day, as we drove north out of the town, I was going to stop and make the jump at the Kawarau river site. He began using phrases such as 'When you've made your first jump,' and 'It's a shame I can't talk to you after you've jumped...' I began to realise that deep inside, I had no intention whatsoever of jumping off no stinkin' bridge.

We arrived at the site on a pleasant, out-of-season Saturday morning. This original bungy site is now a visitor attraction in itself, as they try to cater for and attract people who aren't intending to plummet from high over the canyon. We mooched in, we stood on the viewing platform, we watched a couple of sacrificial lambs throw themselves at the alter of adrenaline. We went back inside for a coffee.

'Are you going to do it?' asked TPCKAM.

'I'm thinking of faking an aneurysm,' I said. Having been against me throwing myself off a bridge in the first place, she looked understanding and relieved. The kids, on the other hand, were crushingly disappointed, and started exhorting me to have some balls. This climaxed in One of Two saying, 'Just do it, Dad, then you won't have to think you're a wimp for the rest of your life...' She may have continued talking after that, but I couldn't hear her because I had my hands over my ears and was singing Nessun Dorma as loudly a possible.

The family wandered off to watch a young Japanese chap throw himself into oblivion for the benefit of his large touring party. I sat in the cafe drinking rubbish coffee, watching the goings on. I wanted to participate, I wanted the positive adenalin-induced feeling that I'd get from the jump, I wanted to get out there. But, in the blessed words of Elvis, from the frankly mortal Old Shep, 'I just couldn't do it, I wanted to run, I wished they'd shoot me instead...'

It was sitting there that I realised the best place to decide not to jump. Sitting in a chair at a table in the cafe, drinking coffee. I just looked like a guy passing through, rather than someone riddled with strangulating pusillanimity at his inability to tackle his own fears. I had made my decision, and like Elvis trying to put a bullet in the napper of his old dog, I just wasn't going to do it.

As we were leaving, the children's cries of disappointment ringing like bells of doom, a group of eleven year-old girls came in to sign up for the jump. There were about six of them. This didn't make me question my decision at all. There are lots of things that don't frighten young girls that frighten me, such as rollercoasters, the Sugababes and eating too much sugar. Now, had a group of middle-aged blokes come in, that might have been the peer-pressure push that I needed. But a group of giggling wee girls? I just looked at them and shook my head.

The bungy jump at the Kawarau River isn't going anywhere. (Unless it gets hit by a stray American missile aimed at a block of flats in Tehran.) I have pinned the brochure to the noticeboard in the kitchen, so that I can look at it every day. It's still out there, calling me, waiting for me to go back. And one day, one day soon, just as soon as I can afford to travel to New Zealand first class on Singapore Airlines, I'm going back...

Tonight We Shall Feast With The Appetite of Many Men

2008-02-21T13:48:00.006+01:00

The February mid-term break just passed. We made the executive decision to not go anywhere. Everybody else with kids in Warsaw went skiing. Everybody. All week, while stuck in the bleak city, nothing to do but the usual rounds of swimming and movies for kids in Polish, I kept receiving texts from friends in the Alps or the Dolomites, saying how wonderful it was. Blue skies, beautiful snow, best week's holiday anyone had ever had, why are you lot stuck in the city, you poor bunch of sad sacks?

All the shopping malls of Warsaw, not just the one closest to the school, are havens for the ex-pat and diplomatic communities. Hard to go five minutes in one without coming across someone you know, or don't like. Last week the malls were deserted. They were the shopping malls of a zombie movie. Occasionally we would be passed by a white-faced miserable old soul, a wizened old woman in her black beret, who would scowl at me and say, 'Dlaczego te dzieci nie są na nartach?'

Instead, we went to Middle Earth. Foreign Office travel advice; beware pickpockets, cave trolls, giant spiders, wizards, the Dead Marshes, Mount Doom, Dark Lords and orcs who will remove your head and impale it on a spike. On the plus side, the mountains are nice.

We watched a disc of Lord of The Rings every night for six nights. The kids hadn't watched it all the way through before. It seemed like a good idea for the holiday - and it was - and cheaper than a week's ski pass in Switzerland. Roaring fire, bowls of ice cream all round and we'd all snuggle down on the sofa to watch Gandalf. At nine and seven they're at the right age. Old enough to watch orcs without getting freaked, young enough to still consider it a treat to sit down with their parents to watch a long movie. Give it a few years, and we'll have the same idea again. 'Hey kids,' one of us will enthusiastically say, 'let's all sit down and watch Lord of the Rings (or some other lengthy movies series, Harry Potter or Nightmare On Elm Street...) and they'll look at us like we're some lower life form, turn the volume up on their iPod and mooch off to the bedroom, locked door and black walls.

Lord of The Rings, like every other art form on planet earth, Middle or otherwise, is there to be loved or loathed. I think it's ok myself, although I feel it takes about six hours to get going, and could do with finishing just after Aragorn gets crowned; and I hate the fact that he snogs Liv Tyler in public - come on, man, you're the king, start acting like one - and I hate the protracted fifteen minute homo-erotic fellowship reunion sequence on Frodo's bed. Oh, and I hate the fact that Sam bursts into tears every ten minutes in the last movie. Apart from that, Return of The King is all right.

But here's the thing I hate most about the entire LOTR movie saga. It relates to the jokey bonhomie between the dwarf and Orlando Bloom during the Battle of Helm's Deep. All that, 'I've killed six!' 'Ah,well fuck you, because I've killed ten!' stuff that goes on. As Legolas kills orcs, one, two or even three at a time, he happily reels off his head count. He gets to fifteen or so in the blink of an eye.

The battle lasts all night. All night. So, let's call it eight hours, as it starts after the hours of darkness. An eight hour battle. When we see Legolas killing orcs, he does it at a rate of about ten to twelve a minute. Let's call it ten for ease of calculation. In eight hours that would mean he killed four thousand, eight hundred orcs. Now, that's obviously excessive, he couldn't keep that rate up for the entire time. So, let's give him a more realistic kill rate of four a minute, plus two half hour coffee breaks in the middle of the night, and we'll throw in a one hour sleep as he must have been getting tired. That still makes one thousand four hundred and forty orcs he should have killed.

So how many orcs does Legolas actually claim to have killed the following morning? He and the dwarf get together, amidst a pile of dead orc flesh, to happily recount their deeds in battle and boast of their killings. Legolas' final head count?

Forty-two.

Forty-two? Forty-flippin' two! Holy crap! What was he doing all night? Did he only kill orcs when the cameras were running? Is he some prima donna elf dude who works for five minutes at a time and then has to have three hours sleep? Did Orlando swan off to his trailer every time the cameras turned away?

Forty-two, for crying out loud.

That's it, I don't hate anything else about LOTR. Apart from all the rest of the elves who are so miserable, so unrelentingly bleak in their outlook, so gloomy and filled with dejection and despair that they could all be old Polish women in berets. Never a minute of the film passes without an elf popping up to say something along the lines of, 'The time of men has come, and men are shite, so the world is going to end,' or 'We're all going to die and there's nothing anyone can do about it,' or, 'It's not our fault, we're elves and we're cool, it's all you, you lot, you're all rubbish, we rock, you suck. That's why the world is going to end and we're all going to die,' or 'Did I mention that we're all going to die? Well, that's not the half of it...'

And then there's also the line in the first movie when Aragorn says to Liv, 'When I first saw you I thought I'd walked into a dream...'

Oh, please... I said to One of Two, any man ever says anything like that to you, run a flippin' mile.

We all await The Hobbit in 2010 - law suits permitting - with great excitement.

A Description of An Incident While Bowling With Two of Two

2008-02-05T16:21:00.000+01:00

Another pre-Christmas event that I'm only just getting around to describing.

There is a shopping mall not far from the school which owes its continued profitability, I'm sure, to its proximity to two international schools. The mall, a dark place of little imagination, is inhabited mostly by international women, as being the nearest port of call where they can spend money/drink coffee/get their nails quaffed, while waiting for their kids. Equally, it's the place to go with your kids after school, if you're looking to keep them amused for half an hour for some reason.

I, like many international women, inhabit this shopping mall on a regular basis. I have my own parking spot, and just like Roger Miller in King of the Road, I know all of the security guards on all of the lanes, all of their children and all of their names. On the top floor there is a children's play area for the purposes of plundering the parental purse. In the last week of school before the Christmas holidays, Two of Two and I went there to go bowling. I limited him to half an hour, as he tends to get bored after that and starts doing little boy things like whinging and walking off and trying to stick the bowling balls up his nostril.

When we arrived there were only another couple of occupied lanes out of twelve, and we set up in lane 6 for our thirty minutes of father/son ten-pin bonding experience. After about five minutes or so, the other lanes finished their games and suddenly we were alone, the only players at the alley. This suited us both perfectly, he and I being of the type of character which prefers solitude than a crowd.

Our solitude did not last long, however.

About twelve minutes in and everything seemed normal. We were zipping through our first game and already getting towards the end. Neither of us was playing like a god-king of the lanes, but we were having fun and there was quality bonding all round. It was the kind of moment that would make up about three seconds of a Hollywood montage scene from the point in the film when the father and son were getting on really well. But, of course, those montages arrive just before the gloom, just before the dream crashes and the zombies march onscreen from stage left.

And so it happened.

The noise levels increased, and suddenly we realised that we were no longer alone. A group of teenagers had arrived, to occupy all the other lanes. At least a hundred of them, possibly upwards of a hundred and fifty. They swept in, like a plague of locusts, like a swarm of demonic bees, like a zombie horde, a-chomping and a-munching. They quickly took up residence in the other eleven lanes, nine or ten youths to a lane. This was an instance of mass bowling on an unprecedented level.

Two of Two started giving me the eye, the look of a small boy who is no longer comfortable. I reassured him. Then two of the horde came and sat down in the curved comfy sofa by our lane, and dumped their bags and coats on top of our bags and coats. I looked at them, the two youths looked back at me. No words were said. I presume they thought we were with them. After all, I'm forty-three and Two of Two is seven, it's perfectly understandable why they would think we were with a group of teenagers.

I kept on bowling. Two of Two had started to vocalise his desire to flee to the safety of the coffee shop.

'Stand firm!' I said. 'We'll be fine.' He didn't look convinced.

We played on while the two glaikit youths sat watching our every move. Our bowling, hardly top-notch to begin with, began to deteriorate under the intense gaze of an audience. I wondered if they were trying to intimidate us out of there, but then they didn't look even remotely intimidating. They looked more like Muppets. No one was ever intimidated by a Muppet.

Nevertheless, with one ball left of our first game, I was contemplating heading for the doors. Whatever weird thing was going on with this post-pubescent collective, I didn't really want to be in the middle of it. Two of Two stopped me as I reached for the bowling ball and once more implored me to get him out of Dodge. I noticed that Bert and Ernie had moved to join the giant swarm of gangly kids at the neighbouring lane - lane 5 - who were happily bowling away with no notion of who was scoring what. I once again spurned Two of Two's advances to get out of there, and turned to bowl the final ball. And there was Bert, of Bert and Ernie - who had, less than twenty seconds earlier, been sitting staring at us like we were the weird ones - clutching a ball in our lane. And before I could say anything, he'd let it rip. Six pins to Bert!

I still didn't consider that there was anything intimidatory about it, I just thought he was being stupid. I marched up and started gesticulating wildly, pointing to Two of Two and myself, saying things like, 'Our lane, me and him, us, him and me, this is our lane!' I probably sounded like Shrek.

Bert looked as if he didn't quite understand the concept, then without a change in expression he minced off to stand eleventh in the queue next door. It hadn't been pleasant, but I had fought off the zombie.

'Come on, Dad,' said Two of Two, 'let's get out of here.'

Having been considering it before, now there was no way I was going anywhere. 'Two of Two,' I said, 'we're flippin' well staying. We will not be chased out of here by this mob. We're staying until our time runs out, and not a second before! I see you stand there like a greyhound in the slips, straining to leave. The game's afoot; Follow your spirit, and, upon this charge, Cry God for Two of Two! Scotland and St Andrew!'

'What?' he said.

'You know, Cry 'Havoc!' and let slip the dogs of war, all that stuff.'

'You're mixing up your plays, dad,' he said.

'Whatever, we're just not flippin' leaving.'

I invoked Dunkirk, Rourke's Drift and Winston Churchill and he reluctantly agreed that there was nothing he could do about it if I wasn't going to take him. I turned, ball in hand, and sure enough, bugger me, but if there wasn't another of the zombie horde standing in our lane lining up her ball. Two of Two gave me that, 'see, there's nothing we can do about it, it's like Day of Dead' look. I ran full pelt and dived in front of her before she could get her ball off. If my gesticulations had been wild before, now there were excessive.

'Our lane!' I cried again. 'Me and him. Our lane.' I indicated the lane, myself and Two of Two repeatedly with wild, exaggerated movements.

She at least had the decency to look a bit embarrassed. This caused me to suddenly come over all British, so that I felt a little embarrassed too, and I thought that maybe I should just have coughed quietly at her shoulder, like Jeeves, and politely pointed out that she was encroaching into territory that was rightly, by all UN conventions, ours for the next fifteen minutes.

'You're embarrassing me,' said Two of Two when he spoke to me next, confirming that everyone was now embarrassed.

The game continued, and thereafter we were mostly left alone, despite still being surrounded. I had to hire a full machine gun emplacement from the bar staff to keep the status quo, but the rest of the bowling passed without incident. A girl from the lane next door did fire one of her balls down our lane, but she was bowling from two yards behind the line and I think the ball just came out at a bit of an inappropriate angle.

We bowled on until our time was up, and then we left. The father-son bonding had been shattered, fundamental damage had been done to the id of Two of Two, but we did at least, and we can be thankful for this, get out of there with our lives...

A Quiet Night Out

2008-01-17T09:41:00.000+01:00

Mid-January. The flattest time of the year. Cold and bleak, nothing just around the corner to look forward to. The kids are asking how long it is until their birthdays, the summer holidays seem a long way off and even then those very holidays will be blighted by the descent of eight thousand apricots in the back garden. Only eleven and a bit months until Christmas. And then Christmas will probably be crap...

I'm writing a book at the moment - Scottish author Douglas Lindsay, 43, has turned his hand to writing an explosive political thriller which meets the full force of the rising government police state head on - so not blogging much. It's not that the kids are not by turn cute, interesting, frustrating, unbelievably annoying etc., but time is short. For example, last week Two of Two asked us one of those questions which every parent dreads: Would you rather eat a live scorpion or lick peanut butter off Gordon Brown's naked butt?

Hmm....tricky. In the end I think we agreed on a compromise solution of licking the peanut butter off the scorpion's naked butt and taking your chances with the stinger.

I could write about much these last few weeks, but the thing I'm going to choose has nothing to do with the kids. Just need to get it off my chest.

The Harlem Gospel Choir...

The Harlem Gospel Choir have been in Poland every December since we got here, so that's three years running at least. Maybe they've been coming longer than that. Every year TPCKAM says she wants to go and see them, and I nod and say, yep that sounds good, and then leave it to inevitable lack of inertia knowing that it won't happen. This Christmas, unfortunately, her thought of going to see the Harlem Gospel Choir coincided with her being in the vicinity of the ticket booth. The show was on a Sunday evening, but since the New England Patriots weren't on tv that night, I agreed to go along.

Before the event, I got to thinking about the fact that the Harlem Gospel Choir seemed to be coming to Poland every year, and wasn't that a bit odd. You'd think they'd want to do, I don't know, Harlem for example, some Christmas. I wondered to TPCKAM if the Harlem Gospel Choir might be a franchise. Like McDonalds or Krispy Kreme. Checked on-line, and sure enough, while the Harlem Gospel Choir are not located on every street corner in the world, there were four different choirs under the same name, touring in December, albeit one of them has a permanent residence at Disneyland Florida, which isn't so much of a tour as, well, a residency. Clearly we weren't going to see the Harlem Gospel Choir, but a Harlem Gospel Choir. One of the Harlem Gospel Choirs.

And, as it turned out, one of the smaller ones. The runt of the litter. To me the word 'choir' says fifty strapping Welshmen, or several hundred pallid youths singing in Westminster Abbey. In the eastern European version of the Harlem Gospel Choir there were nine. If they'd been British they would probably have apologised when they walked on stage. 'I'm sorry, but our people keep dying and management are cutting back and have a policy of no replacement in the event of death.' Being American, however, they just sang more loudly and hoped no one would notice.

They could belt out a tune, no doubt about that. Sister Veronica and Brother Bob and Sister Sledge, or whatever they were called. However, generally each song consisted of one of the brothers/sisters taking centre stage and doing their thing, effectively with eight backing singers. That's not a choir. That's a singer with eight back singers, that is. They opened up with 'I Believe I can Fly...' It never got any better. After a duet, one of the brothers stepped forward and said, 'A big hand for Sister Veronica!' Cheers all round. 'And a big hand for Sister Agnes!' Cheering and whooping and the like. 'And a big hand for Jesus!'

I genuinely hope that if that had happened in Britian, that remark would have been greeted by a stony silence. You can believe, or not, that Jesus is the son of God. But seriously, he had not just been singing 'I Just Called To Say I Love You'. The Polish audience duly applauded.

Later on we were exhorted to give 'handpraise' to God.

Last Saturday morning, Two of Two scored a wonder goal from twenty yards. First time shot, top corner, an absolute beaut. Unthinking, I just automatically got to my feet and let out a Homer Simpson-esque whoop. Which is exactly what I found myself doing when, after forty minutes of the Harlem Gospel Choir, Brother Shenanigan stepped up to the mike and announced a twenty minute recess. Two thousand people turned and looked at me. They all looked pissed off, but then they're Polish. The whole nation looks pissed off. I reckon most of them were probably thinking, I wish I'd done that.

The twenty minute break became half an hour, and there were murmurs of hope in the audience that maybe the Harlem Gospel Choir had remembered they had a dinner engagement at the corner of 135th and 7th. Sadly, however, they eventually reappeared, having been unable to rustle up any new members during the interval. At least none of them had died. The second half wore excruciatingly on. At one point they dragged a poor old woman out of the audience to get her on stage, so they could sing to her and give her a present. They built up and up to the announcement of the present, like it was going to be a big THING. Maybe this eighty-seven year-old Polish woman who spoke no English had been selected to be the newest member of the Harlem Gospel Collective? Instead, they presented her with a signed cd. And a signed cd of the Harlem Gospel Choir to boot, not, like a signed cd from Bruce Springsteen or someone worthwhile. As prizes go it was on a level with Bullseye. The Sister Veronica said something along the lines of, 'Now y'all, don't go beating her up and stealing this, you can buy your own copy in the foyer...'

Handpraise to God!

Later still - I think maybe the concert had been going for three or four hours by now - they dragged people form the audience up on stage to sing-a-long with Kool And The Gang's Celebrate. Dear Christ..., as Sister Veronica might have said. To be fair to the debacle of the old woman being dragged up on stage, it wasn't quite as toe-curlingly embarrassing as that, but by God it was up there.

Eventually they put us out of our misery, packed up their nine microphones and trouped happily off stage. The Harlem Gospel Choir were gone. The evening was over, and we all, the beleaguered audience, trooped out into a cold December evening in Warsaw, spiritual vacuums one and all. Perhaps they will be back next Christmas, although by then they might have been renamed The Harlem Gospel Trio or the Stevie Wonderettes. This time, however, I will employ someone to run ahead of TPCKAM wherever she goes, tearing down the bill posters before she can see them...

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

2007-12-14T10:28:00.001+01:00

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

2007-12-12T11:16:00.000+01:00

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...

2007-11-27T11:05:00.001+01:00

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

2007-10-26T20:24:00.000+02:00

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

2007-10-19T14:10:00.000+02:00

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

2007-10-10T12:14:00.000+02:00

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

2007-10-08T13:59:00.000+02:00

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

2007-10-03T13:28:00.000+02:00

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

2007-09-28T09:03:00.000+02:00

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)

2007-08-10T16:42:00.000+02:00

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

2007-07-17T10:00:00.000+02:00

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

2007-06-28T16:08:00.000+02:00

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

2007-06-22T14:40:00.000+02:00

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...

2007-06-01T11:40:00.000+02:00

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...

2007-05-23T14:00:00.000+02:00

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

2007-03-28T12:10:00.000+02:00

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

2007-03-21T20:04:00.000+01:00

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

2007-03-20T10:28:00.000+01:00

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

2007-03-15T13:50:00.000+01:00

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

2007-03-14T14:01:00.000+01:00

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…

Normalcy, And The Search For Comedy

2007-02-08T13:52:00.000+01:00

I don’t feel greatly inspired to write Kids, And Why You Shouldn’t Eat More Than One For Breakfast at the moment. Maybe it’s the general gloom of midwinter, albeit this is a very half-hearted winter, as if Mother Nature just can’t muster up the fight to have a go at global warming, having put in such a sterling performance last February when it didn’t rise above minus ten the whole month. Maybe I’m getting too involved in writing the latest Barney Thomson adventure. It’s tough to switch lightly between anecdotal comedy about your children, and writing a scene where an old woman gets her head brutally panned in by a guy in a ninja outfit. Actually, maybe it’s not too hard.

So, I think the most likely reason is two-fold. Firstly, the kids aren’t really doing anything funny at the moment. I keep saying to them, do something wacky and daft, or say some really cute kid-type thing that I can write about, but they’re just not doing it. They just sit there and shrug, or look at me like I’m really sad and say, ‘Like, whatever gramps, just because you’ve lost your mojo, don’t expect us to compensate for your total lack of artistic talent. Why don’t you just make stuff up anyway, that’s what you usually do?’

Every now and again the Wee Man comes out with some Nietzschian-level little statement of great profundity, and there are obviously occasions when I include these in the blog, though usually just the ones about my swearing. However, I don’t want to slide into that thing where I write about every little cute remark the kid makes which I think is brilliant because he’s My Kid, when out of context and out of family, everyone else is just going to be bored rigid. The school has a newsletter every week which has a piece entitled From the Mouths of Babes, where they print all the wacky and amusingly insightful snippets from the four and five year-olds. It’s, well, rubbish. They don’t even attribute the lines, so you never get to think, ‘How cute is my kid!’ You just read it every week and think that those kids could do with a new scriptwriter. I try not to fall into the same trap.

Secondly, we’re all getting on quite well at the moment, and there’s only so much humour in normalcy. They’re settled in school, they’ve got their after-school clubs, they occasionally have friends over or go round to their friend’s houses. I wouldn’t go so far as to say they’re happy, but they’re not fighting much, and more or less doing what is asked of them. The pre-school bunfight has become this smoothly oiled machine, rather than the totally chaotic, frenzied warzone of a year ago. We don’t even need Jack Johnson anymore, anyone will do. I’m even getting away with listening to Dylan. Suddenly an hour seems like an age, endless minutes into which we can easily fit everything that needs to be done. This time last year an hour had appeared to be this trivial little sliver of time, a mere fragment, during which everything was conducted at a frenetic pace, with shouting and arguments, quarrels and squabbles, endless disputes left unresolved as the cornflakes flew. For the moment it’s like an episode of the Waltons.

There is occasional wrangling over spelling words, but it’s like the teachers have decided to be kind leading up to the mid-term break, and even they have been fairly straightforward for the past couple of weeks. And so, consequently, child tears and parental shouting are running at significantly lower than normal levels. (This is not withstanding the apocalyptic row between One of Two and TPCKAM last night over cleaning out the rabbit cage. Two of Two and I sat in the other room looking awkwardly at each other, shrugging a lot and making comments about how weird and unfathomable women are. When things didn’t come to a swift conclusion, we hunkered down in the basement with a torch, a couple of blankets and three months supply of tinned vegetables and bottled water.)

We play bingo a lot. There’s fun. Kids love playing bingo, because there’s no ability involved and therefore they have a chance at genuinely beating you. One game of bingo every now and again is ok. Three or four a night is stretching it a little. And when your kid wakes you up at 3:37am to ask you if you’d like to shout Two Fat Ladies! while he and sister mark off numbers, your reply tends to be less than sympathetic.

There I go, making stuff up, although it is based on hearing the wee man creep down the stairs at 12.30 in the middle of the night to play the interactive Scooby Doo game on Boomerang. He at least had the decency to look embarrassed when his plans were thwarted. Not that it stopped him making another attempt at 5.30. Fortunately that time I was sleeping just inside the door, armed with a comedy baseball bat and a Freddy Kreuger mask.

Making stuff up again.

It was a Jason mask.

Next week: How it all went wrong…

The Third 'Snow' Test

2007-02-05T14:18:00.000+01:00

Scenes from the tense final afternoon of the decisive 3rd Warsaw Test Match, which some commentators have started calling the 'Snow Test'.

Some people wouldn't play cricket in the snow when it's -8 degreees centigrade. But kids, they're usually up for anything. Especially when they don't have to leave their own back garden, and there's hot chocolate at the end of it all.

the bleak midwinter

2007-01-29T11:49:00.000+01:00

Winter at last. The first morning that we woke up to snow last week, One of Two said, ‘You always said we’d take the bikes to school in the snow, daddy. Can we?’

It was true. Back in September, when we were happily bike riding to school in nothing but t-shirts and shorts, I used to quip that we’d do this all year, even in winter, even in ten inches of snow. It was another sad case of feeble dad humour. As winter has mildly progressed, bike riding to school has been sporadic. A day here or there, followed by juvenile whining and a renewed moratorium on getting to school by way of exercise.

So last Wednesday we awoke to a light covering of snow, and One of Two made her out-of-the-blue request. ‘Wee man,’ I said to Two of Two, ‘you up for it?’ ‘Yep,’ he said, and that was that. Decision taken. By two young fools and an idiot. They were, I’m sure, imagining riding through light snow on a beautiful morning under picture perfect blue skies. Me? I just plain wasn’t thinking. Morning autopilot. We togged up – and here I didn’t think to put them in snow trousers, there was only one hat between the two of them, and they were wearing thin woollen gloves – and headed out into the blizzard.

Headed out into the blizzard. There’s a bit of a clue there for even the least perceptive parent…

The prevailing wind on the road to school is at our backs, so I reckoned on an ok trip, despite the cold. A hundred yards along the road One of Two made the first intimation that all was not well. ‘I hate this, dad,’ she said, ‘can we take the car?’ If there is a point of no return on the morning trip to school, this was at least a mile before it. This was the ideal point of return. This was the antonym of point of no return. A huge placard was being held aloft by three angels clad in white and singing softly. ‘The Point Of Return,’ it read. ‘Come on,’ I said, ‘we’ll be fine.’ We rode on.

At the bottom of the long slow hill, and before we’d turned onto the long stretch of straight road that makes up the bulk of the journey, Two of Two tossed his bike into a snowdrift, and the pair of them downed tools and refused to go any further. ‘Well, sports fans,’ I said, ‘if we go back, you have to struggle back up that hill in a blizzard. Or we can keep going, turn the corner, we’ll have the wind at our backs and we’ll be there in no time.’ It was classic, 1916-esque, let’s send three hundred thousand troops into a quagmire to get gunned down and we’ll be in Berlin in time for tea and buns. Pip, pip! Clearly it’s no coincidence that General Haig and I share the same first name.

We turned the corner and met the full force of the blizzard head on. Prevailing wind my bloody arse! cried the spawn in desperation. One of them, can’t remember which, rode on determinedly into it and the die was cast. The next mile and a half took a long time. They were both freezing and miserable, they would take it in turns to have little indomitable bursts, forge ahead into the cold, before collapsing in a wailing heap because they were dying. Meanwhile, the other would be stopped still on the pavement, demanding that I abandon them at the side of the road to go back and get the car.

The previous night TPCKAM had read a page or two of Ray Mears to me, in particular the section on how easy it is to die of hypothermia. So there we were, stuck half way to school, unable to go back, too miserable to go ahead, the kids improperly dressed and glacial, and me feeling like the Useless Moron Dad From The Planet Muppet, on the verge of killing his kids.

There was no flash of lightning, no saviour stopped at the side of the road. The kids saved the day. They cried a bit, but in the end they accepted that there was nothing else for it but knuckling down and getting on with it, which they did. They broke the back of the trip, turned the corner at the end and the last few hundred yards they were chipper and upbeat and had a sense of achievement which they wouldn’t have had with sitting in a warm car, stuck in traffic for twenty minutes. The last five minutes of the trip they were cracking jokes about wanting us all to ride home and get the car. In the end we were so late arriving at school that there weren’t too many of the gigantic-4x4-driving diminutive mum brigade there to see us three hardy and foolish souls finally cross the finish line. But we’d made it, humour and health intact.

Kids dispatched, I turned round and rode home. As I struggled along, riding once again, somehow, into the teeth of the blizzard, a man stopped in his car to take a picture of me on his cell phone. Bloody paparrazi. They get everywhere. Although, it might just have been because I was wearing shorts.

Black Cat

2007-01-22T11:47:00.000+01:00

Last week we took the kids to an exhibition of the work of Jozef Wilkon, one of Poland’s most outstanding illustrators, author of illustrations and graphic layouts for more than 160 books for children and adults. I took that description out a catalogue. I’d never heard of him before. Wasn’t just painting. In recent years Jozef – born in 1930 – has branched out into sculptures in wood and art. The highlight was his depiction of Noah's Ark, a faithful recreation of that classic children’s story of God’s mass genocide of everyone on the planet bar one do-gooding family.

The kids were bored of course. The second they walked in. There was nothing interactive, and this generation’s kids need interactive. They looked at the giant rhino for about fifteen seconds, and then started asking when we were going to leave. Nothing was moving, there were no televisions, they were bored. In the second room there was a magnificent display of wooden fish, suspended from the ceiling. You could look at it for half an hour and still be finding new idiosyncrasies in the intricacies of the carving and caricature. Although, obviously not if you have three children with you. (We had borrowed one for the afternoon, because we don’t have enough.) We moved on, continually fire-fighting the let’s-go-home talk.

In the final room there was a painting of a cat. Wasn’t really one for the kids, as the exhibition is presented, but by then they were so bored they didn’t notice. It is a black cat, standing straight up on its hind legs, as if human. The cat has human female breasts. At the bottom of the picture there are a couple of copulating locusts, or some other bug of locust-like quality. Presumably Jozef meant something by the copulating insects, but I’m glad to say I’ll never know. Anyway, I’m walking through this room, past the various paintings and sculptures. I glance at the cat for the first time, it blinks at me, I move on. I look back at the cat, assuming it’s one of those pictures that looks different depending on the angle. I can’t get it to blink at me again. I walk up to it and examine it more closely. It still doesn’t blink, and clearly is just a regular painting, without any blinking capabilities. I stand beside it, bending my head in a variety of directions. Nothing. I walk away from the cat, back round to where I first set eyes on it, and glance round. It doesn’t blink. Five times I walked along the stretch of carpet from which I’d first viewed the cat, wanting to see if I could repeat the peculiar set of circumstances which led me to think that the cat had blinked at me. I couldn’t. It refused to blink again.

There are four possible explanations to this mystery.

1. The picture of the cat is possessed by Satan, or some other more generic demon, and that at some point in the near future I’m going to find myself in a horror movie situation resulting in a lot of fear, huge amounts of screaming and large quantities of blood.

2. I was just imagining it.

3. I’m going nuts, which might explain all the ravens sitting on the telephone wires outside my office window.

4. Someone is intentionally messing with my head, in an Alfred Hitchcock movie type way…which might explain all the ravens sitting on telephone wires outside my office window.

Some part of me feels like I should go back in there, but the large breasted blinking cat’s got me nervous.

Upstairs from the ark and the children’s paintings and the felines-under-demonic-possession, was an exhibition of 21st century Polish art. The children were very excited about that. You can see their faces. ‘Yay! More paintings!’

It was modern art as you’d expect, all guarded by severe Polish uber-women, ready to strike at the first hint of anyone trying to touch any of the pieces, or at the first hint of anyone even remotely beginning to enjoy themselves. There were a few of the art installations presented by the medium of television. These naturally attracted the kids like chocolate. They sat enthralled, watching a man paint a picture, just because it was on tv. Had it been an actual man painting an actual picture, live and in person, they would have whined about being bored and attempted a quick incursion to the exits.

Modern art is as modern art does. Three giant canvases painted beige... “Untitled, 2006.” An enormous hand, with the fingers severed and hovering above it… “Anatomy of Beauty.” A woman’s face and head juxtaposed against a forest… “Coffin Portrait.” I could go on, except I can’t really remember any others. Not that I didn’t enjoy it, but I prefer a crowded 17th Century sea battle scene myself.

The kids’ complaining increased in intensity and finally we relented and took them off in search of cake. Our brief foray into the world of art was over, having not been entirely successful. As we walked out the large front doors, back into a chill January day in eastern Europe, I thought I could hear a low, evil feline snigger, a noise fated to crawl down anyone’s spine.

The cat was still watching…

Blooms On The Trees And The Mysterious Disappearance of LJ Frost

2007-01-12T13:42:00.000+01:00

This is not a recent picture. You can tell that because there’s snow in it. I just thought I’d put it here to show everyone what winter used to be like before we completely screwed the planet up. They say that winter will arrive in eastern Europe some time next month, but by then it will be too late. It’s already spring. During the summer I’m this complete temperature junkie, permanently checking the 7-day forecast for cooler weather, but in the winter I usually switch off. But not this non-winter. Keep waiting for minus 20. Even checking the weather in Moscow, because it ain’t going to get freezing here if it ain’t freezing there.

We make the kids sit at the dinner table every night, fighting Two of Two and his urge to leg it the second he’s finished eating his tomato ketchup and whatever substance is lurking underneath it on that day. And every night, when he tries to run off, we say, “You can’t leave until everyone’s finished, you’re going to sit there and talk to us so you don’t become a weird teenager.” And he says… “I don’t care.” One of his new catchphrases. Very teenage. Already. The other night TPCKAM was giving him a bit of a lecture about the phrase, telling him he had to drop it. In classic unintended undermining of other parent mode, I chose the moment to tell TPCKAM about one of the phrases she overuses. The conversation went like this…

Me: While we’re on the subject, you’ve got to stop saying ‘It’s not rocket science.’

TPCKAM: Why? Do I say it a lot?

Me: All the time. Sorry, but you know…

TPCKAM: Thanks for telling me in front of the kids.

Me: You do it to everyone, usually when talking about the Blair government.

One of Two: Dad’s right.

TPCKAM: If I can’t say that, what am I going to say instead?

Two of Two: You can use the F-word, like Dad.

Enough said…

So it’s January and we’re going to school by bike some days. Not that the kids are happy about this. The other day, riding home into a little bit of a wind, there were objections all round. First One of Two stopped and complained about being tired. I couldn’t hear because of the traffic and rode on. Then Two of Two produced a hundred mile an hour whine which went along the lines of… “I’m tired, and I’ve had a hard day at school, and everyone blamed me for letting in four goals, and I’m miserable, and my legs are tired, and the wind’s in my face and that’s making me more tired, and I’m going to slow down and then you’re going to ride off and I’ll be lost and I’ll never see you again…”

I probably shouldn’t have laughed, but he got over it anyway. We rode on. One of Two caught up with us, tried to pass Two of Two, but he was weaving around like a drunk goalkeeper, and she couldn’t get past. She got off her bike, meticulously leant it up against a post, and stormed off to stand with her arms folded in a huff because the world was against her. Turning round, Two of Two noticed that his sister had downed tools and so he too got off his bike, laid it down in the middle of the pavement and sat on it. A wee boy. Miserable.

It was one of those moments that as a parent you want to be able to frame. Gloom, anger, hormones, resentment, antagonism, cold, wind, rain in the air, and all beside six lanes of fast moving traffic. I leant on my bike and laughed. I was still in the same position half and hour later when the doctors came.

We got home in the end. I was Kissinger rather than Nixon, and you know, I didn’t even use the F-word once. At some point even the most miserable kid realises that when they’re out on a bike and they get off in a huff, there’s no getting home until they get back on it.

It ain’t rocket science…

Things To Do On A Saturday in Warsaw...

2007-01-09T13:41:00.000+01:00

The festives are over, life returns to normal. Sporadically a Thank You note arrives from someone’s children, which only serves to remind us that we never got our own children to write thank you notes. Meant to, the Christmas holidays seemed so long that it appeared inevitable that at some point we’d all have time to sit down and do them… yet the Thank You notes never happened.

Now that school has returned, I can go back to working on my movie script, The Monkfish Cowboy, which is in development with Dan Films. Despite the fact that I usually write serial killer books, and that Dan have in recent years made both Creep and Severance, Monkfish Cowboy is pretty straight romantic comedy, complete with comedy sidekicks and not a slasher or homicidal lunatic in sight.

Saturday morning, I dragged everyone out of bed by eight, and we went skating. The new family activity. Having learned to disengage myself from the sides, I’ve quickly got over the general excitement of being able to do something that I never thought myself capable of, and now I just look like a guy who can’t skate very well. I’ve thought of getting a big “I’ve only been doing this for a week” banner for my head, but that would just be stupid.

We came home, and TPCKAM took the kids for haircuts. This allowed me to do some work on Monkfish Cowboy. I’ve been tasked with examining the journey taken by my two romantic leads. Film people always talk of the journey that the characters take through a film, and by that they don’t mean the 12.35 from Paddington to Bath. I’ve also been asked to invest my male lead with ‘dynamic lethargy’. I didn’t quite manage that in the ninety minutes that the others were out of the house.

A couple of months ago our ambassador held a cocktail party for Michael Palin, who was on his way through Warsaw in the middle of his latest travel show. I nearly didn’t go, because I imagined I would just stand there like a complete lemon staring at the man in awe, before asking if he wouldn’t mind saying, ‘Listen, mate, strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government…’ the finest single line in all movie history. In the end I went. Didn’t talk to him for a while, mingled in that way that I hate, before our ambassador dragged me over to introduce me to Palin, which he did with the words, ‘Michael, this is Douglas, he’s one of your lot, he’s written a film script.’ And then he left me to it. ‘It’s a romantic comedy about monkfish,’ I said to an actual member of the actual Monty Python team. He laughed nervously and said, ‘Don’t tell me any more, that’s all I need to know.’ I suddenly realised that due to the paucity of the introduction, he had me pegged as a civil servant with a film script, and that he thought I was going to ask him to read it or give me advice or some other awful thing. Without blurting out hysterically that the script had been optioned, I managed to get across that it was in development with people who actually make films, and that he didn’t need to worry about me asking him to star in it. He visibly relaxed, but I felt like we never really recovered in our roles as a couple of guys standing at a cocktail party.

Apparently Michael Palin had a part in You’ve Got Mail, but he was left on the cutting room floor. If ever a movie needed Michael Palin. He said that Meg Ryan was really nice, which I just thought I’d mention because everyone thinks Meg Ryan’s awful since her brief stint on Parky.

On Saturday afternoon we went to an exhibition of the Terracotta Army in Warsaw’s oldest shopping mall. Despite the fact that it’s more of a detachment than an actual army, and that most of the soldiers on display are replicas – there are a few in glass cases which (presumably) are the real thing – it’s a fascinating display, kept the kids interested for up to fifteen minutes and made us all want to go and visit China. Or at least to have a no.37 with fried rice for dinner.

The kids then charged to the nearest toy shop to spend some of their Christmas money. Two of Two bought crap. It’s his inalienable right as a wee boy. One of Two bought a giant teddy bear. We waited for the official naming ceremony, hoping that it was going to be something cool. She has a giant dog called Angelberry, which is a cool name for a stuffed dog. However, all her other toys have names like Mrs Pink, and Miss Flower, and Happy and Giggles.

She named the giant teddy bear…Giggles. You’ve already got a Giggles, we said. Now I’ve got another one, she said. Giggles has taken his place at our dining table, place set and everything. Today I’m supposed to be teaching Giggles, the stuffed teddy, mathematics. To be fair to the lad Giggles, he’s picking it up a lot better than the kids.

Saturday wound down with the kids watching the newly arrived Biker Mice From Mars, an education in popular British culture, and probably more important than maths and learning about the Terracotta Army.

The day drifted to a conclusion. Patches chewed the wires, Giggles sat in a big fluffy motionless heap in the corner, and outside the first hint of summer ruffled the tops of the trees...

Five New Year's Resolutions

2006-12-31T15:05:00.000+01:00

New Year’s resolutions are the preserve of columnists and bloggers who can’t think of anything else to write as the year winds down to its sorry conclusion… So here are mine.

1. Iron the dish towels.

Might as well start with an easy win, given that I’m bound to fail on all the ensuing trickier ones. Of course, it’ll make me look like Julia Robert's weird husband in Sleeping With The Enemy. And then there are those moments when you open the dish towel drawer to retrieve something to help in mopping up the latest pint of milk which has been spilled over the kitchen table, and the last stupid thing anyone wants to see at a time like that is neatly ironed dish towels. Still, I’ve already started ironing dish towels in the last few days so I know I can do it.

2. Don’t shout at the kids so much.

Hmm… The eternal optimistic avowal of most parents. It’s not really a matter of sticking to it, as you know you won’t, but you can at least run a sweep on how far into New Year’s Day you get before breaking it.

I had this strange period three years ago in Belgrade, when I went five or six weeks without ever raising my voice to the kids. Nothing to do with them being well-behaved and doing everything on request. It had come from within. My biographers can call it my Zen Period. The trouble was that I had no idea where it had come from, so that when it went away and I suddenly started bellowing at the spawn for fighting and endless prevarication when haste is called for and all those other things that drive parents demented, I couldn’t get it back. My Zen turned up on a pale horse, hung around for a few weeks, then left again. My Zen was Clint Eastwood. The Calm With No Name.

Perhaps one day the Calm will return, but probably only after the kids have gone off to university or to fight rebels in the DRC or whatever it is they’ll do when they finally leave. Assuming they do.

3. Take One of Two ice-skating every week

We bought One of Two ice skates for Christmas. It was the perfect gift, meeting all the Five Big Criteria. 1. She wanted them. 2. It’ll get her out in the fresh air. 3. Not a computer game. 4. Not stupidly expensive. 5. Suitably old-fashioned to satisfy our Victorian aesthetic. (To accompany all those Victorian parenting methods we use on a daily basis.)

The downside is that one of us has to take her ice skating, which we’ve solemnly promised to do. We went this morning for the second time since Christmas. The first time, Wednesday afternoon, the place was jumping, so we threw One of Two onto the ice and let her get on with it. Today we leapt out of bed with the dustbin men, and were at the outdoor skating rink beside the wedding cake Palace of Culture and Science before the crowds. We all went on, the Gang of Four.

TPCKAM is moderately competent and skated off with an air of panache. One of Two kind of minces, but she can scootch round without falling on her backside too much. Two of Two was unusually game for the whole thing, and charged off, falling over every fifteen seconds, and being soaked through to his bones within minutes. Which left me, holding onto the sides and crawling round more slowly than the snail-like velocity of a receding Scandinavian glacier.

Only my second time, so I had some excuse. Stayed on for about forty minutes, and didn’t fall over once, although mostly just because I constantly stayed within grabbing distance of the side wall. The only time I had to edge out was when there was some complete bastard standing against the wall, making sad sacks like me drift towards the middle. I fully expected on these occasions to suddenly fall against these people, pawing at them to stay upright, probably grabbing some poor woman’s breasts as I fell. Fortunately that never happened, although I could see some of them looking at me, clearly thinking, ‘If that guy falls over and does the fake breast snatch, I’m whacking him with my handbag.’ The second great impediment was a huge ridge across one end of the rink, which was just there to make the thing more of an assault course. The third, and greatest impediment, was that the entire rink was covered in ice.

If I do this every week for the next fifteen years…I will still be a complete muppet.

4. Read with the kids every night

A fine aspiration, which probably won’t happen. Maybe there are parents who read with their kids every night – and I mean, you listen while they read, rather than reading a story to them as they drift off to sleep at 11.30pm – but we just never seem to get the time. It’s not like we’re sitting with our feet up watching ‘50 Greatest Celebrity Sandwiches’ on Channel 4 while the kids are playing Scooby Doo games on CartoonNetwork.com. There are so many after-school clubs and various other activities, that by the time you’ve got them home, they’ve moaned and whined their way through other homework, you’ve sat round the table having a family dinner so that you can all talk to each other and they don’t become teenage criminals and drug addicts, and then they’ve splashed fifteen gallons of water around the bathroom and you’ve had a pitched battle over Teeth Cleaning, it’s already some time well into the depths of the evening and everyone’s ready to collapse in a giant heap. Reading’s the one that always ends up on the discard pile.

5. Get the kids to eat more fruit and vegetables

Well….that’s just not going to happen, is it? There will, of course, be sporadic bouts of cauliflower and broccoli, with the occasional gust of peeled apple, but generally we will end up mired in a dreich overcast predomination of pasta, with constant showers of tomato ketchup.

Enough resolutions from the parental wish list. In the end, regardless of what you intend or what you reasonably hope for, the new year usually ends up being pretty much like the old one, and all you can do is jump in head first and hope you get to at least 8am on the first morning of the year without the house having descended into complete bedlam.

How Laundry Happens...

2006-12-28T14:36:00.000+01:00

It’s morning. You’ve got some place to go and inevitably you’re in a time crunch. You shout at your kid, ‘We’re going out in five minutes, get dressed! Clean your teeth!’ After another couple of exhortations, your kid finally extracts itself from the television.

Fifteen to twenty minutes later your child appears at the bottom of the stairs, dressed but with teeth uncleaned. At this point you say/shout (depending on your stress level), ‘It’s a school day, get your uniform on!’ or ‘We’re having dinner with the Prime Minister, get the football strip off!’ or ‘It’s minus 5 outside, put on a pair of long trousers!’ (Now, I’m partial to a pair of shorts in all weather myself, but then I don’t descend into a Duracell whine when I feel cold…)

Child retreats back upstairs and reappears some half an hour later potentially properly dressed. (You then forget about the teeth until some undisclosed moment later on when they breath on you.) The day progresses as planned.

Let’s ignore the rest of the day and go back in time to the moment when the kid returns to his/her room to change out of whatever completely inappropriate clothing he/she had on in the first place. At this point the child:

a)   removes the clothing, folds it up neatly and puts it back in a drawer.
b)   throws off the clothing with happy abandon, leaving it in a crumpled heap on the floor.
c)   finds a toy that they completely hate and decides that they really have to play with it for fifteen minutes.
d)   fights with their brother/sister over some tiny piece of plastic crap that neither of them actually wants.

Pick three from four. The clothing they’ve removed inevitably gets lost under some other toy or game or such in the ensuing stramash. The next time you’re in the room, the place is such a mess that you hardly notice the clean, once-neatly pressed clothing lying in a heap.

This happens Every Day. When you get to the stage of not being able to see the floor, you politely enquire of them if they might clean their room, and they grudgingly mump up the stairs at the seventeenth time of asking. They pick up all the clothes lying around and put them in the laundry basket. You dump the clothes in the washing machine in a bundle, and it’s only then, when you’re hanging the things up and you are actually noticing individual items of clothing, that you start to think, ‘I don’t remember the wee man wearing that…’ and ‘He hasn’t had that on in two years…’ etc. And then you realise why it is that almost 90% of the washing you do every day belongs to one of your children.

And so you shout at them again and the next time they have to change five minutes after they’ve got dressed they remember to put things back in a drawer – cramming it in there in a crumpled mass – and that happens no more than once, then they go back to their old ways and you’re still having to buy a jumbo sized packet of Persil every few days at the supermarket on the corner.

And that's how laundry happens.

Next time...why you have to buy toilet paper every single day.

I, Rabbit

2006-12-24T13:00:00.000+01:00

Christmas Eve. An uneasy calm settles over the planet… The school holidays are nine days old and have been strangely marked by a paucity of internecine warfare. Yesterday Two of Two and I had a long father/son bonding day. Played chess three times, played cricket in the morning for an hour and a half and played football in the afternoon for over an hour. The football was a tight defensive struggle, characterised by long periods of stalemate, which finished 40-35 to me. Imagine if one of the games between Craig Brown’s Scotland and those football behemoths of Estonia had been played first to 40… They would not only still be playing, it’d probably still be 0-0. Maybe having to watch that will be Craig Brown’s hell when he dies. Serve him right. Or, more likely, that’ll be his heaven, and hell for the rest of us. “Well, Brian, I thought the way we advanced briefly into the Estonian half for thirteen seconds in the seventh year showed promise, but even so I was little worried that it left us exposed at the back and so that’s why I brought on another defensive midfield player.’

Whilst we played cricket in the morning, One of Two was in the kitchen with her wee friend – another One of Two, so perhaps we could call her One of Two Two to avoid confusion – making gingerbread cookies. Hard to keep your eye on the oven when playing for the Ashes in the back garden. An emblematic moment in the culinary disaster that was the Saturday Morning Cookie Fiasco, was to come in to find One of Two Two having poured an entire bag of floor into the bowl, using 350g as a very rough estimate. The cookies never stood a chance. When finished, none of them were eaten, and will instead be kept safe in a bag until such times as we’re beside a body of flat water and they can be used for skimming purposes.

So, I more or less devoted the day to the wee lad. Late in the afternoon, not long after darkness had fallen, we trudged happily inside from the field of dreams that is the mudbowl of the back (former) lawn. Unable to face the prospect of any downtime whatsoever, the wee man said, ‘can I go on the computer?’. Well, I’d been thinking that we might nip down the Speckled Band for a packet of crisps, a pint of cider and a chat about football and women, and said ‘no’. So then, raising a blunt middle finger to the day of father/son interaction, the wee man started crying and stormed out the room in a major huff. What is it they say about devoting time to your kids and the positive effect it has on them? Still, at some point he returned to apologise and we moved on. Must be the Christmas spirit.

The first present of the year has already been given. I wrote a few weeks ago about One of Two’s Christmas list, which featured a rabbit. She had been asking for a rabbit for some time. At this stage there was no way she was getting a rabbit. No way, not a chance, forget it.

She kept talking about a rabbit. Big eyes. Big, big eyes.

She had to do a Christmas list in her Pet Diary at school. She wrote ‘rabbit’ at the top of the list, and then the usual War and Peace-esque length of items beneath. However, she left a note for Santa at the foot of this gargantuan list which read… ‘Dear Santa, I’ve written a lot of things here, but actually I don’t want any of them, the only thing I really want is the rabbit. A rabbit is the only thing I want. Just a rabbit. Nothing else.’

I cracked. Classic dad-capitulating-in-the-face-of-his-wee-girl-being-cute situation. Then it transpired that some friends of ours at work had been given a rabbit and weren’t really in a position to devote enough time to it. The planets were in alignment, fate was in full swing, the gods had made up their minds. We were getting a rabbit.

The particulars of the handover of the merchandise dictated that we would come into possession of Patches the Netherland Dwarf (PtND) four days before Christmas. It seemed a long time to keep the wee girl locked in a cupboard, (I mean the rabbit, not One of Two) just so that we could spring the surprise on Christmas morning. She had to be handed over on the night.

When we told her where we were going, One of Two reacted with immediate delight, leaping into our arms and displaying all the cute little girlness that you want from your little girl. Within minutes, however, she was facing up to the prospect of getting what she wanted.

We went to PtND’s apartment. She was sitting on the carpet watching CNN. One of Two and PtND regarded each other with a certain trepidation. For all her desire to have a rabbit, One of Two does have an aversion to Small Things That Move, like mice, spiders and her wee brother. She stroked her, but refused to pick her up. The discovery that PtND’s claws needed snipping as they were, under all that fur, about six inches long, did not help.

We went home, the whole enterprise made easier by the absence of Two of Two, who was spending the night with his wee chum, Two of Three. In fact, given the size of the rabbit cage and the associated paraphernalia, there wouldn’t have been space for Two of Two in the car anyway, and we would have been in another of those tying-him-to-the-roof situations that nearly always get us in to trouble.

We let PtND roam around the living room. TPCKAM held her for a while, and received a massive scratch at the top of her chest for her trouble. It had the air of an accident, but maybe PtND has a vicious streak. As another friend has just pointed out, she does resemble Monty Python's killer rabbit.

They say that kids are always excited about getting small animals, and then the novelty wears off after a while and the poor things get left in a corner munching a carrot. Inevitably it comes down to the parents to clean out the cage then take the beast out in the evenings while watching tv, stroking its ears while it sits in your lap. Like some parody of Ernst Stavro Blofeld, in complete control of the tv remote.

Well, One of Two has done her best to fly in the face of this stereotype, by not being that excited in the first place. Still, as I write, she is mucking in with TPCKAM, doing that clearing up rabbit poo thing. Perhaps, after she’s got used to the shock of actually getting something she’d asked for – and after we’ve had PtND's vicious stabbing weapons of mass scratching lopped off – she will settle into a long and happy relationship with her dwarf.

And so Christmas is afoot, the battle lines have been drawn, and we’re now only a few hours away from that moment when the kids wake early, cry havoc and let slip the dogs of avarice.

Merry Christmas, dear friends! Last man standing is the winner...

Is That A Doughnut or A Meringue?

2006-12-18T09:56:00.000+01:00

Should you find yourself over the next week or so listening to the Bing Crosby yuletide classic, It’s Beginning To Look A Lot Like Christmas, consider this:

“There’s a tree in the Grand Hotel,
One in the Park as well
The Sturdy kind that doesn’t mind
The Snow…”

Of course it doesn’t mind the snow, it’s a flippin’ Christmas tree! What kind of Christmas tree is it which minds the snow? You can imagine the scene in the forest in the middle of Norway. The snow starts, the trees suddenly go into a panic and start running about in a torment of fear and pusillanimity. ‘Quick men!’ shouts the leader, ‘get the women and children inside. Last one in the sauna’s deciduous!’

A week to go until Christmas. School finished on Friday, which seems very early. I, of course, seem to remember school finishing on like the 24th at eight in the evening, or thereabouts, but I expect my mother remembers it differently. There’s another line in the above song, ‘And Mum and Dad can hardly wait for school to start again…’ which has a depth of perception sadly lacking in the ridiculous mince about the outrageously brave tree in the park. I remember when TPCKAM first heard that line, she thought it sounded mean, but I don’t think she does anymore.

The past week has seen the usual torrent of parties and baking and driving the kids all over the city. I had to do two bouts in the kitchen. First was nothing to do with the kids, but was as a result of having to make mince pies for the International Women’s Christmas bazaar. Every spouse in the embassy was asked to make three or four million mince pies, and they still sold out apparently.

I rose early on the Saturday morning, donned my chef’s hat and got to work. Given that I was using pastry out of a packet and mincemeat out of a jar, there wasn’t actually any real skill involved, but it didn’t mean that I wasn’t about to make a mess of it. Assembling a mince pie so that it looks like something you might buy in a shop is the kind of thing they used to do on the Generation Game. I would have been rubbish on that show, and so it proved with the mince pies. They looked, well, mince. When I put them in the oven the time on the digital clock read 9:11, a grim portent of how the mince pies would be destined to turn out.

Four days earlier I had sat in amongst the nest of vipers that is a collective of international mums, as they decided who would make what for Two of Two’s class Christmas party. By the time it got to me, sandwiches, crisps and paper plates had already been taken. I blurted out mini pavlovas for some reason, and then sat back and forgot about it for a few days.

Now, the essence of the pavlova, the meringue, I could have made days in advance. I didn’t. I left it, in fact, until the morning of the party. I rose early – 5:10am – in order to have the meringues cooked and cooling in the oven before I’d headed off to school to deposit the spawn. I addressed the kitchen at 5:15. Separated the egg whites, measured out the sugar. For some reason I thought our electric whisk wasn’t working. I don’t know why I thought that. I didn’t even check it. I think maybe some previous electric whisk burnt out, but that was about four years ago and has long since been replaced by a whisk which is fully operational. It was just after five in the morning, and there must have been some weird psychological dream-like throwback going on. So, lacking an electric whisk – and using the kind of brain-dead thought processing which would guarantee me a job in the senior Civil Service if I wanted it – I decided to go for the electric handheld blender. To be honest, I thought it was a handheld whisk. Electric blenders don’t whisk eggs. It didn’t work. I got out the industrial blender, and fitted the blender attachment rather than the whisk attachment. That didn’t work either. At some point I think I even tried in desperation to whisk it by hand, which was very early-19th century and destined to failure

At this stage I still didn’t realise that I was being a complete muppet. I blamed the eggs, binned them, and cracked open another four. I did exactly the same series of mindless acts of culinary ineptitude. It’s one thing to be idiotic, but to repeat the idiocy twice with a ninety minute period takes a special level of naïve muppetry. The second batch of eggs also refused to be whisked by a series of blenders. I stomped up the stairs in a humph, not too far off seven o’clock. TPCKAM stirred from under the covers. I reported my Morning So Far. To give her some credit, she didn’t laugh at me, she just said, ‘Why didn’t you use the whisk?’

I went back down the stairs and re-entered the battlefield. The whisk was working. I had the meringues in the oven in ten minutes. Basically I had got out of bed, at just after five in the morning, to be stupid. Days don’t start any better than that.

And you know, I don’t reckon that six year-old kids really appreciate a nice bit of pavlova. It’s just something else with a tonne of sugar in it.

So here we are a week before Christmas. Only seventeen days until the kids go back to school…although to be honest I’m not yet at Bing’s stage of not being able to wait for it. The kids have cricket fever at the moment, prompted by my watching it every morning, rather than any actual interest in the England team getting gubbed. This morning they were out in the garden at eight o’clock, temperature just above freezing, barely daylight, a dreich, bleak, damp day, big jackets and wellies, Two of Two in a balaclava, playing the summer game. Having played out there all weekend, I know that the pitch is a little slow and the ball is turning square. Heartwarming enthusiasm from the pair of them. Ten minutes later they were screaming at each other, One of Two ran into the house bringing the garden with her, and I watched from the stands as Two of Two picked up four stumps and the bat and hurled them across the pitch, his face contorted in little boy anger.

Scotland needs a Dennis Lillee.

Lost and Found

2006-12-12T21:20:00.000+01:00

Yesterday I lost Two of Two for the best part of half an hour. That’s a long time to lose one of your kids. He, as he will no doubt say when the story is recounted in later years, knew where he was all along.

It was a typical post-school Monday afternoon. A mixture of school misinformation, bowling and dance class, all with a time crunch element. I arrived at 2.45, thinking we’d have plenty of time for bowling before Two of Two had to be in jazz dance at 4.30. Turned out there was a carol concert which didn’t finish until 3.20, which I’m sure the school never mentioned, although it might have been that I wasn’t paying attention.

We went bowling in the local shopping mall, a few hundred yards from the school. Given that time had become shorter, we took the car. We bowled. We were rubbish. By the time we left bowling we were already likely to be five minutes late. One of Two and I legged it down the escalator to the car park. Looking back I saw Two of Two ambling behind. We got to the bottom, looked round, the wee man wasn’t at the top. Waited about five seconds, legged it up the stairs… He was gone. That quick.

Usually in the lose-one-of-your-kids situations, the initial reaction is maybe ninety percent it’s going to be fine, mixed with a small amount of initial panic. This, for some reason, was the other way round. He had gone so quickly, and at such an easy point for someone to have nabbed the little bugger.

I legged it round the supermarket element of the shopping mall, because we usually go in there. Nothing. I ran up and down like a headless chicken, all the time leaving One of Two standing at the Last Known Point of Contact which didn’t seem safe either. I legged it to the other end of the mall to see if he had his wee nose pressed up against the muffin case in the coffee shop. I legged it back. I ran outside, I ran down to the car park.

We’ve all asked ourselves this question at some time in our lives: if we were one of the Magnificent 7, which one would we be? Steve McQueen, cool, handsome and in complete control. Yul Bryner, authoritative and smooth. Horst Buchholz perhaps, headstrong and impetuous, but brave and true with it. Well, here I was, faced with a stressful situation, and I was Robert Vaughn.

A passing woman who had seen me charging pointlessly about like the Rangers midfield, suggested I try the security guard. The guy considered the facts – veeeery slooooowly – and then took me into the security control room. CCTV everywhere. It was like a movie. I didn’t want to be in a movie situation, I just wanted to be in a regular, shouting-at-my-kids situation. Then he pressed a button, gave me the microphone and told me to make an announcement over the tannoy. I was so scared at this point that I didn’t even say, ‘But I don’t speak!’ I garbled some mince to the wee man, and then legged it back out into the mayhem.

A mum from the school had appeared, and I dispatched her to the farthest reaches of the shopping mall. I ran around like a completely different headless chicken. I was called into the guard room to make another announcement. I ran back out and legged it once more round the supermarket. TPCKAM was on her way to the school to watch the dance class, so I called to divert her and to include her in the panic. Since I was panicking, it allowed her to be calm.

A guard grabbed me and said that they’d located the lad. I collapsed in a heap, picked myself up and went to find him. He took me upstairs to the bowling alley, where there was a party taking place, with twenty kids from the wee man’s school, all wearing the same uniform and matching the description I’d given. He wasn’t one of them. Ran back downstairs like a headless chicken. Panicked some more.

TPCKAM arrived, looking much calmer than she probably felt. I went off to the guard room to do the thing that I had put off doing, which was watch the replays of CCTV footage from the time when I’d last seen him. This was about twenty-five minutes in by now. Maybe I just didn’t want to see him being led off by a stranger. Maybe watching flashing black and white pictures of a shopping mall was too much like watching a grim story on the news. You never get shown CCTV footage when something good happens. ‘And here’s footage of Joey Barton buying his favourite pizza,' or ‘Here’s tv footage of a crowd of guys watching Scotland win the World Cup on a tele in Dixons.’ It’s always CCTV footage of people just before they get murdered.

While I was in the guard room flicking through images of the escalators and hoping not to miss anything, searching for some sign that I didn’t really want to find, another kid arrived at the shopping mall, saw One of Two, and said, ‘Hello, One of Two. Two of Two’s at the school.’

Another guard came and grabbed me and gave me the news. It was over as quickly as it had started. The guards all relaxed, safe in the knowledge that a kid hadn’t been snatched on their watch. We went to school, the wee man was sitting there wondering what we’d been up to, having been happily charging around the playground playing football.

What I’d been thinking: ‘Oh my God, it’s been twenty minutes without me, wherever he is, he’s going to be so scared.’

What he’d been thinking: ‘Gooooaaaaaaal!’

His logic was more or less faultless. He’d known we’d been going back to school, (he’d forgotten we’d taken the car), and he knew it was dangerous to hang around a shopping mall on his own, and safer at school. So he walked the few hundred yards in his t-shirt in temperatures barely above freezing.

At least it has sorted out a couple of Christmas presents. Gadgets from the new Bond movie. For Two of Two, one of those electronic tags that Bond gets in his arm – I told him it wouldn’t be any more painful than the BCG – and for me, the mobile defibrillator, for the next time it happens.

To Tell Or Not To Tell

2006-12-04T17:04:00.000+01:00

There’s a kid in One of Two’s class called Fernando. Every time she mentions him, I say, ‘The next time you talk to him, ask him if he can hear the drums.’

As jokes go it’s rubbish, but it does absolutely nail the Crap Dad-Joke on the head. One of Two doesn’t get it of course, as we’ve more or less protected her from Abba. She just looks at me vaguely concerned, wondering if it’s time for the comfy armchair, slippers, cocoa and the Horse of the Year Show. TPCKAM still laughs, which is nice, but after twelve years of repeatedly hearing the same two jokes – Groucho Marx’s ‘He speaks excellent German,’ and ‘You’d never notice it unless you were looking for a bowl of soup’ from A Night in Casablanca – it’s probably just relief.

Three weeks until Christmas. Well into advent calendar season. The four of us have one each this year, none of which have chocolate in them. The kids don’t seem to have noticed that their tradition-loving parents haven’t produced advent calendars with additives and sugar, and are excitedly opening windows every day. Two of Two is so excited that he’s already opened the 24th. I thought of telling him that it meant he wasn’t going to get any presents, but he wouldn’t have believed me anyway. There’s not a lot you can do about your kids opening doors on their advent calendars too early. You might not want them to do it, but it’s just not that much of a crime.

Anyway, it’s more or less too late to tell Two of Two that any dodgy behaviour on his part will see the big fat man with the long white beard skipping our house and hoofing it for the next chimney along. Last year he observed that one of the presents he’d received couldn’t have been made at the North Pole, as it had a bar code on it and was obviously bought in a shop. Then, having heard the story of the real St Nicholas, made the fairly obvious observation that he must be dead by now. Sharp as a button.

We were watching Miracle on 34th Street the other day. The miracle? An old geezer of a judge goes all soppy at the end and awards Santa a hollow court case victory on technical grounds. Great kid’s entertainment. Two of Two said, ‘There’s no such thing as Santa Claus. It’s the parents, isn’t it Dad?’

Tricky. I fudged and stole a line from Dr Seuss. ‘Go ask your mother.’

Had One of Two not been there, then it might have been time to snuggle up with a bottle of ginger wine and a box of mince pies and tell the lad a few home truths about the Great Santa Claus Fraud. The Big Lie. In essence, you see, he doesn’t give a stuff. He doesn’t care where his presents come from, he just wants to get them. He believes in football, chocolate eggs, Scooby Doo, Yoda and Avril Lavigne’s Happy Ending. Tooth Fairies, Santa, monsters in Loch Ness and other such flights of whimsy are of no significance to him.

One of Two however, despite being two years older, still clings to The Great Myth, and will do so for some time to come. We apprised her of the truth about the Tooth Fairy some time ago, but she still talks about the Tooth Fairy in terms that imply she’s not one of her parents. She’s a wee girl, and she wants to believe. Given that so much of her behaviour is pre-teenage, bordering on complete adulthood, it’s nice that some small part of her is still a little girl. As parents, it’s something you want to hang on to as long as possible.

Like the Tooth Fairy business, I’m sure that when we do tell her the truth, she’ll choose not to believe it anyway. I kind of presume that she already really knows, but isn’t saying. However, if you’re going to break the news to your kid, three weeks before Christmas probably isn’t the time. ‘You know how you’re getting excited about Santa coming, and that whole bag? It’s a lie. A huge lie. In fact, a great big whopper of a fib. And although it’s been TPCKAM and I who have been perpetrating this outrageous falsification year after year, you can trust us to get you your selected gift items of the season.’

The right time has to be a sunny day in the middle of July, school holidays just started, the promise of beaches and ice cream and candy floss, when Christmas seems a hundred years away. ‘Sure you can have a toffee apple, but why not go on the trampolines for half an hour first? After the toffee apple you can have another ice cream. Oh, and Santa’s dead.’

The Santa issue is bound to be raised again and again over the next few weeks. We are entering an age of scepticism. The only certainty is that, at the end of it all, we’ll have spent more money on them than we are currently intending to do.

The advent calendars continue. The kids have noticed that on theirs they are getting animals every day and so have started to complain. TPCKAM and I have exciting pictures like Christmas trees and turkeys and, for some reason, cucumber and radish, and the kids are yearning after this kind of December morning thrill. This morning they had to deal with the tragedy of a snowshoe hare and a mountain lion, while their parents were greeted with the rampant excitement of a teddy bear and a lighthouse. They complained.

Kids. A bellyache for every occasion.

Further Dispatches From The Morning Battlefield

2006-12-01T22:11:00.000+01:00

The pre-school battlefield is where the clash between the warring factions of parents and children is at its most heated. The statement that most accidents happen in the kitchen, can equally be applied to arguments. And for all that every school morning seems to be the same, month after month, year after year, as time passes there are subtle changes, as each side develops new tactics, meeting force with resistance, invoking counter-terrorism against espionage. Today, another new tactic from this side of the great wall.

One of Two thrives on painful sluggishness every morning, taking years to do things which even her brother does in seconds. Most days I end up saying the same thing to her, and I know I must sound like a really tired, boring old parent who never changes the record. ‘You’re the one who’s going to be late,’ I intone, like some ancient incantation. ‘I’m not going to be late for anything,’ I say, (albeit this morning I was hoping to be back in time to watch the last couple of overs of the Test Match), ‘Two of Two, (whose official start time is fifteen minutes later) isn’t going to be late for anything. Just you, One of Two. It’s your responsibility, I don’t care if you’re late.’

Blah, blah, blah. She must just instantly switch off. It’s like Gary Larson’s ‘What we say to dogs, what dogs hear’ cartoon. And then, of course, I invariably completely betray my words, by continually getting on at her until she’s actually out the door, showing that I do care if she’s late. Rubbish parenting.

This morning, for some reason, I decided to be true to my words. I gave her the speech, told her that Two of Two and I were ready to leave and that it was up to her to get ready in time then I walked down the stairs and left her to it.

She did not rush. Time passed. The clock ticked. Outside, cars whizzed by on their way to work and school. The weather changed. A couple of guys painted the Forth Bridge. Geoff Boycott ground out a double century. Civilisations rose and fell. I wondered, as she had already used up her usual morning spoiling tactic of sitting on the toilet for half an hour, what she could possibly be up to.

She appeared, smiling, some time later. By this time I was in such a rush that I didn’t look at her, just hustled the kids into the car and legged it out of the garage. Only then did I notice… She had absolutely clarted her face in make up. Lippy, lip gloss, mascara, God knows what else.

I’m a man, from the west of Scotland. I don’t know anything about mascara. Seriously. I don’t even really know what it’s for. I hate make up. It’s bad enough on women, a hideous abomination on wee girls. However, even though I’m amazingly and happily ignorant about something I see on women every day, I do know enough to sense that stabbing yourself on the eyelid with mascara, giving one eye a small black splodge so that you look like you’re in the first throes of some strange and exciting new plague that’s about to sweep the planet, probably isn’t right.

To be fair to the girl One of Two, she’d nailed the lippy.

I searched the car in vain for tissues. (Finding yourself without tissues or wet wipes is a regular, if minor, bad parenting moment.) When we arrived at school I unearthed a towel in the boot. I’ve no idea what it had previously been used for. Maybe it’s just there in a Hitchhiker’s Guide way in case of emergencies, and this certainly fitted the bill. I pounced on One of Two, and a few minutes later her face was cleared of all Max Factor products and the like. Maybe because she knew she was never going to get away with it, or maybe because I refrained from the boring ‘no daughter of mine…’ speech, she pretty much gave me free reign to towel her face away.

And just to further thwart my intentions, we arrived at school at the same time as two other kids in her class, who proceeded to walk slowly into the building in no great rush. She had spent hours and hours, so it seemed, applying her face, and yet we still weren’t particularly late. Another triumph for the spawn.

Kids dispatched, I drove home and walked back into the house, back to that wonderful silence and calm, a beautiful serenity that cannot be undermined by the clamour of unwashed breakfast cereal plates which surround the kitchen sink like native American’s around Custer’s wagons, and planked myself down in front of the television.

The cricket was finished. One of Two’s victory was complete. When I picked her up I told her that I’d managed to see the last five overs, but she knew I was lying.

Biker Muppet From Planet Senility

2006-11-30T12:32:00.000+01:00

Last week I referred to the kid’s tv show, Biker Mice From Mars, which wasn’t a fault in itself. I didn’t actually slag it off, because I’ve never seen it before, but I mentioned it in the sort of way that old people talk about the internet as being this new fangled thing that most people haven’t heard of yet. Someone kindly wrote to point out that it’s currently the most popular kids show in the UK and was first aired in the 90's.

This is one of the problems with living abroad. Cultural references pass you by. You miss things. You catch most stuff on the internet, on whatever tv channels you can get, or by picking up a newspaper on your visits home, but some things end up slipping under the radar.

Not that this is all bad. For example, whilst residing in West Africa for three years – pre-internet and without tv – we missed the Spice Girls. (And if one of them hadn’t married some guy who plays football or something – apparently he’s with a Spanish team now – we might never even have known they existed.) And while I don’t care that I’ve missed Biker Mice From Mars all my life, I really ought not to mention it, because I end up sounding like some sad old loser, only one step away from writing a column in the Daily Mail, and saying, ‘Everyone is suddenly talking about e-mails these days, but I haven’t the faintest trace of an idea what they’re on about. It’ll never take off.’

Maybe I’m just hiding behind the excuse that I’ve lived overseas for ten out of the last fourteen years. Maybe I’m just really pathetic and middle-aged. We were watching tv last night and an advert came on for one of those awful CD’s of pre-Christmas mince, by Peter Andre and Katie Price. ‘Who’s Katie Price?’ I asked TPCKAM, and she choked on her coffee and put a call through to the Home for the Terminally Sad in the Trossachs that she’s got me lined up for.

It all augurs badly for my future in the family as ‘Dad’. Not yet of course, because the kids are still young enough to not care that they’re dad’s hopelessly un-cool. At the moment, if they mention something that’s entirely alien to me, they start yacking on about it with enthusiasm, rather than looking at me with complete disdain before leaning over and wiping away the drool from my chin with a tissue. Give it a few years, however, and I’m screwed.

Seven years from now, I’ll have two teenagers and be nearly fifty. I haven’t a chance. They’ll be listening to the mince music of the day, playing with the latest electronic gadgetry, and I’ll be looking at them with total horror and disgust, saying things like, ‘But can you whistle it?’ and ‘In my day we had a wooden train set, if we were lucky,’ and, ‘Bananas? They were a treat when I was young, if we could find a place in the cardboard box we called home to put them in a bowl. Not that we had a bowl.’

You want your kids to respect you and to think you’re cool, but really you haven’t a chance. You hang on to both as long as possible, make your choice, and hope you can manage at least one out of two, while reasonably anticipating neither.

The greatest inevitability of them all is that at some stage I’m going to mention Top Of The Pops, and they’re going to fall about laughing and start calling me grandad, and I’ll sulk off, thinking that my kids are from another planet. Mars for example.

Christmas...

2006-11-24T11:16:00.000+01:00

The kids have been compiling their Christmas lists. In fact, I think they’ve been doing it since about September. Last week their work was finally deemed complete. One of Two put both lists in envelopes and addressed them to:

Santa Claus
1 The North Pole
House Number 1

I suggested she add Finland to the bottom of the address, and she wrote Findland. Then she gave them to me to take to the Post Office. Three days later, when the envelopes were still lying around the house, she gave them to the babysitter and asked him to take them to the Post Office. Such trust in her dad. Unbeknownst to her, the babysitter then gave them back to me that night. I do intend posting them, but since there’s a kind of de facto relationship between me and the mystery bearded figure known as ‘Claus’, it’s not really too important that they end up attached to a stamp.

One of Two’s list runs to thirty-nine items. That’s a lot of disappointment she’s setting herself up for. There are three main categories of present she’s looking for. There are the ones where she was thinking about what she would really really want in her life. e.g. a rabbit. Rabbit is number one on the list. She’s been told that Santa doesn’t do livestock, but she’s pressing ahead with the claim. Actually, with the honourable exception of mince pies, a rabbit is the only item in this particular category, until we get to number thirty-eight, where she’s asked for a rabbit cage. Santa does do rabbit cages, but that’d be pretty cruel. “Here’s your rabbit cage, sweetheart, but Santa ain’t bringin’ no stinkin’ rabbit…” Even Billy Bob wouldn’t have stooped that low in Bad Santa. Finally in item thirty-nine she seems to accept the inevitable by asking for a FurReal Rabbit, a more realistic aim. A FurReal Rabbit is more or less the same as an actual rabbit, except for the removal of the option of eating it for your dinner once the kids have got bored looking after it.

Category number two is for items which she thought of when she had some sort of moral ethicator fitted to her brain. This category contains things like a new school bag, pencils, school shoes, a jumper and work books. It also contains the critical entry, Vitamins, A, C, D & E. What stocking would be complete without them?

The third, and largest category, are toys and games which she’s seen advertised on Boomerang, and has hurriedly written down as the adverts piled quickly up, one on top of the other. Consequently there are a lot of spelling mistakes. Or, at least, one hopes there are. A sawing kit for example would seem an unlikely thing to be advertised on a kid’s channel.

Fed up with your Mum & Dad? Too many rules and regulations? Not enough fun? Worried that if you have to kill them you won’t be able to get rid of their bodies? With this All-New Winnie the Pooh and Tigger Too Sawing Kit, you’ll never need to worry about parental body disposal ever again.

I’m similarly hoping that Bratz Fukky Fashion is a slip of the pen on her part. Otherwise those dolls for the under-10’s are getting way too advanced.

Two of Two’s list is in two parts, one that his sister wrote with sixteen items – clearly she has a lot fewer ambitions for her brother – and the one he wrote himself with nine items. His lists are much more one dimensional, full of the kinds of things you’d expect from a little boy. Star Wars figures, a goal post, boxing gloves, Biker Mice From Mars etc. (Non-parents might just have read that and thought, Biker Mice From Mars???, but sadly Biker Mice From Mars are a thing, and while he’s written his list and proven himself unable to spell pirates, football or hot wheels, he’s nailed Biker Mice From Mars perfectly.) He’s also looking for a figure of Dr Who’s clueless cousin, Dr How. “What’s happening Doctor?” “How the **** should I know.”

Of course, they didn’t make a duplicate of their lists, and since they think the babysitter posted them, I can’t now take a duplicate and give it to them, so that they can crosscheck the lists against what they receive on Christmas morning. That might seem like the kind of thing that Gordon Brown will do with his kids, but when One of Two stands looking distraught at six a.m. on the morning of the 25th, clutching nothing but school shoes, pencils, work books and a bottle of vitamins, it’d be handy to be able to show her what she wrote.

Last year Two of Two asked Santa for a toy bat. Where are we going to find a toy bat, we thought, and then went off and made no actual effort to find a toy bat. The week before Christmas we were out without the spawn, strolling contentedly through the local shopping mall, when a ray of light suddenly shone on a toy bat sitting on a shelf on a toy stand on the floor below us. We felt some strange sense of elation at being able to get an item from the list that we hadn’t thought likely. It wasn’t that big a deal, but it was nice.

Christmas morning Two of Two opened up the toy bat, took one look at it and, as he threw it into the corner never to touch it again, he said, ‘Why did Santa get me a bat?’

We should have kept the stupid list. Not that it would have made any difference to the amount of playing time used on the toy bat.

And so Christmas is in full swing, slightly later than normal this year. The kids are practicing carols at home, Silent Night is being butchered on a regular basis, and Bing Crosby is already crooning his way through meal times.

‘Tis the season to be jolly…apparently. Pass the coffee and the pumpkin pie.

Fashion...

2006-11-20T14:29:00.000+01:00

Yesterday we went clothes shopping. It happens around this time every year. Two of Two is in shorts from about early April, all through the summer into autumn. Then the weather starts to get a bit colder, the wee man hangs on to his pantaloons of choice as long as possible, and then some time around the beginning of November he has to capitulate and get back into the long trousers. And, of course, since he’s wellying back eight hundred bowls of breakfast cereal every morning and growing up faster than Le Beanstalk de Jacques, his long trousers are all about six inches too short for him.

Not being Dynamic Action Parents, we didn’t dash out at the first opportunity and buy him new trousers for the winter. The lad has been displaying a lot of sockage at school for the past two weeks. There have been mornings when some demonic members of the Mum Collective have been looking at me in dark ways, thinking that I’m a bad parent because I’m still putting my kid in shorts. Well I’ve got news for your girlfriends, if you must know, I’m a bad parent because I’m kicking my kid out the front door in last winter’s long trousers. Totally different.

So we’re in the local kid’s store. In Poland it’s called Smyk. Toys and clothes. There are potential downfalls to this combination, obviously, but in general it works well. You shop, they run around asking if they can buy every single toy in the store, you say no, every now and again you drag them into the changing room and forcibly stick a (insert item of clothing) on them.

The day was progressing normally. The shop was quite busy, the usual bustle of kids and parents, arguments and entreaties. I Wish It Could Be Christmas Every Day was being piped happily around the shopping centre. Somewhere a car screeched to a halt. On the next floor up a child wailed. A clock ticked.

And then, just as we were thinking that the day couldn’t be any more normal, we were looking through this year’s trouser collection for little boys when we discovered them… Trousers with in-built fake underpants.

[Let that sink in a second. Now, if you’ve just read that and thought, oh yeah, whatever, all trousers have in-built fake underpants these days, don’t be such a DAD, then you’d probably be best just to skip to the end. However, I’ve never seen in-built fake underpants before, so I’m still aghast and feel the need to exorcise the horror. If, like me, you are shocked by the concept of in-built fake underpants, then read on…]

In-built fake underpants are like those in-built fake t-shirts you get on jumpers. You know the thing, grey jumper, bit of white cotton at the top to make it look like you’re wearing a t-shirt underneath. It’s an odd enough fashion concept in itself really.

Someone, somewhere, probably Milan or New York, has taken this idea and applied it to trousers. Perhaps there are also trouser lines with in-built fake socks, but I didn’t see any sign of them. These trousers had fake underpants sewn in around the waist, to make it look as if the trousers themselves were hanging down below the line of the underpants, so that a uniform line of underpantage was on display.

I don’t want to sound old – you know, I’m only forty-two, which doesn’t seem too decrepit, not yet – but why would you do that? I’m familiar enough with the concept of letting your underpants show above your breeks, in this twisted day and age. Each to their own. If you want people to see your underpants, then on you go. But what exactly is the idea of faking the pants? With the fake white t-shirt, you’re basically saving yourself the need to wear a t-shirt. So are fake underpants supposed to stop you having to wear underpants?

All right, adults will as adults do, but it’s just different, isn’t it? Adults have some measure of control over their bottoms, for example, and so can probably be trusted to get through a day without underpants. But wee boys? Seriously? You’re going to stick your kid in a pair of trousers with no pants in them? Why on earth would you do that?

The other possibility is that you intend that your kid wears actual underpants to complement the hygiene predicament inherent in the trousers with in-built fake underpants situation. But at the start of the day, that’s just going to set up so many arguments.

“Put your underpants on!” you shout, in the midst of the daily Pre-School Rebellion.

“No!’ replies your six year-old wee nipper. “These trousers have got their own underpants! They’re in-built!”

‘They’re fake!”

“What d’you mean they’re fake? There’s no such thing as fake underpants! That’s stupid!”

And you know, he’d have you there.

And let’s say you manage to get your kid to wear his own Actual Underpants, beneath his trousers with in-built fake underpants. Like your kid is going to need help looking untidy? Give him five minutes on the hoof, his trousers will be dishevelled and probably falling down, and his Actual Underpants are going to be showing above his in-built fake ones. Older kids in school are going to be staring at him and saying, ‘Look at the dumb kid, he’s got two pairs of underpants on.’

But then, I’m forty-two, I know nothing of fashion. Maybe the two-pairs-of-underpants look is in, even for wee boys.

All this ran through my head in the first fifteen seconds after laying my eyes on the trousers with in-built fake underpants. Fortunately Two of Two was off in the games area and never saw them, so he couldn’t be tempted. I walked away from the site of the in-built fake underpant discovery, feeling old and depressed and out of touch. Life, I thought, does not get much worse than this.

And then Paul McCartney’s Wonderful Christmastime started up.

“Ah well,” I thought, “that’s another five pence for Heather.”

Stress Is As Stress Does

2006-11-16T13:52:00.000+01:00

or A Theory On Life, Stress, Children and Robots…

One of Two had a sleepover the other night. TPCKAM doesn’t approve of mid-week, school night sleepovers because of their disruptive element, but I like to work to the principle that as long as it’s at someone else’s house, and they’re mad enough to make the offer, they can take the disruption.

Two of Two instantly changes personality when his sister is off out for the night. You can tell he loves the chance to get his parents to himself. He comes home and kind of snuggles down into the entire house, knowing that his sister isn’t going to be around to bug him and that he’s not going to have to perform his own bugging duties for another twenty-four hours. One of Two, however, hates it when her brother is on a sleepover and she’s not. Like she’s offended at having to spend time with her dull old parents by herself.

The minute she comes home and the wee man’s not there, she starts mooching around saying, ‘Why can’t I have a sleepover with someone? How come he has all the sleepovers. I never have a sleepover with anyone.’ Give it an hour or two, and she’ll be leaning out the window shouting at passers-by, ‘Excuse me! Can I come to yours for the night, my parents are really boring?’ One of Two would rather spend the night with a tribe of feral goatherders in sub-zero temperatures in a yurt on the Russian steppe under a cloud of chemical waste, than actually spend time alone with her parents. Sleepovers are her holy grail, and she will rarely let an occasion pass without inviting herself to someone’s house. The phrase, ‘you have to wait to be invited,’ is as alien to her as ‘do your homework early and get it out of the way.’

We like to think of this as a sign of how secure she is at home…

At the end of school on Tuesday, prior to One of Two heading off for the sleepover, I was discussing with the other mum the small print of the contract – more particularly, who would provide her snack for the next day. I was saying I’d do it, the other mum said, no bother, I’ll make her a ham sandwich. One of Two hates ham sandwiches. On those mornings when I’m foraging painfully round the kitchen trying to find something, anything, to put in their snack boxes – where’s your show about that Ray Mears? – should the words ‘ham sandwich’ pass my lips, the pair of them will immediately start hyperventilating and will allow their heads to pitch forward into their Cookie Crisp. So, the words, ‘One of Two doesn’t like ham sandwiches’ were on the very tip of my tongue, they were there poised to tumble out over the precipice, when One of Two herself, on hearing mention of a ham sandwich started leaping up and down in celebration, punching the air, crying, ‘Yes! Yes! A ham sandwich! I am emancipated and have been re-born, my path that has been dull is now aglow, as was the road to Damascus for the blessed St. Paul. At last I am free from the tyranny of Dad making my snack, even if only for one day! Rejoice! Rejoice!’

‘That’s great,’ I said to the mum, ‘she loves ham.’

The pace of life is different with one kid. Slower. Suddenly there’s not just less stress, there’s no stress. No arguments over the tv or the computer. Two of Two can do his homework without her butting in and telling him the answers, because it’s easier than doing her own homework. There are none of those ridiculous fights which begin, ‘It’s mine!’ and descend quickly into complete anarchy. Suddenly you walk around your house, aware that there is still an underage presence, just not as you know it.. One which is accompanied by choirs of angels singing soothing songs of tranquillity and calm.

Yesterday morning we awoke to the peaceful sounds of Two of Two playing himself at chess. I pottered around making one packed lunch, doing a few chores, enjoying the pre-school peace. Think about it…’pre-school peace’. How often can you say that without choking on your muesli? Then, for some reason, TPCKAM arrived downstairs and within thirty seconds the two of them were having a Nescafé argument. Hot, instant and not very satisfying.

It was a work of genius on the part of TPCKAM, plucking an argument out of thin air. Like Shane Warne conjuring up a screaming leg-break on a dead wicket, Thierry Henry producing a wonder strike with his back to the goal in a crowded penalty area, or Peyton Manning finding Marvin Harrison with an inch perfect pass through a swarm of cornerbacks while being chased to the sidelines by five 350lb behemoths, it was a sublime act of brilliance, creating anger and noise when before there had been calm. Clearly she’s been working for the British government too long.

However, unlike the mornings when there are two children at the breakfast table, the white squall quickly passed, and the rest of the pre-school period snuck quietly into the morning rain.

Sadly, of course, this is just an illustration of how everything is relative. Having one child around isn’t stress-free, not when you only ever have one child. For a while I used to look at stressed-parents-of-one and think, get a grip, for God’s sake. One kid? How hard is that, for crying out loud? Get a second, my stressed amigo, and then you’ll find out how awful it can be… And then I’d go off and be stressed with two.

But of course, everyone with three, four, five, six or more kids, would read my weekly stress-analysis and think the same thing. Get a life! Or more to the point, get some more kids, then you’ll know how hard it is. It’s all relative.

I have this theory. We were all created by robots. The robots programmed into everyone different levels of various emotions. So, for example, for me they put: Happiness 9.8/10, Gloominess 0.1/10, Stress w/o Kids 0/10, Stress w Kids 8.4/10 etc. We then just go along through our lives, applying those levels to each situation. So, with your constant levels of stress, if you’re the type who gets stressed by kids, one kid will do it, and you won’t be that much more stressed even if you had another five. Your stress levels are what they are. If you’re not stressed by one, then more than likely you wouldn’t be stressed by having another two.

Being less stressed when one of your kids is away for the night, doesn’t really change the tenet, as you know that if you had just the one long term, it’d pretty quickly become stressful again.

It’s not a hard and fast psychological statement – particularly the bit about robots – and I’m not calling it Lindsay’s Law of Stress and looking for a mention in the New England Journal of Medicine, but I think it’s fairly accurate. If you have your doubts, then why not have another couple of children to test out the theory?

We got home last night after school clubs, the house back to its normal quotient of two kids. One of Two got out of the car and hid at the back of the garage. When her brother got out she jumped up and scared him. He burst into tears. She ran up stairs. He ran after her, they screamed at each other for a short burst, and then Two of Two concluded the argument in his usual manner by throwing a hard plastic toy at her and gubbing her in the face. One of Two burst into tears.

It had taken forty-three seconds from the time we arrived home...

A Question Of Logic

2006-11-08T14:38:00.000+01:00

Another morning, another breakfast squabble. Jack Johnson has grown tired and old, the wheels have come off the smooth routine. The kids bickered pointlessly, somehow The Parent Currently Known As Mum (TPCKAM) and I stayed calm and negotiated our way through the morass, and we are now contemplating the children eating breakfast in shifts to put an end to the internecine warfare. However, breakfast in shifts demands more time and even more organisation.

This morning's squabble: One of Two, allegedly, took a drink from Two of Two's cup and then passed it back to him. Two of Two didn't appear to have actually witnessed this incident, but was making the assumption based on the facts known to him at the time. Therefore, he wouldn't drink the milk. It wasn't quite Not The Nine O'Clock News' John McEnroe at breakfast, but it was getting there. TPCKAM was called into the argument.

The facts of the case as presented by the Plaintive:

1. The milk was in an orange cup. He doesn't usually get the orange cup. He gets the blue or yellow, so it wasn’t even his own drink he was being asked to consume.
2. There was a spot of milk on the rim, suggesting that someone had already taken a drink from the cup.
3. One of Two was looking at him in a funny way.

A cut and dried case, more or less. You can see his point. Eschewing the possibility of bringing in high-priced legal aid, he decided to represent himself in the case, delivering his argument in a high-pitched bleating whine. The delivery grated with the judges it must be said and, as one of the judges, I have to confess that it coloured my judgement of the issue.

After a brief telepathic discussion, the judges, who were also the jury - in this case not Twelve Angry Men, just One Angry Man & An Angry Woman - decided against the plaintive and he was ordered to drink his milk.

He accepted this readily and downed the entire cup in one quick, delighted gulp.

I'm kidding, of course he didn't. He decided to appeal the verdict, and in doing so chose to disregard the fact that one of the reasons he had lost the first crucial decision was because of his choice to substitute reasoned argument with abject wailing and hysteria. So he whined even more, the high pitched constant moan interrupted by a blubbing lip, so that he sounded like a prepubescent motor boat. The appeal process was long on brevity, and once more the panel of judges found against the Plaintive.

He pushed the milk away from him across the table, thus risking the chance of spillage and disaster. I was preparing snack boxes in the background, TPCKAM was sitting at the heart of the tornado. She was getting mad. She moved the drink back towards him and repeated her instructions in the Parent About To Explode voice - the one which you hope is going to carry some weight, because you remember your parents talking to you like that and it put the fear of God in you - which only served to heighten the wail, as this grave tone which was so useful for our parents has completely lost all effectiveness. It’s as if the cellular infectious lifeform that is Children has adapted to the antibiotic.

At this point, as I sensed the impending volcanic eruption from TPCKAM, I decided to intervene. By introducing logic... I know, I know, what was I thinking?

A couple of months ago, after the first day of school, I was taking the kids along to the local shopping mall to serve up a consolatory ice cream, a kind of sugar-filled, bittersweet farewell to the summer holiday. Just outside the entrance I met a friend and stood for a brief chat. The kids meandered around bored for a few seconds and then started playing in the dirt to keep themselves amused. I looked round to see Two of Two with a cigarette butt in his mouth. I leapt upon him like an unfettered eagle pouncing on the baby lamb of stupidity, swiped the butt from his lips, and left my friend standing in the dirt as I whisked the kids off, words of censure pouring from my mouth like the crashing of water over the Reichenbach Falls. (Returning to the shopping mall the following week, I found my friend still standing there waiting to finish the conversation.)

This little incident presented the basis of my logic, which I decided to bring into play on the third hearing of the case of Two of Two v The State of Despair. 'Why is it,' I said, 'that you can't drink from the same cup as your sister - if she did even drink from it at all, which m'learned friend has yet to prove to the satisfaction of the court - when you were fully prepared to stick a cigarette butt in your gob, a cigarette butt which had been in the mouth of God knows who, and which had been lying on the ground and stepped on by people with shit and who knows what else on their shoes?'

A perfectly reasonable point. Logical. Sadly, however, Two of Two is a six year-old wee boy and he laughs in the face of logic. Or, to be more precise, whines in the face of logic.

'But this has got One of Two's germs on it!' he wailed. I suppose he had his own logic. It didn't matter what unknown viruses or bugs had been attached to that cigarette, they couldn't possibly have been as bad as those associating themselves with his sister.

Two of Two lost the re-appeal. The case was closed. TPCKAM pressed ahead, ordering him once more to drink his milk. Two of Two held firm, the bottom lip creeping out another centimetre, the protesting wail growing louder. Impasse. Under such circumstances it's hard to find a way out. One doesn't want to cave in to the kind of absurd logical tangental thinking that kids thrive upon, however it seems completely insane to start the day off having a raging fight with your kid over something as trivial as a cup of milk.

I intervened again, this time not being so stupid as to introduce logic into the equation. I turfed Two of Two out of the kitchen, dispatching him to get dressed and clean his teeth. So, of course, the result of that was that he won, but at least it hadn't been TPCKAM - the parent at the centre of the storm - who had made the final capitulation, and neither did I pack him off with a pat on the head and a quiet word of sympathy. He retreated upstairs to blub some more, because at least the tone of the parental capitulation had been so harsh that he hadn't realised he'd won.

We all have to pick our fights, but sometimes you end up in the middle of one which you know you're not going to win, wish you hadn't started, which defies all logic and which is very difficult to get out of.

Hmm...that's reminding me of something, but I can't exactly think what it is.

The Beautiful Game

2006-10-30T18:00:00.000+01:00

Ever wonder why soccer is known as The Beautiful Game?

A few years ago FIFA were looking for a cool moniker for the sport, so they called in fifteen guys from KPMG at $300,000/day. Each. Got them to sit around a table and come up with a name. It started slowly. The first few days resulted in suggestions along the lines of: The OK Game. The Game With A Round Ball Where You Kick It A Lot. The Not Bad Game. The Game. The Funky If You’re Brazilian But Kinda Dour If You’re Scottish Game. A Game On Grass. If Star Wars Was A Game It’d Be Soccer. After several weeks, and several million dollars in consultancy fees, it looked like they were going to have to settle for I Can’t Believe It’s Not Rugby, when during the wrap-up, a small fella from Rhode Island said jokingly, “We could call it the Beautiful Game.” There was a certain amount of sniggering around the table, but these were marketing consultants, men for whom truth means nothing, where style is king and substance is immaterial. “I like it!” one of them suddenly. Then Sepp Blatter said, “We must be ballsy. Ballsy! We are in football, and if there’s anything we have a lot of, it is balls.” And then men in suits started saying The Beautiful Game in low voices until it sounded ok, because if you repeat anything often enough it begins to sound plausible. Try it, it works. For example, I bet now when you read about John Reid being a potential Prime Minister, you don’t choke on your cornflakes the way you did the first time you heard it mentioned. The Beautiful Game was born.

As you can see from the above photo, Two of Two is an expert exponent of the Beautiful Game. Every picture tells a story, and here is a boy, limbs moving fluidly, tongue out, poised to pounce on the ball and stroke a sweet shot into the corner of the net.

Saturday 7th Ocotober was a momentous footballing day. I know that already, you’re thinking. Scotland beat France 1-0, and since France had recently beaten Italy, is made us de facto World Champions. At least for four days. Now, certainly that day was momentous for that, but the principal reason it turned out to be a day of moment, was that it saw the first goal of Saturday morning football, after thirteen months of trying, by the aforementioned Two of Two.

One of Two scored two goals the previous week - she was, as her American coach pointed out, on fire - and another that Saturday. We got that warm fuzzy feeling that one gets when watching one’s kid achieve something, or in our case, as we’re not at all demanding, anything at all. ‘Yay! You ate you’re breakfast without spilling any milk! High Five!’ However, each goal was a stab from a couple of yards, in games on a small pitch, four-a-side. And One of Two does not want to be a footballer when she grows up. She wants to be a doctor or a diplomat, she wants to help people and get everyone on the planet to be nice to each other. By God, she has a lot of disillusion in front of her, but you can say that for all kids, and at least she’s going into it with a decent attitude.

Two of Two, on the other hand, wants to play the Beautiful Game. All the time. He wants to play for someone in the World Cup, although he hasn’t yet decided if it’s Scotland or England or France. (The Lindsays came from Normandy, presumably in 1066, so he’s in with a shout.) He keeps taunting me with the England thing, and if he’s not doing that, he says he wants to play for Celtic. He’s young.

So, there he is, going to football every Saturday morning. They practice skills for forty minutes, and then they play a twenty minute game. Quite a large pitch, decent sized goals, and at least twenty-five six year-old boys roving around the park in a tight bunch, like a herd of wildebeest. When the ball goes to one end, it generally takes about ten minutes to get back up to the other. This is end-to-end football in slow motion.

Goals, under these circumstances, are at a premium. When it can take quarter of the game for the ball to work its way out of a midfield scrum of twenty pint-sized Vinnie Joneses, there’s never much goalmouth action. That Saturday’s game was no different. A dour struggle, characterized by the behaviour of the herd, it was heading towards the final seconds with Two of Two’s side on the wrong end of a 1-0 mauling. The ball had finally worked its way up to the other end of the park, and all the opposition needed to do was keep the thing in the midst of the herd for another ten seconds or so.

Suddenly the ball broke loose, and rolled along the ground to Two of Two. He was about twelve yards out, on the outer rim of the scrum - it was a bit like the sun suddenly breaking loose from the centre of the solar system and finding itself next to Pluto. Twelve yards doesn’t sound too much, but these kids are six, and most of them have trouble kicking the ball twelve feet. Two of Two swivelled, smacked the ball right-footed, first time, and sent a magnificent looping shot, through the crowd and over the dwarf-like keeper’s head. The net bulged. The wee lad then took off up the park, hands aeroplane-like out at the side - he’s been watching all the right tv - and was still charging full steam in that classic goalscorer’s pose when the final whistle blew.

He’d saved the day. He’d scored his first competitive goal. It’s now two weeks later, but he’s still running up and down the park celebrating. Saturday 7th October 2006. It might be remembered as the day Scotland beat the nearly world champions 1-0. But not in this house.

Two of Two, goalscorer. It was sweet, perfectly placed and opportunistic. And you know what? It was beautiful.

A Brief Word On The Search For An Antidote To Pre-School Trauma

2006-10-28T16:55:00.000+02:00

I’m on a mission to find new breakfast music. We are several weeks into the new school year, which means we have so far endured several weeks of pre-school stress, following two months off. (Two months of 24/7 kids on the one hand, but two months of not having to get them out the door by 8 in the morning on the other.)

I discovered at some point in the previous year, the antidote of music. Something relaxing to smooth the first traumatic hour of the day. However, the old favourite, the music which served us so well through the bleak winter months and the chill promise of spring, Jack Johnson, whose calming influence soothed many an early morning bunfight, is now sounding tired and old. Banana pancakes? ‘We don’t need no stinkin’ banana pancakes!’ cry the spawn.

It takes a particular kind of music, gentle yet not banal, to do the job. You don’t want to be making breakfast thinking you’re in an elevator, but at the same time you don’t want some raucous guitar romp which has the kids standing on the table strumming a tennis racket.

On Monday I tried out our CD with 24 versions of The Girl From Ipanema. On the upside, it felt like we were having breakfast in the Sheraton or some other top notch international chain hotel. On the downside, it felt like I was the waiter, the chef, the houseboy and the dishwasher in some top notch international chain hotel.

Wednesday I went for Bailero from Chants D’Auvergne, by Frederica von Stade. This is a lovely piece of music, although at six minutes, it does test you to try to get the kids breakfasted, dressed and teeth cleaned, lunchboxes made up, coats and shoes on, homework finished, spelling tests checked and backpacks on before the song ends. It’s the kind of music that would be used in a Brian de Palma movie while someone gets bloodily disemboweled in slow motion. I can imagine myself shouting at the kids for spilling milk all over the table - they’re currently running at 13 of 22 mornings since school started on spilled milk - and hurling a sandwich at them, the bacon and bread separating in slow motion in mid-air, as the kids dive under the table screaming silently, the operatic-style music filling the kitchen with juxtaposition.

Yesterday we went for Hoagy Carmichael. Sadly, Hoagy didn’t work. Ought to have done, he ought to have filled all the right criteria. However, the minute they started fighting over who got to read the back of the Rice Krispie packet, we were all doomed, and the airy songs of lazy rivers and buttermilk skies were damned. Screaming and shouting ensued, mayhem was no refuge, the kitchen was filled with anger, distrust and cries of betrayal, homework went undone, bowls of breakfast cereal were left unfinished, and not until the school playground at drop-off were words of conciliation finally spoken. Hoagy did not do the trick. In the first James Bond novel, Casino Royale, Bond is described as having a bit of the Hoagy Carmichael about him. Hoagy Carmichael is that cool. However, even the writer of Stardust, who looks like James Bond, cannot do the job of bringing calm to a family of four before school.

Next time, we invite Jack Johnson into our house in person, to sit in the corner and play guitar while the kids eat...

An End To Authority

2006-10-27T14:29:00.000+02:00

A couple of weeks ago we were driving home from school. I’d taken the car because I had to pick up someone else’s kid, and so had put on hold the dicing with fate/death/stress that is the daily bike ride. It’s barely more than five minutes in the car, but barely more than five minutes is more than enough time for the conversation to get round to bad words. Which is one of their favourite conversations after all.

When they talk about this stuff, it’s always pretty mild. They never use the swear word in any sort of proper sentence structure. For example, phrases such as ‘Fuck me, my day was a complete bastard,’ are still alien to them. It’s just the words themselves, and the suggestion of them.

School days for six year-old boys are split between playing football and skulking around the playground in wee groups, the amusement coming when every now and again one of them will say ‘shit’ and the rest will dissolve into fits of giggles. The end-of-the-day report usually goes along the lines of, ‘Today we won 19-2 and Billy said fuck.’

The girls are different of course, and not just because, in our case, they’re all two years older. Girls don’t skulk around playgrounds. They stand in little collectives in corners, (they get it from their mums standing in little collectives at the school gate), wondering which one of their friends they’re going to bitchily exclude from the group for the next fifteen minutes.

So there we were sitting in the car and the conversation started up about some kid who had said the ‘sh’ word of the ‘f’ word or something, and the situation in which he’d used it, which of course is never, ‘David said Miss Peabody is a sack of shite’, but far more likely to be, ‘David was just standing there doing nothing and he said shite and we all laughed.’

It’s one of those minor but ever-tricky parental moments. The first time someone says ‘Billy said a bad word...’ you can’t jump on the conversation and tell them to stop talking about it or there will be no Boomerang for six months. So you let it go. However, you don’t want them to be still talking about it in say six hours time, which you know they will be if they get the chance. So you have to give them some leeway, and then stop them at a moment of your choosing. Or, to look at it from the kids’ perspective... you have to ignore the discussion, which makes it look like you’re condoning it, and then suddenly you tell them off at a completely random moment. Which is probably the moment that you’re getting annoyed about it, and from nowhere you sound harsh and angry. Happens all the time.

On this occasion, seeing as we had a non-family member in the car, when I made my completely random assertion that the conversation had gone too far, I didn’t pick up the hand-held flame thrower that I keep in the glove compartment. Instead I spoke sternly to them. They laughed and edged the conversation a little closer to actually saying the rude words in question, whatever they were. I said some more stern stuff, this time, so I thought, with a bit of an edge, just to imply that, although I had never done it before, this might just be the time when I press the rear seat ejector button which we’d had installed by the Peugeot garage the last time the car was in for its service. My serious, enough-is-enough tone, the one that suggests firm but reasonable authority, the tone that you hope carries weight and gravitas.

They smiled and looked cheekily at each other, but the conversation died and I thought I had triumphed. A few more smirks and then the other girl in the car, the non-family member with, more or less, freedom to say what she wanted, said...

‘You sound like Shrek.’

Giggling all round, and that, in such a small and seemingly insignificant moment, was the end of all parental authority.

Worse, my Scottish accent sounds like Mike Myers. Must be time to go home...

Scooby. Dooby. Doo.

2006-10-26T12:04:00.000+02:00

Last weekend. A quiet Sunday afternoon in Eastern Europe. TPCKAM was in the kitchen making dinner, the kids and I settled down in front of the tv. Two of Two and I wanted to watched the football, One of Two wanted to watch cartoons. We negotiated a compromise. Football until half-time, then switch to Boomerang.

When we changed over, Scooby Doo was just starting. An episode about a guy dressed up as a scary monster, who never actually does anyone any harm. Can’t quite place it from that description? I know...

At one point, Fred and the gang are in a motor boat being chased across San Francisco Bay by a gang of thirty foot great white sharks, which are snapping ferociously at the boat. Something which I expect happens all the time in San Francisco Bay. After a scary chase, which has Scooby leaping into Shaggy’s arms in a comedy manner, they finally think they’ve evaded the sharks. Velma stands at the back of the boat and says, ‘Well, it looks like we’ve evaded those sharks.’ Two seconds later a gigantic shark appears and bites off the whole rear end of the boat, including the motor. Velma looks phlegmatically at the camera and quips, ‘Irony, my old friend, we meet again...’

A lovely line, well delivered. But you can spot the problem. IT’S NOT IRONY!!!!

What is the matter with these people? What she said was counting your chickens before they’ve hatched. It’s taking things for granted. It’s spending the money before the cheque’s cashed. It’s a myriad of things, but it’s just not irony.

Had they been going to swim, and someone had said, ‘no don’t swim, there are people-eating sharks, you’ll die’ and then they’d decided to take the boat instead, but rather than people-eating sharks, the sharks had turned out to be boat-eating sharks and therefore they’d been eaten, when if they’d swum they’d have been all right......that would have been irony.

Irony is a complex idea which generally defies one line description. That’s why some people in a certain country which we won’t mention just don’t get it. And yet they’re the one’s who mention irony more than anyone else. Irony, as William Shatner says in Airplane 2, can be pretty ironic sometimes.

Eastern Approaches II

2006-10-25T12:21:00.000+02:00

They say there are all sorts of animals roaming wild in the primaeval forest at the border of Poland and Belarus. Bison, lynx, deer, wild boar, donkeys, Shrek. They say that if you’re quiet, and if you wander far enough into the forest, you might be lucky and get to see one of these rare creatures in the oldest untouched forest in Europe.

If you’re quiet...some chance of that, with two marauding children. There wasn’t an animal this side of the Urals which wasn’t alerted to our presence, and had legged it to the nearest cave to get away from the screaming menace of a six year-old wee nipper on the charge...

We spent a Saturday morning in Bialstok in eastern Poland, waiting for the kids to fall into a fountain. It was large, with an impressive array of displays, and it seemed inevitable that at least one of our kids would take an immediate header into the water. Amazingly, as if the benign water gods were smiling upon us, neither of them did, despite playing beside it for almost an hour.

Eventually we managed to drag them away and headed off in the direction of Bialowieza national park. We were to spend the night in a small wooden shack with dead animals on the wall and no heating, in the small town of Hajnowka.

We arrived in the peaceful country idyll, were served fantastic steaming bowls of soup made from forest mushrooms, and settled back to relax as the kids roamed free and safe in the unspoiled countryside. So we thought. Instead, they stayed about twenty yards away from us playing in a hammock strung between cherry trees, which would have been fine, except they were producing a level of noise equivalent to the whole of Italy when Fabio Grosso scored the winning penalty in the World Cup Final against France. The peaceful county idyll was shattered. We headed off into the forest in an attempt to wear them out, or distract them long enough that they forgot to keep shouting.

We wore them out, sure enough, which helped by 9pm that evening. For the time being, however, they kept up the noise levels. Had there been any kind of dramatic animal life anywhere near the spot where we entered the forest, it would have had time to pack its bags, put its house up for sale, eat some lunch, watch the first three series of The West Wing, have a bath and then catch a late train to the Black Forest, so much warning did we give them of our presence.

We walked for forty minutes, crossing numerous paths and wondering if we’d find our way back. We’d been leaving a bread crumb trail, but discovered deep into the undergrowth that Two of Two had been scoffing it, along with a light chianti he’d brought along for the trip. Soon they were agitating to turn back. You can fight that kind of thing off for a certain amount of time, and then it becomes unbearable. We caved in and marched back to the shack.

By the time we’d found our way home, Two of Two had three hundred litres of mud in his boots. The rest of the day was wet and cold, no heating, Two of Two going through clean clothing like sweets, so that by the time night fell every inch of the shack was covered in soiled/damp/washed clothing.

Sunday morning we took a horse and cart ride into the forest to an orthodox church, painted vivid blue. The perimeter was fenced off with barbed wire, the gates were locked, and we were shown to the huge hole in the fence as means of entry. Behind the church was a sacred well. We’d been told to take a bottle to fill with holy water, for those awkward child demonic-possession occasions. The area was covered with the signs of pilgrimage and prayer, accompanied by a signpost on the neighbouring fence saying that it was a military area and everyone should keep out. In four languages. That whole military-religious mix. There’s nowt more sacred than that.

We took a trip to the tourist centre at the edge of the forest in Bialowieza, mainly to get lunch and take a hike up to the top of the park tower. In the near distance we saw Belarus. There were a lot of trees. Hard to believe they beat Scotland 1-0 at Hampden last year.

When we headed home that afternoon, we stopped off at the orthodox shrine in Grabarka. The story goes...in 1770, when the town was being ravaged by the plague, the townspeople were directed by a heavenly sign to erect a cross on the nearby hill. They called in the marketing consultants, who advised them at $40,000 a day, to put the contract out to tender. Following a five month process, plagued by corruption and claims of cronyism, the contract was placed, and three years later, and miles over budget, the cross was built. The plague vanished overnight. Of course, everyone was already dead. The hill became a holy place, and is now covered in thousands of crosses. There is a burial area, a church, and large areas where visitors on pilgrimage have planted crosses to commemorate their trip. A remarkable sight. We left the kids playing in a ditch by the side of the road, as they’d had enough religion for one weekend.

And that, apart from the dreary drive back into Warsaw along with everyone else who had been in the country for the weekend, was that. We had seen and enjoyed a lot of memorable things, and yet as always, the weekend was dominated by having two spawn at every turn. One day they may thank us for having taken them to an orthodox wedding, a former Nazi death camp, a primaeval forest, a sacred well next to a military installation, and a holy orthodox shrine, all in one weekend...but they probably won’t.

Eastern Approaches I

2006-10-24T14:54:00.000+02:00

Last month we headed east to the town of Bialstok, near the Polish border with Belarus. We’d been invited to the wedding of our child minder, who strangely hasn’t been put off the thought of marriage and the near-inevitable consequence of children by looking after our spawn for the last twelve months. The wedding was to take place in an Orthodox church, beginning at 5pm on Friday evening.

The Parent Currently Known as Mum (TPCKAM) had a day off work, the kids had a day off school - they needed it after all, after having endured the first three days of the new term following two months off - and we set off from Warsaw at ten in the morning, only an hour or so later than planned, which isn’t at all bad, given that we had two kids and hadn’t packed the night before.

It’s no more than a three hour drive, so we decided to stop off along the way at one of Poland’s Holocaust memorial sites, at the former death camp of Treblinka. Even in this day of kids being seemingly desensitised against the worst horrors of humanity, a former death camp is no place for the under-10’s, but the camp at Treblinka was destroyed by the Germans long before the end of the war, and there are no empty buildings left standing, no relics of the gruesome past. The site, in a beautiful, peaceful, secluded forest, is made of standing stones. The perimeter of the camp is marked out with large Stonehenge-like blocks, and inside there are thousands of small stones, marking the victims and the towns from which they were taken. We gave the children a brief explanation of events, they weren’t at all interested, they charged off into the forest and played.

800,000 people were killed at Treblinka, which is just too big a number for anyone to really comprehend, never mind small children. It is a beautiful memorial.

We arrived in Bialstok two hours before kick off. Checked into the hotel and discovered a children’s play area across the road. We bundled the spawn in that direction, and they charged off, shoes to the wind, and let loose the dogs of war. We settled back with a cup of joe and watched the mayhem. At the heart of the play area was a giant, pink and yellow inflatable breast. Perhaps it was intended to make small children feel comfortable, and ease any separation issues they might have when their mother tries to get fifteen seconds to herself.

High up on the wall was an advert for another children’s recreational joint in the city called Fartlandia. Extra beans optional.

At T minus 60 I returned to the hotel. At some stage, and even before I looked in the suitcase, it suddenly dawned on me that I’d forgotten my white shirt. This is the kind of thing that would have you shouting at your kids for their carelessness. Fortunately my own mother wasn’t there to shout at me, and I was at least able to contribute to the stress of the groom and his mother by asking if there was anywhere nearby that I could buy a white shirt. (Good thing I hadn’t forgotten my sporran, which might have been a bit more difficult to source at short notice in eastern Poland.) A spare white shirt was dredged up form somewhere, and I was saved. The kids told me off, but they’re not as good at it as I am.

The wedding service lasted about an hour. A choir chanted melodically almost throughout, responding to one of the many chanting priests on hand. It was a beautiful service, and One of Two and Two of Two managed to hold themselves in check for the entire time. They looked angelic, and maybe they fooled some of the people some of the time, but they weren’t fooling the parents. We were like Gregory Peck in the Omen. (I mean, we could see through the mask, not that we tried to sacrifice them on the alter with two thousand year old knives.)

The service over, they went on the charge. However, later, when the chips were down at the wedding reception, they once more behaved themselves.

This was a wedding reception like you’ve always dreamed of. No speeches. Frankly, that’s what you want out of a wedding reception, as a groom, father of the bride, or as a guest. When One of Two gets married, I now have an alternative to insisting she runs away to the Dominican Republic.

The food was brought out at a tremendous rate, one course zipping quickly into the next, so that if you didn’t get your cutlery in your hands quickly enough, the plate had gone and you were looking at something else which required a completely different set of implements. The object of fast food and no speeches was clearly to get everyone onto the dance floor with as much haste as possible. And so, within about twenty minutes of everyone sitting at the table, and after several ad hoc localised vodka-fuelled toasts, the music was on and ninety percent of those in attendance were boogieing on down to Boney M. Seriously, Boney M. There’s no escape. Resistance is futile. Despite Brown Girl In The Ring, we danced and danced into the small hours.

Ok, I danced for about ten minutes, and then only because TPCKAM pulled a machine gun on me. Soon enough, however, the long tiring day of mostly behaving himself got too much for Two of Two, and the wee fella started complaining of tiredness. We retired hurt to the bedroom, and fell into a deep sleep, only to awake to the cries of Ra-Ra-Rasputin ringing through the hotel at two in the morning...

To be continued...