Tonight We Shall Feast With The Appetite of Many Men

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

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...