The Two Crows Mystery

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

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

Normalcy, And The Search For Comedy

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

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

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

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

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...

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

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...

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

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?

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

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

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

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

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...

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...

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

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

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.