Rabbit For Dinner

Some people think you shouldn't rename your pet. Some people think it's a legitimate manifestation of self-expression to rename your pet. Some people think that on a scale of Zero to Ten of what's important in life - where a Ten would be, for example, the destruction of the planet by global consumerism and big business - whether or not it's right to rename your pet would be a Zero.

I, while being in this latter category, have renamed the pet for no particular reason, other than the fact that since it's now me who feeds it and cleans up after it - which are just about the only two things you can do with a rabbit - I might as well be the one to choose his name. The rabbit is now called Budgie. Gradually the other members of the family have started to switch.

Budgie, for his part, thinks that the importance rating of what he's called is a Zero. For that matter he also thinks the destruction of the planet by global consumerism and big business is a Zero. Whether he gets fresh lettuce every day is a Ten. As is getting to watch Life On Mars.

In my continuing capacity as Dad, I took the decision that Budgie should be allowed to run free in the garden. The fencing around the garden looks secure, the one area that was open I blocked off. On Sunday I let him out, without consulting the full Executive Board of the governing Autonomous Collective. Budgie bounced around the garden for three hours, if he tried to escape he made a very poor job of it, and at the end we managed to round him up and get the wee fella back into his cage without too much trouble.

One of Two was stressed and unhappy throughout, nervously watching, chain-chewing her way through a pack of forty sweetie Woodbine, waiting for some evil predator to leap over the fence into the garden and tear poor wee Budgie to bloody pieces. A leopard or tiger or some other indigenous Polish beast. Yet Budgie survived, and there was no ferocious mauling at the hands of one of the big cats.

At the end of it all One of Two made me promise not to let Budgie out of his cage in the garden ever again. I didn't make the promise.

The next day, which in an unsurprising turn of events, transpired to be Monday, I let Budgie out on the loose once more. Everything seemed to be going well. It was a warm, sunny afternoon, a few light clouds flitting slowly through the sky. The kids and I played football, Scotland won the World Cup (again), and even One of Two seemed to relax into Budgie's presence roaming free in the great wilderness of the back garden.

As the afternoon rolled on, evening approached and the day started to turn grim, it came time to bring the rabbit in from the cold. The rabbit, naturally, was not too happy about this turn of events and legged it for the back fence, which is shrouded in shrubbery and trees. One of Two and I approached the area in classic pincer movement formation, with TPCKAM and Two of Two deployed in a two-man containing midfield role.

Budgie was as good as in the cage.

Suddenly the somnambulant summer's evening exploded in a cacophonous riot of adrenaline-fuelled action and noise. Budgie had escaped, and unfortunately One of Two was there to see it.

'Budgie's through the fence!' she screamed, as Budgie flew like the wind along the other side of the fence. Thing was, Budgie wasn't flying like the wind in a dramatic break for freedom, Budgie was flying like the wind because he'd just made the acquaintance of next door's dog, Hannibal. A yappy little gobshite of a terrier, may be, but a yappy little gobshite of a terrier well-trained in the arts of ripping leporine flesh into tiny constituent parts.

In a flash Hannibal had Budgie pinned up against the fence, his jaws tearing at Budgie's fur. One of Two had a front row street for the kill. Now me, I was thinking, well Budgie, if it's your time, it's your time... I couldn't give a stuff about the rabbit, and was just wondering if there would be enough left over after Hannibal had finished with him for us to have a wee helping of pappardelle with rabbit, herbs and cream for tea. But One of Two wasn't so sanguine about the impending death of her beloved pet, which she'd mostly ignored for the previous six months.

And while rabbits are of no interest to me, I'm not so cold-hearted as to be unmoved by the screams of my traumatised wee girl. Employing moves not too dissimilar to Bruce Willis's stuntman, I leapt dramatically over the fence, whipping my Kalashnikov from my gun belt as I went, lobbing a couple of hand grenades into the bushes for good measure.

Budgie had managed to escape Hannibal's jaws, had legged it one way, met another fence, turned, managed to avoid the snapping jaws of oblivion and had raced towards the shrubbery at the other side of the garden. It all happened in a flashing stramash of black and white and brown, animals racing at breakneck speed, their very existence at stake. And then, from the shrubbery, came the sound of high-pitched squealing, and then two seconds later Hannibal, the yappy little gobshite of a terrier, emerged with a smile on his face. Some guard dog, he didn't even seem bothered that there was a total stranger in his back garden, and he just walked past me, flicked me the bird, said, 'Your rabbit is stew, Bud,' and casually wandered off to find some other innocent animal to maul.

The garden was littered with rabbit fur, where Hannibal's jaws had been wrapped around Budgie's waist, and from over the fence I could still hear One of Two's wailing lament for her dead rabbit. Things looked grim. I plunged into the undergrowth, searching for signs of a twitching near-dead beast, wondering how I was going to kill it off without having to present any of the evidence to One of Two. Slightly uncomfortable about wading through the shrubbery in someone else's garden, I nevertheless marauded around for a few minutes. Unable to find anything, and fearing being picked off by sniper fire from our neighbour's bedroom window, I legged it back over the fence and faced the tears and recriminations from my eldest spawn.

TPCKAM and I did our best, telling her that Budgie might still be alive, and that there was no body yet discovered to confirm the presumed execution. Two of Two wasn't helping matters by wandering around saying excitedly, "Is he dead? Is there blood? What does his body look like? Did you hear the squealing?" Our babysitter turned up, and he and I set off in a delegation to the neighbour to try and effect officially approved entry to their garden so that we might search for Budgie without fear of being taken out by a well-placed bullet in the napper. Unfortunately I'm not the friendliest looking bloke, while our babysitter was dressed in army combats and had just had his head shaved into a Mohawk. They weren't for letting us in, although they did go and search the area themselves, setting off with the ominous words, 'If Hannibal saw a rabbit he would have killed it.'

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, TPCKAM was fearing the worst, waiting for the two emissaries of the opposition to unearth the twitching and bloodied, near-dead bunny, and so she sent One of Two and Two of Two off to search our garden to give them something to do. I was just contemplating whether or not we should do a sweep of the general neighbourhood, knocking on countless doors and asking total strangers if we might trample all over their plantlife in the hope of unearthing a wounded bunny, when the cry went up from over the fence that Budgie had been found. He had fled back through the hole in the fence with such speed that no one had seen him, and was finally found quivering and very, very scared in the spider-laden area under the stairs.

Budgie was examined for wounding and rendering of flesh, but it appears that the only scars will be psychological. Otherwise, Hannibal the ineffective rabbit-killing muppet, managed to grab a lot of hair and little else. And, in the cold and calm light of day, it was obvious that the squealing sound was Hannibal biting his squeaky toy, in a pathetic, testosterone-laden attempt to have dominion over something, seeing as the rabbit had managed to leg it.

And now, while Budgie the Netherland Dwarf is firmly back in his cage, so am I.

Next week I give the rabbit a bath beneath a dodgy light fitting.

Fleeced

It's been a few weeks. My dream of writing a blog entry every day remains insanely far-fetched. Been back at work on the upcoming blockbuster 'The Haunting of Barney Thomson', after my very own Fanny Stevenson did a Jekyll & Hyde number on the initial draft. Not that I threw the laptop on the fire after TPCKAM had trashed the last sixty pages of the novel, but only because it was late May, the weather was ferociously hot and we didn't have a fire on. Otherwise my ancient Advent 7011 would have been tossed casually into the smouldering ashes of oblivion. A few weeks later, and now The Haunting of Barney Thomson has emerged on the other side, without the eight foot spectral lizard. Some might think that's a good thing. Fortunately, having had to choose between two book covers, one of which featured lizard eyes in the finger holes on a pair of scissors, I had already chosen against it. Just as well really. The Haunting of Barney Thomson remains on track to be the bestselling book in the Barney Thomson series......this autumn.

Usually, in the real publishing world, books - particularly fiction - are finished far in advance of the publiction date. However, in the world of Barney Thomson, it seems perfectly plausible to still be writing the book and expect to get it out in less than three months' time.

We are in the final few weeks of school. There seems to have been a collective agreement amongst all the departments in the school that the pupils should be doing NO WORK WHATSOEVER for the last several weeks. Why teach them anything when they can be doing cool stuff, hopefully involving the parents, EVERY DAY? Next week - which will only feature five school days, like any other - the parents have been asked to attend/contribute to a sports day, another sports day, a performance of Anthony & Cleopatra by nine year olds - OH MY GOD! - helping to set-up for the performance of Anthony & Cleopatra, an Egyptian lunch, a piano concert and a graduation ceremony. A graduation ceremony, you're thinking, I didn't realise your kids were eighteen?? They're not. Oh, ok, I didn't realise they were eleven and going up to high school. Wrong again...

The wee man is seven. He's graduating. To become eight.

What is the matter with these people?! You don't graduate from seven to eight. You move grudgingly from seven to eight. You leave primary two, you trudge into primary three. You don't graduate. But what the hell, we're in an English system, designed by consultants to look like it's American. Why pass up the chance to parade your kids on a stage when you can celebrate mediocrity? TPCKAM can remember at the end of term singing something like 'Keep moving on, dum-de-dum, and before you know it you'll be at the bus stop' or somerthing like that, and off they walked into the next classroom along the corridor. I can't remember doing anything at the end of the school year to acknowledge the fact that it was the end of the school year, other than walk out the gate for the last time in seven weeks. Nowadays they have a ceremony. I expect Two of Two to get the "Most Likely To Play Football For Scotland" accolade in the yearbook, if only because there are no other Scots in his class.

And it's not all suddenly happening next week. We've already been at two concerts, turned down the chance to help on a variety of outings, TPCKAM has read to the class during Book Week and today I went to the geographical museum and the zoo with One of Two's class. School hell. The school ought to put us on a retainer, but they don't use money, they just use guilt. Them and the kids in cahoots.

"Please, please can you come into the school and teach us maths for a fortnight, dad? Please? Sung Hyun's dad comes to EVERYTHING, and he never shouts at him, and he buys him ice cream every day..."

"Bugger off!"

There was a concert the other day with twenty-nine different acts. Twenty-nine. When the programmes were handed out you could hear the collective groan from the parental body. The headmaster stood up and thanked the weather because it had stopped raining... He thanked the weather?... We were inside. Then the concert kicked off, and to the relief of everyone in attendance, it turned out that most of the twenty-nine acts were terrified wee kids playing the piano in public for the first time. Mostly they would race up to the instrument, then fly through one verse of Greensleeves or Like A Virgin as quickly as they could, before legging it for the safety of their mates. The whole thing was over in about fifteen minutes. (No one actually played Like A Virgin.)

We're also expected to be costumemakers for the little 'uns. One of Two needs her get-up to be Cleopatra's handmaiden. She wants to butcher one of my white t-shirts. Sure, I said, why not, it's well known that the ancient Egyptians got all their clothes from George at Asda and then cut them to their own design. Maybe you could do something with my kilt and a pair of scissors? Two of Two needs to be dressed as a simple peasant for his show the week after next. Whatever that means. His Armanis should be fake? He should have a beer bottle surgically attached to his face at seven in the morning?

Currently the simple peasant show is the last thing on the list before the school breaks up and the teachers get a well-earned rest from asking the parents to do all the work, but who knows what events will appear in the next week or two to fill up the first week in July? At the moment I should be able to meet my target attendance rate of around 60%, however should TPCKAM pull another Fanny and lob my latest draft fire-wards, then the final few days of school will be passed in a frenzy of last-minute rewrites, while my poor, wee, lonely children will scan the audience from the stage, seeing everybody else's father except theirs.

It's tough when you graduate from being seven.

Finally, I'd just like to make a warm, heartfelt vote of thanks to the weather, for turning bleak and miserable and reminding me of home.

Party, Party, Party...

We're in that time of the year, early summer, when our kids have their birthdays. The darkest of times. The tragedy of the weeks surrounding Two of Two's birthday, which was on Monday, are exacerbated by the fact that just about every kid in his class seems to have their birthday in the same month. Birthday parties round every corner. It's like some biblical plague, as a quick look at the Old Testament confirms:

Samuel 5:9 And it was so, that, after they had carried it about, the hand of the LORD was against the city with a very great destruction; and he smote the men of the city, both small and great, and declared that every first-born child would have a birthday EVERY DAY. And the Philistines declared, 'All right, enough already, take the stupid Ark back, we don't want it!'

I hate the kids' birthdays.

I don't mind them starting to ask for stuff as soon as they've ripped open their Christmas presents. I don't mind spending money. I don't mind buying them pointless pieces of crap, if they really really want a particular pointless piece of crap. And I'm quite happy to make a cake. What crawls under my skin like a malignant, creeping infestation, is the fact that they always want to include their friends in what they do. They want a party.

I start to get stressed about the birthday thing some time in April, at about the point when I realise that it's already too late to book a decent entertainer or party venue. I then spend the rest of the time leading up to their birthdays, offering them ANYTHING instead of having a party. Anything.

Me: You can have a year at Disneyland Florida with all the Coke and cheeseburgers you can eat.

Two of Two: Great, Dad! Can everyone else in my class come?

We almost succumbed to the party this year, even going along to the de rigueur party venue of the moment to establish if they had a free day. We discovered that they forced you to let them supply the food at fantastical rip-off prices, and if you wanted to make your own cake, you had to pay them for the privilege of bringing your own. YOU had to pay THEM if you made a cake... There's capitalism for you. We felt kind of bad, because obviously there are plenty of parents at the school who put up with this kind of diktat, but we told the wee man that the Party Venue was about to be sold to the Polish government and turned into a high security detention centre for suspected liberals, and that we'd have to come up with a plan Y.

Plan Y: We'd buy him a Nintendo DS, (so far we have steered well clear of the whole Nintendo/Playstation thing, instead buying presents that make him use his imagination or run about in the garden), and take him and a couple of friends to see Pirates of the Caribbean 3.

He jumped at Plan Y. In fact, we had him at the Nintendo, but thought we should at least have something involving his mates. Sadly, being a pair of complete suckers, by last Friday, the trip to the cinema with two wee friends to see Pirates 3 had become a trip with four of his friends to the cinema, followed by a mass sleepover at our place.

Anything to avoid an actual party situation.

The potential for disaster in taking five seven year-old children to see a 12-rated movie that lasts somewhere in the region of eight hours seemed huge, and the stress of that replaced the stress that had been removed by coming up with a party alternative.

And so, last Friday evening, TPCKAM and I crammed five wee boys into the car and headed off for the local shopping mall. (One of Two had sensibly gone to see her friends in New Zealand for the evening to get as far away from Dodge as possible.) On the face of it the odds don't sound too bad. Two adults, five kids. Two and a half kids each. There are plenty of parents who go out on their own with more than two and a half kids, there are teachers who take out groups of kids by the dozen, with only an underpaid classroom assistant for help.

The thing that makes it difficult in this situation is that out of the five kids, you have authority over one of them. The other four couldn't give a stuff who you are. You're just some boring parent. You are powerless, and entirely dependant on them selecting good behaviour as a lifestyle choice for the evening. The secret is to not let them know just how much power they have.

So, we pitched up at McDonald's fully expecting the entire thing to degenerate into a Die Hard-type situation, with Bruce Willis required to rescue all the other shoppers in the mall from this Rat Pack of marauding children.

Dinner - if you can call McDonald's dinner - passed uneventfully. We proceeded to the cinema and plied them with more junk food. The film eventually started and, with the exception of having to provide a bag of sweets somewhere in the middle to help them get through some of the love angst scenes, we made it to the end intact.

(We showed the wee man a picture of the Rolling Stones a couple of days later and said, that's Jack's dad from the movie, and he said, 'So he wasn't wearing make-up then?')

Having had the parental super-genius thought to buy them each a Pirates toy to play with when they got home, they happily gamboled around the house, with barely a passing glance at the carefully constructed and decorated birthday cake, finally settling down at around quarter to midnight. At the time I wondered if this was a ruse, whereby they all laid low for a few minutes to make us think they'd gone to sleep. However, they consequently proved at 0437hrs the following morning their complete inability to pretend to be quiet.

They charged into our bedroom en masse, asking if they could go and play in the back garden. At twenty-three minutes before five on a Saturday morning. We turned the tv on and manacled them to the sofa. At 0553hrs they decided to creep outside in an illicit, covert operation, intent on playing football in a surreptitious manner, a game cloaked in secrecy and subterfuge. By the time I got downstairs - around 0715hrs - they were back inside, and pretending that they'd been watching tv the whole time. It was as if nothing had happened. And if they hadn't spent forty minutes outside screaming their heads off, charging round the garden like hordes of Visigoths laying waste the armies of Rome, so that at 0612hrs the Polish Ministry of Defence declared a state of emergency, announcing that the capital was under attack by unnamed foreign forces, we might never have known they'd crossed the door.

The sleepover raced along, full-speed, to its conclusion. To be honest, when we have other people's kids over to stay I'm not that bothered if they enjoy themselves, it being of secondary importance to them NOT ENDING UP IN HOSPITAL. When the parents pitch up at the door to collect their kids, it's vital that you can hand the kid back by the scruff of the neck, unharmed. Anything else is a bonus. I'm not one to think, 'Well, your son's paralysed from the neck down, but at least he really enjoyed the movie...'

By 0930hrs on Saturday morning it was all over. The lad got his Nintendo, he'd seen the movie, he'd had four mates stay the night, none of them broke a leg... Part One of The Annual Apocalyptic Birthday Stress Disaster is over.

One down, one to go. Now we just have to deal with One of Two's expectation that she's having eight nine year-old girl's here for a sleepover at the beginning of July...

Summer...

It's been a couple of months since the last Kids, And Why You Shouldn't Eat More Than One For Breakfast. Speculation has understandably been rife as to the reason for the gap, and there have been all sorts of wild reports in the press. If you believe everything you read in the papers, here are the top five Reasons For Two Months of Inactivity From Scotland's Premier Blogging Super-Genius:

5. I had a bad motorcycle accident and have been recuperating at my farm in northern Poland.
4. I've been spending all my time finishing off the upcoming blockbuster novel, The Haunting of Barney Thomson, due for release in September 2007.
3. I had a classic rock star 'lost weekend', binge drinking with my grunge junky buddies in LA, before checking into the Betty Ford.
2. I was sent on a posting to Afghanistan, under the new Foreign Office money-saving policy, where they just send the spouse but not the officer.
1. I disappeared into the same temporal rift in space time that allowed those two mysterious crows to materialise in our attic a few months ago.

Well, some of the above is true, although it was my mobile phone which disappeared into the rift in space-time. However, the principal reason for two months of inactivity was that in the middle of March I went to Las Vegas and married Jennifer Lopez.

It didn't work out.

And so, here we all are, in Poland in May. Thirty degrees, not a breath of wind. Summer has arrived with its suffocating pillow of heat. The Gollum that I am, I spend my days in dark, shadowy corners, holding out for winter. Only seven months to go, if it comes at all.

We've done a fair bit of travelling recently. Some of the great European capitals. Berlin, London, Paris, Millport. Went to Berlin to see Bob Dylan. The family, while quite happily hopping aboard the train for the ride to Germany, all refused to attend the concert. Bob was ok. New to my Dylan addiction that I am, it was the first time I'd seen him. Stories are legion of Bob giving awful concerts, due to boredom or drink or lack of rehearsal. Equally, they say he can be mesmerizing. Sadly, in Berlin he was neither. He was ok. He stood there under his hat and croaked his way through sixteen songs, old and new. So, in the six months or so since my addiction became manifest, I've bought 18 albums, read the 750 page biography and seen him in concert. My family are regarding me strangely, but at least I have so far stopped myself writing him a letter starting, "Dear Bob, I'm not weird or anything, but I listen to your music ALL DAY. Would you like to read one of my books where lots of people get murdered?..."

The rest of the time we chalked off the sites of Berlin in three days. It took just a five minute stroll through Checkpoint Charlie to have 'Oliver's Army' in my head for the rest of the weekend. Must happen to everyone. We seemed to spend a lot of our time in Dunkin' Donuts, in that usual way that you do with kids. 'We'll trade you a trip to the Reichstag for a strawberry frosted with sprinkles...'

I took Two of Two to London to see a doctor about headaches. The wee man has suffered from migraines for a few years. Every so often it gets really bad, we get it checked out, we get told it's migraines, he lives with it. The Polish are a hypochondriac lot; that and the doctors all see the diplomatic community coming and start referring you all over the place in a self-perpetuating cycle of medical check-ups. The third guy in said, yep, probably migraines, but still, get an MRI, a catscan and a full frontal lobotomy just to make sure. And stick some leeches on his forehead for the time being just in case. So we fixed up an appointment in London to talk to someone we could take seriously. We saw a wonderful man who came straight out of the Hollywood book of English brain consultants. Grey-haired, bit of a wry laugh, glint in the eye, gentle sense of humour. He's got migraines, he said. Don't get his head opened up.

Thus comforted, we spent a classic father/son day wandering the streets of London. Ate ice cream, took a pedalo out on the lake in Regents Park, ate pizza, looked for toilets. He wanted burgers and war. So we visited Burger King and the Imperial War Museum. The burgers were fine. He walked into the Museum, immediately presented with that wonderful and eye-opening display of tanks and submarines and aircraft that whacks you in the face the minute you walk in, and said... 'I'm bored.' We never got to experience the trenches.

TPCKAM and I managed a weekend alone in Paris, to watch an amateur stage production of Il Est Toujours Minuit Pour Barney Thomson, which was great fun. That aside, we spent two days wandering the streets of Paris, enjoying being able to sit and have a coffee or wander around a small art gallery, without two wee faces looking up at us, demanding ice cream, a toilet, doughnuts or saying, 'Dad, Dad, we're bored, we want to do something mental to make you shout at us.'

Millport was Millport. It doesn't change. There didn't even seem to be any Poles there. They can't have found it yet. One of Two got sick and spent her two days sitting on the toilet. Two of Two got back to his grandmas before getting sick, and then proceeded to break all records for child vomitting in a ten hour period. Seriously, if there are records for that kind of thing, and it being a competitive world, there ought to be - the Nestle Child Vomitting Championships, brought to you in association with Domino's Pizza - he would be in with a shout. I doubt a body could physically vomit more than he managed to. And, of course, he started at ten in the evening, so he and I had a long, long sleepless night. Nowt worse than your kid being sick, and not being able to do anything about it. At two in the morning he started blaming me for his ails, because I was making him drink water every time. Perfect logic. He was throwing the water up, so if I wasn't making him drink it, then he wouldn't be being sick. It was ALL MY FAULT. So I didn't make him drink water the next time. Ten minutes later he threw up pure bile. Thereafter he drank water and removed me from his line of fire. He was still being sick the next day, and it took six days before he was back to the hundred mile and hour dervish that he usually is. Whatever it was, it was vicious. We're blaming Tony Blair.

The travels continue. Next up, a night in Krakow, a long weekend in Barcelona and two weeks at a Bhuddist paragliding retreat in Bhutan.

Only six more weeks of school before two months summer holidays, which is very exciting...

Pint Size Sporting Junkies Go Native

These are harrowing times for TPCKAM. Not only is she having to put up with my Bob Dylan addiction, but we’re also in the middle of the cricket world cup. The tournament already seems to have been going on for eons, yet just as normal competitions would be settling down to a bit of a knock-out phase and a headlong rush to the final, this tournament now slows down and extends into a long drawn-out period of almost a month, which will eliminate only half the teams left in the competition. By the time they get to the final, it’ll just about be time for next season’s football to start, the wildebeest will be heading south for the winter and Tony Blair will no longer be Prime Minister.
 
Ok, that last one was wishful thinking.
 
The kids, particularly Two of Two, have got the bug. Outside at all hours, cricket bat in hand, smacking tennis balls into the neighbour’s garden. (Since we’re not forward in ringing their doorbell, and they’re obviously waiting for the balmy days of summer to visit their back garden, there are now approximately three hundred of our tennis balls covering their lawn.) Two of Two is facing up to the kind of tough decision that faces most six year-olds at one time or another. Whether to be a professional footballer or professional cricketer when he grows up. It’s a tough call. I’ll do what I can do help him in this, although he’s starting to see through me. He had this conversation with his mother yesterday.
 
TPCKAM: When we’re rich your dad’s going to get…
Two of Two: A golf course in the back garden. I know… And a cricket net… And a full size football goal. Two of them.
(Long pause)
Two of Two (wistfully): It’s never going to happen. He needs to get a proper job. Like a footballer or a baseball player.
 
He was almost sounding mature until the line about the footballer or baseball player.
 
Saturday morning football continues, trapped indoors for one more week, despite the fully-fledged arrival of spring. The parents gather to watch in silence, the kids charge on the hoof for an hour. Thirty minutes of ball skills, followed by thirty minutes of stampeding around the hall, a herd of feral monsters, moving in packs, the ball a poor victim, the wounded antelope to the swooping vulture-fest that is the horde of first year warrior-beasts.
 
There is already ample evidence of the influence of watching the professionals at work. The dramatic fall and clutching of the leg; the quick look up and then return to the game when the referee is not forthcoming with the foul and their opponent’s yellow card; the headlong, exuberant rush back down the field after scoring a goal, airplane arms outstretched. The goal celebrations always end comically as they come face to face with equally ebullient teammates and realise that the next step in the process is to hug someone who isn’t your mum or dad. At this point the mimicry breaks down and some mysterious forcefield allows them to leap at each other without ever actually touching.
 
Not all the parents are silent. There is one mum, Mum X*, who constantly shouts at her poor son, Bumblestiltskin*, even when the ball’s out of play and he has no possible way to immediately influence proceedings. The poor kid must have a nightmare every week. Nobody else’s mum shouts at them. Clearly TPCKAM has shouting-at-her-son-while-he’s-playing-football tendencies, but I usually manage to keep her in check. Pity poor Bumblestiltskin though. ‘Come on, Bumblestiltskin!’ ‘Get stuck in, Bumblestiltskin!’ ‘Get up, Bumblestiltskin!’ On and on she goes, while the rest of the parents look embarrassed and drink their cappuccinos.
 
(*Names have been changed to protect the innocent.)
 
Meanwhile TPCKAM’s torment persists. Her life is one long sporting Hell. On Saturday she had to watch the wee man play football in the morning, a bit of Australia-South Africa in the afternoon, before switching to Scotland’s last breath triumph against Georgia. At some point in the evening, when I was switching between the England-Kenya cricket, Australian cricket, and the Israel-England footie, I looked up to see her standing in the doorway, head twitching uncontrollably, hair to the four corners, and clutching a double barrelled shotgun. ‘It’s you or the tv, I don’t care,’ she muttered darkly. Meekly I handed her the remote. That night the television showed only programmes of a gastronomic nature.
 
My strict policy of selective sport watching in order to not create fuss when really important stuff comes on, has gradually fallen by the wayside as the never-ending sporting seasons mount up. It now lies in tatters, splattered at the feet of the on-going cricket and football fest. It’s probably very common. You start out with good intentions, and before you know it you’re watching Dagenham & Redbridge versus Oxford United.
 
Men and woman. Sport. It’s just never going to work.
 
It’s interesting to watch two children grow up, a boy and a girl, and their intrinsic levels of sporting interest. Sure, One of Two was cheering with the rest of us when we scored the late winner against Georgia, but you could tell that it was just to be part of the crowd, doing what everyone else was doing. She didn’t care, not really.
 
Two of Two, however, was off round the room, aeroplane arms outstretched, bumping into furniture, a triumphant goal celebration. And, for him, a triumphant goal celebration which at last brought ultimate satisfaction, as he had his mum and dad to hug at the end of it.
 

And I looked, and behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Patches

Last summer, when One of Two started asking for a rabbit, we were advised by several people not to do it. Kids always get bored with rabbits, they said. Rabbits aren't particularly interactive. There's not a lot you can do with a rabbit other than stroke it, if it lets you, clean up its faeces, repair the wires that it chews and, if all else fails, eat it for your dinner. The kids will ignore the rabbit, and you'll be left looking after the furry wee creature the way you look after the kids. It'll be like having another, if very low-maintenance, child.

So, last summer we didn't so much talk One of Two out of getting a rabbit, we just ignored her. Seemed best. And then, as previously detailed on this page, I cracked just before Christmas, and Patches The Netherland Dwarf was brought into the family.

One of Two's relationship with Patches the Netherland Dwarf has gone through three distinct stages.

1. Regular wee girl with a pet stage. Interested, concerned, doing her duty, clearing up, feeding etc.

2. A reluctant keeper of the flame, usually indulging in three or four hour volcanic fights with her mother every time the subject of taking care of the rabbit came up.

3. Forgetting that the rabbit exists.

The sages were right. Of course. Didn't really think it would be any different, but I suppose I was sucked into trying the anthropological experiment just in case of some miracle. Hasn't happened. One of Two, while being in every other respect a marvellous and individual wee creature, has absolutely hit the nail on the head of cliche when it comes to leporine-caregiving. Couldn't give a stuff. And so, as the Parent Who Spends His Day In The House, rabbit duties have fallen to me.

It's fortunate - and I suppose there was some aforethought on my part here - that rabbits are low, low maintenance. You feed them lettuce and seeds and stuff. Rabbit food. You let them out to bounce around your living room. You clean their cage out every few days, and here is the big advantage of rabbits. Their excrement. That's why rabbits are ok pets. If they splurged out minor cow pats, if they deposited several hundred mini-splats of moist faeces every day, you'd have them in the stewing
pot before the end of the first week. But those hard pellets of crap - which could severely wound a man if fired from an airgun - present few problems in the stench and cleaning department.

And so, Patches the Netherland Dwarf and I have been thrown together, like survivors of a plane crash on a desert island.

Last week we were in the pet shop buying rabbit stuff. The kids came running up excitedly and said, 'Can we get a mouse?'

And at this point I quoted Samuel L Jackson's 'Tyrany of evil men' speech from Pulp Ficton, and chased them from the shop, pistol whipping them with pellets of rabbit shit fired from a ShinSung Career Dragon Slayer .50 Air Rifle.

A Short Note On Bob Dylan

Millions of people have been listening to Bob Dylan for very many decades. Since not long after the middle of the last century in fact. However, despite the Traveling Wilburies and the Concert for Bangla Desh, I’ve never been one of them. Never bought into the whole Bob Dylan thing. I remember a guy I worked with in Glasgow telling me about seeing him in concert; the Bobster came on, either bored or really badly needing to take a pish, played all his songs at three hundred miles an hour, a few seconds and no conversation between each one, and then he hoofed it for the exit and never returned. The guy was forgiving of this, as people seem to be when they see Bob on a bad night. He has that much of a thing about him. Me, I thought it was kind of mental to want to listen to that and went back to my Beatles albums, safe in the knowledge that they would never disappoint me in concert.
 
This was all to change one warm and bright summer’s evening last July. It had been a humid afternoon, and as the sun sank to the west of the eastern European sky, the early evening insects buzzed and swooped and bit, forcing the kids indoors. We were having dinner with our friends Jon and Emma, and as the wine flowed, the conversation turned to the fact that Jon could play the guitar and the mandolin, that I could strum a guitar and play the piano, and that maybe we should form a band. The Mabel Rankin Beat Quartet was born. (The quartet, I should add, is completed by two invisible llamas called Brian, not the women.) We agreed to perform at the embassy club ten days later, and then rushed to put together a set of some description. Like all fledging superstar beat combos, we started with cover versions, and Jon fatefully introduced a couple of Bob Dylan songs.
 
Time passed. The band stayed together – in fact, the Mabel Rankin Beat Quartet debut album, The Year Of The Kitchen, will be released later this summer – although so far there has only been one more sell-out gig and we’re still some way short of a stadium tour. Crucially however, at some point in the autumn I said to Jon, ‘Wouldn’t mind hearing those Bob Dylan songs.’
 
I was hooked, and the die had been cast. At Christmas I received my first two Dylan albums and have since bought eight more. Only thirty-four more to collect. Bob has become the fifth member of our family, a constant presence on the cd player. However, like introducing a new child at this late stage, or an unwanted pet like a warthog or a jellyfish, this has not proven popular with the other three members of the family. Every new album purchase is greeted with groans and cries of despair – and we haven’t even got close to the low point albums of the 80’s yet.
 
Every evening as we sit down to dinner, there’s a dash to the cd player to be the one who gets to choose the music. Usually some blood is spilled. Brawn normally wins out – something I’ll have in my favour for a few years yet – although sometimes craft and cunning is triumphant. Last week One of Two set up a gun emplacement, put on her goggles, and sat behind her 7.62 mm GAU-17 gatling gun. I had to back off, and that night, as we ate our spaghetti hoops and popcorn, we listened to Natasha Bedingfield.
 
(Stumbled across Natasha Bedingfield’s ‘I Wanna Have Your Babies’ video the other day… Oh my God! Couldn’t somebody have said? Eventually, I suppose, it was inevitable that someone would surpass the last thirty seconds of The Girl Is Mine for toe-curling embarrassment.)
 
A few weeks ago, while perusing Bob Dylan.com, I discovered his latest tour dates. Well, I said to the family a few minutes later, we’ve been meaning to go to Berlin anyway. Despite much cajoling, while they have all agreed quite happily to hop on a train to the German capital in the first week in May, I could persuade none of them that they wanted to come with me and spend a Thursday evening watching Bob. Not even if he plays his songs really quickly and then dashes off to the toilet.
 
So, Bob is probably here to stay, although I did hear TPCKAM on the phone the other night trying to have me booked into the Betty Ford clinic. When that failed she searched for the nearest branch of Bob Dylan Anonymous, but that turned out to be in Novosibirsk. I expect, as with all unreasonable obsessions, the madness will fade with time, and we can go back to listening to Matt Munro and Perry Como.
 
For now, Bob is King, except when the mujahaddin kids get to the heavy artillery before me, and bar my way to the cd player. And on those dark and grim evenings, we have to listen to Girls Aloud, Avril and JoJo.

A Weekend Amidst The Dead Leopards

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

The Two Crows Mystery

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

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

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...