Bungy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tonight We Shall Feast With The Appetite of Many Men

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Forty-two.

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

Forty-two, for crying out loud.

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

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

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

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

A Description of An Incident While Bowling With Two of Two

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

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

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

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

Our solitude did not last long, however.

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

And so it happened.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

'What?' he said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Quiet Night Out

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

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

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

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

The Harlem Gospel Choir...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Handpraise to God!

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

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

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

One of Two came to me this morning about twenty minutes before leaving for school asking if I could make her a halo. It's the kind of request which one looks for as a parent in the final minutes before heading off out into the morning cold.

Last day of school, things were pretty easy going. Sure, I'd had to dispatch Two of Two to his bedroom for using the word 'fuckface', but otherwise it was all pretty smooth. (He would have pleaded his innocence had I given him the chance to defend himself, as he'd used the word in the well-known childhood phrase, 'She called me a fuckface' when in fact she'd called him an asshead or donkeybrain or something slightly more banal. It was a classic case of a kid taking the chance to swear and hoping he gets away with it. And given that I sent him to his room for fifteen minutes rather than thrashed him senseless of took away his Nintendo DS for a month, I guess he did get away with it. Usually when one of them swears I blame myself and feel bad, but I don't think I've ever said fuckface, so I was just kind of relieved not to be implicated.) Having established the principle of pre-planning packed lunches and school uniforms, mornings before school at the moment are like the last two minutes of a Hollywood movie, where everything runs smoothly, everyone is happy, and you know it's all going to work out. So I said yes, I would make a halo.

It was a rubbish halo. A few bits of wire, one of which will probably have her eye out before the day is done, and a piece of blue and gold tinsel, it looked like it had been manufactured by Opposable Thumbs 'R Not Us. I suggested she shouldn't bother with the halo and that she looked enough like an angel as it was. She took the halo. I banned her from saying that it was me who had made it.

Ten minutes after the halo request, while I was still in the middle of my ham-fisted construction, she came and asked if I had time to make her some wings... I said I'd put it out to tender, but in the end there wasn't enough time.

And so, this is it. Christmas. Only eleven days to go, but the school finishes today.

Seems very, very, very early. And all the while, Bing Crosby plays on.

Christmas With Bing Crosby

In December 1992 I bought a Christmas cd in a small music shop in a shopping mall in Belgium. Christmas with Bing Crosby, Bing smiling in his bow tie on the cover. You can't get this cd in the shops anymore, it is one of the seven or eight million Bing Christmas cds which are now out of print, replaced every year by new compilations with a different picture of Bing smiling on the cover and the songs rearranged in a slightly different order, with titles like Bing Crosby's Christmas and Bing's Christmas Shindig and Groove Armada Pimp Bing Crosby's White Christmas Feat. Rihanna and Butt Naked Bing Crosby Goes Jesus. Checking on Amazon, I found my cd - out of print - with the same cover and title, but with different songs, and a release date of 1994. Obviously in 1994 they couldn't find a different picture for that year's compilation.

Years later I bought another Bing Christmas cd in an attempt to broaden my Christmas song horizons, but as this one was entitled Winter Wonderland, with Christmas not mentioned, the compilers, while predominately filling the album with Christmas tracks, also snuck in some non-Christmas cheer, including a syrupy awful piece of mince called Children, which is a launch-a-rocket-at-the-cd-player song if ever there was one; The Way We Were, and there's just no excuse for The Way We Were under any circumstances; and Hoagy Carmichael's In The Cool, Cool, Cool of the Evening, which is a great song but a great song for a summer evening. Not winter and not Christmas. I came back to Christmas With Bing Crosby, and here we are in December and once more it is ever-present on the cd player.

So here they are, those songs on Christmas With Bing Crosby in full:

1. White Christmas: One verse, just fifty-three words. But have you ever heard a version of White Christmas that didn't go on for about six minutes? That's because it's soooo.......slooooow..... One day White Christmas is just going to explode and no one will ever be able to hear the song again.

2. Silent Night: It's not rock 'n roll, but you can't argue with Silent Night.

3. It's Beginning To Look A Lot Like Christmas: Includes the great line, "There's a tree in the Grand Hotel, one in the park as well, the sturdy kind that doesn't mind the snow..." What kind of stupid Christmas tree does mind the snow? Do you think Bing ever said, 'I'm not singing that, it's pish!" Maybe he did. He let that one by though.

4. Little Jack Frost Get Lost: A duet with Peggy Lee. The kind of song that says picture-perfect 1950's America, where nothing bad ever happens and everybody's happy. Those were the days when "the bench in the park is all alone in the dark" because it's cold, rather than because if you go into the park after dark you'll get knifed.

5. Medley: Good King Wenceslas/ We Three Kings/ Angels We Have Heard On High: We were singing the first of these songs last week. One of Two thought it was Good King Wencesclaus. I always used to think the first line was "Good King Wencas last looked out." I never got to the third and fourth verses, so I just assumed that since it was the last time he looked out, the song was about some poor do-gooding fool of a king who went out into the cold and pegged it. I think was in my 30's before I discovered the truth.

6. Sleigh Ride: "When they're passing round the coffee and the pumpkin pie..." Iconic. Songwriting at its zenith, although who is the shadowy Farmer Grey character? And the "jing jing jing" bit at the end is annoying beyond words. So, actually, it's not really songwriting at its zenith.

7. Christmas Is A-Comin': "If you haven't got a friendly cat may God bless you..."?? "Christmas is a-comin' and the egg is in the nog..."?? What is this song even about? The Christmas song equivalent of the present of cheap aftershave.

8. Deck The Halls/ Away In A Manger/ I Saw Three Ships: With Deck The Halls, there is just far too much Fa-la-laaing. Away In A Manger I've always hated. A personal thing. I Saw Three Ships... What's really happening with this song? Given that Bethlehem's got that whole, being in the middle of the desert thing going on, where, or more likely, what are the three ships? The three wise men? The Holy Trinity? Columbus's three ships? The Three Amigos? Three horsemen of the Apocalypse? We need Dan Brown to write the book.

9. I Heard The Bells On Christmas Day: A timeless tale of the struggle between good and evil. As in all the best Hollywood movies, good wins out at the end of the day. Bing as Bruce Willis.

10. I'll Be Home For Christmas: Difficult to find any Christmas album without this heartwarming tale of a psycho-stalker serial killer on Death Row writing a letter to his next victim, telling her that she better watch out and better take care because he's coming home...for...Christmas...

11. The Twelve Days of Christmas: Drugs. There's no other explanation.

12. The Snowman: Bing's sons - "Are you ready, fellas?" "Sure, Dad!" - sing this stupid tale of a snowman which can't run and warn the family about the fire on the porch... but it can throw itself on the flames to save them all. Let him melt, that's what I say.

13. Santa Claus Is Coming To Town: Well, Bing, it's ok, but once you've heard Bruce Springsteen....

14. God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen: The Bridge Over Troubled Water of Christmas carols. Bing nails it. And fortunately doesn't sing all three hundred verses.

15. The Christmas Song: This song was written to be performed in a schmoozy Brooke Benton/Luther Vandross loungebar type of way and as such deserves not to even exist. The ratio of people who listen to this song to people who have eaten chestnuts has got to be in the region of one to eight hundred gazillion.

16. Christmas in Killarny: Bing panders to the notion that there's never a bad party in Ireland.

Christmas With Bing Crosby.... as if there's any other way to spend the holiday.

the strangest thing...

This morning I was happily going about my pre-breakfast business in the kitchen. We're a smoothly oiled machine these days - if Tom Brady, Randy Moss and Wes Welker prepped two kids for school every morning they'd do it like this - so I was letting them watch a bit of tv before sitting them down to their breakfast, when the cry went up from the sitting room.

'Dad!'

I ignored it, making the reasonable assumption that they were probably having their daily 'cartoons or sport' argument.

'Dad, come and see this!' came the next cry.

So, I thought, they're not arguing about sport, they're watching an advert for some toy or game they're expecting us to fork out cash for next month. And I ignored them further. The advert was guaranteed to be over by the time I got in.

'Dad! Quick!'

Well, finally my curiosity got the better of me. They weren't fighting over tv, they weren't watching an advert. So I got in there to find them watching the shopping channel. Now, I've just written the shopping channel as if there's only one of them, and I know there are like five hundred or something. I never watch shopping channels, so I can't be specific.

They were glued to an infomercial. An infomercial for a cleaning product. An informercial for a cleaning product specifically designed to clean up pee. It was called Urine Gone. Seriously. Look it up on Google, you'll find it. Urine Gone. Someone, somewhere put a lot of chemicals in a bottle and specified that it was for the exact purpose of cleaning up pish. And then the best name they could come up with was Urine Gone.

(If you put Urine Gone into Google you find 48,300 entries. If you put Barney Thomson into Google, you get 514 entries. I know my place in the commercial world.)

What's wrong with Urine-B-Gone? Maybe that brand name is already in use. Maybe on one of the other shopping channels there are more Americans talking about Urine-B-Gone, the original and best.

The bottle of Urine Gone, which of course looks like any other bottle of cleaning fluid, with the words Urine Gone written without any noticeable embarrassment whatsoever on the side, comes with a handy UV light, so that you can walk around your house detecting all those urine patches that you never knew were there. Some poor woman was doing the rounds of her home discovering urine in just about every conceivable place. God knows who she lives with.

The kids' motivation for watching this mince was that we could now bring Budgie the Netherland dwarf in from outside, on the basis that we can just follow him around with a bottle of Urine Gone and spray the wee fellow every time he lifts his leg.
I got them to change over to a normal channel and we immediately stumbled across one of those awful M&S adverts. The strange thing was, that apparently M&S are now doing their own line of cleaning products.

"Made from the most toxic chemicals and guaranteed to burn its way through the very fabric of your house," breathed Dervla, "this isn't just any old pish stain remover, this is M&S pish stain remover...."

Attack Of The Pre-Pubescent Burger Monkeys

This is just supposition on my part, but I'm guessing that there's no word for 'queue' in Polish.

Or, if there is such a word, the direct translation into English would be 'free for all', or 'he who dares, gets served first' or 'personal space is not a concept with which we here in Poland are familiar' or 'I overtook you on the road by driving along the pavement, I've parked my car over four spaces in the carpark, now I'm barging to the front of the queue, all with no self-awareness whatsoever.'

It's very endearing.

Last day of the school holiday. Originally we had the spawn booked down for school sports camp for the autumn break. For a few magical days we envisioned six days without our kids. In nine years we've never had more than two nights alone without them. On the downside, we would probably have missed them. On the upside, we would have been FREE FOR SIX WHOLE DAYS. For such occasions did Carl Orff write music for choirs of demonic angels.

Pretty soon the bubble burst. Sports camp was cancelled due to lack of interest. I cursed all the other parents, even more than I curse them anyway.

The week has passed uneventfully, as all the best weeks do. Swimming, movies, bowling, Monopoly, Rangers versus Barcelona on the tv. We've had fun, we fell out, there have been tears, recriminations and laughter, burgers & fries and emergency surgery at the A&E. A typical week off.

Today I said that they could go to McDonald's if they used their own money, queued themselves and spoke to the burger sales assistant on their own. They were happy with splashing the cash, not so happy with having to be the face and voice behind the order. However, in the end, when the chips were down and I gave them no choice, they stood nervously in the queue, waiting with trepidation to see if their Junk Food Supply Representative would speak English.

You can see the flaw in the previous sentence. The word queue. The poor wee buggers never stood a chance. They stood, half nervous, half excited about which piece of plastic crap they were going to order, waiting in line. To begin with there were three people ahead of them in the queue. And that was about as close as they got for the next three quarters of an hour. At one point they'd been pushed back to 50th. It was like asking a baby to pick up a coin in front of a stampeding herd of wildebeest.

It was all kids who were queue-jumping, and one could immediately see where the adults get it from. Queue-blindness is obviously something they learn from an early age.

My local Post Office has a ticket system. Get your ticket when you arrive, wait for your number. It's just about the only orderly queue in Poland. Even then, you still get the ballsy few who will try it on. Last Christmas, during one particularly heady bunfight of a line, an old woman approached me and asked to see my number. On discovering that mine was considerably lower than hers and that I'd obviously been there for at least half an hour longer, she shook her head darkly, muttered 'We're not using the numbers today,' and moved ahead of me in the queue. When it came to it, I had to trip her up in order to get back in front of her.

It's dog eat dog. I finally took pity on the kids, let then sit down, and went to wait in line. As my turn approached, I was engulfed by swarms of pre-pubescent burger monkeys. Total bedlam and complete hell. You just can't give someone else's kid a clip round the ear in public.

As I neared the front of the queue and it looked like I was about to be usurped by a gang of five year-old girls, I pulled a smooth move by leaping up on top of the counter and begging desperately to get served. The little girls in the queue had never seen so much derring-do and panache allied to sheer brass neck. The Processed Crap-Food Distribution Hostess was so shocked she served me, and finally the drama was at an end.

Back to school on Monday, but maybe One of Two and Two of Two have learned a much more important lesson this week than they will ever learn in school. If you're going to pick up a coin in front of a herd of wildebeest, get your dad to do it...

Yes, We're All Individuals

Last week the kids at school were all given a poster which showed a multicoloured clay horse in amongst an army of plain grey clay horses. The strapline across the top of the poster read, DARE TO BE DIFFERENT.

Seven hundred pupils were all given exactly the same poster.

Alanis, that's another one for you.

The Pomegranate Supremecy

We had one of those mornings, the spawn and I, when we rode to school, three-a-breast across the wide pavement - the Three Amigos, The Magnificent Three, The Three Horsemen of the Apocalypse - and all the people in their cars and the many-layered pedestrians stared at us like we were insane.

It was the first really cold morning of the season. A lovely autumnal mist, a thick chill in the air, maybe two degrees. Two of Two and I were in our shorts, not a jacket between us. One of Two had a jacket, but was wearing a short skirt and no tights. Not a hat in sight, but a lot of cold ears. And we were all, to a man and child, freezing. But it wasn't because we were insane at all. It was because I was really, really stupid.

Stepped outside this morning, dressed as we were to go to school, realised that rather than just being cold in a generic cold kind of way, it was actually the type of cold that makes your fingers fall off when gripping a bike handlebar, numbs your legs, and seeps chillingly into the fibre of your id. At that point I should have said something like, 'I'll just get the hats!' or 'Another three layers for everyone!' or 'Ok, you win, we'll take the car.' Instead, aware that we were running a bit behind the curve, I said, 'Here, it's a bit chilly. Let's go.' The poor young fools followed blindly and trustingly behind.

By the time we'd arrived at school twenty-five minutes later, One of Two had lost a leg to frostbite, Two of Two had green ear and I had to get the school nurse to amputate my hands. Otherwise everything was fine.

The real issue of the morning, was why we were late in the first place. And it's all to do with the pomegranate.

What is the point of the pomegranate? And how did someone ever open one up and think, 'well that's not going to be a pain in the backside to eat'? The pomegranate, more than any other fruit or vegetable, is designed to have someone else prepare it for you. Which is why One of Two has me.

I don't know what the verb is to describe what it is you do to prepare a pomegranate. There may be another method - in fact, there may even be a particular pomegranate tool in the Lakeland catelogue - but I do it by cutting it in half, then scraping out all those little red things into a bowl. But you can't say, 'Did you scrap the pomegranate yet?' that sounds pretty gross. 'Did you scoop the pomegranate?' doesn't work either. I like the word 'shuck' but it's not at all appropriate. Perhaps an adaptation of the word shuck might work...

The thing about flucking the pomegranate is the amount of juice that sprays out as you're scraping the spoon through the eight or nine million red flesh coated seeds inside. And I did the whole thing wearing a white t-shirt. At the end of the flucking I looked like I'd gone on some wild, chainsawing bloody rampage. And not only did I have to shower, scrub with a wire brush and change, it takes a long time to fluck the pomegranate in the first place.

All the time you're thinking, 'what's wrong with a banana?' But then, in the end, you do anything to try to get your kids to eat a piece of fruit. Even fluck a pomegranate.

And so, finally, when we stepped outside to a misty morning, chilled by a cold front sweeping down from St. Petersburg, I didn't stop to consider the weather, but rode off valiantly into the day, leading my doomed troops to a freezing and bitter end, once more consumed by the endless time crunch of a pre-school morning.

Without Reason

Friday morning, the pre-school bunfight. Things had been getting too easy and well-ordered, so last week I decided to make everything a little bit harder by cooking them breakfast, and finally acquiescing to Two of Two's demands that he'd like a packed lunch, rather than a couple of quid to spend in the school canteen, because obviously my cold pasta is better than their warm stuff. "While you're at it," chipped in One of Two, "I wouldn't mind some sushi in my lunchbox. Min Hyun has sushi."

Min Hyun has sushi...Of course Min flippin' Hyun has sushi, Min Hyun's mum has been making sushi in her sleep from the age of eight. Possibly Min Hyun even makes her own sushi. I'm from the west of Scotland. I make toast.

The hell with it, I thought, I'm going to make sushi. I'm going to make a tuna pasta sweetcorn dish. I'm going to fry them up some French toast. (I'd always wondered what the French called French toast. Did they just call it 'toast'? I checked on Wikipedia. Wikipedia says that they call it 'pain perdu', which is slightly disappointing.)

So, there I was on Friday morning, doing all these things at seven a.m. Now, I'm not making myself out to be some Dad Supergenius. I'm not wearing my pre-school-sushi-pasta-French-toast-making as a badge of honour. It was just what I was doing at the time, and even though I thought I'd be nice to the kids, they don't appreciate it for a second, and never will. Even when they're older and have kids themselves, they're not going to look back and think, 'wow, how cool was dad!' They'll
look back at their mornings before school and think, "I remember there was some guy there who used to do stuff. He shouted a lot."

Two of Two, who I'd just let watch tv for half an hour, such was my general feeling of benevolence towards my spawn, came in and sat down at the table to his pain perdu. TPCKAM said, 'Let's have a quick run over your spelling words before you eat anything.' Well, by God, the wee man went bananas. Partially bananas. He didn't go the whole way of denouncing us for having the temerity to ask something of him and stepping outwith our roles of People Who Are There To Serve. He just growled and then stomped out the room with a screaming huff on.

TPCKAM and I looked at each other with a raised eyebrow or two. (TPCKAM can't raise one eyebrow without raising the other and is consequently jealous of my eyebrow abilities. On the other hand, she can do the Vulcan greeting, separating your third and fourth finger thing, which I've never been able to do, and my jealousy of that is all-consuming, but I guess it really just sets her apart as some sort of alien.) Then I thought, flippin'-hell-here-I-am-standing-in-the-kitchen-cooking-blah-blah-blah. So I went to retrieve the errant wee man. Grabbed him by the collar and hauled him into the kitchen. I started off mad, then decided I'd be better to be cold. In the ensuing five minutes, during which he bungled his way through a spelling practice, I removed his French toast, and then pitched his pasta into the bin and told him he could eat from the canteen. ('That's a waste!' cried One of Two, 'What about the starving children in Africa?!' which was a minor words-coming-back-to-haunt-you moment.) After the pasta in the bin, Two of Two, his spelling test complete, stormed out of the kitchen and cried hysterically for the next forty minutes. Then I dropped him off at school.

Skip forward to Saturday afternoon. Two of Two and I played baseball in the back garden. His idea, as a change to cricket or football. In lieu of a bat, we used a cricket stump. He insisted on playing the full rules, balls/strikes/walks etc. Two innings in and I was leading 4-0 and he was getting grumpy. He started using the cricket bat and began beaning the ball all round the garden. Going into the bottom of the third in a three-inning game, trailing 6-4, I loaded the bases (we were using an imaginary runner system), and was within one smack of the tennis ball over the garden fence of victory. In the end I lost, but not before Two of Two stomped around and got huffy and pouted and threatened to walk off because he thought he was going to lose.

We came in and sat down in the kitchen where TPCKAM was muddling around. It was time for a chat. So I settled him down, now that he was in a good mood, for the full father-son thing, with mum there for backup. Gave him the whole spiel about how wonderful he was, but that sometimes it wasn't a lot of fun to play with him. Tried to sound reasonable, even confessed to my own parenting faults. We all get mad etc etc. I think it was an ok speech. If I'd written it down, I could probably use it some time if I ever do the kind of true-life mince you get on True Movies channel or, well, True Movies 2 channel. Not too heavy handed, I hoped. A decent pitch to the wee fella, intended to insert some sort of Reason button. A new dawn, a new beginning. His sister was away for the weekend, he had his parents to himself, and this was the moment when he would realise that we all have to do things that we don't want to, and that stomping off with a bottom lip the size of Boris Johnson never does anyone any good. There are some things in life that you just have to suck up. I wasn't spinning the 'no one said life was fair' line, because life can be fair. But it can also be testicle-crushingly rubbish.

I finished my bit. To be honest, I reckon it transcended True Movie channel quality. Al Pacino would have made a decent job of it.

The wee man looked up at me and said... 'Can I have that piece of bread?...'

And I, like a million parents before me, thought of Gary Larson and his 'what dogs hear' cartoon.

Infestation

It was a warm summer's night in Warsaw. The kids were in bed and TPCKAM and I were having a classic, late-night, three-hundred-channels-and-nothing-on kind of an evening. We sat on the couch in a vegetative state, flicking endlessly through cooking, garden, real estate, reality, fashion, makeover mince, endless streams of junk tv, before searching the equally endless music channels and tagging another hour on before bed, watching 80's videos and being embarrassed for the poor souls, eternally trapped in time with their big hair and enormous collars. Finally, the spell was broken and TPCKAM announced she was off to bed. After a long night, the power struggle over the tv remote was finally at an end, and I was able to watch sport, undisturbed, for a short while.

At around midnight, I became aware of a strange noise coming from the general area of the dormant fire place. It seemed to be coming out of the walls, or the brick work, or from the piles of wood which line the walls around the fire, as an emergency precaution against any sudden 'The Day After Tomorrow' type situation.

I turned off the tv and approached the area with caution. The noise was quite clear, an odd crinkly sort of sound, like someone was inside the walls scrunching up aluminium foil. I stood staring at it for about twenty minutes, not moving. The obvious thing was to take out a couple of logs and see what was lurking in their midst. I couldn't do it. Confronted with a spider-or-cockroach-on-the-wall situation, plenty of breathing space and no pressure, I can deal with it. But happily flicking aside logs, waiting for something to chew your finger off, I'm not so good.

I decided to go and get back-up. I was aware that it would still be me involved in log removal, but thought that if I was suddenly going to be eaten, slashed or poisoned, it would be good to have help on hand. Stuck my head round the bedroom door, TPCKAM was asleep. Deciding that this was just too ridiculous to actually wake anyone up for, I went back downstairs and looked at the logs again for another twenty minutes. Then I went upstairs, turned on the light and said, 'The wood's making a funny noise, come and listen.'

TPCKAM awoke in some confusion, but was soon brought onboard. She scoffed as I put on my shoes, and we muddled downstairs, me confidently expecting that whatever had been scrunching aluminium foil, would probably now have stopped. The noise was on-going. TPCKAM stopped looking at me like I was weird, and we both sat there, intrigued, for another twenty minutes.

Eventually, and it was now three in the morning or something, the governing council of the autonomous collective which runs the house, decided that I should take the logs outside. Getting the longest piece of equipment that I could, I started lifting the individual logs out at double arms length and transporting them on the veranda. This took about twenty minutes...

We sat down by the fire and listened. Silence. We had our confirmation. The noise had definitely been coming from the logs, not the wall, and there was no remaining evidence of what had been causing it. There seemed to be only one option; some sort of radioactive Dr Who-esque alien space-slime. We sat in the lounge for a further twenty minutes, considering the radioactive Dr Who-esque alien space-slime on the vernada, when suddenly another option presented itself. But surely woodworm couldn't possibly make that much of a racket? Just after 4 a.m., as the grey light of dawn crept across Poland like the haunted groundswell of nationalistic opinion, I went outside with a torch and investigated the wood for small holes. And by God, there they were. I put woodworm into Google, and it all came together. The noise....the holes... The wood....

There is also a large pile of wood in the garage, and every day as we walk past it the noise squirms out at us, as these unseen creatures burrow away. And as the summer turned into autumn, the noise grew louder and louder, crackling and spitting, so that it sounded like we were roasting a pig in the basement. Now, at last, the weather has turned colder and we can finally start sticking the wood on the fire without turning the house into a sauna, and slowly, slowly, the woodpile is diminishing. As you pop the wood into the flames you can hear them scream, these wretched, doomed termite deathbug wood junkies.

Over the last few months, as we've lived with the noise in the garage, I've assumed that woodworm are small, almost microscopic things. But yesterday, as I took a couple of pieces of wood on the short trip to a burning hell, I disturbed one of them. He was enormous. I think he said his name was Norbert. A piece of bark came off and there he was underneath. He looked up at me and said, 'Here, piss off, can't a beetle larvae eat his supper in peace anymore?'

Norbert has since gone to a fiery grave.

Further on-line investigation has revealed that the scrunching little buggers who have inhabited our wood for so long, can grow up to be more than an inch and a half long. When that happens, they probably acquire rights of some sort, including getting to elect a member to the governing council of the autonomous collective. Consequently, the fire has been cranked up and the woodworm are being put to the sword.

The Return of Meadowbank Thistle

The weekend before last I took Two of Two back to Scotland to attend the Meadowbank Thistle reunion. Father of Two, Sucks Unwitting Seven Year-Old Into Dark Underbelly of Scottish Lower Division Football.

A brief history: Meadowbank Thistle came into the Scottish League in season 1973-74. They played in Meadowbank Stadium in Edinburgh to general disinterest for twenty years. In the early 90's they were sold down the river for commercial interests, moved town and became Livingston. Not even Livingston Thistle, just Livingston. The people who moved them didn't want anything to do with Meadowbank, and the team was dead.

The reunion was to celebrate twenty years since we won the Scottish Second Division Championship, and involved a small exhibition, a game between ex-players and a dinner afterwards. Those in attendance were divided into three categories. Players, the players' families, and supporters. Of those three categories, the latter was probably the smallest. That's how it usually was, and that was what was good about it. We supported a small team that played in a big stadium, usually outnumbered by visiting fans. When you told someone that you supported Meadowbank, they checked you for the lobotomy scar, or said, 'Ah, you're the one...'

The guy who sold them out in the end, Bill Hunter, argued that the club wasn't financially viable, and that they had to move to survive. He never seemed to understand, or didn't care, that by moving to another town and away from our incongruous stadium, the club died anyway. Maybe his business interest didn't die, but the team did. Livingston went to the Premier League, they qualified for Europe, and he probably felt justified. But that wasn't what Meadowbank was about. It was a small group of players and fans and officials with no money and a rented park in a council stadium, that won a division and came within a few games of getting promoted to the Premier League the following year. Success on the proverbial footballing shoestring, due to wonderful coaching and a good team. Livingston? Just another small team in another small town, where most of the football supporters get on a bus to Ibrox or Parkhead every week. Meadowbank were different from everyone else, that's why all the other teams thought we were weird, and that's what made it special.

After the exhibition game, Two of Two and I went onto the pitch and had a penalty shoot-out in one of the goals. This was a big moment for me. For twelve years I'd gone to watch this team with my dad and brother, and now here I was playing with my seven year-old on the green, green grass of home. Two of Two, on the other hand, didn't seem so excited or moved. He was just having a penalty shoot-out with some bloke.

One bleak and cold day in 1985, the three of us were sitting at half-time at one of those dire games that football is all about. Scottish second division, Meadowbank 0 Raith Rovers 0. No goals, no football, no excitement. The cold chilled you to the bone, and you sat there thinking, what in the name of God am I doing here? We could be at home, eating fish and chips and watching someone get murdered in Taggart. I turned to my dad and said, 'Come on, let's go home, this is stupid.' He didn't go along with the idea, not being one for that kind of random act of spontaneity. And so I snuggled down into my boots, cursing and muttering and trying to convince myself that I would never come back, and we stayed to watch the second half.

The game finished Meadowbank 6 Raith Rovers 0. A glorious half of innumerable chances at both ends, made all the more glorious by the fact that we took six of ours and they didn't take any. That is why football, if maybe not quite so much as test match cricket, is a great sporting metaphor for life. Long stretches of tedium, and then suddenly something just comes shooting unexpectedly out of nowhere and grabs you by the knackers.

Maybe one day Meadowbank Thistle will be back, but perhaps none of us would really want it to be a new club, with young players and a whole new strip sponsored by that year's Indian restaurant. It would really have to be like Michael Palin's Barnstoneworth United. The same old guys out on the field, as they were last week, with the manager standing on the sidelines in his duffle coat. A cold bleak day in Edinburgh, a muddy park, a hundred supporters surrounded by a couple of thousand opposition fans, with our guys making all the noise as we put the more celebrated opposition to the sword.

Top Ten Moments From A Two Week Holiday In The UK (In Chronological, Rather Than Horrendousness Order)

10. We arrive at Heathrow on a Saturday morning. The kids plead for the Heathrow Express to Paddington. We point out that we are about to spend the equivalent of the GDP of a small Pacific island country over the next two days in London, and that we're not starting with 60 quid for the four of us to be on a train for fifteen minutes. We get on the Tube. Piccadilly line, direct to King's Cross. Straightforward enough. The train terminates after seven stops, the passengers are invited to get off. There are another two trainloads of passengers waiting on the platform. An empty train is brought along and eight million people cram on. We all stand stoically, pressed against each other. The train stops another few stations along the line. We are advised to seek alternative routes as there are signal problems at King's Cross, although we can elect to stay on the train and sit it out if we want. We, and many others, leg it up the stairs to the District & Circle. It's a weekend in the summer, so no Circle line at all. The District line train has just stopped, the passengers have been kicked off and told to go to the Piccadilly line. We trudge down the stairs, two kids, five bags, and go looking for the bus. Two of Two announces that he needs to pee. Not a toilet to be seen...

9. We're on the bus the fellow in the station told us to get on, although he'd said we would need to change. We ask the driver which bus we should get to King's Cross. He looks in the mirror, all chirpy and cheery, and says, 'Jump off here, darlin'..' - he was speaking to TPCKAM - 'the bus directly behind us will take you to King's Cross. We clamber off the bus, two kids, five bags, and clamber on to the next bus. 'Do you go to King's Cross?' says TPCKAM. 'Nowhere near it, luv,' says the driver, and fortunately, given how we're getting on, he doesn't venture any further suggestions. We extract everything we need from the bus, and summon up a plague of warts, frogs and boils on the previous driver, who had obviously just wanted us and our kids as far away as possible. A kind, saintly figure of a man points us in the right direction. As he's not wearing a uniform we take him at his word. The next bus driver is the kindest man on planet earth, and more or less drops us at the door of the hotel, even though he was supposed to be going to Penzance. It takes longer to get from Heathrow to King's Cross than from Warsaw to Heathrow.

8. The British Museum. We had hoped the kids would be interested as there was much that they had studied in the previous year at school. Naturally, however, they were bored. This is because the British Museum is free. They notice you not handing over vast quantities of money as you enter and you can see them looking at each other and saying, 'God, it's free. Like, how boring is this place going to be?' On the other hand, the following days' visit to the Star Wars exhibition - fifty pounds for a family ticket - was greeted with much greater enthusiasm.

7. A personal highlight. I had a couple of meetings in London on the Monday. TPCKAM took off with the kids and I was left alone. No kids, sitting in a pub at lunchtime, eating fish and chips, a pint of cider, and watching the test match on the tv. Life was created for moments like that. Makes you realise that there are higher forces at work. Even having to listen to an American explain the rules of cricket to another American didn't take the gloss off. 'And these guys, like, do this almost every day, and they don't even get paid $50m a year, it's like so weird. The red thing's called the ball.'

6. The next day we bought a new car. It has seven seats in case we decide to have three more children. Before we had moved out of the showcourt, the kids clambered into the back, Christening the rear bumper with marks which we know will still be present five years from now.

5. We saw three movies. Shrek 3, the Simpsons, Harry Potter. We're nothing if not sheep. There's no excuse for Shrek 3. The Simpsons is an hour and a half episode of the Simpsons. Who knew? HP was great. The kids keep saying, 'There's a storm coming 'Arry.'

Well, Two of Two has said it once, but I thought it was funny and I think I'll encourage him to say it more often. Although if he starts saying it every time he sees me getting in a bad mood, then he'll more than likely get a clip round the ear. I should point out, that that would be a virtual clip round the ear, as obviously actual clips round the ears of your children are likely to turn them into pot-smoking, delinquent, school-skipping, dysfunctional teenage young Conservatives.

4. For years now, TPCKAM has been advocating camping as a lifestyle choice. I have countered this by advocating staying in luxury five-star hotels as a lifestyle choice. Finally, the force of nature won the day and I reluctantly acquiesced. The tent was bought, along with all the other camping paraphernalia, for an intended three day camping binge as we drove back across Europe. How we all sang in anticipation!

In our trial run, we erected the tent in the back garden, on a slope, in just under forty-five minutes, which seemed something of a triumph. That night TPCKAM slept in the garden with the kids. On the slope. The next night, with the kids still keen and their mother adamant about her non-participation in a second consecutive night of slope-sleeping camping hell, I was brought off the substitutes bench and corralled into action.

Unlike most nights which have say, eight hours between ten in the evening and six in the morning, this night had somewhere in the region of three hundred hours. The kids slept, I lay awake on a back garden which suddenly seemed to resemble the north face of Kangchenjunga. Outside people spoke on mobile phones in strange languages, cats fought, seagulls swooped and dived, their mournful ululations increasing in desperate melanchollic intensity as they realised they were nowhere near the sea, and beneath it all there was a strange, reverberating hum, presumably coming from the giant underground generator which powers the planet.

3. We arrived in Belgium a couple of days later. Got lost, drove through a variety of strange little towns in the Ardennes, then finally pitched up at our pre-booked campsite at around seven in the evening. It was a beautiful summer's day, a few insects buzzing, a lazy warmth in the air. Perfect camping weather. The campsite wasn't the most elegant, in fact it was pretty horrible, but we found a large patch of flat grass, we had the tent up in seconds, and within an hour the kids were paddling in the river and TPCKAM was sitting by her stove cooking beef stew while we sipped a fruity French white, with hints of melon, papaya and frog. Idyllic. We ate dinner, we brushed our teeth in a communal moment of good humour, and trooped into bed, happier than the Von Trapps after a quick dash across the Alps into Switzerland.

At four o'clock the following morning, the wee man clambered out of his sleeping bag to do the necessary. Upon his return, he claimed that his sleeping bag was wet around the rim. It was indeed wet around the rim. There was absolutely no explanation for why it should be wet around the rim. This is a fundamental truth about camping. Things get wet for no reason. Another fundamental truth about camping is that things frequently get wet entirely with reason. It started raining at 4.40am. Summer shower, I thought as I lay snuggled up in my mummy bag. Drifted back off to sleep. Was awoken at around six by the most fantastic crack of thunder, directly overhead. Massive, massive thunderstorm. Biblical rains, loud noises, bright flashes. Are tents safe in a thunderstorm? Well, you're lying on the ground, which is a bad start. I said to the wee man, 'stay away from the side of the tent.' He's young enough that he just did it rather than look at me like I'm a total sad sack, before making a run for the car. Keep away from the side of the tent.... that's the kind of thing you find yourself saying when you're a parent.

2. We packed up in the rain, we headed for Germany. It rained ALL DAY. At some point we abandoned the idea of camping a second night - actually for me it had been three weeks earlier when I had first acknowledged the fact that it was going to happen at all - stopped in Hannover and booked into an international chain hotel. We asked the receptionist where we could go and get dinner, this being a smallish international chain hotel without a restaurant. She pointed us in the direction of an Italian she liked two and a half blocks away, through the torrential rain. We had nearly died in our tent, and then driven for eight hours in treacherous weather with Audis and BMWs overtaking at 250kph, and while every articulated lorry in Europe drove slowly towards the Ukraine in the inside lane. We didn't want to walk two and a half blocks in a Noah-esque downpour to get something to eat. We walked fifty yards and found a Pizza Hut and realised that the receptionist was a woman without children.

1. We sat in Pizza Hut, relieved and relaxed, aware that there was still another eight hours of driving the following day. Pizza and large glasses of alcohol. The kids had a little play area, everyone was happy. It came time to leave. We said to the wee fella, 'Put on your shoes.' We said this several times. He lifted his shoes from under the table, but then dropped them to the side of the table before the putting on the shoes instruction had properly filtered in. 'Put your shoes on,' we said, another few hundred times. It wasn't like he was doing something else, but kids don't need to actually be doing something else to not do what it is they're being asked to.

The whole sequence would have made a slow motion scene in a Scorsese movie, with grand operatic music and balletic movements from all involved. The shoes lay on the floor. The wee man hurrumphed and stalled and prevaricated. The waitress walked amongst the tables carrying a tray with five pints of Coke and lemonade. We nagged the wee man. He stalled further. The waitress stood on the shoes. She stumbled, she fell forwards. The drinks flew through the air and crashed onto the carpet, ice and Coke and broken glass everywhere. This, in fact, was where it stopped being like a Scorsese movie, because in the movie one of the glasses would have been impaled in the head of a New York gang leader, and in the Pizza Hut in Hannover, the glasses just fell unexcitingly on the floor. The waitress looked embarrassed, we looked even more embarrassed, the wee man found the time to put his shoes on. In the end it was more Sofia Coppola than Scorsese. I was even making up the bit about the broken glass.

The holiday was over, we had survived the camping, we survived the drive from the German border to Warsaw, and we had survived Hannover Pizza Hut. Or, more to the point, it had survived us. And now, only three more weeks and one more trip to the UK to go, and school will once more open up its gates to the triumphant cries of the herald of angels.

Rabbits, Apricots And The Search For Architectural Competence

Into the second week of school summer holidays, and at last The Haunting of Barney Thomson is done and dusted and has been dispatched to the printers. Nine months of work, at the end of which either a very minor triumph or a wallow through the fetid sludge of literary ignominy await.

One of Two has been away on summer camp for nine days. It's obvious what this means. It has been nine days of opportunity to let the rabbit escape/eat the rabbit for lunch/shoot the rabbit and stick his head on the wall as a hunting trophy. 'Welcome home, One of Two! Guess what? We've found a new home for Budgie... above the fireplace!'

We've done none of the above. Instead, I have been Man About The House and constructed a rabbit hutch/pen type affair at the bottom of the garden. Now, I'm not the handiest. I'm more of the cerebral, literary super-genius type. At school, my woodwork teacher turned in his grave, and he wasn't even dead. However, things in the house were grim. The weather had been ugly outside, Budgie's shop-bought hutch was insubstantial, and so we'd brought him back inside. However, it wasn't long before the living room was smelling like the giraffe house at Belgrade Zoo. Something needed to be done.

(I don't mean to particularly disparage Belgrade Zoo over all others, I just happen to be very familiar with it. Giraffe houses are always minging. It's not like you ever walk into the giraffe house at a posh zoo, sniff the air, and think, 'mmm, minty...')

So on Friday Two of Two and I trooped along to the local DIY shop. I bought four planks of wood and some nails and thought I could construct a hutch. How hard can it be, I thought? I constructed the hutch. It was rubbish. It was a classic illustration of How Not To Build Anything. I could have been on tv.

'This is Douglas, he used to be a total muppet at DIY, [show scene of my house falling down and me looking rueful and/or stupid], until he started reading How To Build Stuff Without Making A Complete Knob Of Yourself, a beautiful partwork, available free every Monday morning with the Daily Mail.'

On Saturday I laid out proper architectural plans, bought screws and clips (the clips probably have a more accurate name, but I can't begin to think of what that might be, so I'll call them clips, although to be honest, they're not really clips at all, they're something else, you know a bit of metal bent at 90 degrees, and you screw one side into a plank, and the other into the other plank, and the planks join together much better than if you just nail them together which is what you do if you're a complete moron), a screwdriver, various large sheets of plastic wire type stuff, and a coil of wire to fix everything together. On Friday I was Bert and Ernie, on Saturday I was the Wolf out of Pulp Fiction. I constructed a rabbit hutch of such skill and precision, that if I built it in the centre of London it would immediately be worth in excess of seven hundred thousand pounds. I was on fire. This was rabbit hutch construction by Divine intention. The angels sang, and I had the hand of God on my shoulder throughout, as I swung the hammer, turned the screwdriver and tweaked the little bits of wire with brio, flair, elan and downright bloody-minded flamboyance. Such a shame that the new Seven Wonders of the World list has already been decided, because this would have been in there. If I could write books with the panache, verve and imagination with which I constructed that hutch, I'd be JK Rowling.

Budgie the Netherland dwarf was so excited, that he pished on me when I was carrying him to his new house. I smelled like the giraffe house at Belgrade Zoo. Unperturbed, I took my t-shirt off and put the finishing touches to Budgingham Palace, striding around in the hot afternoon sun like a bronzed god.

Now, they say pride comes before a fall, and what you would expect after such hubris would be that I came outside the following morning to find Budgie mauled and ripped to shreds by a panther, his slender, bloody leporine carcass strewn casually through the wastes of his short-lived palatial abode. Or else I would have come out to find a hole in the carefully constructed Stalag 147-esque fencing system, with Budgie waiting in someone else's garden, just so that he could flick me the bird before legging it for Freedom. Or, even more likely, the whole thing would have collapsed because I didn't screw the clips in properly, and Budgie would have been sitting in the midst of the wasted remnants of despair, greeting me with the shape of an L on his forehead.

Well, it took three days, but it was none of the above. Went out this morning to find the wee fella sitting outside his cage, casually munching grass. It wasn't entirely evident how he got out, although presumably it was by eating a hole in the one piece of the roof that came from an actual rabbit installation system. Maybe he beamed out in a Star Trek kind of a way. And he didn't seem that interested in being on the loose, perhaps remembering his previous near-death experience. But he did fix me with a look of mocking disdain as we scooped him up after a short chase round the cricket pitch.

So Budgingham Palace remains intact, and the final few holes have been sealed with 24-inch thick concrete blocks. However, since we sent him out there full time, the temperature has soared, up to the high 30's yesterday, so now I'm waiting for him to peg it through heat exhaustion before One of Two returns, and then I can face calls of 'Rabbit Killer!' for the rest of the school holidays.

You can't win, you know.

In other news... this is the time of year when I painfully await the arrival of eight or nine thousand apricots in the back garden, an event which makes this fortnight in July no less than a living Hell. Not, however, this summer. We have been blessed. Spring came early to Warsaw, as it did most of Europe. The grass began to shoot up, the trees sprang to life, the first buds of spring poked their heads tentatively out into the crisp fresh mornings. Then, however, as if encouraged by the exhortations of the gods - or, at least, the kind of gods that I'd vote for - winter snuck back up on nature and gave it a good sharp, frosty whack in the knackers. The buds died. And the ensuing, knock-on effect: the apricot season is in disarray. Instead of being Manchester United or Chelsea, it is Watford or Sheffield United, cast adrift in a sea of calumny and despair. Last year we had thousands and thousands of apricots. This year, about fifty. And they're finished. The apricots have been relegated.

Next season, should the weather not prove so willing and helpful, I'm going to sneak out one morning in April with the freezer and attach it to the base of the tree. For now I can sit back and bask in the double triumph of a rabbit hutch of unimagined magnificence - even if it isn't entirely escape-proof - and a lawn that is rich in long grass, spiders and patches of bare earth, but is mercifully clear of apricots and other diseased fruits.

Summer...it's not as bad a season as you might think.

Rabbit For Dinner

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...