Kids these days have it easy...don’t they?

With Christmas approaching, my Christmas tree is up and dropping needles everywhere, all my shopping is done, my Christmas cards are written and sent, my house is looking festive, stockings are up, I have carols on in the car, sing carols to the kids at bed time and generally have gone carols-crazy, and all the presents are wrapped. So inevitably my thoughts turn to Christmasses past, and how different it was for us back then. My kids can consider themselves to be fortunate – they have a stable home (stable as in constant, rather than stable in the context of where Jesus was born, obviously…because that might not be considered to be “fortunate”, as such, in this era of triple-glazed, centrally-heated domestic luxury), a loving family, a comfortable income, and parents who go OTT at Christmas time even though they have spoken sternly to each other about this year NOT buying the children quite such a pile of presents. And then they each go off and buy the children a huge pile of presents.

Now then, my 8 year old self might have thought that my 8 year old son has it easy. But does he actually? As life moves on, society evolves, and all that happens is that children gain a whole new set of anxieties which I as a child never had to concern myself about.

·         Internet grooming. In our youth, the people one associated with one could either physically see, or actually hear through the medium of the telephone. We didn’t have these worries about weird 50 year old men posing as 8 year old boys in order strike up a friendship, and consequently we didn’t have to suffer the hypothetical ignominy of our mothers reading us the riot act every time we dared to set a virtual foot on the internet, rigorously vetting our friends list and loading net nanny on to our laptops so that every time we innocently googled the word “cock” we got a virtual slap on the wrist.

·         Sometimes less is more. Kids have so much these days that they find it hard to place a value on their stuff. If it’s broken, by and large they get a new one. We are no longer a “make-do-and-mend” society. When we were kids, if you needed it for school, you sometimes got it (or in my case you got your big sister’s one with the relevant, highly visible, often very embarrassing alterations made). If you didn’t actually need it, you waited until Christmas. Life was so simple.

·         At Christmas, we got one present from our parents, a stocking filled with small toys and a Satsuma. Sometimes we got something from a non-defective godparent or grandparent. Nowadays, children must experience a certain level of rising panic (although clearly they would never be able to identify it as such) when faced with the sheer volume of presents piled up under the tree. Or maybe they don’t care, and they just rip all the wrapping off without a second thought, and it’s just me who experiences rising panic at the number of thank you letters I’m going to have to persuade them to write.

·         Technology. We had pen and paper, and one of those phones with a dial which, if you dropped it, broke your toe rather than itself. They have (separate) remote controls for the TV, the stereo, the set top box, the DVD player and sometimes even the garage door. They have to understand how to work mobiles, androids, laptops, PCs, tablets, iPhones and iPods. If the TV didn’t work when I was a child, you held the aerial up and walked slowly around the room, leaping up and down and cursing occasionally like some sort of ballet dancer with Tourette’s, until the snowstorm on the screen receded and you could see the picture again. If the TV doesn’t work nowadays, they need to work out if it’s the TV, the aerial, the set top box or the broadband connection, switch everything off and back on again, and then get a man in to fix it.

Perhaps modern technology and modern living has actually made our kids’ lives more complicated. Mind you, on the plus side at least in the age of Google we don’t have door-to-door Encyclopaedia Britannica salesmen pestering us any more.

The times they are a ‘changing

Gosh, doesn’t life move on quickly! Most days I feel like I’m still in my twenties, and it’s only when I am struggling to fend off a 3 day hangover that I realise I can’t keep up with my inner twenty-something self any more. That, and the plain fact that if I ran once up a lacrosse pitch these days I’d probably need to be hospitalised.

And so it is in drastic times like these (in other words, whilst grappling with the afore-mentioned hangover) that I start mulling over my younger days, and comparing them to my children’s lives, and laughing at their incredulity when they try to imagine how it must have felt to be as "deprived" as we all were when we were small, even though we didn’t realise it at the time. Here are some things our children will never have to worry about…

1.      How to use a typewriter. One that doesn’t enable you to correct your errors with the simple use of the back space key. One that doesn’t make lofty suggestions regarding your grammar. One that doesn’t change, without so much as a by your leave, your spelling (which is particularly annoying if you have it set to English US and it insists on spelling the word “aluminium” WRONGLY by randomly omitting a letter). One that doesn’t type your words on a curious downwards slant because you haven’t fed the paper in properly. Remember the advent of the electric typewriter which had a back space key and could actually scrape the offending letter off the page? That was revolutionary. Our children will probably never see one, except in a museum. And again, their first question will almost certainly be “why?”

2.      How to use a phone box (well, except in dire emergencies when they have soaked their mobile phone in a puddle and no one else around them has one) - along with what to do if you have no change, how to swallow your pride and do a reverse charge call and talk your parents, via the operator, into accepting those charges when you know they’ll nag you for weeks about always carrying a 10p piece in your pocket for just these emergencies, and how to look up a number in the Yellow Pages. Our children will always just fire up their iPhones… Let’s face it, if they ever do see a phone box, they ask what it is and what it is for, and the very next question they ask is always, ALWAYS, “why?” You know it.

3.      How to use carbon copy paper. I mean, do they even sell that stuff any more?

4.      How to load a camera up with film, and consequently how to line up your shot properly the first time so that you don’t end up with 24 blurry shots of the top of your subject’s head (or in my father’s case, with every single one of the 24 shots involving a telephone pole or electricity wires, in varying degrees of obtrusiveness, even the inside ones). Our children will only ever have to worry about whether or not they have remembered to clear the camera’s memory card or charge up its battery.

5.      How to record tunes off the Radio 1 top 40 chart show using only a radio, a cassette recorder and a blank tape (or, in a pinch, you have been known to use a non-blank and no longer trendy cassette and sellotape over the wee hole). If you were really lucky, you had a radio AND cassette recorder in the same device, thus eliminating background noise, but most of us had to be REALLY quiet whilst a song was recording, and REALLY fast to switch the recorder on and off, because Simon Bates was an annoying twat who always talked over the beginning and end of every song (possibly because those chaps at Radio 1 were wise to the teenage population recording stuff off the radio thus contravening all manner of copyright laws rather than actually buying it in the shops).

6.      How to load up Jumping Jacks on to a ZX Spectrum computer using a cassette. Most of the words in that sentence will in fact be completely alien to anyone under the age of 30.

7.      What a cassette actually does. Children have mostly never seen one, and if they have, they have absolutely no idea what it’s for. They will certainly never appreciate the vital link between a cassette and a pencil.

8.      How to get completely dressed whilst still cocooned safely within the warmth of your bedcovers because the alternative (ie stepping out into an internal environment which does not involve any form of central heating and thus is as cold as it is outside, in fact ice has formed overnight on the inside of the windows) is too dreadful to contemplate.

Next week: the stuff we never had to worry about but our children face all the time…

Sod’s Law For Optimists

Sod’s Law is a good thing. It means that we all maintain a healthy perspective on life. So when we make the mistake of blithely assuming all our traffic lights will turn to green, suddenly Sod dishes up a swift hefty dose of realism. It stops us becoming too complacent and blasé.

Here are some of the more obvious examples of the law of Sod, and their corollaries.

1)      No switch of domestic energy supplier ever happens “without a hitch”. I may have touched on this before. I am the Queen of Switching, so believe me, I know. Every energy supplier will tell you that it is not possible for you to purchase the same electricity from 2 different suppliers at the same time and be charged twice for it. Of course it’s possible. All it takes is for a not-particularly-monumental computer screw-up with dates and times, and Bob’s your uncle. It’s not like they’re selling individually bar-coded widgets, let’s face it.

·         Corollary: The process will NEVER fail in your favour. Ever.

2)      Money can be removed from your bank account in a few seconds, whether or not you actually owe it. If it turns out you didn’t owe it, money cannot be repaid into your account in anything less than a fortnight.

·         Corollary: Unless of course you happen to either personally know the Managing Director of whichever company it is that owes you money, or are persistent enough on your way up the escalation chain to get his / her direct phone number or email address. At this point magical things will happen (or alternatively the company will do exactly what you do to pay someone electronically in a few seconds, and pay you electronically in a few seconds) and – KAZAM! - all will be rectified. It will always have been your fault, and the repayment will always be given as a “gesture of goodwill”, with the repayer adopting a slightly injured air, as if you, the repayee, have somehow made it all personal (and there was no need for that).

3)      Whenever any business entity uses the words “as a gesture of goodwill”, goodwill is in fact the very last emotion they are actually feeling towards you. It’s the corporate equivalent of starting a sentence with the words “No disrespect to you, but…” which basically means that the second half of the sentence will contain some serious disrespect.

4)      The day after you have bought something really expensive, which you have been researching for months and have even taken out a Which? subscription in order to do the job properly, you will see the exact same item cheaper somewhere else. It will almost certainly pop into your email inbox as a Groupon deal offering the item at less than half price.

·         Corollary: There is absolutely no point in paying for a Which? subscription or indeed wasting any time shopping around. Impulse buying! That’s the ticket.

5)      When it snows, your snow shovel, snow boots and the bag of salt and grit (which you stashed carefully in a handy place so you wouldn’t be caught out like last year’s fiasco) will be nowhere to be seen. (In your defence, last year it snowed on St Andrew’s Night which is one of your really big drinking nights of the year, and after you had laughed until your ribs hurt at Engineer slipping and falling face first into 2 feet of new snow like some sort of pissed up, dishevelled snow angel, you really couldn’t be expected to be anything less than a bit stuck the next day, operating as you were under such monumental hangover conditions, with the added affliction of sore ribs too).

·         Corollary: It will always snow when it is least convenient for it to do so, and when you are least prepared for it.

6)      It will never snow when you really want it to, ie when you are completely prepared and you really want your flight to be cancelled because you would rather dance barefoot in the snow than have to rise out of your lovely warm bed before the birds are up in order to catch the first flight to London for a business meeting.

·         Corollary: Whenever your flight is cancelled, it will only ever be cancelled 3 hours after they optimistically roll the plane out on to the runway hoping that the anti-freeze which they keep pumping over the engines will actually melt the ice that is encrusting them and they won’t refreeze 75 seconds after each application, or that Air Traffic Control will select a window within that frost-free 75 seconds in which to allow the plane to take off. It never works. You will not be fed. You will not be allowed to use the loo. You will not get a cup of tea. And you will eventually be off-loaded from the plane. At which point, it will be too late to go home and get back into your bed. You will be offered a full refund by the airline, but of course it will only be “as a gesture of goodwill”, since bad weather is an Act of God.

·         Second corollary: If you spend time and expense preparing for snow, it will not snow.   

7)      It is completely acceptable for businesses to blame God. Can you imagine how fast you would be fired if you told your boss that you were sorry but the circumstances of you punching the Managing Director in the nose were completely out of your control, God made you do it, and thus you cannot be held responsible for your actions - it was all to do with how God makes your body respond to someone being an annoying twat? Businesses use this excuse all the time, although granted theirs is usually a financially-oriented punch in the nose rather than actual physical violence. “I am sorry, but money for your cancelled train journey cannot be refunded because the earthquake that ripped all the rails out of the ground was not our fault - it was an Act of God.”. Similarly, you will find you are uninsured and uninsurable for these losses.

Life isn’t fair. So Sod it, let's all seek revenge by mailing junk mail back to the mailer and putting cold calling businesses on hold for an hour. That will at least provide a few moments of quiet, satisfied amusement.

My Dad. My Hero.

This blog is a shameless tribute to my Dad, the bravest, most charming, articulate, intelligent, handsome and most annoying all round good guy the world has ever known. Well, he would be if all of the world knew about him, so let’s assume for a minute that “the world” in this context refers to the people who have met him. And let’s exclude traffic wardens and English rugby commentators from that as well, since I very much doubt he has ever been charming towards any of them, should he have ever actually met any of them. And whilst we’re at it, we should probably exclude anyone who has ever said anything bad about HRH The Queen, since she is, in his opinion, the finest human being on the planet.

My Dad is a loyal friend and a terrible enemy. If you are his friend, he will go to the ends of the earth for you. If you mess with his family - my Mum, Little Vulture, Engineer, Judge, Boxer, Lioness or Bear – then you mess directly with him. He had an interesting / difficult childhood. He has 5 sisters, all of whom are completely nuts and absolutely charming. I love them all. I suspect that a lot of their eccentric characteristics were a coping mechanism for their childhood, at the hands of a difficult father, although my Granny was a proper Granny with a heart of gold, and a very gentle and lovely mother to all her children. For the only boy in the family, and the second oldest of 6 children, I suspect my father had a whole lot of expectation and responsibility loaded upon him. He didn’t fail to deliver, gaining entrance to Sandhurst and onwards into a successful 32 year career in the army – he retired as a Brigadier. He says, with characteristic frankness, that he achieved all this “in order to get away from my father”. This is probably mostly true. He lacks the blind ambition which drives people to succeed in their profession at the expense of their family, because whenever his profession threatened his precious time with his family, his family always won. I recognise this quality in myself, which is why I will never be a top level business woman. That, and the fact that I can’t really seriously envisage myself in such a grown up position, TBH. I still sleep with a teddy and cry at Disney movies and like playing in the snow.

With my father’s own children, he became the polar opposite of his father. Tactile where his father was cold and stiff, funny and charming where his father was stern and unapproachable, he is a proper Dad, who still worries constantly about his daughters (who are both in their forties, but nevertheless, people in their forties can still make hideous mistakes, I mean look at Nick Clegg), his wife of almost 50 years and his grandchildren. He was unusually domesticated where I suspect his father and many men of his own generation would probably not have recognised an iron if they had tripped over it in the hall. He ironed his own kilt, he polished everyone’s shoes, he did the washing up, he cleaned the silver (whilst polishing his Claymore). He expended a vast amount of time and energy setting the VCR so that it failed to record programmes off the TV, or recorded the whole programme except for the last 2 minutes when the plot was revealed. For the advent of digital TV we are therefore eternally grateful - Christmas time was always particularly stressful as we discovered which programmes we were getting to watch the whole of, and which ones would leave us hanging. He made up a leitmotiv for every dog we ever had, and he wept openly whenever we had to put them into quarantine for 6 months. He sang in the choir. He played the guitar quite well and the piano quite badly (except the base part of our own 3-part Chopsticks composition, at which he was a Maestro). He did all this, as well as the Dad tasks - cutting the grass, which always involved a goodly period of swearing at his ancient but beloved Flymo in an attempt to coax it to start, washing the car, mending broken things, building things out of other things – a greenhouse from a climbing frame, a garage from a greenhouse, etc.

6 years ago, my Dad ran the London Marathon in 4.5 hours. One month later, he had a massive, life-threatening stroke. He was not overweight, he did not smoke, he hardly touched alcohol (except his weakness for the occasional Rusty Nail, and of course the almost entire bottle of Cherry Brandy which he and I shared just prior to my wedding in order to calm our nerves), his cholesterol and blood pressure were both normal and he was fit enough to have just finished his second Marathon in 3 years in a more than respectable time. The medical profession wrote him off immediately. He couldn’t talk except in a whisper, he was dyspraxic, he couldn’t walk, he couldn’t sit up, he had no feeling in his right side at all, he couldn’t even swallow. They said he would never leave hospital, and if he did he would be in residential care for the rest of his life. They said he would probably never walk again. Then he started having epileptic fits, so they put him deep into a coma to control the fits, and when they brought him out of the coma, the drugs which they gave him to prevent the epilepsy made him dog-tired. All the odds were stacked against him. A lesser person would have given up. I suspect I might have given up.

The medical profession had not reckoned on the fabulous Astley Ainslie rehabilitation hospital in Edinburgh, nor the sheer bloody-minded determination with which my father has always achieved the things in his life that were really important to him. Nothing was going to keep him from his beloved wife and home. These days he walks (slowly and with a stick), he talks (mostly rubbish, but that hasn’t changed since before the stroke and he can do it loudly again), he lives at home (with minor modifications to the house and a very long-suffering hard-working wife) and he even got his driving licence back (but then he demolished the post box in the village so he has decided that discretion is the better part of valour where driving is concerned and he never really liked it anyway – and the Post Office are in hearty agreement with him). He named the dog after his physiotherapist.

He is a truly incredible man. My Dad. My Hero.

Playground Politics

Like every social group, the playground contains a fascinating mix of differing personalities, parenting methods (if you’re me, most other parenting methods are better than mine because how else do you explain just how frightful my children’s behaviour is compared to others?) and varying levels of willingness to get involved with the school fund-raising, extra-curricular clubs or classroom assistance activities (for NO money, NO reward and VERY SORE FEET, and despite the fact that we all pay a big chunk of council tax which allegedly makes our education “free”…and yet still I am the mug running the café single-handedly at the school Christmas Fair…). A completely non-scientific study has brought the following different breeds of playground politician to my attention:

·         Domesticated Dad: A rare breed indeed, this is the Dad who appears to have all his children’s educational requirements entirely under control, without the need for spreadsheets  or barked orders from Mum. Domesticated Dad is an endangered species.

·         Harassed Mum: These people almost always have full time jobs, or part time jobs which actually manifest themselves as full time jobs once Harassed Mum has finally completed the last thing she needs to do before managing at last to extricate herself from the office, amid rumblings from her full time colleagues (who accomplish in their full time hours around 90% of what Harassed Mum accomplishes in her part time hours) about “Flipping Part Timers”. These are the people who always volunteer to help out at school functions, and it’s normally through a sense of guilt caused by them not being able to do the school run on a regular basis.  Always the last to find out what’s going on, unless of course she happens to bump into The Oracle on one of her rare visits to the school, thus obtaining a full download of the week’s occurrences in one sitting, and that’s only if she doesn’t have a meeting she has to be at.

·         The Oracle: The person who knows absolutely everything, and I do mean everything, about any occurrence, recent or otherwise, which has taken place in and around and often also outside of the school catchment area. Every single school in the country has at least one of these. This person knows facts long before they appear in the public domain, and with a frightening level of accuracy.

·         The Gossip: Normally obtains material from the Oracle, but will take input and turn into output any information at all, whether it is accurate or not, since information is not subjected to any sort of verification process. A sort of News of the World in human form. News communicated via this person travels faster than the speed of sound, especially if it’s bad or inaccurate news.

·         Greater-spotted Power-magnet: These characters are attracted to the school management team like un-be-wellied children to a muddy puddle. Their strategy is to befriend the head teacher. Their modus operandi is a thinly disguised brown-nosing campaign, with the ultimate objective of ensuring a smooth path through school for their offspring. It almost never works, because quite frankly head teachers are just not that daft.

·         Lesser-spotted Power-magnet: These people choose instead to hang around their child’s class teacher, in the mistaken belief that if they do so, the fact that their child is a lazy, good-for-nothing trouble maker will somehow pass unnoticed. This is an alternative to the awful prospect of having to alter their parenting techniques. This is rarely successful, unless of course the classroom teacher is spectacularly naïve, in which case fair play to the Lesser-spotted Power-magnet for spotting and exploiting a navigable loophole.

·         The Bad Egg: The parent who has a well-beaten path to the head teacher’s door through the horrific behaviour of its young. Usually engenders a strange dichotomy of feelings from other parents – extreme sympathy because of the frequent appearances before the beaks, tempered by self-righteous fury at the treatment of their own children at the hands of the little horror(s) belonging to the Bad Egg.

·         Earth Mother: The uber-calm Mum with a long string of children, all of whom are always perfectly washed, dressed and on time for school, with all the right homework, money and correspondence in their school bag, and all of whom behave beautifully. Earth Mother has never been carpeted  by the head teacher. Earth Mother does not participate in gossip. Earth Mother never shouts at her children. Face it, we all are simultaneously fascinated by and pissed off with Earth Mother, compounded by the fact that we can’t help but like her. We have absolutely no idea how she gets through all that laundry. We can only imagine she has access to some house-elves (see below).

·         Freeloader: Arguably, the most sensible parent of all. The one who does not get involved in helping out with any of the school activities or fund-raising, but fully expects its child to benefit from it all. I suspect this parent believes an army of unpaid house-elves comes along and does all the work, whilst the rest of us are sleeping.

I’m Harassed Mum by the way, with possibly a side order of the makings of Bad Egg (although I am on the run from the beaks and they have not caught up with me as yet, but as we all know this is only a matter of time), and the polar opposite of Earth Mother. In case you hadn’t already worked it out. Engineer is most definitely Domesticated Dad. Which one are you??

What I know now I am in my forties

You cannot be everyone’s friend. As a teenager, I suffered endless painful angst about the fact that I wasn’t everyone’s friend. In my late teens and early twenties, I stopped caring (pretty much around the time I gave up exercise and took up drinking). In my thirties, when I got married and had my children, and when I finally learnt to empathise, I started to care again. Now that I am in my forties, it’s not so much that I don’t care any more, because I do, deeply. But I am content to live with the undeniable truth that not everyone likes me and that’s ok. And, amazingly, I don’t like everyone, and that’s also ok.

Politeness and respect are really important. I have a heap of unresolved, unresolvable, retrospective guilt which visits me usually in the middle of the night and won’t leave me alone, and it’s basically about when I have been rude or unkind to people in the past. I remember my mother saying it to me, and I now say it to my children: “Don’t treat people unkindly or disrespectfully, because you will regret it in the future..” She was right, I do regret it.

Experiences are much more valuable than material possessions. You remember experiences for ever. You rarely remember material possessions (except my beautiful green bike from circa 1976 which I may have mentioned before…) Kids says they want the latest eye-wateringly expensive gadgets for Christmas or their birthday. But they get more fun, laughter and memories out of an experience.

You never have enough money. Well, you do if you’re Bill Gates. But in recognition of the fact that most of us are not, we pretty much never have enough money. It’s like that annoying physics of packing for a holiday: the combined weight and size of all the clobber you want to put in your suitcase is greater than the sum of its separate parts. Your total income will always be roughly 10% less than you require your outgoings to be, no matter how fiercely you budget, and that percentage is greater at Christmas time (unless you are my best friend N in which case you probably have your whole life organised in a spreadsheet and you never have and never will overspend).

You cannot outwit a bureaucracy. It always flipping catches up with you in the end. It’s usually better to just accept this fact and not even try.

Even if you do not try nor have ever tried to outwit a bureaucracy, at some point the bureaucracy will believe you to be attempting to outwit it even if it has not a scrap of supporting evidence.  It’s usually because someone has inadvertently spelt your name wrong and consequently a computer has you confused with a tax evader or mass murderer. When this happens, until someone actually takes an axe to the computer in question, you will be tarred with this brush for the rest of your days.

No transfer of domestic power supplier ever goes smoothly. Live with it.

Things Aint What They Used To Be

At the risk of sounding like my mother (for example: “All this modern music! It’s just NOISE! There's no TUNE! It all sounds THE SAME! I can’t tell when one song ENDS and the next one BEGINS!”), things just aint what they used to be. This is made very clear to me every year at Halloween. For a start, my children want their costume bought ready to wear, rather than creating a ghost’s outfit from a sheet, my Dad’s army spats, a variety of empty cardboard junk, and a big pot of glue made from flour and water (which coincidentally was the exact recipe you used to make your hair stand on end as well). Secondly, they go out armed with a pumpkin-shaped plastic bucket in which to contain the loot that they expect every single house to provide. Thirdly, they grudgingly come up with one solitary (and almost always a bit rude and inappropriate) joke which is supposed to count as their “treat”. No thought is ever given to doing a dance or singing a song (unless it’s a rude one of course: “Trick or Treat, smell my feet, give me something nice to eat…..” etc). And they normally need help with the punch line until they have visited the 20^th house, at which point they finally manage to remember it through the fug of sugar-related bad behaviour.

When you are the Trick-or-treatee, there is much scrutiny and ultimately often voiced disappointment with the loot you have provided. “I don’t like these” said one child this year. “Can I have the money instead?” Seriously. I was flabbergasted. Is that acceptable?? And although every year I always stoically put monkey nuts and satsumas in amongst the loot on offer, I have yet to see a child actually select either of those items. I am pretty sure that satsumas in my day were considered to be a pretty good treat…

And let’s not forget the arrival of the pumpkin into our lives. I had never seen a pumpkin until a few years ago, except in a Charlie Brown cartoon, and I had certainly never smelt one. Because nothing smells quite like the stinking, stringy, soggy entrails of a pumpkin. Even pumpkin seeds are somehow creepy. How can the feel of a seed make you gag and shudder? Of course, in the old days, we made our lanterns out of neeps. It was a hard shift, hollowing out a neep. You ended up with several bent spoons and broken knives, as well as various blisters and callouses. But it was worth it, because you could make soup or bashed neeps with the remnants, and the burning candle inside the lantern filled the house with a pleasant smell of cooking neeps. Let’s face it, these days it’s you or the pumpkin. The unspeakable stench will kill you in the end, so you have to put the lantern on your doorstep and hope for a kindly prevailing wind.

Halloween is a timely reminder for me that Christmas is coming. This year I am hell bent on doing something about the mountains of gifts which Boxer and Judge receive (which last year took them a week to finish opening. Not their choice, I hasten to add). These mountains of gifts cause them to completely forget about what Christmas is really about, much like distracting someone with something shiny: “Yes yes Jesus and Mary and Joseph, I get it, now then, that’s another one for me isn’t it?” So this year, I am a woman possessed. One main present each. One stocking each containing a variety of smaller gifts, each one worth less than or equal to £5, and a Satsuma, obviously. With careful forward planning and management of lovely and generous friends, any other presents will be from family or god-parents. Nothing else.

This year we will be enjoying experiences rather than things. Children remember experiences. They rarely remember things (except my beautiful green bike which I got for Christmas in 1976, and which was stolen 2 weeks after I got it. I have never got over it.) Mine have never been allowed to ask for a whole lot for Christmas, so when they write their letter to Santa, it is to ask for one thing only. And then I let myself down by starting to do my shopping so early in the year, in order to spread the cost, that I forget what I have already bought and end up with an enormous pile of gifts, exactly what I was determined to avoid.

Not this year. This year, things are going to be much more like they used to be.

Parental Enlightenment

My children are my greatest educators, in lots of ways.

I remember my older step-daughter’s comment from around 6 weeks after the birth of her first child: “If I had known at the start that I would spend the rest of my life working out ways to outwit my child, I might have thought twice about it…”. This sums it up exactly. No matter how intelligent you are, how well you run your own life and how good you think you are at reading other people, as soon as you have your own child you are pretty much no longer equipped to look after yourself, let alone a tiny, defenceless, vulnerable human being, for whose welfare you are entirely and terrifyingly responsible. Let’s face it, for the first few weeks after the birth, you cannot even remember how to start the car any more.

Other things you only learn post childbirth:

1. There is no such thing as an “easy birth”. Anyone who tells you they have had one is either lying to protect you, still high on pain-killing attitude-adjusting narcotics or is recalling it from so long ago that merciful time has washed all painful memories away. Any process requiring pain-killing attitude-adjusting narcotics which you could sell for a serious amount of money in your local pub is never going to be easy. Get real.
2. Any mid-wife or health visitor who describes breast-feeding as involving a “tiny nip” has either never done it or is lying to protect you. Breast-feeding makes your toes curl. EVERY TIME.
3. Telling people how to raise their children is a multi-million pound industry. And you will still get it wrong. Even if you read every super-nanny book available, at some point your child will still tell you that they hate you and that you’re the worst parent in the world and that everyone else they know has a better life.
4. You will be amazed at how well you can do without sleep.
5. You will never finish a conversation, cup of coffee (without having to put it in the microwave to reheat it half way through) or newspaper again unless your child is asleep.
6. Your ability to consume alcohol without turning into a dribbling, havering, incoherent wreck will drop like a stone.
7. Entire evenings with your friends in the pub can now be filled with conversations about school catchment areas. Nothing will be resolved due to everyone’s inability to process alcohol efficiently (see point 6 above) coupled with the fact that every council’s catchment area policy is random and illogical. And the fact that if any council suspects that its residents know all the rules around catchment areas, it must immediately change some or all of them without notice or consultation.
8. People who park their cars with 2 wheels up on the pavement really piss you off. You have never noticed it before. But then again, you have never considered the ability to proceed unencumbered along a pavement with a buggy as a benefit before.
9. You watch people who park in the parent-and-child spaces at supermarkets like a manic hawk, just to make absolutely sure that they actually have children when they emerge from their car.
10. The people who are the least well qualified to give you advice will be the ones who give you advice. The people who are the best qualified to give you advice (eg my mother) will be the ones who say “I don’t really know, I haven’t got any experience, I have no idea what I’d do” or the old classic “it was much easier for us in my day”. Yeah right, of course it was. You had no money, no soft play facilities, no children’s TV, no car, no innoculations to spend sleepless nights deciding about, and absolutely no advice from health care professionals. How is that easier?
11. You will feel guilty about every single thing that you do, from choosing the wrong toothpaste with an inappropriate fluoride content, to allowing your child to eat a packet of chocolate buttons. You have probably never suffered from that much guilt before. You will get your fill now though, because as if current guilt is not enough you will also develop retrospective guilt about things which didn’t make you feel guilty before but which now, with the benefit of empathy, cause you to cringe inwardly every time you think about them.

In short, there should definitely be some sort of qualification exam before people can have children, and all children should definitely come with a handbook. If a toaster comes with a handbook, why doesn’t a complex organism like a child have one?

Corporate Ponderings…

There was a story in the newspaper last week about prison vans being ordered at vast expense, only for the powers that be to discover that they are too large for most courthouse entrances. Really. You could be forgiven for thinking that it was an extravagant (VERY extravagant, like £900 million, I mean how can a few tall buses with blacked out windows cost that much?) April Fool. Of all the people in the world in whose shoes you would not want to be, the project manager of that particular project probably tops the list.

Of course, we all know what happened here. Lots of people, probably dressed in suits, have got together, done a whole lot of talking and very little listening, and have probably come up with a list of proposals, which have then been circulated around a whole lot of other people who either weren’t invited to the original meeting, or were vital to the meeting but couldn’t be arsed to attend, and who thus have done even less listening, and they have prioritised the proposals, and then someone completely different who actually controls the money has had a look at the list and rejected the first 5 items because they are too expensive. So number 6 has been duly selected, but because it was number 6 no one in either of the original parties did any form of due diligence about the viability of the proposal because they only checked proposals 1 through 5. And absolutely no one thought to get their measuring tape out and check the dimensions of a courtroom’s approach roads against the proportions of the vans being ordered. This is because number 6 ticked pretty much none of the boxes, and thus was never really intended to be a serious proposal in the first place.

People have not been singing off the same song sheet. Their ducks have not been placed in a row. Have you ever seen ducks in a row? I have only ever seen ducks in a line, and it’s usually quite a dishevelled and quite frankly a bit stinky line too. If this is a standard analogy in the human world for being well-organised, is it really any wonder that the flipping trucks don’t fit through the gates?

Corporate speak is a shifting landscape though. We are seeing a whole new generation of words and phrases entering common usage, so out goes brain-storming, thinking outside the box and blue sky thinking, and in comes collaboration, transformation and optimisation. At the risk of this becoming a rant (I mean, we wouldn’t want that now would we), here are a few other favourites of mine

• You can’t polish a turd: this means that a group of people, in full recognition of the fact that some situation is poor and unfixable, are meeting nonetheless, probably at vast corporate expense, to discuss how poor and unfixable it is. Rarely will anything be resolved.
• Strategic: Neat, slick, expensive. Never going to happen.
• Tactical: Messy, manual, also expensive but in people hours rather than computer development. Almost always the favoured option. No one ever seems to worry about people hours.
• Collaboration pod: a slightly posher than normal, well-furnished meeting room containing a phone, a set of microphones and a computer with a web camera and a network connection, which usually doesn’t work. In special cases, there may even be an interactive whiteboard which no one knows how to use, and a video link, ditto. Usually there’s a flip chart in the corner. In almost all cases, the door has the words “Collaboration Pod” written in unsteady capitals on the door, not always spelt correctly.
• End-to-end thinking: intended to ensure that the rambling, disjointed route a customer transaction takes through all the different internal parts of a business is invisible to the customer, who just experiences slick, efficient, customer-oriented pleasantness. In reality, each part of the business only considers its own boundaries and doesn’t give a crap if those boundaries don’t interface properly (or indeed at all) with the boundaries of the next part of the business. So the customer experiences a total shambles, and rarely does it end well. (Obviously this is a sweeping generalisation. There are many examples out there of businesses which do end-to-end thinking very well. But I cannot rant about them…)
  

There’s a lot to be said for dictatorship then, you would think. One person makes the decision, there’s no discussion or argument, and anyone who makes a mess gets flogged, so there’s a much greater incentive to succeed. Simple!

The Art of Familial Communications

My sister, let’s call her Little Vulture, is my friend, I am pleased to note. I do hope she agrees. It has become apparent over the years with my dealings with others who have siblings that this is most definitely not a given. She is usually able to finish my sentences for me, which is lucky since these days I have often forgotten by the end of the sentence what I originally intended the end of the sentence to be.  She appears to have forgiven me for the systematic destruction of her felt tip pens circa 1973 whilst she was safely at primary school and I had the run of her toys. I have almost forgiven her for persuading me to tell her what I was giving her for Christmas BEFORE Christmas every year until I finally woke up to her little game (last year), and for always making me have the train at Granny’s house which didn’t wind up and quite frankly wasn’t even an engine if we’re being absolutely honest about it, whilst she swanned around the track with the lovely green wind-up engine.  When things are emotional, Engineer sighs in a long-suffering, resigned way, and gets his umbrella out, as when Little Vulture weeps, I weep, and vice versa. Even talking about the fact that we make each other weep makes us weep. Quod erat demonstrandum (or rather quod esset demonstrandum, let’s make it a conditional rather than a sure thing, even though we all know it’s actually the latter). Apologies to all you fluent Latin speakers out there if my tenses are a bit off. I haven’t had to go there since about 1982, and I haven’t missed it AT ALL.

Engineer has about 152 siblings. Or it might be just 12, but I lose count after the first 6 TBH. Judge and Boxer have (at the last count) 29 first cousins, 2 big sisters (we agree to abandon the qualifiers “half” and “step” a long time ago, as the latter implies fairy tale evilness and the former is just plain silly. How can you be half a sister?), a niece and a nephew, and an expanding plethora of other assorted less immediate relatives. They are a close family. How they manage to transmit information between themselves with the sort of efficiency one normally associates only with ants or bees, and definitely not with anything in the human world, without duplication or distortion, occasionally looping in sisters-in-law / step-mothers on a need-to-know basis, is a constant source of amazement to me.

Little Vulture and I are amateurs in comparison, viz:

Little Vulture: “Well, of course, you know after the papier mache balloon / exploding curry / non-swimming pigs / veering under a motor vehicle / ducklings for dog food (delete as applicable) incident (these are all real incidents, by the way, in case you were wondering)…”

Me: “What papier mache balloon / exploding curry / non-swimming pigs / veering under a motor vehicle / ducklings for dog food (delete as applicable) incident??”

Little Vulture: “You know? What we were talking about at the cinema the other day?”

Me: “You went to the cinema with Fred / Wilma.”

Little Vulture: “Oh. So I did. Well, anyway….”

The presence of our cousins, Lioness and Bear, who to all intents and purposes count as siblings, further exacerbates the problem. They cry, we cry. It’s exhausting. Communication between us all is further complicated by vast geographical distances and the fact that each link in the four-way chain has a different preferred method of communication. Lioness and I prefer instant messaging – this way there is far less chance that we will make each other cry, and it enables us to communicate during our manically busy working days. Bear and Little Vulture favour good old-fashioned telephone chat. This way Bear can make calls from his car on the way to or from yet another comedy encounter with his in-laws, and Little Vulture can enjoy the update with her feet up on the sofa and an appropriate refreshment. This means that things get communicated 3 or 4 times, or not at all, and many things get lost in translation:

Me: “Lioness texted – apparently Bear’s blah ran away with a fishcake!” (incidentally, this is not a real scenario because that would be a bit silly)

Little Vulture: “Yes, Bear just called…it was actually a fish finger…” I think you see the problem.

Of course, SMS communication comes with its own specific set of issues, mainly related either to the vagaries of predictive texting, auto-correct or the fat finger problems which occur as a result of touch screen technology. Thus “sorry will be l8, plane stuck in dog” and other such unwittingly hilarious messages only serve to add to the difficulties of clear communication.

In my twenties, I lived about a stone’s throw from Little Vulture’s front door. Such are our hapless communication skills that we would on a regular basis become annoyed with each other because the other’s phone line was engaged, rather than make the 50 yard journey along the road, safe in the knowledge that the other was in. Well, either that or there was a very garrulous burglar in the house.  

Face to face. It’s the only way.

Bad Grammar. Init?

Right then, the first thing to point out is that since I am not English, and coupled with the fact that I was the only person in my year at school who did not study English Higher, I am almost certainly not qualified to talk about bad English grammar or spelling. Thus, this blog is like a one-legged, rhythmically-challenged, tone-deaf person criticising the tap-dancing skills of others.

Be that as it may, it does not stop bad grammar being something which makes me screw up my eyes, grit my teeth, wince and recoil, shaking my head. You just experimented with that sequence of expressions, didn’t you. My absolute nemesis is the badly placed or completely spurious apostrophe. Clearly, the decision to go vocal about this is a risky one, as it becomes more critical than normal for me to check that there are none of the afore-mentioned offenders putting in an appearance somewhere in the text. How ironic would that be?? 

For me, there are different categories of poorly-used apostrophes, verging from acceptable to just plain wrong. Some I can understand because the rules are thoroughly confusing, and remind me of the rules which did the email rounds a few years ago, the basic premise of which was that if the people who make the rules suspect that the rest of us have figured any or all of them out, they are at liberty to change any or all them immediately and without notice. Some English grammar rules remind me somewhat of the minefield of the random German plural, the two virtually interchangeable varieties of French past tense and the vagaries of the key of C# Major. I may have ranted about this latter item before. Sadly this is Beethoven’s fault, for writing my favourite piece of piano music in my least favourite key (and then insisting upon sharpening a sharp thus making it a natural…I mean, come on Ludwig, I understand that becoming deaf was a career-threatening development for a composer, but it wasn’t really OUR fault as such so there was really no need to take it out on us). Note the correctly positioned apostrophe in that last sentence. Ha!

Falling into this category is the wrangle about where to put the apostrophe denoting ownership by a plural entity, for example the toys belonging to the children. I’ll admit, that’s not clear cut, very annoying and just flipping typical of the English language, TBH. Thus anyone who gets this wrong in future correspondence with me will avoid public criticism, mainly because I will either not notice it, or notice it and assume the version you have chosen is the correct one, since I don’t actually know any better. I think it should be “the children’s toys”, since it denotes the toys belonging to the children. But I don’t know for sure and I’m definitely not brave enough to place a bet on it.

Others are far less forgivable, for instance if I had written that as “other’s”… Just, NO. Particularly annoying are the ones where a standard plural is apostrophised. I mean, why?? “Who let the dog’s out?” The dog is out of what? It reduces the whole meaning of the sentence to rubble.

One of the things I have learned, as the mother of children who are just starting to grapple with the written English word, is that English is not logical. An apostrophe marks a missing letter, unless of course it’s one of the exceptions to this rule (for instance when we shorten road to Rd or Saint to St). An apostrophe denotes ownership. Except for personal pronouns of course (yours, theirs etc). An apostrophe can be used to indicate the structure of unusual words. Except when it isn’t. You see? So basically, I’m ok with a misplaced apostrophe as long as I don’t know it’s misplaced. Oblivion, that’s the key.

Disaster for Scotland

During any sporting tournament whatsoever in which Scotland have been invited to take part (rugby, football, heck even tiddlywinks, let’s face it), blood pressure in this house is dangerously high. Engineer tries to pretend he doesn't care, but his face takes on a pinched, strained appearance and he swears a lot at the officials. Judge is beside himself at the unfairness of every bad refereeing decision, and has his bedroom draped in all manner of Saltire flags. Boxer would care, only she cannot hide her glee at the obvious distress of Judge.

Every commentator who has ever lived, or at least who has commentated on sporting events in which my beloved nation takes part, and particularly if he or she has the misfortune to actually be Scottish, has used the phrase “Disaster for Scotland!”, in a desperate, resigned, tragic tone.

When I talk about the misfortune to be Scottish, let’s be clear that I am immensely, steadfastly, axe-wieldingly fond of my homeland. Mountains, space, heather, castles, square sausage, whisky (and our other national drink, Irn Bru, possibly worse for a person’s health than whisky itself), the generally-accepted practice of men displaying their hairy knees in all weathers, Tunnocks tea cakes and Burns Night, an occasion where it is anticipated, even expected, that the nation will sink its annual quota of booze all in the one sitting. What’s not to love about it? We Scots are frank, funny, obnoxious, and passionate to the point of blindness in our refusal to admit that our beloved nation has any faults whatsoever (eg a smidgen over-patriotic, with a shocking diet and an over-reliance on the sale of plastic tourist tat to make us an extra few quid, not to mention one of the worst sectarian problems on the planet). Please note: I am allowed to make fun of Scotland by virtue of my being Scottish. However, woe betide anyone who isn’t Scottish making fun of Scotland. We just don’t have that kind of sense of humour, quite frankly.

We are, however, famously bad at sport. No, come on, we are. We would love to think we are good at it. The reality is, however, that we fail often, and we usually do it in the most dramatic last minute circumstances. No wonder our blood pressure is so high. No wonder we have the worst record for heart disease of any western nation. It’s our sporting heroes! They let us down you see. And we so badly want them to be glorious. We would do almost anything for them to be glorious.

I went to school very close to Murrayfield Stadium, so I feel rugby-related defeats particularly painfully. As you can imagine, the World Cup in New Zealand is not proving to be a happy, stress-free time for me. The only good thing about it is that the time difference means that most of the action takes place at unsociable viewing times, so I mostly just look at the result and sigh heavily. At least I don’t have to go through every jaw-clenching, nail-biting moment with our boys.

Our propensity to fail in sporting endeavours makes our very occasional victory so very, very sweet though. And we always have fun in the pub afterwards, usually alongside our protagonists, arms around shoulders, all singing “Scotland the Brave” together (if only we knew more words than just “Scotland the Brave”). Perhaps it is enough that we infiltrate our enemies and make them sing our songs and drink our drinks? I suspect not though.

Introductory musings

This will be a series of blogs for gentle entertainment and amusement, and by that I mean both mine and my readers'. I hope. This blog represents my own opinions only, and should not be used as a blunt instrument with which to beat my nearest and dearest about the head.


It takes something of a leap into the unknown, grasping ones self-confidence by the scruff of the neck, to publish a blog. At the back of one's mind is the nagging doubt that anyone on the planet will be remotely interested in anything one has to say on any topic. What if I inadvertently upset someone? Worse, what if no one reads it, and I expose my soul to absolutely nobody?


With all that in mind, and brandishing it as something of a caveat to the general drivel which is likely to appear on this blog periodically, let me introduce myself. I am a mother of 2 and wife of 1, and I also have a full time job which gives me a legitimate excuse to get away from the housework. My children are a good source of both amusement and poignancy for me. I'll call them Judge and Boxer (although just to be clear, those aren't their actual names, because that would be silly. And probably illegal, in some countries of the world). Judge is the older - he is constantly horrified by the unfairness of the world. Boxer doesn't spend too much time being horrified by unfairness - she is more interested in putting things right, and her favoured method usually involves contradiction and then physical violence. They are both still quite little, little enough to pick up (although, in the case of Judge, these days one needs to ensure one has core muscles locked and knees braced) and little enough to think that farting is funny. Oh, hang on. That's everyone isn't it.


My husband (let's call him Engineer) provides good insight and observations. He's erudite, although he will immediately ask me what that means. He observes the world, and then he applies his own not insubstantial intelligence and good, decent belief systems to those observations and comes up with...well, someone who wouldn't do a bad job as Prime Minister, quite frankly. I'd encourage it, and I'd even vote for him, only I wouldn't really want to live in London. Been there, done that, got the sweat-stained, blood-encrusted t-shirt.


We live in Edinburgh, although Engineer's family are scattered around Glasgow, which means they get a nosebleed whenever they come and visit. There are simply HUNDREDS of them. But that's ok, big families are riveting and provide a rich vein of amusing material. And there's always someone to laugh at you when you do something stupid.