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?