Things I Like

As promised, after last week’s doom-and-gloom-laden blog, I have put all my moans behind me, put a smile on my face, and song in my heart and I eagerly await the bank putting some money in my pocket, but I won’t be holding my breath…MAN January goes on forever! But enough of things I hate, I covered all that last week.

I like wind farms. I realise this statement may place me at risk of drowning in a deluge of tree huggers and the noise pollution brigade helpfully expressing opposite points of view, so can I please quickly point out that I don’t like wind farms because they are going to save the planet - indeed, the futurologist recently interviewed by the BBC stated that he did not expect wind farms to feature much in the planet’s energy generation systems in the year 2112, and since he is a guy who was clearly born with a crystal ball in his hand, who am I to argue? I mean, it’s not like he makes stuff up by guessing what’s going to happen in 100 years’ time. He’s paid to be a futurologist, so he either has a crystal ball or a time machine, and either way I’m not about to argue with the man. I just like wind farms because they are big, white and beautiful, and they stand tall on windy desolate moorland where no other idiot would go. I also love the fact that they have to be shut down when it’s too windy. I like a field full of wind turbines. Engineer likes a field full of round hay bales (dispersed neatly at regular intervals). We are the Weird Family.

I like my Brie rock hard. Not many people know, but there are 4 versions of Brie: Break-the-wall, bounce-off-the-wall, stick-to-the-wall and run-down-the-wall. Well of course you didn’t know. You have to be a cheese connoisseur to know. Of course I didn’t make it up. Mine has to be break the wall hard.

I like junk food. It grieves me that junk food is so bad for you. This raises the philosophical question, do I love junk food because I know it’s bad for me? Would I love carrots if they were classified as junk food? Don’t get me wrong, I like carrots. But I wouldn’t stagger out of bed with a hangover and head out to get hold of some carrots. I would do that with a Big Mac Meal though, or a multipack of salt and vinegar crisps and a boat load of Twirls.

I like the fact that people who send me spam messages actually believe that I am stupid enough to send my banking details to them so that they can help themselves to whatever is in my bank account. I had a message recently purportedly from Paypal and it was addressed “Dear Valued Costumer”. A dyslexic thief! You couldn’t make it up.

I like people who are under the misguided illusion that because their child walked / talked / spelled / read / wrote / counted / potty-trained early, they will be a rocket scientist in later life. These people are optimistically delusional and we should cherish them as an important and colourful ingredient in the fabric of society. There’s time enough for them to become realists, and when that time arrives, when their rocket scientist child who could count to a hundred aged 2 struggles with bastarding derivatives or ballistics aged 17, we should all be there to support them. Boxer climbed out of her cot aged 18 months and spoke a full, grammatically correct sentence: “Mummy, I want to see Daddy”. All this means is that she is extremely determined and resourceful, a total Daddy’s girl, and a right royal pain in the tonsils. I’m not naïve enough to believe that this somehow makes her a child prodigy. Judge says the six times table is a sod. I say that equips him well for A Level Maths, most of which is a sod.

Off to get a packet of salt and vinegar crisps.

Things I Hate

So this might sound like a slightly pessimistic post, but, unusually for me, I’m in a pessimistic frame of mind. It’s not like me, and it’ll pass, but hopefully a small blog-sized rant will aid the process of self-healing.

Politicians: What were we thinking, electing a bunch of old Etonian millionaires to run the country, a task which includes but is not restricted to passing us non-millionaires advice about how to manage our finances? I say “we”, I really mean “you”, since I bear absolutely no responsibility for their election, but someone must have voted for them. This is like having a swimming teacher advise us how to hang glide. For Mr Cameron and his cronies, it must be like having an extra-large Monopoly set to play with, except that only they can afford to purchase any properties on Mayfair or Park Lane. Apparently the easiest way to deal with this period of economic difficulty is to “just pay off our credit cards”. Well thanks Mr Cameron, why didn’t I think of that.

Childless or expectant parents advising actual parents on how to rear their children: No one’s perfect, and I know my parenting skills could do with a brush up, but having someone who doesn’t actually have any experience in it passing me tips can be hard to take, even from a health visitor or medical professional. Actually, the people who are least likely to give out parenting advice are parents themselves, because we are wise to the fact that we will be trying to outwit children until the end of time, and we will never succeed, no matter how many self-help books we read. The cantankerous little sods remain one step ahead of us at all times.

Herbal or holistic remedies: You know what, if it’s your last resort, nothing else has worked, and you’re prepared to give anything a go, then fair enough. Fill your boots with all the holistic mumbo jumbo you can lay your hands on. But seriously, what manner of an eejit would rather have colonic irrigation that a simple course of antibiotics?

Corporate or school playground bullies: Rule of thumb – if you wouldn’t treat your family and friends that way, it’s probably not acceptable to treat anyone like that. Life is so much more pleasant if you are respectful and polite to everyone, but I believe that for some reason this is a lesson we don’t learn until quite late on in life, around the time that we develop empathy, and some people entirely fail to learn it at all. A good celebrity example is Jeremy Clarkson. He’s ever so funny, until you find yourself being the butt of his jokes.

Reality TV: I will never understand the attraction of watching people sleep on live TV. Or watching people humiliate themselves on live TV. Or watching people be humiliated by a large audience on live TV because some cruel “friend” has told them they can sing – “seriously dude, you should go on X Factor…”. Those people who know me will know that Engineer and I have a secret X Factor habit though, but I have to watch the initial auditions through my fingers and I leave the room if there’s a cringe-invoking moment.

Always getting the weirdo on an early morning flight: Nothing is more offensive than having to sit beside someone who has partaken of a goodly quantity of Vodka for breakfast, except perhaps having to sit beside someone who considers toothpaste, deodorant and soap as nice-to-haves. Red eyes are bad enough. Malodorous red eyes are a step too far.  

Ah, that feels much better. I’ll do a piece on “Things I Like” next week, just to balance out the positive / negative pendulum, I promise.

2011: What a year that was…

Many notable things happened in 2011. I do like to have a few moments of mature reflection when the old year turns into the new one, followed closely by a good helping of immature reflection. I thought you might enjoy the latter more.

I got addicted to Angry Birds. This is a shame for Little Vulture and Bear, since I do not have an iPhone and they both do. This means that whenever I see either of them I am less interested in communicating with them, and infinitely more interested in feeding my addiction. This is not good for our familial relations, nor the battery life of their devices. As with most addictions, this one took hold surreptitiously and with frightening speed. One moment, I was vaguely aware of the existence of the game but completely disconnected from the reality of it, due to the simple fact that my employer favours Blackberry over iPhone (and I now see why – imagine the hours lost to Angry Birds in the typical workplace…). The next moment, BANG. Hopeless addiction. Cold turkey is the only way forward. Conquering my addiction is particularly important since my pleasure is diminished when I play it with the sound off, even though the noise of unscathed pigs chortling is almost more than I can bear. It must be a pain / pleasure thing.

I realised that Engineer and I can no longer laugh at what Boxer says when we are within her earshot because she gets mightily offended. This is because she is no longer a baby. So when she, on watching a football game, made reference to the guy in the black shirt being “The Janitor”, and Engineer, Judge and myself almost fell off the sofa laughing at the sheer appropriateness of this comment, she shut herself in her room in a huff and refused to speak to any of us for a whole day. When on earth, exactly, did she stop being a baby, and why wasn’t I consulted?

I came to terms with the fact that I do not understand what the Large Hadron Collider does, nor what the discovery of a sub-atomic particle will do for me. I realise of course that both of these items are of significant scientific importance. I still read newspaper articles about them. I am merely resigned to the fact that I will never be able to explain either of them to my children. I look forward to the day when they can explain them to me.

I now acknowledge that there is a place in the world for the Kindle. Just not in my world. I reserve the right for this stance to change in the future though (for reference, see my attitude to the iPod and CDs back in the day. You could be forgiven for imagining that I had had a job in HMV’s marketing department. “Downloading? It’ll never catch on.”). I’m just not an Early Adopter in the change cycle, quite frankly, as the paragraph below will confirm.

This final item will no doubt make me sound like I just arrived from 1985 in a time-travelling Dolorean with a bad perm and shoulder pads, but How Good Is Skype?!? This has been a video-conferencing Christmas – how amazing to be able to see my brother-in-law in Canada, and 2 of my Glasgow in-laws, all on the screen at the same time, all chatting away like we’re in the same room rather than hundreds / thousands of miles apart! And best of all, it’s FREE! I never could resist a bargain.

Happy 2012 to all my lovely friends.

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.