Here, Halloween is an unusual experience.
The local conservation association circulated a flyer, printed on orange paper, to explain how it all works:
"Halloween: what is it?
Halloween is a holiday celebrated on the 31st of October, in which children dress up and go door to door collecting sweets."
Seriously. If you live in a country where Halloween is a given, consider yourself fortunate. There are many, many people here who simply do not understand the concept.
Take, for example, those who posted notices on their doors instructing Trick-or-Treaters to Kindly Piss Off, or something to that effect. Show me a house with a sign like that in the US and I'll show you a house where the owner will spend the next six months scraping dried egg off the vinyl siding and trying to ignore the odor of burnt dog shit outside his front door.
Last year, we encountered a lady who, after distributing sweets to most of the children at her door, decided that she'd handed out enough for one go and shooed the rest away, unrewarded for their efforts. Tonight, a woman handed a single Cadbury bar to our children and their friend and told them to "split this three ways" before slamming the door on them. The children still chorused "thank you" at the unlit doorway.
One very nice lady, an American judging from her accent, handed out Monster Munch crisps. Despite the appropriate name, I think these missed the mark, as I don't believe I've ever heard anyone offer trick-or-treaters a choice of "fiery hot, roast beef or pickled onion."
Halloween here is somewhat surreal and is still very much a word of mouth thing. And this, I think, underscores the major difference between Halloween here and in America.
In the States, you can't possibly NOT understand Halloween. It's been so oversold, so over-commercialized, so over-hyped, that you'd have to have lived under a rock or in an institution your entire life to have avoided it. Here, there are people who just honestly don't get it. They are taken aback every year by encounters on the street with short, oddly dressed people. They do not understand why children keep knocking on their door when they leave their outside light on. They require an explanation in the form of an orange flyer containing helpful instructions to either attract or repel oddly-dressed children on the eve of All Saint's Day.
Here, Halloween feels very much like it did when I was a kid, before Hallmark started flogging Halloween cards (HALLOWEEN CARDS, for Christ's sake. Think about that for a minute.), before the local Dollar Tree began stocking 50-pound bags of second tier candy like Phlegm Balls and Asbestos Chews. Halloween here feels a little edgy and vaguely dangerous. Halloween here is still a bit lawless, like it was before the adults back home started fussing about it and making up rules.
Here, children still dress in black, blissfully unaware of their American brethren's requirement to swaddle themselves in so much reflective material that they are visible from space. Here, children scramble from house to house, tripping over half-buried roots in the dark and crossing roads when and where they please. Here, children do not wear blinking trainers or carry flashlights. Here, parents do not chauffeur their cherished offspring about in belching SUVs, little Tyler and Taylor buckled into their 5-point safety harnesses like towheaded F-16 pilots watching Disney DVDs between houses. Here, the hospitals will not X-ray the children's candy.
Here, there are no set hours for Halloween. Here, people set off fireworks. Here, jack-o-lanterns are lit with actual candles and here, even the older children still dress up and say "Trick or Treat". Here, kids don't just shuffle up, open their sacks and shuffle away again. Here, people still laugh or act frightened when they open the door to a cadre of skeletons and witches and cats. Here, Halloween is still innocent, uncorrupted by meddling parents and officious busybodies.
Here, despite the cynicism of this chilly, expensive city gnawing away at your soul like a giant rat, Halloween still has a bit of wonder and magic about it. Here, Halloween is still pure.
Fiery Hot for me, please.
Sunday, October 31, 2010
Monday, October 25, 2010
The Cook and the Castle Builder
Having recently rolled my personal odometer over, I have begun to notice certain things which suggest that I am aging. Today, for example, I had an old man moment at work while listening to some snotty kid fresh off the grad program bang on about how his group had replaced "ten year old Solaris server infrastructure that was basically just dust! Huh, huh, huh!" I wanted to point out that those servers had performed more reliably and consistently than anything built since, that ten years isn't really all that long for what was at the time a massive investment, that it's bad form to laugh at your own jokes and that maybe it was time to pay to get his hair cut now that he's no longer living on the money he gets from his paper route and whatever small notes he can nick from his mother's purse. But of course saying those things would make me sound old and bitter. And that's because I am. So I plugged in my headphones and turned up the Talking Heads.
Well, I didn't really. But it struck me in that moment - this is a young man's game. This kid, with his spiky hair and his obnoxious mannerisms, he's the future of technology, as I was when I was his age. Now I'm just a dinosaur, and the best I can hope for is that I shall shortly be converted into petroleum and thereby provide at least some residual usefulness.
When I look around my floor at work - and it's a big floor, I can see probably three or four hundred people from my seat - I don't see many people over the age of, say, 50. Most of them are in offices. I am not. That gives me about ten years to either get promoted twice or get the hell out. But what would I do? I'm not particularly good at anything else (and I'm sure that some would argue that I'm not particularly good at this either...).
Frankly, I still can't decide what I'll be when I grow up. I enrolled in college as a Business Administration major. After reflection I switched to 'undecided' because I couldn't see myself spending my life behind a desk. I also did this to avoid calculus. So where have I been since graduation? Apart from the summer I spent in a construction job, I have been in exactly the place I was trying to avoid - behind a desk. Fortunately, I have not been called upon to use any calculus. Don't get me wrong, it hasn't been bad, I'm just not sure it's what I'm meant to be doing. Trouble is, if it's not, I'm not entirely sure what is. I wonder whether anyone ever is sure, really.
When I was very young I wanted to build houses. This was probably down to having identified with Jason the Mason from Richard Scarry's What Do People Do All Day. At some point I wanted to be an archaeologist. When I was in third or fourth grade, I desperately wanted to become a teacher. I'd like to say that this aspiration was born of a desire to make the world a better place, but it wasn't. It was born of a desire to have the book with the answers printed in it in blue and to give out homework. This evolved into wanting to actually run a school. For about a year, I collected school supplies and labelled them "St. Ann's School"
As a teenager, I wanted to be a lawyer. I think I'd have made a good lawyer - I am both anal retentive and orally expulsive, a good combination for lawyering. When I was older, I wanted to be a chef. I worked in a succession of restaurants, first washing dishes, then as a prep cook, a pantry cook and finally, at eighteen, the sous chef in a sizable restaurant. I'm afraid I wasn't very good at it, but I enjoyed the hell out of myself. It was nothing at all like Ratatouille.
Later I wanted to work in theater. I'd spent a lot of time on and around the stage in high school, primarily as a means of avoiding class, but this prompted me to take a course in set construction at university, taught by a guy named Walt. I loved old Walt. He was shockingly overweight, perennially ill-tempered and an accomplished curmudgeon. His favorite expression of displeasure was "fuck 'em and feed 'em fish heads." I still say that.
I work in technology, but I am not a technologist, not really. Someone asked me the other day what processor my MacBook has. I have absolutely no idea, and really I couldn't care less. It works, and that is how I like my technology - working, and with as little intervention on my part as possible. Yes, I can still fix my computer when it breaks, I would just really rather not have to.
There are a fair few things I'd have liked to have done, and I do not think I am unique in this regard. But it's really a bit too late to go making drastic career changes. I don't know if I would have been any more suited to any of those things than I am to my job now. At twenty-one or twenty-two, you choose a life and you live it, and there's really no opportunity to go back and do it over.
So maybe it's too late for me. But what about the children? Michael wants to be a fireman and a castle builder. Caroline wants to be a cook and an artist and a scientist. Their aspirations will probably change over time, but I hope that I can be the sort of parent who encourages them to do what makes them happy, rather than what will make them prosperous.
But I do take comfort in the fact that in about fifteen years, that grad will be sitting at his desk, listening to his Brandon Flowers and feeling nostalgic, when some kid who is currently still eating his own boogers starts spewing about having just replaced some ancient piece of infrastructure, and he will have his very own old man moment. I'm just sorry I won't be there to see it. I'll be in an office. Or not.
Well, I didn't really. But it struck me in that moment - this is a young man's game. This kid, with his spiky hair and his obnoxious mannerisms, he's the future of technology, as I was when I was his age. Now I'm just a dinosaur, and the best I can hope for is that I shall shortly be converted into petroleum and thereby provide at least some residual usefulness.
When I look around my floor at work - and it's a big floor, I can see probably three or four hundred people from my seat - I don't see many people over the age of, say, 50. Most of them are in offices. I am not. That gives me about ten years to either get promoted twice or get the hell out. But what would I do? I'm not particularly good at anything else (and I'm sure that some would argue that I'm not particularly good at this either...).
Frankly, I still can't decide what I'll be when I grow up. I enrolled in college as a Business Administration major. After reflection I switched to 'undecided' because I couldn't see myself spending my life behind a desk. I also did this to avoid calculus. So where have I been since graduation? Apart from the summer I spent in a construction job, I have been in exactly the place I was trying to avoid - behind a desk. Fortunately, I have not been called upon to use any calculus. Don't get me wrong, it hasn't been bad, I'm just not sure it's what I'm meant to be doing. Trouble is, if it's not, I'm not entirely sure what is. I wonder whether anyone ever is sure, really.
When I was very young I wanted to build houses. This was probably down to having identified with Jason the Mason from Richard Scarry's What Do People Do All Day. At some point I wanted to be an archaeologist. When I was in third or fourth grade, I desperately wanted to become a teacher. I'd like to say that this aspiration was born of a desire to make the world a better place, but it wasn't. It was born of a desire to have the book with the answers printed in it in blue and to give out homework. This evolved into wanting to actually run a school. For about a year, I collected school supplies and labelled them "St. Ann's School"
As a teenager, I wanted to be a lawyer. I think I'd have made a good lawyer - I am both anal retentive and orally expulsive, a good combination for lawyering. When I was older, I wanted to be a chef. I worked in a succession of restaurants, first washing dishes, then as a prep cook, a pantry cook and finally, at eighteen, the sous chef in a sizable restaurant. I'm afraid I wasn't very good at it, but I enjoyed the hell out of myself. It was nothing at all like Ratatouille.
Later I wanted to work in theater. I'd spent a lot of time on and around the stage in high school, primarily as a means of avoiding class, but this prompted me to take a course in set construction at university, taught by a guy named Walt. I loved old Walt. He was shockingly overweight, perennially ill-tempered and an accomplished curmudgeon. His favorite expression of displeasure was "fuck 'em and feed 'em fish heads." I still say that.
I work in technology, but I am not a technologist, not really. Someone asked me the other day what processor my MacBook has. I have absolutely no idea, and really I couldn't care less. It works, and that is how I like my technology - working, and with as little intervention on my part as possible. Yes, I can still fix my computer when it breaks, I would just really rather not have to.
There are a fair few things I'd have liked to have done, and I do not think I am unique in this regard. But it's really a bit too late to go making drastic career changes. I don't know if I would have been any more suited to any of those things than I am to my job now. At twenty-one or twenty-two, you choose a life and you live it, and there's really no opportunity to go back and do it over.
So maybe it's too late for me. But what about the children? Michael wants to be a fireman and a castle builder. Caroline wants to be a cook and an artist and a scientist. Their aspirations will probably change over time, but I hope that I can be the sort of parent who encourages them to do what makes them happy, rather than what will make them prosperous.
But I do take comfort in the fact that in about fifteen years, that grad will be sitting at his desk, listening to his Brandon Flowers and feeling nostalgic, when some kid who is currently still eating his own boogers starts spewing about having just replaced some ancient piece of infrastructure, and he will have his very own old man moment. I'm just sorry I won't be there to see it. I'll be in an office. Or not.
Saturday, October 23, 2010
The Dream
It's just like the dream.
You know the one - the dream where you are walking the halls of your high school, those interminably long and dimly lit corridors, both sides lined with spotty teenagers in pastels, teased hair and Drakkar Noir. As you strut, you slowly realize that something is amiss. All the other kids - cool, rich, geeky, gay - their conversations stop mid-sentence, Valley Girl aphorisms half-formed on their lips. They are suspended in time, their spiky hair and leg warmers frozen as you pass. In the dream, you are naked. And everyone knows that you are naked. Their shock gives way to deep and abiding amusement. Your only salvation is to move.
You will never live this down. Never.
It's just like that, except in this dream, I am not naked. And it's not a dream. Instead, I am the only one wearing a costume. There is nothing worse than being the only one to show up to a fancy dress party in fancy dress. Or, rather, I suppose there are some worse things - being accidentally lobotomized, for example. Still. Wearing a costume at a party where you don't know anyone, and when everyone else is in their street clothes ranks as one of life's less pleasant experiences.
Poor Michele wore black lipstick and nail polish so she couldn't really hide, and her pointy black hat and fishnet stockings were anything but inconspicuous. At least I found an excuse to take off my white wig (the fine plastic hair was continually lodging between my molars, so when someone shattered a wine glass on the tile floor, I was only too happy to take the damned thing off and help clean up).
English people are not into Halloween. Maybe this is why I am so comfortable here. English people enjoy flat beer, billiards and lawn bowling. They build monuments to fallen World War One heroes. They wear poppies on Remembrance Day. They do not don ridiculous outfits simply because it is the end of October and they fancy a sweet. The English are an eminently sensible people, I think.
Michael enjoyed himself, though. He dressed as a wizard, with a Phillies shirt underneath. Everyone thought the pointy wizard's cap was part of the baseball uniform. For all I know, it is. Someone will probably correct me on this point.
When, oh when will Thanksgiving come?
You know the one - the dream where you are walking the halls of your high school, those interminably long and dimly lit corridors, both sides lined with spotty teenagers in pastels, teased hair and Drakkar Noir. As you strut, you slowly realize that something is amiss. All the other kids - cool, rich, geeky, gay - their conversations stop mid-sentence, Valley Girl aphorisms half-formed on their lips. They are suspended in time, their spiky hair and leg warmers frozen as you pass. In the dream, you are naked. And everyone knows that you are naked. Their shock gives way to deep and abiding amusement. Your only salvation is to move.
You will never live this down. Never.
It's just like that, except in this dream, I am not naked. And it's not a dream. Instead, I am the only one wearing a costume. There is nothing worse than being the only one to show up to a fancy dress party in fancy dress. Or, rather, I suppose there are some worse things - being accidentally lobotomized, for example. Still. Wearing a costume at a party where you don't know anyone, and when everyone else is in their street clothes ranks as one of life's less pleasant experiences.
Poor Michele wore black lipstick and nail polish so she couldn't really hide, and her pointy black hat and fishnet stockings were anything but inconspicuous. At least I found an excuse to take off my white wig (the fine plastic hair was continually lodging between my molars, so when someone shattered a wine glass on the tile floor, I was only too happy to take the damned thing off and help clean up).
English people are not into Halloween. Maybe this is why I am so comfortable here. English people enjoy flat beer, billiards and lawn bowling. They build monuments to fallen World War One heroes. They wear poppies on Remembrance Day. They do not don ridiculous outfits simply because it is the end of October and they fancy a sweet. The English are an eminently sensible people, I think.
Michael enjoyed himself, though. He dressed as a wizard, with a Phillies shirt underneath. Everyone thought the pointy wizard's cap was part of the baseball uniform. For all I know, it is. Someone will probably correct me on this point.
When, oh when will Thanksgiving come?
Fright Night
I hate Halloween.
I mean, it's fine if you're a kid and all, but the whole dressing up thing as an adult really stresses me out. Last year Michael went as a Vampireman - a fireman with vampire teeth. I thought that was pretty funny. But as an adult, you can't really get away with that sort of thing. I mean, they don't make fireman costumes for grownups. Oh, wait, I guess they do, but you have to spend the night with a bunch of burly guys who smell of smoke to get one.
We're going to our next door neighbors' hastily-arranged Halloween part tonight. I won't know anyone, as their daughter goes to a different school. This alone would be reason enough to feign swine flu, but I also learned today that it's fancy dress. I suppose I should have assumed this and started preparing earlier in the week, but I was in denial. So at 3.30 this afternoon, I set out to find something suitable to we.
The thing about dressing up for Halloween, for me at least, is that it has to be just the right sort of costume. The get-up can't be lame, but it also can't show that I've made a big effort. It has to be ironic without being obscure. It has to be funny without being obvious.
Last year, I was a chav angel. (As a reminder, a 'chav' is a young man or woman who mainly wears jogging outfits, drives a cheap little car with tinted windows and a loud stereo and has a seemingly unlimited supply of gleaming white sneakers. In general, a 40 year old can't be a chav, though somehow there are a surprising number of older men who seem to think that they can.) So for my costume last year I wore a track suit (well, sort of - I wore a pair of jogging bottoms and a hooded jacket that kind of matched) and a thick gold chain borrowed from Caroline's dress-up kit. To this, I added a homemade halo and a pair of aluminum foil-covered fairy wings, also borrowed from Caroline's dress-up kit. It was funny without being over the top and went well with Michele's she-devil wig.
You'd be surprised at the paucity of good halloween costumes here. I could have been a Big Bad Wolf for £25 (this had a lot of potential to be funny, but the costume manufacturer disappointingly went for scary instead of silly), or a Dracula for £19.99 (but I feared this would make me look like I was taking the whole thing far too seriously). So this year, I'm a has-been 80's hair band musician. I couldn't find a long blonde wig in the 45 minutes I had to shop, so instead I'm wearing a white one that makes me look like one of the guys from Nelson after a DIY dye job. The wig, a pair of ripped jeans (they're not meant to be ripped, I fell down and blew out the knee a few years ago), a white T-shirt (if I have one) and Michael's toy electric guitar comprise the extent of my effort this year.
Give me Thanksgiving any day. Yeah, you have to cook a big meal and it takes a week and a half to do the dishes, but at least the only thing getting dressed up is the turkey.
And that's as it should be.
I mean, it's fine if you're a kid and all, but the whole dressing up thing as an adult really stresses me out. Last year Michael went as a Vampireman - a fireman with vampire teeth. I thought that was pretty funny. But as an adult, you can't really get away with that sort of thing. I mean, they don't make fireman costumes for grownups. Oh, wait, I guess they do, but you have to spend the night with a bunch of burly guys who smell of smoke to get one.
We're going to our next door neighbors' hastily-arranged Halloween part tonight. I won't know anyone, as their daughter goes to a different school. This alone would be reason enough to feign swine flu, but I also learned today that it's fancy dress. I suppose I should have assumed this and started preparing earlier in the week, but I was in denial. So at 3.30 this afternoon, I set out to find something suitable to we.
The thing about dressing up for Halloween, for me at least, is that it has to be just the right sort of costume. The get-up can't be lame, but it also can't show that I've made a big effort. It has to be ironic without being obscure. It has to be funny without being obvious.
Last year, I was a chav angel. (As a reminder, a 'chav' is a young man or woman who mainly wears jogging outfits, drives a cheap little car with tinted windows and a loud stereo and has a seemingly unlimited supply of gleaming white sneakers. In general, a 40 year old can't be a chav, though somehow there are a surprising number of older men who seem to think that they can.) So for my costume last year I wore a track suit (well, sort of - I wore a pair of jogging bottoms and a hooded jacket that kind of matched) and a thick gold chain borrowed from Caroline's dress-up kit. To this, I added a homemade halo and a pair of aluminum foil-covered fairy wings, also borrowed from Caroline's dress-up kit. It was funny without being over the top and went well with Michele's she-devil wig.
You'd be surprised at the paucity of good halloween costumes here. I could have been a Big Bad Wolf for £25 (this had a lot of potential to be funny, but the costume manufacturer disappointingly went for scary instead of silly), or a Dracula for £19.99 (but I feared this would make me look like I was taking the whole thing far too seriously). So this year, I'm a has-been 80's hair band musician. I couldn't find a long blonde wig in the 45 minutes I had to shop, so instead I'm wearing a white one that makes me look like one of the guys from Nelson after a DIY dye job. The wig, a pair of ripped jeans (they're not meant to be ripped, I fell down and blew out the knee a few years ago), a white T-shirt (if I have one) and Michael's toy electric guitar comprise the extent of my effort this year.
Give me Thanksgiving any day. Yeah, you have to cook a big meal and it takes a week and a half to do the dishes, but at least the only thing getting dressed up is the turkey.
And that's as it should be.
Sunday, October 10, 2010
Uncommon
Today has been extraordinary. The weather is early-autumn golden delicious, and Michael, sick since Thursday, is finally feeling better. It was a perfect day to take the kids out to blow the dust off of them.
Wimbledon Common is a vast expanse of land about 15 minutes away, some wooded, some open, maintained for people to wander around on, ride their horses or air their dogs.
We brought a lunch of baguette, cheese and apples and hopped on the bus. In America, not having a car is one step away from living in a cardboard box and eating one's meals from the dumpster behind the McDonalds, but here, taking the bus is pretty standard practice. I am proud to say that I do not own a car, and, although there have been occasions when i've wished that I did, in general I am quite happy to live without one, un-American as that may seem.
We spent the afternoon on the Common, going in circles along trails beneath red and yellow canopies, and ate our lunch at the edge of a meadow, in the shade of an ancient oak.
Idyllic as this was at first, it is a fact that no matter where I am, and no matter how much open space there may be in my general vicinity, the minute I settle down in a nice corner of a field for a little rest, some tosser with a football will appear out of nowhere and start kicking the damned thing around right next to me. If no footballs are handy, there'll be a goddamn cricket test match or a Six Nations rugby tournament going on. Entire extended families will turn up with picnic coolers and cans of Tennant's Special Brew, cheering for their side. I could be on top of a mountain in Scotland eating my lunch and feeling one with nature and exceedingly grateful for not having fallen off, and some mouth breather in a Liverpool jersey will come striding along the ridge, football tucked under his arm, straight towards me.
I don't know why I attract people who don't appreciate the sublime beauty of sitting still, of relishing what may well be one of the last shortsleeve days until May, but I do attract them and this set includes my children.
I'd better go kick the ball around with them.
Wimbledon Common is a vast expanse of land about 15 minutes away, some wooded, some open, maintained for people to wander around on, ride their horses or air their dogs.
We brought a lunch of baguette, cheese and apples and hopped on the bus. In America, not having a car is one step away from living in a cardboard box and eating one's meals from the dumpster behind the McDonalds, but here, taking the bus is pretty standard practice. I am proud to say that I do not own a car, and, although there have been occasions when i've wished that I did, in general I am quite happy to live without one, un-American as that may seem.
We spent the afternoon on the Common, going in circles along trails beneath red and yellow canopies, and ate our lunch at the edge of a meadow, in the shade of an ancient oak.
Idyllic as this was at first, it is a fact that no matter where I am, and no matter how much open space there may be in my general vicinity, the minute I settle down in a nice corner of a field for a little rest, some tosser with a football will appear out of nowhere and start kicking the damned thing around right next to me. If no footballs are handy, there'll be a goddamn cricket test match or a Six Nations rugby tournament going on. Entire extended families will turn up with picnic coolers and cans of Tennant's Special Brew, cheering for their side. I could be on top of a mountain in Scotland eating my lunch and feeling one with nature and exceedingly grateful for not having fallen off, and some mouth breather in a Liverpool jersey will come striding along the ridge, football tucked under his arm, straight towards me.
I don't know why I attract people who don't appreciate the sublime beauty of sitting still, of relishing what may well be one of the last shortsleeve days until May, but I do attract them and this set includes my children.
I'd better go kick the ball around with them.
Friday, October 8, 2010
Childcare
"How's it going?" they all ask, in the hushed confidential tones ordinarily reserved for questions to which the response is "cancer" or "twenty five to life."
Michele has gone back to the US and I am on childcare duty. My friends, other parents, mostly, exhibit more concern than I would have expected. I'm not entirely sure who this concern is for: me or the children. They examine my offspring surreptitiously, checking for signs of neglect - dirty clothes, distended bellies, compound fractures - and finding none, smile warmly but with a touch of pleasant surprise.
There is an image, perpetuated by marketers of various cold remedies, laundry detergent and suchlike, of Dad as Incompetent Knucklehead. He gapes, uncomprehending, at the washer, the cooker or the iron like a farmer who's discovered an extraterrestrial space vehicle in his haystack. He feeds the children cake for breakfast. And lunch. And dinner. The family dog, matted and mangy, stands atop the crumb-strewn dining table, gnawing his fleas and alternately licking the dishes and his anus while the sink overflows with plates and cutlery, the remnants of the meals cooked and frozen prior to mum's departure hardening on them like concrete.
I have always been offended by this image. I am more than capable of doing the laundry, the cooking and the ironing, thankyouverymuch (though the last, I must admit, is not my favourite), and I suspect a fair few other men are equally skilled in the domestic arts. Right? Uh, back me up here, fellas. Hello? Well, regardless, I'm offended by the image. Imagine the outcry if a Madison Avenue agency cooked up an ad campaign generalizing women as poor drivers.
So it's now been almost two weeks of just me and the kids. It's not been without its fractious moments. I swore in front of them once, not AT them, mind you, just NEAR them. It was a senseless moment, and I regret it still, even moreso because Michael, who can't hear me tell him to put his socks on until I've repeated myself at least twenty-seven times, suddenly develops bionic hearing when I drop the F-bomb. And I'm sure I've put him off tablets for life now, having forced him, with much crying and yelling and pouring water over him, to swallow half a Panadol for his fever. He always gets a fever when Michele's away. Always.
For the most part it's been fine, though I've had a significant amount of help from friends, who have kindly taken the children after school and fed them dinner, a favour, or rather a whole lot of favours, for which I am extremely grateful. But I get them to school on time in clean clothes, I work a full day from home, I pick them up from wherever they've been causing mayhem for the afternoon. They are showered, teeth brushed, stories read and into bed a bit later than usual, but still within the bounds of reason for respectable middle class children. I get them to where they need to be on the weekend, with the correct equipment. I make nutritious, if not entirely kid-friendly lunches every day (strangely, although my children like broccoli, eggs, milk and cheese individually, when presented in a beautiful golden-brown homemade quiche they're 'yucky'.) All in all, I think I've done an OK job.
But I'm ready to go back into the office now.
Michele has gone back to the US and I am on childcare duty. My friends, other parents, mostly, exhibit more concern than I would have expected. I'm not entirely sure who this concern is for: me or the children. They examine my offspring surreptitiously, checking for signs of neglect - dirty clothes, distended bellies, compound fractures - and finding none, smile warmly but with a touch of pleasant surprise.
There is an image, perpetuated by marketers of various cold remedies, laundry detergent and suchlike, of Dad as Incompetent Knucklehead. He gapes, uncomprehending, at the washer, the cooker or the iron like a farmer who's discovered an extraterrestrial space vehicle in his haystack. He feeds the children cake for breakfast. And lunch. And dinner. The family dog, matted and mangy, stands atop the crumb-strewn dining table, gnawing his fleas and alternately licking the dishes and his anus while the sink overflows with plates and cutlery, the remnants of the meals cooked and frozen prior to mum's departure hardening on them like concrete.
I have always been offended by this image. I am more than capable of doing the laundry, the cooking and the ironing, thankyouverymuch (though the last, I must admit, is not my favourite), and I suspect a fair few other men are equally skilled in the domestic arts. Right? Uh, back me up here, fellas. Hello? Well, regardless, I'm offended by the image. Imagine the outcry if a Madison Avenue agency cooked up an ad campaign generalizing women as poor drivers.
So it's now been almost two weeks of just me and the kids. It's not been without its fractious moments. I swore in front of them once, not AT them, mind you, just NEAR them. It was a senseless moment, and I regret it still, even moreso because Michael, who can't hear me tell him to put his socks on until I've repeated myself at least twenty-seven times, suddenly develops bionic hearing when I drop the F-bomb. And I'm sure I've put him off tablets for life now, having forced him, with much crying and yelling and pouring water over him, to swallow half a Panadol for his fever. He always gets a fever when Michele's away. Always.
For the most part it's been fine, though I've had a significant amount of help from friends, who have kindly taken the children after school and fed them dinner, a favour, or rather a whole lot of favours, for which I am extremely grateful. But I get them to school on time in clean clothes, I work a full day from home, I pick them up from wherever they've been causing mayhem for the afternoon. They are showered, teeth brushed, stories read and into bed a bit later than usual, but still within the bounds of reason for respectable middle class children. I get them to where they need to be on the weekend, with the correct equipment. I make nutritious, if not entirely kid-friendly lunches every day (strangely, although my children like broccoli, eggs, milk and cheese individually, when presented in a beautiful golden-brown homemade quiche they're 'yucky'.) All in all, I think I've done an OK job.
But I'm ready to go back into the office now.
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