Possibly undocumented pleasure of family life: my daughter has a pink tube of Lisa Simpson toothpaste; the boys have a blue tube of Bart Simpson toothpaste. The contents are identical. Whenever possible I make sure the boys get toothpaste out of the Lisa Simpson tube, and my daughter gets Bart Simpson toothpaste.
I get my kicks where I can.
Oh, and just now - file under ‘don’t kids just say the darndest things’. William (6) said: “I know what girls have instead of willies. FASHION!”
Thanks William. That explains everything.
Today I was killing time while my sons had their swimming lesson. I walked around the outside of the pool with my daughter. As we got ready to go back inside I heard a man say to his young son “the Astra is basically Vauxhall’s version of the Focus”. And it’s at times like that that I think I know why Virginia Woolf committed suicide.
Who?! The man who is talking over Doctor Who from Russel T Davies. The seriously cool man who wrote the Best. Episode. Ever: “Blink”. He also wrote “The Empty Child” (’are you my mummy?’) which is the SCARIEST. EPISODE. EVER. I only have to say ‘muuuuuuuumy’ in that voice and my five year-old son flinches and runs to find cushions, which is frankly a useful weapon to have in one’s arsenal, and for that alone respect is due to the scare-meister Moffat.
He also wrote Press Gang, but I’ll forgive him that. And the new Tintin movie which might not suck after all.
NOTE: Just read this on Wikipedia and - if true - I like him even more now:
During production of the second series of Press Gang, he was having an unhappy personal life after the break-up of his first marriage. Producer Sandra C. Hastie was secretly phoning his friends at home to check if he was alright. His wife’s new lover was represented in the episode “The Big Finish?” by the character Brian Magboy (Simon Schatzberger), a name inspired by Brian: Maggie’s boy. Moffat brought in the character so that all sorts of unfortunate things would happen to him, such as having a typewriter dropped on his foot.
I love church halls and village halls. I can still recall the mural in the village hall where I grew up in North Somerset, painted in the 1960s with villagers of the time dancing round a may pole.
Today my wife was detained elsewhere with work and I had to take my eldest son to the rehearsal for his first Holy Communion.
While the children were running around the church hall - put any number of 8 year olds together and they will spontaneously play ‘it’ - I climbed the stage and explored. At the rear, a room full of chairs and old fridges. To the side of the stage a toilet marked GENTLEMEN (don’t put your daughter on the stage, Mrs Worthington, for she is sure to get caught short). A ladder. Had to climb the ladder. The ladder took me to a dusty room high above, to one side of the stage. Here was the handle to open and close the curtain. Chalked above it the words “FROM 17/10/69 ONLY 7 TURNS REQUIRED TO CLOSE CURTAIN”.
There’s a very odd atmosphere in our community today. It’s never been so quiet, even on a Sunday. Especially on a Sunday.
Very odd seeing the priest that baptised my daughter being interviewed live on the BBC News Channel. I keep seeing people I know on TV, in tears.
Very hard trying to tell my son Henry, who is 8 and was in the same class as Jimmy Mizen’s youngest brother, not to worry and that this sort of thing won’t happen to him. But if it can happen to a boy like Jimmy, who went to Henry’s school, a few yards from Henry’s school in the middle of a sunny Saturday, it’s hard not to think that it can happen to anyone.
Sometimes I get bored reading the same stories and singing the same lullabies to my children. So I substitute lines from popular songs. Ten points if you can spot the artists at work here:
Twinkle, twinkle little star
How I wonder what you are
Up above the earth so high
Like Jeff Goldblum in the fly
Twinkle, twinkle little star
It’s not quite a Jaguar.
…in the words of Mr William Bragg.
We were walking home tonight and saw an amazingly bright satellite tracking across the sky, far brighter than any I’ve seen before. And I’ve seen a few - I love watching bits of space hardware scooting silently across the night sky.
Back home I found a neat web site - http://www.heavens-above.com/ - that allows you to enter your location and get predictions for the brightest satellites, including star and ground maps of their trajectory.
The really bright one we saw turns out to have been the International Space Station, which is pretty cool. The kids were impressed, for a minute or two…
I’ve just done some more reading and noticed two things:
- According to their daily schedules, the astronauts spend an awful lot of time ‘formatting PCMCIA cards’ - maybe it’s code for having a dump.
- The ISS is currently docked with the Space Shuttle Atlantis, so maybe that’s why it was so incredibly bright tonight
My eldest son, 8, had picked up a bit on the TV show Smart being pulled off CBBC and the Mark Speight case and asked me about it - I said vague things about him just being in the wrong place at the wrong time, he’s not a bad person, all very sad. But my youngest son William, 5, must also have been listening.
Today my little girl was looking at a Shaun the Sheep comic.
“Dad”, said William.
“Yes.”
“Is Shaun the Sheep on TV at the moment?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Why not? Did he kill his girlfriend?”
I got Dawn of the Dumb, Charlie Brooker’s collection of Guardian columns for Christmas, and I’ve been chuckling my way through it since the big day. This despite the fact that I’m clearly the sort of person Mr Brooker would cheerfully toss under a speeding car - I’m middle class, I sometimes buy organic food, I have not one but three children - called Sebastian, Tiger-Lily and Polenta. I even quite like Jamie Oliver, for chrissakes. But I chuckle on, even snickering at columns like ‘Kids are such c*nts’ and ‘Kids and how to murder the c*nting selfish b*st*rds’. Okay, I may have made those titles up, but you get the idea. He is terribly funny, filthy rude and easily the best TV critic since Clive James made The Observer worth reading thirty years ago.
Tonight I finished reading the boys another chapter of The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe and settled down to finish reading myself another Charlie Brooker column. It was a good one, attacking mystics. Imagine my surprise when the first paragraph I read mentioned Narnia. And the piece immediately following was published on my 40th birthday. I was half expecting the one after that to address me by name and tell me which famous British actress I have a crush on. Which is all very confusing - Charlie Brooker’s coruscating attack on psychics makes me think that something spooky and other-worldly is going on…
(The index is a good read too. For example: ‘nasty grief-raping sucksacks, see psychics’. Or ‘complete and utter c*nts, see psychics’. And then there’s ‘Walliams, David, enjoying sexual intercourse with a potato’.)
Christmas shopping on Covent Garden last week, I got heckled by a street performer.
Yes, I got heckled.
Covent Garden was heaving, you could hardly move. This street entertainer had an audience of, ooh I think maybe two people. I was in a hurry, could see that he was doing his act, so I walked behind him rather than walking between him and his audience. As I walked off he turned to me and yelled “Oi mate, I don’t walk through your bedroom while you’re performing.”
Now I have a couple of problems with this. First, obviously, is the fact that I walked behind him, though it’s possible I did walk between his back and some of his stuff, thus breaking the magic, sacred bond between Perfomer and Scrappy Suitcase. But mainly the thing that annoyed me was drawing a parallel between my own bedroom and the sodding pavement in one of the world’s busiest shopping areas at the busiest time of year.
Or maybe he was just so pleased with the hilarity of his line, he couldn’t resist using it. Even if it didn’t really fit the situation.
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