Speaking as a parent

Xmas Roundup.

Blogging batteries have been low recently, all the while that, ironically, there has been quite a lot of stuff happening to write about.

Headings.

I did a gig. In fact two of them. In a theatre. (Ahh, the theatre - how I have missed it! How it didn't even notice I'd gone!) All for the sake of an extraordinary vocal impressionist, who might be coming to a theatre near you in the not too distant future. Having spent so much time standing on stages over the years it was a strange reacquainance with the sensation of being looked at (occasionally) by a lot of people. I quite liked it.

The cat has learned to use the cat-flap, after a week of being stuffed (by me) through it both ways. She has no idea that it is her microchip that opens it, I am sure. Very confusing, because it is transparent. She doesn't like pressing her head against it so she dabs at it. Otherwise she sits inside looking out at a small television-screen shaped part of the garden and watches, And watches. The cat who use to come in and eat her food occasionally stares back.

Got a call from the police at 1 a.m. recently, looking for someone to come and collect one of my nieces, who was yelling in the background as the duty sergeant explained that the young gel had been dumped off at the station, having thrown up all over his cab and refused to pay for it. That was his story. The young gel, whose mobile had our number first up, later gave a different account of events. She says her drink was spiked. Perhaps. I think the only doubt remaining now is whether it was her twenty third or twenty fourth drink that was spiked. Anyway. I shopped her to her parents, who came from wherever to get her home.

I am awaiting a decision on another book idea. There might be buns for tea if it's a yes.

So, Merry Xmas to all! Peace and goodwill etc.

Flap.

As in cat-. We have paid for and have had installed a hi-tech cat-flap. All that remains is for the cat to understand its basic function. It is a garden interface, a toilet router. As yet this has not dawned on the furry-faced food remover, so at time of writing the device remains merely a -flap, a hole in the door, a small, floor-level, perspex window into or out of our lives.

I was against carving the large hole required in our back door, but my alternative strategy (leaving the door open) has proved unsatisfactory on two main counts. One, the intense cold flooding into the house ten months of the year, and two, the persistent raiding of another local cat, who has been eating about two meals a day at our expense over the summer months. We thought Lizzie was a little too hungry, amd we suspected worms for a while. But no. Repeated visual contact with an unknown tabby provided the answer. We have had visits over the years from the neglected orange tom who lives next door, but he never got as far as the kitchen. This intruder tabby has got the whole thing down to a fine art. Hence the collective flap that produced the hi-tech one.

And now there it sits. So does Lizzie, looking at it and haranguing us in her best 'I am the Queen' voice. "Open this door," she tells us. We simply pick her up and stuff her through the small hole in it. This we have mastered as a standard procedure and we seem agreed upon it as the way forward (or out). How she comes back in is not sorted yet, Someone will probably have to sit in a deck-chair out there and stuff her back through when she wants to come in after toilet/hunting/social duties are completed. So this is progress of a sort.

In other news. I came back from India after a week of five star luxury. The only blemish was on the drive back to the airport, when the driver cut out of a hideous traffic jam to go on an 'alternative' route. Alternative in this context is like comparing The Spice Girls to Cradle of Filth. The substitute road was competely clear and the villages looked beautiful with the early morning mist hanging in the air, dappled by a golden sun rise. Palm trees threw streaks of artful shade across the vivid green vegetation. There were small tea shops crammed with people on their way to work, and not a word of English to be seen on any street sign, signpost or billboard. Nor even standard Devnagri (Hindi) script), just the beautiful rounded, local Kanada lettering. Thre was even a magnificent black cockerel standing on a wall, proud and self-sufficient in his regional kngdom. What there wasn't was a yard of continuous flat road surface. After literally half an hour of being shaken up like a tin of white paint I called on the driver to stop. I got out and threw up spectacularly all over the verge, watched by a group of mildly curious locals. My driver meanwhile went to buy me a bottle of water from a nearby shop. All the good work done on the image of Englishmen by my ancestors, insouciantly shooting and taxing Indians for several centuries, was undone as this gora threw up his last night's kebab (goats's shin) in a faint parody of Empire, bringing his overfed habits and spraying bile in a quiet country corner unaccustomed to intrusion.

Yet other news. We bumped over our sixteenth wedding anniversary. We won at the school quiz night. We saw some fireworks at a safe distance. I painted some wardrobes.

I Can Haz Raclette?

Double birthday last week, for the two girls in the house. It's all right being born on your birthday, but giving birth on your birthday? That's one hell of a way to get a present.

The twin celebrations are rather unfair to the older party, who gets overshadowed and ignored every year as a way of celebrating getting stitches. This year the festivities involved Mel leading a post-Goth, pseudo-emo expedition to Camden Town in search of funky jewellery and bleeding edge tee-shirts, followed by a full six-berth raclette. For those who don't know, a raclette started out as a kind of cheese but changed its job description and is now like a chocolate fondue but with more fighting and less chocolate. Great fun, a sort of grilled bun-fight. and fortunately the girl who only eats fish couldn't come. Fish and raclette cooking don't really make natural partners, and I was dreading having to supervise fish fingers sitting in a little spade-shaped frying pan.

The cat has stayed close to home, and now that we're into the rainy season she is staying in a bit more. At night she now chases moths around the house. This was not in her original job description, and unfortunately she seems to enjoy it a great deal more than chasing mice. Mice eat our food and the moths she catches are not eating anything we have any interest in, not even our clothes. If she rootled out those little mottled jobs with the threads still dangling out of the corners of their little mottled mouths I would be quite pleased. But no. Instead she prefers big, floppy, lost moths to the small, zippy, determined clothes moths we share our wardrobe and sock drawers with.

In other news I am sitting here waiting for an air ticket to India to arrive via cyberspace. I have been invited to stay in Bangalore, and am much looking forward to it.

Lost!

Big drama. Biggest round here for ages. Easily the biggest since Mel's aunt fused the fan in the downstairs bathroom by squirting water into it. This she preferred to do instead of squirting water onto herself, which is the approved technique for shower-head usage in our house, and would have, albeit in a predictable and clichéd way, have got her rather cleaner.

What happened to outrank that event, which came complete with a loud 'bang' that plunged us into instant darkness and left us with a distressed and rather damp aunt? What could top that? Only that Lizzie, the former kitten, went missing. She did not return to her warm house and loving family on Wednesday evening. This was unusual. She did not appear throughout the night, nor by the following morning. She is a cat who likes her comforts, and if cats liked jacuzzis she would never be out of hers. But gone. No sign. Not even a note, like in a Beatles song.

So I spent Thursday morning drafting an A4 description and appeal for help, then stuffing it through letterboxes all up and down our street and the street that runs along the end of our garden. This is not a recommended way to meet all your neighbours - too much stress in the background - but it is an efficient way and it yields insights galore. I met at least two eastern European cleaners and a Filipino maid. I got one person out of bed, one out of the bath and another had no clothes on. (I know because he told me through the letterbox.) I even crossed swords with a notoriously competitive neighbour, who said "Oh, yes, lost cat. How terrible, I didn't enjoy telling one of my twins that his kitty was dead when it fell out of a tree and broke its back". Balmed with this precious quantum of solace, I thanked him for his encouragement and moved on.

I met one genuinely psychotic dog. It barked ominously, out of sight in a side room. It barked several times, then went quiet. So I had a total moment-in-Jaws-when-the-head-falls-out-of-the-wrecked-boat when it THREW itself, frothing and scratching, at the inside of the glass upper panels of the front door. I flinched all too visibly. Not a good idea if a fight was on the cards. Must never show weakness in fist-fights with psychotic dogs. Fortunately the glass held, allowing my experience as a Xmas relief postman in 1974 to resurface. I turned and legged it.

One old lady was so upset for me that she invited me in to her house, then into her garden, to look in her shed for myself. I explained to her that I was convinced that Lizzie would not have gone far, and had probably been locked in a neighbour's shed or stuck in some kind of outhouse/storage area. How right I eventually was. Our neighbour has a half-built basement conversion going on (for the last seven years) and it had been shut at around five the previous evening. He had visited it a lunchtime but had found no sign of a cat. It was only when our chldren went in at around five that evening that she was spotted. The poor little mite, all dusty and scared, had been hiding from big strangers and had not shown herself to her potential rescuer when she had had the chance.

So we got her back, and I have met nearly everybody who lives in the neighbourhood. Isn't life strange?

(The answer, by the way, is "Yes". Please don't write in with the answer.)

Crocked Monsieur.

So hello there! Back from our travels, at least for a few days. Enough to collect the cat from the cattery, get her settled, then send her back.

Went to Brussels! That's right - home of the European blogging industry, or at least of the glamorous Zed. We wandered around amid a sea of warm chocolate and cold beer, admiring the medieval, or mock medieval, frontages. The big secret is that Brussels is a bit mad, but isn't really prepared to let on. Its condition is what psychiatrists call 'encapsulated'. As a tourist the Bruxellois don't really care what you do or where you go. It's a very cheap city to get around - a good tourist point - but they don't let you know where to go. They don't even have signs, like in London, to let you know when you are close to a tourist opportunity. And because of this you don't find crowds, or crowds of beggars, or trails of litter you can follow as a clue to bring you to a juicy touristical feast. We walked all around the outside of the (really very good) Autoworld, while there were no visible signs to tell us it was in there. There was a sign directing us to its café, but not to its front door.

The maddest thing in Brussels, and possibly the entire world, is the Atomium, a model of something very very small (an iron crystal) blown up to be something very very big. I did not dare ask the brusque young woman who let us in what, exactly, was the point of the whole thing, though I longed to be told. The whole structure is so well proportioned that, although you can tell it's very large, you do not realise quite how large the globes that make up the exhibition space within it really are. They are the size of four storey buildings, suspended hundreds of feet up in the air. We climbed up and down, and eventually took a trip in its glass-topped lift, which apparently was the fastest vertical thing in Europe in 1958. While we were in our large crystal palace there were several seasons' worth of weather going on outside, which kept us in it for long enough to have lunch, about 100 metres up in the air, in a large metal ball that, from the inside, resembled something between a submarine and the gondola under a dirigible airship. All quite, quite mad.

The sad downside to the escapade was that the kitchen staff in Phileas Fogg Towers seemed to have had their own little side project, which was to take something else very small - possibly a bacterium - and turn it into something really big, i.e. a bout of food poisoning. Because twelve hours later the fastest vertical thing in Europe was my lunch, reappearing with some force in a hotel bathroom.

In the interim I and my entire family were treated to a raclette supper at the Maison Zed, which, I can now definitively confirm, is not triangular. That is a strange rumour started by some irresponsible idiot. (It was you. Ed.) I can, however, now reveal that you can only get to the Zedderie through a magic wood filled with pixies.

Such a lovely evening was followed, for me, by a hang-dog day trailing round Brussels, not being able to walk freely, feeling like I had been kicked down every single one of the steps of the emergency staircases in the Atomium. I could not face either chocolate or beer, or waffles. Or even mock medieval frontages. Defeated and thirsty, I made us stop at what turned out to be a properly rough pub in a run down quartier near the station, which contained a toilet that could have been created as a tribute to nameless explorers of the darkest Congo. Perhaps it was another secret gem, an under-advertised theme park called Bogland. The darkness, slime and flies were astonishingly realistic, according to those who braved it. Me? I had scoffed some newly purchased Imodium and was in no need of any kind of bodily relief, apart from a large tumbler of morphine. This they did not have so I sipped a lemonade - the first of many that day.

We moved on. The flea market brought me out in a nauseous sweat. As did the busker that approached us during lunch in a streetside bar, who then sang 'Yesterday' for ten minutes of world class tedium. There was a poignancy in the song though. Yesterday all my troubles were relatively understated too, and I felt a flicker of empathy. However, where me and the singer fell out was that since his arrival I had begun to suffer a new, unforeseen discomfort that had got me longing for any time in my entire life before he showed up. After the third reappearance of the middle eight, desperation was no longer going to narrow me down to particular times and dates. Yesterday be damned - it was hardly far enough. He left empty handed. Why he had to go I don't know - he wouldn't say. But if he had stayed much longer I would very likely have thrown up on his shoes.

Nevertheless, do try Brussels. We will probably go back and do all the things that no one told us about till we were already there. Like the extraordinary puppet theatre right in the middle of the town that we only found courtesy of Zed and Quarsan. It serves beer and looks like either an English country pub or a medieval coaching inn. Now, where could I find that in Peckham?

Post of the Month!

Well, this month's post, anyway.

Off shortly for a trip up north, to see the greenery, and some old ruins. But that's enough about the relatives. Just a week, but that is probably enough. No internet access, no telly, so hardship of sorts for the younglings. I will encourage them to sit and look at the Roman Wall. Really, its aspect changes throughout the day, as the dappled sunlight contends with the driving rain, in an ever-changing performance that has been running daily for thirty times longer than the Mousetrap. Well, I'll try.

Lizzie the cat is stalking flies as I write. She is as yet unaware that she will shortly have to sit in her travelling box for seven hours. This is not cruelty on our part - it is simply stubbornness on hers. She just won't come out, or do anything at all for the entire duration of the journey. She just sits in what the children have dubbed her 'happy prison'.

The weather forecast is good. Hooray.

D Day: P Experience.

So it's gone off, delivered. 138,000 + words of it. Now I can do nothing but await the marking of my homework.

I've never finished a book before, so perhaps this counts as a 'peak' experience. These are supposed to be good for you, and you are supposed to have lots of them to keep ahead and find meaning in our shallow 'me me me' world. A bit like vegetables, but less often than five times a day, and more fun. But, alas, things like bunjee jumping and stoat swallowing have never really appealed to me, and I have been consistently unable to shift the thought that too many peak experiences must surely leave one feeling a bit peaky. I have to speak up here for the Timid Tendency, the sort of person who, much like Victoria Wood, gets overexcited if they get flowery patterns on their kitchen roll.

Nevertheless and notwithstanding (ooh, those authorial touches - love 'em) I thought I would share an unstructured list of peak and novel experiences what I have recently had (slipping there..) with all of you - or at least you singular.

1. The evening before the last game of the Premiership (football) season, a near neighbour knocked on the door and thrust two Chelsea season tickets into my astonished hand. The rest of me became astonished shortly afterwards. So, thanks to the generosity of this man, who could not go to the crunch game of the season, myself and the boy went and saw the Blues the next afternoon. The little one had never been to a Premiership game, and this was a belter to start with - at least in theory. The stadium was heaving and very noisy, the pitch was a vivid green, and all Chelsea needed to do was beat or draw with Bolton, provided that and without prejudice to the generality of the former, Manchester United lost to Wigan. Long story scissors - United won, Chelsea drew, but the SUSPENSE! Very peaky.

2. I went to a college reunion. Three sub peaks. First, I was asked to pray for the soul of Robert Maxwell in a chapel service. Now that is a definite one off. Two, my old tutor remembered me. This was more of a biggie than it sounds, because I had seen him eight years ago and he didn't remember me on that occasion. This was rather a disappointment at the time, but I figured there had been hundreds if punks like me through his hands while I had only ever known one tutor as generous with his time and as influential in my life. So drawing a blank with a man who had had about three hundred students since me was not such a surprise. But this time he remembered my name, and even one or two things about me, which was quite pleasing. Last up, someone I had not talked to for thirty years confirmed to me just what a nasty piece of work another teacher I had had when twelve really was. Bonus there.

These three things had pointy peak quality, and the fact that the college food had improved immeasurably wasn't far behind, along with the discovery that one of my contemporaries runs Iraq for the British Army, as 2nd i c of the General Staff. Post script: I held a door open for him and he smiled, saying "Well, we all have to have a second job, don't we?" You don't hit someone with mates like that.

3. I saw someone, whom I know to be a persistent and remorseless liar, utterly discredited on a witness stand, under oath. A very satisfactory piece of self-destruction by an exceptionally nasty individual, for a good cause and in a court of law. That was really good, and will not come again.

4. I played on a record for an old friend whom I had not seen for about six years. He has been through some hard times and his genius with a certain kind of pop song production I assumed had been lost to us. But he is back, the record looks like it will go chartwards, and I might be back on the airwaves for the first time since a dance floor filler and all round thumping tune I was on in 2001. That definitely won't happen too many times more.

5. Went out for an evening's music and chat with the lovely Zoe and her posse. We heard Tony Benn speak, but unfortunately due to the very loud young people with their amplifiers and suchlike I didn't really get to hear Zoe speak as well as I would have liked. That can be remedied, but I doubt I'll hear TB again.

6. Recently, in the British Library, quite by surprise I found a speech made by one of my great grandfathers quoted in a book on Indian history. I wanted to nudge the person next door, but restrained myself - not done y'know - so I celebrated by spending the family's food budget for the week on a sandwich in Leith's tea bar.

So, life hasn't entirely run out of gas at fifty. That I find reassuring.

A Winner!

So it's finally over. What a week! There was tension, there were tears. At times the suspense was unbearable. The waiting, the uncertainty, the nagging sense of unfairness. But that's enough about the endless struggle to get our broadband service restored.

And what about Britain's Got Telephones and Piers Morgan's Got A Nerve Judging Any Talent Contest, then? I, personally, was happy that George won, but I hope we, the nation, haven't given him a permanent cold. For what it's now worth (i.e. nothing) I wanted Andrew the choir boy to win. Why? Because he was actually doing something age appropriate. In other words he sounded exactly like what a wonderful thirteen year old boy treble should sound like. The rest of the junior acts may well have had talent, but they were all somehow precocious, or being judged for doing something that would not have been so remarkable if done by someone ten years older. Faryl is a lovely singer but she will still have that in ten years' time. Andrew's gift will be gone in a few months. Why not let him be rewarded for it in its full bloom? Ah, but that's me, isn't it? Strange fringe dwelling attitudes all the way.

Back to the real drama. Mr. Pipex decided that we should spend less time on the net and gave us about half the week with no option but to talk to each other. Good job there was Britain's Got Talent to discuss. My wife insisted on calling it "Has Britain Got Talent?", which the rest of us regularly enjoyed as a starting point for discussion. Apart from that it was back to making our own entertainment, which is one of those overrated Victorian virtues that ranks alongside shoving children up chimneys. With one exception. Jake decided to invent a running account of bad behaviour in the household, and stuck up a "Board of Naughty People" on the fridge. This proved a lively focal point for free and frank discussion, especially between him and his sister, who ended up accusing each other of the crime of 'existing'.

I have nearly finished writing the book, but I have hardly started on revising it. How bold should I be? Being a maverick with strange opinions might draw a little attention for a while, but what if those opinions are simply wrong? This is the major difference, I suspect, between writing a book and doing homework. (Or writing a blog. Are you listening, internet?) Problem Two is that history expands in all directions constantly the longer you look at it. so, where to stop? I think the red pen may be about to jump out of a long forgotten drawer somewhere.

Apart from that: Carlisle Utd blew promotion, we went to a private view in Cork Street but didn't buy anything, it has rained a great deal, and I am one year older. Probably the biggest news is that I played on a record again! Or at least I played on something that might become a record soon. There is a cute young Danish band called Alphabeat and one of their tunes was in the garage in England getting a new engine. Part of the refit involved me. Watch this space.

~~~~~~
Update:

I have appeared on the Board of Naughty People as 'swearer'.

Packed.

"Are you having a sale," I asked, dead pan. My face was deader than any pan that had ever died before. The man looked at me for a moment, before handing me my books. He looked a bit like Gandalf and was dressed like a lumberjack.

"We are having a sale in the shop downstairs, just by the entrance," he replied. A normal reply in rather un-normal circumstances.

For on this day, this chilly Wednesday, the British Library was humming. Not audibly, but because it had suddenly filled up with young people. Instead of the ageing population I was used to, it seemed to have been invaded by people of roughly twenty years of age, sitting in all the seats I usually liked. The queue to collect pre-ordered books was longer than I had ever seen it.

I cursed myself for my needless levity, and double cursed the way I had so artfully hidden it. I suppose I was a bit surprised and a bit annoyed, in roughly equal measures.

"It's the students," he continued. "They allowed them in a couple of years ago. It'll be like this till the end of May now." Not good news for me, I thought, not getting desk no. 2332 (easy to remember) and having to wait twenty precious minutes to pick up the obscure stuff I needed to read. I had even had to queue to get in to the front entrance that morning. I considered asking him if he wouldn't mind magicking a few of the intruders away with his hidden ring of power, but I reckoned I was in enough trouble already. My only comfort was that none of these students, surely, would be able to afford Leith's prices in the canteen and I wouldn't be queueing there.

Right, in that I didn't have to queue. Wrong, in hoping that I would get a seat, because the academic youth of today were draped all over every chair, table, window sill and horizontal surface, giving the whole place the look of an airport in a snowstorm.

I'm obviously in the grip of middle-aged crabbiness, as I have never resented students before. I was used to people in the BL looking like hippies, and the whole thing was a bit of a shock. Perhaps it was just an aversion to crowds, brought on by far too long sitting at a computer keyboard. What is to become of me?

We are about to go and look at the London Marathon, to have a laugh at the expense of a slow lane's worth of eccentric people.

I hope there aren't any crowds.

Briefly.

Just a short note to thank Peter for his generous name check of today.

I am deeply bogged down in some stuff at the moment and can't really write the sort of thing I would like any new visitor to read. It is 3 p.m. and I am still in my dressing gown, flicking through books and dodging all over the on-line Dictionary of National Biography. What larks!

My daughter is in Italy on a classics trip. My son has gone out to play with a friend, my wife has gone to buy something. I am on-line. Lizzie the cat is staring at the step into the bathroom, or as Jake prefers, she is on her Mice Space site.

Tales to tell? Well, yes, in a moment. For now, just hello.