The Kids

Pleiades and Holidays

I've spent this week recovering from that vague, creeping solipsism that many of a certain age and seniority will experience from time to time - when work becomes sufficiently divorced from the meat and grind of production and one wonders if any of this is real or for what purpose those performance figures really serve, only a good holiday, or retirement will do.

So this week during the day, I have climbed hills, rolled in grass, watched ants, played chess, draughts and scrabble, made Lego and pretend families with baby dolls. In the evening we've made dinner amongst other things, got drunk, smoked, read and slept.

Monday was particularly memorable. Meg and I were watching crows circle the cottage during that short period after the sun has slipped under the horizon but still roasts it a deep orange. We hadn't spoken in a while, enjoying the sound of the birds, when the brightest meteor I have ever seen, shot over our heads from the north. It seemed so close (or large enough), that we could see the thing tumble and spin as it burned up in spectacular whites, blues and reds. For such a magnificent spectacle, oddly it made no sound. Meg was rapturous. She gasped, held her hands to her mouth before running inside screaming "MUMMY, MUMMY, we saw a shooting star!".

How privileged I felt for being able to share that moment with my daughter.

After she and Dom were put to bed, Miche & I lay down on the grass to watch the Milky Way emerge from behind the near stars and waited for the next Pleiades meteor. None came. The peak, apparently, would be Thursday when predictably, the sky would be full of rain cloud. Miche bored of her wait after a long while and left me with my camera to see what I could catch.

This photo above is the fruits of my labour. One of many 30 second exposures that night, but the only one that caught a meteor (in the bottom right corner).

Man 'o war?

It's quiet. So quiet in fact, that I can hear mains hum from a techno gizmo at the far end of the room. It's not an entirely unpleasant experience, given my frantic lifestyle of late, however it's completely alien. The kids are in bed, knackered after a weekend in the outdoors. My wife has followed their example.

So I'm here, for once, wondering how to fill my time, and thought I should blog. I hope that there's still one or two of you with my feed in your reader. If so, hello!

Please enjoy this jellyfish that we found in a rock pool at Bamburgh yesterday. I think it's a man-o-war (circa 3 inches diameter)? Apparently they're common in the south of England and are finding their way up north. Please correct me if I've got my species wrong.

Here's a video of it swimming complete with kid commentaryr;

And these are Black Headed Gulls, yes? Greedy bastards either way. Nicked me sausage roll they did..

Still very much alive

I haven't died. Neither have I stopped blogging. You could say that life has been a bit mental of late. Also, my camera is broken, which means I'm reduced to cellphone crappery and this is not funny.

Thankfully, I'm on holiday for a fortnight. We split last week between the beloved little cottage on the hill and our new caravan. This was nice. Next week, I shall be mostly camping with the kids whilst mother rests at home.

I can feel the urge to blog ripening ready for my return. So do bear with me, dear reader.

Glorious

Pretty much the perfect weekend.

Heaven is real?

I overheard the kids having their first theological debate today. Well, I say debate - if shouting at the top of your lungs and spitting Hovis Best of Both at each other is debate, then that's what they were having.

Dom was offended that his sister didn't believe in heaven, which came as a surprise to me, as we're not raising them heathen any more than we're raising them god fearing. She seems to have come to her own conclusion on the matter. (Neither of them spotted my 'Go Girl!' air punch from the dining room.)

Anyway, the argument went something like this;

"But Meg, heaven is real! It's where you go when you die."

"No it isn't."

"Yes it is."

"No it is NOT!"

"YES IT IS!"

...cut three minutes of tit for tat...

Finally Dom came in with his killer argument for the existence of the afterlife;

"Heaven is pink and has nuts and everything."

"Eh?"

"I know it is, 'cos horses are brown and not green and I've seen horses, so I know. "

I'm feeling rather proud of Dom's nascent logic skills at this point, though what green horses had to to with heaven escaped me.

"Aaaand, I've seen heaven on TV - it's pink and cloudy with nuts. So heaven is real! HA!"

And so I realise that Dom's heaven is from Ice Age 2 where the squirrel dies and goes to his special nutty nirvana in the sky...
Bless 'im.

Too windy for kites

Dirty little parent

My blogging hiatus doesn't mean to say I'm not coming across things that confuse, frustrate or befuddle me. Take this minuted item from our school parents council meeting for example;

A parent has expressed concern that food which is sent in for Christmas parties may not be hygienically prepared in other parents houses and wouldn’t it be better for the children to bring a little packed party tea for themselves for such events or restrict items to crisps and packet cakes.

I say to you, you overly anxious paranoid parent; please, shove your hygienically prepared party food right up your arse...

Watershed

Tomorrow morning Dominic will enter full time education. He'll take his first faltering steps upon the machine's conveyor belt. I've every confidence that he'll find his balance and prevail. When Meg went full time, we worried (needlessly), that her timid personality would get the better of her. Not so with Dom. Quite the opposite. The establishment should prepare itself for the onslaught that is our youngest progeny.

This marks a watershed moment for Miche & I. You see, for the past six years my wife has devoted herself entirely to our young. She gave up her work and all that goes with it. No small sacrifice.

I'd like to say that my grotesque salary has kept the wolves from the door during these single salary years. But that would be a lie. Miche's formidable management skills, self-discipline and relentless subjugation of her husband's excesses have left us debt free. Mortgage notwithstanding.

Later this month, Miche will receive her first salary payment in her new part time job. It will be met with a sigh of relief, a loosening of belts and a fucking good bottle of wine. I'm looking forward to testing the theory that a cheap bottle of Chablis is as good as an expensive one.

Camp 22

There are many books I'm embarrassed to admit I haven't read. Catch 22 being a case in point. I can now announce that I have read it and despite the book being fabulous, I'm utterly knackered and more than just a little bit resentful.

You see, I've been away on the annual "give mother a rest" camping sojourn to the North York Moors with my kids who are exquisitely attuned to the passing of day and night.

At home we interfere in this diurnal influence by way of blackout curtains and double glazing. In a tent however, with two gossamer layers, the chimps stir at daybreak at the same time the sheep start to honk their non-baa baa's.

Ordinarily we all go to sleep at the same time on these trips. This damned book however, kept me up into the wee hours, bloody thing. Anyway, I'm back now and settled on the couch for a little light blogging whilst my rested wife cooks dinner for us all.

The highlight of our break was catching the steam train from Pickering and spending the day hopping on and off to Whitby and back. The sprogs enjoyed the clackety-clack. I enjoyed exploring the quiet rotting areas behind the stations and engine sheds where age old machinery returns slowly to the earth.

One can dream

We have spent this past week in our little wooden cottage high on the north face of the Coquet Valley. Well, I say ours, I mean friends of the family who are now in their eighties and can no longer manage the incline.

It’s a wonderful place, so much so that we’ve explored numerous financial machinations to buy it. They’re pipe dreams of course and quite profoundly beyond our reach. Perhaps in a few years we'll have the means...


Despite London forecasters predicting a northern dousing, Miche & I have enjoyed each glorious evening in the sun room as the kids fall asleep. This was the view;



Anyway, that's quite enough chatter - we've unpacking to do. Here's some more holiday snaps;

Our days in the sun

Today has been a running and catching, sleeping in the shade and an eating in the sun kind of day. Up here in the north of England, they are to be savored, as these sort of days are uncommon. The heat muffled shrieks of the kids and the tiny little flies wafting in the sunlight have got me all quaintly verbose so they have.



My words however, I shall save for my wife, as we're enjoying the last of the sun in our garden whilst we watch the swallows in their dizzying flight paths above us.

Mind, I am relieved that my guts have finally settled. I've spent the past three days trotting back and forth to the John. Not only that, my hay fever, ordinarily subdued with antihistamine, has had my eyes streaming all day.

I've since discovered that the packaging on our laxatives and my new hay fever tablets are remarkably similar...

I am Dad

Half an hour ago we walked home through the fields having spent a fine afternoon celebrating fathers day with friends. Us dads, being men, had seared meat on a very manly BBQ before feeding the chimnea with broken bits of wood as the evening chill set in. We also drank beer, and so found that it is good to be a man.

This is us coming home. It's a bugger that I didn't have the good camera with me.

The heat isn't on

Our boiler has ground to a halt. If there's a time for it to die I suppose, then it's the middle of summer. It's leaking all over the floor, bless it. Apparently the heat transfer unit (read expensive) has corroded, which in itself is replaceable. The problem is, it's been corroding long before the leaky symptom started and has made an irreparable mess of its innards. The dirty little git. So we must fork out £1,200 to have the whole damned boiler replaced.

Bastards.

To cheer me up, I took the kids & dog for a romp in the fields after school. We counted species - 20 cows, 7 Mallard Ducks, 3 posh, plump Pigeons, 2 Cats and an inquisitive Hedgehog which rather than curl up, had a sniff of my cellphone as we took its picture.


After that Meg & I went for our first bike ride together. You see, in this past week, Meg has relinquished her stabilisers and is now a seasoned pro - up and down kerbs like I don't know what. I swear there was a lump in my throat as we rode to the park and back, whilst Meg chatted away as if riding her bike was effortless.

Our money comes & goes. From time to time it annoys me. Yet no amount of it could make me as happy as the time that comes free of charge with my family.

As I was too busy keeping up with my cycling daughter to take her photo, here's one of her making a flotsam city on the beach this weekend.

Two & Two

Apparently he has my mouth.

Crackin' Toast Gromit

This year, for the first time, Meg is of the age that she can butter her mother's toast and carry it upstairs on a tray for Mother's Day. She propped up her home made card next to the tea cup, within which she'd written a story about baby animals and their mums.

It went down well.

Later on today, we took a family trip to Woodhorn where there's an exhibition of Wallace & Gromit memorabilia. I got quite geeky and moist, it must be said, to be so close to these models in real life.

Some photos for you - apologies for the cell phone crapness;

Dripping with caveats

The house of lords will soon be debating an amendment to the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill. The amendment is wide ranging, but includes within it the recognition of same sex couples as legal parents. It will remove the current requirement on IVF clinics to be sure that a father is involved in the upbringing of any child created after he donates sperm.

Forever the optimist, I'd like to think that the bill will receive a fair hearing and be passed by the lords. Perhaps predictably though, the Church has its objections. Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor, the head bummer of the English and Welsh Catholic Church said yesterday that the amendment to the bill was "profoundly wrong" and undermined "the place of the father in a child's life". Given that the Christian church has a disproportionate influence in the House of Lords, my optimism may well be ill placed.

Yet for all my antipathy to this moral posturing, I do have some sympathy for Cormac's sentiments. Putting aside his half baked moral code for one moment, there is an argument for monogamous, mother / father relationships being the optimal circumstance for children to grow up in.

By any statistical norm, there can be little argument against the notion of the nuclear family. Children who grow up in stable families, with a mother and father present, do better on all measures than kids that do not.

Just look at me for example.

Hmn, maybe not, let's move on...

Our social world is built upon the premise that the Mother / Father / 2.3 child family is the norm. Houses are built to home us, the government taxes us with this assumption, holidays are priced for us in the same way that people carriers are designed for us.

Naturally, if our world is designed around this notional 'norm', then those that don't conform to this standard will be at a disadvantage.

It takes no imagination then, to see that the nuclear family has a distinct advantage. Conforming to these norms has a habit of being so. However, we should be clear what norms we're conforming to in the first place.

I'm sure we can think of anomalies; the single mother who raises an emotionally stable genius or the gay father who educates a state senator. And fair play to them for bucking the trend. However, despite my philosophical / moral relativist / slightly Marxist leanings, when it comes to my kids, I'm as conservative as they come.

That said, there is one commonality - stability. This I think, transcends all cultural and sexual boundaries. If a child is raised in a consistent way, with parental role models that are there and together, through good times and bad, then the mother and father roles become meaningless I think.

Love, stability and understanding trump the 2.4 median any day.

So let me make this clear - I support this amendment in as much as I support stable families. Gay / Bi / Straight is neither here nor there.

Blown off our feet

The kids and I have been at a country fair today whilst Miche was working. The sprogs enjoyed it, though it was the usual "locally produced beef" kind of affair. We had a bit of excitement before lunch however, when Meg spotted a helicopter flying towards us.

"Dad! Look, it's coming here!"

It certainly was, the thing flew above the manor house and landed on the lawn right behind it. Meg and I chased after Dom when he shot off to see it close up. As we pursued him, we passed three paramedics running in the opposite direction. I realised it was an air ambulance.

By the time we'd arrived at the machine, the rotors had stopped turning and the pilot was stood nonchalantly at its side. Dom, being Dom ran right up to him.

"Man? Are you the flyer?" He asked, bold as brass.

"Yes I am, and what's your name?" he replied. I noted he had a posh, Scottish Highland accent.

"Dominic" he was told by my son as he started to inspect the wheels.

The pilot was obviously a father himself as he was a natural with my son. He took him round his helicopter and showed him all the controls. Dom quivered with excitement and for once was speechless.

We got to chatting as Meg held my hand, somewhat overawed by the whole thing. I'll admit to being awed by him myself. He was about my age, 6 foot or so, supremely fit, tanned, a chiseled chin and two day stubble.

Honestly, I would 'ave. I really would. And I'm straight...

The old grannies that had gathered around him obviously felt the same.

His radio buzzed, so he went off to the side to confer with his medical colleagues. When he returned he told me that they'd been called for a suspected heart attack. As we were in the middle of nowhere, the only practical way of getting someone in VF to hospital in time is by air.

"Looks like the emergency's over," he said "he'll be OK."

That was the last I heard from him, as the grannies had crowded me and the kids out.

We hung around until he fired up his 'copter, spun it around no more than 10 feet from the ground and sped off over our heads. I was quite moist, I must say.

We were unprepared for this, as none of us have been this close to a flying helicopter before. Me, being me, had my eye in the viewfinder as he roared past.

We were all, quite literally blown off our feet.

"Fuck me!" I let slip as I was shoved to the grass. Oops...

Meg was fine, as she was already sat down. Dom on the other hand, had been blown yards down the hill.

I caught him in my arms as he ran towards me in tears.

"Are you OK Dom?"

"Yeah!" he shouted, "That was brill."

The little lad was crying and laughing at the same time.

Bless 'im.

The last embers of summer

Not to be too smug about it, but I'm left with a rosy glow from today. My legs are nicely relaxed as I had my first run in a fortnight early this morning. The sun was out and the ground dry so seven miles went by in a flash.

The weather was unseasonably good, frankly it was unnerving. If it wasn't for the orange leaves falling off the trees, I'd have sworn it was mid June today. If this is global warming, then perhaps I should be all for it instead.

So, to make the most of it, we packed a picnic and set out for the day;

to collect acorns,


to hunt fungi,


to entrap snails for them to be our pets,

to paddle in the river,


only to become utterly knackered,


Expect next week to be quiet, as I've a number of deadlines that have been woefully ignored. I'll be spending each evening frantically trying to catch up...

Elsewhere

Things may be quiet here for a while as Miche & I have more pressing things to worry about right now. I've not wrote about this before because, well, it just didn't seem fitting. The closest I got to it was this post.

Miche's Dad will endure seven hours of surgery tomorrow to remove a rather large tumor from a salivary gland near his jaw. He goes in at 8:30 AM.

Now, he's a strong man, despite his age; he walks the dog every day and plays golf five days a week. There's every reason to assume that things will be fine. Nevertheless, we will not settle until it's over and done with.

My thoughts, as you'll appreciate, are not on writing right now.