F has started daycare. For the first time in I don't even know how long, I have a morning where I'm at home by myself with no particular tasks in hand.
Bliss! I can sleep in! I can read the internet without being handed toy planes! I lounge in my hammock on the balcony, drinking coffee in the autumn sun! (For it is immediately autumn here, the baking summer has disintegrated like the pony tails I attempt to put F into. Red berries on the trees outside and vast electrical storms have taken over) At last, a few short fragile hours of rest!
I go and hoover the bathroom.
Ah, how the mighty are fallen in the midst of battle. Routine is an inevitable doom, I suppose. Quickly I find that I can't sleep, because I'm too used to getting up and pottering round the house, doing my scattered version of housework. It's a lot easier and faster without F helping, so I can then sit and relax afterwards. Even then, I'm wondering what she's up to at Dagis and rather missing playing the pirate boat game with the kitchen sink from the dolls' house.
(That's where you tip it on its side and pretend it's a pirate boat, if you're wondering. The lookout smurf has to shout 'Look Out!' and point at the dangerous toy cars so you can sail round them. I feel there is a movie spin-off in it.)
Yesterday, V and I took F to see her dagis for the first time. It's a tiny one at the far end of Haga, just fifteen kids or so, but perfectly situated for us. And good for class sizes and adult attention and so on. F got out of the pram and ran enthusiastically away from us, waving bye bye with one hand as she started waving hej hej to the nearest boy.
We didn't see her for half an hour as we sat through the tour and intro talk. She popped her head round the door and smiled at us near the end. That didn't last. She bellowed like a wounded Brian Blessed when we told her it was time to go.
Funny - I'm bone weary at the moment. A few weeks back, I would have given my eyeteeth and thrown my eyes in as a sweetener for a morning off. But after year and a half of parental duty, I'm so inured to it that I can't quite switch off. Nothing that a bit of practice won't cure, I expect. I shall get on to that as soon as the dishwasher is empty and the smurfs are back in their pen.
Tuesday, August 26, 2014
Thursday, August 21, 2014
What Larks
I got a short notice voice job last night and duly warned the guy I might have to bring F along. It's not really ideal for anyone, having her tottering round the studio outside.
Not that the guys at the studio I do most of my work at aren't great with her, on the couple of occasions she's come along. They aren't primarily there to provide childcare, however, and it's not terribly professional of me to ask them to do it. F's happy enough with strangers at the moment, which is horribly alarming for V and me, but she gets cranky and impatient after about fifteen minutes of anything. Which means after fifteen minutes, my takes adopt the higher pitch associated with a forced smile, because I'm trying to ignore my wailing daughter hammering the other side of the glass door to the booth.
Short notice meant I didn't realise I was agreeing to work for a studio I occasionally do stuff for in Stockholm, however.
My contact's name is the same as one of the local sound engineers, so I'm not totally incompetent for getting confused. When he called this morning, though, it was quickly apparent I was in the wrong city. Luckily V's theatre has a studio that wasn't being used, so I managed to arrange using it at lunchtime, so V could keep an eye on F.
Epic failures followed. When I arrived, with half an hour spare to set up and make sure I could manage Skype connections with Stockholm, F was asleep. Ten minutes later, when V got called into an unexpected but unavoidable meeting, she wasn't. I also had
So that was good.
V managed to escape for three frantic minutes, in which she connected me to the internet, suggested putting F in the adjoining music booth so I could watch her through the window, wished me luck, apologised and legged it.
The music room was full of exciting instruments, so looked like a good bet. It had two doors, the outer one of which I couldn't close because only V had a key, and locking F in seemed a bit extreme. One door would probably be fine, and I could keep an eye on her.
Half way through my first take, I kept an eye on her as she opened the door, weeping loudly at the abandonment she'd been put through. Her siren wail moved rapidly down the corridor outside and off into the theatre basement. It wasn't a particularly clean take, all in all.
Once I'd called them back, the clients were very understanding and happy for me to postpone a little. Miserably, I strapped F into her pram and put it in the music room, handing her a recorder and some sleigh bells before leaving her again. I waved and cooed through the window, but she wasn't buying it.
I got the clear after four takes, about ten minutes worth or so, and ran through to console F. Who was very quickly fine and over it, as far as I could see. Especially after parental guilt scored her classy bakery down on the canal. She must have forgiven me, she fed me prawns from her sandwich. After she'd sucked the juice out of them, of course, and I wasn't allowed any chocolate cake. She's probably okay, I figure.
I wasn't, I still feel like a hollow and worthless shell of a man. It's all very well, Larkin making his clear and accurate observations about parenting. He never pointed out the sheer force of fuck-up feedback. I locked my daughter in another room while she was crying! So I could mouth cheerful corporate banalities for money! I am a Monster!
I'll get over it, because, well, I'm over-dramatising it all as usual and anyway, that's what you do. Get on with it and try not to tear too much of the paper from over your cracks in the process. And anyway, F made me read an IKEA catalogue to her yesterday lunchtime, so we're probably about even overall.
Not that the guys at the studio I do most of my work at aren't great with her, on the couple of occasions she's come along. They aren't primarily there to provide childcare, however, and it's not terribly professional of me to ask them to do it. F's happy enough with strangers at the moment, which is horribly alarming for V and me, but she gets cranky and impatient after about fifteen minutes of anything. Which means after fifteen minutes, my takes adopt the higher pitch associated with a forced smile, because I'm trying to ignore my wailing daughter hammering the other side of the glass door to the booth.
Short notice meant I didn't realise I was agreeing to work for a studio I occasionally do stuff for in Stockholm, however.
My contact's name is the same as one of the local sound engineers, so I'm not totally incompetent for getting confused. When he called this morning, though, it was quickly apparent I was in the wrong city. Luckily V's theatre has a studio that wasn't being used, so I managed to arrange using it at lunchtime, so V could keep an eye on F.
Epic failures followed. When I arrived, with half an hour spare to set up and make sure I could manage Skype connections with Stockholm, F was asleep. Ten minutes later, when V got called into an unexpected but unavoidable meeting, she wasn't. I also had
- No script, because the email I'd been sent hadn't turned up for no obvious reason
- No Skype, because there hadn't been time to connect my laptop to the internet and I couldn't work the sound desk to get their Mac speakers playing
- Both arms full of baby
So that was good.
V managed to escape for three frantic minutes, in which she connected me to the internet, suggested putting F in the adjoining music booth so I could watch her through the window, wished me luck, apologised and legged it.
The music room was full of exciting instruments, so looked like a good bet. It had two doors, the outer one of which I couldn't close because only V had a key, and locking F in seemed a bit extreme. One door would probably be fine, and I could keep an eye on her.
Half way through my first take, I kept an eye on her as she opened the door, weeping loudly at the abandonment she'd been put through. Her siren wail moved rapidly down the corridor outside and off into the theatre basement. It wasn't a particularly clean take, all in all.
Once I'd called them back, the clients were very understanding and happy for me to postpone a little. Miserably, I strapped F into her pram and put it in the music room, handing her a recorder and some sleigh bells before leaving her again. I waved and cooed through the window, but she wasn't buying it.
I got the clear after four takes, about ten minutes worth or so, and ran through to console F. Who was very quickly fine and over it, as far as I could see. Especially after parental guilt scored her classy bakery down on the canal. She must have forgiven me, she fed me prawns from her sandwich. After she'd sucked the juice out of them, of course, and I wasn't allowed any chocolate cake. She's probably okay, I figure.
I wasn't, I still feel like a hollow and worthless shell of a man. It's all very well, Larkin making his clear and accurate observations about parenting. He never pointed out the sheer force of fuck-up feedback. I locked my daughter in another room while she was crying! So I could mouth cheerful corporate banalities for money! I am a Monster!
I'll get over it, because, well, I'm over-dramatising it all as usual and anyway, that's what you do. Get on with it and try not to tear too much of the paper from over your cracks in the process. And anyway, F made me read an IKEA catalogue to her yesterday lunchtime, so we're probably about even overall.
Sunday, August 17, 2014
Boxing Match
There is no limit to the amount of excitement one can glean from the humble cardboard box.
A plane, a bed, a boat, some form of car, a postbox, a racetrack. A seesaw, if not entirely deliberately. Less imaginatively (but no less gleefully) a place to explode out of screaming, like a moll in a gangster's cake.
I'd plumb forgotten what fun boxes are. Two years of annual house moves had rather jaded my view of boxes. I could take or leave them. F has thankfully reinvigorated my love affair with their possibilities. A whole hour of this afternoon vanished inside one today. Then we tried finger painting.
Not so successful - too tired to engage, and F is also amazingly fastidious about keeping her hands clean. "Oh no!" she said, holding up a dripping red palm and looking horrified. It's not her first impression of a murderer, either. Tears followed shortly after. I guess we should have stayed in the box.
She says "Oh no!" a lot at the moment. It means something has gone awry and needs fixing. Food falling on the floor, cars rolling over the edge of things, lego farmers not staying upright when rammed with a tractor, F herself toppling over, mummy or daddy not doing as they're told. Crumbs, just crumbs in general, are "Oh no!" when observed. When I hear it, it's usually a summons to action in some form. Now and again it's just narrative for whatever scrapes her tiny plastic Peppa Pig is being put through, but you can't take that on trust.
There is a slight hint of the storm to F at the moment. She's not been well, with a nasty cough for a week or so. It's kept her awake at night and she's not been eating as well as she usually does. The days find her tired and temperamental.
Or is it just the approaching monsoon season of the Terrible Twos? She's point blank refused to have a bath for the last two days, something she's usually a big fan of. Trying to scrape a yelling and paint-spattered infant into the tub, as we did today, is quite the feat of stamina. F beat us. Also a white jumper and two duck-shaped flannels.
Generally, any attempt to balk her increasingly clearly-manifested will result in outright fury now. F will tell me what she wants to eat, and when. If I don't agree that half an hour after breakfast is the right time for a large handful of pretzel sticks, for example, I'd better have a pretty good reason to back it up.
Our current fix-all no-you-can't-eat-that-now excuse is 'We're saving it for later'. F accepts it as tolerable. We had a bag of crisps the other night, and after eating some, we put the rest 'away for later' (i.e. we were going to eat them once she was asleep). Grudgingly, F took this at face value and left to play in her room. Mummy rustled the bag, to pinch a final one, and was immediately confronted by a screaming personification of moral outrage, tears in her eyes, accusing finger pointing at the bag.
Oh good. She can smell our lies. I can feel the next few years getting increasingly complicated, and it feels like migraine.
A plane, a bed, a boat, some form of car, a postbox, a racetrack. A seesaw, if not entirely deliberately. Less imaginatively (but no less gleefully) a place to explode out of screaming, like a moll in a gangster's cake.
I'd plumb forgotten what fun boxes are. Two years of annual house moves had rather jaded my view of boxes. I could take or leave them. F has thankfully reinvigorated my love affair with their possibilities. A whole hour of this afternoon vanished inside one today. Then we tried finger painting.
Not so successful - too tired to engage, and F is also amazingly fastidious about keeping her hands clean. "Oh no!" she said, holding up a dripping red palm and looking horrified. It's not her first impression of a murderer, either. Tears followed shortly after. I guess we should have stayed in the box.
She says "Oh no!" a lot at the moment. It means something has gone awry and needs fixing. Food falling on the floor, cars rolling over the edge of things, lego farmers not staying upright when rammed with a tractor, F herself toppling over, mummy or daddy not doing as they're told. Crumbs, just crumbs in general, are "Oh no!" when observed. When I hear it, it's usually a summons to action in some form. Now and again it's just narrative for whatever scrapes her tiny plastic Peppa Pig is being put through, but you can't take that on trust.
There is a slight hint of the storm to F at the moment. She's not been well, with a nasty cough for a week or so. It's kept her awake at night and she's not been eating as well as she usually does. The days find her tired and temperamental.
Or is it just the approaching monsoon season of the Terrible Twos? She's point blank refused to have a bath for the last two days, something she's usually a big fan of. Trying to scrape a yelling and paint-spattered infant into the tub, as we did today, is quite the feat of stamina. F beat us. Also a white jumper and two duck-shaped flannels.
Generally, any attempt to balk her increasingly clearly-manifested will result in outright fury now. F will tell me what she wants to eat, and when. If I don't agree that half an hour after breakfast is the right time for a large handful of pretzel sticks, for example, I'd better have a pretty good reason to back it up.
Our current fix-all no-you-can't-eat-that-now excuse is 'We're saving it for later'. F accepts it as tolerable. We had a bag of crisps the other night, and after eating some, we put the rest 'away for later' (i.e. we were going to eat them once she was asleep). Grudgingly, F took this at face value and left to play in her room. Mummy rustled the bag, to pinch a final one, and was immediately confronted by a screaming personification of moral outrage, tears in her eyes, accusing finger pointing at the bag.
Oh good. She can smell our lies. I can feel the next few years getting increasingly complicated, and it feels like migraine.
Sunday, August 10, 2014
Poop Poop
Hot summer, this one. Sweden has been basking in temperatures of thirty plus, if by basking you mean 'having massive forest fires'. We had sweaty nappy rashes instead.
The best cure for a big red bottom is to let the owner run about airing it. This meant a certain amount of involuntary potty training. F has an idea about potties. She knows you sit on one. Sometimes she tries to scootch it along as if it has wheels, sometimes she pulls it apart to investigate the subtle inner workings. Sometimes she takes Bunbun (now the settled name for her beloved plushy bunny), shoves her face first into the bowl and then sits on top. So we have a way to go.
Much of this way seems paved with poop. Parenthood generally seems to be.
I haven't written much about poop lately. Sadly, this isn't because my life is no longer saturated in it. It's just since F started doing adult-flavour ones, it's harder to sit and write about them with the same level of insouciant bonhomie I like to promolgate in this blog. Wit fails me, all I can think of it fatuous comparisons to chemical spills.
'Gong farmer' came low on my teenage list of dream jobs. Low it remains.
I have scraped handfuls of nutty slack off my parents' conservatory floor. Even with a nappy on, muddy algal sludge still managed to ooze round a loose corner to be smeared over my trouser legs during what I thought was an unusually affectionate hug. There was something that looked like a chocolate-coated pear under our balcony table. It wasn't.
The nappy rash is much better. I suppose that means having to hunt for landmines round our flat every so often was worth it. I don't know what produces more heartsink, the conversation that goes
J - Do you need a nappy change?
F - (reeking) Nuh.
or this one
F - (proudly pointing to her tummy and running up to me) Poop poop poop poop poop!
So far, she only runs to me with this diagnostic. Both of us are proud that we've at least taught our daughter this much on potty matters. Some of us may be prouder than others.
The best cure for a big red bottom is to let the owner run about airing it. This meant a certain amount of involuntary potty training. F has an idea about potties. She knows you sit on one. Sometimes she tries to scootch it along as if it has wheels, sometimes she pulls it apart to investigate the subtle inner workings. Sometimes she takes Bunbun (now the settled name for her beloved plushy bunny), shoves her face first into the bowl and then sits on top. So we have a way to go.
Much of this way seems paved with poop. Parenthood generally seems to be.
I haven't written much about poop lately. Sadly, this isn't because my life is no longer saturated in it. It's just since F started doing adult-flavour ones, it's harder to sit and write about them with the same level of insouciant bonhomie I like to promolgate in this blog. Wit fails me, all I can think of it fatuous comparisons to chemical spills.
'Gong farmer' came low on my teenage list of dream jobs. Low it remains.
I have scraped handfuls of nutty slack off my parents' conservatory floor. Even with a nappy on, muddy algal sludge still managed to ooze round a loose corner to be smeared over my trouser legs during what I thought was an unusually affectionate hug. There was something that looked like a chocolate-coated pear under our balcony table. It wasn't.
The nappy rash is much better. I suppose that means having to hunt for landmines round our flat every so often was worth it. I don't know what produces more heartsink, the conversation that goes
J - Do you need a nappy change?
F - (reeking) Nuh.
or this one
F - (proudly pointing to her tummy and running up to me) Poop poop poop poop poop!
So far, she only runs to me with this diagnostic. Both of us are proud that we've at least taught our daughter this much on potty matters. Some of us may be prouder than others.
Monday, July 21, 2014
Holidays
Was it really over two years since we last went on holiday together? My, how the time flies when you're shackled to the hard reality of househusbandry and full-time employment.
We stayed in Dunkeld, where my folks live. It's a very lovely part of Perthshire, on the river Tay. For F, of course, this was a whole wealth of firsts. From flying to foreigners, gardens to gloaming - rather than attempt some kind of exhaustive, blow-by-blow retrospective, here is a short and disordered smattering of F's First Holiday in Scotland.
V and I are understandably tense on the plane. Ryanair don't do comfort, F has never experienced ear popping, it will be horrible for everyone if she takes against it.
She babbles excitedly all the way through the airport, says 'nyyeeeow' when we take off and then sleeps through the landing. What a waste of six hours of high-quality parental stress.
F gets to sleep in my old crib, one that Farfar made himself. It has a carved elephant and pig to watch you sleeping, and a side that flips down for easy baby access. When told this is where she'll be sleeping, F hurls her beloved bunny in, pats the mattress with both hands to assess bounciness and then chortles happily.
A few days later when she's cranky, I put F in for an afternoon nap. Much against her wishes - there's a five minute period of screaming, yelling and knocking noises as she tries to shake her way free. Then there's a short quiet pause followed by a loud clatter, a big thump and a long yell.
F has worked the latches and opened the side of the cot, it turns out, tipping herself out in the process. She's more shocked than hurt, much like V and me are. Good - now we can be anxious when she's asleep too. The cot gets turned with the flapping side against the wall and tied up with garden string for good measure.
Up at Rumbling Bridge, F paddles her feet in a chilly Scottish river and learns to throw stones into deep pools, ploomp. It's a beautiful afternoon, sun slanting through the trees into the dark brown water, midges weaving about as I carry F over rocks and under boughs to the safest places to dunk her feet. Farfar and Farmor are there too, it's very peaceful and happy.
Cousin S wants the green plastic golf club F has just dropped to be kept hidden. I ask why. "Actually, Uncle J," she says, "I just don't want her to play with it." I ask why again, but that's all the answer I'm getting right now.
Actually, S and F get on very well, sitting and mixing mud pies together in the garden or just running about on the lawn together. F is quite taken with her tall blond cousin, she follows behind copying her and giggling when acknowledged.
Gardens aren't new to F. Having one on tap, so to speak, is. It's a popular move. First thing after breakfast, she goes to the back door and says "run run run run run" until you let her out and chase her round the lawn. Two weeks of this gives her newfound motor confidence, she's trying out tiptoeing and stamping for the first time before we leave. The latter not just in the context of tantrums, amazingly, just stamping her right foot only on the floor for fun.
Old college friends N and J, with their families, come over for a day to catch up. Insofar as spending an afternoon giving children of various sizes and ages piggybacks all round Dunkeld is catching up. I think I exhanged a record of three sentences with N, one of which was 'great to see you, bye!'
F takes V's chocolate ice cream cone off her, to add to her collection. She's just eaten the last bit of mine. Her own is half-eaten and half-molten, flowing in luxurious pools over her face, hands and table setting. Cafe customers on the tables round us are turning to look, because F is not quiet in her appreciation of a good thing. There's a few disapproving faces, fusty old Scots muttering about messy children. Stuff 'em. Anyone who begrudges someone loud enjoyment of a first chocolate ice cream cone needs a good dowsing in sticky gloop.
There's a Medieval Festival at Dunfermline Abbey. With jousting! Once somebody's suggested it to me, I insist on making everyone go. Look, it wasn't my idea. If you don't want to spend a stickily hot afternoon being jostled by overweight re-enactors in jerkins, don't let me have wind of it in the first place, that's my advice.
I've never seen live jousting, despite having worked as a show knight at one of London's worst available medieval experiences. Sadly, this is rubbish, being more of a kid-friendly joust-themed knockabout, with somersaulting men-at-arms and exploding lances. F likes the horses for about five minutes, then we go and run around on lawns instead. Even I have to admit it's better.
Farfar and I go for a walk up Birnam Hill. It's a hot day, close and almost thundery in the way that Scottish hills do so well. You walk up the steep hills as though ascending into a furnace, and reach seemingly endless seas of bright green bracken.
Farfar has a mission - somewhere in the neck-deep ferns are some mysterious stones marked with cup-and-ring shaped depressions. Nobody knows their origins. Stone age? Pictish? Yithian cult? A Ponaptic fragment? I know which I favour.
If nobody knows their origins, it's perhaps because the map isn't very clear on their location either. Wading about in the bracken with big brown shield bugs pinging off our faces is great fun, if rather fruitless. We don't find all the mystery rocks, just the cup-marked ones (no rings). But we do find great swathes of juicy bilberries, which we pick until our water bottle is filled. So fruitful in some ways, I suppose.
After that, we join the ladies in a local hotel Spa for an afternoon of swimming. F likes swimming. I swoosh her about while V goes for a massage and Farmor goes jogging. Healthy.
As a treat, Farfar and Farmor buy F a ticket to see Peppa Pig's Big Splash, a live action puppet show in Perth. I sit in the foyer while V takes her in. I'm the only bloke in my age group present, although the place is packed out with mums and grandparents. This says something sad about the UK's approach to parenting, I think, but I'm too tired to think what. I'm also too glad not to be watching more Peppa Pig. F sits through both halves entranced, then we run round and round in circles on Perth's North Inch park for an hour. Which is how F approximates picnic behaviour.
V and I take a day to ourselves and stay in a decently cheap hotel in Edinburgh for a night. While we potter round shops, take in a tour of the historical Mary King's Close, get rained on and drink gin, F eats her own weight in pasta with Farfar and Farmor and blithely ignores the absence of her fretting parents as usual.
This is the first day we've had to ourselves for what, a year? I forget. Too long. It's almost like a first date, although without the same level of half-wittedly tentative conversational gambits. Having your first child already weighing on our minds is quite enough to make us half-witted anyway. We spend a fair bit of time at the hotel that evening looking at baby pictures of F and cooing, because we miss her.
She looks taller when we get back. Even if that's technically true, it's still ridiculous.
-
She sleeps through the takeoff on the way home. So do I - we were up at three to get to the airport, only to discover we'd set alarms on our Swedish phones and were actually up at two. Goddamn GMT.
F is clearly delighted to be home, even though she's had a fantastic time on holiday. And she has grown in the last two weeks, both in actual height (she can now reach the lightswitches to turn them both on and off), confidence and mastery of speech.
As is traditional with holidays, this one had an elastically long first week where everything stretched out ahead of us endlessly, then a frantic short second one where everything was suddenly over. And then we're home, everything back to routine normal.
Or as close to it as we get, at least. This is F's new favourite game she's developed out of nowhere, a game called Bake The Smurf. Cramming mummy and baby smurf head first into a cooker is normal. It must be. It's my baby playing it.
We stayed in Dunkeld, where my folks live. It's a very lovely part of Perthshire, on the river Tay. For F, of course, this was a whole wealth of firsts. From flying to foreigners, gardens to gloaming - rather than attempt some kind of exhaustive, blow-by-blow retrospective, here is a short and disordered smattering of F's First Holiday in Scotland.
-
V and I are understandably tense on the plane. Ryanair don't do comfort, F has never experienced ear popping, it will be horrible for everyone if she takes against it.
She babbles excitedly all the way through the airport, says 'nyyeeeow' when we take off and then sleeps through the landing. What a waste of six hours of high-quality parental stress.
-
A few days later when she's cranky, I put F in for an afternoon nap. Much against her wishes - there's a five minute period of screaming, yelling and knocking noises as she tries to shake her way free. Then there's a short quiet pause followed by a loud clatter, a big thump and a long yell.
F has worked the latches and opened the side of the cot, it turns out, tipping herself out in the process. She's more shocked than hurt, much like V and me are. Good - now we can be anxious when she's asleep too. The cot gets turned with the flapping side against the wall and tied up with garden string for good measure.
-
Up at Rumbling Bridge, F paddles her feet in a chilly Scottish river and learns to throw stones into deep pools, ploomp. It's a beautiful afternoon, sun slanting through the trees into the dark brown water, midges weaving about as I carry F over rocks and under boughs to the safest places to dunk her feet. Farfar and Farmor are there too, it's very peaceful and happy.
-
Cousin S wants the green plastic golf club F has just dropped to be kept hidden. I ask why. "Actually, Uncle J," she says, "I just don't want her to play with it." I ask why again, but that's all the answer I'm getting right now.
Actually, S and F get on very well, sitting and mixing mud pies together in the garden or just running about on the lawn together. F is quite taken with her tall blond cousin, she follows behind copying her and giggling when acknowledged.
-
Gardens aren't new to F. Having one on tap, so to speak, is. It's a popular move. First thing after breakfast, she goes to the back door and says "run run run run run" until you let her out and chase her round the lawn. Two weeks of this gives her newfound motor confidence, she's trying out tiptoeing and stamping for the first time before we leave. The latter not just in the context of tantrums, amazingly, just stamping her right foot only on the floor for fun.
-
Old college friends N and J, with their families, come over for a day to catch up. Insofar as spending an afternoon giving children of various sizes and ages piggybacks all round Dunkeld is catching up. I think I exhanged a record of three sentences with N, one of which was 'great to see you, bye!'
-
F takes V's chocolate ice cream cone off her, to add to her collection. She's just eaten the last bit of mine. Her own is half-eaten and half-molten, flowing in luxurious pools over her face, hands and table setting. Cafe customers on the tables round us are turning to look, because F is not quiet in her appreciation of a good thing. There's a few disapproving faces, fusty old Scots muttering about messy children. Stuff 'em. Anyone who begrudges someone loud enjoyment of a first chocolate ice cream cone needs a good dowsing in sticky gloop.
-
There's a Medieval Festival at Dunfermline Abbey. With jousting! Once somebody's suggested it to me, I insist on making everyone go. Look, it wasn't my idea. If you don't want to spend a stickily hot afternoon being jostled by overweight re-enactors in jerkins, don't let me have wind of it in the first place, that's my advice.
I've never seen live jousting, despite having worked as a show knight at one of London's worst available medieval experiences. Sadly, this is rubbish, being more of a kid-friendly joust-themed knockabout, with somersaulting men-at-arms and exploding lances. F likes the horses for about five minutes, then we go and run around on lawns instead. Even I have to admit it's better.
-
Farfar and I go for a walk up Birnam Hill. It's a hot day, close and almost thundery in the way that Scottish hills do so well. You walk up the steep hills as though ascending into a furnace, and reach seemingly endless seas of bright green bracken.
Farfar has a mission - somewhere in the neck-deep ferns are some mysterious stones marked with cup-and-ring shaped depressions. Nobody knows their origins. Stone age? Pictish? Yithian cult? A Ponaptic fragment? I know which I favour.
If nobody knows their origins, it's perhaps because the map isn't very clear on their location either. Wading about in the bracken with big brown shield bugs pinging off our faces is great fun, if rather fruitless. We don't find all the mystery rocks, just the cup-marked ones (no rings). But we do find great swathes of juicy bilberries, which we pick until our water bottle is filled. So fruitful in some ways, I suppose.
After that, we join the ladies in a local hotel Spa for an afternoon of swimming. F likes swimming. I swoosh her about while V goes for a massage and Farmor goes jogging. Healthy.
-
As a treat, Farfar and Farmor buy F a ticket to see Peppa Pig's Big Splash, a live action puppet show in Perth. I sit in the foyer while V takes her in. I'm the only bloke in my age group present, although the place is packed out with mums and grandparents. This says something sad about the UK's approach to parenting, I think, but I'm too tired to think what. I'm also too glad not to be watching more Peppa Pig. F sits through both halves entranced, then we run round and round in circles on Perth's North Inch park for an hour. Which is how F approximates picnic behaviour.
-
V and I take a day to ourselves and stay in a decently cheap hotel in Edinburgh for a night. While we potter round shops, take in a tour of the historical Mary King's Close, get rained on and drink gin, F eats her own weight in pasta with Farfar and Farmor and blithely ignores the absence of her fretting parents as usual.
This is the first day we've had to ourselves for what, a year? I forget. Too long. It's almost like a first date, although without the same level of half-wittedly tentative conversational gambits. Having your first child already weighing on our minds is quite enough to make us half-witted anyway. We spend a fair bit of time at the hotel that evening looking at baby pictures of F and cooing, because we miss her.
She looks taller when we get back. Even if that's technically true, it's still ridiculous.
-
She sleeps through the takeoff on the way home. So do I - we were up at three to get to the airport, only to discover we'd set alarms on our Swedish phones and were actually up at two. Goddamn GMT.
F is clearly delighted to be home, even though she's had a fantastic time on holiday. And she has grown in the last two weeks, both in actual height (she can now reach the lightswitches to turn them both on and off), confidence and mastery of speech.
As is traditional with holidays, this one had an elastically long first week where everything stretched out ahead of us endlessly, then a frantic short second one where everything was suddenly over. And then we're home, everything back to routine normal.
Or as close to it as we get, at least. This is F's new favourite game she's developed out of nowhere, a game called Bake The Smurf. Cramming mummy and baby smurf head first into a cooker is normal. It must be. It's my baby playing it.
 |
| Smurfia Plath |
Thursday, July 3, 2014
Faustus Act 1 Sc 3.76
During the heights of the Cold War, a top US agent working behind Iron Curtain managed to get himself captured. The KGB agents who took him were determined to get their money's worth for the time and trouble spent bringing him in. He was taken to a euphemistically-named Debriefing Centre somewhere in the Urals and tortured extensively for months. His name (or code name, at any rate, the stuff I read wasn't entirely sure) was John G Franklin.
Franklin managed to resist his torture, somehow. Conventional methods (insofar as torture can ever be considered conventional) weren't going to do it. But the KGB didn't give up. Instead, they worked with what they knew of Franklin, or his working persona at least - that of a typical family business man. Using that, they devised a new approach.
They released him into a carefully monitered labyrinth, specially built under the Urals. It had no entrance or exit, just the appearance of such. Although there were places he could rest, feed or relieve himself, reaching them required significant feats of nearly-superhuman endurance. Constant white noise, undercut with sudden violent blasts of sound, was present in every chamber, along with harshly artificial overhead lighting.
Everywhere he looked, Franklin was presented with the reminders of freedom that he no longer enjoyed. Pictures of smiling, happy people in expensive clothes, eating and drinking impossibly luscious food. None of this was the masterstroke in the Russian plan, however. That was to harness explosives to Franklin's chest with thick and indestrucible webbing, explaining to him that entering the wrong room at the wrong time, or exposing the explosives to the 'wrong stimuli' would cause an instant and unpleasant death.
Unless, of course, he cooperated. Which he did after only two days.
It may not seem like a particularly remarkable form of torture to you now, in an age where waterboarding, sensory deprivation and so forth are more widely known. Which goes to show you how ahead of its time it was - the KGB's methods were so widely adopted and expanded upon that they're now universally acknowledged. The influences they've had on modern culture are far wider than previously accepted. Books, games, even architecture.
I myself have had firsthand experience of this. Only today, I went round Ullared's massive indoor retail outlet for seven straight hours with V in full-throated shopping frenzy mode and F in a pram.
If that place wasn't devised by insane torturers expressly trying to damage, if not entirely quash, the human spirit of any entering it, then I don't know insane torturers. An eternity of aisles crammed with a random assortment of things you think you might like but probably could be forced to admit you don't need, all at low low prices. Queues for everything! Queues for food, queues for changing rooms, queues for loos. Queues to get into the queues! My blood runs cold even now on thinking on it! Ahahahahahahahaaa!
Franklin, if you ever existed beyond a pointlessly long run-up to this venting of anguish after a long, long day, then my hat would be off to you. I called the KGB about six hours ago and offered to tell them everything. They were very politely confused in their rejection of my offer, but I think they're just being coy. I shall call them back now and try again.
Franklin managed to resist his torture, somehow. Conventional methods (insofar as torture can ever be considered conventional) weren't going to do it. But the KGB didn't give up. Instead, they worked with what they knew of Franklin, or his working persona at least - that of a typical family business man. Using that, they devised a new approach.
They released him into a carefully monitered labyrinth, specially built under the Urals. It had no entrance or exit, just the appearance of such. Although there were places he could rest, feed or relieve himself, reaching them required significant feats of nearly-superhuman endurance. Constant white noise, undercut with sudden violent blasts of sound, was present in every chamber, along with harshly artificial overhead lighting.
Everywhere he looked, Franklin was presented with the reminders of freedom that he no longer enjoyed. Pictures of smiling, happy people in expensive clothes, eating and drinking impossibly luscious food. None of this was the masterstroke in the Russian plan, however. That was to harness explosives to Franklin's chest with thick and indestrucible webbing, explaining to him that entering the wrong room at the wrong time, or exposing the explosives to the 'wrong stimuli' would cause an instant and unpleasant death.
Unless, of course, he cooperated. Which he did after only two days.
It may not seem like a particularly remarkable form of torture to you now, in an age where waterboarding, sensory deprivation and so forth are more widely known. Which goes to show you how ahead of its time it was - the KGB's methods were so widely adopted and expanded upon that they're now universally acknowledged. The influences they've had on modern culture are far wider than previously accepted. Books, games, even architecture.
I myself have had firsthand experience of this. Only today, I went round Ullared's massive indoor retail outlet for seven straight hours with V in full-throated shopping frenzy mode and F in a pram.
If that place wasn't devised by insane torturers expressly trying to damage, if not entirely quash, the human spirit of any entering it, then I don't know insane torturers. An eternity of aisles crammed with a random assortment of things you think you might like but probably could be forced to admit you don't need, all at low low prices. Queues for everything! Queues for food, queues for changing rooms, queues for loos. Queues to get into the queues! My blood runs cold even now on thinking on it! Ahahahahahahahaaa!
Franklin, if you ever existed beyond a pointlessly long run-up to this venting of anguish after a long, long day, then my hat would be off to you. I called the KGB about six hours ago and offered to tell them everything. They were very politely confused in their rejection of my offer, but I think they're just being coy. I shall call them back now and try again.
Friday, June 27, 2014
Priorities
Cutlery is no longer the mystery it once was; F ate her porridge ambidexterously today, a spoon in each hand. "Cha cha cha cha cha," she said said later, heading towards me over the carpet. In one hand, she had a toy plastic knife, and she was stabbing it up and down like a psycho in a shower.
Rather than disturbing, I thought it was cute. In itself, this is a little disturbing, I suppose, in that if she really was a pyscho in a shower I would still be tipping my head to one side and saying awww by way of explaining her behaviour to the police.
It was cute to me because I'm fairly fluent in Freyish. I knew she was saying 'chop chop chop' because that's what you do with knives. To vegetables. Not Daddy, we've had that chat. "Are you allowed to do that?" is a coded sentence intended to supply the answer "no". It's currently 80% effective. Although she's started throwing the tv remote away from herself when we come into the room, as though she was never anything to do with it in the first place.
Godfather B was here over last weekend. Having someone else in the house makes you rather more aware of how peculiar you get as a parent. To me, F's cat, bird, dog and elephant noises are easily distinguished*. To the passing stranger, they all sound kind of like 'eep'. From an external perspective, I could admit it looks slightly odd to spend lots of time in playparks putting large handfuls of woodchips into the springs under the seesaw. F has always done this. I hope one day to learn why. I tried it myself today, I must admit it does pass the time.
Catching up with friends J and A yesterday, we both agreed parenting deforms the mind. I say catching up, I really mean exchanging fourteen or fifteen disjointed sentences over the course of about three hours, usually as we rushed past each other at the playpark en route to hurling ourselves in the way of some incoming disaster or other. I brought coffee and baked goods, and got more sand in me than either.
But that's sort of normal, is the point. Breaking off half way through a sentence to run across a patio and knock a cigarette butt out of baby's tiny hands is perfectly acceptable behaviour, if a little abrupt. Most people can accept that. To me, there's no difference between that and breaking off the same, resumed sentence five minutes later to attend to F's question of "gna gna da blah blah da" instead of whoever I'm with.
Not understanding what she's asking doesn't matter. From my skewed perspective, it's just more important.
-
F has learnt a new game today, one I remember from Giles Brandreth's book 'I'm a hearty, harmless sort really! Why don't people like me more?'
Rolling on the Floor
For 2+ players
You Will Need:
A floor
A blanket
Place the blanket square on the floor. The leader shouts 'Roll roll roll roll roll roll roll roll!" and lies on the blanket, rocking and rolling back and forwards. Everyone else must join in laughing hysterically, or the leader earns a free massive tantrum. The winner is the first person to break something they'd forgotten was in their pockets, e.g. a phone or their keys. Play continues indefinitely. What fun!
-
It's nearly the holidays. Bring it.
*Which reminds me of a family joke, much beloved of my dad when we were kids. What's the difference between a weasel and a stoat? A weasel is weasily distinguished, whilst a stoat is stoatally different.
Rather than disturbing, I thought it was cute. In itself, this is a little disturbing, I suppose, in that if she really was a pyscho in a shower I would still be tipping my head to one side and saying awww by way of explaining her behaviour to the police.
It was cute to me because I'm fairly fluent in Freyish. I knew she was saying 'chop chop chop' because that's what you do with knives. To vegetables. Not Daddy, we've had that chat. "Are you allowed to do that?" is a coded sentence intended to supply the answer "no". It's currently 80% effective. Although she's started throwing the tv remote away from herself when we come into the room, as though she was never anything to do with it in the first place.
Godfather B was here over last weekend. Having someone else in the house makes you rather more aware of how peculiar you get as a parent. To me, F's cat, bird, dog and elephant noises are easily distinguished*. To the passing stranger, they all sound kind of like 'eep'. From an external perspective, I could admit it looks slightly odd to spend lots of time in playparks putting large handfuls of woodchips into the springs under the seesaw. F has always done this. I hope one day to learn why. I tried it myself today, I must admit it does pass the time.
Catching up with friends J and A yesterday, we both agreed parenting deforms the mind. I say catching up, I really mean exchanging fourteen or fifteen disjointed sentences over the course of about three hours, usually as we rushed past each other at the playpark en route to hurling ourselves in the way of some incoming disaster or other. I brought coffee and baked goods, and got more sand in me than either.
But that's sort of normal, is the point. Breaking off half way through a sentence to run across a patio and knock a cigarette butt out of baby's tiny hands is perfectly acceptable behaviour, if a little abrupt. Most people can accept that. To me, there's no difference between that and breaking off the same, resumed sentence five minutes later to attend to F's question of "gna gna da blah blah da" instead of whoever I'm with.
Not understanding what she's asking doesn't matter. From my skewed perspective, it's just more important.
-
F has learnt a new game today, one I remember from Giles Brandreth's book 'I'm a hearty, harmless sort really! Why don't people like me more?'
Rolling on the Floor
For 2+ players
You Will Need:
A floor
A blanket
Place the blanket square on the floor. The leader shouts 'Roll roll roll roll roll roll roll roll!" and lies on the blanket, rocking and rolling back and forwards. Everyone else must join in laughing hysterically, or the leader earns a free massive tantrum. The winner is the first person to break something they'd forgotten was in their pockets, e.g. a phone or their keys. Play continues indefinitely. What fun!
-
It's nearly the holidays. Bring it.
*Which reminds me of a family joke, much beloved of my dad when we were kids. What's the difference between a weasel and a stoat? A weasel is weasily distinguished, whilst a stoat is stoatally different.
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