Keir Royale

Can I go to the shop?” whines my son, wearing what he hopes is a winning smile.

I look at him, head on one side. He wants to buy sweets, and I’m torn. I don’t want him to have too many, but he doesn’t have them often and he’s been a delight since I fetched him from school. Admittedly this was only fifteen minutes ago, but some days he lurches out of his classroom with a comic strip thundercloud almost visibly hovering above his furious little strawberry blond (ginger if you prefer) head.

Today though, he’s been happy, communicative, and has even volunteered information about what he did at school, “We played with clay all afternoon Mum”. In short, I feel he deserves a reward. It’s also a good way to develop his independence and confidence, as he likes to go to the shop ON HIS OWN.

This was no big deal when I was eight, in fact I’d been going to the corner shop since I could talk, to fetch packets of Gladstone for my Gran. But that was another time and another place. It’d be illegal for me to send him to buy cigarettes, even if I smoked, and some parents are horrified that I’d let an eight year old cross two minor roads to venture into a Co-op which was once robbed by teenagers with knives during daylight hours.

The first time he went he was seven, and I watched him as far as the end of the road, timed him, and was about to go in search of him when I spotted him trotting back round the corner.

Today though, I give him a key and start preparing tea. He arrives back, puffed, red-faced and empty-handed. Has something happened? No. I only let him take ten pence to limit the damage to his teeth, and therein lies the problem.

“You can’t get anything for ten pence Mum.” So, feeling rotten for being the cause of a wasted journey I say,
“Okay, take twenty pence.” But he looks reluctant and mutters,
“Can you come with me?”
“Why? I thought you liked going on your own.”
“I have to run all the way there and back and it’s tiring.”
“Well walk then.”
“I have to run in case someone tries to snatch me.”

So the sum total of all that PSHE, Newsround and Radio Four blabbing on in the background, is a fear of walking.

We have a conversation about how rare it is for a stranger to snatch a child, and I stress that what makes it news is the rarity of it.
“I know,” he says, “it’s just me being stupid.”

But it’s not him that’s stupid, it’s the rest of the world, and he has to grow up in it.

Anyone with the temerity to work as an actor is told that they’ll probably spend at least 80% of their time “resting”, or as the non-acting world calls it, unemployed.

It’s at these times that you can research the world of poorly paid, low-status work, in preparation for the great role that is just around the corner.

To read the rest of this article, see Guardian Real Work

We’re all staring out to sea, far into the distance. It’s sunny, bright, the clouds careering across the summer sky, but we don’t notice the weather. We stare but we know we won’t see him, even if he’s there we won’t see him, not from here.

We scan the sea, our shaking hands shading squinting eyes, the children running wild at our feet. He’s long gone.

She’s been here the whole time, pacing on the prom, leaning over the railings almost too far out for safety. Her fine, white-blonde hair, unwashed and dishevelled, flickers in the briny gusts of sea breeze. She wears the same jeans, caked in sand and stained with the coffee that’s sustained her for two days.

Her children go to school, go home, do their homework, but they’re tired of eating Gran’s meals. They want their Mum. They want to be on the beach, far from the everyday clatter of book bags, packed lunch and show and tell. It’s too noisy there with all their friends, they can’t hear the waves pounding on the sand, they can’t watch the watchers on the beach.

To read the rest of this short story, see Ink. (It’s a pdf file - page 14)

Downsizing. What does it mean to you? More precious hours spent communing with your family? Fewer frantic hours spent scrambling ‘twixt work, nursery, childminder and school sports day?

A calm home life redolent with cut flowers, nourishing winter stews and nutritious summer salads which your young pups will wolf down, along with seven or eight portions of fruit and veg per day… ?

Ah yes! Wouldn’t it be nice to read the paper in the morning instead of using it to mop up spilt milk? Wouldn’t it be great to thumb your nose at the lech who sits opposite you at work and always manages to be looking your way when you try to pick your nose surreptitiously behind your computer?Think again. Consider the realities of half the income and twice the time to spend your dwindling stash of cash.

You need a dose of reality before you take the giant step which will curtail foreign holidays and confine you to your old jalopy while all the other parents upgrade to build-your-own H1 Alpha Hummers.

Readers, I have done it, I have taken the company shilling to wander off into the sunset minus management responsibility and (more significantly) a regular injection of spondoolies into my current account.

So, if you’re dreaming of the so-called simpler life, consider the real pros and cons…

To read the rest of this article, see Bad Mothers Club.

How is it that a pair of habitual atheists can produce two children who are devout Christians?

Some scientists claim faith is genetically pre-determined, but I fear our two are just more than usually keen to disbelieve their parents. Our son, who’s five, is a firm believer in God and Father Christmas, and uses emotional blackmail to get me to say I am too:

“But Mummy, if you don’t believe in God I won’t see you again when I die.”
So I have to make him happy, don’t I?

And when his three year old sister asks, “Do I believe in God, Mummy?” all I can say is,
“If you want to, darling.”

And she does want to. She’s taken to quizzing one of her friend’s mothers, a regular churchgoer, about God, as my answers don’t seem to satisfy her.

All their father believes in is Lincoln City Football Club.

To read the rest of this article, see Bad Mothers Club.

Which do you prefer - Pink or Blue? I mean the colours, not the bands. They’re the shades that dominate a newborn’s life until they’re able to make up their own minds.

But what happens if your child decides to fly in the face of convention? My son’s primary colour is pink. But only at home, for Ben is a closet pinko, driven underground by the forces of macho politics that govern the school playground.

When you’re a five-year-old boy, admitting to a preference for pink is as bad as defecting from the Labour Party to join the SDP back in the Eighties. And although Ben learned the lesson of the juvenile jungle pretty quickly, every now and then his friends spot the delicate tint that sets him apart.

“What do you mean, a pink Ninja Turtle?”
“Of course the pink Power Ranger’s a girl.”
“Oi, Ben! Your Beyblade’s pink!”

To read the rest of this article, see Bad Mothers Club.

It also appeared in Junior magazine.

When I call my three-year-old daughter “sossidge”, I am echoing the broken English of a man who coaxed back flips, somersaults and devotion from generations of eager students.

Eugene Balla was 92 when he died in April this year, teaching acrobatics right up to the last few months of his life.

He moved to Britain from Hungary more than 70 years ago but still sounded like he had just got off the boat. Students who did not put enough spring into their somersaults were affectionately labelled a “sossidge”.

I was not Cathy, I was “Kutty”. Amanda was “Mondy”, Debs was “Debbie” and 17-year old Jonathon started his performing life as “Jennifer”.

To read the rest of this article, see The Stage and Television Today

It was hard enough to remember the combination on my bike padlock. Now in the office or at home it’s not just one four-digit code or password I have to memorise.

I need four-digit pins for each of my bank cards, seven digits to log on at work, while at university I needed nine digits, including numbers, letters, punctuation and capitals.

This has taxed my dogged determination to use the same password for everything. I normally adapt it slightly, use the first four digits, add some noughts on the end or leave out the letters.

To read the rest of the article, see Guardian Real Work

Tragedy by the Bee Gees

“When the feeling’s gone and you can’t go on, it’s tragedy.”

Our two children have the mixed blessing of being born to older than average parents, especially, it must be said, their father. But what they lack in up-to-date, sing-a-long knowledge of the latest poptastic hits on YouTube, or MySpace or whatever it is this week, they make up for with an in depth knowledge of some of the greats, especially their Dad’s favourites, the Bee Gees.

To read the rest of this article see Guardian Family

When I arrived at school this morning, the mother of one of my daughter’s friends said they’d had a traumatic breakfast-time.

“Oh no, what happened?” I said, imagining Coco Pops splattered across the table or lumpy porridge spat into the sink.
   
“We woke up to find Cleo eviscerated all over the floor of the girls’ bedroom. Suki got her in the night.” 

Cleo the hamster had lived just eight short weeks, not even a third of her admittedly short allotted time span on this earth, and Suki the Siamese cat had just confirmed her position as chief hunter in da House.

When Hannah came home from school I asked her how her friend had been at school,           

“Fine. Her parents are going to get her a new hamster.”           

So finally, the disposable attitude I have failed to banish from my children’s malleable young minds doesn’t just apply to Bratz dolls and talking Daleks. It also applies in their blasé, it’s only money, just chuck it out and get a new one way, to living creatures.

At least my eventual death and that of their father won’t give them too much cause for crying.          

“That’s all right, we can adopt a new pair,” they’ll say to each other, shrugging their shoulders at the undertaker.

And by then, they probably will be able to.