Keir Royale

Is it an age thing, or have I always been terminally grumpy and am now failing to hide it as well as I used to?

I know that’s a difficult question when all you know of me is what I choose to tell you, and most of that is digitally enhanced to make me look better than I really am - just imagine what I’m really like.

But anyhow, bear with me.
I was talking to Mike last night. This fact merits a mention in itself, as we were actually discussing ideas and random topics, rather than making arrangements for the following day, or arguing about whether yet another bloody episode of Sharpe constitutes a good evening’s entertainment.

Among the many issues we ranged over was meeting new people and our respective abilities to make inconsequential chit-chat.

It’s never been a particular skill of mine.
I can do it, especially if it’s for work as I can click into jovial, matey mode when necessary. But my real preference is to get down to it, whatever it may be, straight away.

Last night I found myself telling Mike something along the lines of -

I don’t really bother talking to people much, I mean, I chat, and I think I manage to sound friendly and interested, but I’m not really, and I don’t think other people are either.

Most people just want to talk about themselves but realise they’re going to have to let other people have a go, just so they can have a turn.

Perhaps that’s what we’re doing when we try to teach our kids to share, to listen and to take turns.
It’s not natural, so we all have to be socialised into doing it.

That may sound pretty grumpy, but I don’t feel grumpy.
I just feel I’ve got limited time and diminishing patience and I don’t want to waste either of them.

Now that does sound like an age thing.

On arriving at school this morning, Ben refused to take his coat in with him.

“I don’t want it,” he says, “it’s not raining.”

“How do you know it won’t rain later on?” asks Dad, with adult logic.

“None of my friends have got coats with them,” he replies, with eight-year old anti-logic.

“Peer pressure isn’t going to keep you dry,” says Mike.

So the coat had a nice walk to school and back, and although the sun is streaming through the window as I type, and although I lathered their faces in factor 50 sun cream, you never know in these rain-soaked weeks how it’s going to turn out.

Peer pressure has been a mixed blessing so far.

Both our children have church-going friends, so they often start up theological debates the like of which I haven’t considered for thirty years.

“Why does God let people die?”
“I don’t believe in him or any other kind of deity, so the question has no meaning for me,” is what I want to reply, ending all religious conversation.

But I don’t say that, I fudge it.
“Well, people who believe in God say heaven is a better place than here on earth. So maybe that’s why God lets people die.”

“What about hell?” is the obvious response, and it’s the one I get.
“Christians believe that hell is a punishment for people who’ve done bad things while they’re alive.”

I’m sure they know that, but knowing it doesn’t stop them from ignoring every request to brush their teeth, to take their plates to the sink and to put their clothes in the laundry basket.

If they’d just copy the better habits of their well trained peers I’d be delighted.
They have friends who are the model of good, God-fearing children, who help with the washing up and are keen to lay the table for tea.

But my kids seem to pick the one repellent feature of every friend and magnify it, ignoring all the many splendid qualities there for the choosing.

It’s the same with us.
They focus on my one use of sarcasm or the single swear word I let slip in extremis, and studiously ignore all the many times I say please, thank you and flush the loo after I’ve used it. Without being reminded.

As it happens, there’s been no rain, so eight-year old anti-logic wins the day.

One of the first things my grandmother did when my grandfather died, was to buy a new cooker.
“He would never fork out for one,” she explained.
I’m beginning to see where she’s coming from.

Yesterday, Mike came home with a new, bigger, better, lots to blow up, paddling pool that the children can probably practice lengths in.
I’d asked him to replace the one he accidentally strimmed into shreds last year, but the same model would have been fine.

Then today, a large, table-sized package arrived. The next door neighbour brought it round when I got home from presenting my last programme for freesound fm.
“It’s an interesting looking parcel,” he said as he struggled over the wall with it.
“Maybe Mike’s decided we need a new table, somewhere,” I said.

Then when I brought the chldren home from school, Ben saw it and said,
“Oh, that’s probably my new bow and arrow and target. Can I open it?”

“What new bow and arrow and target?” I enquired, puzzled because he already has two, obviously inadequate sets.
“Daddy said he’d get me a bigger, better one.”

So bigger and better is all the rage in our house.
Except.
Except when it comes to forking out for a new cooker.

Our deranged and ancient Neff has refused to heat up to temperature in under an hour for at least two years. We’re used to it now. At least, I am.

But when we stay at someone else’s house, say on an NCT Houseswap, I am delirious with happiness that I have access to a fan oven which heats up in five minutes.

Oh the bliss of getting home late and feeding the kids in under half an hour.
The joys of deciding on the day to cook baked potatotes.

These innocent pleasures, though, are not for me.
As I currently have no spare cash to contribute to large purchases, I am at the mercy of a man who revealed today that,
“All that money I’d earmarked for a new telly has gone.”

A new telly?
We already have freeview, so we won’t be losing our access to Grissom when digital TV explodes into our area.
Why do we need a new telly?

Perhaps there’s a bigger, better one out there that just has to find its way to our house.

I think it may be time to chuck out all the Enid Blyton books and veto anything written before 1970.
Last week Ben asked me,

“Why did Enid Blyton think it was alright for the girls to be servants to the boys?”

Well, there’s a discussion to be having with an eight year old boy.
How do I condense the Women’s Movement, feminism, and all the titles including The Second Sex, The Women’s Room, Sexual Politics, Man Made Language and the Female Eunuch into one easily comprehensible answer.

I give it a go.

“Things were very different in those days, and people thought women should do most of the work in the house. But things have changed since then. That’s good isn’t it?”

“No, I’d like it if Hannah did everything I told her to.”

Great. An unreconstructed son who’d like a doormat for a sister. Luckily, he doesn’t have one.

But I do worry that working at home is giving him a skewed view of male/female job demarcation. I’m the one who fetches them from school most days, and it’s generally me who bangs plates containing food onto the kitchen table of an evening.

We’ve already had the “only men do big important jobs like that” conversation.
Well, I say conversation. It was more like one small person trotting out anachronistic tommy-rot while his mother listened in horror with her chin on the floor.

I did my best to stem the tide of wrong-thinking.
“We’ve already had a woman as a prime minister, her name was Margaret Thatcher and she was prime minister years before Tony Blair.”

I can’t believe I’m having to hold up the honorary bloke, Maggie Thatcher, as a fine example of womanhood. But I carry on.

“Men and women can do any job they like,” I explain, “except wet-nursing and sperm donation.”

I watch the unfamiliar words penetrate the brains of my children, and immediately wish I hadn’t put it quite like that.

Hannah’s first up with “What’s wet-nursing Mummy?”
I explain as best I can, and am met with a resounding, “Urrrghhh!” from both of them.
They’re so horrified at the thought of other women breast feeding them that they forget about the little matter of the sperm donation.

Ben could well be mulling over the word donation, which he may not know, and sperm, which he does, ready to throw them at me, in all their “sperm donation” horror, in the checkout queue at Tesco’s.

But even this would be preferable to rearing a child who yearns for nineteen-fifties suburbia.

He seems to be moving on to Arthur Ransome at the moment, with Horrible Histories and Groosham Grange for light relief, so hopefully he’ll forget the time-shifting example of Julian, Dick, George and Ann, not forgetting Timmy the dog.

I’ll just have to worry about Hannah now, if I can first save her from the Rainbow Fairies.

We visited Dartmoor Zoological Park today, and when I asked the children what they enjoyed most - we saw Siberian Tigers, African Lions, Brown Bears and two Macaws that could say “hello” and “goodbye” like a demented Mark Almond - they said,

“Those sweet little red foxes.”

A couple of foxes which were probably institutionalised by the previous owner, and which should, by rights, be out chancing their luck against the shooting skills of the local farmers.

We could have just sat in a nearby field until dusk, and saved ourselves some cash.

What is it that makes children choose as their favourite activity, the one thing we could have done at home?

They enjoyed the otters though. It must have been nearly feeding time, because every time someone new walked up to look at them, they set up a whiny, begging performance, hoping this person was the one with the fish.

The wildlife park has just re-opened after new owners took over.
The last time I went the children were 2 (Ben) and a few months (Hannah) and it was a sad place filled with desperate animals who rocked from side to side and prowled up and down the fences.

It’s been closed for a year, staff from reputable zoos with established captive breeding programmes have been drafted in, as well as a Wolf expert to sort out the animals’ incessant howling.
Apparently the wolves’ natural hierarchy had been disrupted by their food being put in the same place at the same time every day.

That way they were all eating together at the same time, which is not the wolf’s way.

Feeding is accomplished through the pack hierarchy, with the higher ranking individuals eating first and the lesser wolves eating last. As a result, the higher ranking wolves get the greatest percentage of food and the best portions in comparison to the lower ranked wolves.

So now the food is put in different places at different times, the hierarchy has been restored and the wolves are happy. The staff also play recordings of other wolves to make the animals think there are competing packs nearby. This makes them work together against a common threat.
A bit like a football team.

All interesting stuff. Unless you’re a child. In which case the most interesting stuff is in the gift shop.

Ben brought along a wallet full of cash, purloined from who knows where, and splashed out on a packet of vile Cola sweets and a very bouncy ball.

Hannah was content with a badge she’d made in the Activity Centre and a few of my rhubarb and custard sweets, old-style confectionery being one of the attractions of the gift shop.

The new owners park bought the park after selling a property in Surrey.

So, what would you go for - a big house and garden in Surrey, or a 30 acre wildlife park plus 200 exotic animals and a 12-bedroom house in Devon?

Hannah did her first ballet exam today. In fact it was her first ever exam.

She was excited and a little hysterical while leaping about with her friends before going in. I insisted on half an hour without handstands so her hair had a fair chance of remaining stuck in the precarious bun I’d achieved with copious squirts of hairspray, a hairnet and a packet of grips.

When I asked her afterwards how it had been, she said,

“It was scary, I had flutterbies.”

“And did you enjoy it, or are you glad it’s over?”

“A bit of both,” she said. So it wasn’t too bad then.

We didn’t talk about it, or indeed practice it, much beforehand, as I didn’t want to her to worry, but she must have thought about it, as when she got up this morning she said,

“I wish my exam was over.”

So now she’s in Grade 1, assuming she passes, and her teacher never puts children in for their exams unless she’s sure they are going to pass. Just like the rest of us, she has her stats to consider.

Hannah is proud that she’s done an exam, “without anybody watching”.

I’m hoping she loses interest before she hits her teens, when too much ballet can leave a legacy of body dismorphia that’s hard to shake. And it’s pretty obvious that she’s not going to develop naturally into a lettuce-liking, tissue-munching, chain-smoking, pencil-thin ballerina.

I think, in honour of Wimbledon, we’ll go for tennis instead.
There’s more money in it, you need a bit of meat and muscle to play well, and you can enjoy a game or two well into your eighties.

All we need to do now is morph into tennis-parents.
We own a racket each and we like to win, but that’s about as far as it goes.

We have a lodger.

He knows I have a blog and he was wondering if he’d get a mention, so I thought I’d oblige.

He seems very nice, but it’s early days yet and there’s plenty of time for him to show his true colours. Mike told him to watch out in case I tried to photograph him surreptitiously, so as yet I have no image to share with you.

I now have to be careful not to scare him by going to the bathroom scantily clad, and I feel obliged to make proper, grown-up conversation over breakfast, rather than grunting and repeatedly telling the kids to eat with their mouths closed.

I imagine the children will be pleased with this new arragement, once they look up from their cereal packets for long enough to notice.

This morning, sensible discussions ranged over:-
- the redevelopment of Plymouth, from post-war reconstruction to the current argument over the grade 2 listing of the Civic Centre
- this week’s vote in Sark over whether to embrace democracy or to remain a feudal state
- the impact the BBC’s network programme, The One Show, will have on its regional programme, Inside Out

If I’m not careful I will tax my brain so severely at breakfast time that I’ll have nothing left for the rest of the day.

Sea Monkeys – what are they for?

Every day Hannah carefully aerates hers.

This involves pouring the contents of the little plastic container into a jug and back again, three times. This, it says on the packet, will give them plenty of oxygen with which to sustain their very uninteresting lives.

Every day she looks at the water, and seems to see the sea monkeys happily living their lives. When I peer into the greenish gloom, all I see are bits of floating detritus, and powdery food that she keeps lobbing in.

It may be because I’m over 35. It says on the packaging that aged people such as myself will not be able to see the sea monkey eggs without the aid of a magnifying glass.
Of course the magnifying glass that had been kicking around the kitchen for weeks suddenly disappeared, so I couldn’t see anything except water.

I think this little bit of information may be a clever ploy to fool parents into thinking there is actually something in there worth feeding.

The creatures were a present, and when we got them Hannah was very excited and enjoyed the initial process of pouring water, adding sachets of powder, and hoping the specks she’d seen in the water were sea monkey eggs and not stray nits.

She’s showing remarkable persistence in continuing to care for these unrewarding flecks of nothing, but I’m beginning to think our care regime may not have been up to the job.

I see no signs of this -

Even though they start out so small, Sea-Monkeys grow up to be between 1/2 to 3/4 an inch in length during a 4 week period.
At this stage, they’ll start to reproduce and have more adorable babies.

I see no 3/4 inch long prehistoric-looking skeletons, and no babies, adorable or otherwise.

Shall we give up?
Or is there something we can do to re-invigorate this plastic container full of murky water?

How’s Annie? just posted me a message with a link to this marvellous picture …

How I do miss Twin Peaks.

Has there been such a great series since? I doubt it.

I watched Eraserhead during my youthful phase of seeing arthouse movies only, mostly during all-night showings, and viewing all mainstream films with contempt.
I remember being mystified but fascinated by the little man with the strange hairdo making his way through life in a loud, dystopian, industrial landscape.

Blue Velvet was terrifyingly tense and I came out of the cinema in shreds. I went with two friends and we had to seek out a place for coffee near Leicester Square before we could face the tube journey home.

Mulholland Drive went back to his early days of mystifying but fascinating, not helped by the fact that I’d never heard of Mulholland Drive before seeing the movie.

I live in such a celebrity-free bubble.

But why is it that programmes like Porridge and Rising Damp are on a permanent broadcast tape loop, but Twin Peaks has never been shown again when it was patently groundbreaking stuff?

I guess a DVD boxed set will have to do … although I’m worried it may not live up to its place in my memory if I watch it all over again.

You can have too much of a good thing.

Any requests for tunes for tomorrow’s programme? I’ll probably have time for five or six tracks.

But do bear in mind the selection of music is not extensive - you’ll have to guess what I might be able to lay my hands on and request something along those lines.

There are quite a few Kids’ Pop Party Hits and Disney Princess type CDs kicking around the house…