Keir Royale

Now the festive storm has passed, we can spend our downtime trying to navigate the multiple functions on our shiny new cameras, phones and laptops.

They all seem to do much more than anyone could need in a human lifespan. But if you have a problem with your new gismo, pop round to our place and ask our kids. They are absorbing techno-babble like I used to hope they’d soak up foreign languages.

First it was Club Penguin. They were nattering on about that for months before I realised that it was a chat room: a highly moderated kiddy-lite chat room, but still a chat room.
Then it was Animasher and You Tube.
Now they’ve followed their friends onto Facebook.

Luckily, I’m up to speed on this one. With Club Penguin I had to learn how to navigate the virtual arctic tundra to check what they were doing there. But I’ve been on Facebook for years. Hell, I was on it when you had to be a student to get on it.

So before allowing them on, I bore them to death with checking their privacy settings, insisting they become my ‘friends’, committing their passwords to memory and establishing that they know why they have to be careful online.

I use a handy newspaper article to discuss what I assume will be a difficult subject.
“So that’s how you spell paedophile,” says Ben, more astonished at the vagaries of the English language than at the horrors of human behaviour. Cue a short discussion about the Greek derivation of many of our words.

I drill them regularly about accepting only ‘friends’ they know in the real world. They take this so much to heart that they rigorously interrogate any friend request from people they don’t immediately recognise, even distant cousins who share their surname.

But once all that’s sorted, I am faced with a new dilemma. Do I really want the children entering my own online world?

Certainly not.

At the risk of being accused of hypocrisy, I have mercilessly adjusted my own privacy settings so they don’t receive any of my status updates.

A mother has to have some privacy from her kids.

Christmas is looming large and loud in our house. Lists are dotted about the kitchen in unnaturally tidy handwriting, featuring ponies, playmobil, i-phones and other expensive electronic gadgetry.
The home-made advent calendar has been patched up ready to hold 24 daily trinkets for just one more year and we are on the trail of costumes for the school play.

When the children were at nursery, the slacker parents (me included) could get away with cutting holes in old sheets, wrapping tinsel around a wire coat hanger and telling our daughters what beautiful angels they made.

But those days are over.

At their last school, the Christmas Show required a Victorian street urchin costume for one child and a dalek outfit for the other. I think even Russell T Davies would have had trouble fitting the song about sausages and pizza into his Victorian Christmas Dr Who episode.

I am not handy with a sewing machine, but I can read. So when it seemed the show owed something, however small, to an idea first mooted by Charles Dickens, I suggested, helpfully I thought, that I should read A Christmas Carol to them at bedtime.

Their response was immediate and scathing… “We don’t need you to read it to us, we watched the DVD at school.”

There’s nothing like being a parent to put you firmly in your place.

This year, we’ve been getting a regular countdown.
“Only 32 weeks until Christmas.”
“It’s November now.”
“Has Gran asked what we want yet? Tell her money.”

Last year our son started showing signs that the concept of Father Christmas was losing its sparkle.
“I’m not sure I believe in Father Christmas, lots of my friends at school don’t.”

The first evidence of our children moving into middle age was a shock, especially after all the years of seasonal subterfuge:-
- scoffing most of a mince pie, leaving just a few crumbs in front of the fireplace
- crunching on a carrot, artfully leaving a morsel that Rudolf just couldn’t manage
- slugging back the sherry and filling the stockings with presents wrapped in paper they hadn’t seen lying around the house (especially hard to achieve, that last one)

And still we have bred a Doubting Thomas.

The worst of it was, his comment was blurted out in front of his younger sister, who should still have a few years of sublime belief to enjoy.
And he didn’t stop there.

“When Father Christmas gave me a remote control helicopter because he knew I wanted one, you knew I wanted one too, so how come you didn’t give me a helicopter as well? How did you know he was going to give me one?”

Felled by the killer instinct of a child. If he could only apply that laser-sharp logic to his school work, we would surely be parenting a mini-Einstein.

Now another year rolls round and I am wondering whether he has passed the point of questions and moved into a new phase of humouring his parents, going along with their strange festive fantasies, just to make sure at least some of the items on his wish list turn up, from whatever source, on Christmas morning.

As the prospect of Christmas shopping threatens to crowd out the hazy fragments of summer memories, I decide to surprise the children with a question.

“What do you prefer,” I say, nonchalantly, “Hallowe’en or Bonfire night?”

As I utter the words, images from my childhood flash through my mind. Weekends spent stuffing and dressing a Guy, just to watch it burn in my cousins’ back garden.
A Catherine Wheel, banged half-heartedly into a tree with a bent nail, spinning off into the distance, children scattering in all directions.
And best of all, running, squealing down the path, followed by fizzing Jumping Jacks.

I loved Bonfire Night.

“Hallowe’en!” they chorus. It takes me a while for the truth to sink in.

“Hallowe’en?” I ask.

“There’s skeletons and parties…”

“And sweets!”

They are, for once, as one. I blame the Americans. If it weren’t for Trick or Treating, what would Hallowe’en consist of?

A party? Yeah, maybe.

Fancy dress? Well, yeah.

But door-knocking for sweets? It’s turned into licensed begging and I can hardly believe that we Brits are allowing our proud, political history to be overshadowed by this turnip lantern travesty of a tradition.

Poor old “Penny fo the Guy” can’t hope to win through.

Even I have been sucked into it. I, who was barely aware of Hallowe’en as a child.

Round our way we have to be careful. There’s one door we can’t knock on again because one year we were invited in.
Great, we thought, child-friendly house. But no. Not for us a few pear drops and a sherbet lemon. We were lined up on the sofa to benefit from an earnest, born again sermon.

We left, what seemed like hours but was probably only minutes later, our fists filled with leaflets that documented in graphic detail the error of our Pagan ways.

And then there are the house-sharers two doors down who sit, lights blazing and curtains open, blatantly watching telly and ignoring the plaintive knocking of our indignant offspring.

“Why aren’t they answering us, Mummy?” wails our cherubic daughter, her eyes blackened with layers of face paint that a Goth would consider OTT.

“What’s their problem?” complains our son, whose skeleton outfit is shaking with the righteous rage of the primary school know-it-all, “we only want a few sweets.”

Last year we decided to make a bit more of Bonfire night, in an effort to take them out of their Haribo comfort zone. So we trooped off to sample a fully catered, pub-based, Guy Fawkes experience.

The food, when we reached it, was good.
The beer, when Dad had queued for it, was refreshing.
The bonfire, once the wrong direction of wind ruled out a massive blaze next to the nearby housing estate, was small.
But the fireworks were “awesome” said son, and “loud” said daughter, who borrowed a friend’s ear muffs.

“So what would make bonfire night as good as Hallowe’en?” I ask them.

“Scarecrows flying up into the sky strapped to whizzing rockets,” says our imaginative, if slightly surreal, daughter.

“Sweets,” says her brother.

Guy Fawkes – one
Haribo – a hundred and one

So what do we do? Ban Trick or Treating in an effort to reclaim British history?
Send home-made effigies skywards to satisfy the fantasies of an eight-year old?

I guess we’ll just have to see which way the wind’s blowing.

It was nearly a year ago that Ben (now ten) had his first brush with childhood romance.
Her name was Sandra and she’s in his class.

It lasted a few weeks, the summer holidays intervened and on their return to school it was all over.

“She can’t play football,” was Ben’s verdict.

Well she must have been practising her ball skills in the meantime, as he’s come over all Charlotte Harvey-faced again and every night at bedtime I get to hear how they sat next to each in Art class and drew the same grapefruit.

Or how they played on Club Penguin and kept popping hearts up to each other while sitting, Emperor-like, together on a sofa in the coffee bar.

He brushes his hair carefully each morning and is easily persuaded to wash.
With soap.

He is even being realistic about the whole relationship thing.

“She’ll probably dump me soon,” he says, smiling. “Last time I dumped her before she could dump me. But she might be first this time.”

I now have to listen to tales of giggly chats over the watercolours, while insisting he continues with Cycling Proficiency training and piano lessons when he’d rather be playing footie with Sandra after school.

And he’s starting to ask me awkward questions. Not of the much-missed “What’s behind the sky?” variety.
But more like the “When did you first snog a boy?” and “Have you ever been drunk?” type.

In case you’re interested my answers were “I was older than you are now” (with a bit of a harumph in my voice) and “Ye-es but not very”.

If I were being brutally honest I could have said “12″ and just plain “Yes.”

But all the experts say we should answer their questions honestly, with just enough information for their age. And I think that just about does it.
For now.

I thought it was time to check how savvy my children are about staying safe online.

They don’t really use the computer to talk to their friends yet, but they do play on Club Penguin, which has moderated chat rooms and is probably a good introduction to the 21st century world of digital connections.

For months after Ben had started chattering about this great new game he’d found, I didn’t even realise there were other, real people involved.
I was vaguely aware that there were a lot of strangely dressed little penguins scuttling about on-screen with brightly coloured, hairy bobbles following behind them.
But that was as far as it went.

Then one day Hannah mentioned that all the penguins in the room she was in suddenly disappeared when the moderator turned up to tell someone off.

Moderator?
I discovered that there were, in fact, other children operating other penguins, and that they could all select pre-determined messages to send to each other.

Things like “Hi” and “Wanna be friends?”

I discovered that Hannah has 80 buddies - far more than I have on Facebook.

She has some advice for me -
“I just go around asking people, Do you want to be my buddy? Do you want to be my buddy? And they do.”

Simple, when you’re 8.

So today, after Ben tells me he and some school friends have arranged to meet up on-line at 6.30pm in a pre-determined cafe on a particular Club Penguin server, I casually say -

“You do know not to give out your real name and address and phone number on line don’t you?”
“Why?” asks Hannah.

“Don’t they talk to you about things like that at school?”
“No,” says Ben.

“Well, when you’re on-line the people you’re talking to might not really be who they say they are. They might be…” I struggle to find a way to describe the terrifying possibilities they don’t yet know exist… “bad people, bullies.”

“Well I don’t see how they can bully me if they’re not even in the same room as me,” says sensible Hannah.

On one of my many trips in and out of the room containing the computer, I find Ben typing a message.

“What’s that about?” I ask.
“It’s a question for Aunt Arctic,” he replies.

He’s trying to get a letter published in the Club Penguin Times, and has drafted something along the lines of -
“Dear Aunt Arctic, I’m really worried that my friend keeps giving out his name and password. I’ve told him not to, but he says not to fuss. I’m really worried and I don’t know what to do.”

When I show concern that one of his friends is doing this, he says,
“I’m not really worried, I just thought it would be a good way of getting a question printed in the paper.”

When they’re in bed, and Hannah has reassured me that she hasn’t met any burglars online, I can’t resist sneaking onto the site to have a look around.

It’s late, and Town seems to have been taken over by eco-warriers and disco-divas, all inviting each other to parties in their igloos and to “Turn green if you support Earth”.

I’m masquerading as Ben (who foolishly told me his name and password) and am trying my best not to lose him any cash. This means I can’t accept invitations to play games with anyone, as my ineptitude would surely mean losing some of the coins he has amassed in previous contests.

My constant refusals may give him a reputation for rudeness, but at least he will be able to buy food for his puffles (the brightly-coloured hairy bobbles that follow the penguins about) tomorrow after school.

I end up inadvertently interacting with someone, by inviting them for a coffee.
I follow them inside the cafe, but once there I can’t recognise which penguin I’ve invited.
I spend a few minutes whirling around, wondering who I’m supposed to be sitting next to.

When I notice a penguin sitting on its own, its face to the wall with a sulky-faced emoticon hovering overhead, I waddle across to face the music.

But as I haven’t yet found a way to say anything other than the pre-set “Hi” “Howdy” and “Hey There” options, I’m a bit stuck for conversation.
So my new friend gets bored and wanders away.

Time I did the same, before Ben is ostracised by all right-thinking penguins.

I had to take Ben to work a few weeks ago. It was just for an hour in between clashing delivery timetables - delivery of children to after-school activities, not babies into the world.

I know 9 isn’t 2, and his tantrum, plate-throwing days are (mostly) over. But he can be unpredictable, and he is always persistent. So I wasn’t sure how disruptive he’d be for the 4 colleagues with whom I share an office.

Reader, I was stunned.
I think I will take him to work with me every time I want a bit of peace.

He sat at the table next to me, reading his comic, looking up through his over-long surfer-dude fringe, too intimidated to say more than “Hello” “Yes” and “No”.

It was only afterwards that I realised he’d been earwigging intently the whole time.

“Do you chat all day at work?”
“You swore.”
“You’re so bossy.”

I stand, justly accused of all three offences.
But at least he’s got some idea of what I do. I chat, swear and am a bit (only a bit, mind) bossy.

I’ve been in this job for more than a year now, and my mother’s still asking me - “What is it you do, actually?”

My daughter doesn’t need to ask. Apparently I sit at a computer all day, playing games.

She used to be much more au fait with my world of work.
As a toddler she made regular appearances at the BBC, whenever her father’s work commitments stopped him from fetching her from nursery on his appointed days.

She’d sit next to me, enjoying the delights of a swivel chair, munching whatever chocolate-based substance I could buy from the shop next door, imperiously demanding attention, drinks and access to every knob within reach.

“Don’t touch that,” was my main response to her incessant chatter, as I tried to update the headlines, dial up the next interviewee and generally produce a live, drivetime, radio programme.

She’s older and wiser now, but she’s still not sure what my boss does.

“Does he sit at his desk eating sandwiches?” she asks.

“Does he put his feet up on the desk and have his feet shaved and his legs waxed?” she continues, somewhat bizarrely.

“He makes decisions,” I say.

“That’s easy,” she replies, with the confidence of a just-8-year old who recently told me her friend lives on an estatement.
“I can do that. I’ve decided not to go to school tomorrow.”

She’s got a lot to learn.

What do Man of the Match, Hundred Club and Limited Edition have in common?

They’re the only answer I ever get these days to questions like -

“How was school today?”
“What did you do for lunch play today?”
“What did you choose for Golden Time this afternoon?”

Match Attax cards seemed quite innocuous when Ben first mentioned them. Blog Fodder reassured my nagging misgivings with persuasive arguments like -

“They have to swap cards, so they learn to negotiate; they talk to each other about the players, so they’re communicating; the cards are sport-related, so they might one day do the thing they’re talking about…”

I have spent time trying to learn my John Terrys from my Joe Coles, and I was beginning to have limited success. But then I had to move on to names like Fabregas and Anelka.

Not only do I have to remember them, I’m cruelly mocked if I don’t know which one is Limited Edition and which is Man of the Match.

“And is a Man of the Match a Hundred Club as well, or not?” I ask, keen to show an interest in my son’s new hobby.

“Mu-um, if he’s as good as (insert one of many names I never quite get) then of course he’s going to be a Hundred Club.”
And this explanation is generally followed by a silent but withering look, before Ben turns to his father - now basking in the glow of an admiring son who likes football.

I suppose it was inevitable that at some point my little boy would abandon his Mum in favour of his football-cricket-rugby-anything-with-a-ball-crazy Dad. But did it have to be while he was still living in the same house as me?

When I was growing up Grandstand was sacrosanct on Saturday afternoons. Ever since, I have always associated the theme tune with having to sit quietly “or go and play outside, Grandstand’s on.”
I was determined not to live with a sports nut, and for many years I managed it. In fact I achieved this one small ambition with all my boyfriends - except the one I decided to settle down and have children with.

This may add weight to the theories of those who claim we all seek out the familiarity of childhood relationships when picking a life partner.
But what it means for me is that Saturday afternoons are again a no-go area.

Grandstand may have sprinted to a happy commentary box in the sky, but sport still colonises our low-tech, 4-TV-channel house. And I have to be out, or in another room if I am to avoid two people - one large and one small - yelling at the telly and comparing notes on the progress of their favourite teams.

My one consolation is the fast-approaching end of the football season. This will see off the Saturday night version of Blog Fodder when his team has lost (make that most Saturday nights), and it will also see the end of this season’s Match Attax.

You’d think this would also mean the end of my football education.
But no.
Ben the football fan has now given way to Ben the entrepreneur.

He is insisting that I help him to sell each card, one at a time, on e-bay.

So I now spend my evenings typing names like Fabregas and Anelka, together with detailed descriptions of their match status, rarity and mint condition.

There must be a reward waiting somewhere - even for a non-believer.

What links Abraham Lincoln, Charles Darwin and Blog Fodder?

It’s not another lateral thinking puzzle, it is a real question with a truthful answer.

They were all born on the 12th of February - exactly 200 years ago in the case of two of them. The one that wasn’t born quite so long ago has been ruminating on Darwin’s legacy…

I think I’ve found the fundamental flaw at the heart of evolutionism. It’s not rocket science. Well, obviously.

No, I mean, it doesn’t take a genius to work out where Darwin got it so completely and utterly wrong.

In the introduction to On the Origin of Species he maintains that “any being, if it vary however slightly in any manner profitable to itself, under the complex and sometimes varying conditions of life, will have a better chance of surviving, and thus be naturally selected”.

If this is true, then surely the reverse is also true - and anyone born with the incredibly debilitating stupid gene, which so adversely affects creationists, would naturally be at a huge disadvantage.

So if Darwin’s theory were correct, then over the course of time the stupid gene would be bred out and those that believe in the literal truth of the Bible would not survive.

But they do, and worse, they seem to be flourishing.

Clearly Darwin was barking up the wrong evolutionary tree.

Footnote from Beta Mum -
Or, the stupid gene, far from being a disadvantage, actually helps those affected by it live their allotted span in a contented bovine state, oblivious to the brutal world around them - and thus they thrive.

Where do I start?
I haven’t even mentioned the rats yet, and I can only blame the children for them if I use the guinea pigs as an intermediary.

First - the nits.
I noticed them when we got back from Christmas holidays, and I immediately set to work on Hannah’s head with my trusty Nitty Gritty comb.

I don’t normally recommend products, but this is by far the best nit comb I’ve used, and I’ve tried a few.
a) It doesn’t hurt as much as the plastic ones (I could tell by a drop in the volume of whimpering)
b) It picks up the eggs as well as the crawlers
c) It’s got a great name

So as the basin of water filled with little specks of itchiness, Ben hovered in the background awaiting his turn and taunting his sister -
“Look, there’s another one, you’ve got loads, you’re infested.”

That was at the beginning of January.
It hasn’t escaped my notice that it is now the beginning of February, and we are still not free of the little critters.

At least, we have been free of them a couple of times, but they keep returning.

It makes me want to march into school with a bag of Nitty Gritty combs shouting -

“Will you comb your kids’ hair. Here, take one of these, they work. It involves a minimum of effort. Just once a week and you can save your offspring and mine from scratching - forever.”

But of course I can’t do that. And neither can the teachers. We just have to carry on combing and plaiting and groaning and scratching.

Ben has escaped the latest thrice weekly programme of scraping, presumably because he is always a kick’s length away from his nearest playmate, and his break-time involves no head-to-head exchange of secrets and whispers.

Poor Hannah has born the brunt of it, and she’s fed up of having her hair in plaits every day.

And then there are the worms.

At least we’re not on holiday in France. I once had to mime the condition to a bemused pharmacist in front of a queue of immaculately dressed French people.

Here, the lady in Boots could at least understand the terminology. So that should be sorted - for now.

The verruca was due to be zapped at bedtime - until I read the packaging.

“The freezing procedure will cause a painful, aching or stinging sensation that can take a few hours to fade”
Not an auspicious addition to the bedtime routine.
So that’s been delayed until the morning, if there’s time for an extra task in our daily parade of breakfast duties.

And what of the rats?
I saw one in the garden the other day. I thought I may have imagined it, but then I spotted a nest of holes next to the heating oil tank. They look like rabbit holes, but smaller. The size of rats.

I’ve delegated the problem to Blog Fodder.
He has been to the garden centre in record time and returned triumphant with something called Rat Killer, which “targets and kills rodents humanely” and is “free from poisonous chemicals”.

Presumably it’s not free from chemicals that are poisonous to rats, but perhaps it means we can rest easy when the children go out to dig in the mud.

And how can we possibly blame the children for these uninvited new pets?
Well apparently rats like to set up home near a source of rodent food, and our back garden contains a plentiful supply of abandoned guinea pig chowder, carelessly strewn ‘twixt shed and cage on its way to sustain Phoebe and Sandy.

And why do we have guinea pigs in the garden? Because we have children.

Ergo - the rats are here because of the children.

I rest my case.

I’m a fan of lateral thinking puzzles, and now my children like them too.
You know the kind of thing - a man, a puddle of water and a measuring tape.

The children were reading them out to each other, when Ben was offered this little gem…

A man and his son are in a car crash. The father is killed and the child is taken to hospital gravely injured.
When he gets there, the surgeon says, ‘I can’t operate on this boy - for he is my son!!!’
How can this possibly be?

If you don’t know the answer, stop and think.

If you do…

I remember a time when I found this a tough one to answer.
But Ben (who’s ten) said -

“The dad’s dead, so the surgeon must be his mum. What’s so hard about that?”

What a star, unsullied by the preconceptions of a previous generation.

It seems my hard work and indoctrination has had some impact since the day he said on the way to school -
“But a woman can’t be prime minister.”