Keir Royale

One of my pet hates is the use of the word “haitch” when what the speaker means is “aitch”.

Apologies to those of you who put an “aitch” at the front of the letter “aitch”, but you’re adding a letter that is patently not there.

And now Ben has started doing it.

“All my friends say it like that,” he explains.

“Well they’re wrong,” I say, “and you don’t have to copy them.”

“But I want to be like them.”

Oh dear. Nine years old and a peer-following sheep already.

He’s also started on about wanting a mobile phone, a telly in his room and a laptop of his own which his sister isn’t allowed to use.

Jersey is a more affluent place than Plymouth, and most of his classmates seem to have all these things. Unless they’re fibbing and Ben believes them.

But whether they’re pre-teen fantasists or have each got a multi-media centre in their bedroom, Ben’s having none of these things at the age of nine.

I can’t even imagine who he’d call on his mobile.
His friends?
They spend all the hours between school and tea-time out on their bikes.
They’d have to position themselves at two different ends of the school field in order not to hear each other without the aid of a phone.

His family?
Why would he need to phone us when we’re trying to train him to come home when he’s told to come home, rather than having the option of calling to ask if he can have “just another ten minutes”?

We do need more than one PC though.
Our laptop has just given up the ghost, and my plan is to get myself a spanking new piece of technology and leave the children to share this old dinosaur.
I bought it online while in the early stages of labour with Hannah, and she’s now 7, which in computer terms must make it a relic of a former age.

It freezes regularly and chunters away to itself, happily ignoring all the frantic keyboard commands that it should actually DO something.

But a laptop of his own, kept in his bedroom, is not on Ben’s cards.

We’re having to get used to being the poor relations of everyone we meet here, and I can see it’s going to prompt some increasingly heartfelt arguments between us and the children.

But pronouncing words correctly is free and easy: at least it was, when we were their main focus.

It’s inevitable that we will eventually drop down the pecking order in our children’s hierarchy of people to please.

I just thought we had a few more years yet.

Have you ever struggled to breastfeed a baby while playing football with your toddler… on holiday?

Do you know how many renditions of “Row, Row, Row Your Boat” it takes for you to pull the car to the side of the road and weep?

Or have you wondered, like me, whether it’s actually worth leaving the kitchen before your sproglets reach voting age?

I think we’ve all been there, or at least we’ve left the house intending to get there but have given up half way.

How to Fit a Car Seat on a Camel is a compilation of many such tales, one of which is from me.

It’s rather long for a blog post, so here is an excerpt from my Car Seat contribution.

I’ve always regretted both my parents being English speakers.

How easy it would have been to grow up bilingual if one of them had had the foresight to marry a foreigner.
How many career opportunities it would have opened up to be fluent in one or more extra languages.
I could be working in Brussels right now, simultaneously translating all those important banana shaped edicts for the European Union.

It’s too late for me to achieve true multi-lingual status, but not for my children. Unfortunately I too have opted for a plain old English speaking father for them, and the powers that be in the UK education system have only just decided it’d be a good idea to teach foreign languages to pupils from the age of seven rather than eleven. By the time they start drilling French verbs into the unwilling little brains of British primary school children in 2010, our two will be eleven and nine, far too old to reach fluency this side of emigration.

We need to take linguistic action now, before they reach the “it’s too embarrassing to talk funny” stage. So we decide on a visit to France for the summer. Perhaps if we like it there we can go the whole hog; sell up, move abroad, live like kings on a pauper’s wage, and cram a few more European languages into their ethnocentric heads before their learning capacity diminishes with age.

Just how unimpressed they would be with the idea we couldn’t have guessed, until we set off across the English Channel to Brittany.

We did it on the cheap, using a ferry company we’d never heard of, which obviously balances its books by charging peanuts and providing endless rows of thinly padded, plastic seats instead of proper cabins.

The children enjoyed bedding down in sleeping bags between the rows, but we spend an excruciating night on camping mats in a dingy lounge with twenty or so other people all suffering the same six hours of misery, one of whom had the worst case of sleep apnoea I’d ever heard.

He sloped off early in the morning, leaving the rest of us to muse on the high decibel snoring we’d endured, without respite, all night. We decided, too late for the return journey alas, that cutting back on ferry fares was not worth a night of hell and a subsequent day with our minds wreathed in the fog of sleep deprivation.

The small Breton village we chose scored a big hit with the children. Maybe it was the extra week they had off school – we’d snuck them out early to take advantage of the cheaper term-time ferry fares - or maybe it was the rented house with its enormous garden featuring trees and grass, as opposed to our back yard at home, which boasts paving stones and potted plants and is just big enough for a game of Swingball.

Whatever the reason for their exhilaration, it gave us hope that in just a few days both kids would be conversing with local villagers and playing the French equivalent of tag between the apple trees.

We started our language familiarity campaign by taking them to the playground in the nearest town, Dol de Bretagne, which was filled with happy, laughing youngsters in immaculate matching gear unsullied by mud or ketchup. Still, kids don’t notice things like that, we thought, they’ll soon be playing together despite the pristine cleanliness of the indigenous population.

But every time a friendly French child approached, speaking, horror of horrors, French, our two ran to us in confusion. Five year old Hannah was appalled, despite two expensive terms of after school Club Français:

“Mummy, he spoke French to me and even when I spoke to him in English he carried on talking to me in French. I hate him.”

A bit of local sightseeing didn’t appease their disgust in this unfathomable language. We visited the fairytale Combourg Castle, childhood home of Chateaubriand, a man who, as well as having a steak designed for him, seems to have spent a little bit of time in every town in Brittany, perhaps foreseeing how he could help the tourism industry for centuries to come.

As we trailed round after the guide, consulting the garbled written English translation and trying to whisper it into our children’s suddenly deaf ears, seven-year old Ben complained loudly,
“This is boring. Why is she speaking French all the time? Where are the dungeons?”

It must be said that compared to the multi-lingual, child-friendly audio guides provided by that glorious British institution, the National Trust, Combourg’s lacklustre guide was a rather basic attempt to interpret the history of this lovely chateau.

The children perked up when they saw the cat though. Not a living, breathing moggy that wound itself around their legs in ingratiating feline fashion, but a skeletal, screeching mummified cat which had been walled up alive, thousands of years before, to ward off evil spirits.

It was discovered during renovations and put on display in a glass case, redolent of the dusty museums of my childhood. It confirmed how different attitudes to historic interpretation are in France, and I worried that animal-loving Hannah would be forever traumatised by the mangy apparition. But she was fascinated and edged ever closer to the thing, not quite believing it was dead.

The one French expression the children did master on holiday, despite themselves and with a perfect French accent, was Vide Grenier. Its literal meaning, according to Babel Fish, is Vacuum the Attic, but in Blighty we know it better as the car boot sale, and we came across them everywhere; on the beach, in ancient village squares and, a special treat, a specifically child-orientated sale in Cancale, just twenty miles from our house.

Ben and Hannah added exponentially to their cache of cheap plastic junk, while their Dad became familiar with Brittany’s agricultural tools from the last couple of centuries. It seems the Bretons have had enough of them, so they offload them onto gullible Brits during the holiday season. Mike is now waxing lyrical to anyone who’ll listen about a rusty old chisel type thing that he’s been using to gouge crumbly plaster from our walls.

Despite the minor irritation to our children that the people in France persisted in speaking French, we enjoyed the holiday so much that we started considering a move to Brittany. We huddled outside estate agents’ windows and almost tiptoed into one of their offices, but I saw sense at the last minute and dragged Mike away to the nearest café.

“We could buy a derelict farmhouse and renovate it,” he said, breathless at what you can buy for the price of our Victorian terraced house, “the children would become bi-lingual, we could grow our own veg…”

Then Ben looked up from the steaming hot chocolate he was spooning into his mouth and said,

“I will only move to France if Louis and Silas come with me and if everyone in France speaks English.”

A Conversation with Hannah (6)

Hannah – When I die I’m going to come alive again after ten seconds, and it’ll be a happy life. This is my horrid life.
I’ll be a princess, and I’ll live in a mansion, and I’ll have twenty dogs and five horses.
Then I’ll come alive again after I die, and I’ll have a happy life, then a sad life, than a happy life, sad life, happy life, sad life.

Me – Do you know what that’s called?

Hannah – No.

Me – Re-incarnation, and the people who believe in it think that sometimes they come back to life as a beetle or a tiger.

Hannah – Well I won’t, I’ll be a girl every time.

A Conversation with Ben (8)

Ben – (at bedtime) I’ve got a funny feeling in my tummy and I don’t know what it means.

Me – Is it a feeling that says you need a Mummy cuddle?

Ben – I don’t know.

Me – Shall we try it?

Ben – Yes. (we do)
Sometimes when you leave me in bed to go to sleep I feel so sad I want to cry. One time I did cry.

Me – Why didn’t you tell me?

Ben – I did, but not until the morning and there wasn’t much you could do about it then.

Me – Shall I leave the door open so you can call down to me if you start to cry this time? Then I can come back and give you another cuddle.

Ben – Yes

(So I did, and he didn’t call)

In which Blog Fodder goes all misty eyed over his anorak days of yore…

Our son reminded us at breakfast that there are only 32 weeks until Christmas.
I think he’s trying to soften us up to buy him an iPhone.
He’s lusted after one ever since his uncle came to stay and demonstrated its amazing range of gadgetry.

He’ll be lucky.
We’re talking about a boy who’s lost two school jumpers, many pieces of homework, trainers, two Swiss army knives, a watch and a wallet containing ten euros which he was using as a football, in the absence of an actual football.

So no iPhone.
In fact, no phone of any description.
And that’s not the only thing he’ll be missing this Christmas.

For a start there are no open fire places in the house we’re renting, so there’s no way in for the big man in red.

We won’t be going on the annual Santa Special either, as there are no trains in Jersey, let alone steam locomotives.

Which raises another major issue.
Ben won’t be able to indulge, like his Dad, in the delights of train-spotting.

I remember only too vividly the happy days spent after school at Lincoln Central station, praying fervently for a Streak to come whistling through (that’s one of the A4 class of engines to which the record-breaking Mallard belonged).

Instead all we ever got were the old warhorse B1s with exotic names like Wildebeeste and Hartebeeste chugging backwards and forwards.

I was allowed to spent days on the platforms at Retford and Newark railway stations, noting down the numbers of trains as they thundered through on the east coast main line.
All I had for company was my duffel-bag containing sandwiches wrapped in greaseproof paper and a bottle of pop.

Oh, and my bible – the Ian Allan compendium of train numbers.
Every train spotted was matched by its number being underlined in the handbook.
Namers – trains with title-plates like “Sir Nigel Gresley” or the “Lancashire Fusilier” - were especially prized.

But best of all were those featured in photographs in the book – spot one of those and you could underline the picture.

My interest waned as the steam age gave way to diesel’s deadly dull uniformity.
Though I may have grown up at roughly the same time!

Even if there were still trains in Jersey I don’t suppose children would be allowed to hang around on railway stations. And 21st century kids have better things to do, mainly involving some form of screen.
I wonder if the software developers have come up with a virtual train-spotting game yet.

In the absence of trains, I’ve come up with a new way to indulge my collecting gene.

The island has a unique number-plate system – do you remember Jim Bergerac’s burgundy red vintage Triumph Roadster with the number J1610?
You’d be hard-pressed to recall the numbers of the cars Inspector Barnaby drives in Midsomer Murders.

Well, I’ve decided to try and spot the number-plates from the island’s first hundred cars, J1 – J100.
It’s not easy.
So far I’ve bagged just five – the pride of place going to one I spotted in a car park near St Malo.

Like their UK counterparts Jersey’s low number plates are highly prized so the chances are that most are still on the road – though probably parked in the drives of the island’s more expensive homes.

There’s no Ian Allen book to help me these days.

Chancing upon a new number is somehow deeply satisfying, but I fear the rest of the family think its yet another symptom of my advancing years, another small madness to be indulged because it’s relatively harmless, and cheap.

Ben, for one, isn’t going to be distracted from his quest for the ultimate number-cruncher, the iPhone.
Although by the time he’s earned enough to buy one, it will have been superseded by something we can’t even begin to imagine.

Nearly a year ago, my beloved son caused me a small financial loss, when he used Amazon’s one-click service to order a book - about quilting.

It was the subject of the book, when it arrived unexpectedly, that alerted me to the possibility that someone had been clicking where they shouldn’t have.

He fessed up, I sent it back and was refunded the cash - minus postage and packing.
I disabled one-click to avoid future mishaps.

Now though, with the wisdom of age, his wanton clicking has managed to sign us up for a service which installed insidiously misleading software on my computer.
A menacing little mole now pops up all the time telling me I owe them £29.99.

A bargain.
Nearly thirty quid for a few ill-advised clicks of the mouse by a nine year old who is too young to have legally signed up for the service in the first place.

When I first noticed the nasty little unremovable icon, I asked him if he’d signed up for something.

“No,” he said, looking a little too innocent for comfort.

As the days passed and the uninstall progamme didn’t work, I asked again.

In the end I made my way, via Platte’s indestructible icon, to a website, and found a phone number.

Before calling what I assumed would be a premium rate service, I asked him again to just tell me if he’d signed up for a film service.

He denied it and denied it and then left the room and shut himself away upstairs while I argued with a man in the British Virgin Islands about his insistent pop-ups.

After I’d spent 12 minutes on the phone - at a cost described by the unflappable Abdul as national rates, although whose national rates he omitted to mention - Ben came into the room crying…

“I did sign up for something Mummy. I just wanted to watch some DVDs. I didn’t say yes to any downloads.”

We’d already had the download discussion. Unfortunately I hadn’t broached the no signing up for things rule.

“And anyway,” he continued, “I couldn’t watch any films. It wouldn’t let me.”

So now he’s said he’s very sorry and I should take the money out of his bank account, which is far healthier than mine.

But I’m loathe to give money to this bunch who’ve been the subject of numerous discussion threads and reports to the OFT and Trading Standards.

I’m not techno-savvy enough to remove the bloody thing, so if my computer is destroyed by the Trojan Horse, I may be away some time…

Jersey apparently has the third highest income per head of population in the world, but Beta Mum and I are doing our bit to redress the balance.

Moving here has thrust us into a comparatively low income bracket, which is not easy in a world without the likes of Tesco or Sainsbury.

For instance:

A report in 2004 looked at comparative food prices in Jersey and the UK.
It found that average meat prices were 22% higher in Jersey, vegetables 15% and fruit 20% higher, a sliced white loaf cost on average 70% more and a pint of milk 60% more.

But fear not.
Jersey’s Have-Nots – and there are plenty of them – do have the advantage of several Pound Shops dotted round the island.
At least they will until next month, when they become £1.03 Shops.

That’s because Jersey is about to introduce its own form of VAT.

It’s called GST (Goods and Services Tax) and will be introduced at a rate of 3%.
The Pound Shops say they can’t absorb the extra cost because their margins are so tight.

The introduction of GST has not gone down well in the island.

No-one wants to pay more tax.
And the politics of taxation means there are always other options that some see as more equitable.

There’s also the lingering fear - based on the UK’s experience - that any kind of economic turmoil will give the government the easy option of raising the 3% to increase tax revenue.

Jersey’s M&S franchise already adds an extra 5% to food prices at the till - just for making the effort to get the stuff across the Channel and onto the shelves while it’s still fresh.

Perhaps the Pound Shop would do well to remind Marks and Spencers of its humble origins on a market stall in Leeds, where Michael Marks’ slogan was -

“Don’t ask the price, it’s a penny.”

Jersey’s 21st century equivalent - “Don’t ask the Price, it’s a Pound and Thruppence” doesn’t have quite the same ring to it.

In which Blog Fodder buys useless tat… at least it was cheap.

One of the great things about spending the day at home is all those antique programmes you get to watch - Flog It, Bargain Hunt etc.
If only I had the time …

I did manage to do the next best thing though - visit a real auction and try to spend real money.

In Jersey normal standards don’t apply.
Where else can you buy a Porsche for £150? Only 35,000 miles on the clock as well.

Mind you it was more than 30 years old which tells you something about motoring on an island nine miles by five miles, where the maximum speed limit is 40mph.

And how about the upright piano which didn’t find a bidder, even at £5, despite the fact that it was nicely in tune? If only we hadn’t lugged ours with us, all the way across the Channel.
The crazy thing was the matching piano stool made £30.

But bags of potatoes were hitting record prices - £8 a time, despite the fact none of them were Jersey Royals.

I did try to buy a couple of nice prints featuring local scenes, but I was out of luck.
Guess who outbid me. Yup, it was Lovejoy. Though not the Ian McShane version, this was Jersey’s own loveable rogue.

His antique shop in St Aubin’s Bay suffered at the hands of the recent storms, though not quite to the same extent as reported by the local newspaper.

The article said his shop had been overwhelmed by five feet of flood water. Luckily it was only five inches.

Either way, despite the remorseless progress towards metrication it seems that floodwater will always come in Imperial measures, which seems only right for an act of God - although presumably He still uses palms and cubits.

Strictly speaking, if we’re talking liquid measures, the biblical unit is a homer – which, according to the American Biblical Society, is equivalent to 10 baths.

One of the nice things about coming to Jersey is that you can pay for your auction items in nice crisp one pound notes. Though they can give you a false sense of security – they’re easily mistaken for UK fivers, by me, not by canny retailers.

I did manage to part with some of my Jersey notes - not to be confused with the Jersey Pound which according to Wikipedia is

an obsolete unit of mass used on the island from the 14th to the 19th century, and was equivalent to about 7,561 grains

I picked up a bakelite phone which doesn’t work, two scooters that are too small for the children and a gilt-framed mirror which despite its age is distressingly honest.

Not such a success with Beta Mum as last week’s rusty tandem.

Where’s David Dickinson when you need him?
But then again I’m not really interested in the bronze age.

I’m amazed at how quickly children forget things – things we used to do every day.

The other day Hannah asked me what my full name was. I told her.
And then I thought of something.

“Don’t you remember the song I used to sing you, with all of our names in it?
You used to ask me every day – sing all of us Mummy.”

A blank stare.
A shrug.

“No.”

“Don’t you remember it at all?”

“No-o,” she repeated, this time with Attitude.

So I sang it again, at the tea table.
Ben grinned, open-mouthed and slightly incredulous.
Mike looked a little uncomfortable.

“Oh,” said Hannah, “I don’t think I remember it.”

“But you asked for it. Every day. And you both loved it.” I am amazed and a little sad.

“I remember it Mummy,” Ben tries out the rarely attempted role of peace-maker.

“And I used to sing Daisy Daisy, in the car when Hannah was a baby to stop her from crying.”

“Yeah, her ears probably hurt too much for her to cry,” quips Ben.

It’s pushing the limits of cognitive ability to expect a baby and a two-year old to remember a song that was last popular in the music hall youth of their great grandmother.
But there’s another one they’ve forgotten. A more recent little moment that was repeated ad nauseam.

“What about all the times, every single tea-time, when Ben asked for ketchup and Hannah would say, I don’t like sauce, do I Mummy?
Every day, without fail.”

More blank stares.

Sometimes I wonder why we didn’t just sit in the kitchen for the first four years of their lives.
It would have been a lot easier. They don’t seem to remember any of the fantastic, fun, exciting, mundane, everyday stuff that made up their little lives back then.

Was there any point taking them to castles, National Trust gardens, beaches, museums, parks, moors, rivers, relatives’ houses, holidays, gymtots, swimming pools, NCT come-round-and-moan-about-their-sleeping-habits-while-spilling-coffee mornings?
(Well in the last case, it was more for me than for them, but they did get to sit next to other babies, stare thoughtfully into space and try to poke each other’s eyes.)

Would they be different people now if they hadn’t been to Cornwall, Wales, London, Brighton, Lincolnshire, Kent, Gloucestershire, Surrey, three of the five Channel Islands, Spain, France, Lapland…

Not all these trips were in one year, and many were thanks to relatives or the NCT House Swap Register.

But there was a time, probably every summer up to the ages of 4 and 6, when I wondered why we made all that effort to get the four of us into a car and away to another place that didn’t have all the comforts of home, just to try to re-live those glorious pre-child holidays we remembered and still thought we could enjoy.

And now, it seems I was right to question the effort involved. They don’t even remember most of it.

There is one little leitmotif they do both remember, although I think it may be due to repeated post-event story telling by me rather than their own memories.

When Hannah was 2 and Ben was 4, he went through a stage of continually saying,

“Mummy?”

“Yes,” I replied dutifully. Every time.

“Nothing,” he would chortle.

Hannah would try her best to copy this hilarious exchange, and we’d end up with a grinning toddler giggling and yelling,

“Mummy nuffin! Mummy nuffin!”

To me it feels like just last week, but it was more than half a lifetime ago for them.

No wonder they don’t remember.
Their minds are too cluttered with today’s obsessions: nintendos and ballet and football and Cubs and friends and school and sleepovers and Easter eggs and puppies and presents…

In which Formerly Blog Fodder gets very cross, following attempts to cross the Channel in high winds and rough seas, eager to reach the welcoming arms of his family.

Do you remember those TV ads featuring “That Condor Moment”?

The first whiff of tobacco transported the deluded smoker into a state of blissful serenity.

These days any mention of That Condor Moment re-awakens in me the sickening sound of yet another tannoy announcement along the lines of…

“Condor Ferries regret to announce… “ either an interminable delay or the cancellation of yet another service to France.

Last weekend I was trying to get to St Malo, a mere 40 mile hop from Jersey, for the Easter break.
My journey started on Thursday, but I didn’t arrive until late on Saturday night.

In between there were e-mails, news stories, last minute swaps from one ferry company to another, followed by delays aplenty, variously blamed on the weather and “operational reasons”.

To be fair, the weather was foul - high tides, rough seas and unseasonably low temperatures.

But that doesn’t stop my main memory of the Easter break featuring St Helier’s ferry terminal – a vast and draughty tin shed filled with an anxious throng of bewildered would-be travellers, going nowhere fast.

Heathrow’s Terminal One doesn’t seem such a bad place after all. At least there are shops there.

And it wasn’t just Condor that gave me a headache.
My woes started with a booking made by Beta Mum with the (cheaper) rival ferry company, HD Ferries.

After months of careful preparation for the new season, they had to cancel their inaugural crossing last Thursday because of the non-arrival of a key engine part.

To me, “lost in the post” has a similar ring to “the dog ate my homework”. But perhaps I’ve just been around the block a few too many times.

Friday’s crossing was also abandoned – stormy weather having prevented vital safety checks as well as the journey from Southampton.

So I switched to Condor, the allegedly more reliable but definitely more expensive alternative.

Despite the outlay of extra cash, the frustrations continued unabated.
Their late Friday crossing was also jettisoned because of the weather. I was switched to an early Saturday boat requiring me to be back at the terminal at 7.30am.

I arrived, spent four hours reading the paper and loitering without intent, only to leave the terminal on foot after a string of Condor moments.

The wrong kind of weather was cited again, although the word on the street was that the ferry had been holed while negotiating St Malo harbour - a rumour later confirmed by local media.

Dragged back to the ferry terminal at 6.30 on Saturday evening a ferry finally left Jersey one and a half hours later.

This was a replacement vessel that made very slow headway. A traditional ferry rather than a high speed catamaran, which took more than twice as long as the advertised service - just to add to my terminal frustration.

It was enough to drive a man to drink.
So once on board and safely at sea, I went to the bar:

“A pint of lager please.”

“Sorry, sir, we’re out of draught lager”.

I sighed.

“How about a coffee?”

“Err, the machine’s not working.”

How I needed a Condor moment.

Do those cars look safe to you?

We’re booked onto this ferry, for an Easter weekend en France.
We booked for Thursday evening, straight from work.

But I got a call yesterday - from HD Ferries.

Having been out of service since November last year, and having advertised their summer timetable as starting on Thursday, they called to tell me the sailing has been cancelled.

This is the company whose ferry became a laughing stock last summer.

It just couldn’t seem to negotiate a harbour, particularly one with other boats in it, without scraping the odd hull on its way out.

But the company has had 4 months to sort itself out.
There have been training programmes, engine repairs, licence agreements, cheap offers…

And yes, we were lulled into a “how bad can it be this time? Surely they’ve got their act together now” sense of security.

So now, instead of a four day break, we’re down to a three day one.
We do get a free trip later in the year, but should I risk booking time off work on specific dates which may, or may not, coincide with a working ferry?

By Thursday, we may get another call informing us that we’re off to France for a night, or even a day.

I did enquire as to whether we could get to France on Thursday evening using another company.

“Yes,” they said, “but there’s space for passengers only. Your car would have to go the next day. On HD Ferries.”

We may end up staying here for the weekend at this rate.