Juvenilia, Part 2

It was 1984. Return of the Jedi had come out a year ago. 

A disappointed global public had realised that an apparently great cinematic villain was not only such a poor leader that his army could be trounced by a gang of stone age teddy bears but also that – beneath his iconic helmet – he resembled a cross between Humpty Dumpty and a bruised scrotum.

It may seem incredible today, but with no immediate prospects for further Sith work, Darth Vader was reduced to doing PAs for furniture companies at sports centres in west Suffolk.  

And that’s where I met him. True story. There’s his signature to prove it.

"Never cross near parked cars" - that was his other catchphrase

Now, my parents were quick to assure me that this was indeed the “real” Darth Vader – viz. quondam Green Cross Code Man David “Stop, lookand listen” Prowse. Of course, the helmet remaining firmly in place, it could have been anyone tall.

Oh yes, it’s not all exercise books. I have loads of other peculiar fragments of my childhood to show you. 

“Peculiar fragments” being largely all there is. We have always lived far away from our wider family, and in 1987, me, my mum, dad and brother moved away from Bury St Edmunds to Boston in Lincolnshire. I was 11. I wrote letters to my friends, but that fizzled out by 1990 or so.

As a result, my sense of my early life is composed almost entirely of what I remember – without much third party corroboration at all. Where I live now, there are loads of people who have always lived in the area, who have known the friends they see every day since they were babies and whose parents, aunts, uncles, grandparents and so on all live within a mile radius. Their senses of personal history must be pretty well integrated.

That’s not me. I’m not complaining: it is, as they say, what it is. It just means that looking through old stuff I haven’t seen for 30 years or so gives me a very weirdly vertiginous feeling, that the conscious Roger of Sicily is only a part-time tenant of this brain and that the true landlord is somewhere else entirely.  

Enigmatic, eh?

Not as enigmatic as this story about a “family of dwarfs”, who uncovered a plot by spacemen to take over the world – admittedly, while waiting in ambush to murder them with pointed sticks, which takes some of the sheen off their earth-saving heroism.

When the spacemen declare “the time to conquer the world is here”... it ends! 

That’s the last page of the frigging book! 

What was I thinking? I’d give my eight-year-old self a piece of my mind for leaving such a cliffhanger unresolved, if such a thing were even remotely metaphysically possible. 

Juvenilia, Part 1

Every day, I look at the news and wish I hadn’t. I look at social media, and I wish I hadn’t. Then 30 seconds later, I look at social media again. Still wish I hadn’t.

Back in the days when I wrote on this blog regularly, I wrote about a lot of political stuff. I can’t bring myself to do that now. The world is so horrible, so depressing and so embarrassing that I find myself unable to engage with it. I can’t even take the piss out of it. If piss-taking changed anything...well, Trump, Putin, May, Farage, Brexit, James Corden... shall I carry on?

So I’m off on a voyage of inner emigration – talking and thinking about other things, to distract myself from the disintegrating world out there. Ah, for a more innocent time...

Well.

Recently, my mum gave me some boxloads of my old school exercise books, photos, newspaper clippings. And so, I intend to share some of the highlights with you. Consider this a Bildungsroman –a portrait of the arsehole as a young man, if you will.

The picture at the top, for example, is from what appears to be my first ever school book – summer 1981, when I was in Class 1 at Hardwick Primary School. As you can see, I saw some men with bagpipes. "Nice" - I am sure you will agree with my teacher.

If bagpipes are not enough to prove that I – like Tiny Tempah – lived a “very very very wild lifestyle”, what about this? My brother’s third birthday party (he’s now 38) – which was attended by “some frends”. All of whom, it would seem, were dressed as garden gnomes. That was the 80s, young people.  

Let’s move forward in time a little. Here is an account of what I did on a weekend in 1983. If I remember rightly (and it’s entirely possible that I do not), this was the year that I vomited all over Mrs Almond as we lined up to leave the swimming pool. If Mrs Almond is reading this, I am very sorry. The memory of puking on you still haunts me.

If only I could go back to those days, when all I had to worry about was not wanting to go to Needham Market – and then being bored when I did have to go there.

Having said that, I feel that there is a real Joycean quality to the work here. Nothing much happens, but we are relentlessly, inescapably inside the consciousness of the narrator, who may or may not be unreliable. Even at eight years of age, I showed a precocious tendency towards modernism. And utter self-absorption. 

Moving on a few more years, here we are at secondary school in 1987, doing maths under the late Larry Veale. He retired at the end of that year, having started teaching at Boston Grammar in 1952. He was – quite literally – old school. Certainly, culture had changed dramatically between when I went into that school in 1987 and when I came out in 1994. 

While these days, school children occupy themselves with iPads, sexting and deradicalisaton programmes, back in 1987, we drew triangles. Lots and lots and lots of triangles. Big ones, little ones – but all three-sided and covered in angles. 

As you can see, I was shit at it.

Ban This Sick Filth

When I was a kid, I read comics like the Beano.

Before I get started, I have a confession. Once, I told people at my school that I had had a letter published in the Beano about dressing up as a ghost and frightening my family. That was a lie and I am sorry to everyone I misled. I don’t know why I lied about it – especially when it could so easily have been disproven by reference to back issues. I have been carrying that around with me for over 30 years now, and I feel a lot better getting it off my chest.

Anyway, my kids Roger Junior and Tancred also read comics. They are 8 and 6 years old, respectively. It seems like only yesterday I was telling you about how boring new-born babies are, about potty training, about pieces of rubbish found in nursery gardens. It’s like you, me, them and Oh Dear. How Sad. Never Mind.  are all growing up together, isn’t it? It’s kind of like a Bildungsroman, only longer and without anyone ever really learning anything.

Dr Strange-Bean is not even a pun

I was glancing through Tancred’s copy of the latest issue of Mega! comic. You may not be familiar with this periodical. You may (on browsing it in your local newsagent perhaps) believe that by mistake you have picked up a 30-page advert for Lego.

The whole thing reeks of "will this do?" And I should know. 

It is not, however, my purpose today to complain about the bombardment of young children with marketing messages for Mario, Skylanders, Minecraft, Sonic the Hedgehog and whatever Marvel character happens to be being whored all over the place at any given time.

It’s not even my aim to draw attention to what appears to be the laziest photo feature I have ever seen

– this one, where Mr Bean’s face is superimposed on various pop culture figures familiar to children and a weakly punning name (involving the word “Bean”) added.

No, what I would like to draw your attention to is this cartoon strip, entitled “The Poo Crew”.

This concerns the adventures of a group of anthropomorphic stools. There they all are:

• Colonel Kernel - So called, I presume, because of the oft-remarked indigestibility of sweetcorn kernels
• MC Plopz and Big L.O.G - Some kind of faecal hip-hop collective.
• iFloat – Not really sure what iFloat’s deal is as he doesn’t seem to feature in the story. I can only surmise that he is buoyant.
• Dumpo – A kind of everyman turd, from whose perspective the story appears to be told. 
• Runny Ronnie – This name is fairly self-explanatory.

Now, this is very much the sort of thing I would have made up as a teenager. Indeed, my sons find few things in life as amusing as toilet functions. The magazine also came with a small plastic toy version of MC Plopz.

This all appeals to my non-parental side in a way, and yet I find it a little shocking. Back in the 80s or 90s, Spitting Image produced a sketch called “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turds”, but that was in a late-night show for adults. This is in a comic for young kids. 

I would also like to draw your attention to the liberal use of the word “fart”. When I was young, this was deemed a rude word.

Anyway, as is often the case with these things, the story made no sense at all – in the end Big L.O.G saved the day by pouring a tin of beans over himself. This frightened off the rat and snake antagonists of the strip (I didn’t catch their names) for whom a living, speaking, bespectacled shit covered in beans is infinitely more disturbing than one that is not.

Oh and before anyone asks, I am claiming the right to reproduce these images under the Fair Use terms of the Copyright, Designs andPatents Act 1988 (as amended) – specifically Section 30 (for the purposes of criticism or review) and 30a (for the purposes of caricature, parody or pastiche), as well as the common law public interest defence – re the fact that parents are probably unaware of the contents of the comics they buy their kids and might be somewhat surprised to learn of them. So any lawyers reading this – go fuck yourselves.

Shocked by what I had seen, I put down Tancred’s copy of Mega! and had a look at Roger Jr’s copy of Toxic, wherein I began to read Team Toxic’s adventures in “Day of the Bottoms”.

Look at that - I got to the end of a post without mentioning Brexit or fascism. 

It’s Party Time

Who you gonna call? HE MAN

When I am finally kicked out of my current job, I will have to give serious consideration to the idea of becoming a children’s entertainer.

You may assume that this is because all I really want in life is to bring laughter to the bright little faces of boys and girls, and yet have found myself – tragically – counting someone else’s shitty money for a living.

Not at all.

It is because, through some mysterious, ineffable quality, I find myself being uncharacteristically good at it. I am good at it without actually trying – which is by far the best way to be good at anything.

Don’t ask me why, but children find me effortlessly charming, delightful and invigorating in a way I can only dream of being viewed by fellow adults. It is equally mystifying to my wife, Katie...errr...I mean Elvira of Castille, as it is to me. I am also fully CRB-checked.

So this weekend, I found myself Master of Ceremonies at the birthday celebrations of my elder child (Roger Jr). In this capacity, I was responsible for the amusement and safety of approximately 40 children aged 4 to 7, equipped only with a 15-song musical playlist, two jars of sweets, some balloons and an oversized cardboard Minecraft head.

Those who know me only from my pre-parental life may regard this as a scenario akin to handing a chimpanzee a loaded machine gun and a bottle of scotch and solemnly asking it not to cause any trouble.

Well, I have changed a lot in seven years...

My objectives were clear -which I find to be an indispensible element of any successful undertaking:

• Wear these children out enough that they would sit through an hour-long magic show without going Lord of the Flies on the magician (who, I should add, kicked off his act in style with a sincere threat to walk out if he was booed).
• Ensure everyone survives until the food is ready.
• To the extent that it is compatible with objectives 1 and 2, permit fun to occur.  

I don’t really know how or why, but my series of “games” proved a great success. Nobody won, nobody lost. While the states “in” and “out” formally existed, there was no practical distinction between the two. The only real difference between each game was whether I was bellowing the order to “run over there” with or without a musical accompaniment.

It is an intoxicating experience, having an audience hanging on your every word and obeying your every command. I can assure you, the feeling of power and possibility is only marginally diminished by having several members of your otherwise rapt congregation smacking you over the head with a balloon while you deliver your proclamations. The Pope, Hitler and Martin Luther King never had that to contend with. 

This is what it's like

It would be wrong to say that my audience was under my control. A surfer who rides a giant wave only gives the appearance of having mastery over the unstoppable force which could overtake him and drag him under at any moment. If you hesitate or show any fear or doubt, you’re finished. You can only know what it’s like if you’ve been there.

Even my own kids (the aforementioned Roger Jr and four-year-old Tancred) were largely swept away in the madness of the crowd, and played the games along with the others for almost a full two thirds of my allocated slot.

It is practically unheard-of that so much time (20 minutes) should pass before the irresistible temptation to commandeer a monopoly of Daddy’s attention kicks in.

Of course, each son was only responding to an “amber alert” in their own scale of priorities – amber being parental attention focused on any person other than themselves. A red alert, of course, is invoked only if that other person is their brother. At this point the doctrine of struggle by any means necessary through to victory at any cost is immediately put into action. Fortunately, the crisis never escalated to that level from which – as you know – there can be no turning back.

So my stint as a children’s entertainer ended with Tancred sitting on my knee, demanding to be bounced up and down and Roger Jr attempting to prise the iPad out of my hands to play “What Does The Fox Say” for yet another unsolicited encore.

But in terms of the goals I set out to achieve, I have no hesitation in declaring in the whole experience an unalloyed triumph.

We all have our talents – some more valuable, dignified and lucrative than others. I seem to be good at keeping the attention of primary school children for short periods of time.

However, I am fully booked for the upcoming months and therefore not available for your child’s party. Maybe next year. 

It’s Nerf or Nothing

I’m not a pacifist. I think that violence is the only answer to certain questions. Like the interwar writer and peace campaigner Storm Jameson said about the Nazis, I accept that some things are worth killing for.

But that doesn’t mean that I approve of or like militarism and the glamorisation of violence that we – and especially our kids – seem to be subjected to. Violence is an evil that is occasionally necessary.

As a general rule, Elvira and I have discouraged our boys from having toy guns. Not entirely out of explicit principle – I still remember my boyhood friend in the 1980s who was kicked out of the Woodcraft Folk for drawing a picture of a cannon, which seems to be a matter of putting the cart before the horse – but at least partly because we don’t want them to develop a casual attitude towards the prospect of killing others.

Because that’s what an awful lot of what boys get exposed to through child-oriented media seems to promote. Most of the cartoons that they choose to watch and the video games they choose to play involve fighting of some sort.

Also speaks like a 1930s gangster - WHY?

OK, you expect stuff like that in things like Ben 10 but when the bloody Care Bears are apparently referencing the Vietnam War (or rather films about the Vietnam War) by shouting “fire in the hold” and “incoming!” there’s surely some cultural mutation that’s gone a bit wrong.

Alright, little kids are not likely to get the references (and when did “referencing” things become clever in itself anyway?) but why make the reference to war or war films other than to consciously or unconsciously normalise and make attractive the idea of war?

I grew up as a little militarist through no direct fault of my parents but just by exposure to a pro-violence culture. I thought the Falklands War was the coolest thing ever, primarily because we (Britain) won. In pretty much any scenario, to me and my friends, the baddies were the Germans – despite the Second World War having ended more than 30 years before we were born.

What scientists look like

The hangover from these assumptions are still present today. Watch any cartoon. If there’s a mad or evil scientist in it, he will have a German accent. And he may well be wearing a monocle, which is a cliché that was outdated even by 1939.

Thankfully, we are little more careful today than to casually demonise other races and nationalities to our children. An Afghanistan or Iraq-based version of “Battle Comic” is unimaginable.

Nevertheless, kids are still fed the idea that there is such a thing as cannon-fodder which can be “destroyed” (note the regular use of phrases about “destroying” someone in cartoons as a blatant euphemism for “killing” them) without consequence. It’s just that today it’s robots or aliens or something else non-human that’s been placed outside our moral community, not Japs or Krauts.

To be honest, I think it would do more good to children to show one of these “destroyed” aliens screaming in pain, shitting itself and crying out for its mother than sanitising death to the point where they’re indifferent to it. But instead, we just see the fallen body flash and then disappear – if we even think about it at all. This indifference was parodied to great effect in the first Austin Powers movie, where we saw the henchman’s wife finding out he’d been killed.  

This all brings me on to Nerf guns. Our kids got some of these for Xmas. I wish they hadn’t. Now, if the people who got them are reading this – in no way am I having a go at you about this. Guns are appropriate and popular presents for boys. That’s just the world we live in, whether we like it or not. They were always going to end up with toy guns, it was just a matter of when. The kids loved them and I’m not going to deny that even I enjoyed playing with them.

It looked like this

I had toy guns when I was a young ‘un, ranging from cowboy revolvers to replica M16s. I particularly remember my own Mauser automatic pistol – which, being German, was inherently an evil weapon.

Apart from spud guns though, I don’t think they fired anything. Nerf guns fire sponge darts with a soft plastic tip. They use what appears to be the same mechanism as used by air guns (I stand to be corrected if that’s wrong – it’s not like I do any research here...). They propel those darts with a surprising amount of force. If you got shot with one, it would sting a bit.

Now I’m sure Nerf and other “airsoft” stuff is safe enough to comply with legal standards and that you’d really have to be doing something stupid in order to have somebody’s eye out with one. You can certainly throw a ball, or a toy car, or a rocking horse at someone’s head and do them just as much if not more harm as you can by shooting them with a Nerf gun.

But have you seen the adverts for Nerf stuff? They feature paramilitarised American teenagers – old enough to impress kiddies and young enough to frighten the grown-ups – romping around, Call of Duty-style, discharging blasts from their rapid-fire, multi-barrelled plastic guns, and then proclaiming in a voice laced with menace that “it’s Nerf or nothing”.

If this was taking place in real life, they would – of course – be shooting at each other, or unwilling nerds. But that can’t be shown on TV. And nobody is likely to get very excited about shooting tin cans any more.

So do you know how they’ve got round that problem? Bloody zombies.

Yes, Nerf “zombie strike” weapons are for shooting zombies: kids today’s Germans.

Zombies offer the advantage of having the precise same anatomy as a human being whilst it is nevertheless unambiguously ok to shoot them because they’re evil or because it’s self-defence or something. This is a Nerf machete. Only for killing zombies, obviously.

In no way does this desensitive kids to violence...

And so Nerf takes us over the line from cartoon violence into real world violence where we go around pointing guns at human-shaped objects that we understand to be incapable of suffering and/or deserving of death. And when we pull the trigger, we don’t just get a feeble “rat a tat” noise like we used to – we launch something that behaves very much like a bullet. 

Frozen Apart

I listened to Emma Watson’s speech to the UN about gender equality earlier this week, after having been made to watch Frozen on two consecutive days by my two sons.

Now, we went to the cinema to see Frozen – and my response at the end was to compare it to a Barbie movie. You know, the kind they show on Nick Jr.

It was a throwaway comment from a throwaway thought. I thought it was a bit girly.

But why did I think that? Because the main characters are female?

Both of our boys have been through a brief phase of strong aversion to “geeee-uurrrrls” and anything associated with them, but they now seem comfortable with them. Possibly because anything that is “for babies” is the current anathema.

Roger Jr and Tancred love Frozen and are seemingly oblivious to the gender of characters and their positions and roles with respect to one another. Roger Jr doesn’t like me belting out “Let it go” but that is probably because I only know three lines, and repeat them over and over again. 

I’d like them to stay oblivious. But will they? Can their innocence or lack of prejudice stand up to social conditioning?

The white one lays eggs, so must be a girl

Both kids love Angry Birds too. Apart from the birds’ often heavy eyebrows, I can’t see any evidence to suggest that they are all male. So why did Rovio feel the need to release Angry Birds Stella or – as it really ought to be called “Angry Birds For Girls”?

We thought the Lego Movie was great (I preferred it to Frozen). Lego has never seemed “gendered” to me. So why do we now have Lego Friends – or as it ought to be called “Lego For Girls”?

I don’t want my boys to grow up thinking that girls are aliens. Attitudes laid down in early childhood colour everything you come to think subsequently. Reinforcing the exclusivity of gender through toys and culture are the first step on the train towards not being able to speak to women as a teenager and beyond, terminating at the sort of hopelessly fucked-up attitudes displayed by the people who threatened to release naked pictures of Emma Watson for speaking out.

I’m a white, middle-aged, heterosexual man who is a father of two boys. The most valuable contribution I can make to feminism, I reckon, is to try and make sure my sons are kept off the kind of path that leads to being unable to comprehend, to fearing or to hating half the population (the more interesting half, I might add...).

Internet trolls and other species of arsehole are not created overnight. It takes a human being a long time of holding and being reinforced in deeply mistaken and unpleasant views to get to the point where they make rape threats on Twitter.

Everyone has their part to play, but parents – especially fathers of boys – have to do more to stop forcing kids to see the world in terms of gender “us” and gender “them”.

This isn’t something I think constantly about, but when I do I realise that I feel quite strongly about it. 

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go and watch Frozen for the third time this week. Have a watch of this yourself if you haven't already. Then let it go...

http://www.heforshe.org/

Who was Roger of Sicily?

Generally, I shy away from writing about matters of fact. Not because I think – with Ronald Reagan – that facts are stupid things. Rather, it is because opinions are much easier to produce, being essentially incontrovertible. Even if all the premises are wrong, no one can say for definite that the conclusion is when it’s just a matter of opinion.

Furthermore, you may have noticed that ODHSNM house style directs that if a fact is to be stated, it will be phrased thus:

“So anyway, there was this...”

Thereby implicitly casting myself as an unreliable narrator (in the particular vein of a pub bore). In this way, I assume an ambiguously ironic stance to all statements of fact, getting myself off the hook for having to prove the veracity of anything I say. Does he mean it? Or not?

I am, in a sense, simply inviting you to consider (from the aesthetic point of view) the consequences of “what if” these things were true. It saves me a hell of a lot of time, which I would otherwise have to spend making sure that I’m not talking bollocks.

So anyway, there was this time called the Middle Ages with knights and dragons and shit.

We often think – isn’t it? – that the Middle Ages were a barbaric time, when life was nasty, brutish and short. To the extent that we think about it at all.

After the Romans, most people’s grasp of British history is basically (i) Saxons, (ii) some Vikings, (iii) 1066, (iv) “beard and crown” kings, (v) “bob and beret” kings until (vi) Henry VIII.

Beard kings

 And 1066 was “The Norman Conquest”. The Norman era lasted until the 1940s, whereupon the world’s parents decided never to name another child Norman again. FACT.

It may therefore surprise you to discover that the Normans’ story was not exhausted by the Battle of Hastings, keeping Robin Hood down and eventually becoming the English upper class. Oh no.

Bob kings

Turns out, there was this whole other arm of the family which did some rather more exciting stuff than building squat little round castles and churches and logging the contents of Britain in the Domesday Book. Not least in Sicily.

I have no fucking idea what happened in Britain in the 12^th century. Monasteries, or something? But from 1130 to 1154, there was this AWESOME Norman king ruling southern Italy, Sicily and a chunk of North Africa. And he was called Roger II.

Read the article is you are REALLY into facts. I came across Roger of Sicily when I was reading “The Middle Sea” by John Julius Norwich, also known as Viscount Norwich.

A viscount, for foreign readers, is a kind of lord here in the UK. Here is a full rundown of the British orders of nobility along with a handy system for remembering it:

6. Baron = Villain

5. Viscount = Biscuit

3=. Count = Vampire

3=. Earl = Hillbilly

2. Marquess = Tent

1. Duke = Alsatian

Anyway, this book is a history of the Mediterranean. I picked it up in an airport a few years ago. And a right rollicking good read it is too.  

And in it – meriting about 3 pages, which is a lot by Lord Biscuit’s standards (ancient Egypt gets about the same) – is this Roger II of Sicily.

He built up a giant kingdom (which I’d never heard of), faced down the Pope and the Holy Roman Emperor and had the good sense never to go on a Crusade. More than that, he actually made his kingdom function properly and – to quote the Wikipedia article:

The king welcomed the learned, and he practiced toleration towards the several creeds, races and languages of his realm.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is why I took him on as my namesake. At a time when stupidity, thuggery and intolerance reigned here was a ruler who celebrated the life of the mind and didn’t care about the petty differences that divide people.

Showing you the life of the mind

So, at a time when stupidity, thuggery and intolerance reign, I think Roger II of Sicily is a ruler worth remembering. 

Don't Stand So Close To Me

There are roughly 63 million people living in the UK, and its area is 243,610 square kilometres. That gives around 3867 square metres – or just under an acre – per person.

So why is that people choose to live in such uncomfortably close proximity to one another?

I looked out of the train window yesterday on my journey from London to Leeds – something I don’t normally bother doing very much – and saw vast tracts of farmland, derelict land, meadow land. And yet, I used to live in a flat where we could hear the people upstairs having sex (I can’t remember the bloke’s name, but his wife was called Unita – which I always remember, because it’s also the name of an Angolan paramilitary organisation).

It’s not like all that farmland is being used to grow crops for people to eat. In fact, god alone knows what farmers do with all those crops that appear to be just grass. At least in Lincolnshire you can tell what’s growing in the fields...

Pretty much everything we eat is imported from abroad. If that wasn’t the case, nobody would make a song and dance about “buying British”. I’m sure the Canadians don’t pay extra for “Canadian flour” – even if it does have selenium in it.

As you know, I live in Bradford. The specific bit we live in is constantly being targeted by the council for more and more housing developments, despite the glaring inadequacy of local facilities (see ODHSNM passim). This is in spite of the fact that, within the City of Bradford Metropolitan District Council’s territory, vis to the west of the city, there is BUGGER ALL as far as Halifax.

Obviously the reason is that the bit we live in is very close to Leeds, which means houses built there can be sold for a lot more than houses built on a rain-soaked crag 10 miles further west.

I don't want to alarm my neighbours (who have been very understanding to date). But equally, I do - for example - sometimes want to go out into my back garden in my underpants without self-consciousness. 

I am English! I demand privacy! Privacy in which I will do weird things I want to keep secret!

The Cat Who Let Himself Go

Rufus is our Maine Coon cat. He is nine years old. Or ten. I can never quite remember.

Anyway, he’s quite old by cat standards. Middle-aged at the very least.

Late last year, Rufus’ long-term companion Dudley died and we got a new cat, Simba.  

Dudley was of indeterminate but great age. He was fully grown when we got him and he lived for at least twelve more years. My wife may correct me on these details – the point is not the precise number. The point is, he was spectacularly old.

Anyway, imagining that (i) Rufus would be lonely and (ii) that this time (contrary to all previous experience) the kids would be interested in a new animal for more than a couple of days and that the new animal would not spend its entire life in hiding from the kids, we got Simba.

That was the name he came with, and the children insisted we keep it.

Anyway, Simba is now around two years old. So he’s a lot younger than Rufus.

New boy Simba

As you might expect, they do not get on brilliantly. Although they have settled into a tolerable routine, it is premised on Rufus bullying Simba whenever he gets the chance. He has even started to bully the dog a bit, sitting in her beds for pure wind-ups. 

At the same time as this new side has come out in Rufus, he has also pretty much DOUBLED his weight in the last six months. The long hair (semi-long hair, Elvira would correct me) in the picture above conceals it a bit - but it's basically the same thing as an enormously fat man wearing a even-more enormous football shirt to conceal his blobby contours. 

Rufus was never much of an athlete, and he still isn’t. So it’s not like he has stopped exercising.

The only thing it can be is that Rufus is eating EVERYTHING he gets the chance to eat.

The question is, is he doing this to intimidate Simba or to protect himself? Or, has he just decided, “Look at that young guy – I can’t keep up with him. And as I had my balls chopped off nine (or ten) years ago, what’s the point?”

I literally don't give a toss

Calpol – The Miracle Drug

I have often wondered which medical speciality would be the quickest to learn, and whether other consultants look down upon their colleagues in the “easy” departments.

For many years, I presumed it would be something to do with feet. How much can go wrong with feet that you can’t blame on some other part of the body and make some other specialist responsible?

However, since becoming a parent I have come to the conclusion that training to be a paediatrician must be easier even than foot doctoring, because 95% of childhood health problems have one single cure – and that is Calpol.

For those of you not in the know, Calpol is paracetamol in a pink sugar solution. And it cures LITERALLY EVERYTHING.

When you are an adult, you wouldn’t dream of taking the same medicine for – say – a headache, an upset stomach, a cold, skin complaints, trench foot, hammer toe etc. And yet, Calpol sorts all of these out in children.

This is not just me saying this. I cannot remember a time taking our kids to the doctor (well,  a time of Elvira telling me about her taking the kids to the doctor) where Calpol has not been foremost amongst the medically-mandated remedies.

And kids bloody love it (admittedly, the white version does raise the occasional eyebrow, despite tasting exactly the same and having identical medicinal properties).

Granted, there may be some problems that Calpol can’t solve. But why is the top priority of the entire global pharmaceutical industry not the synthesis of an adult version of this miraculous wonder drug? 

Sometimes the best ideas are hiding in plain sight. 

Skylanders: Pester Force

My kids are obsessed with Skylanders. Your kids may be as well. Alternatively, you will have no idea what I am talking about.

Allow me to explain. “Skylanders” is, in the first instance, a series of computer games and, secondarily, a gigantic range of associated tat. There are seemingly hundreds of individual Skylander characters (some of whom are pictured above) and in the games, they run around doing quests, fighting, upgrading and buying stuff.

What – as far as I can see – makes this different is that to play any of these characters, you have to buy a figure of them.

A Skylander on a Portal of Power

The figures themselves are no great shakes. You can’t move their arms or legs and they appear to be of the same quality as something you’d get with a Happy Meal (despite being priced at £8.99 upwards...).

But, you stick this figure onto the “Portal of Power” – some sort of data-reading device that plugs into your

games console – and, hey presto, you are controlling that character on-screen.

Boys' infantile mania for collecting, listing and classification of made-up fantasy worlds has been successfully harnessed. Pokemon's "gotta buy 'em all" mantra has been successfully transferred to the physical world. My kids are five and three, but this has them completely hooked. For this week, anyway.

Now, I am not a “gamer”. When I was a kid, I had a ZX Spectrum and a Commodore Amiga – and I played a lot of games on them, from Jet Set Willy to The Secret of Monkey Island. I did own a PlayStation One and the original Tomb Raider and subsequently a PlayStation Two and Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. But I played the games I had when I had nothing better to do and had no desire to acquire any more or find out about acquiring any more.

My interest in gaming came to an end when I was unable to complete the “flying a ridiculously uncontrollable biplane through a bunch of hoops and then landing it safely in less than a minute” task about 2/3 of the way through San Andreas after about 100 attempts.

I wasted far more of my youth doing role playing games like Dungeons and Dragons.

So yes, I spent a lot of weekends as a dungeon master – go on, get it out of your system and we can move on. Finished?

Role playing games then were like computer games are like today, only in your head. In principle, you could choose whatever you wanted to do within the limits of your character’s abilities.

Freedom of choice, simplified

Computer games can now appear to do something similar because their memory capacities are so enormous as to give the illusion of freedom of choice, by storing so many different option-scenarios (rather than the “go left”, “go right” or “jump” options I am familiar with).

The whole matter of my RPGing teenage years and the damage it did to my ability to function as a 20-something are deserving of a blog in their own right.

The reason I mention these games is that, sooner or later, everyone who was into it got seduced into the matter of buying more and more supplementary bits and pieces – lead men or additional rule books or whatever – so that they didn’t have to imagine quite so much. It's hard work using your own imagination, whereas buying stuff is easy.

What I have to show for this today is three biscuit tins full of Space Orks in the garage and a well below average stock of interesting anecdotes from my mid-teenage years. 

To return to Skylanders. What the company responsible has done is genius – they have created a computer game that you have to keep buying more things for in order to get more out of it. Some bits, I am told, can only be accomplished using a character of the appropriate element (you know - earth, wind, fire etc). So if you don’t have one, you have to get one or you’re stuck.

Neither the Nazis nor the Soviets nor even fizzy drink manufacturers ever found a way of turning kids on their parents so effectively. You have to had it to Activision . They’ve come on a long way from the Spectrum version of “Ghostbusters” I used to play in the mid-1980s - complete with incomprehensible speech synthesis that mangled the word “ghostbusters” into something that sounded like “granny bastards” being shouted through a paper-and-comb.

Yes, I have to applaud this Machiavellian brilliance, even while I am disquieted by my three-year-old talking to me about “the undead”. I have to applaud it because I wish I’d thought of it. 

The Ghost of Xmas TV Past

When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child; but when I became a man, I put away childish things.

So said St Paul, in his First Epistle to the Corinthians. As far as I’m concerned, this is one of the best lines in the Bible – right up there with 2 Kings 2: 23-24 (the bit about bears eating 42 youths who took the piss out of slaphead prophet Elisha).

"Go on baldy - AHHHH"

Christmas is a time (isn’t it?) when childish things have a tendency to come back out, no matter how carefully we have put them away.

We imagine (don’t we?) that because we remember things a certain way, that this is how they in fact should be – whether they were or were not actually ever so. And when things do not live up to those imaginary expectations, we are disappointed. The secretly-nurtured belief we all hold quietly in our hearts – that the present will never live up to the past - becomes ever so slightly harder.

Crikey. Two Bible references and a load of pop-psychology waffle and we’re only four paragraphs in. Might as well be in church, eh readers?

My point (aren’t we?) is that while nostalgia can be fun and comforting, when it starts to makes you resentful, you have to let it go.

That’s why it’s time to stop pretending that Christmas TV is some great collective experience, something makes the nation collectively pause to huddle together around a Radio Times.

Oh yes. This is about what’s on TV at Christmas.

If you want profundity, you’ve come to the wrong place.

Films

BBC1 gave us Toy Story 3 in the 3pm Christmas Day slot. I remember being so excited I could barely contain myself some year in the 1980s when it was Dumbo in that spot, or when it was The Empire Strikes Back.

My kids got Toy Story 3 on DVD LAST CHRISTMAS. They watch it IN THE CAR.

Network television – you cannot compete with the availability of films through other media. So don’t bother. If it’s nostalgia that makes you broadcast “family classics” at set times over the period, in my humble opinion that is BAD NOSTALGIA.

Classic Christmas Specials

What is this supposed to mean to me?

 I have and do enjoy a “classic” Christmas special. When I have been trapped indoors drinking all day and have finally got the kids to go to sleep, I can certainly see the appeal of watching a festive Morecambe and Wise Show or Only Fools and Horses.

But that’s not because it is actually any good. It’s because it’s comfortable and familiar, like an old pair of jogging bottoms. I can smile along without having to think at all, because I’ve seen them all a hundred times before.

It’s not that these programmes actually entertain. Instead they evoke the memory of having been entertained. Which may very well be a completely false memory.

Morecambe and Wise – for example – did their last Christmas special in 1983. I was 7 years old then. What did they mean to me then? Why should they mean anything more to me 30 years later?

Nothing, other than that over the years, culture has implanted the idea in my head that Eric and Ernie are an integral part of the Christmas experience.

Operation Yewtree, by the way, looks rather more likely to eradicate a lot of this kind of ‘70s and ‘80s nostalgia much quicker than any kind of critical reassessment of what our “traditions” mean to us will. 

Because you can’t have Christmas Top of the Pops without a memory of Jimmy Saville bedecked in tinsel, can you?

I notice that Rolf Harris has been swiftly replaced as the narrator of Olive the Ostrich. Innocent until proven guilty, eh Nick Jr?

Modern Christmas Specials

It doesn’t snow at Christmas in this country.

People do not buy the biggest Christmas tree they can find – with hilarious consequences.

Christmas jumpers are only worn ironically.

Why do programme-makers continue to perpetuate these myths about what Christmas is like and what people do at Christmas that are nothing but remnants of Victorian sentimentalism, 1970s bad taste and echoes of what they’ve seen in other Christmas episodes?

Oh Miranda...

How about someone tries to depict a 21st century Christmas that actually reflects people’s real experiences rather than a mid-century fever dream and hope against hope?

Or rather, don’t even bother. Because the TV may be the focal point of the living room – but unless it’s plugged into the Blu Ray Player, the Xbox and the internet – it is just not the focal point of family life any more. 

The True Meaning of Christmas

I’ve been helping my eldest with his homework: a project on Christmas around the world.

Now, there are no doubt people out there – not ODHSNM readers, of course – who would find this outrageous.

Not me helping my son with his homework. The “around the world” bit. The true meaning of Christmas, they declare, can’t be reduced to some multicultural, relativistic blah blah blah...  - a line of argument which you know full well will inevitably end in someone blurting out the word “Immigrants!”

The true meaning of Christmas, they will say, is...erm...

Well, dear readers, let me put this to you. Christmas is just a celebration of good stuff at a crappy time of year. It has had all sorts of stuff superimposed on it over the centuries, but at the end of the day that’s what it started out as and that’s what it still is.

Don’t give me all that “it’s the birth of Jesus” malarkey. Christ is a late addition to Christmas.

He’s been stuck on top of at least two sets of pre-Christian traditions.

Pagan dessert

Firstly, the Northern European pagan Yule celebrations around the winter solstice. That’s where you get your holly and ivy, your Druidic mistletoe, your Christmas trees, your Yule log (chocolate or otherwise) and all those other Germano-Celto-Scandinavian accessories.

Not one of those things – except perhaps a log – would have been found in the Iron Age Middle East, so have clearly come from somewhere other than the Jesus story.

The second source is Greco-Roman paganism, specifically the festival of Saturnalia.

Saturnalia (Kronoia for the Greeks among us) was a month long celebration of the good old days before that bastard Zeus cursed mankind with the need to work for a living. It involved:

• Gift giving
• Eating and drinking to excess
• A general end-of-term, office party kind of vibe all round, when slaves were afforded freedoms usually denied them and the bosses made fools of themselves

Sounds Christmassy, doesn’t it?

There are loads of other hypotheses kicking about saying that the Christian myth is based on other bits of

Not real

ancient lore, but why get into all that? It’s like arguing about whether Tolkien’s orcs were green or grey. Even if there’s a right answer, it doesn’t matter what it is because it’s ALL MADE UP.

The point is – and I’ll go out on a limb here – it is completely impossible to extract a “true” Christian core or indeed a “true” pagan core. It’s a big syncretic mess of bits and bobs appropriated from here, there and everywhere.

Look at Santa Claus. Where does he fit in? Don’t try to tell me that he’s “really” Saint Nicholas, the fourth century Turkish bishop and early Christian martyr. What the hell would he be doing with reindeer and elves? He’s as obviously mashed up as Baron Samedi.

Balls

Why do you think the Puritans banned Christmas in 1647 as “a popish festival with no biblical justification”? Precisely because they could see how pagan it all was. At least Oliver Cromwell had the balls to recognise it for what it was instead of whinging about the corruption of the “real” meaning on Radio Four.

You can’t select certain bits and say that’s the “real” Christmas and the rest of it isn’t – the Christian bits, the non-Christian bits, whatever. Every step along the way contributed to getting us where we are today. Who can say where taking any of them out would have taken us? There is no distinction between the signal and the noise.

The materialistic aspects of Christmas are just as ancient as the spiritual aspects.

And if we accept that consumerism is our current religion (or substitute for it), then a 50 year tradition of buy-buy-buy from Black Thursday to the January Sales is getting on for half the age of all “ye olde traditions” the Victorians bequeathed us.

It’s as silly to worship a tree or indeed money as it is to worship a big old beardy sky-fairy.  If you pick away rationally at every part of the Christmas myth, eventually you’re left with nothing but a bloody long winter ahead of us.

Maybe we don’t need to have a justification for having a party. The weather’s shit, it’s dark all the time – don’t we have a right to cheer ourselves up?

Perhaps THAT, ladies and gentlemen, is the true meaning of Christmas.