Speaking as a parent

Who's Got Talent?

Well, now is the time to say a few things about BGTalent. No one will care tomorrow, and probably neither will I.

I seriously wonder how long this whole thing can survive. It's gone way off beam this year. Last night we had a child who was obviously too young to be taking part. She crumpled under pressure - and they gave her another chance! Because she was little and cute. I sympathise with her, but the kid with the football last series didn't get a second chance when he loused up. He was slagged off by the jury for incompetence and dumped. John Terry didn't get another go at his deciding penalty against Manchester United in last years' Champions League final. Perhaps he should have cried too...

We, as the public, have a final say in these things, and perhaps we will all switch off at such mawkish entertainment, at watching people not cope with grace under pressure. Regardless, this year we have three tiny kids (of 12 or less) in the final ten, and one 47 year old who is seriously struggling to behave like an adult. Is this fun any more? Simon Cowell has been brilliantly clever about the whole thing, and so far has just about managed to keep a balance between entertinment and competition, between discoveing talent and laughing at inadequates. But there are two main structural problems with the show.

1. Really talented people will avoid it. They realise that 'making it' is not a matter of showing up on a TV show and bluffing/appealing to the mums. This is not enough. All the contestants who make out that the prog is their only chance of success are JUST WRONG. It isn't. The show is a long queue for celebrity, not a real forum for 'talent'. Listen, roll up your sleeves like all the other talented people of all kinds, painters, singers, sailors, pole vaulters, cartoonists etc etc. and get to work. All the artists-achievers you like and admire did that.

2. The jury. We have Simon Cowell, who owns, directs, profits from and basically runs the whole thing - couldn't leave him out, then. But also. to be fair, as a judge he effectively represents the calm cool head of business. We also have Amanda Holden (who is she?) representing everymum, and finally Piers Morgan representing slimy idiots. But - either the public do the judging or they don't. Get rid of the jury at the final stages, say I. All we need is Ant and Dec doing little "How did it go"" pieces.

Oh and 3. Raise the entry age to 13.

Been too long away, tapping away on this keyboard. Now I have two more books to do. One deal signed, another hovering. But that is not the really big news. Last Saturday I actually did a barbecue. I am as pyromaniac as any red blooded male, but I've never done BBQs. The best thing was that the children liked the food, so we are having another tonight. I am looking forward, as last Sunday morning, to smelling my shirt, and finding it delightfully smoke-scented.

Fingers are healed, mock exams have been coped with. (Can you revise for your mock GCSEs by practising derision?) I did a gig in the Purcell Rooms, which was a bit of a new high for me, having done pubs, theatres and clubs, but rarely ever concert halls.

Fair, meet Book.

And what a month or so that was.

Once upon a time this was a nearly daily blog about small happenings. That seems now to be as lost as the time I lose having discovered Spotify. Jigsaws on the internet were idleness enough. Now doing 2D jigsaws while listening to dodgy old 70s music I can't hear any other way is dubble dubble idleness. I never wanted to use the net as a mirror to ego but to try to describe the last month presents a bit of a challenge, one I have finally lost having spent my lunch hour at a book launch (not mine), drinking House of Lords champagne while talking to some charming novelists and a particularly interesting Islamic scholar who put me right on a few points of sharia law and Qur'anic scholarship.

Let me explain.

Having been involved in an ignoring competition with music for a couple of years, I have won a bit of a victory in the last few weeks, in which good ole gentle, warm music has come whispering back into my ear. Or rather, I have done a succession of different and very rewarding sessions, some for money and some not. It started with Comic Relief but continued through a number of other things. There is no accounting for these things. It is a bitter truth that all practitioners of popular music get better at it at roughly the same rate as people lose the desire to ask them to do it. Perhaps I have entered a brief sunny autumn of fun and enjoyment. after which the mellow evening of a once fierce noonday heat declines into an isolated winter. Whatever.

Notes to play again, most willingly plucked. But at the same time the buns are on the table again, for, quite unlooked for, I have been commissioned to write yet another book on Indian history. I wasn't even trying to pitch the idea when the editor I was talking to just told me to write it. This was not on the street but at the British Book Fair, which just happens to have an Indian theme this year. I have never been to anything like that in my life before. I played 'spot the author' because I assumed that the oddballs in weird hats not wearing official event tags were probably kooky writers. Quite a thing to behold. Listened to William Dalrymple read from his travel books. Am not a fan of his historical writing, although his travel books have an undoubtedly entertaining quality to them. They talk in the chronicles about the tented city that the Mughal emperors carried around with them, and I think the British Book Fair was a reasonable modern recreation. All life was there - lights, literature, poetry, talking and eating, the whole thing set up to conquer the world.

Meanwhile the fambly has had its ups and downs, with serious illness visiting a near relative, and even young Jake breaking his finger bouncing a basketball. Who weaponised those little globes then? My mother turned eighty and we had a lovely party in the middle of rural Oxfordshire. All life can sit around on shelves at a book fair, but it goes on all around us too, willy-nilly and without charging.

In sum, there seem to be so many people trying to tell us all about human experience, yet somehow it never runs out.

Final Stretch.

Nearly done now, so the mind begins to wander back to blogging. Not mush incentive to read or write blogs when you are rattling off thousands of words a day or sitting for hours reading dreadful, indigestible books written by authors with a mission to confuse and distress their readers. After a hard day at the (unnaturally quiet) British Library and a long ride home on a (stupidly noisy) bus full of people determined to yell into their mobiles as if the batteries had failed and it was just lung power that was getting them through – a man frankly doesn't feel like dealing with any more literature. By then I resent reading people's tee-shirts.

I have about 114k words to kick around, and by now I feel I should be chucking stuff out, not sticking it in. It takes me four days to read it top to bottom, while 'interrogating' it, which is an expression I picked up from an old friend who writes features for a national paper. He is the only proper writer I know and he says it is a 60/40 writing /editing split for him. With me it's about 30/70. Something wrong perhaps.

What else then? We went on a day trip to Whitstable on a nice bright Sunday a couple of weeks ago. A brilliant idea, and one that about ten zillion other people had too. So we literally couldn't find anywhere to put a foot down, never mind a tyre. We ended up in Tankerton, which is the next place along the coast, and appears to be a town built around a convenient bus shelter that somebody noticed in the 1930s. These days, judging by the shop fronts, the inhabitants are defying standard economic theory and actually are doing nothing except cutting each other's hair.

Comic Relief is coming up, and for ex-musicians like me this is when the phone rings and they ask you if they can use x y z piece of music you're on again without paying you. I said yes and am awaiting my good karma. The piece in question is actually 'The Biscuit Rap' from the Two Pints 'musical' special, wot I did five years ago and never actually saw. Thank heavens for YouTube! With a minimum of googlization I found it and watched it. I quite enjoyed it although I have no detailed memory of doing it at all. My children do though. The only downer in all this is that I picked up this Saturday's Guardian Guide and spotted one of those '20 Things' pieces about Two Pints. "Ha!" I ventured. "Bet they don't mention the Biscuit Rap."

But they did. They said it was 'rubbish'.

BUNS!

Yay!

Book 2 on the runway.

Buns for tea, and maybe a Chilean Sauvignon Blanc for good measure. (I don't much like buns.)

Xmas Roundup.

Blogging batteries have been low recently, all the while that, ironically, there has been quite a lot of stuff happening to write about.

Headings.

I did a gig. In fact two of them. In a theatre. (Ahh, the theatre - how I have missed it! How it didn't even notice I'd gone!) All for the sake of an extraordinary vocal impressionist, who might be coming to a theatre near you in the not too distant future. Having spent so much time standing on stages over the years it was a strange reacquainance with the sensation of being looked at (occasionally) by a lot of people. I quite liked it.

The cat has learned to use the cat-flap, after a week of being stuffed (by me) through it both ways. She has no idea that it is her microchip that opens it, I am sure. Very confusing, because it is transparent. She doesn't like pressing her head against it so she dabs at it. Otherwise she sits inside looking out at a small television-screen shaped part of the garden and watches, And watches. The cat who use to come in and eat her food occasionally stares back.

Got a call from the police at 1 a.m. recently, looking for someone to come and collect one of my nieces, who was yelling in the background as the duty sergeant explained that the young gel had been dumped off at the station, having thrown up all over his cab and refused to pay for it. That was his story. The young gel, whose mobile had our number first up, later gave a different account of events. She says her drink was spiked. Perhaps. I think the only doubt remaining now is whether it was her twenty third or twenty fourth drink that was spiked. Anyway. I shopped her to her parents, who came from wherever to get her home.

I am awaiting a decision on another book idea. There might be buns for tea if it's a yes.

So, Merry Xmas to all! Peace and goodwill etc.

Flap.

As in cat-. We have paid for and have had installed a hi-tech cat-flap. All that remains is for the cat to understand its basic function. It is a garden interface, a toilet router. As yet this has not dawned on the furry-faced food remover, so at time of writing the device remains merely a -flap, a hole in the door, a small, floor-level, perspex window into or out of our lives.

I was against carving the large hole required in our back door, but my alternative strategy (leaving the door open) has proved unsatisfactory on two main counts. One, the intense cold flooding into the house ten months of the year, and two, the persistent raiding of another local cat, who has been eating about two meals a day at our expense over the summer months. We thought Lizzie was a little too hungry, amd we suspected worms for a while. But no. Repeated visual contact with an unknown tabby provided the answer. We have had visits over the years from the neglected orange tom who lives next door, but he never got as far as the kitchen. This intruder tabby has got the whole thing down to a fine art. Hence the collective flap that produced the hi-tech one.

And now there it sits. So does Lizzie, looking at it and haranguing us in her best 'I am the Queen' voice. "Open this door," she tells us. We simply pick her up and stuff her through the small hole in it. This we have mastered as a standard procedure and we seem agreed upon it as the way forward (or out). How she comes back in is not sorted yet, Someone will probably have to sit in a deck-chair out there and stuff her back through when she wants to come in after toilet/hunting/social duties are completed. So this is progress of a sort.

In other news. I came back from India after a week of five star luxury. The only blemish was on the drive back to the airport, when the driver cut out of a hideous traffic jam to go on an 'alternative' route. Alternative in this context is like comparing The Spice Girls to Cradle of Filth. The substitute road was competely clear and the villages looked beautiful with the early morning mist hanging in the air, dappled by a golden sun rise. Palm trees threw streaks of artful shade across the vivid green vegetation. There were small tea shops crammed with people on their way to work, and not a word of English to be seen on any street sign, signpost or billboard. Nor even standard Devnagri (Hindi) script), just the beautiful rounded, local Kanada lettering. Thre was even a magnificent black cockerel standing on a wall, proud and self-sufficient in his regional kngdom. What there wasn't was a yard of continuous flat road surface. After literally half an hour of being shaken up like a tin of white paint I called on the driver to stop. I got out and threw up spectacularly all over the verge, watched by a group of mildly curious locals. My driver meanwhile went to buy me a bottle of water from a nearby shop. All the good work done on the image of Englishmen by my ancestors, insouciantly shooting and taxing Indians for several centuries, was undone as this gora threw up his last night's kebab (goats's shin) in a faint parody of Empire, bringing his overfed habits and spraying bile in a quiet country corner unaccustomed to intrusion.

Yet other news. We bumped over our sixteenth wedding anniversary. We won at the school quiz night. We saw some fireworks at a safe distance. I painted some wardrobes.

I Can Haz Raclette?

Double birthday last week, for the two girls in the house. It's all right being born on your birthday, but giving birth on your birthday? That's one hell of a way to get a present.

The twin celebrations are rather unfair to the older party, who gets overshadowed and ignored every year as a way of celebrating getting stitches. This year the festivities involved Mel leading a post-Goth, pseudo-emo expedition to Camden Town in search of funky jewellery and bleeding edge tee-shirts, followed by a full six-berth raclette. For those who don't know, a raclette started out as a kind of cheese but changed its job description and is now like a chocolate fondue but with more fighting and less chocolate. Great fun, a sort of grilled bun-fight. and fortunately the girl who only eats fish couldn't come. Fish and raclette cooking don't really make natural partners, and I was dreading having to supervise fish fingers sitting in a little spade-shaped frying pan.

The cat has stayed close to home, and now that we're into the rainy season she is staying in a bit more. At night she now chases moths around the house. This was not in her original job description, and unfortunately she seems to enjoy it a great deal more than chasing mice. Mice eat our food and the moths she catches are not eating anything we have any interest in, not even our clothes. If she rootled out those little mottled jobs with the threads still dangling out of the corners of their little mottled mouths I would be quite pleased. But no. Instead she prefers big, floppy, lost moths to the small, zippy, determined clothes moths we share our wardrobe and sock drawers with.

In other news I am sitting here waiting for an air ticket to India to arrive via cyberspace. I have been invited to stay in Bangalore, and am much looking forward to it.

Lost!

Big drama. Biggest round here for ages. Easily the biggest since Mel's aunt fused the fan in the downstairs bathroom by squirting water into it. This she preferred to do instead of squirting water onto herself, which is the approved technique for shower-head usage in our house, and would have, albeit in a predictable and clichéd way, have got her rather cleaner.

What happened to outrank that event, which came complete with a loud 'bang' that plunged us into instant darkness and left us with a distressed and rather damp aunt? What could top that? Only that Lizzie, the former kitten, went missing. She did not return to her warm house and loving family on Wednesday evening. This was unusual. She did not appear throughout the night, nor by the following morning. She is a cat who likes her comforts, and if cats liked jacuzzis she would never be out of hers. But gone. No sign. Not even a note, like in a Beatles song.

So I spent Thursday morning drafting an A4 description and appeal for help, then stuffing it through letterboxes all up and down our street and the street that runs along the end of our garden. This is not a recommended way to meet all your neighbours - too much stress in the background - but it is an efficient way and it yields insights galore. I met at least two eastern European cleaners and a Filipino maid. I got one person out of bed, one out of the bath and another had no clothes on. (I know because he told me through the letterbox.) I even crossed swords with a notoriously competitive neighbour, who said "Oh, yes, lost cat. How terrible, I didn't enjoy telling one of my twins that his kitty was dead when it fell out of a tree and broke its back". Balmed with this precious quantum of solace, I thanked him for his encouragement and moved on.

I met one genuinely psychotic dog. It barked ominously, out of sight in a side room. It barked several times, then went quiet. So I had a total moment-in-Jaws-when-the-head-falls-out-of-the-wrecked-boat when it THREW itself, frothing and scratching, at the inside of the glass upper panels of the front door. I flinched all too visibly. Not a good idea if a fight was on the cards. Must never show weakness in fist-fights with psychotic dogs. Fortunately the glass held, allowing my experience as a Xmas relief postman in 1974 to resurface. I turned and legged it.

One old lady was so upset for me that she invited me in to her house, then into her garden, to look in her shed for myself. I explained to her that I was convinced that Lizzie would not have gone far, and had probably been locked in a neighbour's shed or stuck in some kind of outhouse/storage area. How right I eventually was. Our neighbour has a half-built basement conversion going on (for the last seven years) and it had been shut at around five the previous evening. He had visited it a lunchtime but had found no sign of a cat. It was only when our chldren went in at around five that evening that she was spotted. The poor little mite, all dusty and scared, had been hiding from big strangers and had not shown herself to her potential rescuer when she had had the chance.

So we got her back, and I have met nearly everybody who lives in the neighbourhood. Isn't life strange?

(The answer, by the way, is "Yes". Please don't write in with the answer.)

Crocked Monsieur.

So hello there! Back from our travels, at least for a few days. Enough to collect the cat from the cattery, get her settled, then send her back.

Went to Brussels! That's right - home of the European blogging industry, or at least of the glamorous Zed. We wandered around amid a sea of warm chocolate and cold beer, admiring the medieval, or mock medieval, frontages. The big secret is that Brussels is a bit mad, but isn't really prepared to let on. Its condition is what psychiatrists call 'encapsulated'. As a tourist the Bruxellois don't really care what you do or where you go. It's a very cheap city to get around - a good tourist point - but they don't let you know where to go. They don't even have signs, like in London, to let you know when you are close to a tourist opportunity. And because of this you don't find crowds, or crowds of beggars, or trails of litter you can follow as a clue to bring you to a juicy touristical feast. We walked all around the outside of the (really very good) Autoworld, while there were no visible signs to tell us it was in there. There was a sign directing us to its café, but not to its front door.

The maddest thing in Brussels, and possibly the entire world, is the Atomium, a model of something very very small (an iron crystal) blown up to be something very very big. I did not dare ask the brusque young woman who let us in what, exactly, was the point of the whole thing, though I longed to be told. The whole structure is so well proportioned that, although you can tell it's very large, you do not realise quite how large the globes that make up the exhibition space within it really are. They are the size of four storey buildings, suspended hundreds of feet up in the air. We climbed up and down, and eventually took a trip in its glass-topped lift, which apparently was the fastest vertical thing in Europe in 1958. While we were in our large crystal palace there were several seasons' worth of weather going on outside, which kept us in it for long enough to have lunch, about 100 metres up in the air, in a large metal ball that, from the inside, resembled something between a submarine and the gondola under a dirigible airship. All quite, quite mad.

The sad downside to the escapade was that the kitchen staff in Phileas Fogg Towers seemed to have had their own little side project, which was to take something else very small - possibly a bacterium - and turn it into something really big, i.e. a bout of food poisoning. Because twelve hours later the fastest vertical thing in Europe was my lunch, reappearing with some force in a hotel bathroom.

In the interim I and my entire family were treated to a raclette supper at the Maison Zed, which, I can now definitively confirm, is not triangular. That is a strange rumour started by some irresponsible idiot. (It was you. Ed.) I can, however, now reveal that you can only get to the Zedderie through a magic wood filled with pixies.

Such a lovely evening was followed, for me, by a hang-dog day trailing round Brussels, not being able to walk freely, feeling like I had been kicked down every single one of the steps of the emergency staircases in the Atomium. I could not face either chocolate or beer, or waffles. Or even mock medieval frontages. Defeated and thirsty, I made us stop at what turned out to be a properly rough pub in a run down quartier near the station, which contained a toilet that could have been created as a tribute to nameless explorers of the darkest Congo. Perhaps it was another secret gem, an under-advertised theme park called Bogland. The darkness, slime and flies were astonishingly realistic, according to those who braved it. Me? I had scoffed some newly purchased Imodium and was in no need of any kind of bodily relief, apart from a large tumbler of morphine. This they did not have so I sipped a lemonade - the first of many that day.

We moved on. The flea market brought me out in a nauseous sweat. As did the busker that approached us during lunch in a streetside bar, who then sang 'Yesterday' for ten minutes of world class tedium. There was a poignancy in the song though. Yesterday all my troubles were relatively understated too, and I felt a flicker of empathy. However, where me and the singer fell out was that since his arrival I had begun to suffer a new, unforeseen discomfort that had got me longing for any time in my entire life before he showed up. After the third reappearance of the middle eight, desperation was no longer going to narrow me down to particular times and dates. Yesterday be damned - it was hardly far enough. He left empty handed. Why he had to go I don't know - he wouldn't say. But if he had stayed much longer I would very likely have thrown up on his shoes.

Nevertheless, do try Brussels. We will probably go back and do all the things that no one told us about till we were already there. Like the extraordinary puppet theatre right in the middle of the town that we only found courtesy of Zed and Quarsan. It serves beer and looks like either an English country pub or a medieval coaching inn. Now, where could I find that in Peckham?

Post of the Month!

Well, this month's post, anyway.

Off shortly for a trip up north, to see the greenery, and some old ruins. But that's enough about the relatives. Just a week, but that is probably enough. No internet access, no telly, so hardship of sorts for the younglings. I will encourage them to sit and look at the Roman Wall. Really, its aspect changes throughout the day, as the dappled sunlight contends with the driving rain, in an ever-changing performance that has been running daily for thirty times longer than the Mousetrap. Well, I'll try.

Lizzie the cat is stalking flies as I write. She is as yet unaware that she will shortly have to sit in her travelling box for seven hours. This is not cruelty on our part - it is simply stubbornness on hers. She just won't come out, or do anything at all for the entire duration of the journey. She just sits in what the children have dubbed her 'happy prison'.

The weather forecast is good. Hooray.