SAAP was six months old on Sat 19th. It’s gone by in a flash, for me anyway. Thanks to all of you who have read me.
I thought I might post a selection of my personal archive favourites for anyone who drops in over the holiday season. I will be back in the New Year.
Five Myths About Parenthood.
Crime and Punishment.
YuGiOh - A Parent Speaks.
Dark Santa.
Questions.
The Lice.
Detox.
Merry Xmas Everybody.
We're trying to do Xmas right but it really isn't that simple any more, is it?
I don't like the idea of asking the chldn for wish lists. A careful parent will not ask a question of a child unless the answer is already known. I feel more inclined to give them a list of what I want them to have.
Simply to ask them to nominate an open ended list of junior consumer items seems a guaranteed way to generate either disappointment, broken promises or a short term cash flow crisis. I suppose it would be all right if they were banned from reading the Argos catalogue and watching television for the months of Nov and Dec, but the genie is already out of that particular bottle.
I would really like to imbue the season with a deeper meaning but it feels like I'm swimming upstream on this one. Trying to explain what pine trees and mince pies have to do with Palestine 1 AD has proved difficult. I was ready for questions like “How can Father Christmas’s reindeer fly?” (Why, magic, of course) but it's been questions like “How many reindeer does Father Christmas's sleigh have?” that have stumped me. I don't subscribe to the Rudolphian Heresy so I say 8, not 9. I don't think we should rewrite our collective myths for the convenience of Tin Pan Alley songwriters who are accountable to no one. And I don't think a formation of 9 would be aerodynamically stable either.
It all gets stuffed down one's throat, this festive business. I draw the line at hearing Paul MacCartney singing “Wonderful Xmas Time’ in a chemist's. I didn't feel spurred on to give all my relatives sticking plaster or Organic Slimming Aids, but nothing was left to chance. The piped music was interrupted by a voice exhorting me to select the perfect gift - an electric toothbrush - 'the gift that will really raise a smile'. Have they thought about that? I don't think I would be very pleased to get an electric toothbrush for Xmas.
Cards are a nightmare too. Matching up people and images gets v tricky - Dickensian, modern abstract, religious, so many choices. It would help if they could grade them, like cheese, for religious strength. And our register of people's partners and chldn is a bit behind - another potentially tricky area. We're a bit behind too. I have fond memories of the time Mel did Jury Duty. That year they were all done by mid September.
What's going on? First Michelle wins Pop Idol and now Gary Jules is the Christmas No 1.
A size 20 woman wins a pop beauty contest and the most genuinely touching record of the year actually sells shedloads. !.
Has the revolution started and nobody told me?
The last newsletter of the term came home this evening. Mrs Gore the Headmistress has agreed to a trial of the Fairer Football Initiative. I reckon that if St Hugo's really want a level playing field then they should just play all their matches at home.
The school magazine arrived too, glossy and colourful. I liked it but Zoe was disappointed on several counts. Firstly 'Brockham Hill Today' struck her as a worse title than any of her suggestions. Secondly her DVD reviews had been cut down from the original twenty she submitted to two which seemed to her to be somehow not enough. Lastly she did not appreciate the use of the resulting space for a feature about Jake's successful Under-9 football team, who got through the whole term undefeated.
Some harsh and hasty words followed, initially from Zoe to Jake, then shortly afterwards from me to Zoe. A lot of crying ensued during which I managed to get a grudging apology from Z, then a grudging acceptance from J who now wants Z to attend 'sistering classes'.
Jake's class had to sing 'O Come All Ye Faithful' at the concert on Tues, which didn't strike me as remarkable at the time, but this morning he asked me what it all meant. Apparently they hadn't been told and I realise now that 'abhorring not' and 'wombs' and being 'begotten' are not straightforward for a child whose seasonal sensibilities have been shaped by our video of 'The Snowman'.
I remember the first time I heard Stanley Unwin and it struck me that OCAYF was having a similar impact on J. I have spent some of today musing about how the great man would have delivered the text.
O comely or faithful
Joyfulous triumfold
O come ye o come ye to breathly home
Calm and a door jamb
Warm the fingers deep joy
O come let us outdoor him
O come let us outdoor him
O come let us outdoor him
Cries the law.
God of God
Lighters light
Lowly a boar's not a virginy womblode
Very God
Begotly not inflated, oh no
etc etc
Twas the week before Christmas
And all through the land
The charts were clogged up
With the boring and bland
I've been thinking about ways to drive up standards in pop music for some time. The Charts are as dull as ever this week and set to get duller, so now might be a good time to unveil some constructive suggestions.
Exclusions.
1. Original Content. Could we set up some kind of peer review system where qualified persons could decide on elegibility for a chart entry, based on a minimum quota of original ideas? This would keep things moving along as in, say, advertising where originality is prized. Thus the Flying Lizards' version of 'Money' would be in, and nearly every record made by duff UK boybands would be out.
2. Drugs. Surely it's time to take a lead from the Olympics and test for drugs. Music may well sound better when the listener is stoned but I think history conclusively proves that music sounds worse when the performers are stoned. As evidence I call:
- Tusk by Fleetwood Mac.
- nearly all 'serious' dance music since 1988.
- everything by Jamiroquai (except Virtual Reality, which is good).
Unlike sport it's not that the drugs confer unfair advantage, it's that the drugs confer inappropriate delusions of genius. We would also be rid of 50 Cent who, by his own admission, both takes and sells the stuff.
Creative Weighting.
For years the record companies have been at pains to ensure the integrity of the national charts and have introduced rules about the length of records, the giving of free gifts, numbers of remixes, in-store promotion etc etc. Surely it cannot be beyond the wit of these people to devise a scheme that rewards excellence and discourages exploitative practices and plagiarism?
Chart placings could be docked for:
- insufficient number of different notes included
- excessive spending on the accompanying video
- use of the kind of language that has no place in broad-based entertainment
- being called Sophie Ellis Bextor.
Or placings could be added for:
- original rhymes for 'dance' or 'groove'
- changes in key, tempo or rhythm (up to an agreed point. I'm not advocating a return to prog, just more bits like the waltz section of 'When Will I Be Famous?' by Bros, which still stands as the most listenable 8 seconds in their catalogue.)
- blingless video content
- never having been shot.
All constructive suggestions gratefully accepted. If we work together on this one, people, I know we can make a difference.
It was the School Christmas Concert this evening and Zoe was on the bill in the Recorder Group. She played beautifully, as usual. To my annoyance I then dozed off during the Drama Group's mime item that followed. Tired + quiet + warm = zzz.
I was really angry with myself for nodding off but even angrier because I woke up in time for the Junior String Ensemble's assault on Ding Dong Merrily On High, performed in a variety of keys and tempos.
And I was right about the school bloopers video - it was on display and available as we left.
I have probably been sounding a bit gloomy about the prevailing moral climate recently but I remain undaunted. In fact I'm keen to return to my moral development programme as soon as possible. Recent events, however, have made it clear to me that I must get my general position clear first.
Morality can prove a trackless land for the unwary, and by modern standards it does lack benchmark assessment points, but late yesterday evening I stumbled upon the idea of matching us up with the Ten Commandments. I know they're a bit negative in tone but I don't think you can easily find anything with much more moral authority.
So how are we doing? We're pretty good on numbers 1,2 and 5 thru 9, and frankly I don't foresee graven images as ever being a big problem for us. However we're not brilliant with the Lord's name, the Sabbath can get pretty busy and Jake certainly covets Spencer Butterworth's Incredible Hulk light up slippers with the luminous soles. Seven out of ten isn't brilliant I know but we're not really that far off the pace even in our three weakest events.
So having run a sort of moral Norton Utilities we've got 'Minor Problems Found' but without getting the 'You Should Fix This' prompt. I, for one, am much encouraged.
The coincidence of 50 Cent under the football results and Xmas 'wannit' ads on the telly have brought several issues to a head for me.
A few months ago I was concerned that the television was offering us more and more choices, none of which seemed better than what we had before and a great many of which were definitely worse. A while ago I called this 'dumbing sideways'. Now I see some additional directions in cultural travel. We've got a relentless 'sexing up' and a pervasive 'numbing down' too. I for one don't like it at all.
What does it mean to be a child these days? What is left of childhood under the onslaught of insidious targeted marketing that surround small people and their larger Purchasing Managers?
What do major record labels care about the words and images they sell, safe behind the stockade of free speech?
What do cable and satellite channels care for the mission to instruct, educate and entertain that our broadcasters began with?
I paid for it but I'm beginning to wonder whose side my television is on.
The school's annual Winter Fayre was on Sat and a grand production it was too. In general we had much better luck than last year. This time the Mystery Bottle stall yielded not Spiderman Bubble Bath but an Aussie red, and we managed not to win back our homemade biscuits in the Tombola.
The chldn, flush with their cereal sponsorship earnings, descended on the second hand toy stall and netted a haul of three Power Rangers with a total of 9.5 limbs between them, a Batman Polly Pocket without Batmobile and a tape of Sir Michael Horden reading 'The Magician’s Nephew', Sides I and 2 only.
The big excitement, though, was Mrs Phelps' attempt to buy back all the brownies she had sold at her stall. I didn't understand why she was running around at first but then I overheard her urgently telling Mr Phelps that she had only just noticed that a large stone from her engagement ring was missing and that it must have fallen into the brownie mix. He was sufficiently taken aback to stop videoing the proceedings. I have to admit the guilty pleasure it gave me to see her make him rewind his footage and describe the purchasers in his viewfinder, but only a heart of stone could not admire her subsequent efforts to locate and persuade her customers to sell back whilst not daring to tell them why.
Got home in time for Final Score, which I haven't watched for a while. I was shocked to hear 50 Cent's 'In Da Club' used as an underscore. Have they listened to the record? Or is this some tenuous linkage based on the word 'club'? Have they all gone completely numb at the BBC?
Thank you for all your advice, the lice are mostly gone, we think. We deployed tea tree oil, a fine tooth comb, loads of grip-hampering conditioner and a thing called a RobiComb which zaps the lil critters and goes Bzzz when it does so. The noise it made rather reminded me of the old buzzer on 'Ask The Family' and I fell into a reverie in which Robert Robinson had oleagenous and charming things to say to dead nits like:
“My commiserations to the Parasites who played the game so tenaciously.”
or
“Well played the Bloodsuckers, and it was surely only a cruel and heartless destiny that pitted you against an electronic gadget in such splendid form. You have my admiration and my sympathies and I would definitely invite you back as the highest scoring losers if it wasn't for the fact that you are now dead.”
During my stints with the comb I did a great deal of moaning about the chldn's school friends who have dumped this infestation on us. I was using the terms 'form' and 'class' interchangeably and hadn't noticed I was doing it until Zoe pointed it out. Rather intelligently she asked me what the difference was, if any, between 'form' and 'class'.
I couldn't resist and I told her that form was temporary but class was permanent. I think all the suffering was worth it just for that one moment.
Autumn has now slipped seamlessly into winter. Like the ancients we track the passing of the seasons by the transit of the sun across the horizon, but we mark its progress not by reference to the alignment of ancient stones but by where we have to leave the chldn's solar powered calculators on the window sill.
A number of related strands have been coming together chez Preene lately and I have been thinking that my concern for the smooth running of the household may have caused me to neglect the equally important area of Personal and Moral Development. Last night I had a chance to begin to put that right.
Zoe was rather miserable because she had spent a great deal of time working on a map of an imaginary island but had not been given the high mark she (and I) felt she deserved. Nor had her effort been chosen for display on the board in the corridor. I had been looking for a way to bring up the pride/ambition thing ever since my talk with Jake about his car park antics, and this seemed to be an ideal opportunity.
After their bath I sat on Zoe's bed and I told them both that being proud of oneself was the bedrock of a balanced personality, even though it was sometimes hard to feel that pride in moments of adversity. I refrained from singing any parts of “The Greatest Love of All” but I did say that it was not a good idea to feel bad because someone else could run faster or get higher marks.
Zoe asked if I meant that coming last was all right. I said that it wasn't if you didn't try but that it would do if it was the best you could manage. I considered telling them that the pride in yourself that you could be allowed to feel if you came last was a bit different from the pride you were allowed to feel if you won but I decided not to broaden the focus too much at that particular juncture, and to be content with establishing the general principle.
Jake, whom I know to my cost is not comfortable with any sustained period of abstraction, wanted to know why he needed to bother working on his stamina seeing as he was quite proud of it as it was.
I said that pride was important but that it was also a good idea to strive to improve. I then moved on to motivation and explained that it was important to try harder because you wanted to do it for yourself anyway and not just to be like someone else. He pointed out that I was basically telling him that he should be proud of himself no matter what, and that he already knew that. He even started to tell me which Disney films he had heard this same piece of advice in.
I cut him short and moved on to say that neither self-hatred nor envy were good reasons to strive to improve oneself and that ambition was a fine and noble thing when seen as part of a quest for perfection, for its own sake.
Zoe then posed the question: if it wasn't right to be jealous of other people's success or money was it right to try to get fame and money for yourself? I said it was right but not to want it because of jealousy. Jake asked me what kind of wanting it would be all right.
This was all getting rather difficult by now and I began to regret recharging my glass before coming upstairs.
I called a halt, kissed them good night and went back downstairs to regroup. At the moment they seem to be clearer headed about it all than I am. I've been going over the discussion for most of today and I will reapproach the subject when I've got my thoughts marshalled. Perhaps we'll take things in smaller steps next time.
Something will appear here today.
Something else that is.
I keep being told that Xmas is now ‘fast approaching’. How's that I ask? Does early December pass more quickly than early November? No matter, I've made one thing clear. This year we're going to be ready.
No thoughtful person has ever yet given me an extra room lined with cupboards for Xmas so if we don't act now then come Boxing Day there will be less space for the people in here, as usual. Therefore before any more toys come into this house an equal number are going to have to leave.
In the past we did try getting child approval for selective toy removals but we abandoned the policy, having never got anything other than a ‘No’ out of them. So last week we finally resorted to underhand tactics. Mel spent all Fri morning choosing old toys to take to the local charity shop. Selection criteria included:
- any toy with 66% or less of the parts remaining
- any toy with visible teethmarks on it
- any toy that takes more than three battteries more than once a week
- any toy that I can still hear upstairs in the bath.
She collected a large binlinerful but then left the swag out on the landing, where it was discovered soon after the return from school. The plan was foiled and the enemy alerted.
So we’re on to a different approach now, still underhand, but more ruthless. By this afternoon it will be done. In YuGiOh terms we are playing our most powerful card - ‘Dark Santa’ - a shadowy figure carrying a black sack who enters children's bedrooms unseen and then sneaks away to give their toys to all the shops that have been good.
Adam at arpeggio has cheered me up mostwhat with this.
I suggest: Saving Private Ryan's Daughter.
Nasty and prolonged punch up at a rural Irish wedding during which several people become better people.
I was saddened this morning to discover that Mike at Troubled Diva has gone on indefinite hiatus. I was going to say something else today but it's all rather left me now.
Having been a blogger for less than six months I now have tremendous admiration for anyone who can keep up a quality blog for a period of years and although I don't know how it feels to do that I am coming to see how much of one's life it can require. When I started I thought I would post once a week. Then it suddenly seemed easy to do more. Now it seems very much harder.
I also didn’t realise how attached I would become to people I had never met. I see now that personal blogs do that - if done well.
I would like to thank Mike for his kindness to me. He did once describe SAAP as his new favourite weblog and I cannot really describe how good that made me feel.
So Mike. Thanks for the reads. Thanks for the encouragement. Happy retirement.
Now for a look at those flowers.
Mel has been spectacularly stressed this week leading to an orgy of camomile tea drinking and lavender baths.
It started on Mon morning when she couldn't strap Jake into the car because one of his friends had filled the seat belt mounting with toffee papers over the weekend. It got worse on Tues with the return of head lice (it's never our kids who start it). She hit crisis level yesterday afternoon when she couldn't find her car keys for the school run, waited for a minicab for forty minutes and then had to pay £20 for the chldn's time in the Late Room.
I arrived home last night to find her on her knees on the kitchen floor attacking a plastic box with a kitchen knife and making noises like a overburdened anglegrinder. When I asked her what she was doing she told me she was trying to open the box of scented candles she had ordered on the net which had finally arrived by courier. That was the bare bones of what she said anyway. In the interests of good taste I have chosen to leave out some of the adjectives she used. And in the interests of fairness I have also omitted some of the comments she made about me.
There were three types, cedarwood, lavender of course and frankincense, all specially chosen for their calming and stress relieving qualities. It seemed that the packaging was not singing from the same hymn sheet so I took over.
I got the thing open in pretty short order but in the process I managed to cut myself on first the knife then the jagged edge of the inner plastic box. By then the effort of getting the thing open had put us both beyond the reach of candles and we both required a guideline-bending amount of Pays D'Oc to sort us out.
Nevertheless we lit the frankincense one which claimed to raise spirits and it did seem to help, about halfway down the bottle.
Mel has put in a lot of work on our front garden since we moved and although it has died back recently it now looks a great deal better than it did. Last night I was just telling her how nice it looked and was about to move on to saying how I wished some of the people round here would make a bit more of an effort with their properties when Jake, who had been listening, asked me if we were houseproud.
I said that of course we were and that it was no bad thing to be. He said that if we were then why didn't we get one of those big bright lights that come on at night whenever anyone walks past? He said that loads of people with much worse looking front gardens had them.
We laughed when he'd gone to bed but I've been thinking about it since and he may have a point. I'm tempted.
It's taken a while but I think I've cracked the cereal thing.
To recap. We have a pile of abandoned cereal once intended for our chldn but they won't eat it unless bribed with free gifts. In the case of four out of the five packets these gifts were given out long ago, during the first bowlful in fact. We have a classic case of Planned Consumption Incentive Deficit.
This is like Planned Obsolescence but is a more subtle, postmodern strategy designed to maximise consumer engagement. It depends for its effectiveness on a finely judged balance between on the one hand the attractiveness of the TV related free gifts and on the other hand the absolutely disgusting nature of the cereal. A ratio of one bowlful per gift would be ideal and if maintained at anything like that level would make any brand manager v happy. Basically it is a reworking of the old Mustard Baron's trick, that is to make a fortune out of what is never eaten.
How to fight back? I have thought deeply about this in several baths heaving with relaxing gel - blue goo thinking if you like - and the answer is finally clear. We must get the chldn to eat the stuff by reincentivising the process in a way that avoids the craven and threadbare deceptions employed by the manufacturers.
So this is the scheme. We, Mel and myself, will sponsor the chldn to eat the rest of the stuff at 50p per bowl. And now the clever bit. The chldn can keep 10% of their earnings and the rest goes to hunger relief chartities. I'm calling it 'Tackle World Hunger and Get Rich'.
It's an empowering concept of which I'm rather proud and I think it could catch on, although nutritionally speaking I accept that in our case it's a little heavy on carbohydrate. I'll rustle up some forms on the computer tonight and I'll get the chldn to rope in some of their school friends. I think the days of the Cereal Mountain are numbered at last.
(Nos 1-4 in a series of 21.)
Autumn darkens into winter and I continue to feel pessimistic about the popular culture that my chldn are offered. I have some questions. And they all 'bout us.
1. The coarsening and sexualising of popular entertainment. Whose idea was it and whom precisely does it benefit?
I always thought of Puff Daddy as a bit of a joke, even before he called himself P Diddy which is, you must agree, a name of truly fearsome power. PD's elaborate attempts to look tough convinced me even less than Adam Ant's attempts to persuade me he was a Red Indian.
One message certainly did come through though - “Look what I got” he said. Fifty Cent says much the same thing but with one important addition. He's keen to point out that he didn't have to work for it.
I think we have reached a kind of Lady Chatterley moment in our light entertainment history but instead of asking whether we would want our servants reading these lyrics we need to ask:
2. Exactly which parts of pimping would you relish explaining to chldn aged ten or less?
3. Have any of the people who produced, manufactured, promoted or broadcast Fifty Cent’s records asked themselves that preceding question?
Because if all these individuals do their jobs properly (and they have) the saturation exposure that follows is bound to, and indeed is designed to, reach our very young. Little people are going to get to hear this stuff.
To pretend that this is an issue of self expression is bogus nonsense - the issue here is profit.
4. Have all these clever people got nothing else they can sell to us?
Broke out the Advent calendars this morning and got the usual grumpy reaction about the lack of chocolates in them. Four years ago we did have some with chocolates in but we have avoided them since. They proved less successful than hoped, and by successful I do not in this case mean popular.
I thought the chocolate would act as a kind of incentive to help the chldn listen to the series of talks I had planned to give throughout Advent, explaining that Christmas had a deeper message and was about much more than presents.
Zoe, then 6, chomped away happily and nodded sagely all through the first talk on Dec 1st. When I had finished I asked her if she had understood. She said ‘Yes’ and that she now understood how Christmas was about chocolate too. Chocs 2 thru 24 then disappeared by the morning of Dec 2nd. We’ve been back on the old fashioned ones covered in glitter ever since.