The weekend passed hazy and indistinct as a sock-dimmed saxophone solo, the torrent of family experiences dammed to a trickle by anxiety all round. I spent most of a tense Saturday binge-hammering, hanging and rehanging pictures, all pencil marks and bent brass pins.
In my glory days, say 1987-93, when I had disposable income and no chldn, I bought wine and works of art, hoping they would sustain me through the puritan years of parenthood that loomed before me. Times changed and I found to my chagrin that it was no longer my income that was disposable but my services. These were the years when people asked me "How's the music business?" and I would reply: "It's getting along quite nicely without me, thanks."
In the end I drank the wine sooner than intended and deferred the picture hanging indefinitely, which struck me as a pretty reasonable strategy at the time.
Back to Sat. So why the unusual sense of urgency that had me replacing lightbulbs and endangering my fingers when I could have been watching FA Cup football on the telly with Jake, to be there for him while he peppered me with the usual hyper-imaginative questions exploring the outer limits of probability in competitive sport? Fear was the spur, fear of an impending relovisit, fear of the expected arrival on Sunday of the House Police, aka the militantly decorous wing of my wife's family.
They haven't been here for a while, a much needed cooling-off period having passed since their last visit which included rather too many questions like why couldn't we live in a nicer area and why didn't Mel wear newer, more flattering clothes. That little lot followed on from a previous inspection during which they had unilaterally decided to bleach the inside of our teapot because it seemed to them to be a little too brown by approved standards. So I was up the ladder working on the ancient principle that forewarned is forearmed, which is sufficient for most people, except perhaps the goddess Kali, who seems to feel the need to be six-armed.
Anyway in the end it all passed off peacefully and a spirit of compromise seems, at least for now, to have replaced the familiar, essentially futile, clash of lifestyle aspirations. The chldn had picked up on all the tension and were as relieved as we were that everything had gone smoothly. As they sat in the bath I explained how it was pointless pursuing arguments that started from mutually exclusive principles and they agreed with me. I was poised to make some pithy observations about the Counter-Reformation and the Thirty Years War but they seemed to have got the point in their own way perfectly well and decided between them, quite rightly, that it was like the old arguments that start "Whoever smelt it dealt it" and continue "Whoever denied it supplied it".
Other news. I have been highly ranked in a search that included the terms 'pictures' and 'school canning of girls'. I don't have many rules regarding p*rv*rts visiting this site but is it too much to ask that they must be able to spell?
Me (to Jake, as he left for school yesterday): "Your hair is a disgrace!"
Jake: "Exactly."
Hmm. I wonder about that boy, about what is going on in that tousled CPU. He recently announced that he was sick of putting his hand up in class and not being asked when he knew the answer, and that he had developed a foolproof strategy for catching the teacher's eye. If a question arises that he's particularly keen to answer he doesn’t raise his hand but instead stares pointedly out of the window with a dreamy expression on his face. Like a shot they're onto him and he then has not only the satisfaction of giving the correct answer but also the triumph of an ambush sprung, a fish played and landed, an adult childed.
So what lies ahead for him? A career in counter intelligence? Or would such understanding of human nature be wasted anywhere other than the advertising industry?
On Saturday we jumped on a bus and headed for the William Nicholson exhibition at the Royal Academy. It was the last day of the show, so I had timed our late run into position with all the precision of a Roy Keane. In the event my forgetfulness was punished careful timing was spoiled by the fact that it was also the first day of the new Turks exhibition and the one queue stretched all the way across the yard, right over the little water bumps that pass for fountains among the arty elite. Keane-like I could have kicked out in rage at the many obstructing legs or gone down noisily claiming illegal contact in a bid to clear the path to goal, but after a moment's thought I decided to queue quietly along with everyone else.
Finally in, we were given Art Detective kits to amuse the chldn. These included a section of blank squares for the child to alphabetise their visit, taking as model Nicholson's brilliant series of woodcuts starting 'A is for Artist'. Zoe set about it with glee, copying outlines from the hanging pictures. Jake seemed less interested and when I looked at his paper after about twenty minutes he had managed 'E is for Exit'.
Anyway, I thought the paintings were wonderful. Nicholson painted silver as lustrously as Van Dyck painted silk. And that is saying something.
Lunch was Italian in a restaurant called 'Ask'. After waiting forty five minutes for our food I came to understand why. Eventually large pizzas appeared, which seemed to go into Jake at such speed that I began to expect 'S is for Sick' might cover the rest of the blank paper in front of him. Fortunately not. He ate his fill then burst into a rendition of 'Hound Dog' which baffled me till I noticed he was holding two flaps of his remaining pizza over his ears.
"Ah," I said, empathic and connected parent to the gills, "you're a dog. Very good."
"No," he riposted, offended. "I'm Elvis. These are those thingies on his face."
Zoe took up the theme, holding a triangular pizza slice under her chin.
"Got it!" I cried. "You're Lenin!" She looked disappointed. "Shaggy from Scooby Doo?" Deepening gloom. "Er, Osama Bin Laden?"
"Father Christmas," she said in a why-do-I-bother voice, very reminiscent of the one I use when offering to polish Jake's shoes. Perhaps there’s a show in this called Puppetry of the Pizza.
Sunday was much duller and only really enlivened by hearing someone on Radio 3 describe a work by 'difficult' composer Harrison Birtwistle as a 'ventifact', and if that means 'a product of pure wind' then I'm sure it's right.
More chillingly, I finally got round to opening the Saturday Guardian's Weekend section to see a picture of Prince Harry dancing in his lovely Nazi arm band between one partygoer dressed as a member of the Ku Klux Klan and another blacked up like a Minstrel. Game over, Harry. Get some new friends and preferably a brain rebore. Now we understand. Got me there.
I awoke this morning to the deep fulfilment that only a brand new jar of Gold Blend can bring. This, my coffee of choice, had disappeared from all our local shops just recently and I took the opportunity to buy some yesterday on a trip to Safeways, which lies a little further afield. Ah, the joys of increased leisure, provided by the removal of deadlines. I feel fully restored now, having survived for nearly a week on Nescafe's Half Caffeinated Gold Blend variant. Oh, the joys of niche consumerism.
A part of me, the non-partisan middle way part, was a tad rueful to leave behind the perfect cuppa I had recently discovered, namely half caffeinated coffee with semi-skimmed milk taken standing half way between the dishwasher and the kettle. But a mixture of progress and tradition has brought me round again to the familiar coffee I have enjoyed for a quarter century.
And that paragraph has got me neatly past the performance anxiety that always besets me when I return after one of my regular absences.
So what has been going on? In blogworld I seem to have missed a good barney about post thieving. I read the blog in question and in the poor woman's defence I can say that she appears to have some fantasy that she is hosting a series of moral debates. Seeing theft for what it is would be a good start, one might think, but she prefers instead to divert every topic to discussions about the evils of 'socialisation' and the wickedness of homosexuals. Quite what someone with such illiberal views is doing reading Little Red Boat and MBIAT beats me. One to avoid.
I did read something thought provoking there, though, which was a discussion about whether it was wrong for Prince Harry to wear a Nazi costume at a fancy dress ball. The thought provoked in me was that large sections of the world at large seem completely, densely ignorant. Were the Nazis that bad, some asked? No, some said, because Ghengis Khan killed people too. And wasn't it an infringement of Harry's liberty to condemn him for a private action so harmless and mirth inducing? I suspect that some of these people were natural Nazi fodder themselves and quite possibly American and therefore less sensitive to issues involving Nazis and the British Crown.
So let me clear up a few things for the avoidance of future doubt. The Army in Britain is the Queen's Army. This may look like a disadvantage at first but let me assure you it's better than letting it be the politicians' army. It's small and it's meant to be sent overseas. The Royal Family and the Army are inextricably bound up by tradition and personal links. Harry himself is due to serve in it soon, in the way that many of his forebears and his close family have done so. The last really big war this Army fought was against the Nazis, who were implacably awful wherever they went and whoever they dealt with. The Russians were bad, yes, but their ideology was at variance with their behaviour. Ditto the Brits and the Yanks in the heat of warfare at times.
With the Nazis, however, you got what it said on the tin. They were explicitly committed to programmes of extermination. They believed it was axiomaic that Germans were superior to every other national grouping in the history of the world and that this allowed, indeed necessitated, that they behaved with utter ferocity on the battlefield and unlimited cruelty off it. There has never been a political ideology like it before or since. And it is a rag-bag of nonsense, a monumental midden of clap-trap, founded in hatred, intellectually ridiculous, designed to attract frightened and demoralised people to whom it offered a one-stop solution to the ills of an unfair world.
Nazis are not funny, clever or entertaining. Prince Harry is no Mel Brooks. It would actually have been all right if he'd gone dressed as a bear, a premise that some trainee satirist tried to wring some weary humour from. The only humour in the whole dismal episode was when Sarah Ferguson waded in, as a media savvy ex-Royal, to defend Harry's honour. I bet Harry felt like General Custer looking up to see five thousand more Indians appearing over the brow of the hill.
And don't get me started on the confusion that arises out of a basic inability to distinguish between the Wehrmacht and the SS.
You may not like the royals, you may not like the Army, you may not like Prince Harry, but he really shouldn't wear Nazi insignia, for his own sake, for the sake of the family firm's interests, for the memory of those the Nazis killed and those who died trying to stop them.
There.
Tomorrow: Carlisle under water, the rights and wrongs explored.
Very belated Happy New Year to all.
Some stiff will appear here shortly, now that I have returned from a dangerous mission beset with movable deadlines and a man-eating director.
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Update:
Yes, that should have read "Some stuff..." but I think it's better as is.