Speaking as a parent

Goodbye.

Fantastic entertainment. Brilliant people. That's been my experience of blogging.

But mystery too, and somehow the magic has been lifting recently. If that's how it's going then it's going without me.

Does the world need my opinions about anything? Well, er, no. That may well go for the entire blogo-multiverse too. But not my place to say. Only my place to say about me. And I know that if blogworld has a voice, it isn't mine.

Started blog following my nose. Now my nose says stop. My ears listen and my heart says 'Yes'.

Huge thanks to readers, commenters, linkers. Been wonderful. Incredible the global reach from this little keyboard in this little corner of this little house. But the children need the chairtime, I need to do some work and nobody needs this blog.

Will review this decision in three months. Not pique - far from it - just knowing when enough is enough.

Loyal Moment.

Happy Birthday to Prince Charles, heir to the throne and one-time amateur watercolorist, the man I once dubbed The Prince Formerly Known As Artist.

May he prosper, and we look forward to the day he gets the top job, when he finally gets a kingdom for his horse.

Waterloo: We Were Defeated.

We went to see the Lord Mayor's fireworks, which was a much better arrangement than him coming to see ours. He would have been disappointed. Ours were bought at three seconds to four last Sunday in Woolworth's, in that little lull between all the shoplifters going home and the doors closing.

The security man watched impatiently as I picked over the debris, buying four packets of coloured sparklers of the sort that probably wouldn't frighten a kitten. And they didn't frighten her, unlike the twenty one rocket salute next door but one, fired off in honour of some idiot's ego. And as a bonus I reckon our sparklers had a carbon footprint equivalent to less than a bottle's worth of Cokey burps.

The green and red sparklers lit easily and were waved happily in semi-solitude. Just the four of us with a watering can for an audience. Unlike the fifteen minutes of pyrotechnic mayhem last night, shot off for a heaving Waterloo Bridge's worth of eager Londoners. But we did get to see all of ours all the way through, unlike the Lord Mayor's which were interrupted by regular advertisement breaks on the sides of tall buses. The Lord Mayor's style was rather more ITV to our BBC2, I thought.

The Black Parade is still popular round here. It occurred to me that, rather than emo, perhaps My Chemical Romance should be classified as chemo.

Fund Management.

The rest of the curly kale made its way onto the table last night. With some cheese on top and something else mixed in which I didn't recognise. Mel had made it for good but it had turned out evil. Even lots of extra cheese couldn't reform it. Some Oz plonk, a last resort, seemed to help, but only when applied directly into me, not onto it.

The kitten's insurance confirmation turned up in the post today, so she'd better watch out. She's now potentially worth much more than we paid for her. In certain circumstances anyway. We took the Gold Option, so we'd get £750 if anything, y'know, happened to her. If anything does happen in the next year then she will have comfortably outperformed any standard investment that I know of. She was a voucher once before, and now she is redeemable again.

I have suggested renaming her 'mini-ISA'. Investments can go up or down, or round and round and then sleep on your bed.

Kittens - you know they make sense.

Got To Laugh.

The phone rang. It was a friend. He was holding a copy of a High Court judgement in his hand, recently delivered by a County Court judge acting up in the High Court - Family Division. He had noticed that the sloppy handwriting on it had, by virtue of an uncrossed double 't' and a cursory 'ng' rendered the word 'sitting' as 'silly'. So the judgement was given by 'Her Honour Justice ***, silly as a High Court judge'. He laughed and I laughed too.

I admired his reaction, and thought it spoke well of him, considering that the judgement called him a liar and an abuser of his own child, awarded costs against him of more than one hundred thousand pounds and barred him from seeing his own child, even under supervision, until he has accepted his 'illness' and sought treatment.

All on the word of an inveterate fantasist, believed by a inexperienced, cocksure social worker. And one silly judge.

Cuddlywuddly.

Smi-i-ile.

Mel put some curly kale on the table last night, to accompany an old-skool stew. She offered to put butter on it. I tried some and suggested she put anaesthetic on it. We chomped on. She suggested we had another go at watching some expensive multi-part political thriller she videoed last week. Suggested, that is, because when we tried to watch the recording last week she fell asleep. Time-shifting programmes has rolled over into time-shifting naps round here. The issue is becoming urgent because if we don't watch last week's tonight we'll have no idea what's going on this week. Yes, we could video this week's episode as well but then Mel would be asleep for most of the rest of the evenings this week if we try to watch two.

Frankly by 10 o'clock last night she didn't look up to it so I tried to pep her up with a long and eloquent speech about the nature of blog fame.

Not that I have any myself to talk about, but because I was with a lot of famous bloggers last Saturday and I was taking notes. My observations included that generally they spend Saturdays in pubs and get drunk. Only one in twenty five has a baby, which is quite honourable, because babies are easy material and famous bloggers go beyond the commonality of our experience. Mostly they drink Guinness and are not very good at getting served, possibly because they are all quite nice and not competitive about these things, probably doing loads of observing of their own while they wait.

I watched them and enjoyed their youthful gambolling, with their tongue studs and nice shirts. I used to think I had youth on my side. Now I've just got middle age on my front

Zoe has bought The Black Parade by My Chemical Romance and has been listening intently. It is a whole album of doom. I have been looking for signs of emo excess but so far she shows no trace of deviating from the party line round here, which is that staying alive is good. The only person who has slashed any wrists in this house is Lizzie the kitten, and they weren't hers.

Zoe did the job of watching Robin Hood this weekend. I have said elsewhere that the new Robin isn't threatening enough for me and seems to get out of tricky corners by producing an enormous soppy smile. He smiles at everyone, including the Sheriff of Nottingham, who frankly isn't either that funny or fanciable. Confronted by bloke with a quarter-staff and a vicious dog? Smile. Gets told he's to be hanged 'pon the morrow - smile. Zoe says she counted six smiles in all this week. Must have been a dangerous old episode, that.

Bad Moment.

Today we have mostly been playing Granny algebra. How to get two grannies, two houses and three families to join up. A equals granny, X marks the spot. PG rates the language.

Anyway, that wasn't why I called you. I need you to help me out here. This has been sitting on my mind since last week.

When I went to the cattery-petshop to get the kitten back I dashed in to get her, leaving the cab waiting outside. The lady was expecting us and I slapped down the required money on the counter. A cool thirty. A giraffe an' a half in saaf London pet shop parlance. She seemed to want to talk but at the same time she was hurrying up the boy who was dallying and canoodling with the kitty and not putting her in her box. I felt we should leave and was about to say so when I noticed a customer waiting patiently on the human side of the counter.

I started to say something to the effect that everything was fine and you should serve this person waiting. What came out of my mouth was "No, we're fine. Why not serve this..."

And an awful silence followed. It lasted about a second but it felt epochal to me, because I looked at the waiting, adult customer and suddenly realised I couldn't tell whether it was a woman or a man. About fifty thoughts ran through my head quicker than Paul Simon could say "Get off the bus, Gus.". And what actually came out was: "Glarblexscrunng... bluph... nnng."

So this is my dilemma. Is it better to mistake a man for a woman, or a woman for a man? How offensive is it, either way?. Not when you think it, but when you actually SAY it. Even in a pet shop.

You see I really couldn't tell. It was wearing a denim jacket and some slacksy trousers. No apparent make up, medium length dark hair - a bit kinky, olive complexion, no obvious curves or lumps. I would have said "Serve this customer" but I predetermined that that would sound patronising. "Please serve this person" could easily sound contemptuous. Now, bear in mind that I had started the sentence aware of this person's presence but without having taken the necessary butcher's. (Butcher's hook = look, for my transatlantic readers. Or reader.)

Just one second in my life, yes. But a very bad one, which got worse throughout.

What should I have said?

Emo.

The word of the week over here is 'emo'. It's a word I've known for years but suddenly it's back in fashion because of My Chemical Romance's ascent to public notice. A notice so noticeable that the Daily Mail has apparently alerted the nation to the dangerous death cult of emo. Zoe, our contemporary music fan, is interested enough to have read a long article-interview with the band in last Friday's Guardian but as yet shows no signs of rag-doll teenage despair. I read the article too and was pleased to note that although I don't precisely know what emo sounds like, neither does anybody else.

Zoe is all muscular lostprophets by choice so probably finds superdroopy mope-rock bands a bit, y'know, sad. She has told me about a current emo torch-carrying combo called Panic at the Disco. I saw five minutes of them at Reading and noted that they were so sensitive that they couldn't even look at their own fans. They have long song titles, using words that DON'T THEN APPEAR IN THE SONG. Wow. So we had a little talk about what 'pretentious' means.

Mel's attempts a few months ago to play her daughter some proper 80s music didn't quite hit the spot. She dug out her old Living In A Box album and made both children sit through their eponymous masterpiece. Half of the younger generation remained unimpressed, but Jake latched onto the pronunciation of the word 'box' which in the 80s was pronounced 'baax'.

There has been one beneficial long term result of that evening's listening for the family, though probably few for the neighbours, apart from the fact that it hasn't been repeated. Now when Lizzie sits in her cut-down cardboard box we can all chant

"Sheeza sittin' in a baax, sheeza sittin' in her cardboard baax"

which we have all found pretty well endlessly amusing.

Other than that the kitten has discovered a new game; yesterday she sat under my chair as I typed and raked her claws down my bare legs. Her claws are small and didn't really hurt but after a few minutes of this methodical carving the results were unexpected. I looked down to find long strands of flesh hanging from my legs in a series of curls. Early signs, I think, that when she grows up she could do well serving in a kebab shop, the sort with big meaty legs in the window. She could be good at that.

Fireworks night is still the main excitement for the whole of the rest of Peckham, it seems. Incoming mortar fire last night at 1:30 a.m. Or perhaps it's just another escalation in the local drugs wars.