Words and Lyrics

We have a CD of children’s songs and nursery rhymes. It is musical saccharin, with happy, bouncy tones and in many ways is ideal for playing to a child during a game of musical chairs, as it’s been hacked to death enough by the producers and musicians that its musical quality is hardly dented by repeated stop-starts. I detest what the production company has decided to do to traditional lyrics – the black sheep has become a woolly sheep and the drunken sailor has become the jolly pirate.

Let’s consider What Shall We Do With The Drunken Sailor as a telling case of the misguided assumptions made by adults that take exception to the traditional lyrics and impose a new-speak devoid of cultural or historical significance for children. Basking in their own lack of lyrical and practical knowledge, they believe that removing the reference to alcohol somehow stops kids thinking about beer. If they’re wrong, as I believe, then they are just wasting their time and lessening the song, but if they’re actually right, and songs are able to influence behaviour then the drunken sailor song is actually quite a strong anti-drinking message. The traditional lyrics document a wide variety of punishments including keel-hauling, a naval punishment whereby a rope is attached at one end to the bound feet of a miscreant, and at the other to his hands, the salient detail being that in the rope then forms a loop running across the deck, down one side of the boat, under the boat (and water) and up the other side. To keel-haul and individual the rest of the crew would pull on this rope so that the bound individual completes a lap of the boat. As a communal punishment, keel hauling is unique in that there is almost no way for the administrators of the punishment to be “nice”, pull too slowly and they drown their mate, pull a little harder and they grate his supine form across the barnacles encrusting the bottom of the boat &nadash; as any rescue diver will tell you, such an injury is almost certain to get infected. All in all I think you'll agree this is hardly an advertisement for drinking!

I have a sneaking suspicion that Baa Baa Black Sheep may be being re-branded because of some vague sense that the word “black” may be in and of itself racist. This is a rather stupid assumption on their part. When filling out passport application forms we are told to“use a black pen”, because pens, like sheep (and indeed the wool they produce) come in a variety of colours including black. Countless government offices, employment agencies and other lovers of easily scanned filled in forms all instruct us to “use a black pen”, they don’t sidle round it by saying “use the darkest pen you can find, nothing too gothic but darker than blue” and I feel we should have the same faculty to describe sheep in song.

The other reason this bugs me of course is that “woolly” sheep sounds like such a weak cop-out when presented with a musical educational opportunity. If we really want to go for it we could mix and match animals and cooking techniques so that kids are still learning something (I’ve composed two examples below):

Recipes with Duck

QuackQuack Cooking Duck
are you nearly done?
Yes Sir, Yes Sir, lunch at half past one.
Breast meat with orange sauce,
A leg in cassoulet,
The other we'll have tonight, in Chinese takeaway!

(this only works if you pronounce cassoulet as a French word (kas-ou-lay)

The Tesco Horsemeat Song

Clip Clop Lonely Horse
Have your friends all gone?
Yes Sir, Yes Sir, round here there are none.
One's gone to Tesco,
he is in a pie,
Yet they tell you all it's beef, keeping prices high!

That's all for now. If anyone knows a production company that wants to put children's songs with teeth and educational value on a CD have them drop me a line

DAD

"Normal"

Ask yourself, "what is normal?" Answers to this question span the entire gamut of human experience, because my "normal" is me and your normal is "you". That could of course make us destined for a violent and untimely clash (if your "normal" is Jihad, paedophilia or "peanut and jelly sandwiches" [peanut and jelly sandwiches are something the culinary world wishes it could uninvent, putting it right up there with VX gas].

In a similar vein I have a friend who's a police officer. We spend a couple of hours a week talking and spending time with each other. He says it normalises him, as he spends so much of his waking life dealing with individuals whose tail-spin lives damage those around them in a vortex of aggression, violence and crime. His working life is completely different to mine (next week I'm attending training in Paris with mild mannered boffins whilst he'll be kicking down doors and taking names) and it strikes me that what we see as normal profoundly effects our path through life.

Take something really simple, like home ownership. Before the kid came along I lived mostly out of suitcases in a variety of overseas jobs. Within 8 months (he was early!) I'd returned to the UK, purchased a house and established myself. I see it as normal that kids grow up in a house that belongs to the parents, rather than having some vaguely Freudian landlord looming in the distance. I do this because it's exactly what my parents did, and therefore is normal and "makes sense". The effect will probably be that in 25-30 years when my grandchildren are on the way, my son will see the same thing as "normal". The world our children know as they grow up shapes them fundamentally (which is why religious indoctrination of the young can be so very wrong as the wife-beating nutter in the semtex vest probably thinks he's normal too). I feel that having the security of a family owned house makes an individual slightly less deferential, and slightly more ambitious. With these observations in mind, what can we do to establish a good kind of normal for our kids so that they demand and receive a successful future?

Comparing their present status with their future is a valuable exercise whenever you have a choice to make. Let's consider school meals:

Plated service

All the kids sit in their place, and food is brought to their table. There is either plated service, or part-plated service (i.e. they help themselves to vegetables from tureens in the centre of the table). This isn't just for private schools. The state run primary school I attended served meals in this way, and several of the local government-funded schools still do this. I eat like that when "client facing", and when sitting in the officer's mess.

Buffet Service

The kids line up for their meals, and balance plates, cutlery and bread rolls on a tray. They have some power to choose what goes on their plate, but in exchange do their own leg-work. This accurately reflects the factory floor, most office work and the cuisine offered to enlisted men. Societally this is quite normal.

Trays with slots

If the kid's school has those special trays with moulded slots for the different components of the meal, served by a slightly moustachioed woman of indiscriminate age, then your children are role playing prison every lunch-time. It's time to consider home-schooling, or a shank.

Of course, it is possible to become too obsessed by all this, and speaking as a parent who likes his kid to have variegated friends and slightly inappropriate hobbies (canal swimming and practical jokes anyone?), too far is currently represented by Katie Hopkins who comes across as slightly neurotic and definitely snobbish. I'm not overly bothered with micromanaging my son's life in terms of the friends he has or the homework he does (provided he passes the test). Instead I feel that the biggest dose of "normal" he should absorb is that happiness is a given. Hopefully he'll be as comfortable sleeping in a 5* hotel as under a hedge, and as compelling in the boardroom as in the comedy club, just like his dad.

DAD

Maternal Panic Sydrome

It’s snowing in the UK, so extensively that my brother has been stranded in Norway (where I’m informed that Norwegian airport staff find it comical that anywhere shuts for snow), and this has given me a bit of respite and a chance to write.

This last month has been one long string of “baby firsts” (which will be the subject of other posts). It’s also exposed a rift between the parenting style of myself and his mother together with an outbreak of MPS (not to be confused with PMS, an equally feminine condition for which you don’t require a baby!). Baby and I have discovered that his mum worries about a lot more stuff than I do, much to our amusement.

I had a lot of fun yesterday afternoon with a particularly cute onset of MPS. I was called over because the child was “bruised and bleeding from the head”. I followed a little known route to diagnosis which I think we’ll christen "the three L’s":

LOOK

Hmmm, that looks like Marmite to me, and I was holding him whilst I had my breakfast.

LICK

[This stage was accompanied by a shriek of hygienic outrage]

Oh, that tastes like marmite as well, I’d better polish his head with my sleeve.

LAUGH

Whilst trying to explain how the Marmite got on his head, and that she worries too much!

I’m a big believer in the axiom “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger”, and so the baby’s first adventure with solid foods was a raisin one day whilst I was baking with him in the high chair rather than anything suggested by the glossy booklets provided by oh-so-concerned companies trying to sell baby food. He’s also been carried out into the snow to experience the tickle of cold on his face and still sparse scalp (against motherly protests). You would have thought I had delivered the line “I'm just going outside, and may be some time” rather than merely stepping into the driveway. My wife’s reaction is probably tinged by the fact that she’s never lived anywhere less than tropical for winter before.

I feel that people have an instinctive manner when it comes to raising children which is largely dependant on what was done with them as a child. Essentially, parents default back to what didn't kill them as infants. These differences would exist in any family, but are probably all the wider thanks to differences of race, nationality, religious outlook (not the same as a religious difference, I just expect any deity that created me to have a sense of humour!) and social class between my wife and I – for the record, she’s the “uptown girl” with the doctorate.

To me children are proto-adults, embarking on their first steps towards the rest of their life. For this reason I let him chew my uncle’s dog, stroke passing cows, watch cooking, and sample anything that doesn’t contain one of the forbidden foods (at this age, salt would be lethal, and processed sugar, dairy, meats and baked goods would not do him any good at all). To her he’s a doll, this special little self contained bundle who’s almost frozen in time. It’s probably why she fills a baby book whilst I make plans.

DAD

Talking in soft voices

My wife has a cold and her sneezing scares the child. Yesterday she erupted whilst he was sat on her knee and the poor mite was terrified; it wasn’t just a plaintive little whimper it was the clarion scream that signifies true fear... and she got that reaction by sneezing whereas I only manage it when he squirms his soapy little self from my grasp in the bath and finds himself holding his breath and looking up at me through the bubbles... (he’s far too bright to open his mouth under water, he just lets me know that he’s not happy once he’s been fished out!)

Not only that, but when my wife did scare him, I managed to reduce him to giggles again with my usual mix of animal noises and over-the-head baby acrobatics. She thinks that it is unfair that whilst I can pitch my voice at “werewolf growl” or deliver a chest-thumping Tarzan ululation to giggles and smiles, a simple sneeze from her delivers panicked tears.

I feel that this is another one of those areas where many parenting books get it wrong by trying to do too much of a good thing... they often teach that you shouldn’t startle a child or talk in harsh tones around the child; that hushed, gentle tones should always be used.

My own thoughts contradict this for many reasons: the fact of the matter is that your emotional and endocrine based responses are there to keep you alive and well and protect against social and macro-scale (i.e. something your size or slightly larger) threats that want to do you harm, and in many ways they are analogous to the immune system. Now, whilst some restraint is to be encouraged (i.e. don’t torture your kids [as an aside all the cases of children being water-boarded seem to come from the USA!) wrapping them in verbal cotton wool is likely to produce analogous results to fearfully rationing peanuts whereby low exposure leads to sensitization and death! Similarly, experience of growls, sarcasm and even vastly over-dramatised threats at a young age is likely to lead to the kind of young adult who grins knowingly and thinks their way out of a conflict situation or mugging in later life (if a child has never heard a sarcastically raised voice, they’re likely to be the fetal-position chalk outline with extra groin based damp patches!)

This is something that the wife and I agree to differ on. I feel his exposure to both approaches is advantageous in the long term, and it is interesting that when he’s feeling down both her dulcet tones and my growls have the same calming effect; maybe it’s not so much what you say, or how it’s said, but that you’re there, caring enough to interject.

DAD

The right amount of worry

I have this friend who’s recently become a dad. Our kids are about the same age and I guess we’ve got an awful lot in common, even down to the way our kids were dragged into the world (bonding over forceps conjures an interesting mental image, but I digress!)

The thing is with this dude is that he’s a worrier; part of me thinks that his adventures are more somber because he worries, and part of me thinks that maybe it’s the other way round... he worries because he’s one of those unfortunate individuals to whom bad things happen as a matter of course.

Take our attitudes to caring for a baby. My personal philosophy is that a baby will survive most things with a minimal of fuss, and this is borne out by the fact that whilst I’ve been dizzy and out of action for three days with a seasonal bug, the net effect of the same bug on the baby is that he’s learnt to enjoy gurgling snot-bubbles of various hues out of his nose. Meanwhile my friend panics that the child will somehow contract Ebola from a swallow-borne coconut (an African swallow obviously!) and when looking at a kid from his perspective the child suddenly appears far less robust.

The problem I often face is when dealing with questions. Recently we’ve had the following exchanges and I feel my responses haven’t really lived up to his angst-driven expectations:

“My baby wakes me up every night. He grunts whilst breast feeding!”

“He probably wont pull more than once at Glastonbury!”

“My baby shows signs of autism.”

“Well, looks like you’re holidaying in Vegas in matching suits!”

“I don’t have any time to relax.”

“Let me show you how to cradle a sleeping baby and play xbox at the same time!”

This is the usual pattern of our exchanges, and I often play the voice-of-reason in his more pathetic metro-sexual moments. The last exchange has been rather more worrying and my usual humour doesn’t seem to be cutting it... he said:

“I walked into the room, and the baby was laughing but my wife was in tears, what should I do?”

To which I wanted to reply:

“I saw this in a movie once. Get an exorcist, the baby’s clearly possessed!”

On reflection I really wasn’t the best person to go to for advice in this kind of situation. If I ever encountered a moment like that with my own wife and child, I would probably check the room for sharp objects and then try to make up my mind whether the wife or demon-child posed more of a threat to my person and sanity before calling the ghost busters. For once my somewhat lumbering friend got it right, he gave everyone a big hug, told them he loved them and is just keeping a quiet eye on them both.

It would appear that when it comes to dealing with upset and depression in a family being more of a man means being less of a lad. I think I learnt something and would like to throw the blog open to comments from anyone feeling they’re shouldering it all some days, because you’re not alone.

DAD

Seduced by the Dark Side

Those of you with an eye for detail may have noticed the new badges which point to the fact that this blog is now a member of the “mumsnet blogger network” (I’m buried in their directory somewhere in the M section!) , and can also be found in the rather small fatherhood category.

Is this going to change my blogging and parenting style? The short answer is no, which only leaves the question of how long a father who believes in introducing his child to the wonderful world of adrenaline fueled laughter and risk taking is going to hold on to his affiliate status. I tend to find the idea that mums are the only or primary parent either comical or offensive depending on how the marketing spin is presented. As such my link to mumsnet is an attempt to move behind enemy lines and start rattling some cages.

A telling case when looking at gender bias in parenthood is TESCO’s marketing campaign. They have recently managed to be both offensive and unintentionally humorous. I received a magazine, addressed to me, with vouchers from them as part of their “shop even more with us now you’ve had a baby” marketing campaign (I’m not sure what the official name of the campaign is as they have not yet replied to my emails). The magazine had two tiny pictures of men buried in its pages – one of whom was demonstrating a complete lack of chivalry by standing at the top of some steps watching a woman labour to carry a pushchair, presumably containing his child, down the steps. These two solitary men were massively outnumbered by women, often clutching a baby whilst grinning womaniacally (a feminist maniacal grin!). Marketing material like this is offensive; those women would not have the baby to clutch without a man being involved at some stage, and assuming that the woman remembers his name, there is no reason why the guy’s presence in the child’s life isn’t as celebrated (and photographed for glossy promotional literature) as the woman’s.

As for the humorous, the vouchers I recieved contained one that read “introduce a friend to our mother and baby club so she can experience our discounts too!” Reading this as a man I imagined sitting next to a rather buxom young lass in a bar and trying the line “would you like to try some TESCO discounts, because there’s a special club I can help you join!” My imaginary conquest didn’t end well, nor did the imaginary divorce hearing where “TESCO made me do it” was not considered a rational defense!

So, dear reader, I see it as a moral duty to fight the corner of dad-ness. I may even try to goad some of the mumsnet denizens into commenting on my posts, but will remain true to my principles and the importance that being a dad has for me and the sprog.

DAD

Dad’s night out

Two days ago I had my first night out since Harris was born. It was really quite dramatic, and involved both drugs and a nice blonde running her hands up and down my bare chest...

Sadly, this was in the context of being admitted to hospital... the drugs were painkillers and the girl with the nice hands was an impossibly pretty surgeon who was busy deciding how much of me she was going to turn into hors d’ouveres for Hannibal Lecter this time (it seems that every two years a different chunk of my insides is sent to the pie factory in the sky!). The most incongruous element is that I had a lot of fun; the team consisted of the aforementioned bombshell together with an eerily cheerful yet far too tired nurse who kept writing all my vitals in the wrong boxes on the form, leaving me with a resting pulse of 98 and a blood oxygen level of 67, and a diminutive Iranian health care assistant who talked geography and homesickness whilst taking my blood and explaining that it didn’t really matter which tube she filled first (despite the instructions to the contrary on the poster in the nurses’ station!), and all the time I was immersed in the world beyond bills, nappies.

What’s kind of scary is that the only person on the ward who was finding hospital as exiting as me was the guy in the bed next to me. His day out consisted of "worse TV, but better food" and the surgical extraction of the mobile phone he’d somehow managed to turn sideways whilst concealing it in his rectum from the guards at HMP Nottingham (he deserves a medal, it was a large Sony Ericsson, not something manageable like a Nokia). We sat, (flanked by the guards who couldn’t really go anywhere on account of being chained to the patient just in case he received a suspicious call) discussing how good it felt to be on the outside... the only difference being that his sentence is up in 10 weeks time whereas mine runs at least until the kid finishes university.

I’d like to take this opportunity to thank ward C31 at Nottingham’s Queen’s Medical Centre for providing a degree of light comic relief along with excellent medical care... it would be really nice if you could start doing theme-nights!

DAD