Just another Christmas with a two-year-old

It is a truth universally acknowledged that there is nothing more tedious than other people’s children – not even columnists recycling opening lines from Jane Austen.

If this is your view, I can only repeat what newscasters say when they turn to the football results shortly before Match of the Day: look away now.

Because Christmas is undoubtedly a time for children. (Yes, that is three major clichés already.) Even for those of us who would have done most of our festive spending in the off licence, if only it had not been closed down by supermarket competition. Ho, ho, ho. (Four.)

So the chances of a memorably happy Yuletide looked pretty slim around 7pm on Christmas Eve when the exhausted teenager in charge of A&E announced that our two-year-old son should be admitted to hospital for observation.

This had a cathartic effect on young Charlie, who immediately burst into floods of tears. I sternly explained that it was his own fault for taking one of Mummy’s pills, carefully hidden in an apparently inaccessible part of the kitchen.

“But I didn’t,” he sobbed. “I didn’t.”

Which was interesting, because he had spent the previous three hours insisting precisely the opposite, and it is another of those aforementioned universally acknowledged truths that very young children never lie. All investigations of child abuse rely on this premise.

In the car home Mrs Hann proudly recalled an article she had read somewhere which claimed that the sooner a child starts telling porkies, the more likely it is to become a senior executive. (That figures.) I hope there are some talent scouts from the FTSE-100 reading this.

Charlie did not comment, though he was with us in the car because the (very) young man at A&E had gone on to say “Of course if you want to act against medical advice and take him home, that is up to you.”

For which I heard “That’s us covered against a compensation claim if the brat dies. Next please!”

So we decided to take the risk. Because the pill Charlie claimed to have taken, designed to control his mother’s gestational diabetes, was rather too large for him to have swallowed. While his adamant refusal to eat a huge range of delicious things, other than sausages and fish fingers, made it improbable that he would have gone to the trouble of chewing it.

It was our second visit to A&E in less than a week. Prior to becoming a father I had only entered a hospital emergency department once in my life, after a hilarious mishap involving a trouser zip when I was still only an apprentice drunk. Actually, I did not find it at all amusing, but I defer to the universal opinion of the nurses at Addenbrooke’s hospital in Cambridge, who fell about with mirth. I have been a staunch advocate of button flies ever since.

Our previous visit was occasioned by the boy developing a grotesquely swollen eye after bumping it on a shopping trolley in Tesco. Not their fault at all, of course, though that did not stop me drawing up plans to build a new conservatory with our compensation cheque. Until his eye got better.

So mum endured a sleepless night keeping him under observation of her own, then we enjoyed a delightful Christmas morning unwrapping presents and walking the dog. Charlie quite liked the pedal-powered tractor that I had spent hours assembling, though he was seriously disappointed that I would not allow him to use its front loader to dig up the lawn. But he declared that it was outshone among his gifts by the model Land Rover from the splendid toyshop in Rothbury.

After which I confiscated the matches yet again, dragged him away from the cooker for at least the tenth time, and came close to a seizure of my own in the face of a massive tantrum about the lack of gravy on his Christmas dinner, even though its solid content was barely visible above a Lake Superior of the stuff.

Kids, eh? Who would be without them? (Clichés? I’ve lost count.)

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne. A fuller account of Charlie Hann's Christmas may be found at http://www.blokeinthenorth.com/2011/12/and-so-this-is-christmas.html

The sooner every party breaks up ...

How I ever made a living out of public relations is as huge a mystery to me as it must be to all my current and former clients.

Once again on Saturday I found myself at a party where a succession of people came up to resume conversations we had apparently enjoyed in the past, while my face all too clearly proclaimed that I did not have a clue who they were.

The fact that it was a private party made it worse. At least at a business event I would have issued all attendees with name badges which I might have stood a chance of reading, if they had not put them on upside down, back to front, inside their coats or hung unhelpfully from their belts, so that the absent-minded PR has to grovel for a non-existent contact lens to take a surreptitious glance.

It did not help that it was my wife’s 40th birthday bash, and all those present were her closest colleagues and dearest friends. She had drawn up the guest list herself, and booked the splendid room in a local hotel, when it finally became clear that her heavy hints about how much she would enjoy a 1930s themed surprise party in a marquee in our garden were destined to fall on stony ground.

Mrs Hann prepares to greet her guests, and Master Hann begins to nag his grandmother to take him home

Because I hate parties, me. Always have, since I was a child and we had to play musical chairs (now mercifully banned by Elfin Safety) and spar with someone’s faintly sinister uncle, who would desperately try to inveigle us into saying a forbidden word like “sausages”.

My favourite character in the whole of English fiction is Jane Austen’s Mr Woodhouse, for his pronouncement that “The sooner every party breaks up, the better.”

Bring on a bowl of gruel and a nice warm blanket over my knees.

The trouble is that I married someone who is not only vastly younger than I am, but also infinitely nicer and more sociable. This makes me, I am constantly reminded, a very lucky man. The question that periodically exercises me is: what on earth made her do it?

It is not as though I am particularly rich or successful. After 55 years without any dependants, I don’t even have a decent life insurance policy she can look forward to cashing in. Later this week we are going to London to see the Royal Opera’s new production, Anna Nicole, about the tragic 26-year-old Playboy model who married an 89-year-old Texan oil billionaire. You do not need to be a genius to work out the attraction on both sides there. My own case seems considerably harder.

I endured my utter social ineptitude for a couple of hours, and three pints of bitter, then went for a little lie-down, from which my poor wife had to rouse me to propose a toast while she cut her own birthday cake. Then I went back to bed until the joyous hour when the taxi arrived to take us home. I believe that the young people devoted the intervening period to dancing. I shudder at the thought.

The birthday cake, making it a bit pointless to lie about her age

The birthday girl and friends, apparently having a Good Time

The really worrying thing from my wife’s point of view is not so much my own miserable behaviour, which she has come to expect, but the fact that our son matched it with an equally urgent desire to be taken home and put to bed at the earliest opportunity.

The puzzle is that we sang “Lord of the dance” at my mother’s funeral in memory of her youthful enthusiasm for a good party. She was nearly 45 when I happened along so I never saw this side of her character. Perhaps that is where we have been going wrong. Clearly I must encourage Charlie to marry young in the hope of eradicating the Hann anti-party gene before it passes on into the 22nd century.

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.

A barren life without Downton Abbey

I write this in the complete despair of one whose life became a meaningless wasteland when Downton Abbey ended on Sunday night.

By the time you read this they will also have killed off Jack Duckworth on Coronation Street. Cue tumbleweed blowing across the desert of my existence, and serious questioning of the point of going on.

Why is ITV persecuting me like this? Though perhaps the more interesting question is why I, as a would-be middle-class person, have started watching ITV at all?

I was brought up to regard it as common and second rate compared with the dear old BBC. As a child, it is true that I always used to try and catch the magnificent blast of “Blaydon Races” that Tyne Tees TV played at the start of each evening’s broadcasting, but then it was straight over to the other side for Blue Peter, Animal Magic and Look North with Frank Bough, or later Mike Neville and George House.

As well as adopting just the right tone on State occasions, the BBC could always be relied upon to appreciate the crucial importance of airing a good costume drama on Sunday evening. From the black-and-white Forsyte Saga at the start of BBC2 through an apparently endless series of Jane Austen bonnet-fests, they hit the spot time and again.

Yet now ITV has seized the crown with a series that began with one well-worn cliché (the sinking of the Titanic) and ended with another (the outbreak of the First World War) and in which frankly nothing much happened in between. While the press has been buzzing with suggestions that large elements of the plot, such as it was, were lifted straight from the likes of Little Women and Mrs Miniver, and pedants found that the meticulous period detail was slightly marred by the intrusion of TV aerials and double yellow lines.

Admittedly these trifles pale into insignificance compared with the scene in The Tudors where Henry VIII bedded one of his many ladies in a house with two red Calor gas bottles outside.

Still, we snobs can forgive such lapses because Downton Abbey writer Julian Fellowes is proper posh (married to the niece of Earl Kitchener, don’tchaknow). Quite how he follows up his addictive success in the promised second series is open to question, given that so much went to hell in a handcart for the aristocracy from 1914. Fast forward to the Bright Young Things of the 1930s (though Maggie Smith’s Dowager Countess would then be about 100) or try a prequel set in the Naughty Nineties? I can hardly wait.

Meanwhile the BBC has been on strike. When I turned on Radio 4 last Friday morning and they announced that they were airing a programme about birds of the Wash in place of Today, I naturally took this for further sabotage by the National Union of Journalists, or a homage to that running joke in the recent Harry and Paul comedy series about two blokes with a microphone making the dullest radio documentary in the world.

I switched channels immediately, and was later surprised to read that the public actually preferred the birdsong of the estuary to John Humphrys. Though perhaps I should have expected it, because Radio 3 also dropped its usual schedule (though why waffling a bit between CD tracks counts as “journalism” is beyond me) and played instead a long programme about my favourite composer, Handel, which made my usual morning car journey fly by.

Back to normal service yesterday, I listened to the usual self-righteous waffle about the Burmese general election (their chance to vote for the usual generals), then heard that the NUJ were threatening to strike again over Christmas. Oh no! Could this mean a schedule packed with repeats of classic costume dramas? Maybe life is not looking so bad after all.

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.