What a way to spend a birthday: my son's first taste of school

It is a rum business, getting old. I cannot for the life of me remember whether I took my pills this morning, yet I can still vividly recall the interview that clinched me a place at my first school.

It was with Jack Russell Perry, the former naval person who had become proprietor and headmaster of Akhurst Boys’ Preparatory School in Jesmond Cottage: a substantial Victorian pile that thoroughly skewed my perception of what constituted a cottage for many years.

He gently asked me why pillar boxes were red. I gave the wrong answer (“to match the mail vans”) but he generously let me in anyway, perhaps because my parents could just about afford his fees (though my father, were he still alive, might wish to take issue with that).

There might have been an element of familial keeping up in the decision to grant me a private education, given that I had two older cousins who had already been sent to Akhurst. Though my mother always swore that the clincher was that I was a June baby and the local state school at Benton would not accept me for another year, when I would have been five and a quarter, and she simply could not endure the pleasure of my company that long.

Luckily there are no such issues with my own June-born son, who celebrates his fourth birthday today with his first “settling in session” at the local authority primary school where he will begin in earnest in September.

I have already been to two parents’ evenings at the place, which is two more than my parents ever spent at Akhurst. The regime seems markedly gentler than it did in my day, with more of an emphasis on learning through play and less on sitting in straight lines staring at a blackboard.

There is no stuffed lion’s head in the stairwell to frighten the infants, and no map of the British Empire on the walls. I also very much doubt that the children will be invited into the headmaster’s sitting room to watch the launch of our latest mighty warship, as I did when the pioneering nuclear submarine HMS Dreadnought came down the slipway in 1960.

On the plus side, they do still expect their male pupils to wear ties, which was naturally a key factor in making the place my first choice in the great primary school lottery.

I shall wait with interest to see what they make of Charlie and what he makes of them, given that his response to my own efforts to educate him about anything tends to be “Stop talking rubbish, Daddy” or “The thing is, I already know all about [insert subject of your choice].”

I took him to Hampton Court, Buckingham Palace, the Natural History Museum and the kitchen garden at Meldon Park last week, and he was adamant that he knew more than me about the Tudors, horses, carriages, soldiers, gun salutes, the monarchy, dinosaurs and horticulture.

Though I did gain a small tactical advantage when I briefly managed to convince him that the dragon in Meldon Park’s woods was a real one that chiefly ate small boys.

I have advised him that the right answer to the pillar box question, if it ever comes his way, is that red makes them stand out so the public can spot them.

I was all poised to say that some years later when I was interviewed for a place by the senior tutor of a Cambridge college, but he sneakily changed the question to what was unusual about the then newish 50p piece.

I replied that it had seven sides, which is true, but this was not the answer he was looking for: it is an equilaterally curved heptagon. Mind you, he also let me in despite my ignorance so clearly a consistent failure to shine in interviews is no bar to educational advancement.

Even so, I consider it fortunate that no one actually spoke to Charlie before granting him his school place. I strongly suspect that the next interview will be mine with his form teacher, and my betting is that her killer question will be “Is he always like this?”

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.

The miracle of new life that made me grow up - well, almost

The physical ageing process is inexorable, but for most of us intellectual development reaches a full stop quite early in our lives.

In an extreme case, Nancy Mitford nicknamed her sister Deborah, now the Dowager Duchess of Devonshire, “Nine” in honour of her mental age. When I visited my mother in her nursing home shortly before she died, wheelchair bound after losing two legs to diabetes and with her sight now failing, she said sadly, “The worst of it is, inside I still feel like I did when I was 17.”

While my wife, like every girlfriend who preceded her, repeatedly points out that I have the mind of a 14-year-old boy trapped in the body of a middle-aged man.

Yet on Valentine’s Day 2012 I thought I had finally overcome my limitations when I strode nervously into the operating theatre where a crack team of obstetricians stood ready to perform their version of that popular old conjuring trick of sawing the lady in half.

When first asked whether I would like to accompany my wife during her Caesarean, my instinctive reaction was to ask how much she would fancy being present if I were having my appendix out. I thought pacing a corridor like a 1950s father was much more my style.

Fortunately a friend with vastly more experience in the wives and children department advised me that, from the male point of view, a Caesarean is an altogether less stressful experience than a natural birth. How right he was. I did not feel a thing (and, more importantly, nor did Mrs Hann) as the surgeon went to work. We could not see anything, either, though our prayers for the baby definitely alternated with ones that the gaffer tape holding our screen in place would not come loose.

Then came that first cry which, as every new parent will tell you, is simply the most moving and wonderful sound you can possibly hear. Shortly followed by the first sight of a tiny but perfectly formed human being, seriously hacked off at having his rest so cruelly disturbed.

In that amazing moment, I knew at once that nothing else in life mattered in the slightest. I was still marvelling at my new sense of perspective as I drove into my office the following morning. I was also trying to pin down that other unusual sensation I was experiencing. I finally worked it out: I was happy. Perhaps, at long last, I had finally and belatedly graduated into adulthood.

After visiting the hospital that evening, I spent a very long time slaving away with an Allen key to assemble the cot I had left in its packaging until baby Jamie was born, for fear of tempting fate. As a result I was still awake when my phone rang shortly before midnight, and a client reported that he had just signed a £1.5 billion deal. We hoped to announce it at a civilised hour the next morning, but it proved to have already leaked.

In consequence, I found myself welcoming a newborn baby into the house after a night on my own in which I had managed just three hours’ sleep, wondering whether this set some sort of record.

James George Frederick Hann is a delightful little chap, even if he does bear a disturbing resemblance to the octogenarian Queen Victoria, and has touched off a slightly wearisome upsurge in attention-seeking behaviour by his elder brother.

After a long first day with both our boys at home, my wife and I flopped gratefully on the sofa in front of the television, holding hands and revelling in our great good luck. Then the appearance of a female weather presenter prompted me to make a light-hearted but typically politically incorrect comment.

My wife sighed, as she has so often done before. “Are you ever going to grow up?” she enquired.

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.

Age slows us down as time speeds up

With age comes the sense that time is passing more quickly, and the certainty that routine tasks take ever longer to perform.

I got up to write this column at 6.30 yesterday and reached my desk two hours later, after a bath and a simple breakfast of porridge. Once the process would have taken 45 minutes, and even then my girlfriend used to chide me for being a terrible slowcoach.

On Saturday I took advantage of the splendid weather to take a favourite circular walk in the Breamish Valley. Ironically, I started recording the times taken to complete my walks because the authors’ estimates in my guidebooks always seemed so wildly generous. In 1997, it took me 3hr 10min. By 2006, this had increased to 3hr 40min. In 2010, it has become a 4hr 20min hike.

Soon it will be an all-day expedition, rendered impossible because I won’t be ready to leave the house until mid-afternoon.

Having a young child renders my deterioration all the more depressing, particularly since he is already starting to outperform me right across the board.

Charlie has sadly been a bit poorly of late, and his doctor prescribed an antibiotic to supplement the ubiquitous Calpol. The first time he approached us with an open bottle of medicine and a spoon, the Strict Blame Culture operating in the Hann household swung into action and I duly interrogated my wife on who had dispensed the last dose and failed to secure the cap properly.

By the third time it happened, I had been forced to concede that our one-year-old son can open supposedly childproof closures that often defeat his parents. Though why should this surprise us, when six months ago he had already comprehensively reprogrammed my wife’s mobile phone?

The penicillin proved an unnecessary precaution, since the shock news finally emerged some time after our consultation with the GP that Charlie is actually suffering from foot and mouth disease. I was on the Internet trying to track down a captive bolt gun and some old railway sleepers for the pyre when my wife arrived with a print-out from the NHS website listing the symptoms (with a large red tick in her own hand against each item) and the reassurance that, in humans, this is normally a mild viral infection.

The final successful diagnosis was reached through mothers’ gossip in the office. Which was at least cheaper than the staggering £369.73 that it cost me last week to be informed that my dog has an enlarged heart. “Stone me!” I gasped at the vet’s when his receptionist announced this total, causing a ripple of merriment around the waiting room, though I soon lost their sympathy by pointing out that I could have had the dog put down, bought a new puppy, paid for it to be microchipped and vaccinated, and still had change for a good night out.

I don’t even know whether the diagnosis is correct. I was shown what was supposedly an X-ray of my dog’s chest, but it could just as easily have been a black and white Luftwaffe aerial photo of French defences along the Maginot Line.

The good news is that the alleged problem can be treated with drugs. And the one helpful tip to be gained from this column is that it is never a brilliant idea to embark on a four hour drive with a dog that has recently swallowed a diuretic pill unless you want to find yourself doing 70mph on the M62 wondering where that noise like running water can be coming from.

I think the long walk on Saturday did him good. It certainly energised this sufferer from an enlarged stomach. And at the pace I can manage these days, could there be a better companion than a valetudinarian Border terrier or an ailing toddler?

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.