A journey into hell, with a party bag at the end of it

I am writing this in a state of shock unlikely to be matched unless I witness my own house burn down, or my new car disappear over a cliff without my mother-in-law inside it.

It all started innocently enough at 6.30 last Tuesday morning, when my son Charlie joined me at the breakfast table. I wished him a happy birthday, but he apparently felt no interest in that.

“Daddy,” he announced, “I need to tidy up the conservatory and I need you to help me.”

I was astonished. Hitherto, Charlie’s commitment to doing the reverse of tidying up any room he enters has been pretty much total.

I finally persuaded him to open his cards and presents instead, but then he started banging on about the conservatory again.

So his mother and I naturally asked him the reasons for his sudden conversion. “So it’s tidy for when all my friends come round for my party.”

“But that’s not until Sunday,” we pointed out.

Cue floods of tears. Charlie’s not ours.

The party continued to dominate conversation for the remainder of last week, during which it grew in my mind from a vague and distant warning in the long-range weather forecast to an imminent destructive tornado.

We had decided, foolishly, to operate on the assumption of decent weather and rely on the kids to make their own entertainment running around the garden. To assist, I laid out an old battery-powered ride-on train, kindly donated by a cousin, which proved no longer to work. We also hired a small bouncy castle, delivered by a large man in a Citroen Picasso who insisted on taking his instructions from my wife and referred to me dismissively as “Granddad”.

As if by magic ...

"Charlie, do you want to have first go on the bouncy castle, then?"

Usually this not uncommon faux pas at least secures me an apology and discount from the trader concerned, though on this occasion only the former proved to be forthcoming.

When my contemporaries started breeding 30 or more years ago I often remarked that I had no plans to follow their example as I did not like children. This invariably elicited the shiny-eyed response, “Ah, but your own are different!”

I will now concede that this is true, up to a point. I can just about bear to take my two out in public together, and I do not glare and tut anything like as much as I used to do when I find myself next to other people’s noisy brats on a train or in a pub.

However, I can also report that a room full of four-year-olds is, without doubt, completely unbearable. Give me a chanting mob of bloodthirsty fanatics any day.

After numerous cancellations I think that only about eight of them actually turned up, but it might as well have been 800. And they were in my house for less than three hours, but it seemed more like three months.

I had been enjoined to put Charlie’s Hornby train set into full working order for their entertainment and they descended on it like a plague of locusts, snapping signals, ripping off couplings and testing the track to literal destruction.

Worst of all, their own parents just beamed indulgently throughout. By the time they had sung “Happy birthday”, eaten their cake and sloped off with their party bags, I was a broken man. I slept for a solid 12 hours afterwards.

On the home straight: birthday candle successfully extinguished

I recalled my elderly mother’s reaction when a nephew came round to show off his new son. She seemed distracted throughout, and after my cousin left I asked what had been on her mind. “All I could think,” she replied, “was that if that child broke something, I would scream!”

I found that amusing at the time. Now I know just how she felt.

We are supposed to be looking for a new home nearer Charlie’s first school, but I am beginning to think that we should actually look for two of them, including a nice little flat in sheltered accommodation for me.

Failing that, perhaps we could run to something with a granny annexe. Given stout locks, soundproofing and an ample supply of bookshelves, that might just about do for “Granddad” until the men in white coats come to take me away once and for all.

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.

Reflections from the life laundry

You know how it is when you start tidying up. As soon as you begin delving into cupboards and clearing shelves, you create a mess at least 100 times worse than the one you were trying to tackle in the first place.

If, like me, you are foolish enough to have thrown away virtually nothing for 20 years, the results of embarking on what I believe is called a “life laundry” are truly horrific.

I can barely move for stacks of books, videos (remember those?) clothes, toys, crockery and pictures, despite having occupied most of my spare time for the last week making repeated, heavily laden trips to the Alnwick household waste recycling centre.

The good news is that I have uncovered numerous interesting things I had completely forgotten acquiring. The bad news is that, after a couple of decades lurking at the back of slightly damp cupboards, most of them are too mildewed or rusty to be worth keeping.

There is a simple lesson here: do not buy things you do not really need. And, if they come as gifts, do not hesitate to recycle them swiftly through a charity shop, ideally one that is not frequented by the person who gave you the present in the first place.

I am belatedly taking my own advice now, though struggling to apply the necessary ruthlessness to books and papers. I feel attached to my extensive collection of reference books, though I never actually use them since it became so much easier to find the answer to everything on the internet. And I cannot quite face admitting the futility of having made and kept so many press cuttings, which I never look at again after they are filed.

There are well over a thousand unopened biographies, novels and historical works I bought because I was mad keen to read them. Indeed, five years ago I gave up my job in London primarily so that I could devote more time to this. What I was overlooking is the fact that the books you read in your teens and twenties stay with you forever, but by my time of life the brain has reached full capacity and little sticks.

Around the age of 40 I felt the need to start defacing my books with little notes to remind myself that I had actually read them, in the hope of preventing myself from doing so again. Now, like a castaway on Desert Island Discs, I really only need one book that I could read again and again, with a goldfish-like delight. Something by Evelyn Waugh or P.G. Wodehouse, I fancy. There’s no point taking anything too seriously when your mind is going.

Albums of family photographs covering four generations also take up yards of shelf space, though at least that has stopped growing since the invention of the digital camera; a great boon given that more images must have been captured of my son in his first five months than of any of the previous generation of Hanns in all their three score years and ten, or thereabouts.

I was just going to sit here surrounded by my piles of junk until I expired, then let my unfortunate heirs sort the mess out. Now I have had to become my own executor before the baby starts crawling, to enable him to move around in relative safety.

Everyone told me that it would be really hard to do, but that I would feel much better afterwards. A bit like climbing Everest or stopping banging my head against a brick wall. It is perhaps too early for me to say, but I think I am beginning to see their point.

Possessions really are a burden. They tie us down. Memo to last week’s big lottery winners: buy nothing apart from a really good digital camera and one outstanding book.

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.