The V&A East is not a Storehouse it is an Awehouse

I'm always bemused when I see friends melt away from London just as their kids get a bit older. To my mind if you are going to forsake this magnificent metropolis the time to do it is when your kids are born. It is no exaggeration to say that parenting small children is a form of imprisonment. Why would you serve your sentence in a grey cage and not one of limitless green far from cars, syringes in the playground and undesirables on the street corner? London, in my view, really comes into its own at 10+.

Which means when I have an 8 year old and a 5 year old and a baby to entertain I'm really put on my mettle. I've tried the V&A in the past and the only way I've made it work is to devise a points system for dog, dragon and lion spotting. The winner gets 50p, the runner up also gets 50p, because by now I've figured out how children work. If your children are more 'rude bits' inclined you can always substitute body parts.

It was therefore with some hesitation that I determined to take them to the V&A East Storehouse (http://vam.ac.uk/east/storehouse/visit), despite the rave reviews. I should not have worried, they were ENTHRALLED. And as far as I could make out so was everyone else. What is more I am confident it was not just the novelty of the place. It is, as far as I know, a unique experience. It is ironic that when we live in a time in which everyone is a curator and everything is curated that the greatest discovery of museumship should be a total absence of curation.

There are almost no labels at the Storehouse and, if they want my advice, they should get rid of the very small number that there are. This is not art explained, mediated, or presented. This is objects in their rawest and most naked form. Another irony for a 21st century space is that it makes absolutely terrible Instagram material. These objects are not on display at their photogenic best, they are not on display at all, they are in store.

But it's a store of dreams, a cross between Aladdin's Cave and Mr Gruber's Antiques shop from Paddington. None of the objects are in a context; there is no chronological or thematic framework. What that means is that you really look at the object on its own terms. What is this? What's it for? What's it made of? Where is it from? Who made it? Who owned it? It's that immediate appeal to curiosity that unites adults and children alike.

The best thing, because it is after all the 21st century, is if you want to know the answers you can find them. Even more amazingly, if there is an object in the collection not on display, you can put in an order 2 weeks or more in advance and it will be produced for you. FOR FREE. When you reflect on how many terrible experiences are now ruinously expensive here you have the entirety of one of the World's greatest collections at your fingertips, for absolutely nothing.

Attempting an Answer to 'Adolescence'

 

I recently fielded an enquiry from my 8 year old – 

8yo: Dad, can I have a smartphone?

Me: Absolutely not. 

8yo: When can I have one? 

Me: When you’re 25. 

8yo: Oh, come on, don’t be ridiculous! What about 18? 

Me: Deal. 

I’m not much a believer in offering other parents unsolicited advice but if your 8 year old has a smartphone I strongly suggest you find it and throw it immediately into the sea. If I had any kind of moral courage that is exactly what I would do with my own phone; the time may yet come when I will. 

In asserting that, and as a criminal justice professional, I suspect I was not part of the target audience for Netflix’s ‘Adolescence’, which has so vividly captured the media and public’s imagination. The fact that it has been so successful suggests it is telling a lot of people something they did not know or, if they knew it, they have sought to close their eyes to the poison that is unbridled access to smartphones. 

Little children are scared of imaginary monsters under the bed but it’s parents that should be frightened of the very real ones provoking and inciting their sons online, on devices hastily flung there hours after bedtime. Your son’s bedroom is not a safe space if he has unregulated access to the Internet, no room or place is in those circumstances. 

Modern parenting is often surrendering to a mania for your child’s safety but without a moment’s thought for whether others are safe from your child. The paradox is that one of the first justifications parents give for providing their offspring with smart phones is concern for their safety and knowledge of their whereabouts. But what use is knowing your kid’s whereabouts on a map if you have no idea of where on the planet their mind has been taken and by whom? That isn’t to say that every 13 year old boy is at risk of becoming a murderer but there are many things short of fatal violence that we have cause to fear. 

Another of the merciless lessons of ‘Adolescence’ is that if fathers are not present in their sons’ lives, not just as bodies that come and go to work, but emotionally, spiritually and intellectually then it should be no wonder that boys look elsewhere for their guidance, instruction and philosophy. And if they’re getting that from Andrew Tate and his ilk then healthy relationships with women and girls will be the first sacrifice. 

Because ‘Adolescence’ is primarily a cautionary tale it is perhaps unfair to criticise it for not offering solutions, still less hope. But I take the view that a hopeless narrative is a counsel of despair and, as a father of sons, I am determined never to submit to that. Even the most blinkered dolt can now diagnose the symptoms of the digital plague that has seized the imaginations of far too many young men. What is needed now is solutions. It goes without saying that accepting responsibility for developing and demonstrating right values in our boy children’s lives has to be part of it. But there is scope for more imaginative solutions than just that. 

It was a cruel irony that the Southport killings occurred in the setting of a Taylor Swift dance event. The goddess of girlhood and the bodily expression of the soul attacked by hateful rage and jealousy of innocent joy. Where is the Taylor Swift for boys? WHO is the Taylor Swift for boys? If the measurement is reach and impact upon impressionable minds then the dismal answer is Tate himself. 

It is very striking that there is no male singer with anything like Swift’s following. Who is the successor to Springsteen, the protégé of Prince, the bearer of Bowie’s flame? If young men want to look to the stars they shouldn’t have to look to the aged and the dead. The retreat of young men from culture is an alarming 21st century phenomenon but it’s in music, the most accessible art form of all, that we should be most concerned. 

40 years have passed since 'We Are The World' was released as the American riposte to Bob Geldof’s ‘Do They Know It’s Christmas’. If you want to see an extraordinary account of some of the biggest talents in the World setting aside their ego to find a joint voice for a common purpose the watch the documentary ‘The Greatest Night in Pop’, the trailer is here. It is genuinely one of the most uplifting things I’ve ever watched. It strikes me that if 21st century musicians are looking for such a common purpose they couldn’t do better than collaborate on a single or even an album that gives young men something to rally around as a positive totem against the proliferation of misogynistic incitement. 

Something else I believe could be an extremely effective vaccine against Incel attitudes and identification taking root is more dancing. This may seem an absurd or naive suggestion but almost no children learn to dance and even fewer boys do. ‘Billy Elliot’ was such a remarkable film because, for so many, what it depicted was and remains so remarkable. Dance is an expression of joy and connection and the best possible weapon against digital detachment and isolation in the ‘manosphere’. I don’t have in mind the hideous awkwardness of school discos but partnered dancing. If you went to school in Scotland the chances are you were introduced to Ceilidhs at school, like this one at Dunbar Grammar School. It is much harder to ‘other’ girls as being no more than pieces of meat to use and abuse if you have spent every Friday afternoon learning to do-si-do with them. The dancing obviously doesn’t have to be Scottish but being partnered means there is actual, real human connection. 

Perhaps neither of these suggestions resonate with you but surely it’s time to start focussing on the solutions to not the symptoms of male rage and resentment?

Growing Into Fatherhood

I was recently reading a long and furious thread on Mumsnet posted by a new mother expressing equal parts astonishment and anxiety about how hopeless her partner was proving to be at parenting. It would be fair to say that the more seasoned mothers leaping to weigh in were neither astonished nor anxious. They were familiar and furious, piling in scornfully with expressions like ‘weaponised incompetence’ and ‘learned helplessness’. 

One mother, clearly subscribing to the show don’t tell school of thought, simply posted this picture (by Javier Royo interviewed here: https://www.rebobinart.com/en/javirroyo/): 

And I don’t know if I’ve ever been more discomfited by an image in my life; I felt attacked. How I wish I did not, how I wish I could have looked at that and been entirely nonplussed: ‘What’s all this about?’. Instead, there was a curdling sense of recognition. 

So affected by this little cartoon have I been that I’ve taken, at drinks, dinners and meet-ups with friends, to producing it and observing carefully the responses it provokes. My own private Rorschach Test. I’ve seen Trumpian expressions of quizzicality, tight lipped smiles, heard gales of laughter and, in the case of one mother, it elicited a single word response: ‘Yes.’ 

You sometimes hear Tigger like first time parents enthusiastically announcing: ‘We are pregnant.’ And maybe the fathers to be that make these declarations go on to act as embodied ripostes to the suggestion that fatherhood infantilises. They are, no doubt, the sympathetic abstainers who eschew booze and decent cheese to affirm that they are doing pregnancy together. Rocking up to pregnancy yoga classes and cultivating expertise in hypnobirthing techniques. 

But I hope I will be forgiven for expressing my personal opinion which is that pregnancy is personal. In fact, it’s hard to think of an experience that is less collective or shared than gestation. I think of it in prepositional terms. Pregnancy happens IN a woman but it happens BY or occasionally AT a man. In the latter case you need to watch out because a man that feels that way is highly likely to conclude that he does not like pregnancy being done at him and will be out the door faster than you can say ‘Child Support Agency’. 

You sometimes hear talk of the 4th trimester, the idea that babies, even at term, are not fully cooked and need a few months to realise that they’re in the world and no longer in a personal flotation tank. You don’t so much hear talk that for most if not all fathers the 4th trimester is their 1st trimester. Sure, unless they’re particularly obtuse or myopic, they will have noticed that their partner or wife’s shape has changed somewhat over the preceding 9 months. But it’s not their body that has undergone a life defining and creating transformation. 

Because pregnancy happens in a woman every day of it is, quite literally, a growing preparedness for the baby that is to come. When a woman lays her hands on her belly she is laying her hands on her baby. When a father lays his hands on her belly he is touching someone else, no matter how besotted, committed or evolved is his devotion to their relationship. Seeing is believing, as they say, and one thing I can say to any new father is when you see that baby you best believe that your life is about to change: big time. 

If you’ve undergone the bourgeois rite of passage which is the NCT course or read any books on first time parenting you sometimes see or hear an observation to the effect that mum’s job is to look after the baby and dad’s job is to look after mum. I have always balked at this advice as it is trite and glib and patronising but also because what most new mothers want more than anything else in the world is sleep and the only way in which they get any sleep is if someone else is looking after the baby. And therein often lies the rub.

Returning, for a moment, to the despairing mum of Mumsnet, in the detail of her post she enumerated the ways in which her partner had demonstrated himself to be the Dummkopf of daddies and the feeblest of fathers. He was hopeless at feeding the baby, at changing it and at soothing it and, if you know anything about babies, you’ll know that’s all of it. 

This provoked scores of responses effectively saying the same thing: he’s doing it on purpose; don’t stand for his shit; does he think this is your job; women have to learn this stuff too and, most jaundiced of all, the dreaded LTB (Mumsnet for ‘Lose The Bastard’). Being an anonymous online forum there was, unsurprisingly, no defence mounted to this denunciation and I certainly wasn’t foolhardy enough to venture one. Apart from anything else maybe this hapless father was the embodiment of the expression ‘If you want something done properly do it yourself’. But there is a riposte to that aphorism and it’s ‘Practice makes perfect’. Of course, in order to practise you have to want to but, just as importantly, you have to be able to. 

I can only begin to imagine how spectacularly uncomfortable it must be to be 9 months pregnant, permanently impeded by having the equivalent of a small box of books strapped to your belly. But even harder it is to imagine what it must be to have one moment life within you and the next without. Newborns want their mothers and mothers want their newborns. That is inescapable biological reality. If you’re a new dad this can be quite confronting. If you’re a decent dad wanting to give it your all you will need to reckon with the possibility that even your all isn’t want the baby wants. More challengingly your all might also be found wanting by its mother. 

This is where humility and patience are required. You are a latecomer to this party and you will need to prove that you’re bringing something to it. If I could rewind the clock to the arrival of my firstborn I would very much like to have understood this better. However understandable it is to feel that the introduction of a baby adds the metaphorical 3rd to the marriage if you don’t learn to relinquish that feeling you are doomed forever to be the lemon. The way to retain your partner’s affection, respect and ultimately love is to work for it and that means staying firmly on the side of team adult not diminishing and demoting yourself to the kids’ club. 

But there is a lesson too for mothers. Fathers are only as useful as you permit them to be. There’s nothing like being in left in charge of a baby to learn what it is to be in charge of a baby. And not for an hour or two under close, anxious supervision. But a weekend or even a week of working it out for himself. And sometimes his working out won’t be yours but if it works, it works. Obviously, if the baby is endangered in any way there is a clear red line but giving birth confers no parenting expertise, it’s a question of trial and error and if you want your partner to be a father you have to let him try and, just as importantly, you have to let him err.

The great thing about having more than one child is you get more practice and I’m hoping with our 3rd I can, albeit belatedly, demonstrate that however many fathers that cartoon might fairly lampoon I am not among their number.

In Parentis - My New Job

 

How can you tell someone is having a good time on social media? They're not posting anything. If they're having a really good time they don't have social media at all. In a similar vein, how can you tell if a father is doing a really good job of parenting? He sure as hell isn't writing a blog about it. With this little paradox in mind I'm starting a new, part-time, full-time job in 2025. Except it's not new and it's neither part-time nor full-time, it's also not a job. I'm going on paternity leave. And it's not leave because I'm self-employed, so I'm just not working (and not earning) for 4 months, also I'll be parenting for the rest of my life. And parenting's not a job unless your child is your boss, which is never a good dynamic.

Furthermore, the baby's already here, he's been here for 6 months. Conventionally it's the first child that enjoys maximum attention from its parents but in my case it's the 3rd that will be getting 8 times more of my time than either of his predecessors. It's hard to explain why it's taken me 3 rodeos to put in something approximating a proper shift (and I say that conscious that 4 months is still only 16 weeks) but the simplest explanation is that it's not if not now when, it's if not now never.

It may also be that my wife subscribes to the 3rd time lucky school of thought when it comes to entrusting her progeny to her liege man of life and limb. While I'm in the midst of fathering, at the same time, an 8 year old and a 5 year old I'm acutely conscious that dedicating months of your time to children when they're older is not really possible. If you don't build that bond in weeks at the beginning it can take years or even decades to build it later.

I'm feeling a combination of excitement, apprehension and relief. Relief at stepping off, even if for a moment, from the 100mph collapsing carousel of the criminal justice system, apprehension at having my shortcomings exposed when I really should know what I'm doing by now and excitement about being able to parent with full focus and attention and not in hurried moments between frauds and fisticuffs.

Baby yoga, baby sensory, baby cinema, baby music, baby art - I can't wait.

You'll know I'm making a decent fist of it if I'm not posting (too much).

In Loco Parentis

 

Discovering a person in adulthood whom you previously knew in childhood is one of life's quietly dislocating experiences. It's like realising a picture you thought you knew well was in fact just a child's sketch. Few children know the adults around them with an evolved intellectual awareness of the type of person that they are, but all children know how the adults around them make them feel.

These thoughts were much on my mind as I attended last week the Memorial Service of my House Master James Cook, whose obituary you can read here: https://www.thetimes.com/uk/obituaries/article/james-cook-obituary-eton-master-who-married-his-matron-vfrsv2tcr

I did not know James, or JNBC, as teachers at Eton are known by their initials, in childhood but in adolescence; that long liminal state in which we can be embarrassingly sure of our opinions and judgements. I can tell you how he made me feel: cared for and regarded. It was with good cause that something his eulogy emphasised again and again was his kindness. 

We like to assume that all children grow up surrounded by kindness but one of life's roughest lessons is discovering how often that is not so. When you are entrusted as a child to the residential care of an adult who is not your parent if that trust proves unfounded lifelong damage can be the result. I was blithely oblivious to that fact as a teenager but two decades in the criminal justice system has proved to be a hard education.

I wrote after the birth of my first child how there is nothing like becoming a parent to engender a sense of gratitude towards one's own parents, however deficient they may have been. But my real awe and wonder is reserved for those who are prepared to take on that mighty responsibility for children who are not their own. It is little secret that teenagers can sometimes come up short in the delight department; imagine what it is to be literally responsible for the health, care, and wellbeing of 50 of them. Exposed daily to their pranks, defiance, and churlishness it seems incredible that corporal punishment was relinquished so readily.

James Cook was a profoundly civilised man who cared that his boys should be civilised also. I shudder to recall how often we were anything but. However, it was only in listening to his nephew's beautifully delineated account of his life that a man was revealed entirely unknown to me and my complacent assumption that I knew him at all.

We live in a time when more and more are choosing not to have children or who have not, by force of circumstance, made that choice of their own volition. Men like James Cook are a reminder that the cultivation and development of young people is not the exclusive preserve or responsibility of parents.

The kit ain't it - Babying without the buggy

I feel like one of the strongest contrasts between a first time and a third time parent is quantity of kit. New parents are absolute suckers for the marketing man or woman and the erroneous if understandable belief that the more paraphernalia they buy the less terrifying the rollercoaster will be. I write this as the window closes on what is by far my favourite period of being a parent and unfortunately it only lasts about 8 weeks.

Our 3rd was born 7 weeks ago and he is, I'm glad to report, thriving. That is baby speak for growing and getting milk drunk as many times a day as he wishes and he wishes A LOT. While it would be an exaggeration to say that he has doubled in size where once there were sparrow wings and fretwork veins now there is chunk and ruddy cheeks.

All of that means that I am glumly counting the days until I can no longer safely and comfortably tuck him under one arm and go for a decent walk. Obviously, if it really came to it, I could probably give a prop playing teen a firearm's lift if their life depended on it. What I'm talking about is a leisurely stroll without perspiration or real effort.

Most firstborn parents enter such an intensive nesting phase that it's not uncommon for this entire golden period to be gobbled up without the baby so much as leaving its home. And if they do there is anxious zipping, swaddling, hatting and the accursed pram. It was a blessed moment in my life when the pram was finally banished from the hall when it was deemed that No. 2 could jolly well walk and a moment of some dismay when it returned to block, obstruct and generally encumber passage in and out of the house.

What the pram most particularly does is separate the baby from you and from the world and if I believe in anything it's in connection and not separation. Don't get me wrong I love a bit of a sky view but if you're just arrived in the world surely you want to see it and its people? For that reason I'm even a bit unenthused about slings and not because, like Piers Morgan ludicrously sling shaming Daniel Craig, I think they are unmanly but because I want my baby to turn out not in.

Unless you've done it it's difficult to describe the contagious joy and goodwill that is engendered by taking a tiny baby for a walk in your arms. Even surly faced men well versed in London's rules of studied disregard for strangers will stop you in your tracks to wish you congratulations. Walking past a full bus had the same effect on the passengers as if I had just walked past with a million pounds in cash in my hands. 

More importantly the baby gets to see all these people and to see the world at its gladdest and most welcoming. If it takes a village to raise a child the village needs to see the child even if that village is to be found on the mean streets of North London. It also goes without saying, if you're a dad that is, that taking the baby out gives the mother a break and teaches the baby that it is just as safe, well and homed in the hairy arms of its dad as the more familiar ones of its mother.

Lastly, and most positively for me, there is the enormous impact on the father's wellbeing of spending time with a baby like this, mano a mano, not as combatants, obviously, but as collaborators. I was extremely interested to read recently a piece by Jonathan Kennedy in the Guardian which explained that fathers that engage in this kind of bodily contact and care experience a rise in their levels of oxytocin. Anecdotally I can absolutely attest to the amazing feeling of calm and wellbeing that is spurred by perambulating without the pram.

A Matter of Life

Having an English degree from a decent university means I should probably know the difference between fear and anxiety. Therefore it was probably not ideal that I was pondering their respective definitions sitting quietly in the corner of a room on the labour ward while an excellent midwife carefully explained the induction process to my wife. Eventually I decided that fear means knowing something bad will happen and anxiety is worrying it might. Consequently, it was the source of a great deal of anxiety that I realised what I felt was fear.

Husbands, birth partners, men in the birth room, call us what you will, are not there for the fellow feeling of shared experience. At best we can soothe, support and advocate but what we can never, ever do is speak from experience. It is intriguing, therefore, that so many women choose to be attended by their husband, partner or boyfriend for what is, inescapably, a uniquely female process.

What was clear to me was that was not the moment for such idle wonderings. My one job was to be a pillar of reassurance. But it is hard to sound reassuring when you are frightened. So I had to focus my efforts on transmuting sickening fear into, at most, racing anxiety. This was very hard to achieve because one thing my English degree did equip me to do was to detect and reject a euphemism at 1,000 paces. And the plain English word for induction of labour is force.

Freebirthers will have you believe that labour is an entirely natural process and that medical intervention of any description is an unforgivable interference with nature's way, they would rather give birth on the concourse of Euston Station than in a hospital. Conversely there are some medical professionals who take the view that the only truly safe birth happens on the surgeon's table. Being a man I've always taken the view that it is not really my place to have a view on this debate.

But even with no skin in the game I did not, do not, like induction. It is an oxymoron to say to a pregnant woman: We're going to do this naturally but we're going to force the naturally. You don't need to be a consultant obstetrician, gynaecologist or seasoned midwife to predict that the body's reaction to this is likely to be WTF, at best.

Often induction crops up as a late pregnancy solution. Sometimes, as in our case, it's a result of medical imperative. What that means is 'I'd rather not' doesn't really have anywhere to go. So when the midwife talks gently through the sweep, the gel, the hormone drip, the 'popping' of the waters I realised it would be facetious and inappropriate to ask when the emergency caesarian would take place.

Waiting for life is much like waiting for death. You don't know when the appointed hour will come and so once the door closes on the labour room you can't know whether it is for 3 hours or 3 days. As the man in the equation you are chief spectator and primary witness but, in an ironic finale to the process of conception, you are completely impotent. It is sometimes said that there is no torture worse than seeing one you love in pain and it's reasonable to ponder whether the movement to have husbands and partners present at birth was spearheaded by an emotional sadist.

Or, alternatively, it is a basic blow for equality that if you're going to share in the pleasure you should share too in the pain. And there is definitely no lesson in life that actions have consequences like being present at the arrival of a new one. It would be interesting to know the extent to which witnessing childbirth deters men from doing the dirty on their partners. The cowardice of desertion from a mother and child can only be accentuated by having seen what the mother went through to produce the child.

It is generally considered that it is testosterone that impels some men to do harm and cause pain. But I have wondered whether it is the agony of childbirth that causes most women to balk at the idea of inflicting physical pain. When you have suffered so much to give life who in their right mind wants to deal death?

Anyway, only a man could fritter time in such metaphysical wondering when there are nappies to be changed, a baby to be burped and a push present to be bought. So I will confine myself to saying this; I could not be prouder of my wife or love her more for all that she has endured and my admiration for her. and all those that have borne children, is unbounded.

Mother and child are doing well. Dad will look after himself.

Captain Parent

As I await the arrival of our 3rd I’ve decided it would be prudent to conduct some research into advice and guidance for multi-child parenting. There are the obvious tomes: How to talk so kids will listen & how to listen so kids will talk; Siblings without Rivalry; Peaceful Parent, Happy Kids; and so on and on.

Wherever one looks there is an expert or a guru on hand to foster secure attachments, to encourage baby led weaning and to emphasise the sanctity of your child’s autonomy. I mean no disrespect to any of them in saying that I eschew all of it in favour of the absolutely inviolate parenting template that is The Sound of Music. 

Before you get completely the wrong idea I am OBVIOUSLY not talking about that meddling nun. Instead, I’m taking about the GOAT of parents, the original Big Daddy -Georg Ludwig von Trapp. It is a shame that so little of the film is devoted to an examination of his first-class parenting methods for let us not forget the scale of his task. 

In a time in which many two parent families are completely undone by the stresses of rearing just one child Captain von Trapp was single-handedly raising 7, and just consider the age range: 

Liesl 16 

Friedrich 14 

Louise 13 

Kurt 11 

Brigitta 10 

Marta 7 

Gretl 5 

That’s a whole 7 Aside team of pre-schoolers, tweens and teenagers. Without rules, boundaries and discipline that schloss would have been reduced to the state of a menagerie in a trice: Liesl snogging Rolf under the pergola; Friedrich sneaking off to Salzburg to neck Schnapps with his mates; Louise Tik Tokking on the parterre and Brigitta blaring out Taylor Swift from the drawing room. 

You probably weren’t counting the last time you watched the film but he has ALL of those children on parade in under 10 seconds and the one that’s late is late because she’s reading a book. This is Olympic gold medal parenting. And lest you rashly suppose that actually this can’t be good for them given how beastly they are towards the hapless succession of failed governesses think on this: they drove those nannies away because they already had the perfect parent. 

 So here are my 7 reasons for tipping my cap at the Captain: 

 1. The whistle – permissive parents might balk at the Captain’s manner of summoning his ratings or ‘children’ as they’re known on land. But think of the frequency with which you have to shout to gain your kids’ attention and you too will see that the £25 you spend on your very own Boatswain’s Pipe will be one of the best investments you ever make: https://www.acmewhistles.co.uk/whistles-accessories/acme-classics/boatswain-pipe 

2. Individuality – it’s modish to feel that perhaps the children might be inhibited by their uniformity at the start of the film when in fact the Captain has taken great pains to give every one of them their own distinctive call, a system so successful that even Gretl gets it. 

3. The uniform – Speaking of uniformity those children are in a turn out smart enough to bring a tear to any Hapsburg eye. You want your children to act smart then get them dressed smart. You want your children capering about in public embarrassing the family name then dress them in curtains. 

4. Routine – Mornings are spent in the classroom and afternoons are spent marching. Mens sana in corpore sano worked for the Romans and it works for the Captain too. And as an Anti-Anschluss family those children are going to need to know how to handle themselves when the time comes. 

5. The stage – Like any civilised parent the Captain recoils at the idea of exposing his children to showbusiness. He knows too well that it starts with folk songs and before you know it there’s a film crew in your home trashing the parquet and smashing the Meissen. 

6. The Baroness – Until Maria turns up with her innocent ingenue act the VT children are on the point of being blessed with a step-mother for the ages. The whole point of a step-mother is that she’s supposed to fall for the dad in spite of the kids not because of them. When Liesl’s 20 who’s she going to want to be taking style tips from soignée Schraeder or milksop Maria? 

7. The flag – The Captain can spot a tinpot blackguard at 40 paces and if parenting is about leading by example his flag rending isn’t just one of the most stirring scenes in all cinema it’s proof positive to the Von Trapplings that their old man is made of the right stuff.

3 is the Magic Number

If you ever ask a parent of 3 children what it’s like there’s always a pause. It might be a second, it might be 4 (I know because I’ve counted). The answer is then invariably some euphemistic spiel about the challenges heavily caveated with an insistence about how they wouldn’t have it any other way. 

 You often hear about ‘one and done’ or ‘two and out’, this blog is about ‘three fall’. My interest in the concept of 3 child families has grown significantly since my wife announced that we are to become one. That particular pregnancy announcement hit very differently to the first. Less bouncing off the walls jubilation and more staring at the crayon streaks on the walls apprehension. 

 I’ve heard it all. No more man marking: it’s zonal defence with 3. Stupid big car. Impossibly expensive holidays, impossibly expensive outings, impossibly expensive meals. Impossible. Expensive. It’s getting your draft papers when you haven’t even finished your Hail Marys for making it through the first two tours. 

 Obviously, there are also the ecocidal reservations but learning that the childbirth rate has fallen off a cliff means that perhaps signing up for a 3rd rodeo is actually a form of public service. Whether it’s a good thing or a bad thing it’s definitely a thing. When my wife prevailed upon me to take the leap I said I would do so whole heartedly but warned her that there would obviously only be one outcome to her rolling the daughter dice for a final time. 

 Quietly, I too was looking forward to a girl, variety is the spice and all that and different flavour parenting certainly holds an appeal. As fate would have it, however, Nancy Drew will not be joining the Hardy Boys, at least not this time around. Still, it’s going to save a fortune on the hand me downs; although we might want to put the redecorating on hold for another decade. 

 Any lingering doubts I had about the endeavour were dispelled by a friend who has just welcomed his 3rd. Once you’ve had 2 kids you are, unequivocally, a parent, he said. So why stop at the GCSEs when you can get the A Level as well. The other thing you realise is those bloody hard days, weeks and months at the beginning really don’t last and not because everyone tells you this too shall pass but because you know it does. And isn’t there something enticing about rearing a baby without the fumbling terror of the ingenue? I joked to my wife that perhaps we should go back to NCT classes, this time as grizzled veterans rather than anxious neophytes. 

 I will not pretend that I took to parenting at the first like a duck to water, more like a duck in a Chinatown window. But 7 ½ years down the track this is definitely who I am now and I’m looking forward to giving it a go having got the angst and petulant dismay at the loss of my unencumbered life out of the system. 

 On that note I’m off to explain Middle Child Syndrome to the 4 year old.

Absent Friends

 Marjorie & John Somers Cocks

 

Lee & Elizabeth Hardy           

If yours is the sort of family that engages in toasting the likelihood is that over Christmas you will have raised a toast to absent friends. In a family context absent friends is generally a euphemism for close and sometimes not so close relations. But to mourn someone's absence you have to have known them and not everyone sitting down to Christmas lunch will have known those that are called to the minds and hearts of others sitting around them.

I was fortunate enough to have had both my grandmothers figure prominently in my life into adulthood and can readily and pleasurably recall numerous Christmases spent with each of them. Their influence on me was marked although they were chalk and cheese. One a disciple of duty who worked for MI6 during the War and the other a raconteuse who lived for leisure, fashion and entertainment.

Unfortunately, by way of contrast, I knew neither of my grandfathers, one of whom died when I was 2 and the other nearly twenty years before I was born. I've sought as I've grown up to get a sense of the men they were but that sense is, of course, almost entirely dependent on the recollection and accounts of others, primarily my parents.

Obtaining those accounts depends to a very significant extent on time, energy and inclination and even the most minute account necessarily only conveys the idea of a person. One of the chastening discoveries of early parenthood is the realisation that as far as your child is concerned your life before their arrival is a matter of little consequence or even supreme indifference. The more curious children do of course want to learn more in time to fit the puzzle of their existence together. But as their parent you don't get to see that puzzle and therefore the possibility that their sense of a person, so vivid and real to you, is in fact wildly inaccurate or misapprehended.

Unless someone is really obtuse and dull it seems to me to be a near universal desire for people to try and understand who they are and where they came from, by which I don't mean from Milton Keynes but the nature rather than nurture part of themselves.

If you have a difficult relationship with your parents and you did not know theirs it's worth trying to know more about that relationship. But, more importantly, it's worth trying to imagine that relationship. I don't necessarily subscribe to the maxim that to know all is to forgive all but so often, in my experience, with understanding comes at least forbearance. At the very least when we try to imagine the childhood of others we are exercising empathy and sometimes a little empathy can stitch even the greatest rifts.

3rd Child Energy

Unsolicited advice is the worst advice because even when it's good, or for that matter needed, it always carries it with it an air of presumption. Few scenarios more vexingly attract unsolicited advice than matters parental. That must be especially so for first time parents who, for a particular type of person, seem eternal victims of a desire to show off expertise and proficiency.

I long ago learnt to confine my observations to those expecting their firstborn to expressions of reassurance that they will almost certainly discover what works best for them and their baby. But if there was one thing I could wish for all fresher parents then that would be 3rd child energy.

I should make clear here that I'm a parent of two and therefore I know not of what I write from personal experience. However, I have enough friends with 3 to see that the one thing no parent of 3 ever has is time. No time for doubt, no time for reflection, no time for self-reproach.

In a family of 5 the newest arrival's basic needs must of course be met but there is distraction and obligation at every turn. It's often said that children compete for their parents' attention but it's less often remarked that is perhaps a good thing and, maybe, a better thing yet they don't have it all the time.

By all means babies should be doted upon and it goes without saying they should be loved but I'm not convinced it does babies any good for them to be obsessed over. I don't think it does parents any good to do the obsessing either. It is natural for first time parents to get obsessional over their firstborn's wellbeing because caring for a baby is, at the beginning, an intimidating prospect and the vulnerability of babies feels a lot like frailty. But most babies if they're fed, rested and stimulated are actually pretty robust.

They're also remarkable emotional barometers and if they perceive a busy, active family around them they fall into its routines and rhythms. On the other hand if they sense only overwrought, anxious and stressed parents for company it is perhaps not surprising if they start mirroring those emotions.

The obvious difficulty with 3rd child energy, which I acknowledge, is how a first timer is supposed to tap into it. It's rather like taking a first time skier up to a Black run and suggesting that they adopt some Tomba energy or taking a beginner driver onto the M1 and recommending a Hamilton vibe.

The problem with experience is that it is only achieved by experience. That does not mean we don't have our imaginations or that we shouldn't use them. So if I was asked for advice by an expectant mother or father I would ask them to imagine that this was their 3rd born and not their 1st and see what effect that has on their outlook and attitude. As adults we already know how to crawl, walk and run so perhaps it's just a question of mentality whether we take faltering first steps as parents or break immediately into a confident trot.

The worst question

On Saturday recently the 7yo’s team went down 1-0 to Primrose Hill he having presciently warned me to ‘never underestimate Primrose’. Over a consolatory pizza he completely sideswiped me with a question that left me quite literally speechless. I had complacently assumed I was the kind of parent that could take any kiddie q in my stride but this was an absolute pearler. Out of absolutely nowhere: 

“Dad, what is the worst thing you have ever done?” 

I sat gulping at him like a goldfish while he nonchalantly reached for another slice of pizza. When you’re in the questions business you know you’ve asked a ripper when the witness responds with stunned silence. So bold and effective was this enquiry that I have considered incorporating it into my standard cross-examination routine. I was half minded to say why don’t we talk about babies come from instead? 

My brain went into frantic overdrive as I snatched in vain for any answer that would fill the unforgiving silence that was growing between us. Just as I was about to equivocate with the classic diversion of asking a question of my own he followed up: 

“I know already, you once tried a cigarette didn’t you.” 

Immediately I seized on this: “You got me kiddo, guilty as charged!” I said with relief that I hadn’t volunteered a single one of the possible answers I was going to give. Mercifully he did not follow up with asking what the second worst thing I had ever done was. Nor, slightly less reassuringly, did he elaborate on why he had selected this particular line of enquiry. The conversation moved quickly on but the effect of the question did not. 

My initial intention had been to ask him to define the terms of his question. By worst did he mean most embarrassing, most foolish, most unkind? Or were we in 7 Deadly Sins territory: most prideful, greediest, wrathful, envious, lustful, gluttonous or idle? When he’s a bit older, perhaps 47 for example, I might follow up my curiosity with him. Absurdly my chief anxiety was that my answer was going to disappoint him. Like most people I would not want every moment of my life broadcast on the Piccadilly Circus billboards but all told, so far at least, my history is a bit thin when it comes to iniquity and perdition. 

There’s something a bit bombastic about superlatives but I do think the youngster may have been onto something. Try asking your parent of what achievement they are most proud, (instant disqualification if the answer is birthing or rearing you). If they’ve won an Oscar or a Nobel prize their answer might be rather predictable but in most cases, I suspect, there would be more than a surprise or two. 

Likewise, eliciting from your parent which was their most shaming moment may not be your most endearing moment but it’s an enquiry of challenge and an opportunity, therefore, for some truth telling and seeing your parent as a human first and parent second.

Breath is Life

One among many of the responsibilities of a barrister at court is putting witnesses at their ease so that they feel able to give their best evidence. This applies whether that witness is the defendant, the complainant, an eyewitness or even a police officer. If I can tell that a witness is or is likely to become nervous I will often remind them to keep breathing. This may seem patronising advice but it is extremely common for witnesses overcome by nerves to start breathing in a shallow way up at the top of their lungs and in their throat. This has a negative effect on voice projection which can make them inaudible and it is the opposite of the sort of deep and controlled breathing that helps dissipate the anxiety brought on when the brain is not being well oxygenated.

Breath is life seems the sort of platitude that it's easy to dismiss as a vapid athleisurewear slogan. It also happens that it's true and conscious breathing is a sure path to a better life. I have found that in times of acute stress I sometimes, without realising, actually hold my breath. This is not healthy for a number of reasons not least of all proper functioning of the heart.

Another statement of the obvious is that exercise is good for you and one form of exercise, yoga, is particularly good for you. Again it's obvious because it's true. But to the uninitiated and the untrained yoga can seem intimidating or alienating, with poses only harder to say than they are to perform. The key thing to remember and understand though is that yoga, like breathing, is not a competition.

What yoga does do is make you conscious of your breath so that your breathing serves you in movement and stillness. What quickly becomes apparent is how much easier movement is when working with the breath rather than against it or oblivious to it. But conscious breathing doesn't just improve the functioning of the body it helps settle the mind and level mood.

Thus comes my parenting point. Because if parenting is about anything it's about moods. Your own and that of your children. Many of the emotions of parenting are welcome but some are not and the black box emotion is anger. I call it that because it's easy to believe that anger is an emotion that parents need to keep locked in a black box. That belief stems from the fear of what displays of anger can do to damage a child.

But we cannot pretend anger away however much we might like to believe that it's an emotion that can be suppressed with sufficient self-control. Some parents, regrettably, have no self-control at all and the criminal courts all too often bear witness to the terrible harms that can be done to children when their parents succumb to a rage that is unchecked.

Anger is natural, you will feel it, perhaps all too often as a parent. The question is what you do with the emotion. If you pretend it is not there a time will come when it will insist upon you acknowledging that it is. That time will not be convenient nor will it be pretty, in fact it may be actively unsafe.

Anger can be channeled into physical endeavour like running or chopping wood. You can literally exhaust the anger by exhausting yourself. However there is a way of causing anger to dissipate like the morning mist on a hot day and that is through breathing and the best breathing comes with yoga. And while we are alive it is very important that we keep breathing.

Fathering fit

People talk about being fighting fit but other than an absolutely feeble scuffle in my teens that makes Grant v Firth in Bridget Jones’ Diary look like the Rumble in the Jungle I’ve never had to consult the Queensberry Rules, or a martial code of any description. It may be that I’ve seen more than my fair share of people that raise their fists in anger but my perception is that fighting is going out of fashion. When I was a baby barrister my diary was chock-a-block with pub punch ups; nowadays my staple diet is far seedier and I sometimes long for a good honest split lip and black eye. 

So whatever men are getting fit for now it’s not for having it out in the garden of the Dog & Duck. My sense is it’s wellbeing and the dismal pursuit of a physique to match Andrew Tate’s. If only men would learn that the dad bod has achieved iconic status for a reason. Contrary to popular male belief not all women swoon at the sight of ripped torsos, bulging biceps and rock hard calves. 

This is because most women are familiar with an immutable truth which is that any man that has achieved physical perfection comes with at least one and sometimes all three of the following fatal character flaws: i. Irredeemable dullness 

ii. Incurable narcissism 

iii. Insatiable appetite 

Most people of perception realise these are in fact all sides of the same triangle. Thor might have a surprisingly good sense of humour, really care about other people and be a one woman man. He’s also not real. 

Which brings me to my actual point which is that the most important thing I’ve got fit for is fathering. To say it has been belated achievement is an understatement. One of the many cruelties that early parenthood inflicts new on parents is that it annihilates physical fitness. If you have got time to keep fit with a new baby in the house that’s because somebody else is caring for the new baby in the house. For the rest, watch as the hours of sleep you lose at night transmute by some hideous alchemy into inches added to your waist. 

There are a number of things I regret about not having my first kid at 20. Chief is the fact that my eldest would now be 23 and, ostensibly at least, standing on his own two feet. But hot on its heels is the vigour I have squandered. Nothing serves to remind one that age is absolutely not just a number than having a kickabout with a gaggle of under 10s. Young boys benefit from young dads and in the absence of youth they need energy. 

There’s a lot of advice one can give parents of sons but the best advice is that they need a hell of a lot of running, like dogs. It’s not by chance that boys boarding schools lay on 2 hours of sport a day, an unexercised boy will exercise your patience and needle your nerves like nobody’s business. 

The problem with exercise, in case you hadn’t noticed, is that it’s boring, unpleasant and time consuming. At least that is until you find your thing. Just as there is a person for everyone I truly believe that there is an exercise for everyone. Being picked last for football at school is a sure-fire way of dissuading many from realising that curling, scuba diving, samba dancing or speed walking are in fact their thing. 

I’ve ridden a bicycle since university. Not for fitness but for transport. Consequently, when Spin broke free from Manhattan fitness studios to end up in London basements I thought what a mug’s game to pay through the nose to ride a bike that doesn’t go anywhere. 

Well, let me tell you I am the mug because spin is amazing. You know when you’ve found your thing when exercise doesn’t feel like work it feels like enjoyment. Turns out the dark, some disco, and flashing lights is all I needed to put the brakes on mid-life collapse. Having trudged my way around the Hackney Half Marathon last year I’ve realised that solitary exercise is not for me. There is something about collective non-competitive exercise that provides a jolt of fellow feeling to go with your fitness kick. 

If you’re having your first child don’t forget to get fit for fathering and remember it’s a marathon not a sprint.

Clock watching and Kids

Parenting is quite often thinking to yourself ‘Nobody told me to expect that’ and then realising in fact absolutely everybody told you to expect that. Somewhere close to the top of the list is being told you will have no time to yourself. The inability to apprehend what this will actually mean is demonstrated by people who say to themselves that they can’t wait for the baby to be born so they can finally get a break from work, finally sort out the house renovations or, most ludicrously, finally write their book. 

The basic and hard reality is that when a baby arrives a completely new clock will start in your life and that clock tells baby time. It is not a clock you can ignore or wish away. And the secret to successful parenting is getting your clock to synchronise with that clock as much as possible and for as long as possible. 

First time parents that are fortunate enough to enjoy new baby bliss often do so because they advertently or inadvertently surrender totally to the baby clock and they do so gladly. For the rest there is the shocking realisation that their clock, and in particular their body clock, is coming under attack and they are completely defenceless. ‘Just sleep when the baby sleeps.’ LOL! 

The good news, if you find babies difficult, is they don’t remain babies forever. The bad news is that just when you’ve worked out how to ride the bicycle you quickly discover you have to fly a fighter jet. Baby time becomes toddler time becomes school time. 

The total sublimation of the self in the early days and weeks is, in some respects, actually the easiest time for parenting because there is something completely unequivocal about the totality of attending to a newborn’s needs. You simply can’t pretend that you can juggle your needs, far, far less your wants, with theirs. 

The complication begins and then accelerates like a chain reaction when you try and in fact need to attend to your clock. Parenting is very expensive. Parental leave is very short. Paying the bills inevitably means not paying your child attention. And there are very, very few parents that don’t feel the pain of that compromise like a lance in the side. 

I’m soon to have two of school age. That brings the benefit of predictability to the clocks. For part of every weekday their clocks are completely known. If it wasn’t for my calamitously chosen profession where on Monday I might be in Maidstone and on Tuesday in Taunton, so too would mine. [As an aside when you have children I could not more strongly encourage you to have a 9-5 job, and by 9-5 I really mean 9.30-2.30]. 

Some parents hanker almost immediately after birth for a rigid demarcation between their clocks and the baby’s clock. Hence sleep training just months in and nursery before 1. Other parents really struggle with the separation of the clocks once merged, staying at home 24/7 with their child all the way up to their first day in Reception, hence weeping at the school gates and massively premature Empty Nest Syndrome. 

For everyone else there is gradual extrication and trying and sometimes failing to stop the clocks from clashing. Sick childminders, sick children, school strikes all punctuate early parenting with drop everything moments; easier said than done when you’re in the middle of a speech in Court 1 of the Old Bailey. It hardly needs saying that the more one avoids the clocks clashing the easier and more enjoyable parenting becomes. And the real enjoyment comes in finding common ground when the clocks synchronise. While my children were still toddlers I found the one activity that was absolutely guaranteed to bring mutual gladness was trampolining. Childcare is not a chore when you’re having fun. 

It is obviously amazing when your children genuinely share your passions and interests, rather than affect to through filial devotion, but what is really magical is coming to enjoy theirs in return. Children provide a constant opportunity to see the world with new eyes or with eyes you foolishly closed long ago. 

If you’re involved in partnered parenting the position is hugely more complicated. You’re not balancing two clocks you’re balancing a wall of them, like the clocks on the wall at NASA. You have your clock, you have your child’s clock, you have your partner’s clock. Those clocks will synchronise and clash in many permutations. There is your time, there is your partner’s time, there is your child’s time, there is your time with your child’s time, there is your partner’s time with your child’s time, there is your and your partner’s time with your child’s time and (if you want any chance of your relationship surviving) there is your time with your partner’s time. That is a lot of spinning plates, or dials if we’re sticking with the clock analogy. Single parents bear a very, very heavy burden but managing and negotiating that many concurrently running clocks is not one of them, although I imagine it is only a very small mercy. 

Something that requires my constant improvement and effort is not treating my child’s clock as mine. Time spent together is best spent doing things enjoyed together. When I was a child my sister and I spent most holidays and many weekends visiting almost every National Trust property and historic house in the land. I attach no blame to my father for that, there’s not a day that goes by when I don’t need to distinguish an Ionic capital from a Corinthian, but Disneyland exists for a reason. 

The only warning I can really urge upon you is never ignore your child’s clock; as Harry Chapin wrote and Ugly Kid Joe made Millennial: 

“When you comin’ home, Dad 

I don’t know when, but we’ll get together then 

You know we’ll have a good time then.” 

There is only now: never then.

Emotional Peaks & Troughs

I saw a question posed recently on Twitter asking whether you would prefer to live the rest of your life with double your emotional range or half of it. The highs yet more Olympian or the yawning chasms rendered gentle dips? 

If you’re able or willing to live your life on an emotional even keel it obviously wouldn’t make much difference if the range available to you was much bigger or smaller. But for those condemned to or desirous of living life at its edges it’s a genuinely interesting question.

How much control do we have over our emotions anyway? When you see two drivers, complete strangers to each other, squaring up over a minor roadway squabble or a friend mooning calf-like over a new partner it can seem that the answer is not much. Certainly some seem to have a greater facility for self-control. Resolutely not losing their heads when all around absolutely are. But if you were five years old with a grazed knee are they the ones you would go to for hugs and consolation? 

One thing I know for certain is that if you asked most parents whether they would like their small children to have a doubled or halved emotional range you would have to wait for their hysterical laughter to subside before getting a pretty unequivocal response. Imagine the Terrible Twos to the power of two!

It’s a pretty trite observation that small children are what might euphemistically be described as ‘naturalistic’ in exhibiting their emotional range. And, in my opinion, a 3 year old that has learnt to keep its emotions strictly in check is somebody I would want Social Services checking out pdq. 

While my children slowly (sometimes very slowly) evolve out of unconstrained emotional display I have realised that this is one of the aspects of parenting I find most interesting. What is the dividing line between rearing deplorable man babies unable to get a grip in the face of life’s most inconsequential obstacles and emotionally constipated furled umbrellas unable to tell their wives they love them even on their wedding days? 

As with most things parenting only time will tell. But it’s telling isn’t it that ‘If you’re happy and you know it clap your hands’ doesn’t have a second verse ‘If you’re a gloomy and you know it cry your eyes’ or a third ‘If you’re livid and you know it ball your fists’. The one emotion we’re encouraged never to self-regulate is happiness. 

One thing I am confident of is that we have words for a reason and while you can’t always and should not strive to reason emotions away words are the way to understand better what lies behind emotions. The unhappy truth is that children are often condemned or criticised for their emotions because their emotions are either inconvenient or uncomfortable for the adults around them. 

Sometimes discerning what has prompted an emotion is plain as day. Hunger, tiredness and boredom will all make themselves unmistakably known. However fear, shame and embarrassment often have causes well out of sight and can trigger curious or even counter-intuitive emotional responses. 

Whether your child’s emotional range is as high as the Himalayas and low as the Mariana Trench or it’s more Scafell Pike and Ullswater it is one of the chief responsibilities and privileges of parenting to become familiar with every gradation and to learn how to help your child comfortably and confidently ascend or descend the scale as the occasion demands.

A Feedback Folly

There are numerous things that many British people have an instinctive and immediate dislike for and one of those is feedback: both the giving and receiving of it. In societies that prize directness and speaking one’s mind telling someone exactly what you think of them and their performance comes as naturally as the leaves on the trees. 

For the British, however, there is all the labour of circumlocution and its interpretation. The safest place to communicate these oblique messages is, of course, in writing. Face to face encounters require command of the body and voice so that they do not betray what the words are so carefully designed to conceal or merely imply. 

So it is that parent teacher meetings represent a peculiarly fraught rite of passage for new parents. Not just face to face feedback but a reckoning of parenting skill and endeavour. My wife, being German, had much less anxiety than I about how our inaugural post-Covid 5 minutes would go. 

Inevitably the anticipation proved far worse than the actuality although it takes a peculiarly Trunchbullish teacher to say anything unkind about a 6 year old. Instead, we were gratifyingly assured about how empathetic our eldest was. Indeed, we were told that if any other child was sad or the subject of unkind words or actions our lad was the first to tell teacher. 

‘So he’s a grass, you mean?’ I said. 

‘No that’s not what I mean’, replied the teacher with a forbearing smile, while my wife kicked me under the table. 

One thing I did note was that rather like a patient leaving a consultation the most important thing is said the moment they are walking out the G.P.’s door; it was the teacher’s parting words that really conveyed where we needed to be putting in extra work. 

Teachers are dispassionate judges of our children’s characters whose assessment helps wrest us from parental indulgence or, more rarely these days, severity. Sometimes teachers can be blessed with striking powers of foresight. Consider the Eton Master in College’s unyielding analysis of Boris Johnson’s character. 

Everything he became he already was. And by way of aside ask yourself this curious little question – how ever did that prescient critique of him make its way into the public domain? Surprisingly (or not) the answer seems to be that the family approved its publication. 

Anyway, back to feedback. It’s one of the features of reaching adulthood that feedback is delivered to the person and not the parent. This is a necessary evolution. The mere idea of your boss or, still more terrifyingly, your spouse providing feedback about you to your parents will likely seem completely and utterly bizarre although it would make for some very lively discussion around the Sunday roast. If you're feeling particularly provoking perhaps try it some time?

Father Christmas KC

 

My wife is from Berlin and German Kinder leave their boots out on 5th December to wake up to presents left in them by Saint Nikolaus for Nikolaustag. I'm a Brit and Santa's sleigh needs no explaining. My entire step-family are Italian and the bambini there await the arrival of La Befana on Epiphany Eve who is a benign witch like figure who, you guessed it, doles out gifts.

If my children have any wit at all it won't be long before they enthusiastically embrace their tripartite cultural heritage in legitimate expectation of a Trifecta of present receiving. What all of these visitations have in common is the threat of a sanction for bad behaviour, usually coal instead of sweets, although the Germans, as usual, take it to the next level by having some absolutely terrifying beast called Krampus turn up to frighten the living daylights out of little miscreants.

I suspect, in reality, vanishingly few children are in fact spirited away in a barrel rucksack by a devil bearing birch. There is though, to my mind at least, something infantile (and not in a good way) about the expression 'naughty or nice'. If Christmas and Santa specifically is about only receiving the whole thing becomes an exhausting exercise in entitlement.

As the above photograph demonstrates we gave into commercial and cultural pressures to arrange a visit TO rather than FROM Father Christmas. Being made to wait with a score of other families on hard chairs in a corridor as if for a visit to the dentist slightly detracted from the magic. That said I have to give this incarnation full points for his real beard. I want the reassurance of knowing that Santa has been in training since at least the start of October (although the magnolia walls were slightly more North Hampstead than North Pole).

Where I do feel that he really fell short was with his lack of rigour with my children. His examination of their conduct and exploits in 2022 would have embarrassed a first day Bar School student. No details, no dates. No more really than a completely unevidenced assertion that they had been good boys, elicited by a leading question too, for shame. And he didn't even call the best evidence of their conduct when I was standing right there.

Laboured legal assertions aside I do think it would be nice if Santas might think to enquire of children what generous thing they intend to do for another is before the inevitable superhero tat is handed over. Certainly that's what I intend to do when the salt has finally taken over from the pepper and the dad bod has been promoted to a granddad bod.

Wherever you are I wish you, your family and loved ones a very happy Christmas.

Not so hot on cool

I am a big fan of the unremarked milestones of childhood. When your children start singing the alternative lyrics to Christmas carols for example. Then there's the replication of things recalled from one's own childhood. I was enjoying a breakfast croissant this morning when the 6 year old came up to me with a mischievous grin:

'Give me 5'

'Up high'

'Down low'

'Too slow!' 

Followed by uproarious mocking laughter.

That one's so old I'm sure my parents were doing it in their playgrounds. 

On an unrelated note 'Give me 5' is very triggering for me as it reminds me of one of my most embarrassing courtroom moments. Some years ago I was defending a teenage girl in quite a serious case who was a complete newcomer to the criminal justice system. We got to the end of the court day, the judge had risen and I went to the back of court to explain what had taken place and what would be happening the next day. I raised my hand in parting and to my horror she mirrored me and went in for a high 5 and thus it was that I end up playing a feeble sort of a pat-a-cake with a 15 year old girl in court in full court dress.

Anyway, my morning humiliation got me thinking of the rituals and rites of childhood and in particular something that I am really not looking forward to. There is an indistinct but seminal moment in every child's progression when they suddenly become cognisant of cool. A demarcation: BC (Before Cool) and AD (Adolescent Development).

BC, much more than how babies are made, why Trump and Johnson got elected and how we are all going to live underwater, to me represents the real Eden of childhood. A state of blissful ignorance about how the rest of the world perceives you so that you can unabashedly dance like nobody's watching even when everybody is. The ingenuousness of children is their absolute number one charm without which their childishness would be completely insufferable. Seeing it give way to a self-conscious desire to fit in is like watching a beautifully plumed bird rolling in the dust so that nobody notices it.

And at the heart of this dismal process is the desire to be cool. The days, weeks, months and years that we waste in this fruitless and heartless endeavour. For me the real hallmark of full maturity is the realisation that being cool is having the courage to be true to oneself, one's interests and one's quirks. But before that moment comes there is surrender to peer pressure, concealment of identity and, worst of all, denial of passion; because nothing is less cool than being keen.

Obviously there is a balance to be struck and AD necessarily involves understanding when it's appropriate. essential even to run with the crowd but if you don't learn to be an individual you grow up to be nobody.There are many things I want my children to be: unabashed, curious, heartfelt, compassionate, genuine. Cool is definitely not one of them.

Of cabbages and kings

Amidst the super-abundance of commentary triggered by the epoch ending event at Balmoral is guidance about how to talk to your child about the Queen's death, by way of just one example here are the tips shared by Save the Children. It may be that my children are anomalously morbid but I've found that they already have an intense interest in death and it's a fascination completely shorn of the euphemism with which many adult Brits seek to blur the edges of death's finality. She is not asleep, she is not passed, she is dead. Speaking for myself, at least, this is not a difficult or hard conversation. A much more interesting conversation is how to talk to your child about the Queen. Or, to be more precise, how to talk to them about monarchy.

My 5 year old is very keen on dressing up as a pirate and wears his costume, eyepatch and plumed tricorn hat my mother bought in Venice many years ago, in public with exactly the unabashed lack of self-consciousness that is one of the chief delights of children. The pirate costume is matched only in popularity by his king outfit complete with sword, robe and a paper crown of his own design. I will forbear from observing that perhaps plunder is the theme that both costumes have in common.

Even very small children seem to get the concept of kings and there can't be many American kids that haven't watched the Lion King. To my mind one of the lessons and markers of adulthood is realising that there is no normal there is only your normal. And in Britain our normal is monarchy. It's hard to assess quite how many people would prefer that was not so but it would be idle to pretend that everyone here is content to be a subject.

We can only imagine what normal is like for children in countries like North Korea or Russia. Countries without monarchs but the kind of leaders whose exercise of power would have been familiar to and even envied by some English kings past. As it happens I don't find it especially problematic explaining how British parliamentary democracy works to my children and the concept of a figurehead that symbolises power but can't wield it.

What is more nuanced and thorny is this. I believe that all humans are born alike in dignity and value and I want my children to believe that too. Money, beauty, power and celebrity all conspire to assail that belief and it is very, very easy to have one's head turned by any or all of those things. A king is only a king when sufficient people recognise him as such. One of the more entertaining and absurd Instagram accounts is Royals Without Throne (sic). Because a king without a crown or a throne isn't really a king he's just a person. But then a king with a crown and a throne is also just a person.

One of the things I have always wondered about the Queen is what it must be like to live an entire life in which every single person she met would be reconciling, sometimes not very successfully I am sure, her personhood with her status. And also what it must have been like never to have experienced that frisson of excitement that all but the most determined republicans felt upon getting to meet her. Better by birth is an abhorrent concept but there was a quality that the Queen possessed that was almost superhuman and that was her reticence and circumspection. Opinions are free and all should be free to share them but not her.

There's an ironic tension in the fact that so many were willing to accept and treat the Queen as special and yet had she exhibited a belief on her part that she was special that willingness would have withered long ago. You don't need to be a queen to have immaculate manners but we were fortunate in having a queen whose manners were absolutely beyond reproach. At the heart of good manners is the biblical maxim of treating others as you would wish to be treated.

So maybe the key to kinghood is don't consider yourself a king no matter how ardently and vociferously those around you insist upon it. Monarchy or not I have no problem in telling my children that nobody is better than them and they are better than nobody.