Theodore Roosevelt said of his eldest daughter: “I can be president of the United States, or I can control Alice. I cannot possibly do both.” Although the professional burdens of the 26th President weren’t nearly so weighty as mine, I do feel some sympathy. For parents who work at home, like Teddy and me, it’s hard to avoid pestering our children while they attempt to play. So, to achieve a clean separation between work and life, I’ve built a tiny shed at the end of our garden. I’ve made it like a real office by the addition of blue carpet tiles, a computer that crashes, and a patronising fellow to lecture me on what I did wrong to the computer. I can reach this man on a telephone helpdesk. He is incredibly knowing, urbane and sophisticated and yet inexplicably does not have a partner or anyone at all who cares about him. I wonder why that is. The fact that I’m publicly trashing him – I won’t print his name here, but I will print it here: Alan – the fact that I’m trashing Alan just goes to show that I’ve created a very realistic office environment, complete with seething interpersonal resentments. That’s quite impressive in a space that measures four feet by six. And yet even this neat separation of home and work hasn’t been enough to protect my children’s privacy.

The problem is that my kids’ projects are so much more interesting than mine. Today they assembled a nativity crèche. If you don’t celebrate the Christmas story then please don’t feel excluded, because neither do my kids. Well not in any traditional linear sense. Returning to the house for a cup of tea, I sneaked a peek at their crèche-under-construction. It was the presence of Green Power Ranger, hanging out crib-side beside the three kings, that first tipped me off that my kids were embarked on some intriguing historical revisionism. On my way back to the shed, tea in hand, I noticed that Buzz Lightyear and Woody were kneeling beside the adoring Holy Couple. They were getting in some serious manger time.

Back in my shed, I tried to focus on work. But do you ever get the feeling, when you’re, say, 50,000 words into a novel, that your kids’ take on postmodernism might be more fun than yours? I hurriedly typed eight more words (“I’m borrowed from another story?” said Buzz. “Absurd!”) and rushed back indoors to check the crèche. “Why are there two Stars of Bethlehem?” I asked. Our five-year-old regarded me with pity. “One for the wise men to get to Bethlehem, and one for them to get back home,” he explained. “I see. But why is Buzz Lightyear there? He wasn’t alive 2,000 years ago.” “Yes Daddy, but Jesus is alive today. My teacher said it.” “So it’s Jesus who’s travelled through time?” “Yes Daddy, because he wants to use cars and the internet.” All I could do was nod and mutter something that made me sound knowing – it’s a trick I learned from Alan – before hurrying off to my shed.

Half-an-hour later I was back, ostensibly to use the phone. A T-rex and a hippo had joined the ox and the ass in the stable. The stable had been extended with Lego to make a carport. Parked inside was the pink die cast 1950s Corvette which, one had to assume, was the Holy Family’s ride. “I think this is getting out of hand,” I said. Our two-year-old looked up from the rubber pterodactyl he was trying to balance on the stable roof. “Daddy go back in office,” he said sternly. “But…” The boy shook his head. “Daddy go back now,” he said. Who taught these pesky kids to answer back like that? I sighed, and slunk off to my shed with a fellow dad’s words ringing in my ears. As Teddy Roosevelt said, “If you could kick the person in the pants responsible for most of your trouble, you wouldn’t sit for a month.”

This entry was posted on Monday, December 15th, 2008 at 11:57 am and is filed under My column in 'The Guardian'. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.