Each New Year we – Britain’s stoic parents of young children – must redouble our efforts to convince ourselves that we are truly living, rather than simply taking quite a long time to die while plastic toys crunch underfoot. Read the rest of this entry »
Archive for the “My column in ‘The Guardian’” Category
This week our family is a smaller and a quieter thing because my grandmother, Mary, has died. In her long and remarkable life she raised a family, educated hundreds of children, won the love and respect of all who knew her, and endured with a nation at war. What I will always remember her for, though, is saving me and my brother from geese. Read the rest of this entry »
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Nothing says more about our families than the way we decorate our homes for Christmas. 
Santa – who lives at the Norf Powl according to the address our 6-year-old wrote on the envelope in his charmingly bonkers handwriting – has an extra delivery this year. On Christmas Night, operating on written instructions from our two boys, the bearded one will swoop down to deliver a flock of chickens to an unsuspecting villager in the developing world. 
Our boys are coming home from school and bursting spontaneously into tunelessness – it must be That Special Time Of Year again. 
I’m having an horrendous day with the kids. Our baby is screaming, our six-year-old is being uncharacteristically curmudgeonly and irritable, and our three-year-old appears to have been possessed by the demonic spirit of AC/DC’s ‘Thunderstruck’. He is a tiny ginger-haired evil guitar riff of a boy, marching to a drumbeat of savage fury. 
Our six-year-old’s school project this half-term is ‘The Victorians’. It’s a big project, since of course the Victorians invented everything good that exists in the world, except for the modern and still relatively untested concept of letting foreigners administer their own countries. 
It has come to our attention there are some readers of this Guardian column who lie about their post codes in order to fall within The Guardian newspaper’s catchment area. 
The most grounding thing about being a parent is that your kids cheerfully assume you don’t know anything about anything. Wheel in any random grown-up off the street, though, and your child will hang on their every word. 
The latest competition in our six-year-old’s class is to see whose teeth will fall out first. Although I’m not a naturally competitive person, I take a certain grim satisfaction in noting that the winner is me. 
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