What I Go To School For

I have always been wary about writing about my kids ever since my oldest, Annalie was born. She arrived half way through a stint I was doing as stand in host on a Radio Two show and my natural shiny, new enthusiasm for the world was slightly tarnished by a comment sent to the studio which said, “Tell Coia to shut up. People have had babies before. It’s no big deal.”

I can still remember the deflation I felt as my spirit of joy gave way to a feeling of wanting to hunt this listener down and bombard him with cake and flowers in an effort to make him see the world in the same warm, fuzzy tones that I did. Had Google maps existed then he would have been bullied by niceness. If that hadn’t worked I would have fallen back on sharing dirty nappies through his letter box.

Anyway, eighteen years on, that same baby has just started university, and I’m hoping that the grumpy listener has learned about the happy things in life and has now joined The Samaritans to spread peace and joy - or suffers from halitosis and huge haemorrhoids. I’m not bothered which.

University is about learning, and our trip there certainly was an education for me. The journey with a car full of girlie stuff was eye opening. As I packed the car I wondered who needs THREE embroidered pillows and why does the mattress need a feather duvet covering, as well as another proper duvet on top of my sleeping daughter? Does she really need a coffee maker or a corkscrew? Why the fairy lights? And what of the many boxes of lotions and potions, skin cleansers and makeup? My suggestion that if she gave up wearing cosmetics then she wouldn’t need cleansers and we could fit three more people in the car, met with hostility. I’ve no idea why.

I’m not sure my daughter will adapt well to student life for two, major reasons. Firstly she now has to share a toilet with four others, and for someone who wants to start earning just so she can pay someone to follow her with an ermine lined, heated, toilet seat wherever she goes, this may be a problem. Secondly she doesn’t like curry. The words student and curry go together like bread and wine, food and nourishment, fresh air and health, and me and chocolate. The vouchers waiting in her dorm offering discounts on Korma and Tikka Massala might just get used to clean the toilet seat, but that’s about all.

Through the wonders of Skype we speak to her most days and, not to be too much of a worried parent here, she seems to be losing weight. This may have something to do with the fact she puts food in the oven at her digs but forgets to switch the thing on. For this reason she was eating cold pizza the other night at eleven p.m. before heading out to a club. Midnight used to be sleepy time in her world, now it’s time to get the party started.

So where does her studies figure in all this? Er, not too sure. She seems to have a couple of lectures a day, Friday off, as well as weekends, and she hasn’t managed a full lecture yet. Her first session found her sitting in the wrong lecture theatre. When she realised, she left and wandered in to a meeting of the Islamic Student Council, before arriving at her proper lecture soaking wet from running through rain showers, just in time to hear her tutor say “Thank you for coming, see you next week.”

At home my fiercely independent daughter would refuse help and insist she could do anything I could do. She was going to prove in life that girlies are every bit as hands on and useful as boys. Since arriving at Uni she’s joined the cheerleading squad and told me not to worry about the new printer I sent as she’d get one of the boys to plug it up for her.

Perhaps further education really is teaching her something after all. Forget the lectures. Learning how to use her feminine wiles is a lesson that her mum graduated in with first class honours and I think history may be repeating itself.

Who's Sorry Now?

Remember Arthur Fonzarelli a.k.a. The Fonz?

There’s a great scene in the American comedy series Happy Days where Fonzy, a cool, much admired lady killer in a leather jacket, tight jeans and a quiff the size of the Statue Of Liberty, has to admit to the loser Ralph Malph that he made a mistake when advising him to join the Marines.

“I was Wrngggggg”, he says as the word ‘wrong’ sticks in his throat. He tries again. “I was wrrrrrrgggg” he mumbles, pained and incapable of admitting he’s less than perfect. “You mean you were wrong?” asks an incredulous Malph with a huge smile. The Fonz looks away hurt as if hit across the face with days old fish wrapped in wet underpants.

I now know how The Fonz felt as it’s difficult to say that you were wrong when you think you’re always right, but I’m going to have step up here and proclaim very loudly, “I was wrong”. There, it’s not that difficult is it? So what am I admitting to?

I wrote a blog at the beginning of summer saying I didn’t want the Olympics here in the UK and that it would be an enormous waste of money and an embarrassing failure. I criticised the whole scheme and said no one was interested. Since I wrote, not only was it considered the most successful summer Olympics since Zeus drove his chariot from the clouds to open the first Games and Aphrodite won gold for synchronised swimming, the follow up Paralympics has now taken on legendary global status with record crowds and TV audiences. Apart, of course, from America where NBC deemed it about as important as cheese wrapping and consigned it to one, short, broadcast.

In the end our London roads didn’t grind to a halt, our underground trains continued to move, and everyone had a smile on their face as thousands of kind volunteers kept the thing running smoothly and historically. I sat in the Olympic stadium for the Paralympics’ athletics, joining eighty thousand others in awe of athletes running on blades instead of legs, being guided round the track in races for the blind by sighted helpers who train every bit as hard as they do, throwing heavy shot putts from wheelchairs further than I could throw a tennis ball, and all of us teary as the anthems played to hail another success.

I will always, and I mean always, remember the fifteen hundred metres heat, four laps of the track with every athlete home and dry apart from one obviously pained runner who still had two laps to go. A one armed, limping man named Houssein Omar Hussan, the only athlete sent by his country Djibouti, hobbled round for eight hundred metres on his own. As I noticed him getting lapped, initially I felt sorry for him but this turned to total admiration. He refused to bow out. He wanted to finish for pride. I have tears in my eyes as I write this, remembering as I stood with the rest of the stadium and applauded him all the way round those lonely hundreds of metres.

That’s what you missed NBC, you idiots. A spirit that speaks to generations, an endeavour that feeds souls and encourages the triumph of hope. In this light your network branding stands for No Bloody Clue.

So, I and NBC were wrong, wrong, wrong. The Olympics and Paralympics were a one off. A bit like me admitting I made a mistake.

It will take more than four years for me to do that again.

Gimme Shelter

I do think it’s unfair that the name Assange doesn’t rhyme with Strange and Derange. The Wikileaks founder Julian Assange may pronounce his surname to rhyme with Duck a l’Orange but he has turned out to be a uniquely bonkers fowl indeed. Currently, he’s completely ducked.

His original pledge, that he was going to share rare secrets we really needed to know through Wikileaks by dispersing government papers, promised we would all sit up and realise what a freedom loving, marvellous human being he was. I think the idea was that the Pope would canonise him, he would ascend to Heaven, then come back while The National Lottery gave all charitable monies to him as the only “good cause” worth preserving. He would probably also take over presenting duties on Who Wants To Be a Millionaire and marry Jennifer Aniston while finding a cure for verrucas, cancer and Jeremy Clarkson.

In the end, of course, there was little new in his paper catharsis and this self proclaimed trailblazer of righteousness and freedom of information now finds himself fighting to avoid extradition to Sweden where he faces rape charges. The Australian activist, who looks like a debauched incarnation of Captain Scarlet’s buddy Blue, has claimed asylum from the Ecuador government, a country with a national anthem that sounds like “Here Comes The Bride” and a system that imprisons journalists who don’t agree with it.

Last July three directors and one writer from the El Universo newspaper were jailed for three years and told to give forty million dollars to the President for questioning his decisions in print. No hypocrisy there then, eh? Mr Strange may want to save us all, but he wants to save himself even more.

Anyway, I bring this up because Assange walked in to the South American country’s embassy in London and has been living there for weeks, unable to leave without being arrested. An internet campaign to raise money for someone to set off the fire alarm and get him on to the street has so far raised £6,500, while the UK could engineer a sewage problem, perhaps feed George Galloway in to the water and block up their toilets, and that might get him out.

But meantime he’s confined to the inside of the embassy, not allowed to leave.

This may sound OK, almost as if he’s having a bit of a holiday, but I doubt it. Once you’ve counted the number of Galapagos tortoises on the dining room wallpaper and had a pee in every single one of the embassy's many bathrooms, what’s left to do?

I can imagine it makes for a very poor diary. “Woke up, had breakfast, tried not to molest the embassy secretary, looked out of the window at those nasty police people, had lunch, then afternoon nap followed by a bit of internet porn, then sent out for a curry and up to bed.” Not much of a life is it? It must be like working from home but without the distraction of a quick trip to Starbucks.

Perhaps I’m too cynical and the guy is actually well intentioned rather than self obsessed. Perhaps he didn’t carry out the sexual assaults, but he’s got to show his own belief in humanity by allowing twelve good men and true to decide his guilt or innocence in a court room. The longer he stays holed up, as welcome as a bad smell in Coco Chanel’s bathroom, the more sympathy he loses.

If all he’s guilty of is believing in his own puffed up importance then that’s not a crime. Self delusion is easily fixed by getting out and joining the real world.

Walking On Sunshine

The capital of Portugal is Dublin, the Portuguese drink nothing but Guinness, and from Lisbon to Faro you’ll see people looking out for leprechauns and singing traditional Iberian folk songs like The Wild Rover.

That’s the only conclusion I can come to after spending a few weeks of summer on the Portuguese coast where every person I met sounded like they were auditioning for Boyzone or Westlife. There can’t be many people left in Ireland right now, as the number of Algarve karaoke bars resonating to ‘Danny Boy’ will testify.

I blame Ryanair, the Irish airline that takes its business plan from Fagin and its charm from Lord Voldemort, forgetting to tell you the add ons such as an actual seat, or toilet paper, or oxygen to breathe, increase the bill enormously. The Irish seem to have fallen for it, and Ryanair’s destination boards may read London, Lisbon, Paris etc, but I suspect that once in the air the pilots are all changing their minds and landing at Portugal’s Faro airport. Maybe it costs extra if you want the pilot to use his GPS.

The big trend on the continent this summer is not designer tops or shorts, but flip flops. If you haven’t got Havaianas you haven’t got anything worthwhile. These fashion must haves look like ordinary rubber shoes from the Pound shop but they have a small flag of Brazil on the strap, so cue everywhere selling rip off footwear with the little blue globe flag proudly stamped. Those photos of you lying flat on your back outside the holiday karaoke bar will make you look like Hollywood royalty if you get your feet in the picture.

Before Portugal we spent a week in Spain and flew in to Gibraltar. If you’ve never been there imaging setting a plane down on Oxford Street in a typhoon and you’ll get the picture. As we landed, passing the huge mountainous rock on our right hand side, we suddenly accelerated and took off again. A very novel way of arriving in a country. Turns out the captain wasn’t sure he’d miss someone’s house and decided to try again. If he only worked for Ryanair he’d never have to worry.

Have you noticed that one downside of our increasingly jaded lives is that a great old holiday tradition seems to have died out? No one claps and applauds the pilot any more when the plane lands. It was always a reassuring sign of being posh by deliberately, and snootily, refusing to join in, but now it seems we’re all sophisticated so I may have to start the tradition again on my next flight.

Our place on The Algarve is near Tavira, a quaint fishing town with 25 churches, 6 chapels and 5 convents. If you think you’re overworked, these are all served by 1 priest. As my daughter said “he must do a church crawl every Sunday”. I think it’s like a pub crawl but with a less varied wine choice.

As usual tattoos were in abundance on the beach, and my prize winners included a Scottish guy who had full size angel wings running the length and breadth of his back and The Mona Lisa wearing a clown nose on his arm. He tied for first place with An Essex bloke who, classily, had the word DEVIANT on his fat belly and a barcode on his back. I’m sure Jeremy Kyle is making the calls now.

We took part in a holiday quiz and actually won it, though I’m not sure how. Daughter number one was writing down the answers, and to the question “which organisation has the motto Per Ardua Ad Astra” I told her to write The RAF, and she then asked how to spell it. Seriously! She also refused to accept a question about the famous song The Londonderry Air as she couldn’t believe anyone had written a song called The London Derriere. Remind me to check how much we’ve spent on her education.

Anyway, it’s good to be home. We flew back from Faro airport and all the wannabe Boyzone people were there again, this time literally! Ronan Keating was waiting for a flight to Dublin with his kids, and even though he probably has a private jet he chose Ryanair. He must have a sense of humour.

Holidays are great, and they’re educational. I now know Ireland decamps to the Algarve for two months every year, everyone on our beach knows now that a tattoo of the Mona Lisa wearing a red clown nose is funny for just ten seconds, and my daughter has now learned how to spell RAF.

Holidays should be compulsory.

Running With The (K)night

I just bought a new dictionary and looked up the word Olympics. I may have remembered it wrongly but I’m almost sure it went something like, “Pain in the ass sports day for show offs. Useful for bankrupting countries, upsetting locals, and leaving wildlife legacy (see White Elephants).”

For those who don’t live in the English capital city let me give you an insight in to the conversations all Londoners seem to be having right now as we get ever closer to the opening of the 2012 Olympics.

People here fall in to one of two camps. The Mayor and his pal, organiser and knight of the realm Lord Coe, say something like “Isn’t it great? It will put us on the world map. It’s worth every penny”. Everyone else says “Bloody waste of time. Traffic will be horrendous and we won’t get to work. We’re paying for some jumping and running with sticks. No wonder the country has no money.”

As far as I’m aware London is already on the world map – left of Paris, right of Dublin – so if this is a glorified advert I want my money back. It all seems so short sighted that it was surely pre ordained that the 2012 Olympics mascot would turn out to be a cuddly toy with one eye. Presumably Mr Magoo turned them down.

Already signs have gone up warning us all not to drive in London from next week as congestion will be apocalyptic, ground to air missiles have been installed on top of apartment blocks, and there’s a no fly zone over the east of London.

Stadium security, we now know, will have to be handled by our army because the original company, G4S, which is headed by the worst mullet haircut this side of 1985, has decided they can’t, after all, provide the right number of properly trained security guards. They’ve left it to the very last minute to let us know, of course, with their P.R. and Communications department stuck in the dark ages - a bit like their boss’s hair style.

Near to us the Wimbledon tennis championship courts have been turned over to the organisers of 2012 so they can change the floral hanging baskets to Olympic colours. A necessary expense I’m sure you’ll agree. Better to throw out the thousands of pounds of arrangements that looked so brilliant last week for the Championship finals so that everyone will leave the Olympics saying “the tennis wasn’t up to much but at least the flower hues replicated that of the running track.” Being colour blind may I say “thanks for nothing”.

As spectators we are paying for this sports day twice – once through taxes and again through ticket prices. My friend has bought two tickets for the swimming races costing just under one thousand pounds, and for this he gets to sit and watch the splashing for two hours and then he’s thrown out and replaced by others. He’s been told he can’t take food or even water in to the stadium as he has to buy from official vendors, and the only credit card he can use is from Visa.

Meanwhile sponsors and their connected clients, with their kids and grannies twice removed, have been battling with great British sportsmen like Will. I. Am and Japanese clients of Samsung to run with the torch through rain soaked streets of Britain spreading the good news.

Personally I’m giving it all a miss. Rightly or wrongly though, I’ll be there in the stadium watching the Paralympics which seems to me to be more about the original Olympic ideal than watching Usain Bolt preen and kiss himself all over. I’ll make sure to set out for the stadium a month ahead to get through the traffic.

So, if you want to annoy this London resident, or any other, right now just start the conversation with “you must be so excited about the Olympics.” Then run away as fast as Lord Coe used to. Or just duck!

Yesterday

I note that the mother of Prince Charles’ maid has put a piece of toast up for auction that she made for the Royal on the day he married Lady Diana. Not exactly a good luck charm then. She’s asking five hundred pounds for it which, coincidentally, is what a piece of toast will cost in most London hotels during the Olympics.

Meantime an African mine worker has been jailed after being caught smuggling precious stones which he’d stolen from his work. This impressive man was arrested at an airport in the Congo with 127 diamonds hidden up his bottom. Now that’s what I call a diamond ring.

I came across these news stories while reading at the airport today, waiting for my daughter and her friend to take off for Spain on a working holiday.

Years ago when I left school, I took a job for the summer working with my mates in a brewery where I spent weeks watching labels stick to bottles, addresses stick to packing cases, and demented lifers stick two fingers up at us “new boys” and make our lives miserable every day from eight a.m. till five p.m.

My daughter on the other hand has used her summer to fly to Spain to work in the sunshine at a kids’ club in Marbella. Her arduous day consists of swimming and playing with children of wealthy parents from ten o’clock before checking off and heading to the beach at twop.m. That’s even fewer hours than an MP works. Can’t be fair can it?

My first day in the brewery involved me smashing bottles against a wall, sweeping up the broken glass, shoving it in a skip and then starting all over again. My daughter’s first day consisted of having coffee with a famous singer whose dad is an equally famous Russian cosmonaut, then playing with the woman’s son and bodyguard at the pool before handing the offspring back to a nanny. Where did I go wrong?

Well, I was obviously born at the wrong time for a start. When I took the bus in to the brewery all those years ago, on wet Glasgow summer days, I had never been in an aeroplane before. Holidays were always taken in Britain and ‘suntan’ was the leader of Brunei. How times have changed.

Now sixteen year old girls arrive at their prom (another story I caught up with in that newspaper) in helicopters and limousines, with two turning up this week in full evening dress in Barbie boxes on the back of a trailer. In my day we wore matching patterned shirts and ties and caught the bus, then we stood at one side of a hall for the whole night avoiding eye contact, or indeed any contact, with girls till it was time to go home.

But there are downsides to being a teenager today, as shown by Britney Marshall in that same paper. The poor girl is only fourteen but is getting pressurised by her mum and sisters in to getting a boob job. Between them, Britney’s female family have ten breasts, three litres of silicone, thirteen operations, and one brain cell. Britney’s mum says she’s a psychic, so no doubt she can read my mind right now and see what I think of her.

Add to this pressure of looking good the problems of drugs, unemployment, student loans, etc, and I certainly don’t grudge kids their trips to the sun to look after the Russian billionaires’ offspring for a few weeks, but I guess the part of me that’s still back in that Glasgow brewery has a tear in his eye. I’m simply jealous.

I’ll look and see if I might still have a salmon paste sandwich somewhere from my school leavers’ dance. Maybe I’ll cheer myself up and put it on eBay alongside Prince Charles’ toast.

Happy - ish Birthday To You

I take a lot for granted – that daylight will follow nightime, that my kids think I’m clueless and embarrassing, and that British footballers will always play the game as if they have arthritis, their shoe laces tied together, and gold bullion hidden in their boots.

But, if I was in danger of taking good luck for granted I had a wake up call this week all, unfortunately, at my daughter’s expense.

Yesterday was the day before her 18th birthday. (I know, you are about to say I look too young aren’t you? Er, aren’t you? Please, take your time.) So what could go wrong?

Well, for starters we had a complete electricity cut for the whole day after a stupid neighbour employed cowboy labourers to erect a post outside his house. They drilled down through a power cable and left the whole street without electricity till night fall. No hot water for showers means, to a teenage birthday girl, the equivalent of no oxygen, light, heat or life. It’s a disaster. Forget the no electric kettle for cups of tea, no TV or lights, no cooking or microwave, a total lack of computer action, silent radio and a perfect excuse not to shave. Actually that last bit was good if I’m honest. It may be a disaster for teenage legs but for dads it’s heaven sent. I suppose even hell might have a corner away from the fire that has an ice cream van.

But, being a paid up snob, I had one extra problem that the other neighbours didn’t experience. The gates to my house are electric so, although I could climb over them with a bit of care and effort, I couldn’t get my car out. This, on the day Debbie had organised to take our daughters and her mum to The Ritz for afternoon tea as a pre birthday celebration. As you do.

Seriously, the Ritz was meant to be a day my daughter would remember forever. I’d promised to drop everyone off then motor on to pick up some special surprise helium balloons before driving to do my radio show. So what to do? Kindly, a neighbour drove them to the station after they scaled our gates with stiletto heels, and I took a taxi for the rest of the day. The birthday surprise was saved in the end but at the cost of a few rips in dresses which appeared after the gate climbing.

I know the stupid neighbour who booked these cheap workers didn’t check if they have insurance, and I also know they won’t even know what insurance is, so do I go to the guy and ask him to pay me back for the cab journeys, the wasted food in our freezers, and the dress repairs? Or am I being mean? Do you think he’s likely to pay up?

With one disaster out of the way the actual birthday today had to go without a hitch, didn’t it? Well almost.

We hired a boat as a surprise, complete with champagne and banners, and the whole family set off up the Thames. Within two minutes the engine broke down and we drifted aimlessly until another boat came to our rescue. Our hour on the river consisted of us being towed up and down with one of our party dangling over the front to keep the rope taught.

Annalie tells me the disasters ensured she won’t forget her 18th in a hurry, which is kind of her. Once I get hold of my neighbour and the boat owner I doubt if they’ll forget either.