Traditions

I guess every household has its own traditions at this time of year, whether it’s breaking resolutions, tipping that discarded, crispy, Christmas tree over the fence into a neighbour’s garden or expressing surprise to the bin men that the Christmas envelope you left for them must have been nicked.

The Scottish tradition of “first footing” is important to Scots everywhere and, each New Year’s Eve, my Dad visits and goes outside at one minute to midnight so he can ring the bell and be the first visitor of the new year. Our family’s variation on the theme is to merrily ignore the door bell and leave him freezing on the porch step.

Of course traditions don’t have to be as old as Nicholas Parsons to be worthwhile and some have only been going for a few years. In our house, for example, one tradition we have every New Year is that I sit the kids down and video them answering questions. It’s not so much a pilot for a new quiz show as a look back over the past year with them remembering their holidays, school friends, adventures and activities.

I have these tapes going back around eight years so it really is a fantastic family record of growing up. Except, of course, it isn’t, as we never, ever, watch them.

In good moments I have visions of my kids sitting down with the tapes in years to come and laughing uproariously at the way their voices, faces and fashions have changed over the years. They’ll forget me dragging them against their will to do it, prompting them from behind camera and making them sing whatever nursery rhyme or song was their favourite at the time. They’ll fall on their knees with angelic choirs on fluffy clouds ringing in their ears as they sing their thanks in soft focus and probably in Latin. Then they’ll text their thanks to me in Heaven.

But the reality is they’ve both told me that, when I go to meet the great Director in the sky, these “end of year” tapes will go in the big wooden box with me.

And yet I still tied them down again last week, forced truth drugs down their throat and did a review of their year and, for the first time, I think I noticed a little bit of interest. No rushing off to catch Coronation Street, email their friends or grab the Ipods. They actually cooperated and were inspired afterwards to go find more memories by digging out their baby books.

Now I realise that those of you without kids will probably think, at best, that this is pointless and, at worst, you’ll be reaching for the sick bag. But hey, it’s a parent’s lot to be misunderstood. Childless friends of mine think those of us who intentionally put little people on the planet are a waste of skin and self important, totally pointless and deserving of the debts we run up. We are the Kerry Katona of life’s pecking order.

In truth, though, we probably bring it on ourselves. When my first daughter, Annalie, was born I was broadcasting on Radio Two, filling in for Ken Bruce. Terry Wogan congratulated me at the changeover and various others popped in with big cigars and I felt duty bound to share my joy with the world. I was elated like never before till I read the duty log - that’s the record of calls received from listeners - and found many variations of “Tell Coia to shut the hell up. You’d think no one had ever given birth before”. I was gutted.

Yet I now know how they felt because I’ve come to understand that kids are great, intelligent, funny and talented only when they’re your own. I’m afraid to say that other people’s kids just don’t hack it and when an acquaintance tells me a story about how funny their kid is, or what a clever thing he said the other day, I feel exactly like those cynical, jaded radio callers.

So, with that in mind, it’s with trepidation that I share with you what my eldest found in her baby book. Among the curls from her first hair cut, lists of kids at her first party, photos of her with Santa, and a tatty piece of plastic that revealed itself to be her hospital bracelet, I’d written something she’d said when she was three and which I’d long forgotten.

As she’d started loving the sound of her own voice, Annalie was repeating everything she overheard including my being told off by my wife for only driving with one hand on the wheel. For days I was harangued by this tot from the back seat and then, one day, she wandered in to the loo where I was standing answering a call of nature. She stared aghast and tutted loudly. “Two hands on your willy Daddy, two hands”.

Although those end of year tapes may well be going in the box with me when I go, I’ll be holding on to them with both hands and I’ll come back to haunt future generations of my family by slipping the cassettes in to their tape players every new year.

For now, though, I’d better go and let my Dad in.