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.
Showing posts with label Kids. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Kids. Show all posts
Sunday, July 8, 2012
Tuesday, January 8, 2008
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.
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.
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