I'm Not a Pear Either

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You know that feeling?

Yeah, that one.

The one where you’ve not been somewhere for a long time and now you’re a bit scared of going in?  Or where you’ve not seen someone for a while and you’re just a little bit nervous of seeing him, in case they’re not the same person anymore, or you aren’t?

I feel a bit like that right now.  My blog is very much foreign territory to me at the moment.  I very rarely look at it (N probably wouldn’t even recognise it if I checked on the stats like she used to) and when I do it is with one eye closed and my face scrunched up in case I find that it has actually given up on me and disappeared.  So far I’ve been in luck, but soon it really will just up and find someone who will look after it better, so I really ought to put something new there.

Unfortunately I can confirm that the lack of blogging hasn’t come about because of my vastly improved fatherhood skills, those are still struggling to get out of first gear.  I haven’t committed any real howlers recently, like feeding N a meal solely of peas and sweetcorn, or playing chase with her so excitedly that she got scared of me and I had to spend twenty minutes cuddling her before she would play again.(1)  Nothing like that has happened in the last couple of days, which means I must be learning, although my general level is probably still novice. 

Lack of blogging is simply down to lack of opportunity, but today N came out with a statement which I just had to blog about, and so here we are again, and I really think that this could be the start of something wonderful.

But back to N.  Now I will readily admit that I am not a lot of things.  I am not an artist, of any type or description.  I am not good at DIY (see here and here for examples of my particular ineptitude in this regard).  I am not over 30.  See?  There are lots of things that I cannot claim to be, some of them I would like to be, though I don’t ask for much, I would just like to be able to paint a picture without people having to ask what it is, and if I could just learn to hang a picture I would be happy for days.  Some things I am not, however, and I haven’t even thought about it, which is where N comes in.

We were sat eating our tea and N was entertaining us with little morsels of her Cowardesque wit when she came out with a pearler of a one-liner.  “Daddy is not silly.”  This might not seem funny to you, bordering on downright dishonest as it does, but the best was yet to come.  “Daddy is not orange.”  This was delivered in the sort of voice one might associate with announcing that it was raining again, or that Nottingham Forest had dropped another three points.  A totally reasonable, unsurprising statement.  And suddenly I saw myself in a new light.  I had never really thought of myself that way before but she was absolutely right, she had struck right to the heart of the matter.  I am not, in fact, orange.  It was a revelation.

I still don’t know where it came from.  We hadn’t been talking about oranges, we have no oranges in the house, our walls are not orange, and I don’t think N has recently become acquainted with David Dickinson.  It was just a bolt from the blue, not orange.

Welcome back everyone.  It’s nice to be back and as with all of these things, there really was no reason for that feeling.  I’ll try to make sure I have no reason for it again.

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(1) Both of which I have, unfortunately, done in the past.

Long Time, No See

No.  It’s not been that long.  You must be mistaken.  How could it have been so long?  Well.  You see.  There was this thing, and then that other stuff happened, and then the dog ate the laptop, which all conspired to mean that I couldn’t possibly blog.  Sorry.  But hopefully this will mark the resurgence of the blog.  A strict new regime will be implemented, which will mean that I will be able to blog at least two out of every three blue moons, which will be a vast improvement on the current schedule I’m sure you’ll agree.

So, onwards and upwards.  Who’d like to hear about my holiday?  Good.

Those of you with very good memories will remember that we went to Wales.  The Pembrokeshire coast to be precise.  And that I thought it was a fabulous week.  A week by the seaside can’t really go wrong can it, unless it pours for seven days solid, but happily it didn’t, and so we were able to go on the beach every day.  Which led to one particularly memorable incident.

I’m no photographer, but I do like to take photos.  However, my photos tend to involve landscapes and empty beaches.  This holiday B said perhaps it would be nice if I took photos with people in.  This sounded good, but it turned out I couldn't really be trusted with that responsibility.

At least I got the bag in the picture, that's something, right?

I’m pretty sure B was there when I took the picture, but somehow she managed to evade the cold glare of the lens.  It wasn’t long though before I managed to pin her down and take this, quite stunning, perfectly framed picture of the top of her head and the bottom of my face.  I can feel the Turner prize winging its way to me as I write this. 

There is no truth to the rumour that I don't actually have eyes

(The inclusion of this photo was entirely against B’s better judgement.)

Whilst my wife and I were struggling with complex ideas like aim, and point and click, N had taken one look and decided that we were really not the parents for her.  She turned her back and strode purposefully across the expanse of sand, desperate to put as much distance between herself and her clowning parents as possible.

Excuse me captain, are you going my way?

I’m not convinced that she hadn’t decided just to dig her way out of there, note the spade she is gripping onto.  Happily, it didn’t quite get that far and we were all united again eventually.  This time I managed to get a photo of all of us.

Mummy, we'll never make sandcastles if you keep filling the bucket with stones.

Well, two out of three ain’t bad is it?

Holidaying

Holidays change everything.  Routines are out of the window.  Cosy little rituals which you have developed with your child for months are out of the question.  The comfort of knowing where everything is and needs to be out back is just rendered totally out of the realms of possibility.  OK, maybe the last one is a little over the top, but I had to make it fit with the others.  Things definitely get harder when you’re on holiday, even just down to the fact that the rooms are laid out differently so you now can’t creep past the child’s bedroom door to get to your own room without the child immediately being aware of you and its eyes, like piercing lasers, suddenly locking onto you while you have the sinking feeling of knowing that the supremely tired child is not going to go back to sleep for another hour. 

A Triumph

On Saturday I went to Triumph Live with my dad.  Now I am no motorbike enthusiast, in fact, I’m not even really a motorbike lukewarmist, I can tell one end of a motorbike apart from the other, mainly because it would be a very brave design choice to put the handle bars on the back, but that is about as far as it goes.  I am a big fan of standing around people as they look at engines and nodding sagely when they talk knowledgeably about sprockets and cam shafts and the occasional carburettor but I couldn’t tell you anything about those things, I wouldn’t know what they looked like never mind what they actually did.  I can be part of a conversation like that whilst not actually following a word of what was being said.  I can point out the windscreen washer fluid inlet funnel, because it has the cool picture on it, and I know where the oil goes because I feel I should, but more than that and I am not the man to help you.  So I was mildly interested to go and see some motorbikes, but i didn’t actually expect to really understand what was going on, especially as part of the day was to go round the Triumph factory, a place that I was expecting to confuse me from the moment I stepped in.  In my head, as I prepared myself to go in I knew that this was going to be a trip in which my ego was going to take a bit of a beating.

It was brilliant.  It was so brilliant that I ended up taking almost a hundred photos which for me is like a normal person taking about a thousand.  This really was something quite wonderful.  There were explanatory plaques and stands, some incredibly intricate machinery and one wonderfully excited father.  The fact that I really hadn’t got a clue what was going on was more than made up for by my dad who was charging around like a small child who doesn’t know which present to open first.  It was like taking my daughter round, I kept having to stop myself from reminding him that he couldn’t touch anything.

Anyway, there were a few things that I really wanted to show you, so I shall now proceed to bombard you with photographic evidence.

Stoppit and Tidyup

Meet the new cleaner.  Blurry photos are my stock in trade!

Vacuum Cleaners are great.  There is very little that satisfies me as much as taking a room that is a real tip and tidying it up.  Putting stuff away in their proper place carries quite a thrill for me.  I imagine those of you that have supremely tidy houses with nothing out of place to begin with are bemused by this, but you should really try it.  Let a room get into a complete state and then feel the joy as you restore order from chaos.  Which is where the vacuum cleaner comes in.  It applies the finishing touch, the icing on the cake, the floor has been cleared of the detritus of life; books, coffee mugs, the odd slipper, an occasional hedgehog, all put back and then out comes the vacuum to give a room that just cleaned vacuum sheen.

I have quite the soft spot for vacuum cleaners as you can probably tell, so when the opportunity came up to put one to the test and then write about it, I will admit to having a little shiver of excitement.  Well, maybe not, but I was looking forward to it.  So much, in fact, that when it came to be delivered I forgot to let my wife know that it was coming.  Which meant that when a delivery man tried to foist what was for her a totally unlooked for cleaning device, she was, as you might expect, surprised to say the least.  Once the persistent delivery man had convinced her that the address was hers and that the name was mine and that really there wasn’t anything she could do but take the cleaner we were finally the recipients of a Hoover Globe.

Don't Toy with Me

For a while now I have had a suspicion that has been growing.  I think that children’s toys must be infused with something which makes them irresistibly attractive to people over the age of twenty five and completely unattractive to little girls who are almost two.  This suspicion has been confirmed to me by the visit of two friends this afternoon.

Our little girl has been singularly uninterested in her toys from a very early age.  She will give them barely a glance whilst on her way to a book, or something that she isn’t allowed.  It doesn’t matter how colourful, how much noise or how many moving parts a thing has, she will just totally snub it.  Every now and then a toy will be picked up and examined, as though she has decided that today she is going to learn all about colourful xylophones, and then, once all the information has been sucked out of it, it will be discarded again, cast aside like yesterday’s news.

The only time that she is interested in getting her toys out is when time is running short to get the house tidy for guests.  At that point she will be desperate to get everything out, and sit and play with them as it gathers in a pile around her ruining the effect of serene tidiness that you are trying to portray.

This means that when people come round it tends to be that there are a few toys still out which, having been put away three times already, manage to evade the final sweep and sit, sparklingly tempting, in the middle of the floor.  At which point the guest will, almost inevitably, as demonstrated wonderfully this afternoon, swoop upon the toy, turn it over in their hand a few times and then fall to playing with it.

This applies to guests who are in their twenties, thirties, forties, fifties, sixties or seventies.  It turns out that, in the end, we are all just children.  Drawn to the bright lights and exciting sounds of children’s toys no matter how old we are.  Unless, of course, we are their intended audience, in which case just point me in the direction of the shelves where all the ornaments are.        

Leading Her Astray

So, it’s the first week in which I am working full time and the schedule has broken down already.  Which is bad when we look forward to the next few weeks.  I am going to be getting used to a new schedule and timetable for quite a while, which means that the blog may well hit a few road blocks on its journey to worldwide fame.  Sorry about this, once I know how things are going to work, I will establish a new routine and there will once more be regular issues of the tales of super girl and her clumsy, doomed to make every parenting mistake there is, father.

Speaking of examples.  I try to be a good example to my daughter.  She is, and has been for a while, capable of watching me and wanting to copy me.  In fact she has seemed to have been aware of what we were doing from much earlier than I had expected.  But now she is just like an eagle.  She doesn’t miss anything.  Which means that you have to be on your guard constantly in case you happen to do something that you might not want her to emulate.  Which, I’m sure, for most of you is simple, but as I have mentioned in the past, I’m not entirely confident that I am responsible enough to be looking after a child, which can lead to some awkward situations.