Tradition

We didn't have any family traditions when I was a kid  (unless you count spending every Christmas day sitting quietly and trying to guess what time dad would go into meltdown this year, which was a pretty shit game to be honest) so all of the traditions in our house have come from my wife's side.

There's nothing particularly out of the ordinary - our Christmas days are formatted in the same way as those of her childhood, every year the whole family rents a cottage by the seaside on the weekend of her mother's birthday, and at least once a year we all spend some time together at her parents' second home in Fornells, on the north coast Menorca, just as they've been doing since she was a little girl.

It's all very nice, and I get along perfectly well with my in-laws, but sometimes it can feel like I've just joined her family rather than starting my own. So I'm trying to introduce some of my own traditions into the house. My favourite, and the one which seems to be sticking, is the annual Eurovision party.

Taken in isolation the Eurovision Song Contest is a depressing celebration of mediocrity and blandness, but when you fill your house with people, booze and various barbecued meat-products, you've got the recipe for a cracking night. So every year on this day we send an open invite to any and all comers to join us for an evening of stuffing our faces, drinking to excess and moaning about how Graham Norton is nowhere near as good as Terry Wogan used to be.

As family traditions go it's admittedly a bit pants, but it's mine and I'm keeping it. Viva Eurovision.

Fucking quinoa

So it turns out I've been pronouncing quinoa wrong all this time. I thought it was quinn-oh-ah but apparently it's key-noir. Fuck. They're going to kick me out of middle class land and send me back to Stockport in shame. I don't even like quinoa. This is a disaster.

Suzanne Moore hates me

As a fairly standard, run-of-the-mill kind of man who has never raped anybody, never physically assaulted a woman, and never abused a child* it’s hard to be anything but baffled by Suzanne Moore’s comments in this piece which is currently doing the rounds on Twitter.

Her opening point, that it’s hard not to hate men when there’s so much rape and abuse in the news, immediately makes her sound unhinged – you hate me because somebody who happened to be the same sex as me committed a terrible crime? Not a particularly balanced or constructive argument, but let’s press on.

Do I think all men are rapists? No. Do I think all women can be raped? Yes. From one-year-old babies to octogenarian women, females are raped. That's just a fact.

Can’t disagree with that, but it seems a little disingenuous to skirt around the fact that young boys are frequently abused too. I can’t imagine why that point might have been omitted from the argument.

There follows a few rambling paragraphs about prostitution – in which she seems unable to accept that there’s any difference between a person being forced into the sex trade against their will and a consenting adult making a free and informed choice to sleep with people for money.

Next we move onto the use of rape as a ‘weapon’ in armed conflicts, typically of the third-world variety. I have no doubt that this happens, and that it’s a deeply horrible thing to experience. But all this talk of the penis as a weapon of mass destruction is just silly – given a choice of being on the business end of a dick or an AK47, I can’t imagine many sane people choosing the latter. (Yes, I know it’s not meant to be taken literally, but still - rape or death?)

Frankly I think it’s weird to look at a conflict where hundreds of thousands of people are being slaughtered, starved, tortured and maimed, and imagine that rape is somehow any worse than the rest of the crimes against humanity that are occurring within that sphere. The whole shitty mess is disgusting and you should be equally appalled by all of it.

And then we circle back to the main point, such as it is, of the article – that somehow even innocent men are a little to blame for, or complicit in, the rape and abuse committed by others.

Every time dreadful things happen, nice guys say: don't associate this with my gender, don't hate me. This is not good enough.

I genuinely have no idea what else she expects of us. Most men aren't rapists, most men would do everything within their power to prevent a rape or to bring a rapist to justice, a lot of men would go further than that. Why do you think sex-offenders are segregated from the general population in prisons? (Hint, it’s not to stop them getting sore-hands from all the high-fives off the other prisoners.)

I’m really not sure what Moore wants from men like me. To acknowledge that rape is a terrible thing? That’s easy, mission accomplished, we already do. To recognise that systematic abuse of women happens in our society?  I’d be hard pressed to find a male friend that thinks otherwise.

Now that’s solved, perhaps we can move on to some of the more difficult issues, like why are we seeing so much of this systematic rape and abuse in Britain’s Muslim communities? Perhaps Moore has something to say about that – or maybe it’s just easier for her to whinge about men.

*Unless you count making your children watch you dance to AC/DC while you’re making their dinner as abuse, in which case, guilty as charged. 

I wish...

...anything in life could make me as happy as a 50p bottle of soap bubbles makes my kids.

Making a spectacle of myself

Today was my first day of wearing glasses. I was walking around thinking "OMG! This is tits amazingballs* I've totally got these things stuck onto my face, how mental is that?!" But I'm still a bit new at work and nobody really commented on it because they don't know that this is an exciting and momentous lifestyle change for me.

So I eventually got over myself and started settling into my new life as a spectaclist, and so far my conclusion is that wearing glasses is like watching The Hobbit in 48fps. Yes, technically everything looks clearer and sharper, colours and textures are more vibrant, but ultimately it all feels strange and unsettlingly wrong, and I can't quite put my finger on why.

Even though they made the text on my screens clearer, I ended up taking them off when I really needed to concentrate because the feeling of weirdness was too distracting. Maybe I'll get used to it, or maybe I just wasted a lot of money on an ineffective paperweight.



*Or whatever it is you kids say these days

A warning shot

10am on a Saturday morning. Wife has just got back from her 5k run to find me sprawled on the living room floor, rough-housing with the boys. The one year old is sitting on my neck and giggling as he bashes me on the head, the two year old has gone to meet her at the door.

"Jump on daddy's belly" she playfully suggests to him, because she's an evil person, so he charges across the room, jumps and lands feet first on my stomach. I can't really do much about this because of the small person sitting on my neck, apart from spasm as little heels dig into my Solar Plexus. The toddler loses his footing, falls off my stomach and shrieks in pain as he lands awkwardly on the floor - and when we try to get him to walk, he won't put any weight on one of his feet.

And that's how we ended up in the local A&E for the first ever time with our kids. The sense of guilt came delivered on the back of a twelve-ton truck, as it always does when you think you might have been even slightly responsible for hurting them, even when you know it wasn't really your fault. Wife shouldn't have told him to do it (she thought he would belly flop onto me), I shouldn't have let him fall.

After a couple of hours of examinations, and waiting, and x-rays, and waiting, we learn that it's nothing worse than a sprain. He spent the rest of the weekend hobbling around on it, but he'll be fine in a day or two.

Two boys, growing up fast, close in age, already boisterous - how many hours are we going to spend in that waiting room over the next couple of decades, I wonder.

That's the place fer fun and noise

Walking to the office this morning, along the Strand, outside the Australian embassy. Behind me I hear a sound I recognise, a kind of crunching thud followed by a slow, drawn out scraping, grinding noise. I look behind me and, sure enough, there's a big motorcycle sliding along the ground on its side, shedding chunks of plastic fairing as it goes.

It takes me a couple of seconds to locate the rider amongst the noise of a central London rush hour, he's landed on the pavement, not far from where the bike eventually comes to a stop, thunking against the kerb. By the time I've managed to get across the road to him, a handful of people are already trying to help - he's lying on his back, but conscious and not obviously bleeding, so I just make sure they know not to take his helmet off  and then get on with calling the ambulance.

It takes a frustratingly long time to give the operator all the details, they ask me a ton of questions about the situation and I have to repeat the address four times before he gets it. The operator asks me for the victim's age, and I guess at late forties, early fifties. The elicits a good natured protest from the downed rider (he's in his late thirties) who's listening me describe his predicament, which causes a little jollity amongst the small group of bystanders looking after him.

By the time I've finished the call a couple of motorcycle cops arrive on the scene and take charge. The rider is sitting up and talking to one of the cops, while the other one starts taking a statement from an American woman who saw the whole thing.

I hang around for a couple of minutes in case the police want to talk to me, but then realise there's nothing of use I can tell them, so I amble off to work. The ambulance turns up as I'm walking away, probably no more than five or ten minutes after I made the call.

London is full of these micro-dramas - barely a month goes by without witnessing some kind of incident. You try to do what you can, but most of the time that amounts to very little, so you just let the world get on with it and walk away with a little tale to tell when you get home.