My Little Classifier.

It's an hour before noon, when Bobby will wolf down his lunchtime cheese sandwich and some grapes. Just time for a little walk down the stream. So it's back pack on from a ground start, with no help, in one of those precarious manouevres that's one day going to go badly wrong and end up with Bobby on the ground, and out into the autumn sun. The stream springs from the limestone about half a mile away. The water is crystal clear and, to my mind, drinkable. I do drink it, in fact, though I fall just short of encouraging my children to, what with run-offs of fertiliser when it rains or the chance that some dog shit has found its way in further up. I love having this stream so close. Observing how it changes through the year. Paddling in the cold healing stuff. Watching Anna catch Miller's Thumbs and occasionally a tiny Brook Trout in the cheap nets I bought recently. Observing the growth of the weed, the changes in the stream bed, the sudden muddying after rain fall that clears within hours, and the rampant water cress. Seeking out larvae beneath the gravel. Dipping Bobby's feet in. Helping Grace back up on to the parapet of the bridge so that she can leap into my arms, and again, and again. How I love to share my fascination with all this with them, how I hope they'll be open to it and not turn away from my Daddy-in-teaching-mode tone that sometimes bores Anna. A pied wagtail - see its tail wagging up and down. A yellow wagtail. A heron. And what are those birds with long tails, a little flock chattering to each other as they skitter along the hedgerows by the stream? I just have to know so I shall follow them downstream, Bobby on my back, to get a better look. Later I'll google the description to see if I can find a name for them. Ah-ah, says Bobby, pointing and I see that he wants blackberries. This is our new ritual. I pick them and pass them over my shoulder to his waiting fingers. He scoffs them as fast as I can supply them. Black - Berries, I say slowly. Black. Berries. And amazingly, he echoes my sound as best he can - Ack Erries, he goes, though not as precisely as that. I thrill to his parroting instinct. That's three syllables, impressive for 15 months, but I would say that wouldn't I. Better still, as we move away from the black berries, he stops saying Ack Erries, which means he's linked the sounds with these shiny black buttons that pepper the hedgerows round here at this time of year. He is naming, so I return to pick more, so I can be thrilled at his achievement once more. Black Berries, I go, instinctively cementing the tag. Ack Erries, he goes. And so we go on calling to each other, but quite who is copying who now I'm not sure. Call, response. Name, echo. The mirroring of behaviour, but who, Mr Neurologist, is mirroring who? One, two, three, I chant ritually as we saunter home. Now counting has no meaning for him yet, it's just mimicking sounds as far as he's concerned. Later the idea of quantity will come. In the meantime I am reminded forcibly of my father-in-law's aphasia, and the effort he puts in to ponderously repeated one-two-threes in a tone that's unnervingly similar to the one I'm using with Bobby. And he replies, slowly, one-two-three, sounding just like his Grandpa. The difference being, one is an act of budding neural integration while the other is a heroic struggle to restore the stroke-ravaged neural pathways of his speech centre. Opposite ends of life.

Water Cress Soup

I LOVE stars, says Grace. And so do I. Tonight they're phenomenal. Moonless, with The Milky Way pushing through. How I love to share the wonder of all this with my children, to hold on to the naive awe that I felt when I was a boy, which has never really left me. Look at all the shapes, Grace says. Ah.. the shapes. Therein lies the story of our species, but not tonight darling. Earlier we went for a walk down the stream, to the little stone arched bridge where water cress grows. I've noticed that it flourishes twice a year, now being the second time. I take off my shoes and socks and step into the crystal clear water that I like to drink. Brook trout dart away at our approach. Grace paddles, gloriously fearless of the squidgy bank and the watery life that lives there. The cat has followed us so we have to make sure he knows when we're returning otherwise he'll get lost again and I'll have to come out and call for him at midnight. Cats get a bit silly when they're too far from base. This one does, anyway. It's dusk. The shadows are lengthening. Autumn cool. I grab a large bunch of water cress to make soup with later on. Before going back to the house we pick half a jug full of blackberries.

Tidiness

I'm not the tidiest of people. But lately, as I've tackled the flotsam of dirty plates, crumby breadboards, jammy knives, half opened cans of tomatoes, old teabags, and so on, and so on, that seem to wash up several times a day on our kitchen work surfaces, I've begun to understand tidy people a bit more. And as I've picked off the clutter, bit by sticky bit, and a semblance of space and order has momentarily returned before some child dumps a cereal bowl or the cat leaves muddy paw marks, I've even found myself wondering whether I'd develop OCD. If life was finally to become little more than a losing battle against dirt and chaos why not embrace the challenge and become obsessive about it. Wipe your feet. Don't spill it. Clear your things. Whose is that!? Give me order in the chaos. Give me back some control before I finally capitulate to the onslaught of stuff.

Intensity

Good or less good to experience the intensity of your young children's emotions? Sometimes may be better to gently switch off, but what may be missed or misunderstood in doing so?

A Wedding

Here are most of us - at Emily's wedding 22 August in Hawes in Wensleydale. I'm the one in the blue tie. I'll leave the rest to your imaginations. The fifth washing machine is hidden on his mother's shoulders. You can see all the others clearly.

Cold Turkey

Something wrong here. Leaving our bed regularly in the middle of the night when 15 month old still waking gorgeous boy comes in. Can't sleep with the snuffles and restlessness. Then Grace comes in an hour later - once or twice a week. Must sort this and soon. Given that he's not ill or hungry we should not let the screaming get to us. Make him aware of our presence close by but don't lift him up, they say. This is a four nighter. How do you even contemplate it when you're nodding off at the wheel and aching in every joint already? Cold Turkey, for all of us.

Where's North?

Walking back the through the village to our house Grace, 4, suddenly asks 'Where's North, Daddy?' I'm usually good at unravelling concepts for children but this one is hard. I wave my arm vaguely across the fields to our right where rain looks to be pressing in to ruin our day. 'Over there, where those clouds are. Do you see?' 'Can I go there?' 'Not really darling. It's a direction.' Hopeless. 'You remember how I told you that we live on a giant ball. Well when we walk up that ball we're going North.' Still no good.

32 Toyota Tankfuls

On most days of the week we both finish work work around five and then switch straight over to childcare, which goes on until at least nine. Or maybe one of us is working later. Either way there's no let up, for either of us. This hefty routine has been going on, on and off, in my life since the early 1970s and the sheer exhaustion you feel on the last leg is the surest way to alcohol dependence. It starts with a single glass of wine, just enough to neutralise the buzz and get you smiling at each other. Quite soon this becomes two and from being an undiscerning quaffer of plonk you begin to know a little about wine. The idea of dependence doesn't occur to you - it's just a way of making a hugely stressful experience manageable, enjoyable even. Supper time is fun. You give yourself to bath time. You are present when you're reading the story and could even recount it if asked. And there's the thought of what's left in the bottle for that quality time together later on.

I stopped drinking completely nearly three years ago - not a drop since apart from a couple of glasses of Prosecco at our wedding and even this made me feel rough the next day. What struck me was how STRONG it was and what shocked me was how much of it I must have drunk in the previous 35 years. When I stopped I was drinking about a bottle of wine a day, not excessive by alcoholic standards, but then what exactly constitutes alcoholic? I had been trying to stop for a while until one day was just the right day to go for it. Why stop? Because something I'd thought was making me more present was doing the opposite, cumulatively, over a long period of time. Not that I was ever drunk. More that I realised that effect of alcohol never really left me. I can't say, at the end of a long day of work work and childcare that not having a drink has made me feel that different. Once past the sense of achievement it's DAY ONE of the rest of your life. But my older children tell me I'm different, less emotionally absent, easier to communicate with and I suppose they'd know. I do miss good red wine though. But a bottle of wine every night for 30 years? At 12% alc that's 12% 0.75 litres x 365 days x 30 years = 985.5 litres of pure alcohol - or put another way - 32 Toyota Avensis Tankfuls. That's a lot.

Hearing the Cry

As my mother grew older she grew steadily more deaf. When it wasn't funny, it was annoying having to shout and repeat what you'd said to her. The TV was always turned up too loud when we visited and she was too vain to use her hearing aid. Do you know what? I'm going the same way and, like her, I've resisted a hearing test. Pathetic, isn't it.

When I found out, aged 63, that I was to be a father yet again the hardest thing to accept was that I was going to be in it to the finish. Oh yeah, of course there was all the pride, the thrill of a boy at last, quiet pleasure in the visible evidence that I could still, you know. But the fact was there would be no Indian Summer to my life, no sitting back to enjoy a fat pension (no chance of that anyway). I had already been looking after my young children since 1972 and this wasn't set to change. Challenge now was to stay alive for long enough - say 90 - when Bobby would be 27 by which time all of them would have got enough FATHER to live reasonably balanced lives and my death would be more relief than tragedy.

What they don't warn you about getting older is how bits fall off. But like an old car, most of us still run OK with a few faults. We keep going through bad teeth, gouty toes, piles (not me), high blood pressure (managed) etc and of course, hearing loss. One of the upsides of mild deafness, I'd thought, was that I wouldn't get woken up so much by the baby crying. Natural earplugs, I joked. After 30 years of broken nights I would at last get some sleep. Not a bit of it. While I often don't hear him when he wakes when I'm downstairs in the evening there's something about the wavelength of his cry later in the night that goes straight through to me, especially when he's in the same room as he has been since a series of weekend of visitors have been sleeping in his room. Encroaching deafness does not shield you from your own baby cries. Nature's made sure of that. Not that this has made much difference in the share of baby care I've been doing through the night this time round. When he wakes I take him groggily from the cot and pass him to Lu, then decamp to the bed in the other room. But more of this bad habit another time.

The 1st Washing Machine

It was a Hoover, bought in Woolworths (RIP) on Holloway Road in North London early in 1973. The money for it (£84) was a present from my Uncle and Aunt to celebrate the birth of Jo. We lived in a collective household at the time, not quite a commune, but shared responsibility for the house and a little bit (very little) for children (Jo was the only one). The washing machine became the house's washing machine. When I thanked my Aunt for it she was horrified to discover that other people's washing - ie not family - went through it. A PURITY AND DANGER issue. The commune contaminates the nuclear family. Repellant. Disgust, almost. The emotional core of ideological conflict.

Biped

The zillionth time a human adult has gasped when a child of theirs stood for the first time. But I am still filled with awe as holding my gaze, wide eyed with pride, Bobby gradually eases himself from a crawling position to a... to a... hold it boy, hold it there darling boy, to a wobbly, unstable, all over in a few seconds... STAND... before, bump, collapsing on to the cushion of that wet nappy I should have changed and clapping the air to our cheers.

The Poppy Seed

I baked bread before we left for Tessa's mill on Saturday. I've got this down to an art now where I gauge quantities by eye and feel rather than use the scales. This batch was 95% white flour with a touch of whole meal, splash of olive oil and more salt than you'd think you need because of the way the yeast interacts with it during the rise. Then a hefty sprinkling of poppy seeds which an ignored intuition told me was unwise and would spell trouble later on. Which it did, because when Grace asked for a ham sandwich later in the day I said, 'Of course darling, with some of Daddy's lovely new bread and the ham I bought at the butcher this morning.' Good ham, much better than the supermarket stuff and cheaper too - (later puzzle to solve: why do I now order ham in metric - 200 grams please - but persist with Imperial when buying everything else - 1lb of sausages please, a 5lb chicken, half a pound of mince please?). So Grace says, 'Yes please Daddy', and I make this delicious sandwich, bread cut thin just so, crusts off because Grace neither likes the crust nor the poppy seeds that have sunk in during the bake, cut artfully into quarters, here you are darling... 'I don't like that sandwich!!' Loud whiny tears. 'I hate that sandwich!*!*' Exactly the response to trigger my anger and here it comes, whoosh, rising up inside me - 'I DON"T LIKE IT WHEN YOU TALK THAT ABOUT FOOD PEOPLE HAVE MADE YOU! STOP THAT NOISE!' Then to Tessa, our hostess. 'Sorry about this, I just can't stand waste. Or ingratitude. It's just so damned rude.' But my stupidly angry response just escalates matters and if I'd only paid attention to the little voice that said in a Cognitive Therapeutic kind of way 'Don't respond angrily, it will only make things worse, count ten, deep breath, who cares about a silly sandwich anyway', but I let fly instead and rationalise my anger by saying to Tessa, Lu and Anna - who hates my outbursts - 'Well somebody's got to raise a voice round here. It's the only thing that gets results with this spoilt child.' The trouble is, today it patently has not got a result, just made things worse, because Grace's cry has now escalated into a wail and a choked explanation, finger pointing at said sandwich 'I don't (sniff sniff) like (choke cry) those things...' I follow her finger to a tiny black speck in one of the sandwich quarters - a single poppy seed - defiling dot. 'ALRIGHT!' I'm still angry and pick out the offending impurity, flick it crossly away. Moral of tale: 1) pay attention to intuitions - no poppy seeds. 2) Don't try and deal with 4 year old daughter's vile temper by losing it yourself.

Torn

6.00 am and I'm the only one awake. Sun raking in from the East. The baby is trying to prolong an endless sleepy suckle on Lu's breast that we should have put a stop to months ago. Grace is sprawled next to them. Anna flat out in her own room. I shall sneak down to The Office (sic!) and write this entry. A fantastic little bit of time to myself, no-one tugging, no nasty shift in the bank balance, yet, just me, cooing pigeons, hungry cat and the freedom to find my centre and start writing here. Aaargh .... just making tea when I hear them stir upstairs. Should I go up and help now or pretend I haven't heard. I'll ignore them just for the few minutes it takes to write this. I'll pretend Lu hasn't had a bad night and do my own thing, just for a few minutes, oh, but I should join them now, change a sodden nappy, plan our trip to Tessa's mill because, hey, it's the weekend and I shouldn't be working now, should I... I should be present, participating, helpful, good-natured - not pursuing delusions here at the keyboard. But maybe just a few minutes more...

The Snooze

It takes most of the drive home from the nursery before Bobby finally nods off. A little twist of the rear view mirror shows me that Grace is still asleep, her head lolling uncomfortably against the hard window trim. The challenge now is to maximise the time for my own snooze before one of them wakes up. The question is where to stop – the road is so hemmed in by private property that there’s nowhere obvious to park and the few lay-bys are so narrow that the buffeting of passing vehicles will wake me up. So on I drive, feeling drowsier with every minute, longing to shut my eyes but unable to, until I decide to cut my losses and go home where I might at least be able to grab a few minutes parked outside the house.

The question now is whether to leave the engine running so that the vibrations keep them asleep enabling me to get a longer snooze or do the sensible thing and switch it off. If I leave it running there’s a remote chance that some of the exhaust fumes will find their way into the car, the worst-case scenario being asphyxiation. If I switch it off the sudden absence of vibration will probably wake them up. A look at the trees indicates a light wind blowing towards the front of the car which means that the exhaust fumes will be dispersed away from the rear, posing no danger. Decision made. The engine stays running. Straight away I enter a deep head lolling sleep from which I never want to wake.

Within what feels like seconds, but is in fact half an hour, I am jerked suddenly awake by a thumping on window. Outside the anxious face of the postman is staring in. ‘Are you alright?’

‘Um, yes. We were just having a snooze.’ The children start to stir in the back of the car.

‘I just thought I’d check. Engine running and that.’

‘Oh. I’m sorry. I hope you didn’t think..’

‘Well I did look for the hose.’

A man and two children, all slumped forward, in a car with the engine running. He’s joking now, but for a moment he wondered if it was a family suicide.

‘You’re not a banker, are you?’ he adds with a grin.

Fatigue

Monday is my Bobby day but when you’ve been playing catch-up on a film edit that’s badly behind schedule for most of the weekend you start the week pretty tired, so the thought of looking after my six month old son and his four year old sister for a day is exhausting. On top of my age, the fatigue is made worse by a year of short and broken nights, last night no different, when I was woken first by Bobby's cries and capitulated as usual to bringing him into our bed and then, just as I was managing to blot out his snuffles on Lu’s breast and drift off to sleep, Grace climbed in prising open a space between us that shunted me to the edge of the mattress where I clung for an hour, worrying about overdrafts and the distance between us, until finally forced to bail out to the spare bed in Bobby’s room where I snatched a final hour before jerking awake to the sweet tinkle of 6.00am phone alarms that usher in the day, every day.

The thing about childcare, as if I didn’t know it by now, is how utterly exhausting it is. During the next two hours, for example, I will settle Grace in front of C-Beebies for half an hour having capitulated to her demands for a bowl of Golden Nuggets on the sofa in the living room rather than in the kitchen where crumbs don’t matter; I’ll make her packed lunch for nursery having forgotten to buy ham; I’ll change Bobby’s shitty nappy and wake Anna who’ll be grumpily drowsy from watching Casualty too late; I’ll take a cup of tea up to Lu and give Bobby breakfast knowing that the pears are too hard; I’ll rouse Anna again and as Lu showers and stretches, grab toast for myself, feed cat, before the usual set-to with Grace over the wrong tights, a confrontation that escalates when I switch off the telly; I’ll shout at Anna for yet again losing the wallet containing her lunch card and bus pass, which means instigating a panicky last minute search with a heavy baby on my arm, that turns up a range of lost combs and phone chargers but no pass; I’ll reluctantly lend Anna £2 for lunch and bundle her crossly out of the front door before pecking Lu goodbye as she heads off, late again, for another day working with the dying in Birmingham; by which time it’ll be time to get Bobby and Grace into the car and set off for the nursery, three miles away, where I’ll leave Grace for the morning and start wondering when I might be able to squeeze in a snooze.

Childcare is hard work, harder even than work-work - which can feel like a holiday by comparison. Years ago we sat round in groups and analysed this. What was childcare we argued, courtesy Engels ‘Origin of the Family’, other than the production of labour-power for tomorrow’s work-force? And who did it? Women of course, whose mothering role was a natural extension of the wifely role that ensured her husband left for work each morning rested, sexually satisfied, and well-fed. And what was to be done about this? Men were to do their fair share, that’s what. Men who could afford to, that is, and who were sufficiently in control of their working hours to cut down and spend more time at home. This usually meant middle class men in unconventional working situations, in short, men like me. Which partially explains why, four decades later, I’m leaving the three labourer’s cottages knocked into one that is now our home and heading off through the village to the nursery in Chipping Norton with two of my five children in the back and mixed feelings about the day of childcare ahead.

Why Five Washing Machines?

Because I have five children, the first born in 1972 and the last (definitely) in 2008 - and each child has used up one machine - a little under in fact since they last about eight years.  This is a blog about fatherhood through four decades - forty years of looking after young children - from the communes of the early 70s, to nuclear convention, then implosion, to nuclear happiness -= how things have changed and how stayed the same.