Fatherhood

Sometimes a week passes and you hardly notice it and on other occasions a week is marked by a couple of things which make you sit back and reflect. Last week was like this.

It started with Ashley, one of my BT pals coming round to the house last Saturday with his 4 year old twins, Lydia and Edward. It was a beautiful day and they had been promised a swim. Their local pool was closed and I’d always offered ours to Ashley if he needed it and so they’d popped round for a couple of hours.  What cute kids….. and quite different characters for twins, well to me at least. Lydia quite independent and confident and Edward a bit more reliant on his dad but both as cute as buttons. They splashed around in the pool and then came up to the terrace for some milk and biscuits and all the time I just sat there and watched a father who obviously adores his children. I quite often invite Ashley up to the house to watch sport on the big screen but he frequently declines the invite because he’s taking his kids up to the mountains, down to the sea, out to a theme park or off swimming. That's fatherhood.

That point I made about Ashley ‘obviously adoring his children’ might confuse some people. All parents adore their children don’t they but they adore them in different ways. I was, and still am a rather reserved parent but my love for my kids, both sets of them, knows no bounds. I just don’t show it the way other fathers do. There is no doubt when watching Ashley with his kids that they are adored and that they adore him. It was wonderful to watch. 

We also had another parent and child here this week, Gary and 3 year old Max who stayed with us for a few days. Gary’s partner was Julie’s au-pair down here in Tourettes for a couple of years and they always kept in touch when she returned to the UK. Sadly Jenny died last year at the very young age of 32 and despite the fact that Julie would have walked to the UK to attend Jenny’s funeral, she couldn’t – it was our wedding day, which made it quite an emotional day all round for Julie and myself.

So little Max lost his mother when he had just turned 3 and Gary has manfully struggled and succeeded to keep his career going whilst attempting the very difficult task of bringing up such a young child on his own. He has the support of his and Jenny’s parents and other friends but it must be a monumental job trying to be both a mother and a father to an inquisitive, very active and loving 3 year old. Watching Gary, as I did with Ashley, I could see a bond between father and child, a bond which was obvious to everyone watching and a bond which some day, despite their obvious age difference, maybe will be closer to that of brothers rather than father and son.

So in the space of a few days, I have witnessed two amazing fathers and it has made me reflect on the sort of father I am. Will I change ? Can I change ? Probably not, but my kids are in no doubt that I love them. If they ever are then that’s when I’ll have failed.   

 

The End Might be Nigh – 8 Days to Go

Those of you with a nervous disposition should not read this blog. It’s about the possible end of the world.

Quite a few years ago I was asked to do a sales call on a Dr Schwarzer in Geneva. Although I was based in London my job entailed working across Europe so I was used to cavorting round Europe’s capitals with my briefcase talking to potential clients with strange accents, but this was odd – a single sales call in Geneva ! My boss must've thought it important. It was all rather last minute too so I couldn’t do any research into the organisation, not that it mattered that much as the work we did then transcended all types of industries and organisations however, it might have been useful to understand what CERN did.

Dr Schwarzer was charm personified. He asked me if I knew what CERN was involved in and I apologised for not knowing. He then asked me what I knew about particle physics and this may surprise you, but I knew diddly squat other than it was to do with atoms and that sort of stuff. My view was that if I had known about particle physics I wouldn’t be strolling round Europe asking them if they wanted ‘any BT today’ ? Would I ?

He gave me a brochure which I put in my briefcase, said the project was still a bit hush-hush but it involved transferring huge amounts of data around Europe and across the world. We talked a bit, but it was clear that BT could not help him, so we said our goodbyes and off I went. I read the brochure (it was a guide to CERN) on my way back to London and have had a passing interest in CERN to this day.

Basically, the Centre for Research Nuclear, CERN, have built one of the world’s longest underground tunnels. It’s 17 miles long and forms a perfect circle 300 feet underneath the surface. In this tunnel is a particle accelerator which will fire atomic particles in different directions around its 17 mile circumference, 11,245 times every second before smashing them headlong into each other. Basically, it’s just a lot of magnets in a ring making other magnets (in this case atomic particles or very small bits of matter) move because of their polarity differences. It’s a similar concept to one of those driverless trains you get at Gatwick or Stansted only they're quite a bit slower. Once the particles crash, the result will, for a split second, replicate the conditions that existed in the moments immediately after the birth of the universe, known as the Big Bang. In a space a billion times smaller than a speck of dust, the collisions will create temperatures 100,000 times hotter than the centre of the sun.

Now all this might have already sent you to sleep but I would urge you to wake up because some scientists, not hippys or New Age cookies, but some eminent scientists are trying to slap lawsuits on CERN to stop the experiment, which after some 25 years of building and tens of billions of pounds, is about to take place on the 10th September. The reason for their disquiet is that these scientists think that the collision of the sub-atomic particles (bits of dust) will create a black hole and that the world will be sucked into itself.

Now if you cant get your head round this concept think of the saying, ‘disappear up his own backside’. That is exactly what these guys are saying. The world will simply disappear into itself. Never to be seen again. Everything we know and see will just disappear, basically in a cloud of dust. Not that we'll see it - we'll all be in the black hole !

So, on the 9th September I urge you all to have one big party. Do something you’ve always wanted to do and forget the consequences cause if some people are correct, it wont matter, if you’ll forgive the pun.

Here is the website for CERN. Have a look at it whilst it still exists ! The picture at the top is a …….Black Hole !

http://public.web.cern.ch/public/

My Life and Other Animals

Because of the rural nature of the place we live in we often see sights people in the cities don’t. Some of the sights are welcome, some are not, but each and every one of them is worth experiencing, even if they pose some degree of danger.

Not long after I’d moved over to Tourrettes, I was weeding at the end of our lane. The sharp spines on some of the plants made me wear thick gardening gloves and I was tearing away at the brush when a large snake slithered past me. I’m not sure who got the biggest fright but I gave up weeding for the day and went back to the house for a stiff drink – any old excuse ! The next morning I ventured down to that area of the garden again wearing wellies, gloves and gripping a baseball bat but I needn’t have bothered. The snake was dead – something had bitten its head clean off. A few weeks previously and in anticipation of seeing a variety of animals down here I had bought a book called Mediterranean Wildlife and I looked for two things that day – what sort of snake was it (Montpelier Snake – length up to 200cm or about 3.5 feet) and what could have killed it (no idea). The second discovery was more worrying than the first !

Thereafter, on a regular basis we’d see a variety of wildlife in and around the house. Wild boar with their young in the garden, other, smaller snakes, buzzards and various creepy-crawlies. Badgers, foxes, rabbits and deer to name but a few. Now you can see deer in Richmond Park in London but you don’t often see snakes meandering across the roads. On one occasion when I was returning home from the school run the kids pointed out a small snake right in the middle of our path. It was just sitting there in the middle of the road, so being the big brave guy I am I jumped out and, trying desperately to remember how the late Ray Mears picked snakes in his TV show, I grabbed it just behind its head. Obviously not close enough to its head because it just bent it’s neck 180 degrees and sunk its fangs into my finger. It was excruciating, like two red hot needles being stuck into your flesh just below your fingernail. Well, the snake went flying as I threw it off, I started hopping about holding my hand, wondering how long I had to live and the kids just sat in the car laughing their heads off ! Since then I give snakes a wide berth. Even the smallest ones.

Scorpions on the other hand I kill. I stamp on them and make sure they are absolutely dead. The scorpions you get out here can give adults a nasty sting but are a more serious threat to young children, so if I see one, they’re dead. They don’t do any good anyway – like wasps they may be part of nature but I don’t like them. Normally you only find scorpions in wood piles but recently our neighbours have found them on the sofa and in the bedroom, luckily not under the pillows but just wandering around the floor. Nasty if you don’t wear slippers ! I tried to kill one only the other week and as I tried to squash it, it jumped up to eye level (I was kneeling down at the time), looked me square in the eye and seemed to suggest that its mates would get me.

However, the real object of this blog posting is the strange marks we had all over our lounge ceiling the other morning. Little black spots of dust with no particular pattern. I immediately thought the kids had been bouncing something off the ceiling (like one of the cats) but they protested their innocence. It was a hell of a job cleaning them off. It took about 2 hours and I could only get one or two spots before I had to move the steps to get to another couple. It was back-breaking work.

Once cleaned however, it was all forgotten about until tonight when the biggest moth you’ve ever seen started bouncing itself all over the hall ceiling, and yes you’ve guessed it, leaving black spots every time it bashed its head on the white plaster.

It was enormous. Like a small sparrow so out the book came again and it appears to be a Privet Hawkmoth (Sphinx Ligustri) which has a wingspan of – wait for it …….4 inches and which is also native to the UK !! Now I know moths are not supposed to be dangerous but I still took the precaution of trying to catch it with one of J’s dishcloths – a J-cloth even . Once I’d grabbed it, I swear that the lift generated by its fluttering wings raised me off the kitchen floor. Or that could have been the wine I had with dinner !

Real Food, Real Food

The pressure was unrelenting. It started on the Thursday night, continued all day Friday and it was the first thing I heard when I woke up on Saturday morning. ‘Are you going for a boys’ lunch’ ? In this case, the boys were myself and Guy. I had innocently suggested, earlier in the week, that we needed to get some protein into our bodies after being on the dry cardboard and shredded duvet diet for the previous 10 days.

And so it continued all Saturday morning. In matters like this when I know there is an alternative agenda I can play a very subtle game. On the other hand Julie is about as subtle as a flying brick ! And so I prevaricated right up until about midday saying I could not be bothered showering and changing (I’d been doing some painting) when I was finally undone by Guy’s heartfelt plea, ‘Thomas can we go for some real food please’. Well my heart melted, I showered and changed quickly and off we went to the Midi which is our local bar which serves good, simple food…..oh and nice cheap wine as well. Just Guy and me on my scooter. Julie and Kitty were going off on another retail therapy jaunt – well you can’t blame them – it was pay day yesterday and we cant have money sitting around in the bank – can we ?

I got a Daily Mail, Guy got a computer mag. I got a packet of cigarettes and a pitcher of wine. Guy got a coke. And we sat there in the sun on the outside terrace of the Midi enjoying life. We’d read a bit then talk a bit. We’d read a bit more and then the food came. Egg and Bacon Skillet for Guy and Courgette Quiche pour moi. Frites with both of course. A basket of bread and lashings of mayonnaise. Scrummy.

We said the exact same thing almost simultaneously as the first forkfuls of food hit our taste buds. ‘Real Food, Real Food’ . Once we’d reacquainted our bodies with some protein, we started to discuss what the ‘girls’ might be doing. We were unanimous in our view that they’d head to that housewife’s graveyard, Cap 3000, the humongous shopping mall down on the coast. I wouldn’t say that Julie is hooked on the place but she has made it known that when her time on this earth has come to an end, she would like her cremated remains to be put into the air conditioning distribution unit at Cap 3000 so that even in death, she can grace all those shops which she so enjoyed in life.

Anyway, it was a given that that’s where they would be but what would they eat ? I suggested that Julie would have lobster after all it was pay day yesterday. Guy was a bit less specific and said they would head for the gourmet mall and that ‘Mummy ‘wouldn’t spend that much’.

We finished our lunch and headed home. About 5 hours later the girls came through the door and asked if we could open up the loading bay so they could unload their purchases. I’m quite a good forklift truck driver so it only took me a few hours to unload the ‘shopping’ and then the coup de grace. I said, ‘what did you have for lunch dear’ ? ‘Oysters’ was the reply.

Nuff said !