Garden

Do you recall, not so long ago, all those property programmes on TV banging on about how great decking is?

No, neither do I really, but I assume they must have done, because one day in mid-2008 I realised that every garden I went in seemed to have planks of wood where grass had once been.

When we bought our house in 2010 the decking craze had faded a bit. But, because no-one had any money anymore *shakes fist at Lehman Brothers et al*, all the gardens which had been covered in nice wood were now covered in two year old, neglected wood. Our new home had been treated to a liberal smattering of decking, roughly 70% of the back garden was covered in it.

Aesthetically speaking, the decking was okay. It did have a thin film of incredibly slippery green stuff on it, as a result of the previous owners never cleaning it, but as long as all you wanted to do was look at the garden from inside, it was okay. Cutting the lawn took moments, as there was only roughly four square feet of it.

Structurally, the decking was not so good. It was flagged up by the surveyor, as it had been built too high, which meant a risk of damp creeping up past the damp proof course of the house itself. It also had a bit of a rickety "DIY" feel to it.

One day, soon after we moved in, water started coming through the kitchen floor, which put something of a dampener (sorry) on our moods. We didn't know where the water was coming from, and the decking didn't have an access panel to the drain we assumed would be underneath it. If that drain was blocked, causing our kitchen to do an impression of a paddling pool, it needed sorting. The decking had to go.

The occasions where I feel like a manly man are few and far between.  The day that I started taking up the decking was one of them. A hammer, a saw, not one but TWO crowbars were my weapons of choice.

The decking didn't go without a fight. Despite it's less than sturdy appearance, I soon discovered that whoever had built it was a firm believer in not using one nail if there was the option to use six. Reinforcements were drafted in: Mrs L, my younger brother, my mum and dad, all pitching in to purge the garden of the wooden blight.

Slowly but surely, we were winning. At the very end of the day, I let my guard down. I lost my respect for our adversary and trod on a six inch nail. I didn't have any body piercings before that day, and I had never suspected that my first one would be right through my foot.

One tetanus jab later and the last few pieces of wood were transported to the tip. Hooray.

Sadly, the state of our garden beneath the decking looked like an homage to London during the blitz. Which is pretty much how it remained until last Tuesday, when a nice man came and rotovated it, turfed it, and gave us a nice, Cam friendly garden.

The house I grew up in had a big garden at the front, a small garden at the rear, and a disused quarry which me and my siblings used as our personal adventure playground. I can't imagine I'll ever be able to offer Cam a similar facility, but we do now have some usable outside space for him to run around in and get muddy. This pleases me enormously. I love the outdoors, and the availability of green space for Cam to use is important to me.

We already have the obligatory Little Tikes Coupe, what other garden essentials do we need? Over to you for your suggestions…

Thatcher

Hear that rumble? It's the sound of a bandwagon, which I'm about to jump on. I've been deliberately staying away from this up until now, because I've been hearing all sorts of impassioned stuff. I didn't really feel I had anything to add when it comes to, you know, HER.

See, I'm a bit too young to remember what life was like when Margaret Thatcher was Prime Minister. She was resident at Number 10 for the first eight years of my life, years where I was definitely more interested in the exploits of Optimus Prime than those of the Prime Minister.

Of course, as luck would have it, I lived in the South West of England, so my family wasn't being directly affected by things like the closure of coal mines. My dad was made redundant during her tenure, but not as a result of anything she did. Would I have understood or cared even if he had been?

So I wasn't old enough to have an opinion of the Iron Lady at the time she was exerting her will upon the nation, nor was I in one of the geographical areas most impacted by her policies. According to many, this means I'm not allowed an opinion on her now.

Well, sorry, but, no.

One of my ex-girlfriends lived in a shared house at university. Among her housemates was a young woman who would only watch films, or read books, which were set within her lifetime. Incredibly, anything prior to this was considered completely irrelevant to her. That's weird, right? Really weird?

I hold an opinion on Margaret Thatcher because she was important. She did big things. Changed the way a lot of people think. Wreaked havoc on whole swathes of the country and had no interest in hearing people's objections.

Some people have probably thought about (and cursed the name of) Margaret Thatcher every day for the last twenty years. I haven't. But I have thought about her in the last week, because:

- She was kind of a big deal
- She died
- It has been the top story for every media outlet ever since

Probably the most divisive political leader in living memory, and some people think we shouldn't be talking about her. Except that's not what it is, is it? The people who are resisting the negative comments about Thatcher are the people who believe that she saved the nation (and, for the record, I think anyone who sees no bad in her actions is a fool, but I also think her actions came at a time when something needed to be done, and big changes are never positive for everybody). These are the people who want to hear only praise. Probably, in large part, they are the people who did well during Thatcher's time in government.

Now, I have no desire to go to a party in celebration of anyone's death, that's a bit macabre for my tastes. Do the people staging these things think that somehow Lady T still had her hand on the steering wheel all these years? That the unwell old lady portrayed by Meryl Streep in The Iron Lady was a cunning disguise? Maybe don't put your energy into celebrating Thatcher's death, put it into fighting against her ideological offspring's current style of government. Or, maybe, have a death party, I don't really mind. I also wouldn't mind if you were celebrating the death of someone whose politics align more closely with mine. It might be bad taste, but I don't find it offensive.

If Margaret Thatcher is now in some other plane of existence, watching down (or up…) on us I don't think she'd be offended. I might be too young to remember, but apparently she was quite a strong character.

PS - The alleged cost of the funeral though? That's taking the piss, especially with the "we're not telling you how much it cost until it's happened" line which the government are taking. No-one's funeral should cost that much. Silly.

Re:shuffle

Dear son of mine, how nice it must be to be a baby. When you wake up singing every morning one or other parent (usually your mum, I'm not going to lie) comes into your room and is treated to a beaming smile. You are a happy little soul. Your only care in the world is the array of teeth jostling for position beneath your gums.

I envy you.

Soon enough you will wake up and watch the news. If you had done that this morning you'd have heard that a man in London, a man who shares your name but, with luck, nothing else, had made some changes to his team of Cabinet ministers which he'd be announcing later in the day.

You could have gone to work, wondering whether Mr Cameron had decided that the policies his government have pursued since their (sort of) election in 2010, the policies which caused his Chancellor to be booed by eighty thousand spectators at the London Paralympic Games last night, policies I believe are designed to alienate and demonise the disadvantaged people in our society in order to make the rest of the electorate think it's okay to remove the support the state gives them.

Deep down, you'd probably know that was unlikely. That Cameron wouldn't be changing his mind about the correctness of any of his party's policies. That the next two years will just feature more of the same.

More of DavCam's smug-faced, earnest assurances that everything they do is for the greater good. More of George Osborne's unbearable smirk in response to any questioning of his methods.

Actually, that's not strictly true. The changes to the Cabinet mean the next two years might be EVEN WORSE. Yay! The appointment of Jeremy Hunt to replace Andrew Lansley as Health Secretary could have implications for abortion rights (he doesn't like the idea of them being allowed more than twelve weeks into a pregnancy, okay ladies? I'm sure you'll understand). Not only that, Mr Hunt voted in favour of homeopathy hospitals. Maybe it's this vote that got him the job; infinitesimally small quantities of dubiously effective ingredients dissolved into lots of water are probably a cheaper treatment for cancer than the latest drugs, and we all know how important it is to reduce the deficit (it is, but is it really so hard to find some ways to do it that don't involve fucking over everyone on the way?)

There are other appointments, but, to be honest, I stopped paying too much attention. I already know I don't like the way the Tories vote on a wide range of issues. Putting a different, equally unqualified, Tory into a new role doesn't really mean anything more than a furtherance of the nastiness already happening. Same shits, different day.

The silver lining, I suppose, is that surely after another two years of this there won't be too many swing voters ticking the Tory box on their ballot? Labour may be (are) far from perfect, and I may never forgive the Liberal Democrats for looking like a real alternative and then capitulating to almost every Tory whim, but this current lot make my skin crawl. Make me want to divorce myself from the whole system, so low is my belief in it.

This isn't the first Tory government I've lived through, but it's the first I'll remember. I'm happy that you won't remember it Cam, because I want you to have whatever perfect happy thoughts are in your head now for as long as possible, and I'm pretty sure you're not dreaming about your namesake.

Career

When I was little, I wanted to be a Dalek. No joke.



Dream Job



I used to wander around the playground at my infant school during lunch times, my cagoule’s hood pulled tight around my face, exterminating fellow pupils.

Surprisingly, I was mostly alone in this pursuit.

If I wasn’t being Doctor Who’s most awesome enemy I would be pretending to be a plane. Arms out for wings, air forced through pursed lips for convincing facsimile of a Spitfire’s Merlin engine, interspersed with the staccato “ack ack ack ack” of my machine guns.

Needless to say, twenty-five years on, I am neither a Dalek or a plane. If I was the former you’d be dead by now, and if I was the latter I wouldn’t be able to talk. Or type.

All of which means, I suppose, that I am not one of the 15% of children who (according to BBC Breakfast) manage to end up being what they wanted to be when they were young.

Not exactly a surprising figure though, is it? They were asking eight year old kids. Even the most forward thinking eight year old isn’t likely to say “well, I’ve considered my options carefully. Given my relative academic strengths, and with due consideration to work life balance, plus of course the need for financial security, that ideally I’d like to become an actuary”.

Predictably, there were a few who wanted to be professional footballers (actually, they didn’t specify professional, that’s me putting words in their mouths) and some more who wanted to be singers (well done Simon Cowell, the youth are yours now). There were a fair number of proto-police officers (who, I bet, actually want to be Daleks, but think the dome shaped helmet of the police is the closest they can get).

No-one wanted to be a lawyer. Or a banker. Or a salesperson. Or work in a shop.

Back in the studio, the presenters wondered, were we perhaps allowing our children to be too optimistic in their goals? Should we be stopping their wild flights of fancy (No, junior, don’t be ridiculous, you’ll never be a police officer, now go to your room and reconsider your aspirations) and promoting a more realistic aim?

Not in my opinion.

If someone had told the five year old me that I couldn’t be a Dalek, once I’d finished trying REALLY HARD to exterminate them, I’d have probably been rendered unspeakably melancholy by suggestions of sensible roles. In reality, even now, I look at most job descriptions and pine for those days of care free ignorance about the need to make money.

Job hunting is a long way off for Cam, thankfully. I already know that I want him to be clever. I hope he is. The genetic building blocks ought to be there. I did okay at school, and probably could have done better if I’d been a bit more motivated. Mrs L excelled at school and university.

Ideally, he’ll have inherited the best attributes from each of us. That would probably put him in a pretty good starting position.

I don’t want him to grow up thinking in wholly realistic terms. I want him to aim high, to be something fantastic, something enjoyable which also brings in enough cash. I want him to do better than I have (I’ve helped him out here by not being terribly successful). I want him to be awesome, and I want to do everything I can to help him. I want him to be the best he can be.

More than anything, I want him to be happy.

If he could work out how to turn a human into a Dalek along the way, that would be great.

*does Dalek voice* EXTERMINATE!

House

I’m thirty years old this year (14 th of July, I like real ale, #justsaying). I still live in the town I grew up in. The town where it is easy to trace one side of my family’s roots back over two hundred years. I don’t feel a huge amount of attachment to the town itself, but there are things in it which I can remember from when I was little.

A couple of months ago, one of those things, probably the most important one, disappeared.

The house I grew up in was built from scratch by one of my ancestors. It was an old house by the time I was born, handed down through a couple of generations and a little worse for wear. On winter mornings there was ice on the inside of the windows. The dark shadow of damp crept across the ceilings of the bedrooms. There was no bathroom, and the only toilet was outside. Downstairs the wiring was only up to running a mini-oven, upstairs the wiring only went into my parents’ bedroom. There was no central heating.

I was occasionally embarrassed by some of the above, mostly the lack of a bathroom, which seemed weird to the children of the management types in modern houses who made up the bulk of my friends.

But despite its shortcomings, our house could not have felt more like a home. The accumulated belongings of my mum and dad, me, my sister and my brother were on display throughout, the trappings of a twentieth century life far greater than the storage capacity of a nineteenth century house. The kitchen table bore the marks of being eaten at by me and my siblings, as well as the other family members who had gone before us. The open fireplace in the lounge was as much the focal point of the room as a flat screen TV is to many today.

We grew up in that house, our parents looked after us in that house, we fought, played, behaved and misbehaved in that house.

Now that house is gone.

It’s been a long time coming. My parents moved away five years ago, selling the house (and, more importantly, the large patch of land it stood in) to a developer. The house remained there while planning permission for new buildings was wrangled over, growing more dilapidated with every passing day, but still standing.

Then, just before Cam entered our lives, we walked past the house. Except there was only half a house to walk past. I looked into my childhood bedroom without having to use a window, because the exterior walls no longer existed. I remembered some of the things that had happened in that room, happy things mostly, and it made me sad.

The following day the rest of the house was demolished. Reduced back to the individual bricks it had been well over a hundred years ago.

When you see property programmes and the people are looking for a house “with character” they are talking about a house like the one I grew up in. They probably want it to have a toilet though.

The house we live in today isn’t like that. It’s a reasonably modern, reasonably standard house. Even so, I hope that by filling it with fun and happiness and life it will come to mean to Cam what my old house meant to me.

Is the house you grew up in still intact? Do you ever get to see it? Do you ever think back to the time you were there and smile, or cry?

Protection, Part 1

When I was little, about seven years old, my dad bought a similarly little motorbike for me to play on. It was red and noisy and exciting. Truth be told, I was a little scared of it. It felt pretty fast to me, and I wasn’t confident enough to get the most out of it.

We went on a family camp with the cubs one year and took the bike with us. My dad looking after maybe twenty excitable boys and their desire to ride the dinky machine. I went first, and out came the show off in me. I went far beyond the area my dad had marked out for riding, and onto the slicked down grass of the route that cars had taken into the campsite.

My fledgling ego dictated that the throttle remained pinned open, despite the increasingly bumpy terrain and my distinct lack of ability.

Moments later I was bucked from the bike, cartwheeling over the bars and onto the ground in a tangled heap. I had run out of talent in dramatic fashion, and had no chance of holding back the tears. My dad (and the other boys) ran over to me and assessed the damage: a bleeding lip where my tooth had pierced it, and a bruise on my ego, but nothing more. I still have the scar on the outside of my lip. I’m not sure whether my ego recovered.

Like this, only more crashy.

At the time, once the tears stopped, I didn’t think anything more of it. I didn’t ride the bike again for quite a while.

I’m grateful for the masses of fun stuff I used to get to do as a boy. Our back garden was a small, disused quarry which me, my sister and brother treated as our own personal adventure playground. Climbing trees, skidding down muddy slopes, running through the masses of nettles and brambles. Fantastic stuff.

Scary stuff.

When I look at my little two month old son, I can’t imagine ever thinking: “I know, I’ll sit him on top of an engine with two wheels attached and let him loose on a field”. What if he too displays more ambition than ability, but instead of an inadvertent lip piercing ends up with broken bones, knackered nerves, or worse?

I imagine an impromptu mini-motocross event is the sort of thing which cub scout organisers will not allow in these days of risk assessments and liability insurance, and our garden will only take thirty seconds for even the least daring of children to explore.

But I don’t want Cam to grow up cocooned in cotton wool. I don’t want him to fear the unknown and to suddenly realise, later in life, that he’s paralysed by fear when faced with anything more exciting than an Xbox game.

The urge to protect is as strong for me now as it must have been when my dad strapped that helmet onto my head, sat me on the motorbike and watched me disappear in a blue tinted cloud of two stroke fumes.

So how do you, as a parent, balance the risk of pain, injury, even death, against the desire for a well rounded, well adjusted child who has experienced a range of the awesome things that the world has on offer? Preferably without having some kind of nervous breakdown.

What activities do your kids do that make your heart stand still? Are there things you just won’t allow them to do, for their safety and your sanity? Let me know in le box du comment.

Thanks for reading :-)