Gorilla Days

On a small, rather scruffy island in the middle of a lake in Wiltshire, a lowland gorilla named Nico sits in silverback solitude watching satellite telly while hoards of tourists cruise past him as part of the Longleat ‘adventure park’ experience.  It is a thoroughly depressing scene but he’s probably on Prozac too, so maybe he’s untouched by the smallness of his own adventure.

“The thing is,” I say to my boys who are transfixed by the fortieth repeat of the Top Gear Vietnam Special, “if somebody switched that gorilla’s telly off, he’d probably learn how to swim or take up rudimentary raft building and he’d get off that bloody island and…”

“And what, Mum?”

“And… go to the theatre, hook up with the guys, play a bit of footy.  I don’t know. Gorilla stuff? The point is, he could go out and find some life!”

“Are you saying I’m a lonely, stupid gorilla?” asks my thirteen year old.

“You can’t be,” says his younger brother. “That gorilla’s got Sky for a start.”

My kids watch TV. They play computer games.  And sometimes they do these things during the hours of daylight, or worse, sunlight, when they could be charging around the large garden we’ve overextended ourselves to buy.  It makes me feel uneasy.

When I was growing up, the viewing of television was strictly controlled; at least, it was strictly controlled when there was an adult present to strictly control it.   When the household adults were at work and we were left home alone (‘childcare’ wasn’t fashionable in the seventies and eighties) we would wait ‘til the car was safely out on the Ongar Road and then we would switch on the box, to enjoy a full day in front of such treats as ‘Pebble Mill’, ‘Crown Court’ and ‘The Sullivans’. 

Upon his return from work, my father would stride purposefully into the sitting room and place his hand on the top of the TV set to feel if it was warm.  My brother and I would pretend to read from highbrow books with our hearts in our mouths, hoping we’d timed the ‘cooldown’right.  Time cooldown wrong and Dad went into meltdown, explaining that passive viewing would rot our brains, deprive us of any motivation or imagination and lead to underachievement in later life. 

The trouble was, we lived out of town and there weren’t any structured holiday activities for youngsters.  There was a chip shop where you could buy a potato-based lunch and kick empty Pepsi cans around, fields behind our houses where you could smoke fags stolen from James’ Dad’s shed, and a bit of shoplifting if you could be bothered to walk the three miles into town. 

Given my extra-curricular activity programme, underachievement was a positive aspiration.

So now I’m parenting myself and I’m working a few things out.  I have decided that there is definitely an ok place for telly, especially if it includes ‘The Simpsons’.  The stuff that is referenced in that programme makes up for systemic failures in the state education system as far as I’m concerned.  But whereas, back in my day, out-of-school activities were minimal and only for the truly aware and dedicated, these days, you can’t move for gymnastics sessions, music lessons, sports clubs, language classes and part-time theatre schools (my own included).  The pressure is on to enrol your child into something ‘improving’.  Not putting yourself out to get your kid into extra-mural education is seen by some as damaging to his/her life chances. 

Thank God then, for Dr Bryan Caplan, a U.S. academic, who has launched a new book, ‘Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids: Why Being a Great Parent is Less Work and More Fun than You Think’, hitting back at the current trend for over-hyper-super-uber-helicopter-tiger parenting so many have gone in for.

His aim is to nullify the guilt parents might feel when they fail to leap out of bed at 5am each morning to take their children to early morning swimming/ice skating/running/diving/dance/tennis (complete this sentence with whichever discipline you failed at yourself) .  He seeks to reassure those of us who are sick of fighting resistance to the practice of musical instruments and who would rather spend the money they dish out to teachers of Japanese maths methods on a good bottle of wine or (when they do the Japanese maths themselves) a holiday in a five star resort on Barbados.

Very little of this stuff, he concludes, will actually affect the success or otherwise of the mature product.  I must say, I largely agree.  For nine years from ages 7 - 16 I was forced through an education in the violin.  My father would do everything he could to pay for the lessons and keep his pink Capri on the road so he could take me to Saturday morning music academy.  He had heard an interview in which Itzhak Perlman spoke of how he had hated being made to practise the violin by his parents, but how, as an adult, he appreciated the lengths to which they had gone in order to help him achieve his potential in the instrument. Where Mr and Mrs Perlman led, my father would follow.

For nine years I detested the violin.  I forged my parents’ signatures in my practice book and I was accused of miming in the orchestra.  I had no aptitude or enthusiasm for it and barely scraped through the grades, and yet neither of my parents would countenance my giving it up. 

They meant well.  They wanted me to be happy and successful. And all these years later, I’ve ended up successfully being happy and I don’t put that down to my barely adequate vibrato.  I do however, put it down to good genes and all the stuff we did that was fun – the holidays abroad, the games of Scrabble, Monopoly and Cluedo, the cricket in the garden, the trips to the theatre, picnics in Kew Gardens, free concerts on the Southbank, the Sunday lunches listening to Jazz Record Requests, days out to the Tower of London, museums and art galleries, the talking round the dinner table that meant we were always late to meet our friends when we were old enough to go out to the pub. 

I might have been the world’s least impressive violinist, but I knew where you could buy the best salt beef sandwich in London and which jellied eel outlets were to be avoided.

Some children have personalities that make them compliant and ‘pushable’; they need no coaxing and cajoling to do their homework or practise their violin or audition for a play, but try pushing a different personality and you run the risk of alienating them and compromising your relationship.  Dr Caplan's advice is to do the stuff you all enjoy and accept that your children's lives will be shaped not by the choices that you make on their behalf, but the choices they make for themselves. This I agree with, but I would add that, to avoid life looking anything like Gorilla Island, your duty as a parent is to let them in on the choices that are out there...

My children do learn musical instruments and they’re fortunate to attend a school that gives them daily opportunities to play sport with all the discipline and team skills that sport instils. We live in a beautiful part of the world, in the middle of the countryside but in striking distance of the beach.  Our summer evenings are spent playing quik-cricket on Sandbanks and barbequeing with friends. We take walks to examine the glow worms on Hambledon Hill; my father takes the boys to Bath RFC matches and we cart our picnics to any number of rainy venues to listen to live music.  The boys don’t listen to Jazz Record Requests, but they do listen to most of the output of Radio 4.  They have seen plays at the National, the RSC and every provincial theatre across the South; they’ve been to music festivals, comedy festivals, cheese festivals and beer festivals. 

They know that life is a privilege; that, unlike Top Gear, it’s brief and unrepeatable.  They owe it to Nico to switch the telly off and get to it.

A Race Apart

“Have a look at these,” says Sarah, placing a box of trainers onto my kitchen table.

“MBTs,” she announces proudly.  I stare at her.  “Masai Barefoot Technology,” she adds, urging comprehension.

“Are you in training with the Kenyan distance running team?” I ask.  “I suppose there’s a space in the team now that Sammy What’s-his-name's tragically fallen from his balcony…”

“Don’t be silly, I’m in training for June 25^th.”

June 25th.  Have I missed something?  It doesn’t ring any bells.

“Sports day? The Mothers’ Race? You can’t have forgotten?”

Of course.  The Mothers’ Race. Once upon a time, when mothers still wore pinnies and slept in rollers, this was a little bit of sadistic fun invented by games masters to ensure that women attending Sports Day couldn’t nod off in the sun behind their copy of Woman’s Weekly while their little Johnnies wobbled down the track with newly off-ration eggs.  Fast forward fifty years however and, like everything else in British culture, it’s an altogether meaner, more competitive story.

Last year, forty-two year old Sarah came second in the Mothers’ Race.  The mother who beat her is nearly ten years younger with a thirty-four inch inside leg (Sarah is five foot four with a following wind).  These facts are immaterial, apparently, as no handicapping system applies to novelty races, much to her dismay.  Instead, she has chosen to approach the event as if it were the London Marathon, which explains the over-priced, hi tech trainers.

My own introduction to the Mothers’ Race came several years ago.  I was thirty-four – just a filly – and gym fit.  I took the race at face value: a bit of a laugh before we broke open the picnic lunch and the tepid cava.  “Shall we jog at the back and chat?” I asked my pal, Mandy who nodded in agreement.  We took our places in the line-up, me in my flip-flops, she in Dunlop Green Flash.  I could have sworn she hadn’t arrived in those… 

The starter’s gun sounded.  Mandy disappeared into a cloud of dust; the dust I was eating.  I was left to amble in last, a picture of bewildered confusion.  It was only as I flip flopped across the tape that now lay fluttering on the ground, that I realised the Mothers’ Race is a front for so much more. 

What I had failed to appreciate in this uber-competitive era, is that where you finish in the Mothers’ Race invites judgement not just of your running ability, but of your competence as a parent. The faster you run, clearly the better able you are to bring up a child.  The mother who breasts the line in first place therefore, is the best mother. And she even gets a medal from the Headmaster to prove it.

If you wanted evidence to support this unpalatable thesis, you’ve only to think of Princess Di.  In the face of self-confessed faithlessness, philandering and proper dodgy liaisons, she retained an unassailable position in the mothering stakes.  She’d surely earned it, for who cannot recall her spirited win in the Mothers’ Race at her sons’ prep school in 1989?  (Before you protest, I simply won’t countenance any theories that the other mothers let her win just so they’d be safe from accusations of treason.)

“So,” says Sarah, “will you be taking part?”  I see that she is already sizing me up; she needn’t worry.  I have every intention of running, but none whatever of competing.

“I expect so,” I say, “I like to support the children.”

“That’s right,” she agrees, “it’s not the winning that matters but the taking part.”

I snort.  It seems to me that that particular adage belongs to a bygone Britain. Today, it’s only winning that matters, even when it sets friend against friend, mother against mother. What we need is more people prepared to lose graciously.

“Why do you always come last, Mummy?” asks my younger son when we discuss the matter later.

“So nobody else has to,” I reply.

Public Displays of Affliction

I chose to work on the day of the Royal Wedding.  I live with a Marxist intellectual for whom there is simply no debate about the having of a monarchy; any events with footmen, bearskins and carriages bring him out in rash and a rage which even the poking of fun at badly dressed princesses will not quell.

"So, you don't want to knock up a batch of fairy cakes so I can have the girls round to watch it?" I asked a few weeks before the big day. (His cakes are, I am loathe to admit, much better than mine.  I think it's something to do with a superior confidence about timing, but, in these straitened times, the MOD might like to take me on in munitions; if anything would fell Gadaffi, my cupcakes are a cert.) 

"No." He replied.  "Frankly I have better things to do than create confection in celebration of a bunch of sponging German bastards.  And you say 'have the girls round' but it'll be a street party before you know it and I, for one, am not spending the day being groped by local farmers' wives tipsy on warm chardonnay, in the name of community cohesion."

I got the message.  I have seen him groped by at least one local farmer's wife behind the calving shed of a local dairy farm, his eyes wide with terror as she launched herself at him to the strains of 'You Saw Me Crying in the Chapel' sung by the bloke who hires out skips round here.  I understood.  This is not H E Bates territory.

"Ok, ok.  But I think you're being churlish..." I ventured.
"I'm not being churlish.  I just think that, in an evolved society, a monarchy is an anachronism.  It doesn't make sense."

What can you say?  Of course it doesn't make sense.  But lots of things that bring pleasure don't necessarily make sense.  Take the erotic dream I had on my ski holiday last month.  Much to my distress it featured Ian Hislop and Boris Johnson. At the same time. Of course, I attributed it to altitude sickness - I don't go for gnomish, bald men or mop headed buffoons -  but it's a perfect example of how something that is entirely illogical, repellent even, can bring a (very great) deal of pleasure.

"Eighty percent of Brits don't want the monarchy removed," I said.
"Then I share an island with fifty million people who ought to be more offended by their status than they are.  That said, I accept the will of the majority whilst wishing it were otherwise.  At best I am indifferent to the royal family.  Make your own cakes."

In the end, I got the call to work, broadcasting essential updates about the Royal Weather to the south - open top carriage, or glass roof?  Would the clouds keep their tears to themselves or shed them in a tribute to Lady Di, who unavoidably couldn't be there?

As I drove into work, I listened to the radio coverage, swapping between Radio 4 (James Naughtie speaking over Ed Stourton and clearly positioning himself as the voice of the royal gigs yet to come) and Five Live (lots of gushing along the route and fabulously trivial contributions from people in the crowd, all hosted by 'Nicholas Campbell'. 'Nicholas Campbell'? Perhaps he thought the princes were slipping into their strides with Five on in the background).

I was somewhere on the M27 when Julian Worricker, catastrophically unfit to report on the first glimpse of Kate by the hoardes along the Mall, was asked to describe the dress.  Sorry, that should read: THE DRESS.  The best kept secret, saving the honeymoon destination.  The dress with which fashion writers across the planet had filled miles of copy even before a needle had been threaded.  THAT dress, Julian.

"It's a long sleeved outfit... I think it's a V neck outfit." 

Alexander McQueen would have hanged himself all over again.  Nothing about lace or fabric or the rarely-seen tiara borrowed from HM.  Or the striking similarity to Princess Margaret's 1960 wedding dress.  And nothing about the expression on her father's face; no comments about how his career as cabin crew would have equipped him not only to keep his emotions under control but also to walk down the aisle without treading on anybody's toes (a fact nobody pointed out). 

This is where the BBC needs to sort itself out.  It's all very well having reporters dotted along the route, but reporters are used to reporting news. The fall of dictators, the collapse of economies, the hacking of phones; that they can do. But this wasn't news.  It was a wedding.  What Auntie Beeb needed was aunts.  Aunts speculate, they criticise, they praise, they gossip, they romanticise, they bring up family secrets and things unspoken of for generations; they draw attention to visible panty lines and paste jewellery;  they notice.  An aunt, on seeing Elton John in the congregation, would have made a quip about there being more than one old queen at this wedding.  An aunt would have commented on how tired he and David Furnish looked, but would have graciously balanced it with relief that there was no baby sick on their suits.  An aunt would have hazarded a guess that David Beckham was regretting those tattoos on his neck, but added that Victoria was doing an heroic thing wearing those sky scraper heels in her condition.  I'm an aunt.  I know these things.  Book me.

By the time I'd got into the BBC South newsroom, Kate was alighting from the Roller and smiling.  Then Pippa was sorting out her dress, calculatingly bending down to trigger a global gasp in the tweetersphere in respect of her 'fine ass'.  And, as Kate began her long walk away from freedom, I was hooked. 
"Those eyebrows," I whispered to Jo, whose husband had pulled the plug out of the telly that morning, "those teeth... so beautifully captured in the parentheses of such charming dimples..."
And, as she (let's face it) led her father down to the balding bloke in scarlet, I exhaled in awe: "That is a girl who has seriously got her shit together." (Jim Naughtie eat your heart out.)

At a quarter past eleven I was obliged to phone into the BBC Weather Centre for the mid-morning conference where the big news was that the risk of showers that had threatened the Royal Happiness had been downgraded. 
"Less than twenty percent now, I think," said Jay Wynne. A Royal Weather Person from another region suddenly made an involuntary noise.
"What?  What is it?" asked an alarmed Jay Wynne who, professional that he is, clearly did not have one eye on the telly.
"He's struggling to get the ring on," I said.  "And now he's offering to honour her with his body..."
"Oh," he said, distinctly unimpressed, and continued to confine the risk of showers to the coast.

Thankfully, the momentous balcony scene occurred between bulletins and I was able to enjoy to the full the chaste kiss which these days serves to indicate the consummation of the royal marriage.  Back in Henry's day, the bride and groom would be sent off the bedchamber as soon as the ring was on, with clergy standing outside the door to confirm God's will was being done and the honouring with the body had happened.  Which lucky BBC journo would be entrusted with coverage of that, I wonder?

Of course we are only interested in the kiss because our schools all have 'No PDA' rules (and if you don't know that PDA stands for 'Public Displays of Affection' you were never in danger of being caught in a game of playground Kiss Chase).  No PDA along with the 'thirty centimetre rule' limiting the proximity of the opposite sex outside of the private sphere - these are the regulations that have made ours the uptight, sex obsessed, sensually retarded culture it is.  Which is why we're so keen to see the kiss.  We're actually waiting for a prefect to appear from behind the curtains and slam the miscreants in detention.

And so a youngish, baldish man kissed a pretty sorted and pretty, sorted, young woman and it was done.

I spent the rest of the day battling irrational jealousy of my girlfriends who were texting me updates from the royal wedding events they were attending:
'Anchored off Brownsea with prawns and Pinot!  Is it gonna [sic] rain?'
'Totally hammered.  Who said the civil list was a bad idea? lol '
'Look like Alice Cooper.  Unfounded claims about this mascara. Keep crying!!!!!!'
To each I replied simply: 'Have Royal Wedding Envy. Do not disclose to husband. '

Eventually, I took my cue from the Duke and Duchess and left in an old car.  Driving home I tuned in once again to Five Live where Drive were doing a round-up of the nation's street parties.  They crossed to Paul Greer, live from Bucklebury's celebration where it seemed that the population of the village was intoxicated not only by the free flowing Jacobs Creek, but by the media attention they have clearly embraced.

"Is that it?" asked the professionally bouncy Asma Mir. "Is it all done and dusted?"
"Oh Lord, I really hope so," came a weary response from Greer.

It sounded as though Paul had taken one for the team.  No doubt Bucklebury has its fair share of farmers' wives.  You can have too much community cohesion sometimes.