John Heron Project

— Daddy?
— Mm?
— Why is it raining?
— Well, the flowers and the grass need to drink and stuff.
— Daddy, why is it raining?
— Well. Um. It was sunny yesterday, so I suppose it’s the rain’s turn.
— But Daddy, why is it raining?
— Um, well, the wind blew and the sky turned grey and the rain came.
— Daddy! Why is it raining?
— [sighs] Conditions of atmospheric pressure in the air high above us necessitated the precipitation of clouds of water vapour into droplets of water which then fell to the earth below.
— Oh. Daddy?
— Mm?
— Why is it raining?
— The clouds needed a wee.
— OK.
[short passage of time]
— Wood?
— Darling?
— Are you aware that our son has just caused a panic in the park playground?
— Uh, no?
— Did you tell our son that the clouds were urinating on him?
— Uh, no. Why?

There’s this cliché about Welsh women
About how they’re really filthy when they talk about sex
And they have all these tattoos
And I can’t vouch for the first
But since the summer started
The layers have been shed
And at the gates of the Welsh school
The ink is there;
Butterflies on shoulders,
Dragonflies on ankles,
And here’s a fearsome black-haired nan
With a vast tangle of roses and hearts and birds
And the names of her grandchildren
Etched on her calf from ankle to knee,
And I feel sort of naked actually,
With only these half-dozen dots on my hand
Witness to a failed attempt at this
Home-made tribal framework, aged seventeen
That got all gungy and fell off.

All this ink,
All arrayed across the track
Fading in the sun
In honour of two dozen three- and four-year-olds
Wobbling plastic eggs on massive spoons
And clambering through tunnels
And running as fast as their little legs will carry them.
Here you are,
You I came to see
And Mrs J picks you up and drops you in the sack
And she tells you to jump.
And you will not jump.
You will not.
She holds your hand and tries to coax you
And you will not jump
And I am so proud.

Now I realise that the reason you’re not jumping is because
You hurt your foot a couple of days ago
And it hurts to jump
But I am your dad
And it’s my job to project upon you my own failures and desires.
I’m your dad.
I jumped when they told me,
But I never jumped high enough or far enough.
I wish I had not jumped.
I wish I hadn’t screwed up this tattoo.

Listen, when you’re old enough to appreciate it,
I’ll issue a finite number
Three maybe, or five,
Vouchers for sickies.
I’ll write you a note,
No strings, back you up,
Get out of Sports Day free,
If you like.

Obviously, we won’t tell your mother.

By David John Ingham, age 3, transcribed by Dad.

The Crocodile, he found a friend
And then he found another friend
And then he found his mummy and daddy
And then he ran away
And then he went to bed.
The Whale he found his Dinosaur friend
And then he went to bed.

(more…)

Do not name him, please;
Leave him gazing from the print,
All trust.
Do not allow him to pitterpatter
In my imagination.
Let the people who care grieve,
Let the people who did not be punished,
Let me find my children and
Hold them,
So very tightly.

Matthew James Ingham was born this morning, 12.17am.

He was 8lbs 7oz in weight, which means Becky owes us a bag of jelly babies.

Not liking kids is a sign that you need a slapping.

That’s all.

Further to my recent discussion of kids’ television, here’s a question for the three of you who read my blog:

If a childrens’ show has stuff in it for adults, for example political references that a child won’t get, references to things grown ups like, or even slight, sly references to, ahem, adult themes, is that clever and funny, or a betrayal of a medium that’s supposed to be for children?

I realise it’s not a zero-sum game, and that adult-friendly references might fall on either side of the line, even in the same show. I suppose the question is, is it really fair to make a show that’s supposed to be for children but really for adults?

Let’s not beat about the bush. It was my 32nd birthday back in September, and I got a lot of CDs. And a turntable, so I can play vinyl again. I also got a laptop, but I broke that (as in, beyond repair) in record time.

The Arcade Fire’s Neon Bible is a good record because, like the album that preceded it, it’s new music that sounds like you already know it. It attacks that familiarity centre you have in your brain. Well, mine, anyway. “Intervention”, “Antichrist Television Blues” and “Keep the Car Running” are all brilliant.

I have raved about St. Vincent a lot. She is really called Annie Clark, and she has an album called Marry Me. It is quirky and has a bit of the classically trained soprano thing and a bit of the torch song thing and a bit of a one-octave-lower Kate Bush thing and a bit of a lot of things. I love it very much, and have been playing it solidly for the six weeks since I got it. There is no duff song on the album, but “Now, Now”, “Jesus Saves, I Spend”, “Apocalypse Song” and “What Me Worry” all make me go a bit funny inside.

The same can’t be said for The Polyphonic Spree’s third album, The Fragile Army, which, like the other two, I played obsessively for a while before abruptly losing interest. Question: is that thing they have where they again play the last bit of the previous album at the beginning of the new one and the consecutive track numbers (album number three is tracks 21 to 32) a sign of genius — a desire to create a consistent, sequential body of work — or just prog-rock pretension?

There is a little bit of prog-rock pretension in the Decemberists‘ 2006 album The Crane Wife. I can live with that; my mate Martin is not so sure. I think it’s an interesting fusion of magic-realist folk and prog-rock concept album (prolk, if you will), with some nice tunes. Martin thinks it draws from — I use his words — the “joke end of prog and the parts of folk I don’t like”. Becky likes it, though.

I found Tanya Donelly’s recent album This Hungry Life — it pains me to say — a tiny bit disappointing. I treasure Tanya Donelly’s music, you see, and have done since I was in my teens and she was the lead singer of Belly. This Hungry Life is good and all, but, apart from that title track, which is lovely, it’s not that good. It’s really pleasant, but it doesn’t engage me. I feel bad just writing that.

Welsh-language indie act Swci Boscawen engages me, and the album Couture C’Ching (say “ka-ching” — Welsh doesn’t have any Ks) is great and fun and transcends that whole low-rent indie-pop thing where they think rubbish production and out-of rhythm handclaps equals quirky and original. No hand claps, which is good; proper singing, which is better; and decent production, which is excellent.

Watch out for more of Swci (AKA Mared Lenny) in future. She is going places. She recently duetted live with Rufus Wainwright, which is somewhat counter-intuitive.

“Counter-intuitive” is a good if slightly strained way to describe reviews I read last year (this one, for instance) of the compilation Colours Are Brighter. This is a compilation of songs for children, curated by Belle and Sebastian, and featuring Ivor Cutler, Jonathan Richman, Snow Patrol, Franz Ferdinand, Half Man Half Biscuit and others.

I didn’t read a single review that actually involved playing it to actual children. So I did. Martin, who gave me the CD in the first place, brought round Calum (6) and Ailsa (4) and we asked them what they thought of it.

Ailsa thought most songs were “nice” but liked the Jonathan Richman number, a slow song about a dog getting older and being about to die. Calum thought that one was boring. The Half Man Half Biscuit song that the critics liked so much, “David Wainwright’s Feet”, which is about a boy who gets his gran to buy him cool trainers and pays the price (ie. bunions), met with indifference. On the other hand, Franz Ferdinand’s “Jackie Jackson”, a very silly song about a boy who eats so many pies he explodes, which was reviled by one critic for sounding as sounding like they were trying too hard, was received with warm approval. The opener, Four Tet’s “Go Go Ninja Dinosaur”, got the kids boogying, even my own Little Dave (who is two today).

Dave had lost interest by track six, though. The Divine Comedy’s trio of Winnie-the-Pooh songs was, to my surprise, liked, but no one was surprised when the Flaming Lips’ frankly boring song “The Big Old Bug is the Baby Now” got turned off after thirty seconds. Kathryn Williams’ song bored Calum; Ailsa liked it, but not as much as the star of the show, which was the Belle and Sebastian tune, “The Monkeys Are Breaking Out the Zoo”, which has vocals from a member of the band who can’t sing, and — the real winner — comedy sound effects.

The kids loved that one a lot, and Calum was, I understand, singing it for much of the next day.

It’s bedtime. (more…)

Of course, education is a pretty recurring theme on CBeebies. (more…)

You’ve got a pre-school kid. You live in the UK. You have a TV and a cable, satellite or freeview box. You know what that means?

You’ve seen CBeebies.

CBeebies is the BBc’s pre-school kids’ channel, which spun off of CBBC, its original childrens’ programming stream. I had originally vowed that my kids would avoid the telly for as long as I possibly could, and that I would play with them and feed their little minds properly. But you know, a man’s got to have a rest some time.

No, I’m not a failure as a parent. (more…)

I was in the park next to my house for a while this afternoon, having abandoned my work nightmare for a moment, and I lay on my back on the grass, in the sunshine, and my little boy, who’s not even two years old, lay there next to me, and he smiled and laughed and pointed at clouds and the branches of trees and spoke in his funny private language and I thought, I want this to last forever.

Dave meets Cathy for the first time.

Tracy and Cathy.

…the birth of Catherine Joy Ingham, at 1am on 23rd May 2007. Weighing 7lb, 2oz, she was born at home, as planned.

Chuffed.

So last week, I was in a shop that I don’t normally go to and I ran into someone who was at one time quite a good friend, but who I kind of lost touch with and hadn’t seen at all for a very long time. We talked for a bit.

So I mentioned my little boy, and how we were expecting another one. Now the individual in question, from the very first moment of our acquaintance, has always been known to me as one to express extreme opinions very strongly.

(Yeah, I know. Laugh. But I’ve not always been like this.)

The point being that my acquaintance went on a five-minute rant about why hating children was reasonable and how people who go shopping should not be allowed to be accompanied with children, and if they can’t they should just go online and shop on the internet.

“All non-accompanied babies should be eaten,” said my acquaintance. As if it were funny.

I laughed it off, but inside I was almost too angry to speak. It’s not the first time that I’ve heard opinions like that, but the older I get, the closer I am to bluntly stating my own view, which, simply put, is this: if you hate seeing or hearing children, particularly small children, and you don’t see anything wrong with that, if you are unapologetic about that, there is, in point of fact, something very wrong with you. You are a defective human being. If you state these opinions to me without a damned good rationale and an implied apology, you’ll earn my contempt. I will consider you to be beneath me.

One extreme opinion, strongly put, richly deserves another.

That is all.

Tiny little feet really do go “pitter patter”.

Little Dave is at the cusp of walking and talking. And if you didn’t know, there’s another due, in May. Wish me luck.

In today’s Guardian, Charlotte Raven writes about how hard it is being a parent.

Oh, boo, hoo, hoo.

The birth of my daughter was a terrible shock to my psychic system. Like most of my generation, I’d assumed that the goal of parenting was ego gratification (we called it fulfilment) of the kind we’d been taught to expect. I had imagined my daughter as a mirror in which I would see myself reflected back and was somewhat surprised to discover that this was exactly what she thought of me. The struggle for primacy that ensued was unseemly, looking back. At a time when old-fashioned mothers would be bonding with their babies, the modern woman is fighting to retain her (false) belief that the universe revolves around her.

She won, of course. I tried tuning her out, but her cries were insistent and incessant. Nobody else could see that she had wilfully set out to destroy my sense of self, so I felt lonely as well as defeated. The next few months were hell. I did my best to besmirch her character but no one would listen, except other mothers bearing the scars of the same narcissistic wound.

The thing that gets me is that both of the methods of parenting this self-obsessed, empathy-free emotional cripple describes, the apparent “liberal” and “conservative”, are fundamentally selfish. At no point in the article is there any assumption that the child is an independent human being with feelings that matter as much as the mother’s, and the need to be cared for, which the mother doesn’t need, being an adult.

Here is the news: parenting involves subordinating your own desires to the small, helpless, needy, beautiful human being you brought into the world. You have to actually care for him or her. You actually have to put yourself to one side. Stuff “self-actualisation” and “fulfilment” - they’re just excuses for selfishness anyway.

You know, maybe selfless parenting is in fact a self-obsession in its own right, a kind of martyrdom. But you know what? At least the kid gets a bit of acceptance as a human being.

…was when Dave started smiling at us, on Boxing Day.

Little Dave smiles for the camera

Via Dadology:

Tom Cruise is going to make Katie Holmes keep quiet during the birth of their kid…

Scientology couple JOHN TRAVOLTA and KELLY PRESTON are urging KATIE HOLMES to have a ’silent birth’ when she delivers fiance TOM CRUISE’s baby next year (06) and follow the church’s strict doctrines.

Scientologists believe children should be brought into the world without any fuss and be allowed to quietly get used to their surroundings. That means no music, no chatting and no expressions of pain from the mother.

Preston explains, “It’s just because everything in moments of pain is really recorded and you want to have that (the birth) peaceful and clear of sort of suggestions or different words that can then affect them (babies) in their future.”

Ri-ight. That’s nuts, that is. Dadology puts it like this:

…any man who can suggest this to his wife is either under the influence of a very bizarre cult or a total tosser.

Now I’m with my paternal colleague in this.

But, you know, when I was in LA back in February, I met about four people who had Tom Cruise stories. Apparently, if they’re true, he is a) a really nice bloke although b) not too bright. I also own a copy of L Ron Hubbard’s book, which has a disclaimer in the front cover, saying that if the book screws up your life, it’s your responsibility and not the Church of Scientology’s fault, and you can’t sue them.

So, I’d probably have to settle for the former, given the evidence.

Little Dave:

Happy mum, quiet baby:

David John Ingham was born at 3.35am, on 5th November 2005, in Singleton Hospital (things didn’t go according to plan). Mother and baby are doing well.

Dad’s knackered.

The midwife isn’t going to let me eat the placenta. Oh, well.