Crinklybee

Complicated

I come home from work to find Frankie running towards me down the corridor, arms outstretched.  He’s wearing nothing but a nappy.  The sartorial innovation is a new development, but is part of a wider campaign on our four-and-a-half-year-old’s part to resist the inexorable, and apparently slightly scary, process of growing up.

 

A few minutes later I’m upstairs getting changed.  Frankie comes in and plonks himself down on the bed.  I lie down next to him and ask him what he’s been up to at school today.  As usual, the boy is exceptionally cagey on this point, and won’t be pressed on any detail other than that he ‘played with David’  (which is the standard reply to this question, employed even on days when we know for a fact that his friend David has been off sick for a week with chicken pox).   So I decide to try another tack:

 

‘So, what’s happened to your clothes today, Frankie?  Why are you just wearing a nappy?’

 

‘Because I’m a baby’

 

‘But you’re not a baby anymore, love, you’re four years old- you’r e a little boy now’.

 

‘I don’t want to be a little boy daddy- I just want to be a baby!’

 

‘And why’s that, love?’

 

Frankie gives this one a moment’s thought- as if this is something he’s been wrestling with himself.  And then:

 

‘Because it’s too complicated being a boy, daddy’.

 

I open my mouth to demur, but then hesitate.  After all, it is complicated being a boy- and the graduation from extra-size Pampers to your first pairs of tiny cloth underpants is just the start of it.   There’s also the tribulations of going to school five days a week, such as remembering where you’ve left your packed lunch, and then having to spend lunchtime eating it in an imposing Victorian dining room full of noisy, older boys.  Back at home, there’s your parents- their unfathomable obsession with vegetables, and their cryptic mealtime references to ‘little boys in India who would give their left arms for that carrot’.

 

All this for a boy to deal with, and we haven’t even started on the subject of girls. No, it sure as hell is complicated beng a boy- there’s some of the finer points I’m still a little hazy on myself, and that’s after forty years of practice.  So I can’t really hope to shield Frankie from the inevitable stresses of growing up; the best I can probably hope for is to come up with ways of making the day-to-day experience just that little bit more bearable.  Fortunately, just the day after the ‘nappy talk’, I come across just the thing while on a lunchtime visit to the newsagents….

 

…..The Euro 2008 Panini sticker album comes in at £2.50, and a packet of stickers to go in it comes in at 48p.  ‘They’re for my young lad- he’s just four’, I feel compelled to explain to the newsagent on my way out.  I’m fooling no-one here- and sure enough as Frankie rips open the crinkly green packet at tea-time it’ a close call which of us is more excited at the prospect of our first quintet of pristine stickers dropping out onto the kitchen floor.  It’s a classic set as well- alongside mugshots of a couple of obscure Croatians and the Swedish reserve goalkeeper, we have an action shot of Cristiano Ronaldo in full flight down the wing, and a shiny silver-backed one featuring the emblem of the Spanish Football Association (those ones, I remember, were particularly prized in Fenham back in the day).

 

As we stick the stickers carefully in their places, there is no need for slighly fraught conversations about school- or about anything else for that matter.  Frankie is fully occupied with making sure the stickers fit at exact right-angles into their rectangular spaces, and I’m engrossed in the short biographical detail under the spaces assigned for the Romanian squad members (which reveal that they were almost without exception born in Bucharest, and the oldest of them is my junior by a half-dozen years).  For these blissful few moments, the complications of being a boy (of four years or forty) could not be further from our minds.

 

No, for the next month or so, I’d say the most complicated matter me and Frankie will be attending to will be what to do with spare Romanian defensive hardmen, unwanted Czech midfield dynamos, and duplicate Spanish goalpoachers.  Which, by the way, might get just a little bit complicated, as other than Frankie’s imaginary friend Dodder we haven’t come across anyone else to exchange our swaps with.  If anyone out there wants to join us, then let us know via the comments box exactly how many dour Eastern European centre-halves you will let go of in exchange for a spare Alessandro Del Piero.  No reasonable offer refused.

 

Crinklybee- the first four years

This morning it occurred to me that it must be nigh-on four years to the day since the first-ever Crinklybee post.   A quick check of the archives reveals that this auspicious anniversary is just a week or so away.  As good an excuse as any, perhaps, to embark on a nostalgic trip back in time.....

Year One: June 2004- May 2005

That first ever post - concerning my neurotic difficulties with the various stages of getting a letter into a postbox- was met with universal indifference.  However the grand total of no comments received whatsoever did little to deter me, and I soldiered on, regaling my as-yet-seemingly non-existent audience during the first month with tales of a disastrous flirtation with extreme gardening, an unexpected city-centre encounter with a flock of fibre-glass cows, and a cycle ride to work enlivened by a fantasy in which the A6 Stockport Road featured as a particularly leisurely stage in the Giro Di Italia. 

It is this last post which attracts Crinklybee's first-ever comment- from a person called Wendy exclaiming simply 'Shit, I've got a puncture!'  This scant confirmation that at least one person out there is taking some notice is enough to inspire me to continue, and over the course of the year several themes emerge; The relating of my life story via unorthodox means such as a history of eyewear, trips out to various points of the North West to peer through the drizzle at lower-grade football (I seem to have nurtured a worrying affinity during Year One with the serially useless Stockport County), and a fascination with the harmless eccentrics of South Manchester. 

Year Two: June 2005- May 2006

The year started with our first (and so far only) interactive competition thingy, in which readers were asked to read between the lines of the first years worth of posts to find the answers to multiple choice questions on matters such as whether the first single I bought was 'My Girl' by Madness or 'New Song' by Howard Jones.  Controversially the competition is won by my sister Abby who, it is argued in some corners of the comment box, had an unfair advantage derived from living in the same house as me for eighteen years.  As if to emphasise the detractor's point, my mother comes a close second.  The soon-to-be-inernationally-famous Petite Anglaise (from whom I had nicked the idea of a competition of this type) is among the other entrants but she is too distracted by the demands of impending literary superstardom and trails in a distant ninth.

During the long hot summer we have a week-long adventure in Devon, during which Charlotte is nearly carried away into the skies by fierce local pigeons.  On our return I embark on another odyssey- into the world of battered old indiepop singles.  This month-long series features the covers of seven-inch records from the halcyon days of the late 80s photographed against backdrops such as the platform of Levenshulme station.  A compilation audio-tape featuring the greatest hits of Talulah Gosh, The Fat Tulips and The Mighty Lemon Drops is offered as an accompaniment, and sent out to anyone who wants one- which turns out to be two people.

As winter draws near, we are greeted by a surprise development, when someone anonymously sends me a pristine Parka coat in the post.  Despite various theories being advanced as to its provenance (and a shadowy figure from the self-proclaimed 'Parka Club' coming forward to claim responsibility) the mystery is never adequately explained.

The Parka incident comes as a welcome diversion from the almost unbearable tedium of my nine-to-five life.  Further entertainment is provided by a Saturday night get-together of Manchester bloggers, an account of which features in the first (and sadly only) edition of a new 'Time-Out' type magazine aimed at the City's hipsters.  For the fortnight during which the magazine is available on the shelves (hell, they're even selling it in the Cornerhouse) I am walking on air, convinced that the 425-word article is the first stage on a stately march to journalistic fame.  Sadly, the man stepping out from the bushes and intoning 'Here, Put This Coat On' remains a distant fantasy.

Year Three: June 2006- May 2007

The year starts with the concluding chapters in 'Wolverhampton; a four-part trilogy'.  This account of a brilliant twentysomething friendship and its sudden, traumatic ending sparks the most heated ever debate in the Crinklybee comment box, and leaves me in fear of the attentions of sharp-suited Spanish libel lawyers.  Retreating into the comparatively less troubled territory of the delights of latter-day domesticity, another series charts two-year-old Frankie's use of the English language via an 'A-to-Z' journey through his burgeoning if idiosyncratic vocabulary.

As the nights start to draw in my growing frustration with meaningless nine-to-five drudgery once again comes to the fore, and a stilted exchange over a jar of pitted olives leads to sudden and troublesome intimacy with our new Persian grocer.  Thankfully the harsh winter gives me an excuse to limit my excursions into the outside world to a mimimum- a policy whose wisdom is underlined when a freak storm sends my new trendy media glasses scuttling along the pavement in the general direction of Deansgate. 

The end of the winter brings reason to celebrate, as we welcome baby Oscar into the fold (his arrival in the comment box is due, I should think, about six years from now...).  In an altogether less momentous development, a Crinklybee post features in 'Shaggy Blog Stories', a compilation of British blogposts published in book form under the editorial guidance of Mike of  'Troubled Diva' fame.  This brush with the blogging glitterati ranks alongside the time Petite Anglaise entered our first birthday competition thingy as one of our proudest moments.

As the year ends, there is a surprise development - well it surprised the living holy Bejesus out of me, anyway- when I leave the comfort zone of corporate drudgery behind to jump headlong into a scary new Guardian-style job somewhere in Manchester's fashionable Westside.  The screaming heebiejeebies brought on by this collision with the unknown leave me temporarily quite unable to post anything at all and I fleetingly hark back to the cosy busom of the flange desk... 

Year Four: June 2007-May 2008

The year starts with me engaged in a heated debate with myself over the wisdom/recklessness of my recent leap into the world of scary Guardian-style jobs.  Various of the regular commentistas step forward with kind wordds of encouragement that can be summed up in the phrase 'pull yourself together, man!.  As Autumn approaches, I more or less manage to do just that- and even to start to enjoy my new existence enough to ponder the various means by which Manchester's Fashionable Westside may be reached during rush-hour. 

The onset of the long winter is characterised by a series of posts harking back to the halcyon days of pre-adolescence (none of which, it seems, are quite remarkable enough to earn me a first-ever place on the podium at the Manchester Blog Awards).   Perhaps the judges would have looked more kindly on slightly later efforts, such as the one about having to call out the AA when we locked ourselves out of our car, or the one about how it takes four hours to get Frankie off to bed then you end up falling asleep yourself. 

The New Year gets underway with a short-lived efficiency drive, before veering off into another four-part trilogy (a little like the Wolverhampton one) which ends by once again raising the spectre of Cantabrian solicitors in double-breasted business jackets.  Back in the present day, my nascent professional football career comes to an end at the premature age of thirty-nine and eleven-twelfths.  As a result I start spending more time than ever on buses- and we are back to one of those familiar themes from the very beginnings, as a Grade One South Manchester eccentric catches our eye.

............

So there you are.  Hasn't time flown?  Some of you have been there since right at the start (maybe even since those first half-dozen posts when I suspected nobody was reading whatsoever).  Others among you are more recent arrivals (and if so why not click on a couple of ancient links that take your fancy.. you never know where you will end up).  To all of you, I would like to say thank you- without you dropping by (and keeping the comment box ticking over, the inbox thrill of 'a comment has been received' has never really diminished since Wendy chimed in to tell us about her puncture back in 2004).... well, there just wouldn't be any point, would there?

Here's to us all staying on board, then... for another four years at least.