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.

 

Comments

[Abby]

A brilliant summary of the difficulties of existence and how to avoid them, wor Jonathan. I'd bet Camus and his ilk would be nodding sagely, if they were still around to read this, and weren't too busy swapping UEFA stickers to deal with such mundane matters.

[Paul]

48p! Talk about inflation, I remember when they were 10p a packet.

Of course, as a new dad, I shall be sure to employ your tactic in a few years time when such problems need confronting in the 1000 shades household.

[Mike F]

Brought back some lovely memories did this...Mum always seemed to pick up a packet or two for me whenever she'd been in the newsagents. I'm off to see her at the weekend and must thank her again. You'll not look back now Frankie

[Jonathan]

Good to hear from you Mike F... I wonder if you remember the classic Espana 82 collection... they ran out of stickers in Fenham so my dad would send me out on the bike to far-flung parts of the West End in search of an elusive Phil Neal, or in response to rumours of a grade A batch of Bulgarians just arrived in Benwell... as you may gather I rather suspect my dad was slightly more into collecting those stickers than I was (although at 7p a packet I wasn't complaining...). Strange how history repeats itself....

[Joliet Jake]

so why is the boy wearing nappies at four years old? I suppose I've missed something way back

[jonathan]

Welcome Joliet Jake. No you haven't missed anything, it was just something he started insisting on doing for a few days (just at home I should add!) then stopped just as suddenly... I think it's just a four-year-old thing, a couple of weeks earlier he had decided he was a pirate, and wouldn't leave the house unless fully attired in the appropriate costume, complete with hook and eye-patch. We would walk down the street together to the accompaniment of passers-by shouting out 'hey where's your parrot?'

[bushra]

hmm to think i have all this to look forward to!

[Mike F]

I do remember Espana 82, but Europa '80 was my favourite album, despite the absence of Rep and the rest of the Dutch...seem to remember the tournament was a disappointment, despite Ray Clemence (resplendent in yellow) recovering from the effects of tear gas v Belgium to save a retaken penalty v the Spanish