4:27AM, and I have been wide-awake for half an hour. Any attempts at getting back to sleep are being complicated by the presence of young Frankie, who at some point in the night has crept into the middle of the bed and spreadeagled his five-and-a-half-year-old limbs across approximately 60% of the available surface. It's like trying to sleep with a cute but ungainly orangutan.
That is one of the things that is keeping me awake. The other is the collection of some half-dozen items I have suddenly decided I absolutely have to tell you about, all of which are competing for attention in my head, and none of which (I am warning you now) I can focus on long enough to stretch out into anything like a proper post.
So clearly there is nothing for it but to get up, make a cup of tea, and write it all down in a deranged, sleep-deprived flurry. In order to bring some semblance of order to the proceedings, I will extend to you the small courtesy of a series of sub-headings. Thus:
1. Boy
A year or so ago, as you may recall, Frankie was given to remarking that it was 'complicated being a boy ', and indeed had made a conscious decison to revert to babyhood, complete with a retro penchant for nappies. This identity crisis was short-lived, partly (I like to believe) due to a masterful parental intervention, in the form of the purchase of a Euro 2008 Panini sticker book, followed up by a regular nightly supply of adhesive-backed photographs of stern-looking Bulgarian centre-halves.
That was a year ago. Now Frankie is altogether positive about everything to do with being a boy, or as he prefers to call himself, a 'feller'. Suddenly, everything I do is fantastically interesting, and Charlotte finds herself banned from the living room for half-an-hour at at time, on the grounds that some not discerbibly macho show on CBeebies (Charlie and Lola, say, or The Night Garden) is 'just for fellers, like me and daddy'.
Secretly I suspect that Charlotte is not overly upset by this development, although other aspects of Frankie's new-found identification with his gender are slightly more alarming. For instance for some quite unfathomable reason he's got it into his head that maleness equates to drinking beer and watching football, so has taken to asking anyone who will listen (such as the neighbours, or any of his little friends who come round to play), whether they fancy 'coming down the pub for a pint to watch Newcastle United'. And on the way to the park the other day, he made a valiant but vain effort to effect a diversion into Hennigans Sports bar, which, he informed Charlotte, was 'just for fellers, really. That's probably why you don't like it'.
Having said all this, Frankie's best friends at school are still all little girls, and he's suddenly become interested in the idea of learning to read (until now, any effort to point out the words next to the pictures has been met with indignation bordering on outright tantrums). And he's also completely besotted with Amaya, the half-Spanish, half-Mancunian seven year old whose grandparents live two doors down, to the extent of wanting to do anything at all that she does, even things he would in normal circumstances flatly refuse to consider, such as going to swimming lessons or eating a banana. So all is not lost (apart from the devotion to Newcastle United of course- I can speak from experience there and affirm that there is absolutely no going back on that one, God knows I've tried).
2 Allotment
For some time now I've been telling anyone who will listen that I am going to get an allotment. Not any allotment, either, but one on the much sought-after plot up at the 'nice' end of Levenshulme near the biscuit factory, where depending on who you listen to the waiting list is either six months or three years. Me and Frankie have even taken to wandering up there on Sunday mornings and spending an hour or so admiring the potatoes (or leeks, or strawberries, or whatever they are; we are very much still at the beginner's stage here) and striking up conversations with passing gardeners in the hope that one of them will turn out to be An Influential Member Of The Committee.
We haven't succeeded in this quest yet, but we have been given a guided tour of three separate plots, one of which included a free fifteen minute step-by-step tutorial on the basics of shedmaking (Frankie was transfixed). And in a new development, we have been reliably informed (by my mam, who knows about these things) that in order to get an allotment it isn't actually compulsory to stake out the committee with the aid of small children- you just have to ring the number on your Council website and get yourself put on the list. It turns out she's right, which is slightly dissappointing as me and Frankie were quite enjoying the subterfuge aspect of our weekly excursions. But I'm going to make the call anyway, and am already making plans for the first potato harvest, scheduled provisionally for sometime in 2015.
3 Bike
Not content with nearly getting an allotment (or at least nearly putting myself on a list for one) I've been preoccupied with nearly getting a bike. Partly this is due to a realisation that since I ...
a-can't play football any more
b- have an aversion to swimming owing to the chilly municipal water and attendant danger of drowning, and
c- can't get an allotment for fifteen years,
...a bicycle is pretty much my only route to physical exercise of any kind. Which would explain why I was to be found wobbling around the backstreets of Manchester's fashionable Westside at 4:15 this afternoon, when I should really have been at work. I was testriding a gentleman's bicycle in a lurid shade of pink, which had been advertised on a postcard in Sainsbury's at a price of £40. The vendor was a chirpy Irish chap named Tommy, whose claim that the pink effort was 'me brother-in-law's'; he's just bought a new one' was somewhat cast into doubt by the presence of approximately thirty other bikes in various shades and states of repair, scattered across his drive. There were also several full sets of golf clubs for sale, and I'm sure if I had enquired over the availability of an unused fondu set, or an olympic-sized trampoline, or a vintage Ford Granada in fetching beige, he would have sauntered off to his garage and come back with a choice of each. I can't say for sure because I didn't ask. What I can tell you is that in the end I declined to part with the asking price for the lurid pink mountain bike, partly on account of its doubtful provenance, but mostly because my wobbly perambulation about the backstreets of the Westside had brought to light a troubling slipperiness about the gear-change on the small sprocket.
I did have one or two other items that were swirling about my head, such as a recent series of especially soul destroying work meetings, each of them more pointless than the last, culminating in a night-time one which I travelled specially to but was the only attendee at, as they had cancelled it and not let me know (actually that was the most enjoyable one of all, I stayed for some time after finding out about the cancellation, lounging in the communal armchairs and gazing contentedly through the descending dusk at the walls). And there was also the trip to M19 bar to take in the Manchester derby in the company of the twenty-strong gang of vociferous, snappily-dressed Zimbabweans who you only ever see in M19 bar, and only on big match days. They drink only lucozade, and are given to sudden pronouncements in African-accented RP, on the lines of 'That was damn shoddy defending, Ferdinand! Shaky and Shoddy!'
All very mysterious, but it will have to wait for another day, as it is now 5:49 and I am overcome by a desire to go back to sleep, or at least to climb into bed and wrestle for mattress-space with a slumbering orangutan-like figure. Sweet dreams, everyone...
Recent Comments