As confusing as the weather might be in this ozone depleted, globally warmed world of ours I can still just about recognise the change in the seasons. As such I am gearing up for lighter nights and the promise of a trip to a local beauty spot. We will look at old buildings eating ice-cream and, if I can convince my wife to bring the flat shoes she uses for driving, we will sample some local ale.
The day out will no doubt include two things that are as traditionally to our family as raincoats and flip-flops.
Firstly, we will walk far enough to hear the girls complain about the distance; this will develop in to an argument about wearing the correct type of shoes and end in at least one party member refusing to budge another 2.54 cm.
Secondly, one of the girls will decide to challenge mum to do something a little more daring than would be her natural inclination. 'Come on mum, have a go. Everyone else is doing it' they will cry leaving her protestations ignored.
Last year we took on the delights of Bolton Abbey. We looked at relics and ate frozen dessert before setting off on the path towards the river. Here we were faced with a choice that divides all families into two camps: stepping stones or footbridge.
The girls started work on chipping away at mum’s footbridge selection. 'Look mum, even little kids can do it' says daughter number two laying down a challenge.
My wife asks for my opinion and, to be honest, I am torn between two thoughts. Firstly, I feel the need to protect her from the overwhelming power that is 'four daughters working together'. However, I am also caught by the idea that it might well be fun to watch her attempt the stepping stones. Her fate is sealed.
Two daughters head off across the stones without fear of the two-foot deep stream of water. I walk ahead of my bride in an attempt to talk her through the whole process with two other daughters in tow. Ten stones into our journey and my wife's nerve disappears. Now please don’t think of her as fearless. You can't give birth to four daughters without having some ability to face a challenge.
On this sunny day however the bride of my youth stopped in her tracks and refused to make another step. Returning the way we came was not an option because the steps were full of other eager travellers. By now whole families had stopped to watch proceedings from both banks of the river and the nearby footbridge.
Using all the encouraging words that I could find I attempted to lure my wife across the waters but the lady was not for moving and I had to make the ultimate sacrifice. Without fear for the safety of my own Nike trainers I jumped into the river to hold her hand as she continued. I was neither bothered by the applause from the assembled crowd nor by the cold water rising towards the area that men are most accustomed to protecting; my wallet. No! It was the thought of how much my footwear was going to smell after such an episode.
We arrived at the other side to cheers and I received a worthy hug as my wife once again saw me as a hero. I am certain that she is not the only person to have reached stepping stone number ten and refused to move in either direction. I have therefore decided to set up a new help group for those who have suffered a similar trauma at Bolton Abbey; VENUS; ‘Vow Eternally - Never Use Stones’. I also feel the need to set up a group for all those heroes who, like me, have felt the cold water in vulnerable places. It will be called MARS, ‘Manly At River Steps’. We will gather in a local hostelry to dry our trainers and share stories of our heroic deeds.
The Day Trip
Salad Onions
I was on my way out of the house when the second eldest of my four daughters asked where I was going; a question I answered with what I thought was perfectly good communication. ‘I am just off to the greengrocers’ I said and prepared to close the door behind me.
‘You are going to the green what?’ shouted my 18 year old offspring as if I had spoken in another language. ‘The greengrocers: the place where you buy fruit and vegetables’. She had not got a clue what I was talking about having only ever experienced the questionable joys of buying ‘greens’ at a supermarket.
Anyway I had no time to explain so I rolled my eyes, in the way that parents do when they have finally realised that they have failed to properly educate their children, and set off on my quest.
Now you need to understand that it is not my intention to confuse my children every time I open my mouth, I just can’t seem to help it. Even though I am as fully engaged with modern life as I can be, I still have a whole library full of words and phrases floating around in my head that have long since been made redundant.
I find it so much easier to say LP rather than CD or Infirmary instead of Hospital. It’s not as if I am trying to hold back time or be intentionally awkward with words and phrases. I just lapse back in to using redundant words.
The number of times I have asked for a Marathon when wanting a peanut chocolate bar only to be stared at by the bubble gum chewing youth waiting by the till.
When I arrived at the ‘greengrocers’ (actually it was a supermarket, which is what I meant all along but used the wrong word) I asked the assistant if they had any spring onions. I had thought that this would be a simple request but I was more than a little put out when she just looked at me and then nudged her teenage pal who was throwing tomatoes into a crate. I had even chosen my words carefully in order not to confuse, by avoiding the term ‘scally onion’, but they were of no help until one of them said, ‘we have salad onions, will they do?’
‘Salad Onions’? What are they trying to do to me? It’s bad enough that they have nine types of tomatoes and fourteen varieties of lettuce on offer but now they are changing the names of my favourite produce. I paid for my goods after answering a multitude of questions at the till. ‘Have you got a loyalty card?’ I was asked, ‘Why, do I need to prove that I am of good character before I can shop?’ The comment was lost on the shop worker so I returned home subdued and hungry.
As I have already protested I am trying my best to be engaged with current culture. I send emails and buy things on the net. I can set up spreadsheets and use a 5 in 1 remote control with limited success. The problem I have is that I just can’t help mixing the old with the new.
My daughters gave me an iPod for Christmas and what a wonderful sound it makes as I walk around the house talking loudly and singing every fifth word. The girls, however, think it is hilarious that I still say that I am listening to a record on my iPod. ‘Dad, they are called tracks not records’.
In a world where the phrase ‘open a window’ no longer means let some air into a room it is easy to get misunderstood. I once told my daughters that I used to score at the local cricket ground when I was a lad. They thought I was telling them a story about taking drugs.
It would seem that long gone are the days when you could buy spring onions from the local greengrocers, therefore I will endeavour to keep up with modern life and use words that are understood today. Now please excuse me because I have to fit some oilcloth in the pantry.
Woman Code
Shopping: now there’s a disaster waiting to happen. It’s ok for my wife, who seems to be able to sniff out an ideal purchase from several miles away. She is an expert shopper; not something I will freely admit in public, so please don’t tell her that I said it. She has her own tried and tested methodology that highlights the difference between us. As I try to project manage the whole operation; with questions designed to limit both the amount of precious time used and the shoe leather lost, my wife has but one phrase in response to all of my requests for answers. “I will know it when I see it”.
It makes absolutely no sense to me but I suspect it is woman-code for “I am not going to limit myself later by any of the answers I give now”.
Woman-code is amazing and it has infinite possibilities of ensuring that, whenever you think you have just begun to get a basic understand of it, there are new contexts, giving new meanings.
Take for example a seemingly simple food related question like “What flavour crisps would you like?” There is in my world a definite answer to it: Cheese and Onion.
My wife’s reply is, without exception, “anything will do”. Now you know instinctively that this is not the whole truth; it’s woman-code for “anything except prawn cocktail or beef”.
It is an answer designed to get you into a mild state of man-panic. Man-panic is the only possible response to woman-code. You know: the kind of feeling that you get when you are encouraged to embark on a shopping expedition to ‘get a couple of things’. Yes right! Now if that’s not code I don’t know what is. It is more than inevitable that another six things will be spoken loudly in your general direction as you leave the house. I am my own worst enemy in these situations: I always seem to make the same mistake of not writing a list, even though I know that I am doomed if I have to remember more than three items. To be honest I can manage up to a dozen items if I, in any sense, find them interesting. Give me two different types of batteries, four varieties of wine and half a dozen choices of chocolate and I am near perfect. Ask me for toilet roll, cleaning fluid and frozen food and I turn into a wreck. But that’s beside the point.
So it is, with foolish joy that I look towards this week’s shopping trip. Some things are as certain as running out of battery on your mobile when you have lots of credit. I know, for example, that in every clothes shop (female) I will make an immediate dash for the sales rail. I will hold up various half-priced items and wave them, across the store, at my wife in the hope of encouraging her away form the new, full priced product. She will, in return, roll her eyes towards the broken air-conditioning unit above her head at every one of my offerings, in a manner suggesting that she is normally proud of me; but not at this moment.
During the expedition I will also choose to hold her hand as we walk between shops, so that I can try to deflect her from any expensive establishments and towards anywhere selling food or electronic gadgets. On most occasions this will prove to be useless but I celebrate inwardly at every one of my victories, no matter how small.
After we have listened to in-store shopping music until we can stand it no more, we walk heavy-laden, with the worship of consumerism complete, towards the dark and hidden world of the car park. Once I have finally convinced the ticket machine to accept one of the few pound coins that remain in my pocket, we stand with all the other weary shoppers, gazing at the ocean of cars, trying to remember where we left the ours.
“Which section did we leave it in” she says, hoping that my memory has miraculously returned to the condition of my youth. “I will know it when I see it” I reply. Which in man-code translates as ‘two can play at that game’.
