Things I learned at Loch Melfort

1. Small boys exert a strange magnetic field . If you took one to the north pole, he would find another small boy to play with.

2. It's kind of cute when your restaurant waiter tells you that the other small boy is his brother and asks if yours will be out to play again later.

3. The sight of children running down a path to the beach can render adults in the dining room misty eyed.

4. Highland cattle are rather appealing.

5. Comfy hotel beds render your child's chances of sleeping in his own bed again minimal to say the least.

6. Local produce also renders your chances of feeding your child supermarket sausages without complaint even more minimal.

7. A tidal rock pool can be the source of hours of fascination.

8. Southern small boys find the thought of a land without KFC bizarre and horrifying.

9. When planning for hours of exploration, allow for the fact that the Highlands are steep, and that sheep need fences.

10. When planning a trip to a fish farm for book research purposes, just look out of the window. One may be closer than you think.

11. It is an unwritten law of the universe that if you are in a hotel somewhere with no light pollution and there is a telescope in the living room, the nights will be cloudy.

12. When you pack to go home, expect to find every pair of clean underpants your son brought, unworn.

Loch Melfort: lovely place and friendly people who were completely charming to writers with galloping morning sickness and small sons in tow. The Boy is desperate to go back again.

A Boy's visit to the Harry Potter Studio Tour

The Boy was incredibly lucky last week; his school had the opportunity to go to a preview of the Harry Potter Experience at the Leavesden Studios. Our (very) small claim to fame is living within walking distance of the studios. Sadly, they are excellent neighbours and I have never seen or heard anything interesting from the outside.

When The Boy told me about his day, pretty much every other word he used was 'awesome'. So, over to you, Boy:

• We saw  the trolley from the train, and you could eat the sweets, They had snakes to eat that moved in my mouth!
• There were chocolate cauldrons with caramel goo inside them that you could drink, and wands that dropped bits of licorish out of the end. They tasted delicious.
• We went into Fred and George's shop. There were actually fireworks! We saw Peruvian instant darkness powder that makes black smoke go everywhere. My friend went home covered in it. 
• The electric shock hand worked! 
• We met the actors that played Fred and George and they were really funny. They were jokers just like in the films.
• There was a cinema and we thought it was going to be boring but then the wall turned out to be the screen. After the film the screen went up and there were two huge doors. Everybody gasped and didn't move. Behind the doors was the great hall, with no roof. Apparently they only used candles in the first film because they kept falling on the children's food!
• In the tunnel I swear there was magic going on there, because there were lights on the walls and they moved around. You felt like you were walking upside down!
• We went into a huge room with 15 golden snitches to find. Finding the snitches was a lot of fun. They were... Stop! You can't tell people where to find the golden snitches!
• We saw Hagrid's Hut, Professor Dumbledore's office, the night bus, the Griffindor common room, the Slytherin common room, the dormitories for all the houses, the floor network and the Ministry for Magic.
• We got to drink butterbeer! It was really nice.
• There were wands that shot a bright light out of the end. I really, really wanted one to take home.
• There was lots of other stuff but the absolute best thing of all was wearing the quidditch robes and riding the broomsticks! You got to see yourself  on a screen. It was awesome! 
• I still wish our head teacher had let us get autographs from Daniel Radcliffe, Rupert Grint, Emma Watson and Ralph Fiennes. She had a load of paper and she wouldn't give it to us.

So, overall, good day out?

One of the best days of my entire life. I would recommend it to every single person in the world, and that includes people on Mars.

Thank you, Boy. The Harry Potter studio tour officially gets the nine-year-old's seal of approval. In fact, he wants me to take him again when it opens so that he can show it all to me. I think I might have to. I want to ride on a broomstick too.

Things I learned on my holidays



Image courtesy of http://dir.coolclips.com/



1. There is no point at which nine year old boys get bored with chicken nuggets.
2. It's good to keep an eye on the river as you eat the the giant spherical fish cakes in the Ramsholt Arms in Woodbridge, just in case Neptune comes back for his nuts.
3. Tents function far better in the rain with the roof vent covered up.
4. It takes a long time to boil a kettle if you don't realise your gas has run out.
5. Take the map with you into the corn maze.
6. People who think they can write anywhere should try doing it while sitting on a tree stump in the forest.
7. It is only when you have to sleep on an airbed for six nights that you realise how much your memory foam mattress topper keeps the rest of the world safe from you.
8. Being next to a colony of rooks as they all take off from the trees together makes you wonder if you're in a gothic horror story and don't know it yet.
9. Getting on a bouncy castle aged 42 makes you the coolest parent on the planet in the eyes of your offspring.
10. Forty year old brains experience bouncing differently to nine year old brains.
11. It only takes a nest of spiders three hours to create a cobweb scene worthy of a horror film in an unattended tent.
12. When you are camping in bad weather, angels sing over the door as you walk into a centrally heated pub.
13. It helps to tie your bikes to the bike carrier on the back of your car as well as to each other.
14. Hearing drumming practice in the distance in Rendlesham Forest makes you feel like you're on the set of an old Tarzan movie and the natives are about to come after you.
15. It's always good to discover the flying ants preparing to rise under the tent after you have packed up to go home.
16. When you see hundreds of birds circling overhead, tell yourself it's the flying ants they want and don't make any sudden moves.

The Further Adventures of Freddy and Jason

Last year, The Boy and I wrote a story together. Freddy's Itchy Bottom was a riot to write, and one of the best things we have ever done together. I am no education expert but seriously, try it with your kids. It brought his literacy back from the grave of lost small boy interest. I printed and bound a couple of copies and he is sooo proud of them.

He wants to do another one, and since the second draft of my solo endeavour is out for critique at the moment, tonight seemed a good time to start.

He has blown me away. We plotted out the first section tonight in lieu of a bedtime story, and only stopped because it's a school night. It is going to be a wild adventure of secret treasure, a race to find it and pranks. Many, many pranks.

I can't wait.

Milestone!

Image courtesy of Mark du Toit

Good day today. Really good day.

1. The second draft of the novel is finished and out for crit. Unless you count the rewrite which happens in between pen and paper and the keyboard, in which case it's the third. No matter. Point is, time for a few days off and that thing called life. First step, render the house fit for human habitation again. That deadline led to some serious lifestyle collateral damage.

2. Unexpected pressie arrived from bestest writing buddy in the post. I'll be reading Magical Words and reviewing in due course.

3. The Old Git has just installed me an in-the-wall vacuum cleaner. I have wanted one of these for years. Just plug the hose in the wall and away I go. I have been using his builder's cleaner, Henry, for five years since the Vax died from dog hair abuse.

4. The Boy ate spinach tonight for the first time and loved it. Small Boy + Leafy Green Vegetable = Major Maternal Score. I have a foolproof recipe for Spinach Pie that can convert the most die-hard green vegetable hater. It is bundled up with bacon, egg, onions and lots and lots of cheese (cottage and cheddar)  in a puff pasty case. It is yummy. And probably horrendously fattening, but the spinach cancels that out. In my humble opinion.

5. Big glass of madeira wine and China Mieville's Kraken next to me. I have been hoarding it as a reward for finishing the book, and it will be my February review for the TBR 2011 Challenge. January will be Break No Bones by Kathy Reichs, which I just finished.

On with the reading.

A year in Rosieland

There were high points and low points in Rosieland this year. Pictures feel like the way to go:

 


Goodnight Ted. We miss you.

Proud mother is proud.

Who says you can't make great friends on the internet?

13m drop + 41 year old mother = audible abject terror.

It snowed, and it snowed, and it snowed some more.

And finally, there was the labour of love and horror that morphed from a flash piece to a novel under the gentle whip hand of Hurricane Cathy. I didn't enter it in the competition in the end. Too many words in too short a time, and I wanted the time to polish it and make it as good as it can possibly be.      

58000 / 80000 words. 73% done!

2011 is the Year of Finish the Damn Book.

Heh heh, hair

 Beloved baby brother has just been given a kitten for Christmas by his wife. He is smitten with his itty bitty kitty.


Of course, it occurs to me that after years of enduring, and occasionally complaining about, the dog hair that is a permanent fixture in Rosieland, he's going to have pet hair to vacuum up himself.

It would be unfair of me to give an evil laugh, right?

Eh? What was that?

Image by Yaron Jeroen van Oostrom

Today is not a good day in Rosaland.

The Old Git has always given freely of his professional expertise to help me in my work. He is a gift to the consultant who works in a profession allied to the building trade: A builder willing to answer any technical question, no matter how stupid, who will take you to sites to show you installations and develop your technical expertise before you are let loose on the paying public, and who will tell you all the little sneaky cost-cutting tricks builders get up to that might explain the problem you are trying to troubleshoot for someone.

When he never heard the oven timer going at home, I started wondering why. When he couldn't hear the background jungle sounds I was playing on my internet radio to keep me company while I wrote, I got worried. The Old Git is not really that old; only 47. It was time to pay him back for everything he has done for me professionally.

I hauled him into my audiometry lab for a hearing test this morning, and established that he has noise induced hearing loss.

This is a very unpleasant discovery. Hearing lost through noise damage will not come back, it is gone for good.

Now the Old Git is more careful with his health and safety than most self employed builders who have to arrange their own health monitoring. He owns a pair of high spec. ear defenders and wears them whenever he thinks he is around very loud noise.  The problem was, the Old Git didn't think his noise exposure was significant because he already couldn't hear how loud it really was. I played him an example of the highest level of noise you should be exposed to without ear defenders, and it wasn't that loud to him.

Existing hearing damage, whether it comes from occupational noise exposure or an Ipod turned up too loud, means that you cannot trust your ears to tell you that they are being damaged.

"I know not to play it too loud" doesn't work if you can't hear how loud it is.
I know from experience that most self employed builders don't want to hear about protecting their long term health, especially when a test will cost them money and they don't have any option but to stay in the trade, but really, truly, if you have a family member in the building trade, *make* them go and get a hearing test before it is too late.

And if you are in the south east of England and need a hearing test from someone who understands the building trade, I can help with that.

Oh son? A word?

There is no picture to accompany this post. The reasons will become apparent shortly.

The Boy is in trouble when I get home.

I use my own camera when I need to take photographs at work because it's easy to use. That being the case, the last time I needed to take it out on a job, I downloaded all the holiday photos already on it and dumped them in a folder on my work computer so that I could put them on a memory stick later and take them home. I forgot about them until today.

ROSA: It is lunchtime. It is cold out. I know, I will read blogs at my desk while I eat this sandwich.
ROSA: Maybe my blog could stand a new post too.

Rosa thinks for a while.

ROSA: Posts are hard. Posts are work. Maybe I'll just add some pictures along the bottom instead. I have photos on this computer.

Rosa looks at the holiday pictures in the personal folder on her work computer.

SON OF ROSA AND FRIEND: Hey, did you ever wonder what happened when you left the camera unattended in the tent and went for a massage? Observe these photographs of our bare bottoms.
ROSA: This is my WORK COMPUTER! I am so fired.
SON OF ROSA: And here are some photographs of my winkle.
ROSA: Never mind fired, I am going to prison.

The Boy is in sooo much trouble when I get home.

A Darwinian question

A Darwinian question currently exercises my mind. It is turning over in my head as I sit in my car for five stolen minutes before I re-enter a fray that has me *this* far from snapping.

What is the evolutionary purpose of PMS? In a species which relies on vesting massive amounts of long term care to ensure the survival of offspring, and therefore genes, why gift the women with the potential for unprovoked anger which combines with existing parental irritation to create a murderous, young-eating rage? I don't get it.

On the plus side, the Old Git saw it coming and took over before I terminated our shared genetic heritage with extreme prejudice.

My reluctance to start the engine and drive back into the campsite where our tent is pitched brings to mind my mother's comments when I told her we were going camping as a family for the first time.

"I'm really happy that you have such wonderful memories of camping as a child," she said, "but speaking mother to mother, don't do it. Just don't."

Too late, I realise what she meant. I suspect there isn't a mother out there who wouldn't be tempted to smother squabbling offspring using a damp sleeping bag as rain beats down on her canvas prison.

Fun with physics

Son of Rosa is now officially eight and growing up fast. I am enjoying the small increases in freedom ("You're a big boy now, so you can get your own breakfast"), although it comes at a price ("Why is there weetabix and milk all over the floor?").

Birthdays always seem to be a voyage of discovery in Rosaland. Last year I discovered that a bouncy castle party for 25 seven year olds is a whole different ball game to a bouncy castle party for 25 five year olds. Seven year olds are adventurous. They want to go higher and faster. My nerves were still jangling two weeks later. That was the year we terminated proper parties in favour of outings. Since Son of Rosa had copped an accidental headbutt on one of the inflatables and had the mother of all nosebleeds on his birthday, he didn't object.

The year before we learned not to even bother buying pizza with vegetables on it for a party of six year olds. Forget healthy eating and just don't. On the plus side, the dogs were thrilled with all the leftovers.

This year's learning curve had more of a physics flavour to it, courtesy of Aerial Extreme in Milton Keynes.

ATTENDANT, HOOKING UP ROSA'S SAFETY LINE TO FOLLOW THE GROUP OF SMALL BOYS ROUND THE COURSE: Is one of them yours?
ROSA: Yes, the one in front wearing the yellow tee-shirt.
ATTENDANT: Oh, the dramatic one.

Indeed. The one shrieking as he hung on to a rope bridge further up the course. Son of Rosa is a bit of a ham.

The course was straightforward enough, though, once he got over the urge to scream at everything. The physics lesson came when we did the big jump. The big jump is a 14 metre drop from a high platform wearing a harness. Faced with five nervous but eager boys, I wasn't about to chicken out; I couldn't afford to scare them and spoil their fun, plus I wasn't about to be left behind by a bunch of kids (and yes, this attitude has got me into a few hair-raising situations over the years).

Like a mother duck on a river bank, I watched them jump off one by one and float down to the ground. As Son of Rosa got near the bottom, his voice floated back up to the platform, "Awesome!" closely followed by: "Can I do it again?"

Then it was Mummy's turn. A turn where I discovered that mummies who weigh three times as much as their sons reach the ground a bit quicker than them. The word we're looking for here is 'plummet'.

They are building an even higher drop soon, called Goliath. Son of Rosa wants to do it.

Son of Rosa is on his own.

You called it what?

The Old Git is a whiz at plumbing, electrics and getting under site manager's skins while managing to never do anything they can punish him for. He is often the most irritating man on any given building site; convinced that he knows better than anybody else and not slow to tell them. The most irritating thing of all is that he's usually right when challenged, and it would take more reading time to prove him wrong than anybody has to spend.

What a shame his talents don't extend to spelling and emails.

I had to interrupt the hour before school when everything is rushed to show him how to attach an invoice to an email.  While he was searching for the email, I spotted an invoice titled 'Vaginia' in his work folder.

He refused to tell me what Virginia thought when she received her invoice. He also claimed that my horrified laughter was putting him off finding his document.

Still, at least it was sent months ago. The time for angry phone calls is probably past. Maybe he gave her a paper copy and she never saw the document title.

I really, really hope so.

Domesticity is overrated

Dinner tonight was two promotional miniboxes of Cheerios and Nesquik, served together with milk in a pyrex mixing bowl and followed by a couple of bananas. Something of a low point in meal planning and preparation but tasty and remarkably satisfying. The Boy was a willing accomplice. We discussed it and agreed that the bananas made it acceptable overall. I'll try to be more grownup tomorrow.

Liking the 11th Doctor

Sometimes I get to watch Doctor Who. Not on television, my word no, because idiots put it on at times that seven year olds are still awake. Seven year olds that get scared. Seven year olds that get scared and have nightmares. Seven year olds that can only sleep after nightmares when they are in Mummy's bed. Seven year olds that can only sleep after nightmares when they are in Mummy's bed with a big handful of her hair to pull and twist and....

I guess mummies have their own versions of nightmares.

But, in a move that makes me forgive the BBC and accept that they are not, in fact, idiots, the BBC give me a chance to download the episodes and watch them on my computer with their I-player. It's a big moment in the world of Doctor Who because the Tenth Doctor just exited and a new actor took over to be the Eleventh Doctor.

(For those that have been tragically deprived of the Doctor Who experience, he's a time travelling alien that can regenerate into a new body. Everything you ever needed to know and probably a lot more that you didn't here.)

I was a very big fan of the Tenth Doctor, as played by David Tennant, and when he announced that he was leaving the role I was disappointed. The new actor, Matt Smith, was so young, I just couldn't see him pulling it off.

Wrong, Rosa. Very, very wrong. He is fantastic. His first episode was fantastic. I will be downloading many more episodes to watch in the dead of night when scaredy seven year olds are sleeping.

In their own beds.

The Eleventh Hour
(I think you have to be in the UK to download it though)

Say it how it is

From The Boy this morning, after The Old Git left with our youngest dog surgically attached to him as usual:

"If Daddy went to heaven, Buddy would be flying after him shouting, 'Wait for me!'"

Lost for words

I enjoyed a rare sight last week: The Old Git lost for words. It doesn't happen often so it's something to be savoured, especially when something nice has caused it.

Actually, cancel that. Make it a unique sight. I've never seen it before.

He has been working to get a new restaurant set up in Chalfont St. Peter, Hertfordshire for the last few months. As usual, he went in to do one job, the heating, and turned into Mr. Fixit, the man who can think around corners and fix everybody's problems. Unusually, though, he didn't do that many late nights. Just one to keep some machines working and another on standby before the engineers could get there. We've seen more of him at home than usual.

When it was all set up and the place was running, he took the family there because he wanted us to see it. We went on a midweek night because we had a seven year old with us, all dressed to kill in his smart suit and tie that we got for a wedding last year.

A quick note here on the subject of fussy eaters. I had never thought of tapas as a solution to eating out with children, but it surely worked. Little portions of lots of things:

Look, we got you some frittata to try. You don't like it that much? Okay, no problem, try these ham croquettes. They're nice, aren't they? Yes, very nice. Ah, is anyone else going to get to try the ham croquettes? No, that's fine, you can eat them all if you like them that much.

Actually, the frittata was excellent, and the fish croquettes were even better than the ham ones, but it's all good; if he liked them as much I wouldn't have gotten any. Homemade lemon sorbet to die for too. And the Boy did a very good job of being grownup in a grownup's restaurant. No bedlam or glares from the adult diners.

After a lovely dinner The Old Git went to pay the bill and they wouldn't give it to him. Instead they gave him a thank you card from the owners and all the staff.

He was speechless. I think there might even have been a lump in his throat.

Yep, even tradesmen have feelings. A thought to take away with you. We would have been happy to pay the bill, but that thank you gesture was worth five times the cost of the meal.

Go try the food at El Boncena. They're nice people, and they deserve to be a success.

On the subject of winning

When you have lived with someone for a while, you start to recognise recurring themes in the things they talk about. When you have lived with them for a long time those recurring themes start to shout at you so loud that the words become a kind of meaningless noise around the outside.

The Old Git is a competitive man. He knows it, I know it, anybody that spends more than an hour in his presence knows it. It is a sad fact of his life that he loves chess, draughts, scrabble, and any other board game that allows you to use strategy to destroy your opponent, but that he can't find anyone to play him. He has played a lot of people like me, who know the moves but just play for fun, but strangely enough, after enjoying a taste of the full on play-to-win meat grinder, we usually aren't in any rush to repeat the experience.

Frankly, I'd rather stick pins in my legs.

So, he doesn't have a steady supply of willing victims, and this disappoints him. Now I may not want to play him, and I may frequently want to stab him, but The Old Git's happiness does mean something to me, so I do sometimes try to find him a new victim, oops, I mean opponent.

I thought I had cracked it when some friends introduced me to lexulous on facebook. It's a variant of scrabble. Eight letters, different layout of scoring squares, but essentially the same game and you get to play other people that aren't on your friends list.

My simple little strand of Rosa logic went:

--> Playing strangers
--> Playing people who like to play a lot
--> People like The Old Git
--> people he can play
--> SCORE!

Problem solved, right?

Wrong.

Now we have a new problem.

He is playing. Oh my, is he playing. When my friends saw his active game list they said, "This dude is obsessed."

The Boy would concur. Most evenings he complains that Daddy is always playing lexulous. Some of that is jealousy, though; he wants to play too but facebook doesn't exactly have a junior section. He too has a competitive streak a mile wide.

And then we have the game talk. As with other obsessions that have come and gone, he wants to tell me about it. This is where those themes come in.

"I don't understand how the rankings work."
How is everybody going to know that I'm winning.

"This game allows nonsense words. No way is that a word."
The game is letting the other person cheat and stopping me from winning.

"I found out how the top ranking people stay up there. They delete any game in which they think they might get beaten."
They're using cheat tactics to stay up there. If they played fair I'd be winning.

"My opponent got 400 points and still lost. That's got to hurt."
Look at me winning. Am I not awesome?

I guess it could be worse. You should have seen him in his paintball phase. Imagine Rambo with a paintball gun. Now imagine him half the size and armed with a devious mind and an evil grin. It was The Old Git who proudly announced that he took out half a dozen people at one time firing up into the air so that the paintballs dropped down on them as they hid behind the barrier. Boy did they complain. He's also the one who worked out that you could rack up some serious points if you hid near the Quasar gun recharge point and shot all the people coming back with empty guns.

No, I don't play him, at anything. I'll just carry on running a victim procurement service. At the moment he's dragged himself away from his lexulous victims for a while to teach The Boy how to play chess.

I'm scared.

A tale of tales

Sit back and I will tell you a tale. A tale of a woman telling a tale of a woman who told tales. With musical accompaniment.

Once upon a time in her youth, Rosa discovered classical music, and discovered that she liked it. She liked the music of Rimsky-Korsakov very much indeed, and her favourite of all was Scheherezade.

Fortunately for Rosa, many other people also liked classical music and Scheherezade, and she listened to a radio station that played it for her and all the other people that listened.

When Rosa discovered she was pregnant, she was very happy. She played classical music in her car, and in her house, and on her computer. Nobody knows how much the bump heard as it travelled around with her, but it is an undisputable fact that Son of Rosa also liked classical music, and his favourite was Scheherezade.

It came to pass that one day, Rosa and Son of Rosa were on a long drive together. As they drove along the motorway, Scheherezade came on the radio and they turned it up and listened to it together. Son of Rosa was a very curious boy much given to asking questions, which Rosa did her best to answer, for she felt that being given answers to your questions in life is a Very Good Thing. And so Rosa and Son of Rosa found themselves discussing the tale of Scheherezade, and from there the tales of Sinbad the Sailor, and Aladdin, and Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, for these were tales she remembered from her youth.

Just like Rosa, Son of Rosa loved reading and tales even more than classical music, and he begged his mother to read to him the tale of Scheherezade, and from there the tales of Sinbad, and of Aladdin, and of Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves. Rosa remembered that she had read the Tales from One Thousand Nights in her youth and promised that she would.

In fact, Rosa still even had the book from her youth, and when Son of Rosa asked, she found it and opened it to read to him at bedtime.

But the book was old, and things were not as Rosa remembered from her youth. She feared that she had made a terrible mistake when Son of Rosa asked what it meant that the Queen was found in the arms of a Negro slave, but she tried. She explained about the Bad Things that are slavery and racism, and why he should never use That Word. She explained that the Queen had been found kissing someone that was not her husband, and that this too was a Bad Thing. She feared that worse was to come, but she loved Son of Rosa very much and she had promised, so she continued with the story.

She read, and she read, until she came to the next page. When the next Queen and her slaves all took their clothes off and the Queen prepared to be unfaithful to her husband, Rosa closed the book with a snap and would read no more.

Son of Rosa was sad and asked why he might not hear the rest of the tale, and Rosa did confess to her son that the tale was Too Naughty For Children, and picked up the tale of the Fantastic Mr Fox instead, and Son of Rosa was happy.

Rosa suspects that, some day soon, Son of Rosa will find the Tales from One Thousand and One Nights in the bookcase and read it for himself. She knows that this is the way of children everywhere, and that it is as inevitable as Son of Rosa one day playing the collection of rap CDs with naughty words belonging to Husband of Rosa. She feels that, while Son of Rosa's life will be improved by contact with classic literature, her own life will be much improved by not knowing. And so she has returned it to the bookcase and not hidden it.

Much.

What price honour?

I very rarely watch television these days. Anything I would have watched invariably clashes with The Boy's bedtime or worse, gives him nightmares; no more Doctor Who for you, Mummy. Might as well give up that idea right now. The internet has snuck into its place instead, until I find myself not even thinking of the television as an option. The noise irritates me, and I find myself looking for excuses to switch it off.

Since The Old Git comes home around his bedtime anyway, this has given The Boy that child's holy grail: control of the television remote. Subject to parental approval, of course.

He likes the Challenge channel, which screens wall to wall game shows, so up until now that approval has been pretty much automatic. Indeed, Ninja Warrior, which is the Japanese show Sasuke edited with a new voice-over, has been the subject of more than a few last minute sprints to the school gate. It sucks all three of us in over breakfast. It's hard to look away from with its mixture of cannon-fodder hopefuls and dedicated competitors pushing themselves to the limit on the assault course from hell.

What I love about it is the way they perform astonishing feats of agility and endurance pitting themselves against the course. Not against each other. If an all-star, a serious contender, fails, you see that the other all-stars are gutted for him. It's about making it past the post, not being the first one there or getting one over on the others. And if no-one wins... no-one wins. Train hard ready to try again next time.

I think it would be a wonderful example for British game shows, but somehow we seem to be locked into a cycle of beating the other guy at all costs.

Nowhere was this more apparent than when I saw for the first time another game show on the same channel, Goldenballs. All homegrown this one, and I am ashamed of the fact.

I watched competitors bluff and lie to each other to keep themselves from being voted off by the others and make it to the final, where the last two standing co-operated to maximise their winnings. I didn't like the arguments and the accusations of the earlier rounds, but fair enough, bluff has been the language of card games forever.

But then there was the last part of the game, where the contestants had to each secretly decide to split or steal the money. If they both secretly chose split, they shared the money. If one chose split and one chose steal, the stealer took it all. If they both chose steal, they both went home with nothing.

The sheer treachery of the outcome took my breath away. The successful contestant would promise to share, entreat the other to and then steal it all, to the horror of the other, more trusting, soul.

It celebrated the lowest of human behaviours and I felt soiled at the end. There will always be people who will lie, steal and betray, but I think making it into a prize tarnishes our collective souls.

Compare that to the honest endeavour of the Ninja Warriors. The Boy will not be watching it again.

Ninja Warrior

Goldenballs

There's too much of him

The Boy and I are currently on our second re-read of the Winnie the Pooh stories by AA Milne. This works for me; it makes the bedtime story a laught a minute, and he's quite happy to carry on reading on his own until he feels sleepy.

Last night I read him the beginning of 'In which Tigger is unbounced' from The House at Pooh Corner.

One day, Rabbit and Piglet were sitting outside Pooh's front door listening to Rabbit, and Pooh was sitting with them. It was a drowsy summer afternoon, and the forest was full of gentle sounds, which all seemed to be saying to Pooh, "Don't listen to Rabbit, listen to me." So he got into a comfortable position for not listening to Rabbit, and from time to time he opened his eyes to say "Ah!" and then closed them again to say "True," and from time to time Rabbit said, "You see what I mean Piglet," very earnestly, and Piglet nodded earnestly t show that he did.


"In fact," said Rabbit, coming to the end of it at last, "Tigger's getting so Bouncy nowadays that it's time we taught him a lesson. Don't you thing so, Piglet?"


Piglet said that Tigger was very Bouncy, and that if they could think of a way of unbouncing him, it would be a Very Good Idea.


"Just what I feel," said Rabbit. "What do you say, Pooh?"


Pooh opened his eyes with a jerk and said, "Extremely."


"Extremely what?" asked Rabbit.


"What you were saying," said Pooh. "Undoubtably."


Piglet gave Pooh a stiffening sort of nudge, and Pooh, who felt more and more that he was somewhere else, got up slowly and began to look for himself.


"But how shall we do it?" asked Piglet. "What sort of a lesson Rabbit?"


"That's the point," said Rabbit.


The word 'lesson' came back to Pooh as one he had heard somewhere before.


"There's a thing called Twy-stymes;" he said. "Christopher Robin tried to teach it to me once, but it didn't."


"What didn't?" said Rabbit.


"Didn't what?" said Piglet.


Pooh shook his head.


"I don't know," he said. "It just didn't. What are we talking about?"


"Pooh," said Piglet reproachfully, "haven't you been listening to what Rabbit was saying?"


"I listened, but I had a small piece of fluff in my ear. Could you say it again, please, Rabbit?"


Rabbit never minded saying things again, so he asked where he should begin from; and why Pooh had said from the moment when the fluff got into his year, and Rabbit had asked when that was, and Pooh had said he didn't know because he hadn't heard properly. Piglet settled it all by saying that what they were trying to do was, they were just trying to think of a way to get the bounces out of Tigger, because however much you liked him, you couldn't deny it, he did bounce.


"Oh, I see," said Pooh.


"There's too much of him," said Rabbit, "that's what it comes to."


Pooh tried to think, and all he could think of was something which didn't help at all. So he hummed it very quietly to himself.


If Rabbit
Was bigger
And, fatter
And stronger,
Or bigger
Than Tigger,
If Tigger was smaller,
Then Tigger's bad habit
Of bouncing at Rabbit
Would matter
No longer,
If Rabbit was taller.

We read this part together and it suddenly hit me: This is our youngest dog in every way. Who knew? We actually have a Tigger under our roof, and his name is Buddy. I think the original Tigger must have been an unusually marked short-coat border collie. We rescued Buddy's original owners so we don't know anything about his family tree, but I'm willing to be that if you go back far enough there would be at least one ancestor with orange and black stripes.

You'll note that I say we rescued Buddy's owners. I don't consider our sweet bonehead of a Buddy to be a typical rescue dog like the others we have. When we went to see him, he was a good-natured, happy-go-lucky young dog without a scrap of trauma. No, it was his loving owners that had that 'bunny-in-headlights' look that accompanies the working dog trying and failing to be a pet.

I'd like to say that doing agility and going to work every day with The Old Git has helped, but in all honesty it has just honed his working instinct to a point like a laser. That is not the same as saying that he's had any success in agility competition. But he's trying.

Very trying.

We persevere.

Anyway, Winnie the Pooh. Every time I read the Winnie the Pooh stories I am saddened that they got the Disney treatment and were sanitised and babyfied. There is hardly a baby product out there that hasn't been merchandised with that familiar red jumper (which, incidentally, he doesn't wear in the original illustrations) and Winnie the Pooh is now seen by many children as something for babies, something they are too old for.

Having enjoyed the stories, we got on the Disney train and watched the cartoons, and they were too babyish and moralising to hold The Boy's attention.

But when we read the books, the sly humour of the stories comes out, and it's humour that a very young child wouldn't understand. The characters are occasionally pompous, and not above telling a lie to avoid looking bad. The jokes are dry. They are a delight, and at seven, The Boy is only just capable of getting them on his own. At six we had to point them out to him.

I am so glad we read the books before the cartoons had a chance to put The Boy off them. Winnie the Pooh is wasted on babies.