On tenterhooks: Those of you who have walked this lonely road longer than four months. Way back then I mentioned the possibility of our traveling as family to the States for a vacation. Sorry I kept you awake at night, wondering, wondering…

Neen is going there in April, leaving Africa with all its hustle and dust, and going to a small American village called Washington DC. She has been sent on business to an archiving/digitization conference, and the boss of some little village library, the ‘Smithsonian’ (nice cute provincial name) is going to schlep her around.

I will remain, to protect the children from 1^st world temptations, and we will likely feast daily on all the flavour varieties of instant noodles.

We were preparing for her trip in all sorts of ways. I brought home a book called ‘Speak American’, a Survival Guide to the Language and Culture of the U.S.A. several useful words and terms are explained.

For instance, in South Africa, if you ask someone to ‘Zap your weenie’, you will likely meet with violence of the crudest sort, but the book leads me to believe that in the States, it means nothing more pedestrian than to microwave a hotdog.

In so many books and movies over the years, I have heard references to the (apparently) edible ‘grits’. As Neen will also be going to Atlanta, we figured a Southern education may come in handy. Finally, I discover that grits aren’t made of meat, but are some kind of nasty corn dish eaten at breakfast. I prefer toast. For you Americans, that is a slice of bread grilled in a specially designed machine, the TOASTer, smeared with marge, and pretty much whatever else happens to be lying around.

I am going to take some time off to be an acronym. I will be a temporary stay at home dad, or TSAHD (pronounced as if you hit in the solar plexus with a fishing rod)

While Neen stays at a 5* hotel in DC, I will continue the character-building work of removing various bodily fluids from the walls, and trying not to cry in front of the children. I know the US is a teeny place, so if any of you would like to glimpse Mrs Anon as she passes through, you are welcome to wave a small banner at the airport.

I would love to have traveled with her, and stalked some of you, but my balaclava is being dry-cleaned. Next time I shall look you up (although only if invited!)

A good day: One where you invite some friends from church over to pray, and don’t make the mistake of putting your new Rolling Stones cd in the cd player, the one with ‘sympathy for the devil’ on it, instead of a worship cd.

(This hasn’t happened yet, but it is the kind of thing that does happen to me, the kind of thing I live in anxiety of doing).

A bad day: when something really horrible happens while you are listening to your favourite music, and you are doomed to associate it with that event forever. Neen still gets nauseous when I play a particular song in memory of her morning sickness days…

Recently, I bought two cds I’d been eyeing for ages, and when I took them home to play, found out a friend had died.

An ambivalent day: Your colleagues catch you inadvertently singing ‘Row, row, row your boat’ quietly to yourself, because of the power of infant indoctrination, and you have to carry on singing the entire song as if you really meant to, and you realize that all that separates you from a lunatic asylum, or rest home as they are euphemistically called, are a macramé kit with safety scissors and a knitted Napoleon hat.

When I was fifteen, and dying to grow up and be privy to the privileges of adulthood, nobody warned me about days like these…

Imagine for a moment what it must be like to be a cockroach…

Role reversal. There you are inside a huge cavernous temple, vast items of furniture bought at roach IKEA, looking like something designed by Geiger, the guy who designed the ‘Alien’ sets. A dark kitchen where tantalizing buckets of trash are boiled up, huge crusts falling to the floor to be picked up by any opportunist who happens along.

Naturally, you are hungry, as you have two children to feed (not ten thousand of the little tykes, but it is all relative), so you stick to the greasy cupboards, edging ever closer. Suddenly, a shadow falls across you, you squint upwards, only to be blinded by the glare of the spotlights (do you also have spotlights in your kitchen that make you want to make an acceptance speech every time you turn them on?) Six bristly legs tower above you, there is a faint shriek followed by the ‘SKOOOOSH’ of a gigantic aerosol. Immediately, your chest closes up. You feel the desperate urge to dash around in circles, except your foot is wet and stuck to the smooth linoleum. You start to lose your breath, and fall on your back, your two useless legs pedaling furiously in the air. Another shadow approaches. The last thing you see is a million bristles. The broom of deliverance. You perish, thinking of the orphans you leave cowering under the sink.

Or a mouse.

You cower daily in your hole behind the TV cabinet. You shake constantly with mild seizures, and the terrifying world beyond must be interpreted through your heightened sense of smell. Mom always said you had a cute button nose, but now that you live in the house belonging to the giant mouse family, your nose is your lifeline.

Wait! All is quiet. The passage light is on, in case anyone needs to wee during the night (we know how unpredictable a mouse bladder can be), but they have all retired to their nests. Your receptors tell you that there, just beyond the bin, is a feast waiting to be had. Taking your time, you advance tentatively. The carpet catches your tiny feet, but you skitter around the skirting boards. Paydirt. A huge plate, festooned with hamburger and fries, and a giant chocolate shake lie on the floor as if by design. You pause. Drool seeps over your lips. The unpredictable nature of meals means that this is an opportunity not to be overlooked.

Sniff. Seems fine. You reach out, grab a chip, and as you do you feel the tension in the plate shift. The whole feast shifts, as a massive spring is released, and a vast iron bar shoots down towards your neck.

Footnote: As you lie there, your feet twitching, you are still glad that they didn’t keep cats as pets.

May I close by quoting Dr Seuss?

“But then a strange thing happened:

Why, those pants began to cry!

those pants began to tremble:

they were just as scared as I!

I never heard such whimpering

And I began to see

That I was just as strange to them

As they were strange to me!

(From: What Was I Scared Of?)

Is there such a thing as being too sensitive? Sometimes I am so paralysed by the fear of offending people that I am rendered speechless.

I wish I could be brash and abrasive. Bandying about phrases without fear of recrimination. Stomping bullishly through the china shop of social intercourse. I have met people that can do things with their eyebrows that intimidate and express. I could leap up and down on the spot flailing my arms like a windmill in a hurricane, and people would look straight through me.

I will now set out to offend half of you reading this page, deliberately.

I will show you the new edgy me, the me that takes no prisoners. I will make you step back and think… is this the floor-tile we visited yesterday? Is this the man whose anger is as impotent as a genetically modified strawberry?

Hey you! Yeah you! Bet you have trouble putting on your underwear without falling over… Are you one of those ridiculous sock-rollers? Do you in fact take a fresh pair of socks, and with no regard for the sensitivities of others, roll them up with vigorous twisting movements before you put them on? What kind of a hosiery reprobate are you?

I mean they are socks! Ya just pull em on! Are you afraid of pulling a ligament in your misshapen foot-digits? Do you suspect that if you do it a different way you will graze an ankle? Somebody has taken the effort to bundle the things up in pairs, but that’s ‘acceptable’! Oh no! You have to take them and unroll them, and then squidge them up individually before you guide them over your over-protected feet. Live a little!

I bet you even sit on the edge of the bed as you do it! What is your problem! Hopping around the room not good enough for you? I hope your drier causes a major sock-divorce, and that you end up with disorder in your foot-wear shelf. Singles. Holes. Ridicule in the office. May your shoes seem not to fit, as you stagger around in mis-matching cotton and wool non-pairs!

I can’t continue.

I feel so bad. I picture you all weeping and vowing to alter lifetimes of dressing habits. I am just not actively aggressive. I enter a week filled with so much potential for confrontation and negotiation knowing that I am too polite to say what is on my mind. I am the guy who gets to apologise when I am the one being maligned. I am the one whose ‘socks’ are mocked, and who lacks the courage to stand up and say “ Hey, pal, these socks may be different to yours, but that’s the way I like em”.

What are your ‘socks’? Do you also wish you were more vocal in your defence? 

On James’s ‘healthy’ snacks that he is allowed to take to school, the words “Bite-sized” appear. Urm, yes, that would be the point of a product geared towards a snack market, and packaged in snack-sized packaging. Bet it took their product development team weeks to come up with a reason for the failure of their ‘As-big-as-your-head’ range of snack products.

I walked past a shop today that promised bargains ‘in-store’. Just in case I was looking for their products lying in the gutter with little red ‘reduced’ stickers.

I did a two-year advertising and copywriting course a long time ago, and part of me is thrilled not to working in an agency, if only because you have to write lots of exciting things about lots of mundane things. My personal unfavourite at the moment is competition copy that promises prizes that are ‘UP FOR GRABS!’ Grabs sound like something mean kids do to smaller kids with odd haircuts and sensible shoes.

Maybe those greedy prize-seekers could form an orderly line, and then politely say ‘you first…no you….no really…’.

(Note: this attitude could come from being a sore loser. When I enter a competition, I expect to win… I entered the national lottery once only, and fully expected to beat the statistics. Oh well, maybe being a multi-millionaire would have made me lose my calm and rational way of coping with life…)

“Should I marry W? Not if she won’t tell me the other letters in her name…”

That’s a quote from Woody Allen, an actual humorist, as opposed to the only sane person in this world, as it felt today.

Let’s call him B. B came to me at work, the place where I work, C, is not doing so well at the moment. I have begged B for advice on how to reverse this trend. B’s suggestion today was that D, someone I nearly fired when I caught stealing, and who was sent in disgrace to another C, come in and take over.

I nearly pooed my pants , P. So D should come and try to rectify the problem which is none of her business, and be promoted over me, M?.  After I nearly P, I had to wander around for a couple of hours, with my mouth in a goldfish ‘O’ of incredulity.

In my rage, I threw a ham sandwich across the kitchen.

(Note: rarely will you have the chance to see rage, R, and ham sandwich, H, in the same sentence).

I must have missed that episode of Dr Phil where he spoke on the catharsis of cold meat flinging, but amazingly it helped. Once the R ebbed a little, I peeled the H off the floor, and started to calm down.

If only I had had a plate of lasagna, or a chicken pie, I could have achieved nirvana.

(I am now just seething and simmering away, but don’t be afraid to visit. It was one of those days where I dream of being a stay-at-home-dad, SAHD, instead of having to spend my days in pointless frustration, dealing with B’s, C’s and D’s).

12345678910… counts…breathes…flings ham…

“A young animal may leave some droppings or urine on your shoulder but this generally stops once it’s a little older.” Quoted from ‘The Rat’ by About Pets publishers.

This is part of my research into the feasibility of having rats and small children under the same roof. Even though I kept rats as a child, I didn’t want to remember those times, joyous though they were, and allow my current attitudes to be rose-tinted. Admittedly, male rats have freakishly outsized testicles (ratpacks), which must be alarming to females of the species.

My life has been partly shaped by rats. (Aha! I hear you proclaim, just as you’d guessed!) I don’t just mean gnawed into shape, but rather there have been some pivotal moments in my life concerning this much-maligned beast.

My first great acting role was in the musical the ‘Pied Piper of Hamlyn’. I was the piper, as I was one of only two boys skilled enough on the recorder to lend credence to the role. I wore a motley satin suit of red and gold, and spirited both rats and children away with my spectral piping abilities. I count this a turning point in my life, where I grew to love the adoration of crowds…

My first real experience of grief involved leaving my pet rat, Adrian No 1, in too bright a patch of sun, and his water and life ran out, one shortly before the other. I buried him in the garden, and after the grief had lessened, dug him up a few times to observe the passage of decay. If there are any laboratory workers reading this, check no rats are reading over your shoulder…

Rats look kind of the same, so I replaced him with Adrian No 2.

Some childhood books worth rereading…: Mrs Frisby and the Rats of NIMH. A brilliant social fable, scurrilously destroyed by a film version. Who are those intelligent rats living under the rose bush? Is there something sinister to their tale?

The Rats by James Herbert. Horrifying horror, which in retrospect a child should not have read. (Rats gnawing human flesh etc.)

And finally, the Pit and the Pendulum, a short story by Edgar Allan Poe. (Again, the threat of gnawed flesh… What was I reading as a youngster?)

London was hopelessly overpopulated in the 14^th- 15^th centuries, fortunately the Black Rat helped reduce the population by at least a third, and HELLO! It was the fleas that were to blame for the plague…

I remember an album I used to listen to when I was about 14, by the Stranglers, I think called Rattus Norvegicus. It had a gimlet-eyed rodent on the cover, and was very punky. I remember that the drummer of the band the Damned called himself Rat Scabies. (Who knows, maybe he still does?)

Before you worry that I am having some post-goth-punk crisis, I am just having a twisted trip down memory lane, as I consider buying a rat for my son as a pet. (Purists would say a rat cannot be ‘bought’). Apparently one can buy big fat cane rats, as big as medium-sized dogs, as pets, or even for the pot… Mmmm roasted rat…

I don’t see that becoming one of the great flavours of the 21^st century: Barbecued Beef, Chicken or rat noodles? Maybe you too have eaten in dodgy Chinese restaurants, where the ‘chicken’ chow mein tastes just a little toooo gamey… Chalk it all up to experience, I say, even if it does make me sound ninety-three.

Rats are the new dog! Ever seen a maltese poodle in a maze? I would personally love to see the author of ‘Who Moved My Cheese’, that tiny ‘motivational’ tomelet thrown into a giant maze, covered in cheese essence, and hunted down by red-eyed sewer rats. Why don’t you re-engineer that corporation, buddy…

How much is that rodent in the window?

The one with the pink hairy tail

How much is that rodent in the window?

The one that makes girlies go pale…

Hug a rat today. And then have your shoulder laundered.

(If you have persevered, and read this all the way through, trust me, I haven’t lost my marbles. Yet.)

We may not have sat around hugging ourselves and beating djembe drums, but James and I had a good time of male bonding on Friday night. We sat huddled in the gale force wind, and I listened to other people party until 4am, and then dozed fitfully until 4.15. We had to get up early so that I could get to work, so sleep didn’t really feature.

Anyway, camping= tick: We’ll definitely do that again.

Right now, James has moved on to different challenges. Neen and I recognized a fundamental deficiency in his life today. He was playing in his paddling pool, and he found a dead ant. (Everyone hum the ‘Pink Panther’ theme music: deadant, deadant, deadant deadant deadant…) He was earnestly trying to coax it back to life, giving it little bowls of water, and speaking in soothing baby-talk to him/it. Suddenly (!) He rushed inside… the ant had come back to life! I can attest to its feeble head movements, although there was little happening in its thorax. (It was a sexiplegic). James rapidly ascribed the miraculous healing to Jesus, but sadly the ant did indeed succumb to the inevitable a few minutes later.

Unpeturbed, he set about making a little home for his new pet, the dead ant…

We have also seen him leaping about the house trying to catch a fly to keep as a pet, but when your son is happy to settle for a dead insect as a pet, it is time to act. Apart from some allergies to dogs and cats, and some degree of caninophobia, we have no restrictions on what we can keep as pets.

Neen, being cautious, called him over. James, would you like a goldfish? She probed.

Nah. What kind of pet would you like? We asked. He is not too fussy, it seems, and would settle for a hamster, a tadpole or a parakeet. I have some experience in living with, and outliving, small pets, and was able to tell him about the nocturnal attitudes of hamsters, and the short life spans of mice.

I am quite fond of rats as pets, as they are affectionate, clever and clean. (Just like me). I managed to clinch the deal, and he was about to settle for a hypothetical rodent, when Neen offered to get him one for his birthday. Ever since, he has been asking us questions about rats. What do they eat, do they bite, and can he take it to school… Neen’s only proviso is that it doesn’t have creepy pink eyes. (Sorry if you are an albino blogger, my wife can be hopelessly insensitive).

But generous. Come September, our house will be infested with rodents again, except this time it will be in a cage instead of roaming free in our ceiling. (Mental note: Get rid of any remaining sachets of rattex…)

I have seen those kids in his class. They are quite ‘exuberant’, ie, violent, and I don’t want to be like the Stephen Spender poem, ‘My parents kept me from children who were rough…’. I want him to have a fair stab at fitting in, and presenting a dead ant as his pet at ‘Morning Ring’ (kind of show-and-tell) is bound to bang some nails in his social coffin. Rats carry a certain amount of weight, socially speaking, although you don’t want to get too attached, as very few people with a rodent on their shoulder succeed at blind-dates.

James, beat that drum, and throw that rat a cookie… We’ll make a man of you yet…

My hands are the hands of a bookseller. I don’t have big leathery callouses, apart from the one on my typing finger from using the backspace key. I do have a dickey tendon in my wrist, either from reading too much or playing the guitar with too much exuberance.

I just carried a tent for two hours. I borrowed it from a colleague for James’s campout at the school. It was one of those objects that feels light when you pick it up, and even though you have a nagging feeling to the contrary, you think you will easily be able to carry it home. I was doing my best not to look like a hobo as I rode the train and the taxi, and had to resist jiggling my house keys to prove that I do live under a solid roof.

My uncalloused hands are smarting now. When I was younger I camped a fair amount, but in those days tents were tent-shaped. I had to bring this tent home today to practice putting it up, as it is a modern non-prismatic affair. I don’t want to look like a bookseller tomorrow in front of the other dads, I want to throw it together as professionally as an Everest sherpa setting up camp on the South Col. The last thing I need James to see at his new school is his dad being jeered by other fathers sitting outside their Eiger Dome Homes.

The tent is on the floor, and as I am writing, you may have guessed that I am procrastinating about putting it together. It comes in a surprisingly small bag, which hopefully doesn’t mean that some bits didn’t make it here.

James has never been camping, and he has been rambling giddily about it all week. Apparently we are going to ‘explore’, (as we will be camped on a playing field, who knows what uncharted territory we may find) and eat, and use his specially purchased torch. We have both got torches now, but their combined beam is barely enough to get a moth to raise an eyebrow, or compound eyebrow, or whatever lepidopterae have. I don’t want to barbecue in front of other professional super-dads, and was contemplating getting the pizza man to deliver one to the school. Does that make me lose dad points?

Every time I plan to do something outdoors lately it guarantees rain. We can go for weeks with nothing but blazing sun, and the minute I commit to being adventurous and outdoorsy, it pours.

Assembling the tent is intimidating me. I still have flashbacks about that terrible Christmas Eve where I spent hours trying to reassemble a pile if bolts and thingies and snibs, and turn them into a bicycle. The badly translated Chinese directions referred to miniscule diagrams with vague pictures, and said unhelpful things like ‘Place cranking shaft of (A) upon the turner making sure to tight all for entirety. Be not attaching (F.2) for this be great danger to buttock of user.

Fortunately, I was in the cub-scout movement until the age of ten, and should the tent prove too complex, I have earned my ‘Shelter Construction’ badge. I can bind leafy branches together using vines, and James and I will be safe from the elements.

I have a deep suspicion that this experience will provide material for at least one other post, so keep an eye open for part two of “THEY HUNTED WILD PIZZA”

Also: Should I be having this suspicion that Neen will be laughing herself to sleep thinking of the males outside, since she declined, a little too emphatically, to join us?

Did you wear red and white today? Did you purchase something unusual with a heart-shaped motif? Did you watch the phone, hoping it would ring… (At this point I will restrain myself from quoting the song ‘Are You Lonesome Tonight’, especially the bit where it goes ‘Do the chairs in your parlour seem empty and bare, do you gaze at your doorstep, and picture me there…’ See? I didn’t quote it in its syrupy entirety.

Love isn’t such a bad thing. Romance is vital for any relationship. (Apart from work relationships, and extended family relationships: there, the romance trapdoor is best nailed shut).

The power of tv:

In the 1970’s tv show, the Hulk, starring Lou Ferrigno, there is a scene at the beginning during the opening credits where a woman whose child is trapped under a burning car harnesses this incredible strength, and manages to lift it into the air. That’s love, man. (Of course, when I try to lift cars, I merely get a double hernia, and little cuts from the rusty undercarriage).

Why does my brain file that away under ‘love’?

I didn’t wear red, but I did buy some chocolate for Neen. Fortunately, at no point was she prostrate under a conflagratory automobile, so I escaped having to prove the intensity of my love.

May you all find someone to share your lives with, someone who values you and respects you, and isn’t afraid of being embarrassed in front of you. May you also find someone who likes the way you think, and isn’t afraid of helpfully reminding you when you are being a twit.

May you find someone that will love you the other 364 days of the year.