On Children

Yesterday we took them all to the park to run around for a few hours then we all went to a nice café that does food too and we ate all together.

I say ate all together but given our five children are best described as intelligently feral, it was probably more akin to bailing out water on a sinking old-style viking ship.

Allow me to paint a picturesque slice of blissful family life.

The 2 and 3 year olds immediately removed their shoes, which is just as well as they used the comfortable settee type armchairs as trampoline, climbing wall, leap of faith and dog kennel. No, we don’t have a dog. The seven year old was essentially emulating the 2 and 3 year olds but with shoes on. The 11 year old, bless her, was trying to help manage the chaos.

The wife was sitting on my lap until we managed to add a chair at which point the baby wanted feeding. My wife also wanted the salad dressing on the side and a non-menu item added to it. It’s like she still hasn’t understood Italy at all. It took 6 requests to eventually get what she wanted. Which was awesome and kind of the servers and the chef, because in Italy that Americanism of making an order “special” by asking for non-standard items usually gets you a blank stare and possibly a shoulder shrug.

The food arrives and the little one decides forks are an oppressive tool of the bourgeois. Her brother, the three year old, makes a valiant effort to show her that noble blood requires the use of eating implements. In fairness he only got the chocolate, from the pancakes with strawberries, on his face and arms, not all over his clothes too like she did. The seven year old decided her hamburger was not McDonald standard, being made of actual beef instead of rat off-cuts, and left it after one bite. Her mother ate it while waiting for her salad dressing on the side.

As I am looking for chains to bolt the three small ones to their chairs, finally the last babycino for the boy arrives. He interrupts his practicing for pillage and mayhem by picking up the tiny teaspoon, looking at me and saying:

“Daddy, is that foam?”

“Yes, son, it is.”

Remembering a conversation from 3 or 4 months ago when I explained that milk foam is not the sludge of some primordial ectoplasm, he gingerly uses the teaspoon to eat the foam one little spoonful at the time.

Fascinated, the cyclone of baby-wipes, squeals, and ship-to-ship armchair-to-armchair leaps, fades into the background as I watch him. He looks up when the foam is finished:

“Daddy, is this milk?”

He has always been suspicious.

“Yes, it is.”

He grabs the little handle on the espresso cup and again looks at me.

“Can I drink it like this?”

“Yes, that’s right.”

He very carefully drinks his warm milk from his little cup as if it were precious liquid gold. Good form too.

“That was nice, daddy.”

“I’m glad you liked it, son.”

And then the tornado starts again.

When he tries to run off throughout the restaurant, I grab him and tell him no, he says,

“But why?”

Very logically I might add.

“Look around. Do you see anyone else running around the restaurant?”

He looks around. “No.”

“There you go then. People come here to eat and be calm, it’s a restaurant, not a park.”

“Oh, ok.”

And to be fair, he didn’t try to run around the place again. Which stunned the crap out of me.

I couldn’t help thinking to myself: You mean the other 49 times I told you not to do that before in your life, you were just thinking dad’s a spoilsport asshole for no reason, eh?

In a tiny lull in the chaos I point out to my wife a small group of adults, childless friends enjoying a drink and I say smiling, “Look at that, poor bastards, sitting there with their friends, childless, trying to convince themselves they are happy.”

My wife knowingly nodded melancholically, thinking of late nights dancing, and partying, no doubt.

Later at home though, when they are all finally in bed and we are talking, she says:

“You know, I did look around in that place. And it was awful. Even the pretty couples, just sitting there, not even talking to each other. Looking at their phones.” She made a face as if a shiver was going down her spine at the very thought.

And it’s true. The worst day of running around chasing after one half-naked kid while another has an exploding event in her loose nappy and the third one is screaming around the house about stink bugs, beats the crap out of a nice day going to the cinema (when they still existed) with your girlfriend and a dinner after.

The entire premise of modern life is to have things as easy, effortless, simplified and standardised as possible. And that’s no way to live.

It’s like that old question, if you had the choice, between:

• living in a perfectly safe, very large compound, with no crime and you could order whatever food you like every week and do only ten hours of work a week, with unlimited access to films and books and sometimes also other entertainment, say a sport you can do up to twice a week and you even get regular sex with a beautiful person of the right sex for you three times a week, with visits of up to a further 6 hours a week (but no further sex than three times a week), or…

• Being outside of the giant compound, where you have to fend for yourself against wild animals, the elements, other wild humans like you and so on, you can have a few weapons and equipment to start but after that you’re on your own, which would you choose?

Most people, over 99% I estimate, will choose the compound with the regulated sex and free menus.

And their squalid little lives will mean absolutely nothing. Not even to themselves.

While those of us out there in the wastelands are the ones that will rebuild civilisation after your “utopia” collapses faster than your atrophied imagination can possibly guess.

Maybe, with a bit of luck, one of us might even remember that proper cappuccinos have foam on the top, and will figure out how to build a proper coffee machine.

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