September 6, 2018

In praise of the three-door family car

The news of impending parenthood is shortly followed by the swift emptying of your bank account as you prepare the house to welcome junior. There is a temptation to upgrade your car, if not to a full people-carrier or Chelsea tractor, then at least to something roomy. Indeed, the three-door VW Polo we had was surrendered by its original owners as they upgraded to a Tiguan when they were expecting.

We didn’t replace our car, not because we knew better or we’re taking a principled stand, but because we couldn’t afford to. And yet, three years later, we’re really happy that purely thanks to luck and weak spending power, we are still driving that hatchback Polo, and I’d like to encourage prospective parents to stick with or even choose a three-door car.

First, hatchback boots are roomy, and having height as well as depth (something saloon cars lack) for luggage has saved us several times.

More importantly, though, is that because in three door cars the front seats fold forward and slide away from the rear, you can really get access to your baby or toddler in the back seat when loading them up or getting them out. This is probably less of an issue, at least pre-toddler, with ‘travel systems’ in which you put the baby in a self-contained seat that you separate from a fixed base and lift wholesale out of the car, but we chose not to afford this either, instead getting a non-removable seat into which we placed our baby, and in which she now sits as a toddler.

And flicking the front seat away, and having room to perch on it comfortably while facing the baby seat and carefully getting the kid secure and happy is wonderful. We didn’t even realise how how wonderful until we tried to settle our kid into a car seat in a five-door car, which involved an awkward sideways delivery, with less visibility of straps and buckles, and with a greater chance of knocking the kid on bits of the car as you manoeuvre them in. (Sorry, Ada.)

Had we had more money, we may have bought a bigger car, and bought a travel system. Had we done that, though, we’d probably have had a worse experience.

August 26, 2018

Echo @ Dundee Contemporary Arts

For every exhibition at Dundee Contemporary Arts, the public is invited to create its own responses to the work, in an ongoing project called Echo. Your response can take any form, and they’re exhibited, performed and so on at a special event. Recently, DCA hosted the first major European exhibition of the work of American artist Eve Fowler, and Jenny and I produced the response you see here. Below is our statement supporting it, which was read on the night.

We – a husband and wife team – wanted to reflect and further develop some of the ideas in Eve’s work, using the same vernacular in order to draw a close parallel between the original work and our response.

We both identify as feminists, something that acquired new dimensions when we had our first child, a daughter, three years ago. Watching her and listening to her talk, as she works out the world and bumps up against its limitations, and as we anticipate restrictions and opportunity throughout her life, is emotional.

In this response, we take things our daughter, Ada, says, and have Chris, her dad, transcribe and typeset them verbatim in a series of posters. The act of her voice being mediated through a literally paternalistic figure is key to the response; men have a crucial role to play in advancing the cause of feminism and equality, but in acting as the point of amplification, and even by being in control of choosing what gets amplified, we’re commenting on how deeply ingrained patriarchalism is in our society – and how even if well-meaning, it centralises power and sets tone and content.

The posters are Ada-scale and mounted at her eye level, a comment on how easy it is to overlook children and what they say, however significant. They use shiny, sparkly textures to set up a dialogue about how women’s spoken pitch and vocal fry often leads to their contributions being dismissed in cultural conversations.

The concept is Jenny’s, but after that spark of genesis her role gets deliberately sidelined; the response quotes Ada and is created by Chris. There is comment here too not just on the invisibility of women – “behind every great man…” – but also specifically on the erasing of mothers from society and its discourse.

Below are some photos of the work in situ, taken by DCA’s Helen Macdonald.


May 8, 2018

I love you, now and always

You’ve never felt your heart break quite like when your kid tells you that you don’t love them.

It’s not quite as dramatic as it sounds; at a simple level my daughter is just getting to grips with what love is, a question that has stumped even Foreigner.

She tells me I “don’t love her all the time”, and I believe that what she means is that, say, when I’m being firm with her, or roughhousing with her, or lose my temper I’m not being loving, and I think that for her, now, that single facet of love dominates any other meaning.

And okay then, fine; I just have to both help her grow the richness of her definition of love, and constantly demonstrate through word and deed that I love her more than anything else in the world. Job done.

I do, though, have some unresolved anxieties around those of my behaviours that she seems to interpret as me not loving her. She usually squeals with delight when I pick her up and snuggle her, and seems to genuinely love getting tickled, for example, but these are, I think, things that would fall into this category, and there’s a sense in there somewhere that she’s not wrong. Issues about consent and agency, and her body being hers alone – issues that would be true for a boy too but have particularly dark resonances when the power dynamic is between a male in a position of authority and a younger female in a more junior context – swirl in the mix, and need to be considered and reflected upon. This all, as her life stretches ahead of her for decades, isn’t simple.

But for now, tomorrow, I take the least complicated, purest step. “I love you, Ada. Now and always.”

November 4, 2017

Hiut Denim Co., can they fix it? (Yes, they can.)

I’ve been fortunate to be in a position in the past to buy two pairs of Hiut jeans. I like them because they fit well and look good, because I like the company’s schtick and its championing of local crafts-based skills and communities, and, of course, because all that resonates with the image I have of myself.

But I also like them because they offer a free repair service, in-keeping with their, and, increasingly, our, mission to redress the balance away from disposability. Jeans get ripped? Chuck ’em.

Not with Hiut. My original 2012 pair have already been back once to have the crotch repaired, and when my newer pair started to go too, as well as early parenthood having ripped the left knee of the first, they both went back at once.

And look at the results below. They’re beautiful. It’s neither trying to make the jeans look good as new, nor is it kintsugi, the Japanese tradition of explicitly highlighting repairs. They have developed their own robustly unique character and identity, organically, and if you’ll indulge me, it’s one of the quiet dignity that comes from having worked hard and still had care and attention lavished on them. I love that in repairing the knee – which was an gaping inches-long gash in the fabric – they’ve even colour-matched the thread to the worn patch on the knee. (New, the jeans are a dark indigo, and they fade and scuff and soften slowly with use.) They even tidied up the fraying hems, though I hadn’t asked them to.

Hiut has a customer for life in me. I can’t justify another pair just now, but though I was tempted to cheat with another label in the weeks during which these two were off being repaired, I knew they wouldn’t please me anything like as much as they do.

Repaired Hiut Denim jeans
Repaired Hiut Denim jeans
Repaired Hiut Denim jeans
Hiut Denim jeans label

October 29, 2017

Trick-or-treating in another guise

Every year, I see and hear stories about the American import of trick-or-treating at Hallowe’en. The ones I’m thinking of roll their eyes and almost audibly tut at this, another example of good, wholesome Brits swallowing another vulgar American import.

I have decided that this year I shall allow myself to get annoyed at this, and it’s for two reasons. The first is: and so what? It’s fun, exciting, and gives a focus for activities as the weather worsens, and it may even prompt some interesting discussions about spirits and evil and death that could help kids process the world around them. Don’t be such a wet blanket; buy some fun size Mars bars, make the effort to be more neighbourly for one night, and get over yourself.

More prosaically, though, I think it’s a shame that these reports – which usually emanate from a media machine which ostensibly serves the UK yet is persistently England-centric – demonstrate how little the prevailing cultural narrative makes an effort to understand and include the whole country.

Scotland and Ireland have long had a Hallowe’en tradition of guising, going door to door in the neighbourhood in fancy dress; it’s a little different from trick-or-treating in that kids usually do a turn – tell a joke, sing a song, do a trick – before getting sweets or pennies, and the familiar pumpkin lantern is instead a hollowed-out turnip. And I know the turnip bit especially sounds quite funny – the kind of “what is like a pumpkin but more drab and dour?” fiction you’d write in translating a real-world American tradition to your novel which features a population that if not explicitly modelled on the Scots are definitely a bit Scot-ish – but there are records of guising from long before America existed.

I know too that I sound humourless and chippy, and this is hardly a pressing issue, but at a time when so many forces seem intent on dividing us, it’s sad both that the UK can still be snobbish about arriviste American traditions, and that neighbours who don’t even have the excuse of an ocean separating them can still know each other so little.

October 3, 2017

Zig-zag butterfly

I finally realised a while back why parents’ anecdotes about things their kids say and do struck me as so banal before I became one myself: it’s because you have no calibration for what’s remarkable.

Anyway, tonight as I read my two year-old daughter The Cat in the Hat at bedtime, when we got to the line “And look! With my tail! / I can hold a red fan!” she said, with some effort, “Daddy, the fan is like a butterfly! A zig-zag butterfly! Like [the butterfly in the garden she named] Dotty!” And I am undone.

An illustration from The Cat in the Hat; the cat is holding a red fan in its tail which has a white zig-zag pattern on it

June 29, 2017

Driving each other crazy

If two cars reach an impasse in Britain, and one flashes its headlights to the other, it means “come on; I cede”. In France, it means “stay there; I’m going to push through”. Imagine the scene where a Brit in France or someone French in the UK gives or sees a flash and interprets it the wrong way, judged against the dominant convention in that place. There’s a crash, and both aggrieved parties leap out of their car, each thinking they’re in the right as they talk at each other, not only in a foreign language but from a completely different context.

Neither is right, neither is wrong; but both think both that they are right and the other is wrong, by sheer force of cultural conditioning. It’s not merely a question of perspectives, but of failing to realise that the lessons and values of your culture have been so subtly but fundamentally and perniciously codified into your worldview that you don’t think to ask if there could even be another perspective. What is this wanker doing? He flashed his lights for me to come on so I drove forward but then so did he and now there’s car on the ground and we’re both shouting at each other.

I think about this often.

June 4, 2017

‘Safe’

I went to bed last night as Twitter was just starting to twitch with news of something happening around London Bridge, assuming that when I woke it would either have been jumbled mis-reporting or the latest in the capital’s history of terror attacks.

This morning, as we read and listened and reflected, my daughter was playing on some foam climbing blocks when she slightly overreached her balance and toppled slowly off, crying – mostly from surprise – when she hit the floor.

It is a trite point, but, curiously, a legitimate and profound one too, that ‘being safe’ doesn’t – rather, shouldn’t – mean that one must never come to physical or emotional harm; it means an environment wherein you are confident in exploring and playing and expressing yourself, knowing that if you overreach and come to harm, there is kindness, support and comfort.

‘Never coming to harm’ is a dangerous fiction, one that legitimises and excuses authoritarian behaviour and policies that actively damage those for whose lives you are responsible.

January 17, 2017

Don’t wake the monster!

I’m only part joking when I say I bet the dramatic trope of creeping past a slumbering monster must have been originally written by parents who have tried not to wake a sleeping baby.

Had to pop stuff into Ada’s room tonight; crept stealthily in, but she stirred and sat up in bed. I immediately dropped down behind the solid end of the cot, out of sight. She seemed to resettle, but I couldn’t be sure, so I had to risk a peek. If she was awake and watching, catastrophe! But she was asleep! Creep, creep, set down qui-et-ly, creep, creep, pull door to at a tectonic rate – breathe sigh of relief. Properly cinematic.

Frankly, I’d take a rabid dragon or slavering Cerberus to sneak past any day; consequences are less dire.

December 31, 2016

Playing with Lego

For as long as I can remember, I’ve loved playing with Lego. The love hasn’t dimmed as I’ve gotten older; Lego’s role in my life has just changed. Where once it was about the stuff of play – about discovering how objects interact and about how I could at the same time give shape to and spark my imagination – as an adult I would occasionally turn to the calm, methodical accretion of a set’s blocks as a way of quieting stress and anxiety.

Our daughter got some Duplo for Christmas, and it’s been wonderful to play with her. Of course we play with her all the time, but it is usually asymmetrical. The pleasure my wife and I got from the play was meta-level; we enjoyed seeing Ada develop and become curious and then work to sate that curiosity, and of course we enjoyed the simple fact of the time together, but there wasn’t much enjoyment to be wrung for us from the activities and games themselves.

This is different, because while all that meta-pleasure is just as present, we’re both surprised by how much delight and fun we’re getting from the Duplo itself.

And it’s exactly because of that curiously cyclical sparking and feeding of imagination. Sometimes I’ll set out to reify an object that’s in my head, but more often than not I’m just noodling about with bricks – these big, coarse voxels in unexpectedly beautiful renderings of simple colours – and either end up creating pleasingly nonsense objects, or I’ll turn over what I have in my hands to find that it suddenly looks like a whale, or a truck, or an oddly stooping old lady. It’s something akin to pareidolia, or what the creator of those Lego ads was tapping into – another take on “the pictures are better on radio”.

It’s silly, I guess, to find this quiet joy surprising, since I can’t remember a time without Lego, but it is. It turns out I had simply forgotten that this was a thing Lego could be; not only a tool by which to construct a given object, whether realistic or fantastic, but also something that one almost has a dialogue with, something that you grip and manipulate and query and listen to as you play without direction – like a child does. And as I am rediscovering how to, thanks to my own.