One Day in History

Well, firstly apologies for the delay. It has been a very busy couple of weeks. There have been job interviews (well, a job interview), gigs (two - the Bull & Gate in Kentish Town and The Horn in St Albans), romantic dates (with the lovely FM), and an awful lot of arguments and general humptiness (principally with the Beast of Willesden Green but also a falling out with the Dame over his stage demeanour). Also YD appears to have taken becoming thirteen somewhat seriously (as in 'I am now a teenager so I am going to become uncommunicative, moody and don't try and hug me, OK!') which I have found a little difficult as whilst I am used to that with OD, it was a bit of shock to see YD conform to stereotype too (and with such speed!)

However, no time to write this up now but I will attempt to bring you various snippets over the coming days. In the meantime, I – like thousands of others – contributed to the ‘One Day in History’ mega-blog of 17^th October (www.historymatters.org.uk). Here was my bit. Rant, moan, etc.

---- Tuesday 17th October ----
There is nothing like starting the day with an argument. This morning, like nearly every weekday morning for the past month, was no exception. Since OD moved in with me last June, I have found it increasingly difficult to get her out of bed for school (if I can achieve that at all). Year 11 is her GCSE year. According to her recent Academic Progress report she is currently set to achieve two ‘C’ grades and fail everything else. This time last year she had anticipated ‘A’s across the board. Yep - things have really gone down the tube.

In order to get to school for 8:45, OD needs to leave my house at 7:45. I always wake her at 7:00 and give her ten minutes to doze before calling her again. When she started Year 11 in September, she would invariably rise at this point. However, six weeks later and this is no longer the case. “Ten more minutes” she calls out to me. I give her five and call her at 7:15. Then again at 7:20. At 7:25 I enter her room: “You have twenty minutes to get ready for school”. Five minutes later and still no sign of movement. “You are now going to be late, it is just a question of how late” I shout through her door at her. She ignores me. I re-enter her bedroom. She is sitting cross-legged on her bed, texting. “Get out my room” she shouts angrily. “Get up for school and I will” I respond. “Fuck off out of my room” she yells back. It is now 7:35. She sneers at me: “I can’t get up when you’re in the house. I used to get up when you went to work earlier”. I point out that the reason I changed my hours of employment was because that was the very thing she wasn’t doing and neither was she going to school. We exchange a few more shouts and I go downstairs, hurl a cereal bowl at the floor in temper and stomp out. Now who is the child and who is the adult? “You’ve really annoyed me today” I tell her before I leave. She just smiles. Mission accomplished then.

My day at the office is the same as most of my time there. I have a variety of dull and uninspiring clerical tasks to complete, a number of which I achieve whilst some roll over to tomorrow. I buy a flavourless lunch from an over-priced sandwich chain in Cheapside and spend the afternoon looking at my PC screen and arguing with our external Auditors about why the controls being in put in place for our SWIFT message transmissions are so severe. My company have outsourced their IT infrastructure services. They monitor the SWIFT transmissions. However Audit now want us to monitor their monitoring. Why? If the messages are not being correctly despatched or safely received, we’ll soon know about it as the business itself will complain. So is there any purpose to this new initiative? No, not really. None at all in fact.

I’ve never understood why Audit departments are held in such high regard when their chief function is to state the obvious and increase one’s workload with an ever burgeoning number of needless reports. Each year you spend hours explaining why things are done they way they are to some fresh-faced graduate who is looking to impress his new paymasters with his diligence and then twelve months later the exercise is repeated all over again with someone completely different as the graduate has either moved on to a new client or departed the organisation due to terminal boredom. In the meantime you are faced with ever increasing levels of pointless paperwork just so someone upon high can tick a box with the word ‘yes’ next to it. Pointless? Who said that!

I left work at 6:30 and took the drain to Waterloo station where I met FM at 7:00 and we dined at the nearby Thai Silk restaurant. The place was packed (all the more surprising for a Tuesday) and so I was glad I’d booked a table in advance. After the meal (which was pretty darn good; they do a mean green curry) we retired for a couple of snifters at a local hostelry before I walked FM back to the station and she wended her way home to Richmond. As third dates go it was, I feel, a success. I eventually reached my home in beautiful downtown Watford just after midnight. OD was asleep and on the kitchen table was a note saying ‘my skirt and jumper are in the washing machine’. I took them out and hung them on the collapsible clothes horse before getting to bed around half-midnight. Six hours till the alarm then - and another argument, of course.

White Hart & other things

“I felt like I was twenty five again!” the Dame beamed at me after we’d come off-stage at The White Hart in Whitechapel (best known as the pub where Ronnie Kray shot George Cornell although oddly enough I didn’t see a plaque) where we supporting eighties soft-rockers XFX. He’d had a great gig. Of course, he wasn’t the one pinned into a space the size of a postage stamp and hadn’t spent the last three numbers with his foot rammed against the Wing-Commander’s bass drum to stop the damn thing from sliding forward.

It wasn’t a bad show though. We certainly played a lot better than the previous Saturday at Zeph’s birthday party and someone did comment after that he could hear traces of The Who in us, which is probably due to the incredibly toppiness of Ron’s bass amp combined with my propensity to over-indulge on the note front. Next Sunday we are at the Bull and Gate in Kentish Town which will be our first official London show so hopefully we will be fired-up to deliver a good one. There are still some things which need sorting out (some of the older material doesn’t sit well with the new stuff; the Dame’s between song patter errs on the ‘please love us’ side of things whilst my own view is much more 'this is it: like it or lump it’ – the difference between the old pub rocker and the old punk rocker I think). Anyway, at our age its just a bit of fun so I shouldn’t take it too seriously (‘but what about your professional pride?’ – ahhhh, well there is that)

So, what’s been happening on the OD front I hear you ask? Other than having to meet the Head of Year and phone calls from Brent council’s Education Welfare Officer, plus the never-ending battle known as ‘get your arse out of bed’ every single bloody morning, things have been OK. She has received her Academic Progress report which tells me that unless she sorts her course work out in the next few weeks, she is on target to achieve ‘C’s in Music and Drama and fail everything else. Well that’s good news. She is going to school though at least four days out of five at the moment, although I don’t actually thing she’s made it on time for quite a while. School starts at 8:45. Classes begin at 9:15. I think she believes there is no point getting in before 9:10. However things seem to be going very well with her and young Chris, who seems to dote on her, which is great because – let’s face it – we all need someone to make us feel special

Culturally I’ve been up to… well, not a great deal. Saw a revival of Jonson’s ‘The Alchemist’ at the National. This production has had astonishingly good reviews but whilst it had its merits (the open house set; Ian Richardson's marvellous delivery of Mammon's feast speech) I thought it lacked the right level energy and drive. Remembering that this text begins mid-argument, for the lights to rise on a resolutely Pinter-esque kitchen table with the cast lazily sat around it and the bustling dialogue to be slowed to a crawl, replete with long pauses, completely sucked all life out of the first act. Jokes were trampled over rather than relished (for example when a mis-cast Surly asks Mammon what he calls the brother of Dol's mad aristocrat, his response of 'My Lord' should provoke one of the biggest laughs of the night; here it was nervously spluttered and the gag became lost). Alex Jennings performance was workmanlike and that seemed to subdue Russell-Beale. And as for transposing the brawler's rhetoric into Ali G style street language: who on Earth thought that was a good idea? Also, I thought the program notes were appalling (and this guy has a book out?) So, in short, disappointing.

Other than that, FM and I went to see The Bastard Sons of Johnny Cash at the Borderline. They were good but not as good as they thought they were (Dale Watson does the trad country stuff much better). Excellent lead guitarist though: Telecaster through a Fender twin for that wiry country sound. Place was about a third full and they’d come all the way from San Diego so a bit of a bummer for them.

And that’s that for now. Zeph’s birthday party was great fun and if you to her MySpace page can see us murdering ‘Alabama Song’ together. Sweet.

Last Weekend

With YD in Cambridge with the Beast (taking young Patrick up with his evil Mother as he begins his first year at University) and OD doing her own thing as per usual, I had that rare event last weekend: an entire two days to myself. And did I spend it wisely? Well, on Saturday I hoofed into London and met the Wing-Commander for a coffee, a spot of book/CD shopping, and a visit to the Kandinsky exhibition at Tate Modern. (And what did I learn about Kandinsky’s work? He was rubbish until 1912; at that point his creative dawn broke but it took him four years to get the hang of it, but by 1916 he’d got to grips with this abstraction malarkey and was knocking out some right belters). On Sunday I bought a birthday present for BotS, played my bass, watched a Charlie Chan movie on DVD and then went to the Bull and Gate in the evening where I met the lovely Melinda and we watched La Momo (female French Velvet Underground fans with strange keyboard noises), Stuntdog (middle-aged blokes not sure what they want to be or what they are doing and with no dress sense whatsoever between them but have a few good songs lurking among the dross), and the excellent Bill Drake (a man, a piano, and Stars in Battledress backing him up on guitar and harmonium). I also bumped into my old friend MacDeath (for that is indeed his name) which was a treat too. The B&G is one of the few venues in London that is still run by people who are passionate about music and so I was pleased to see that the posters I dropped in at the door for my own band’s gig there on 22^nd October were actually up on the wall by the time I left. God bless ‘em. Home by midnight and thus another week begins.

The Last Two for September

Wednesday 27th September
Had a phone call at work this lunchtime from OD’s PE teacher: “this is the fourth week back at school and your daughter hasn’t attended a single PE lesson yet. I went looking for her yesterday when she should have been in class and I found her in the computer lab”. I apologised, obviously. I explained the problems I’ve had with getting OD to attend. I said I was committed to trying to get OD to attend every lesson of every day of every week. What I didn’t say was “PE? Who gives a shit! My priorities are getting her to Science, Maths, French, and all the other subjects she is sitting a GCSE for. PE? You can stick it up your arse love”. OD later told me that she’d been in the computer lab catching up on her Science coursework as she felt this was a better use of her time. Well, whilst I agree with her I did rather feel that if she spent studied a little more at home studying and spent a little less gossiping on MSN every evening she wouldn’t be in this predicament. She looked at me as if I were mad.


Friday 29th September
OD wouldn’t get up this morning. “I feel ill”, she said. “My legs hurt and my stomach hurts”. After twenty minutes it was clear that she wasn’t budging. “You can forget your pocket money this week and I don’t want any friends over” I barked. She gave that ‘as if I give a shit’ stare and said “if I feel better later, I’ll go in this afternoon” she said. I didn’t believe her, but before departing for work I left this note:

'The more time you take off school:

- the further you get behind your classmates and the more difficult it is to catch up
(so that the girl who was so bring now knows less than the thick kids)

- the angrier your teachers get at you (and so the less likely it is that the will
want to help)

- I become increasingly disinclined to pay for the things you wants (e.g. hair cuts,
clothes, concert tickets)

You know all this - so why continue to bunk and make a bad situation worse?

Please attend this afternoon.

I love you,
Dad xxx'


At 11:30 she called me to ask how the new tumble dryer worked as she’d just hand- washed her uniform. She then went in this afternoon. Well done. I was really pleased and I told her this.

Of course, the question now is which of the three lessons she had this morning had she not completed her homework or missing coursework for and was desperate to avoid a bollocking for? English, Maths or RE?

Two more from September

Thursday 21st September
Dear Chum,

Good to hear from you again. I am well, thank-you. I went to see 'Life of Galileo' with Phil last night. A very strong production of an under-rated play but quite long at three and a quarter hours. David Hare’s adaptation stripped all the Brechtian elements from the core text and so it was far more naturalistic than I had anticipated. If you get a chance to see it, do though. Simon Russell Beale is excellent in the title role and you do come away feeling you know an awful lot more about the why the Reformation gathered pace so quickly in the early part of the sixteenth century.

Also from a cultural perspective, I saw Shawn Colvin on Monday at the Bloomsbury and she was great: just her and her acoustic guitar singing songs of regret and telling gossipy stories about being a back-up singer with Suzanne Vega in the 1980s and arguing over whether a guitar tuner is necessary or not with Sting: "Did Ornette Coleman use a tuner? Did Bob Dylan use a tuner? What's wrong with ya?". Finished with a fantastically emotional rendition of The Bee Gee’s ‘Words’ which also closes her very fine new album ‘These Four Walls’. A top evening as the support act (Sons of Jim: two men, one guitar, and some strong tunes including a Ben Folds cover) were very good too.

Thanks for asking after my offspring. OD has (he says, fingers crossed) been into school every day this week thus far. She finishes early today as tonight is open evening and therefore also doesn't have to be in until 10:00 tomorrow. I can't stay at home that late in the morning so I am only hoping she doesn't blow it on the final day. She is staying at her Mum's house on Friday (first time since she started living with me), as is Chris. She may be consciously trying to give me a break but that could just be wishful thinking on my part. She is certainly 'loved-up' at the moment. In fact, I am wondering whether Chris is the good influence on her regarding her school attendance or if she has finally realised that she is now so far behind if she does fudge about then her mocks are going to be even worse that I fear. She’s sill a bit on the gobby side mind you, but sometimes we will talk for a minute or two and I actually feel like I have a proper relationship with her - which is, of course, very nice.

YD is fab and looking forward to her birthday next month (not least because I’m buying her a PSP). Did I tell you she is now 5' 8" and still only 12? I think she worries that she might not stop growing and end-up a giant. She remains a fantastic soul and still spends every weekend with me, which as far as I’m concerned is great. Won’t last too much longer though. Another couple of years and she’ll be wanting to stay in WG with her mates whilst OD will be out and about even more than she already is.

On other news, Lou is about to start-up her own prosecution business and Mr M is coming over tonight to quiz me about what I used to do for a living. On Tuesday I'm meeting my old PhD supervisor for a beer after he's given a paper at the Globe so it will be nice to catch-up with him. Work is very VERY busy. My horoscope today reads 'a certain tension is building and the theme here really is change or bust'. It certainly feels like that right now. I’ve always felt like the proverbial square peg to the round hole that is the IB, but these days I look in the toilet mirror at work and see this middle-aged, grey haired be-suited man I barely recognise staring back and wonder how on earth I ended-up doing what I do for a shilling. It was never in plan A (musician) or plan B (lecturer) or indeed any plan that I ever conjectured even in my quietest or most creative moments. Life has a tendency to overtake you and the grand schemes of tomorrow become the failed plans of yesterday before you even realise that the night has passed. In a blink I shall be too old to plan anything and my fear is that I’ll look back at my life and think “well, that was a complete bloody waste of time”.

Sorry – there I go again: miserable as buggery. Keep well and I’ll write again soon.

DK



Tuesday 26th September
And it was all going so well! OD was in school Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday last week. Could she make a full run for the first time since Lawd alone knows when? Could she? Of course not; how foolish of me to think that she might. And she didn’t go on Monday either, but her bunking was somewhat more elaborate. Get this - she actually got up, got dressed and left the house with me. I pootled on ahead and the moment I turned the corner and was on my way to the station she turned around and went back home. (She never walks with me, just like she’ll never sit and watch a DVD with me. Or, if she had her way, actually talk to me. I’m surprised she hasn’t learnt sign language). “I went back to bed because I was so tired’ she said - well that’s what happens when you spend the entire weekend partying all night and kipping all day. “I went in this afternoon though, except I didn’t bother to register”. Of course you did dear. You went to school but because you didn’t register they will have no record of you attending. Do you think I live on planet stupid? I don’t suppose, by any stretch of the imagination, you could have bunked off, met your boyfriend and spent the day with him? No, surely no. Never!

Leaving for work this morning with OD (and this time I knew she was going into school because she was so grumpy) I said to her: “I realised something last night. I try and treat you like a grown-up (this is because I believe her to be an intelligent, articulate individual who deserves her independency] whilst you treat me like an arsehole”. She just grunted. Actually, she may have told me to p*ss off – she does that a lot too. But at least she went in.

Two more from September

Mon 11^th September

This morning OD refused to get out of bed. I try to get her to go to school. She won't. I stand in her room and deliberately keep her awake. I am calm. I don't lose my temper. I sing songs. I talk rubbish. I put Radio Three on. Her response is to get up and go into the bathroom where she locks herself in. I continue talking to her. She puts the shower on so that she can't hear me. "You have promised me for the last two months that come September you will go to school and knuckle down. You've just been lying to me, haven't you?" She says hasn't. "Let's talk about this like adults", I say, beginning to get as weary of this mantra as OD undoubtedly is. Clearly she finds the idea of an intelligent, calm, level-headed conversation with her Father abhorrence. Eventually, through the toilet door, she tells me that her Head of Year, Mr Moore, is the reason for her reluctance to attend. Apparently he just follows her around, shouting at her for no reason and acts in a sarcastic and patronising way [isn't that what all teachers do?]. I point out that I did tell her before she went back that her teachers were going to be waiting for her to fail and that she has to be made of stronger stuff and prove them wrong. Her mocks are in three months time and unless she intends to get straight 'D's or worse she needs to get her backside into school. I try to make her understand that she is just making things worse for herself but she doesn't pay any attention and I'm left getting into work even later than I am supposed to and ringing Mr M to ask for his take on this. If he stays out of her way and cuts her some slack, will she make more of an effort to attend?

So I rung Mr M and - to be honest - I was completely taken aback by the level of dislike there seems to be for my daughter at that school. But what is worse, it all appears to be justified. "We pussyfooted around last year", he said, "and tried the soft approach but it got us nowhere. The teachers here have done everything they can to help her along, but all they get in return is ignorance and disdain. She is completely switched-off in lessons. On a good day, she sulks; on a bad day, she’s much worse than that. She’s rude, she’s arrogant and she shows no respect for anyone. I had three teachers looking for her on Friday afternoon because she was truant within class." (This is, of course, the PE lesson that I wrote a note to excuse her from. I quizzed her about it and she said: "Oh, Laura and I decided to just bunk off".) "Every meeting I attend, her name comes up three or four times. We have rules here. She can't just breeze in and out of school whenever she likes. For example, we had 184 students in Assembly last week and she just strolls past the window late [which day was that I wonder?]; she won’t even wait for her form tutor. She’s been late so many times that the staff in the office are even saying ‘it’s not my job to register her'. It’s the sheer arrogance of her. It is like she is going out of her way to fail - and she’s achieving that goal’. I thought back to the conversation I had with him last July about what will happen if her attendance didn't improve this term: "we'll come down hard and we'll come down fast" he said. This was re-iterated today: "if she carries on like this for the next week or so, then it will be escalated". I put these issues to OD tonight who, of course, dismissed them. "If she comes in tomorrow on time, we'll start with a clean slate. She can sort out what happened on Friday with her PE teacher. But she needs to be here five lessons a day, twenty-five lessons a week - just like everybody else is". The school appears to be reaching breaking-point with her. I can't believe how things could have gone so totally tits-up in less than a year.

Sunday 17^th September

I now know that were my stress levels registering on a VU meter, I would be so far in the red that I would be distorting like a Tube Screamer through a Pignose with the gain control on 10. After dropping YD home this evening, I asked OD for her weekly train pass in order that I could renew it. “I’ll get it later” she said. “No, I need it now”, I replied, calmly and friendly, so I can get your renewal and you won’t have to muck about tomorrow morning”. “I can’t be fucking bothered” she replied and disappeared upstairs.

OK. Admittedly I had woken her up when I got back. She had been up half the night entertaining chums (again - her visit to her Mum's on Friday went out the window when she learned that one of friends' parents were having a weekend away and leaving their sixteen year old with the place to herself and her older sister: what are they? Mad?) and she clearly felt cream-crackered. However what next happened was that I completely lost the plot. I managed to smash three plates, two glasses and a plastic cup by hurling them out of the kitchen door so that they crashed against either the far wall or the flagstones. Milk flew through the air as I raged. In short, gentle reader, I lost it.

Part of my anger was a build-up from this morning. Having expected OD and her friends (three girls; four boys) not to return from their camping trip at the local park until the early hours, I was surprised by their entrance at 11:30PM. They were, however, quiet and well-behaved (or at least, if they weren’t well-behaved I didn’t hear them). Before retiring to bed, I reminded them of the rule which OD had broken the previous weekend: “girls upstairs; boys downstairs”. I thought they would obey that, even the two boys who I had never seen before. However on rising the following morning everyone was downstairs. Or at least so I thought. I then found part of a ripped condom packet outside my toilet and the realisation dawned on me: H wasn’t there. And neither was one of the boys. And OD's bedroom door was shut. For fuck’s sake, these kids are now seeing my house as a shag pad.

Suffice to say strong words were spoken: first to OD; then H (if her parents found out what had happened, they would go fucking berserk); and lastly the group en masse. This chiefly consisted of a rather wound-up me declaring: “listen… I know you are fifteen and you want to shag but this is my fucking house. You get far more fucking leeway here than you would at your own parents. I fucking let you drink. I let you smoke. You probably even fucking smoke weed for all I know. God knows what you get up to when I am not here, but when I am fucking here I do not expect you to fucking shag and if you aren’t happy with that, then don’t fucking come here at all”.

With hindsight, perhaps I should have thrown more of a hissy-fit and chucked them all out but I am in a difficult predicament. My main concern remains getting OD to school and making sure she doesn’t completely screw her exams up. (She still seems to behave as though the stream of ‘D’s she got at the end of last year will magically turn themselves into ‘A’s with only the bare minimum of effort; what planet does she live on?) I would also rather she and her chums were somewhere safe than hanging around a grotty park or street after dark. Yet, equally, it is MY house (emphasise capitals: ‘MY’) and I spend fifty hours a week in a job that bores me shitless in order to keep my house mine, and I am getting increasingly fucked off with it being hi-jacked by OD’s mates every weekend, who turn-up en masse at midnight (or whenever the fancy takes them) and feel they can do whatever they God-damn like (especially those things which in many cases their own parents would throw a fit at). My house is my home; it is not a youth club or a drop-in centre, or a squat, or somewhere you go for a fuck.

So – that’s why stress levels are high and that’s why I was throwing my own plates out of the kitchen door in anger. Calm, calm, calm, calm