footpad, posts by tag: children - LiveJournal (original) (raw)

Trainsitions	[Apr. 10th, 2012\|10:54 am]Footpad
[Tags\|children, cornwall, dogs, easter, family, holidays, trains] [Current Mood	partly fulfilled] [Current Location	a train in England]Another day, another train. So much of my life spent in trains. When I was knee-high to a wolfhound, trains made a continuous tacketytack, tacketytack noise. Another memory lost to progress and continuous welded rails. Someday soon I'll be at least physically old.I've been in Cornwall, that green land of bright air and the memories of childhood, spending the Easter holiday with my family in a welter of children, dogs, and assorted generations. When I arrived at the small farm where I grew up, I found the house empty: my parents were still sailing back from Spain with my big brother. It was just me, and the spring-green grass and the daffodils and the sun and the rain and the wind. So I spent two days alone, tending the wood stove, cooking meals and baking bread, doing small jobs and walking to town for provisions, savouring the familiarity and the gentleness and the silence.Then everybody got back and, in shocking contrast to those days of peace, bedlam descended. We're not so much a family as an indefinitely extended autochthon, and the youngsters tend to be very fond of their lupine uncle. So I was promptly dragooned into adjudicating wooden-sword fights, messing around with chemistry sets, commentating on Lego constructions, answering interminable questions about "blowing stuff up", cooking traditional German meals of potato and pig (to general applause), basking in the lovely English weather, drinking proper English beer, and suffering through every damn English virus that anyone cared to donate to me.Easter Sunday was of course a riot: the children ransacked the farm for chocolate eggs, the adults took shelter wherever available, and my parents' Labrador got loose and soon developed symptoms of theobromine poisoning, which will do nothing to curb her relentless scavenging in future.And now... a train. A train bearing me away from Cornwall and towards Zürich, back to the strange everyday life I lead, so divorced from these elements of earth and water, air and fire, wood-stoves and children and dogs and bread. I spend a lot of time in trains, and every train represents a phase-change in my existence, a wormhole between different social contexts, a transition in my way of being. With this train, I quantum-tunnel from the rowdy heart of my family to the sardonic human mode of work in Switzerland; in a few days, another train shall translate me home to the warm hearts of akeela and mischamute. For this I am quietly glad.Sometimes I wish I had just one state of being, and no trains switching me between them, but I suppose I'd eventually find it monotonous, like the ongoing steady-state whoosh of a modern train.
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The plastic horse of the Apocalypse	[Aug. 31st, 2011\|07:22 pm]Footpad
[Tags\|children, oops] [Current Mood	bouncy] [Current Location	zurich]I like children—that's to say, I like them when they're reasonably happy, and therefore I have a vested interesting in cheering them up.You know those little coin-operated child rides that people leave around supermarkets? Chuck a coin in the slot, and the brightly-coloured toy car or fire-engine or motorcycle starts to rock gently and make _vrrrm_-ing noises? If so, then you know how children invariably sit in them even when they're doing nothing. For a long time I've been planning to catch a child on one of those, slyly shove a coin in the slot, and watch the little cherub's chubby cheeks light up with joy as their chariot magically comes to life beneath them.Today I got my chance.Nipping down to the supermarket to get a sandwich, I saw a dear little child sitting on a plastic horse. So, as I passed, I winkled a Swiss franc out of my pocket and chucked it in the slot.The horse went into Grand National mode. The child started falling off, panicked, began screaming blue murder, and had to be rescued and shoved into its mother's arms to do its wailing in relative safety.The mother thanked me profusely, apparently thinking I'd rescued her offspring from a malevolent machine come to life of its own accord. But the child knew exactly who was to blame for its terror, and cried at me with a terrible accusing glare all the way down the supermarket concourse.
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Nine hour time shift, and how it came about that I actually quite like children on aeroplanes	[Jan. 25th, 2011\|06:32 am]Footpad
[Tags\|children, flights, jetlag, klm, travel] [Current Mood	optimistic]Nothing fixes jet-lag but time. I've tried various regimes of brute-forcing my diurnal cycle with drugs and exercise and food and forced wakefulness, and it never makes enough difference to justify the effort and fuss. The biochemical diurnal rhythms of the body just have too much inertia to be easily affected by that stuff. These days I just roll with it, sleep when I will and can, take modest amounts of caffeine¹ to tide me through the day, and let my jangled biorhythms settle down in their own time. It's just as easy as any other way of dealing with the jet-lag, and a whole lot more relaxed.My indispensable survival tips for air travel remain, quite simply, (1) ear-plugs, and (2) lots and lots to drink, and not that kind of drink either.The trip out to San Francisco was infested with children. At the departure gate for the short hop to Amsterdam, a small child threw a tantrum, and fifty fellow passengers emitted a palpable common thought-bubble: "I hope to God I'm not sitting next to you." So I sat down and found myself next to the small child; who turned out to be an enchanting dark-eyed whelp from Peru. The mother and I barely had a language in common, but she was an inexperienced flyer and didn't really know how to deal with anything from the seat-belt buckle onwards, so I advised her and entertained the child and afterwards one of the KLM cabin-staff very sweetly thanked me for my help. I glowed.Then, on the long-haul flight, O horror—two small children, in the seats to my right and left, from different families, but both of them already having travelled from Nairobi to Amsterdam, and now flying on to the USA! And the one on the left was accompanied only by a fairly clueless mother, who didn't know about bringing child entertainment on the flight, or keeping the sprog well hydrated, or any of the things that make everybody's lives more bearable in the tight confines of an aeroplane. When the child started acting up, she simply told it to sit still in its seat, which is of course a physical impossibility for a three-year-old on a ten-hour flight.So, making a virtue of necessity, I befriended the sprog and played small games with it and we held long conversations, mostly about fish, even though communication was hampered by my abject failure to speak any of Swahili, highly accented babyese English, or the unknown tribal language through which the child's speech oscillated with carefree agility. By the end of the flight we were firmly in love, and waved and called endless goodbyes to each other as we were separated to our respective queues for quality-control by the semi-mechanical guardians of the American border realm.It did throw an unholy tantrum somewhere over Wyoming, but by then it'd been in the talons of public transport for over twenty-four hours and I really couldn't blame it.So I think it's established that (a) I actually really like children, and (b) I'm even fairly good with them.KLM were just wonderful—punctual, efficient, lovely staff, borderline edible food, and aeroplanes that didn't fall out of the sky, while also being among the cheapest tickets going at the time.¹ I'm getting much better at caffeine now that I've paid close attention to its long-term effects on me. These days I can drink a cup without entirely shafting myself; I just need to consider first how it's going to affect my sleep and behaviour for the next two days.
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Nine hour time shift, and how it came about that I actually quite like children on aeroplanes

[Jan. 25th, 2011|06:32 am]Footpad

[Tags**|children, flights, jetlag, klm, travel] [Current Mood**

optimistic]Nothing fixes jet-lag but time. I've tried various regimes of brute-forcing my diurnal cycle with drugs and exercise and food and forced wakefulness, and it never makes enough difference to justify the effort and fuss. The biochemical diurnal rhythms of the body just have too much inertia to be easily affected by that stuff. These days I just roll with it, sleep when I will and can, take modest amounts of caffeine¹ to tide me through the day, and let my jangled biorhythms settle down in their own time. It's just as easy as any other way of dealing with the jet-lag, and a whole lot more relaxed.My indispensable survival tips for air travel remain, quite simply, (1) ear-plugs, and (2) lots and lots to drink, and not that kind of drink either.The trip out to San Francisco was infested with children. At the departure gate for the short hop to Amsterdam, a small child threw a tantrum, and fifty fellow passengers emitted a palpable common thought-bubble: "I hope to God I'm not sitting next to you." So I sat down and found myself next to the small child; who turned out to be an enchanting dark-eyed whelp from Peru. The mother and I barely had a language in common, but she was an inexperienced flyer and didn't really know how to deal with anything from the seat-belt buckle onwards, so I advised her and entertained the child and afterwards one of the KLM cabin-staff very sweetly thanked me for my help. I glowed.Then, on the long-haul flight, O horror—two small children, in the seats to my right and left, from different families, but both of them already having travelled from Nairobi to Amsterdam, and now flying on to the USA! And the one on the left was accompanied only by a fairly clueless mother, who didn't know about bringing child entertainment on the flight, or keeping the sprog well hydrated, or any of the things that make everybody's lives more bearable in the tight confines of an aeroplane. When the child started acting up, she simply told it to sit still in its seat, which is of course a physical impossibility for a three-year-old on a ten-hour flight.So, making a virtue of necessity, I befriended the sprog and played small games with it and we held long conversations, mostly about fish, even though communication was hampered by my abject failure to speak any of Swahili, highly accented babyese English, or the unknown tribal language through which the child's speech oscillated with carefree agility. By the end of the flight we were firmly in love, and waved and called endless goodbyes to each other as we were separated to our respective queues for quality-control by the semi-mechanical guardians of the American border realm.It did throw an unholy tantrum somewhere over Wyoming, but by then it'd been in the talons of public transport for over twenty-four hours and I really couldn't blame it.So I think it's established that (a) I actually really like children, and (b) I'm even fairly good with them.KLM were just wonderful—punctual, efficient, lovely staff, borderline edible food, and aeroplanes that didn't fall out of the sky, while also being among the cheapest tickets going at the time.¹ I'm getting much better at caffeine now that I've paid close attention to its long-term effects on me. These days I can drink a cup without entirely shafting myself; I just need to consider first how it's going to affect my sleep and behaviour for the next two days.

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The screaming horrors	[Jun. 28th, 2009\|05:24 pm]Footpad
[Tags\|children]Yesterday I woke to the sound of heartbroken wailing.My six-year-old nephew is being a terror to his mother. Like a Hollywood schizophrenic, he oscillates from the sweet enthusiasm of his natural character to sheer inexplicable nastiness. My sister's a saint: I simply don't know how she maintains her temper through the constant outbreaks of recalcitrance, tantrums, aggression, passive-aggression, sulking, destructiveness and outright malignance. The outbreak yesterday was ostensibly because he woke with the sudden realisation that he hadn't had a piece of cake the day before. Later he spent ten minutes hissing, "fucking idiot, fucking idiot" at his mother, then threatened to throw himself out of the car, and all because he couldn't have a chocolate bar. Nice one, kid.It rather reminds me of what akeela had to put up with when I was at the nadir of depression. But in little Jago's case it seems more like outright rebellion against the confines of life with his mother. He looks to me like a kid who needs a good entertaining demolition job to work off some of his inner wildness, but instead he's driving his mother to distraction over the petty excuse of sweets.I'm so glad he's not my problem. Children—who'd have 'em?
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The screaming horrors

[Jun. 28th, 2009|05:24 pm]Footpad

[**Tags**|children]Yesterday I woke to the sound of heartbroken wailing.My six-year-old nephew is being a terror to his mother. Like a Hollywood schizophrenic, he oscillates from the sweet enthusiasm of his natural character to sheer inexplicable nastiness. My sister's a saint: I simply don't know how she maintains her temper through the constant outbreaks of recalcitrance, tantrums, aggression, passive-aggression, sulking, destructiveness and outright malignance. The outbreak yesterday was ostensibly because he woke with the sudden realisation that he hadn't had a piece of cake the day before. Later he spent ten minutes hissing, "fucking idiot, fucking idiot" at his mother, then threatened to throw himself out of the car, and all because he couldn't have a chocolate bar. Nice one, kid.It rather reminds me of what

akeela had to put up with when I was at the nadir of depression. But in little Jago's case it seems more like outright rebellion against the confines of life with his mother. He looks to me like a kid who needs a good entertaining demolition job to work off some of his inner wildness, but instead he's driving his mother to distraction over the petty excuse of sweets.I'm so glad he's not my problem. Children—who'd have 'em?

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