Winter comes early to Durham

Winter has come early to Durham (late November 2010). We've had epic, blanketing amounts of snow over the weekend, and again today. Proper seasons, not like them in that there London...

To their huge credit (though this is not quite how Liam saw it), his school - Blue Coat Junior, in Newton Hall - defied the snow to insist on opening, when pretty much every other school in the city closed. Most of the staff live locally, it seems. We got there OK in the morning, by bus, to learn that only two other kids had made it from Liam's class.

But when it came to collect him, Valeria and I ended up walking the mile or so in a full-on blizzard... It reminded us of the Shackleton DVD we watched recently. Paraphrasing Sir Ernest somewhat: "TO BLUE COAT JUNIOR SCHOOL! FIVE HUNDRED METRES A DAY!" But Valeria did look very cute in the snowstorm...

Daddy also made two snowmen to greet those trekking up our road... And Liam made a couple of creditable snow angels in our front garden... Round the back of Country Hall, about a 10 minute trudge from our house, there are a couple of agreeably steep and long hillsides for sledging.


Liam took a while to feel comfortable with having a go, but loved it after one run. Hopefully you can open the film of one go...

Two out of three ain't bad...

I've written elsewhere about Liam's complex relationship with football. All right, all right, about MY complex relationship with 'Liam and football'.

Like most football-mad Dads I had hoped my only son would similarly love the beautiful game, and we'd share that bond forever: replica shirts for birthdays, bunking off work/school to go to away games in Europe, having someone to confide in about my fears re: Arsenal's options in goalkeepers, etc etc... But I'm starting to accept the reality that Fate has dealt me. My name is Graham, and my son is utterly indifferent to football.

With hindsight, alarm bells should have been ringing from the outset. There is an infamous passage in the family video of Liam's first ever birthday, when he staggers over to the TV showing an Arsenal match (highlights admittedly, but still...). Liam takes one look at the screen, one look at Daddy, and switches off the telly. At the time, I put it down to his playful experimentation with cause-and-effect. Now...? I can barely watch the footage without wincing inside.

And yet, with a ball at his feet, Liam had shown reasonable promise: look at these pictures, taken when he was four. Check out the Cruyff-esque command of the ball at his feet, as if he is surveying the positions adopted by his team-mates; why, in the next picture, he's even trying a prototype drag-back. The main picture at the top, meanwhile, suggests an emerging thunder to his shooting. (We'll overlook the bottle of fruit juice in his hand below which, while technically not covered in detail in the FIFA rulebook, is probably frowned upon...) More recently, Liam's form with a football has been patchy. There is the elegance of this strike of a foam ball on his birthday... ... but see how he's leaning back as he approaches this ball in a square in Barcelona - that could go anywhere (well, if it wasn't made of iron and secured to the pavement, but you know what I mean).

As for going to see live games, to enthuse him with the raw emotion of the crowd, and that sense of affiliation with a common tribe, and the artistic spectacle of the game in all its glory... Well, up here in the North East, I'm at a bit of a disadvantage on that front, with a choice between Sunderland, Newcastle and Middlesbrough (and Hartlepool United and Darlington, OK, but talk about digging your own grave!).

To date, Liam has been three times to a live game: Sunderland twice, and at no stage in any of the 270 minutes he has witnessed first-hand did even so much as a hint of a possibility of a monkey's being given cross his cherubic little face... So that approach was doomed.

The end of the dream came quickly this year, in two quite desperate episodes. The first was one Saturday afternoon, when he was doing his drawing on our table and I was working o the laptop listening to 5 Live's commmentary of Arsenal away at Bolton. We were 1-0 with eight minutes to go, when we scored a second.

"YEEEEEEEEEESSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! COME ON!!!!" I cried, punching the air.

"What? What is it, Daddy?"

"Liam, Arsenal have just scored, we're going to win", I explained, hoping subtly and subliminally to make that connection in his formative mid: Arsenal scoring = extreme happiness (YOU SHOULD TRY IT, SON!)

Liam's answer? "Dad, I don't care".

It was difficult to see a way back from that. But the final moment - almost certainly, although there is always hope - came during the World Cup this year, when Liam asked, "why does it have to last A WHOLE MONTH?!" I mean, the one gene you want to pass on...! But no, I have to face facts: it just doesn't look like it's happened.

So - one down. But, there is hope: Liam has always been a creative little boy, he's good at drawing and making stuff, and when he was five he came home from school with "his first real six-string". Talk about an emerging Seasick Steve-style commitment to the blues in its purest form!

It got better when, later that night, just before bedtime, he gave his debut performance, singing a medley of the classics, while displaying his virtuousity in switching effortlessly between guitar styles... (Watch for his face at the end, when he tries to get his head around some of the more peculiar edicts of punk rock.)



Then, when I came home from, well, see the previous post, I learned that Liam is now taking guitar lessons at school. He promptly got out his real axe, and started to set up. Amazed, and bursting with joy, I asked him waht he was doing.

"E Minor" came the reply.

Glasses off, eyes dabbed for the best part of half an hour I think.

And so this is what I'm clinging to, his not-yet-confirmed-but-surely-latent love of music. When we're both on the table doing our thing - him drawing, me probably some bloody deadline or other - and I've got the music on, his head nods sub-consciously along, and he has a clear preference for noisy guitars. As he once put it, albeit - I think - with a bit of help from me - "I like the ones where you can't hear what he's singing over the guitars".

Not sure I could put it better myself.

Now, I worked in a song reference in the title, but to be honest I'm not sure what should be the third of the Vital Trinity: football, music, and....? Any ideas?