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?

Liam rides his bike without stabilisers!

It's a defining moment for any parent: the first time your child rides their bike without stabilisers. And, yesterday, April 19th 2009 at the age of 5 and three-quarters, Liam did it.

We had expected him to take to it, as he had been completely without fear on his tricycle aged 2 - see the report at the end here - but we were also fearful of him falling off the instant we let go the saddle, and being traumatised, primarily by a sense of failure (he can be quite hard on himself when things don't go according to plan).

We had a few practices in the back garden (2-3 minutes tops), then moved to the park on Park House Road for the showdown with destiny!

And, of course, Liam being Liam, as soon as we let go he was off! The first film below is, literally, only his 2nd ever try - a creditable effort, the unorthodox 'controlled stop' technique notwithstanding!

As you can see in the later film (below), he had become so blase about the whole thing he could admonish his own father for not keeping up!

Also, out of nowhere, spontaneously, and not - we hope - driven by our seething ambitions for the boy (which amount to him being happy whatever he wants to do), he said, "I want to make you proud!"

Which we both were, of course.

Christmas in Tenerife, 2007

We felt we needed a break for Christmas 2007, but faffed to such a level that we would be shoo-ins to represent the North East in any nationwide Faff-off, so much so that we'd be worth an outside bet for the paired dithering and coxless prevarication events. In the end, we got a good deal on a week's half-board 3* flight-and-hotel in Puerto de la Cruz, in the north of Tenerife, the opposite end to the all-the-steak-and-chips-you-can-eat-24-hours-a-day-and-would-sir-like-a-dodgy-timeshare-with-that? horror of Playa de las Americas.

In the hotel room, on the last night in our best tops!

We flew out on Christmas Day, and I was half-expecting to see Jeremy Beadle waiting by the revolving doors at Newcastle Airport ready to ask, "it's Christmas Day ya pillock, who flies on Christmas Day?!" But, no - the Thomson staff were at check-in, thinking of the overtime premium no doubt. Then the pilot walked in wearing a Santa hat, which didn't quite give off the 'cool, detached professionalism' vibe you look for in someone in charge of one hundred tons of aircraft sheduled to carry you and your next of kin across a body of ocean.

But he got us there, and we stayed at the Hotel Florida, with - as you can see - a decent sea view and of mount Teide, replete with festive snow. It served its purpose as a hotel, nothing special.

And we had a great time: 22 degrees every day, the beach (black sand, but clean) only two blocks down the road, and a hotel pool - though not heated, so dips were bracing rather than relaxing. Still, Liam loved it in there.

Here are some pics of Liam having fun variously the plane on the way over, in the pool, in the hotel's and the town's centre playgrounds, and on the beach at Playa Martinez. Readers who venture beyond this point may see me in just my swim shorts. You have been warned...






































































He also loved the Outdoor Chess set, despite his - er - rudimentary grasp of the rules and strategies (see what we think is a very funny film somewhere near here):





The great tourist attraction of Puerto de la Cruz is Tenerife's excellent Loro Parque zoo. It's walkable from the hotels, and has a tremendous collection of animals, including - as you can see below and hereabouts - crocodiles, gorillas, killer whales and dolphins, penguins, seals, and monkeys.

As we walked around, Liam asked me to make a Plasticine figure of whichever animal we were viewing, and he's holding my attempt at a penguin in one of the pictures below.(It's possible you can't quite tell from the picture, but take it from me, it was uncanny. Aardman Animations, I'm waiting for the call...)