You are allowed to enjoy this…

As it was the weekend we thought it might be nice to cheer up Verity with a quick trip to Toys R Us while Herbie had his afternoon nap under the watchful eye of his nan. The trip went as expected and she found the two Wonder Pets soft toys she had been looking for to bolster her collection to 3 x Ming Mings, 2 x Linnys and 2 x Tucks. Of course, I don’t expect you to understand the workings of the Wonder Pets and the characters.
While we were choosing a suitable soft toy for Herbie a family descended upon us and before we knew what was happening a large child (probably 11 or 12) had grabbed Verity by the arm and was using her as some kind of cantilever to lean forward into the soft toy display.

The Missus disengaged his grip while I tried to move my child out of the skirmish. She spoke to the father who replied with a pathetic excuse for his child’s obnoxious behaviour, which bordered on common assault on Verity:

“He’s autistic.”

I kept my reply simple and short: “Well you should keep him under control.”

As I shuffled away, shielding Verity from the sudden air of unpleasantness, I didn’t notice that the child had pulled Verity’s hat off or the father telling me curtly to “Fuck off!”. Thankfully, I was out of earshot otherwise the incident would have turned very bloody, very quickly.

I am sick of pathetic excuses. I am sure that there are plenty of parents out there with autistic children who do not use their condition as a reason for them to indulge in bad, threatening behaviour. This fellow should be grateful that they weren’t born fifty or hundred years earlier in a time where his “special” child would have been locked away in an asylum for their own protection and the protection of the public.

But hey, we live in enlightened times, don’t we? Whoopee-fucking-doo! Don’t it make you feel proud?

Nope…

Life and death is very much order of the day and quite a conversation topic for Verity. The departure of her friend Jim still weighs on her and she is equating getting older with dying. Asking me how long we’ve had Alex the Wonderdog, I tell her that it has been nearly ten years and he’s getting an old dog.

“Alex is old,” she says with alarming frequency now, “And when he dies we are going to get a new dog. A spotty dog. One I can stroke.”

No wonder Alex the Wonderdog growls at her and eyes her with suspicion.

The same logic has been applied to my up-coming birthday and with cold precision she keep foretelling my death and saying she’s going to buy a new dad when I’m gone.

You soon learn to grow a thick skin in this business.

One shaft of light appeared today when I told her that I needed to make some phonecalls and that I needed to call the estate agents.

“Estate agents are bad people!” she exclaimed, before running away in tears.

‘Nuff said.

I made waffles. This is the first time I’ve made waffles. The Missus bought me a new sandwich toaster which also doubles as a waffle grill. The outside of the toaster/waffle grill gets hotter than the inside. Something is afoot.

I digress. Here are my waffles…

Now the punchline to this entry reads as if it is made up, as if I am putting it down purely for comic effect, but I can assure you, dear reader, that the following exchange did happen yesterday evening.
The new place we are renting was the refuge of what I call an enthusiastic DIY-er. Now I have strong opinions about DIY and they go something like this: DON’T. There are some people who do a great job at home maintenance, but my experience is most do an half-arsed job of things and over the years I’ve become a bit “OCD” about screws. Yes, screws. In my previous home, the owner had taken the trouble (either by design or incompetence) to make sure that every single screw in every single fitting was odd – so you’d have screws of various shapes, sizes and colours holding the door handles on, etc.
Every time I sat down to have the morning movement, I was greeted by the sight of four odd screws gleaming back at me, taunting me, offending my vision with a symbolic one-fingered salute that was in my own mind. I mean, who would do such a thing? Why would anyone do such a half-arsed job? Not even myself could come up with such a scheme. I’m no handyman but I have a collection of different screws and nails in my little toolbox that I could approximate a similar screw. Heck, there’s always the local ironmonger or DIY store to help you with uniformity of your metalwork.
You can imagine the relief when the car smashed into the shop, it was an ideal excuse to get everything changed (at our own expense, I might add – there was no big compensation pay-out for the likes of us, no insurance scam, just the bare minimum to get by, etc). And so, we paid for all those little niggles to be wiped away. And no more was my sight offended by four odd screws to every fitment.
And so you can imagine my dismay when we arrived at the new home to find that the previous owner had a similar mental tick. Only this time it wasn’t odd screws, it was missing screws. Yes, you look at a door handle and there is one missing screws (or a combination of odd screws), and the handle to the back door is held on by two solitary screws. Another half-arsed DIY fanatic.
Also, every fitting wobbles or appears to be hanging on by sheer will power. We have shelves that teeter, and three shelves that are up so high that only I can reach them on tip-toes – and I’m six-foot in stockinged feet (though the last time i wore stockings was when I was ten years old – don’t ask). The person responsible is a moron and I want to smack him hard in the back of the head until he regains some sense or at least employs the services who can do the job properly. The irony (geddit?) was that a Screwfix Direct catalogue greeted us on the doorstep when we moved in so I should have read this as a portent of things to come.
The previous night, The Missus was putting some items on one of the shelves in the kitchen when it collapsed. On inspection, the whole thing was held up by four small pieces of plastic, three of which had sheered off and caused the collapse. Last night, we were discussing the incident and I offered to blow the dust from my tool box and make the repair, putting four replacement screws in place in order to hold up the shelf.
“Can I watch Daddy screw?” asked Verity in a loud bright voice.
Let’s just say the conversation ended there with us both raising our eyebrows and glad that the vicar hadn’t called around for evening tea.
Trust me, no one in their right mind wants to watch Daddy screw for I am just an enthusiastic amateur.

They were words that struck fear into my heart. How were we going to move on from this? How would this pan out in the future?

“When I am old enough I am going to get a tattoo, like Jim…” said Verity at bedtime last night.

She was always fascinated by the couple of tattoos Jim had on his arm and keeps wanting me to take her into the tattoo parlour we pass on our daily walks. Verity is only three and a half years old.

What the hell am I going to do when she is fifteen???

Somehow I feel I am on a hiding to nothing…

Verity is going to the hairdressers at the weekend for her first ever proper hair cut. She has decided that the hairdresser will be her new best friend.

“Daddy, you aren’t my best friend anymore,” she said having decided on a replacement, “I am going to take you to the meadow and leave you with the cows.”

To me, this sounded as if it came from the same school of euphemism as the kind of rhetoric you hear in a mafia movie – “He’s going to sleep with the fishes.” For a moment, a chill ran through me and then we moved onto the next subject of conversation.

Kids, ain’t they marvellous?