The little black dictionary

I have, at various points, honoured the work of one of the great wordsmiths - Douglas Adams. Today I will continue to do so by adding more to his wonderful dictionary "The Meaning of Liff"; the basic premise of which was to take place names and to given them meanings for experiences we all have but for which there are no words.

Today, it's for the parents. A little black dictionary for those experiences you don't even want to admit to yourself that you have.

My apologies to the good people of Norwich and Norfolk.

Spixworth (n) - the thirty five cents or so of change which is all you're going to get from a fifty when you take the family to dinner at Maccas because you just can't be bothered cooking tonight.

Hellesdon (n) - the infernal experience of having to cope with the kids when you've got a force 10 flu going on and you'd really rather they all went to Hell so you could crawl back into bed and feel sorry for yourself.

Little Melton (n)- a polite way to describe the kid whose behaviour is a sure sign of future jail time and whose father is clearly where he got it from but with whom your child insists on maintaining a friendship, despite your ongoing efforts to:

• separate them,
• have the child expelled from the school or, at a pinch, 
• abducted by aliens.

Costessey (n) - the money you begrudge your kids occasionally because you'd rather spend it on a dirty weekend away than on the $120 rowing outfit they need and the $400 matching tracksuit, hat and gear bag.

Elsing (v) - just straight lying to your kids to get them off your back for ten minutes.

Barnham Broom (n) - the piece of cleaning equipment that you feel like wrapping around their heads because your children haven't managed to pick up the three bits of Lego, damp towel and orphaned school shoe that you've only asked them to tidy away twenty times in the last half hour.

Blofield (n)- those 16 square grid things that what passes for homework these days is laid out in and you know is going to be the bane of your existence for the next fortnight. Although three of the items are meditate, play a game with your family and exercise (which you can tick off on night one), the others are monsters. In reality, they are so difficult that you are going to have to do the work yourself, with just enough input from the kid to make you feel OK about it.

Stoke Holy Cross (expletive) - the only phrase you can come out with at 9pm when they are still fighting and won't go to sleep and you know you're not allowed to scream 'Go to sleep, you little shits!"

Surlingham (adj) - descriptive of the bedroom of a teenage daughter whose life is falling apart due to the injustice imposed by asking her to help with the washing up. There are probably rude little notes on the door, too.

Horning (v)- trying to get the kids into bed and asleep early.

Horsey Windpump (n) - the person who doesn't actually have young kids but feels the need to pass snide remarks about what good parenting is or to make comments like "Well my parents would never have put up with that".

Langley v Chedgrave - the important piece of case  law that allowed the defence of "having young children" to be advanced in cases of murder of Horsey Windpumps.

Saxlingham Nethergate (n) - the made up excuse you find for not attending your kids' school assembly or liturgy when, in reality, you just can't bear another minute of listening to the aural offences committed by the school band or the patronising, nasal voice of the principal.

It's beginning to look a lot like .....

Oh bloody hell, it's started again! The dreadful office tree is up, the shopping centres are bedecked with plastic holly and large gold objects of a shape which has no formal geometric name but looks uncomfortably like a butt-plug, greetings carefully constructed to avoid religious references abound and I have been press-ganged into the office party and Secret Santa (so named because no-one knows how to spell or pronounce Christkindl - it always comes out sounding like some kind of chip).

Christmas. If I had a residual sense of universal justice I would ask "What have I done to deserve this?" but, as I am now soundly convinced of the inherent randomness of the universe, I am putting the whole thing down to a meme that has mutated and gone cancerous.

The early signs of the disease started back in September with the emergence, in a hidden corner of the supermarket, of cards and gifts for one's loved ones overseas. A visit to the GP at that point would have been wise as he could have spotted the growth for what it was and excised it with a painless little procedure in his offices and sent it away for testing to detect any signs of malignant festivity.

Hindsight is a fine thing but, we are forced to admit, we ignored these early eruptions of fake snow and ploughed on regardless, distracted as we were by the quotidian concerns of work, family and fun.

Then, in mid November, the red started to spread from it's little corner and slowly pervaded more and more shelf space. H G Wells' Martian red weed has nothing on the Santa / holly / blood-like tones that crept like a threatening crimson shadow down the supermarket aisles, engulfing unwary products in its path.

At this point, had we been wise, a strong dose of radiation or some chemotherapy might have knocked the beard off the Santa and left him exposed for what he is; a strange, obsessive, fictional stalker with a long record of break and enter and a judgemental personality. But, again, we missed our opportunity.

For experts managing pandemics, the great fear is that the contagion will become airborne and its spread will be uncontainable. And that is exactly what happened in the last week of November. Infected by contact with badly drawn nativity scenes on cards or packets of discount mince pies, store staff made the fatal mistake of switching on the Christmas music. Medical authorities cried into their beers from sheer despair as George Michael, John Lennon, Bing Crosby and other opportunistic disease vectors spread the infection far and wide.

And now it's too late. Christmas has leaped from person to person. Increasingly serious cases are turning up at emergency departments every day having grown red hats, antlers and desperately jolly flashing earrings in consequence of having caught the disease. Mental health experts are overwhelmed by the number of adults regressing to childhood, pretending to be elves, sitting on the knee of the office creep who volunteered - yet again - to dress up the red suit this year and walking around ringing tiny little tinkly bells.

Houses and public buildings have become cesspools, spreading the illness to innocent passers-by through garish flashing lights, inflatable characters doing unlikely things on the roof and fake snow melting off the windows in the 35 degree heat and running in rivulets across the footpath.

There is now nothing for it; we are beyond cure. The whole country is going to be put into palliative care until the New Year after which, it is to be hoped, we will have found some kind of vaccine.

Then the wind changed

"Be careful. The wind might change and you'll get stuck like that!"

Some might say it's an old wives' tale but, looking around I have to disagree; if you keep your face that way and the wind changes, you'll be stuck like that forever. Sit at a cafe and look at the faces of people going by- you'll see what I mean:

The Eaglehawk: like the Muppets character, this lady looks at you from on high , down the length of her nose. And what a nose! Even if it's not actually a beak, it gives off a definite sense of beakiness, a beak- aura, if you will . There's an implied pair of half-glasses there too and, whatever it is, you know she disapproves of it

The White Rabbit: crafted by many years of dragging unwilling children through uninteresting shops - with no time to say hello, goodbye - this face retains its air of put upon panic well into middle age (>60) and beyond. The reason for the frazzle has gone but the face of the frazzle has stayed. Stop and chat to this face at your peril.

The Charlotte Bartlett: Made famous by Maggie Smith's portrayal of the eponymous character in "Room With a View" (oh Helena, how my teenage heart longed for you) this visage is characterised by resigned, long suffering disappointment with just a pinch of unappreciated self-denial for flavour. There is a slight pursing of the lips that happens every so often, like a nervous tic. It doesn't, generally,seem to be related to any apparent cause for disapproval but small children, public laughter, unsuitable shirts in shop windows or a slight change in the relative humidity - all crosses to be borne - will trigger the tic and implied sigh of resignation.

The Bambi: The dead give away that someone was dazzled by the headlights of oncoming life when the wind changed is the slightly open mouth.  It is usually matched with the gentle frown and general air of being thirty seconds or so behind unfolding events. It is a face that will probably have to blink once or twice when spoken to in order to bring it's owner's focus into the here and now.

The Winston-ish Churchill: This is a face almost solely seen on men.  It's a look they've been building to all their lives.  There is a slight tightening of the mouth,  a disdainful look in the eyes and a definite feeling that the next sentence will start with "Well, young man,  in my day ...". It is a face of assumed but unearned superiority.

The Billy Connolly: This is the face I want when the breeze backs into the West for me.  It's a face that has seen the joke. There is the merest hint of a smile at the corners of the mouth,  a gentle gleam in the eyes and a tendency to look at you sideways and grin when someone is griping their latest gripe.  This face is welcome anywhere and a real relief,  particularly to the young,  because they know that they'll walk away feeling better about themselves and their lives. I want to have this face.

Transparency - the curse of knowing

If we were to list the public morals of the Western world in the 21st century, in any top 5 list the word "transparency" would have to come up. It is usually paired with "accountability". This loving couple brings to us the message that

"everything about you should be known to anyone that wants to know and you should be able to answer, to that anyone's satisfaction, any question about your actions with a reasonable and rational response".

"anyone that wants to know" is often rephrased as "stakeholders". I often think it's worth remembering that Dracula had stake holders too and they didn't do him all that much good.

Is transparency truly a good idea?

I have a packet of chips next to me. I know they're not healthy. Pure fat and salt wrapped around a piece of potato of sub-atomic thickness. Do I really need to know that in every 50g serve there is 150% of my lifetime's allowance of sodium and enough fat to keep most of the population of the Horn of Africa alive for a month? No. Honestly, I don't want to know. It's not going to change my behaviour - I'm still going to eat the things.

I saw an autopsy once. All those squidgy bits packed so tightly in together. It's not pretty. If you've ever witnessed one it should be enough to convince you that seeing what goes on inside a person is not a good thing. Admire his well chiselled features, his high, academic forehead, and his manly biceps. You don't want to see how any of that is made, trust me. Anything south of the mouth and north of the .. and so forth, is best left to the surgeons. Opacity is our good friend in this case. I suspect that the darkness behind the eyes is also best left un-illuminated. Messrs Escher and Burton have nothing on my brain. And I don't think I'm unique. Men walking up inverted staircases and hands that draw each other are dealt with before breakfast. From then on it gets seriously weird. You really want this to be transparent? If you ask why I did something, do you truly think the answer will make sense? I'll tell you something I think you want to hear but I could be doing it because the little puppet figure with the big head fell off the self-sustaining waterfall and wound up stuck in a room full of prime numbers with a bad base of acalculia. For your sake and that of your loved ones, just take my explanations at face value and don't worry about where they came from.

Sometimes I think real business is like that too. I watch the latest scandal involving quasi-government Australian companies selling wheat to dodgy dictators or going through a suspicious amount of petty cash and brown paper bags and I wonder why I needed to know. Our guys are making a profit. Their guys are eating. Provided we're not burning children or funding another bloody zombie apocalypse movie or committing other crimes against humanity, did I need to look through that particular window? A discrete drawing of the blinds might have been better. The world isn't full of nice people and we have to do business with the world. Far better not to know what we had to wash off our hands afterwards.

If you're spending my money or pouring luminescent putrescence into my waterways as you produce your thneeds then I need to know what you're doing and why - here are my fifteen cents and a nail - but sometimes I think that we, as human beings, need to realise that there is a sane, rational and reasonable world that we need to pretend that we live in and then there's the darkness of real existence - chaotic, unpredictable, random, and existing in fractional dimensions. To take the wrong pill and wake up outside our comfortable Matrix might not be such a good idea - there be dragons.

Making your childhood dreams come true

I am very disappointed. A lifetime of twee kids movies and self-help books had led me to believe that, if I worked hard enough and truly, really-truly, believed with all my heart, that my childhood dreams would come true. I too could get an all-smiles freeze frame shot with my whole family and a jaunty little tune over the credits.

And have they come true? Have they what?

I have tried for years, man and boy, to make the swing go all the way over. It was the classic boyhood dream that one day I'd be strong enough to lean back super-hard on those chains and make the swing go so fast that it would loop right up and over and I would come screaming down the other side - the envy of all I surveyed. And it hasn't happened. No matter how big and tall I've become, how many of my greens I've eaten, it just won't work. I get to almost horizontal, the chain goes slack and my dreams sag with it.

And while we're talking about flying, I've never managed to get into space. My homemade rocket boosters - thoughtfully built using recycled materials such as toilet rolls and cotton wool with a touch of metho - did nothing. Not even so much as a creditable disaster on the launch pad. Absolutely nothing. So I upgraded the tube to empty paint cans, nailed onto the back of the cubby. Orbit? No. On reflection, it may be as well that this particular dream didn't work because my life-support system consisted mainly of a purloined length of garden hose but the principle remains! It was my childhood dream. And it hasn't come true. Even as a grown-up, I can't get the damn cubby-house off the ground.

Nor the car. Sitting in the middle of the back seat as a kid, I knew I was on a runway. The night was dark, the headlights illuminated the morse-code lines down the middle of the road and the runway edges were marked in flashing red and white. If dad would only pull back hard enough on that steering wheel we were absolutely going to fly all the way home. The only reason it didn't work was that dad just wasn't trying hard enough. Or so I thought. I am the dad now and, try as I might, I just can't get the DeLorean effect. Another one bites the dust.

2015 is next year, by the way. The bloody car companies have some serious R&D to get done.

If I couldn't get to the sky, the next dream involved getting the sky to come to me. I could attract lightning! My parents, dream killers that they are, were less than keen to provide me with a key and a kite so I had to work out my own plan. Metal attracts lightning so the more metal you have, the more likely you are to get yourself killed. So, get as much as possible. Lots and lots of nails hammered into a block of wood and stuck out in the rain? Rust. An old pineapple tin cut down the sides and opened up to look like a receiving dish then nailed to a block of wood? More rust. What's a boy got to do? Trees could do it all by themselves with no metal. I worked and believed my little heart out and not so much as a tingling feeling on the end of my tongue.

I was lied to. Were you?

Getting all medieval on my ....

I was highly distressed recently to realise that The Australian Bureau of Statistics has put me into the middle-aged cohort, Once you pass 40, that's officially "it", you've summitted. All that's left for you now is to make it safely back to base camp and write your memoirs in the hope that these will pay for it all.

Even more distressing and disappointing is just how much sympathy I haven't gotten from my nearest and (now formerly) dearest. My loud denunciations of this egregious mistake of categorisation are met not with rousing cries and exhorations to man the picket lines but with slight smiles, a shake of the head and softly spoken treachery in the form of statements like, "Well you are, dear". It's as if they are keen for my demise to begin. Well, I warn you all now, there's not that much there to inherit just yet so don't wish me gone too quickly.

And so it seems that I am now medieval. Not that I'm all that happy about it.

Firstly, the middle ages were characterised by the feudal system with older men at the top in positions of seniority and respect with all sorts of privileges including the droit de signeur. Tragically I find myself, at 41,  sans castle, sans vassals and with my wife keeping a close eye on any exercising of droits that might be in contemplation. Given some of the conversations I heard at the shopping centre this morning, however, I appear to be well supplied in the way of fools.

(How on Earth can you turn a metal tin, designed to store one's dishwasher tablets, humorously shaped as a dishwasher, into a ten minute conversation?)

I don't like the idea of middle age. I don't look at myself in the mirror all that much - probably because the answer to the question I might ask said mirror would almost certainly be "Well it sure ain't you, pal" but I don't think I look old enough to be middle-aged just yet.

Middle age always reminds me of the couple in the Meaning of Life

Struggling to find anything interesting enough any more to warrant talking about. And I just can't see myself in that hat.

It's a time of life when sexual attractiveness has faded to a pleasant reminiscence and that's not good. Middle aged people are probably sexually attractive to one another, but that's hardly the point. As any man will tell you, it's not a question of actually wanting to have an affair, it's just the knowledge that you'd be at the starting line with other contenders in the Golden Chase for 25 year olds, having blitzed through in the qualifying rounds.

It's also the time of life your parents were at in the earliest real memories you have of them. You were ten or twelve and they were 40 or thereabouts. And they were always old. Parents were always old and uncool and finding their joy in coffee and chat, not sunny beach and silly buggers. I don't want to think of myself as having reached the stage where my children will start at loving contempt and slowly graduate to doting pity and finally sympathetic visits and loud inquiries as to whether I've remembered to take my pills today.

There is also that first hint of gathering darkness, just out there on the horizon. I can see the distant flashes of lightning and know that the storm approacheth. Unlike the me of my adolescent delusions, this me will not live forever, hiding out in society and changing my name every eighty years so that people don't get all hysterical and burn me for a warlock. I will die at some point. This brilliant coruscation that is consciousness will one day be gone and I have no evidence at all that my being will continue beyond that point. I am not afraid but I'm not happy about it.

So I've decided that my own person medieval period will be short. Enter my personal Leonardo and my own Renaissance. Quite how that's going to work in reality, I don't know but I'll keep you posted.

Developments in the ultimate reality show

The public outcry has been predictably muted following the eviction of Zoroaster from The Deity following weeks of speculation that the ancient Persian god had been out of the A-league for too long to remain competitive. Something of a wildcard from the beginning, Zara - as he'd become known on social media - was never really expected to make the final cut but will probably not disappear into oblivion quite yet as the chat shows and gossip mags will want to listen to his commandments for a few weeks at least.

Zara joins a list of gods that have made the walk of shame from Nirvana - the show's glamorous set at MovieWorld on the Gold Coast - and out of contention to be the god of the world.

The Aztec's were the first to go when Huitzilopochtli got only four nominations in the first round of public voting. Pundits speculated that this was mostly because his name was impossible to SMS or pronounce for the viewers that call the 1900 number.

Zuul went in controversial circumstances following accusations that she wasn't a real god at all but just something made up for the Ghostbusters movies. The producers were rumoured to be upset by the loss because a little 1980's sex appeal was a good thing for the ratings and did something to offset the oversupply of men in beards and robes.

 As for Venkmann, he didn't even make it past the auditions after forgetting the famous advice that "When someone asks you if you are a god, you say YES!"

Thor looks unlikely to continue much longer either. The Norse thunder god is just not competitive in the various styles of godding that are required of the contestants. He started strongly with a great audition calling down the wrath of the weather and striking fear and awe into the hearts of the peasants. He seemed to be likely to go far after he incinerated Simon Cowell for being excessively facetious and annoying.  Since then, though, Thor has struggled to demonstrate versatility, unable to change water into wine, cure lepers, or move mountains as required.

The favourites in the competition, Jesus and Mohammed, continue to perform strongly but there are whispers on social media that Mohammed's support is waning as people are reminded that he never claimed to be a god at all - merely the prophet of the god. This is the same god that Jesus and Yahweh - the leading Jewish contender following the loss of Baal in the early days of the contest - claim to be and questions are being asked as to whether the big M has the hubris to succeed under pressure.

Zeus is the surprise challenger. The old man turns out to have versatility that no-one expected. When asked to show diversity in the Manifestation round, Jesus only managed tongues of fire. Yahweh looked to have taken the round with a pillar of fire and the same of smoke but Zeus came out of left field and blitzed the public with a goose and a golden shower. Always trust experience.

We are all looking forward to October when one deity will be chosen as god of all the world and will then bring an end to religious disputes for all time - thanks to the power of reality television.