This doesn't feel like Christmas

I have a sneaking suspicion Christmas used to be more exciting than this when I was a kid.
For a start it's almost 4 am and my daughter is soundly asleep while my wife is downstairs wrapping up her presents.
If it had been left to me I would just now be trying to ascertain what stores are open at almost 4 am on Christmas Day.
When I was five-years-old I don't think I'd have been asleep at 4 am. On one occasion I stayed up most of the night in fervent expectation that some old guy with a white beard would leave a few eclectic offerings at the bottom of my bed.
Of course I didn't believe that rubbish some adults told us that Santa arrived down the chimney, because we didn't have one. Nor did I believe there was one Santa for the whole planet who visits x billion kids in one night. I'm not sure how anyone can fall for that.
But I did believe in Santa, although I rationalized it. I figured every local authority employed a few Santas that went round the houses ringing door bells. Hell maybe they had a Santa budget and a Christmas Committee that would make great fodder for the local newspaper when they implemented Santa cuts.
My thought process didn't make for an easy night. For a start, I'd listen out for the bell to ring for hours on end, probaby pissing off my parents no end.
Then after I finally fell into a fragile sleep for 10 minutes, I would feel the wonder of the magic stocking at the foot of my bed and eagerly trace the outline of the presents through the fabric.
I didn't actually get stockings. My mother put our presents in a couple of pairs of her hose (tights as they are known in the UK) which is just plain wrong now I come to think about it.
Then when we were finally allowed to open our presents at around 5 am we would rip them open enthusiastially and cherish each one, even the apples and walnuts that my parents used to pad out my mother's hose.
Often there would be a book about ghost stories and my sister and I would tell each other tales under the tree.
In the case of my daughter it's different. She'll wake up at about 9 am, yawn a lot and ignore most invitations to get excited about Christmas. Then she'll matter of factly open her presents and bug me to get out my chainsaw to remove them from their Fort Knox approved packaging.
I'm tempted to use her reaction as an allegory on how Christmas has lost its excitement and meaning.
But maybe she's just like that.

Yakety yak

The Chinese don't have a Year of the Yak but, if they did they would surely devote it to hairdressers.
I braved the salon early this morning in the vain hope that the hairdressers woudn't have oiled their jaws with coffee at such an hour.
My good intentions were in tatters within 10 seconds. That's how long it took for my least favorite sylist to catch my eye and to lure me across the room to her tatty torture chair.
No sooner had I recovered after a close to strangulation encounter with the black gown she had clingwrapped round my neck, than she was subjecting me to a barrage of questions about Thanksgiving, her matronly hams fiddling with various razors and bottles by the mirror.
I desperately played for time, talking slowly and mumbling something about recalling a turkey. The subtle hint that I was at Supercuts for a haircut as opposed to a cross examination was left to dy up on the cutting room floor.
My hairdresser continued into a spiel about how she didn't want to get up at the "arse crack of dawn" to visit her father on Christmas day but perhaps he wouldn't force her to do breakfast because her sister had moved to Georgia and they were close before, but nobody had liked his first wife but now they were divorced the situation was better and perhaps they would do breakfast and perhaps they wouldn't and did I want the back of my hair flattened off or rounded?
She had to repeat the last bit because I was flatlining.
In such situations I tend to be polite but monosyllabic. Maybe I have been beaten into submission by hairdressers. Back in the UK they'd always go on about their holidays but here in the US nobody has holidays so they talk about turkey and how oyster dressing makes them flatulent.
The only hairdresser I have ever had who hasn't submitted me to a verbal ordeal was a taciturn Russian woman I went to in Ilford who was more likely to cut my ear off than talk it off.
But unless I stand up to hairdressers soon I am going to snap because the alternative will be ending up resembling a montage of all of the early Jackson 5 because I'll be too rattled to ever get my hair cut.
Maybe I should have blurted out: "I'm sorry. I thought I came here for a haircut rather than a monologue on your dire and dysfunctional Christmas arrangements."
But knowing me I'll just continue to nod my head and run for the door as soon as she puts down her yakkety scissors.

The Death of TV

I'm old enough to remember the birth of television on our street.
That's not to say I was around in 1925 when John Logie Baird succeeded in making monochromatic silhouette images move on a screen.
But I recall the odd brown box that arrived in my parents' home one morning in the 1970s and the air of pioneer excitement and they fiddled with clunky dials and a picture fought its way out of a snow storm.
Back in those days there were just two channels, BBC 1 and BBC 2 and two colors, black and white, as well as the unedifying spectrum of greys in between. We could get ITV on a sunny day but my parents didn't approve because they were forced to watch adverts for commercial appliances, the latest transistor radios, twin tub washing machines or Cliff Richard spinning at 45 revolutions per minute.
Early TV provided a script for our childhood. We hid behind the sofa when we heard the alien theme tune of Doctor Who thumping through a vortex of time because we knew the Daleks were about to appear. We shared our early years with the avuncular presence of Ronnie Barker in Porridge and John Cleese strutting through the corridors of The Ministry of Silly Walks or beating up his Austin 1100 with a tree branch in Fawlty Towers.
And it sounds like a chiche, but some TV-less neighbors did come to our house to watch the wedding of Princess Anne and Captain Mark Phillips in 1973, although our mother was at pains to point out she didn't look like a fairytale princess; more like a horse.
Then there was adult TV, which meant something different in our childhood than it does now; the serious grown-up drama that my parents were addicted to such as When the Boat Comes In and Dennis Potter's Pennies from Heaven.
Color arrived in our home at some point in the 1970s. I can't remember when but I recall the characters from Dougal and the Magic Roundabout suddenly gaining the hallucinagenic hues of their LSD addled creators.
As we grew older TV ceased to lose its novelty and charm. It was just there in the corner of the room like a goldfish or picture, although I still have fond memories of the monotone voice that read out the football results on Grandstand and the game we played predicting what score came next based on its cadences.
At some time in the next decade I drifted away from TV. When I returned in the mid 1990s it was a curiously different creature from the one I had grown up with. The feeling was mildly disconcerting. It was as if I had been going into the garden to feed a reliable but unaminated pet rabbit every day for a decade, only to notice one day it had grown green tusks.
For me the green tusks of reality TV first arrived in the form of Changing Rooms. The plot was simple. Take two sets of neighbors who are good friends, add garish paint, some MDF, a ridiculous fop with a name like Llewelyn-Bowen and get them to decorate each other's homes, resulting in neighbors who weren't such good friends.
The other reality TV show that I first noticed was Airport, a fly-on-the wall about Heathrow airport. I was suspicious from the outset. I'd spent long enough hanging around Heathrow Airport waiting for delayed flights to not want to watch this kind of thing as a leisure activity.
My cynicism did little to arrest the forward march of reality TV.
About 10 years ago I attended a lecture by Peter Bazalgette a TV executive who outlined the vast popularity in Holland of a show in which random people were put in a house and eliminated by public vote. Bazalgette explained audience numbers peaked when two housemates had sex, which equated on the small screen to two grainy figures wriggling around in a sleeping bag.
The scene was set for Big Brother and the rest is history. I have lost track of how many tedious series of Big Brother have been filmed or the cast list of desperate wannabes the show has enabled. But by hanging on every action of these characters the media has transformed them into vacuous celebs who are famous for being famous.
Characters like Jade Goody made being talentless a talent. And they lived and died in the glare of tabloid TV.
Today I have more than 30 channels on a basic cable package in the US. I can surf them for hours without finding anything I have a remote interest in watching.
Reality TV is TV whether it's Wife Swap, the real housewives of whatever place you can think of, the Kardashians, The Osbournes, Hulk Hogan's daughter, men who catch crabs in cold places or men who force themselves to eat enough food to feed an African village for a week for a certificate.
And Bazalgette's monster has spawned in a way Frankenstein's never did. You can vote on America's best model, singer, dancer, cook. Surely America's top snail racer or sewage technician will soon be a mere lazy flick of a channel away.
Meanwhile I'm a Celebrity Get Me Out of here is in its umpteeth series on British TV and the soiled underwear of dozens of minor celebrities we had forgotten about is being paraded across the tabloids. TV has surely reached a parlous state when the departure from the show of Jordan, a woman famous for her gravity defying breasts, and I can't think what else, causes the viewing figures to plummet by two million.
If this isn't bad enough plans are now afoot to make the bushtucker trials, the stomach churning tasks the D-listers endure in I'm A Celebrity, such as eating kangaroo testicles and witchetty grubs, the centrepiece of new prime-time series.
Stateside our obsession with celebrity shows few signs of abating. In Colorado a father apparently pretended his son had floated off in a hot air balloon to raise publicity for a reality TV show he had pitched named The Science Detectives.
Perhaps he should be rewarded with a few bushtucker trials.
In DC a couple up for consideration for The Real Housewives of DC crashed a state dinner at the White House.
The monster unleashed by TV executives more than a decade ago who realized they could save money by avoiding high quality productions and using members of the public instead of actors, is out of control and nobody's going to round it up any time soon.
And as TV increasingly becomes fragmented and rendered obsolete by the Internet, it's hard to escape the conclusion that TV's going to be voted off this challenge.
Years ago when I first saw those flickering shades of gray it seemed like the beginning of something. Little did I realize I was peering into a golden age and contemplating the beginning of the end.

The Last Days of School

I have a lot of regrets about my pathetically short career as a teacher.
But not parting with $29.95 to buy The First Days of School isn't one of them.
The book by Harry and Rosemary Wong is the bible for new teachers. You see them showing up during the new teachers induction, its perky green font sticking out of their shiny, new tote bags. If they ever forgot it you saw them turn pale and give the kind of look reserved for the first passenger on the Titanic who does a lifeboat count.
For the uninitiated the Wongs write about how being a teacher is the best career in the world. Turn to page 106 and there's Harry dressed for success resplendent in a waistcoat in the door of his classroom, his hand outstretched to connect with those of his students, radiating Oriental efficiency from every pore.
"I love to stand at the door on the first day with a giant smile on my face, hand stuck out in an invitational pose, waiting for those 'little darlings' to come down the hall," the caption reads.
I don't want to shatter any illusions here, but I tried a similar thing and gave up after the second spurned handshake. The sight of a tsumani of 12th graders rolling my way convinced me I would be crushed into a pulp on the first day of school unless I retreated.
It didn't end as suddenly as that but I was crushed over the next few weeks.
I can't pinpoint exactly how and why I failed but I found it hard to act like a teacher at times.
It takes a few semesters to click into the mindset of a teacher which is similar to that of a prison guard. Always be suspicious and assume the little darlings are lying or on the make unless you have evidence to the contrary in the form of a pass, an email or something else official.
I had some effective teaching moments but I failed to be a classroom cop.
And at the final reckoning I realized two months in I was already beginning to hate the humorless automotan I knew I had to become to keep order. It was hard to switch off at times. I was barking orders at my daughter across the supermarket aisle and middle aged ladies were giving me funny looks.
As Wong correctly points out, the most important factor governing learning is classroom management. On many afternoons the words of the great classroom Confuscius would come back to haunt me at the end of another 90 minutes of hell under artificial lighting when I sat in the middle of a maelstrom of paper balls and mangled desks.
My head of department took a dim view and rightly so. Desks out of line and books thrown around were tantamount to an invitation to riot. From then on I was fastidious about lined up desks and paper on the floor, although they didn't always listen.
And my thoughts were out of line with my departent head on one key area. I felt the uneven desks and papers thrown around were a symptom of a general lack of respect, rather than the cause of the chaos.
Wong says humans have a success instict. I'm not sure this was the case with all of my 10th graders. Indeed some seemed to have a failure instict and told me they saw their future in shoplifting. This leads me to conclude either Wong is wrong or some of them weren't human.
With this in mind I spent 10 minutes of one of my lessons looking to see if any of my students had small antenna pointing out of their heads.
It broke up the lesson and wasn't any more useless than some of the activities suggsted in the local authority's curriculum guide; jigsaw activities; fishbone maps; sequential episode maps; thematic maps etc.
I considered doing a sequential episode map with my kids and changed my mind. This was, afterall, a class that took 15 minutes to sort themselves into four groups.
But they were good at some group activities. Fighting for one. With no effective prior direction and little preparatory work two of my 10th graders successfully managed to beat each other to a pulp, while I hopefully pressed the red panic button.
"Why didn't you break it up? You played rugby back in Britain," one student asked me afterward.
Those exaggerations always come back to bite you.
So now my teaching career is practically over and although I'll miss the prospect of working without pay next year, it's not all bad. For one thing I have more time to read Wong's tome.
Wong said schools should organize a first day of school celebration where the teachers should stand at the bus stop and welcome them. "Wave and smile like it's aunt Mabel whom you have not seen in 14 years and the airplane has just pulled up to the jetway."
Hmmm. I feel I need to contact Wong or find him on Twitter. I actually had an aunt called Mabel. She was objectionable and flatulent and last cracked a smile the day Prince Albert died.
My family never failed to crack open the champagne at the sight of her oversized backside waddling away to the bus stop.
On the subject of flatulence, Wong doesn't tell you what to do when someone breaks wind and the whole class runs screaming to the door.
I suppose if I'd had the classroom management thing down to pat they would have remained glued to their undersized chairs, their nostrils twitching, fearing my withering gaze more than the odor.
My kids weren't really like that but my fellow teachers told me it took time to get it right. Nobody listened to Lenin and Trotsky much at first. It took a civil war and a lot of upheavals before Stalin came in to impose some heavy duty classroom management.
Nor does Wong devote any lines to insects which, to my mind, is a grave omission in The First Days of Schools.
It only took an oversized fly to reduce my best class to chaos. Just when they were calming down the infernal creature would reappear to torment me. When one student tried to swat it on a girl's head, the victim wanted to see me outside to press charges.
They don't tell you how to deal with that kind of thing on the training course.
My fellow teachers told me there's a lot that you learn on the job. I have nothing but admiration for these heroes of the education system, who go into a war zone every day without complaint.
That's not strictly true. There was a guy I met sometimes at the photocopier who reminded me of Travis Bicker, the De Niro character in Taxi Driver.
He told me the conditions were getting worse, the kids were getting worse; nobody wanted to learn.
"I gotta get out of teaching," he told me in a New York drawl.
He was drawn and on edge. I wondered what he would do next.
The day I realized he was six years younger than me my mind went on a loop and those words kept circulating in my head. "I gotta get out of teaching."

Fall colors, Lake Maury, Newport News

A gray Saturday in Virginia

Today is Saturday and it could be the first day of the rest of my life.
But then so could any day.
The leaves lie limp on the tree outside the office window and there's a grayness hanging over the squat buildings of the toy soldiers' compound across the street and the gantries of the great shipyard beyond.
Soon the leaves will turn into a beautiful portfolio of red and russets although it's hard to imagine anything beautiful growing from the limp yellow offerings hanging outside the office.
It's funny how a densely populated city on a Saturday afternoon can feel like the surface of the moon. There's not a soul on the streets, trash is being kicked along and abandoned in cold corners by an aimless wind and even the linear highways are bereft of all but the occasional car. I hear a low whirr from my office window and it's gone.
There's a scanner voice out there in the areas of the office that still lie in quasi darkness like the half abandoned strip malls round these parts.
And information lies all around me, but nobody's making any sense of it. My redundant notepads are still here, a testament to two years of collecting information for people who will quickly forget.
Who now remembers Mary S. Thomas, two counts of child neglect or Christopher A. Judkins, abduction and kidnapping?
These nefarious acts that scour and scar and ruin existences, are commonplace on the yellowing pages of my notepad. The shorthand outlines take on a life of their own on the page. I can't even recall if they made it into print.
So many lives and deaths are forgotten about. Today I am driving through the city to see a woman whose uncle was blown away outside a convenience store two years ago.
It was the first day on my job as a crime correspondent. I heard the call but my predecessor went out and covered it. She wrote of the everyday nature of death. The school bus that had just disgorged its cargo when the youth worker was peppered with bullets outside the store.
The store closed for a while. Then it reopened. Life went on.
A few days later I went on the peace march. A small crowd lighted candles and placed flowers on every street corner of carnage, before they went home to finish off another day. So many victims: all forgotten now.
My predecessor ignored the quotes I had collected and put her name alone on the story. I only cared in passing. She went on to the education beat but left soon afterwards. Everbody's forgotten about her now.
Like the wind that batters old papers and sends them skidding from gutter to sidewalk, we are buffeted along uncertain paths and we play many roles before we return to a second childhood.
And we forget. Many of us completely, but some of us not so well.
I have a problem forgetting. Like I said I am a collector. I hoard memories, I miss faces; I reguarly make futile searches on Facebook for my best friend at university.
I miss people. I miss whole continents. I often see the late afternoon sun caught in the windows form a dazzling sculpture of mirrors on cliffs of Positano when I close my eyes.
Then I open them again. And it's still a gray Saturday in Virginia.

The First Month of School

Today I saw a girl in a busy hallway who I dimly recognized.
"Mr. Cifaldi," she said, and gave me a look as if she was unsuccessfully trying to reconstruct a relic from a lost age.
"Macaulay." I mumbled, as I struggled to remember her name.
Then it all clicked into place. I think the expression is epiphany. I should know as I've spent most of the week trying to teach epiphany in My Left Foot to a bunch of unreceptive 10th graders.
Roberta was another new teacher at my school back in the day, somewhere in the Jurassic period or at least in the dark ages when Beowulf was written.
A month ago to be exact.
We hung out one lunch time on the whirlwind induction week and talked about teaching. In measured tones and idealistically.
Have I mentioned it was only a month ago? Before the age of students.
Neither of us has got out much since; not out of our classrooms let alone into the sunshine.
Except when the school holds fire drills.
And the only contact I have had with my fellow students on the career switcher course has been on taut emails when they have described their nervous breakdowns.
The girl who landed a job teaching at the school I wanted to teach at quit after a week-and-a-half.
She couldn't stand another day trapped in a "windowless hell."
My classroom hasn't got windows either. And it can resemble hell.
Whenever an administrator comes in and all hell is breaking loose I tell him or her we are rehearsing Milton's Paradise Lost. There's a limit to how many times I can use that excuse.
The trouble is that, while I like many of my students individually, collectively they can become a rowdy mass that's hard to bring to heel.
But then sometimes, against all odds it works. The class is silent and I have to pinch myself to believe it's true.
Then a few minutes later it isn't. I'm floudering like a big filleted, flat fish on a beach as the tide recedes.
And inevitably time becomes the tide. I'm looking at the electronic slab of a clock, at the angular red letters on the gray wall, wondering if my material will run out before the bell. I know chaos could ensue on the next digit and if I lose their attention for a second, I'm doomed.
But let's look on the bright side. I survived a month and June is just round the corner. Kind of.

Jockey's Ridge

Sunday was a day of refracted sunlight and benign clouds that rolled across the azure skies of the Outer Banks without threatening cause any serious damage to anyone's mood.
When I first woke up the beach house felt the same as always. The holiday light still seeped through the plantation shutters in the morning, illuminating memories of long, lazy weekends in the days when I had more ahead of me.
But for the first time in nine years the familiar family portraits had gone from the bedroom walls and heirlooms were poking out of boxes on the floor. Order had been replaced with uncertainty.
Visiting my inlaw's home hasn't always been a pleasant experience and I confess there have been times when my foot has slipped off the accelerator as soon as we turned into their street and the car almost stalled.
But the idea of them selling up, leaving and searching for a cheap house in the dead heart of North Carolina after all these years filled me with sadness.
When I climed to the roof deck and looked over the sea and Sound, I wondered if it would be the last time I would gaze beyond the weather vane at the gentle roof contours upon a quiet Sunday by the sea.
And then, as if by instinct, I drove down the main highway averting my eyes from the neon signs, the strains of Kate Bush's Cloudbursting driving me onward from the stereo.
I turned off the highway into Jockey's Ridge State Park, where a vast sand dune towers over the flat inlets of these barrier islands.
With the sun still low in the sky and the clouds scurrying overhead, Jockey's Ridge was almost deserted.
Recent rains had formed lakes in the sand that weren't here the last time I walked across the dunes. Now they gleamed in the sand like circular washing basins that trapped the clouds and turned their fleecy undersides dark with refraction.
So I walked and I took photographs and I thought and felt the morning drift away as the sand warmed up on my feet.
And I wondered where the sand on the dunes would be when we were all displaced and gone and mankind had been rendered as insignificant as a glassy grain in the egg timer of history.

First Day of School

I haven't blogged for ages because I was recently offered a job teaching English at a local high school.
My first reaction was surprise because I had been on about 300 interviews. This quickly turned into euphoria and then panic at the thought of telling my bosses at work who were lining me up for the dizzy heights of covering the city of Newport News.
The Washington Post was meant to be offering me a job in its Hawaii bureau but the letter failed to arrive. We live in a new condo development and the mail is unreliable.
The first thing that hit me about school was the requirement to be somewhere the next day at 7:30 am. I didn't really know what 7:30 a.m. looked like but, in fact, it was similar to 8:30 a.m. with the requirement for even more coffee.
I haven't looked back or slept since.
For the last week I have been familiarizing myself with school procedures.
Monday was tough. We were trapped in an introductory meeting for about three hours without a bathroom break. Now it's one thing explaining away the fact you have never taught, quite another the fact that you are a new hire who has wet his pants in front of the whole school.
I made it without an accident but it was a close call. It felt like being back at school.
For the rest of the week I have been trying to make sense of the craziness, the bell schedules, the online tardiness procedure, the absence procedure, 504 plans, blocks, AYPs, SOLs and HELPs.
The only thing I seem to have remembered is where the red panic button is on the wall of my classroom. A successful lesson involves not pressing it within the first five minutes of class.
And nothing is simple. Searching for a grade 10 text I decided on The Great Gatsby because a- The Great Gatsby is a great novel and B - there are at least 30 copies in the school book closet in a decent condition.
But one of my colleagues came over all skeptical when I mentioned Gatsby. I could tell by the criss crossed lines that appeared on here forehead.
"That may be more grade 11. You'll have to check with the Grade 11 teachers that they're not using it."
So plan B is A Farewell to Arms. But there appear to be only 26 copies - leaving me about 4 short and many are in a dilapidated condition. So do I tell the class most can have a copy but three luck souls will have to buy one?
It's these kind of considerations you don't think about when a small light goes on one night and you think: I want to teach.

Charleston cemeteries

The last time I was in Charleston there was a lot of heat and a lot of kids.

At times like this escape is in order. I hastily made my excuses and headed into the labyrinth of old streets with my camera looking for the nearest cemetery.

Although I live in Virginia it doesn't feel a lot like the real old Antebellum south. There are too many wide highways and gleaming new buildings up here. Virginia has progresss and that doesn't always look pretty.

Antebellum is one of those curious pleasant-sounding words that describe something unpleasant.

To me the word conjures up sleepy images of plantations, festooned with Spanish moss and hammocks swaying under the Magnolia trees, rather than the days of strife and bloodshed that led up to the Civil War in a south scarred by the monstrous system of slavery.

The specter of the war still limps around some of these quiet streets and you can find a few old timers who still curse the Yankees.

But the good news for the visitor who has passed through hundreds of miles of hideous strip malls and Piggly Wiggly stores to get here, is that General Sherman didn't.

Charleston is a living museum and its churchyards are some of the most atmospheric places in America.

I've always had a fascination with cemeteries, be it the blackened necropolises of Glasgow where ghasty stone angels hold court against a sky of leaden clouds, or the quirky ivy-choked Cornish churchyards where gulls wheel high above the crashing turquoise sea.

When I was in Cairo years ago I wanted to visit the Cities of the Dead where the vast tombs have been converted into homes and given minaret towers. I was overruled by a partner at the time who had heard stories about tourists being stoned by the local kids.

At least I got to visit the grandest cemetery of them all, the Pyramids of Giza where some rather powerful people were buried under oversized headstones.

I have photographed seas of plain white crosses that stand like mournful sentinels over the empty fields of Flanders, celtic crosses beside monasteries in Ireland and tombs like small houses in Cuba.

If there was a world cemetery tour and I had the time, I would sign up for it.

Some people may find my fascination with such places morbid but I am always moved by cemeteries because they are a small window into the vastness of time and the transience of life.

They make you wonder who the people under the slabs were, what kinds of lives they led and, mostly importantly where they are now.

If I had the answer to that question I could become very rich. I might even be invited onto the Oprah show.

Cemeteries can be mourful and romantic. In Charleston they have a ghost tour where they recall how the ghost of Annabel Lee appears at the Unitarian Cemetery. Apparently Lee used to meet her young sailor lover here before her father found out about it and locked her away. The tale of doomed love inspired Edgar Allan Poe to write the poem Annabel Lee.

A day after hearing this tale I visited the Unitarian Cemetery to photograph it for a travel feature, but a downpour meant I only managed one uninspiring and hurried shot.

But there was no rain on the day I visited the chuchyard of St Philip's and the recent memory of fountains, hyperactive kids and extended family, led me to spend some time here, although I missed the grave of former Vice President and all round reactionary guy John C. Calhoun.

All of which gives me another reason to go back there.

The Art of Being a Crap Dad

I have this recurring nightmare that I'm on the shortlist for the Crap Dad of the Year award.

Imagine the Oscars and then whip away the red carpet and set it in a dingy, smoke-filled bingo hall in New Jersey and you've got the idea.

The bingo hall is full of dads who have left their offspring somewhere en route but can't remember exactly where.

In the dream a couple of dads come up and make speeches about how being a Crap Dad is an art form, thank the director and the sound man and recall a tale about how they sent their kids to school wearing their pants inside out.

Crap dads aren't like some of the fathers I report on. Dads who smoke crack around their kids are Bad Dads - Crap Dads are something else entirely.

You know you have been rumbled as a Crap Dad when you drop your daughter off so late at daycare that all of the other kids are midway through their midday nap. The teachers can expose a Crap Dad at 20 paces with their piercing stares.

You make the situation worse by apologizing too loudly and dropping your keys, causing about seven babies to jump up in their cribs and start wailing as you head for the parking lot.

I wasn't that late today. But I was late enough that the rest of my daughter's class was already outside involved in a rather frightening pursuit called Water Play.

(let's face it. If most of us were lined up against the wall and blasted with a hose in all weathers we'd probably describe it as water torture).

But Zara seems to like it. Unfortunately.

She methodically put her clothes in her bag and put on her water shoes, ready to go to water play. She hung up her bag.

Then the worst thing imaginable happened. All the other kids came back into the building, wet with shining morning faces. Water play was over and it wasn't even 9.30 a.m.

"You missed water play, ha ha." they screamed. It struck me as a conspiratorial cacophany.

Zara crumpled into a heap. I muttered a few meaningless words of consolation and put an arm round her, all to no avail.

So I beat an embarrassed retreat thinking if I'd been an assertive parent (ie. a mother) I would have confronted the teacher, asked if they could do water play for five minutes longer and threatened to withdraw her from the daycare if she refused.

More than 12 hours later Zara's still talking about it, but she doesn't seem too upset.

Still I worry. What if in 20 years time she looks back on the water play incident as the point when childhood ended and early angst set in? Did Jeffrey Dahmer have a 'water play moment' as a child that changed his life for ever and turned him into the sort of guy who cut up people and kept their skulls in his fridge?

I hope not but I'm scared to sleep because the Crap Dad dream may return. What if I end up as one of those shuffling out of the bingo hall clutching a gold over plastic Crap Dad Oscar?