The postman knows us very well. There isn’t a week goes by where we don’t get a package of some sorts. It’s got to the stage where he knows we’ll be about so holds on to packages for use if he misses us while we’re on the nursery/food/chicken feed run and swings by later to pass them in. Every single package is for Vonnie. The stuff inside might be for the kids but it’s always addressed to Vonnie. Then last week a box arrived addressed to myself…
Turn back time to just over a month ago. I’m sitting at my desk at work trying desperately to do as little as possible whilst still looking busy (for all prospective employers out there…read back through my journal as there is a reason for it ;)) I stumbled upon a competition being run by the Scottish Book Trust. All you had to do was complete the titles of a few books and give their authors and you could win a few books. Easy. So over lunch I completed my entry and then completely forgot all about it. That was until the other week when I received an email saying I’d won the competition. With it being kids books it was a nice win but my limit of good luck never stretched to more than a few quids worth of prizes.
Now we’ve had a few freebies from them in the past. One of the things they do is to reach out to every child in Scotland and at various times of their give them a bundle of books to help encourage the love of reading. So needless to say with having four kids we’ve seen our fair share of Bookstart books come through the door.
What arrived was a little more than a few free books however.
Rory and his Magic Castle by Andrew Wolffe Yo-Ho-Ho A-Pirating We’ll Go by Kaye Umansky Stella to Earth by Simon Puttock Mungo and the Picture Book Pirates by Timothy Knapman Captain Flinn and the Pirate Dinosaurs by Giles Andreae The Octonauts & the Sea of Shade by Meomi Chick by Ed Vere Paddington : King of the Castle by Michael Bond Love From Louisa by Simon Puttock Call Me Gorgeous by Giles Milton I Love Holidays by Anna Walker Red Rockets and Rainbow Jelly by Sue Heap and Nick Sharratt Hairy Maclary from Donaldson’s Dairy by Lynley Dodd The Very Hungry Caterpillar by Eric Carle
To buy all that in the shops your looking at around £60 and Nairn’s already demanding to have the dinosaur pirates one read to him at night. We already own a copy of The Very Hungry Caterpiller just like every household with children in the UK but I think we’re on to our 5th copy and that is on it’s last legs. My favourite off them all must be Chick though. With us keeping chickens it’s a great wee book for the kids but Nairn was the only one of the younger kids to go through the hatching of our chicks and be able to remember it. If we don’t hatch this year then it will be perfect for the girls to get a better look at how our chickens live.
So needless to say I’m very pleased with the prize and so are the kids. Now all I need to do is buy them another bookshelf to fit their new books on!
So hows things with us other than winning books? We’re getting there. Greer is loaded with the cold and seems to be teething so we’ve been up a fair bit of the last two nights. Vonnie says my eyes look like pinholes which is a nice look. With Nairn we’ve got the whole speech therapy thing going on as well as trying to work out whether it’s in his best interest to go to school a year early or not as well as working out just what school we should be sending to him. Erica’s speech is confusing me. She still has her own wee language almost as her pronunciations aren’t great but in the last few days her fluency has shot through the roof. Findlay? He’s in his own wee work with his laptop these days. If he’s not playing on Club Penguin he’s round at his friends houses.
Today all the kids are at nursery so although I had plans to use that fact to get started on decorating the girls room it’s looking like a quiet day with tea and a sofa to snooze on. This isn’t a bad thing.
When we moved up into Primary 7 our footballing world changed considerably. Gone were our best players and we didn’t have enough new talent coming through from the year below us to pose a serious threat to anyone. We called in a few of the fringe players from Primary 7 and they actually surprised us even if they weren’t used to playing in an 11-a-side team. The other change was that one of the other local schools was being refitted and their P6 and P7 classes moved into our school for a year. Where we used to struggle to to fill two 7-a-side teams for games at lunchtime we were getting 14 v 14 at times and it became an intense rivalry over the weeks and months that it went on. Games would be started at the morning break if we hadn’t already managed to get a game underway before school actually started in the morning. We’d then have a long ‘half’ at lunchtime where our players would join in as and when they finished their lunch and we would finish it off at the afternoon break. The rivalry went much further than just football though. When it came time for the local school swimming championships one of their players managed to get a silver in the 50m freestyle competition. Their joy was short lived when they realised that Craig had stole the gold and I’d brought home the bronze. I don’t think we ever let them forget that.
This year seen our best result so far and possibly the one result we remember. We didn’t even win and it was our best result. How sad is that? As with almost all schools in the West of Scotland there is a huge rivalry between the catholic schools and the non-catholic schools. Some say it’s a bad thing but at that age almost no one is interested in bigotry side of things as it’s all about the fact we were better than they were at whatever we were playing or vice versa. Our Lady of Lourdes Primary was our enemy. Where we had a healthy rivalry with Kirktonholme as they were sharing our school Our Lady of Lourdes was actually the nearest school to where most of us lived. If I went to the corner shops at the end of my street you could see it. We never mixed with them and so the only time we could get one up on them was during sports. Unfortunately they had one of the best teams in the league. The previous year they were putting six or seven goals past us with ease but this time we were determined to get something back from them.
I’d been moved over to play in central defence by this point and I managed to get a good understanding with the other defenders. Nothing could get past us on the ground as every time the ball came near us we would throw a crunching tackle in and clear the ball back up the park. Where we fell down however was we were still as slow as hell. All it took was someone to realise that we couldn’t keep up with their forwards and boot the ball over our heads and have it come down to a foot race. Our Lady of Lourdes hadn’t worked this out though. We got stuck into them hard during a cup game and pretty soon we were drawing 2-2 with them and the scoreline stayed that way until the final whistle. You would have though we had won the cup given the way we were celebrating. Before the game we were told that in the event of a tie as there was no time for replays and because we were under a certain age and couldn’t play extra time whoever put the most pressure on the other team and won the most corner kicks would be declared the winner. For every corner they had won we must have won at least two we were that worked up about this game. Then their headmistress got involved. It was unheard of for her team to lose like that and was putting in a complaint that the referee was biased towards us. There we were having played our hearts out and finally won something even if it wasn’t technically a win and she was pulling it away from us. I’d skinned the entire length of my leg on the ash park after throwing everything I had into every tackle and ended up having to get a lift back to the first aid room at the school. Whatever happened after that game though we have no idea but we found out at the next practice that we were having to replay the game. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a bunch of eleven year olds make so much noise in disgust before. Needless to say they put about 13 goals past us in the replay.
We took part in a seven-a-side competition in Strathclyde Park about midway through the season and were about the only team from East Kilbride taking part. Sometimes I wonder how we managed to get into these things when we were so far down the league but we never questioned it at the time. In our group stage were three other teams and basically if you didn’t win two out of your three games you weren’t going through to the next round. So the first game we played we were completely overwhelmed. There was no beating about the bush they were just far superior to us. At this point we realised that the team we were due to play next was being managed by Derek Ferguson and as we were almost all Rangers supporters we spent more time trying to talk to him than concentrating on the games. As I can completely understand now he got a little pissed off with us and ended up have our manager pull us away so that he could work with his team. It was at this point that someone realised that the reason Derek was managing the next team was that his younger brother played for them. We were royally beaten but the game didn’t end before I managed to kick the younger brother, Barry, up in the air and almost end his future career before it started*. It wasn’t malicious but I was terrified Derek was going to beat seven different shades out of me. We got stuck in and as with any competition we ever entered we started to play well as soon as it was impossible for us to win anything. We beat that team but we were on the bus home within 5 minutes of the game ending feeling as though we hadn’t won a thing.
Again we finished second last in the league although this time I managed to captain the team a couple of times.
Even 7 years later when I was still playing for hours every night I could never get that feel for competitive football again. Throughout secondary school I never played a game outwith P.E. and certainly was never picked to train with the team. I became more comfortable on the ball and my passing improved and with that my position gradually changed from a centre half to somewhere in the midfield. I don’t play football very often now. Those of my friends that do play all have regular games which I can never get into and to be honest until I get a clean bill of health from the doctors anything that involves me running about is off the cards.
I would spend days and weeks playing Football Manager/Championship Manager on my computer during the winter months whilst waiting for the weather to become good enough to play for real. I ate up anything I could find to read about Rangers and followed every game on TV. To this day I’ve still never set foot in Ibrox and in all honesty I’m not really a fan of watching the game but I still love to play it. I guess it makes me feel like I’m eleven again.
* Barry went on to play for and captain Glasgow Rangers and Scotland over his years of playing professional football.
I’ve been thinking a lot recently about my childhood. I don’t know if it’s because I now have kids of my own or whether it’s because I’ve got back in touch with a few folk from primary school through Facebook but it’s certainly on my mind.
And do you know what strikes me more than anything about that time? The sheer amount of football I played. I’m not talking a game of seven and by on a sunny night when our parents had kicked us out of the house. I’m talking from the age of about five years old playing at least 2 hours of football a night and even more on weekends if the weather was good enough. Even at the age of 18 I was playing 3-4 hours of football on weeknights. My sudden stop when I fell out with/lost contact with they guys during the year I turned 19 basically explains where my gut came from.
Being five years old and the tallest in my class meant that any time I played football you could almost guarantee I would be in goals at some point. We used to play on a huge strip of grass beside my parents house. On one edge there was a swing park and we used the rest of the grass as a huge pitch. To this day I’ve never worked out why we always placed the goals where we did. On one side the hill fell away and was covered in bushes and nettles and about 20 yards in we placed the goals. The other side of the pitch ran all the way up to the road which was about another 100 yards away. The only rules we used with regards to pitch markings was the goal line and the outer boundaries of the park for the sides. If it went passed that it was either a goal or out of bounds but you could keep playing even of the ball went all the way up to the main road.
As with most groups of kids playing in the street the age range usually ran from about fives years old right up until twelve. Any older than that and they found something better to do or better players to play with. We were always in awe of the older players. Brian and Stevie were brilliant and I remember rumours that they had scouts out looking at them later in their football life. At least one of the guys we played with ended up having a trial for Chelsea although I can’t for the life of me remember his name. One guy was just huge. Even at that age you could tell he was going to be tall and when a kid gets the nick name ‘Sherman’ it doesn’t come as a surprise that he ended up playing and coaching for the EK Pirates american football team.
I won’t lie. I was never what you would call a fantastic player. I had great reflexes and my time in between the sticks was spent shot-blocking with the occasional amazing dive across the goal mouth to the tip the ball by for a corner kick. I couldn’t hold on to a ball and to this day I don’t have the confidence to run with it either.
One summers day both myself and my mate Billy were playing at a bit of grass at the end of my street and were convinced that a scout was watching us. We spent hours afterwards wondering who he was from and what fantastic shot or save would have caught his eye. Years later I found out that the guy was actually my neighbours son who was visiting but had been locked out whilst my neighbour was out. He laughed when I told him our story after all those years.
Then came the day we were dreading for a while. The local council sold off our ‘football pitch’ and they built sheltered housing for the elderly on it. We would have to walk twice the distance to our school in order to get to a red ash hockey pitch we could use instead. Needless to say we didn’t go there. We started playing on the hill at the end of my street. Even when we were chased by the police we still went back. The council ended up planting additional flower beds so that we couldn’t actually get a large enough area to play on… We still found a way though.
As the years moved on I finally made it into P6 and they decided to start the school football team back up. At that point we were playing most of our football at school in the loading bay below the school kitchen. It was about a quarter of the size of a 5-a-side pitch and we managed to play 10v10 on there at times. Shots on goal could come in from just about anywhere and at any time so my reflexes were getting a good work out but any time we moved up onto the full size pitch I was useless. I don’t know if it was because I wasn’t used to the size of the goals or if it was that I was that small I could only touch the cross bar if I took a run at it but I went from being a really good keeper to being someone that folk insisted not be allowed anywhere near the goals. I was always a good reader of the game even of I wasn’t the best actual player so I did eventually get the hang of playing 11-a-side on the full size pitch.
The school football team was run by three parents. Mr Paxton, Mr Clapperton and Mr McLaughlin. I have very vague memories of Mr McLaughlin playing for Dumfermline or some other lower division team that I’d heard of but never paid any attention to but Mr Paxton didn’t really know what to do. I was 10 years old at the time so what do I know about managing a team though. When Mr McLaughlin was involved we did circuit training and practiced dead ball situations but when it was just Mr Paxton we played 5’s in the Main hall or took penalties for the fun of it with our outfield players taking turns in goal. Craig McPhee, our captain in P7, took his turn in goals one evening only for the ball to be hit that hard that he broke his wrist against the bench we used as a goal. I’ll keep the rose tinted spectacles off. We were rubbish. I think there were something like 10 teams in the league we played in and the only one we could beat was The Murray Primary School and we loved going there for a game. It was the only school in East Kilbride that had a grass pitch at that point so it felt like we were playing at the end of our street.
We had some outstanding players in that team that year and to this day I don’t understand how we didn’t manage to do better. Craig Purden was possibly the best goal keeper in the league and in James Madden we had one of the best central midfielders as well but the rest of the team couldn’t hold back the opposition. We tried hard and we did have good players but without direction and any tactical know how the end results were usually inevitable. We were also threatened several times with complaints and recommendations that we be kicked out the league. Why you may ask were we receiving this sort of welcome? We had the ‘cheek’ to have a girl play for our team apparently. Usually there was no bother before a game and the schools were very good with providing some sort of separate changing facility for Catrina but by the end of the game and they’d seen how good she was the complaints usually started.
When i joined the team I moved from being a goal keeper to playing at right back. I still don’t know why I was put there as I could never keep up the pace and run up and down the wing like the other full backs we played against and I was never happy with our central defenders. They were good players but they struggled to play as a team and at times forgot that without linesmen you can’t pull the offside trap unless the player is that far offside the ref can spot it from half way across the pitch. So we went from them not communicating very well to both stepping out at the perfect time had we had linesmen giving the attacker that few yards head start that we could barely afford giving the speed of our defence. We leaked goals constantly and in one game a guy called Speedy ripped us to shreds whenever he decided to try and get past us. It was only Craig’s skills that stopped the number of goals we lost heading into double figures I think.
We ended up second bottom of the league that year.
The wedding was at 1.30pm at the church on Clapham Common. I’d hoped to have done the practice run the night before to see how easy it was to get to and to make sure we left enough time to arrive before the bride did but it wasn’t to be.
The kids lay in bed watching TV whilst I nipped to Tesco for some cereal and to pick up some plastic bowls which I’d forgotten to get for the camping supplies. By the time everyone was showered and dressed the clock had hit 1pm. Where had the day gone? We decided that the tube was going to take far to long and had the hotel phone us a taxi hoping that traffic wouldn’t be too bad. We couldn’t come all this way and then miss the ceremony! This feeling wasn’t helped when the driver said it normally took at least 25 minutes to get us to where we were going on a good day and within 100m from the hotel we were in gridlock. He managed it though. Erica however had fallen asleep in the back of the car by the time we arrived at the church.
We arrived just before H-Hour and I took the kids through to the creche while Vonnie took her seat. Just as I stood in line at the toilet with Nairn the music changed and I panicked a little until I realised everyone in front of me in the queue was in the choir so I was safe until they all disappeared. Back in the church I found my seat and time went past but still no bride. To cut a long story short there was a music festival on Clapham Common that weekend so the roads were extremely busy and the brides driver went the wrong way around the one way system, I think, so she ended up having to walk across part of the common to get there.
As the ceremony started I had a quick look at the order of service and it looked huge. We we’re going to be there a while. It turns out that the Church Of England is nothing like the wedding ceremonies up here in Scotland. The normal CoE ceremony seems to be 90 minutes long and with a bit of shaving and the cutting of a few hymns Jamie and Zara got theirs down to 60 minutes but it’s still far longer than the Scottish “Do you? Do you? Yer maryed” ceremony. It was really nice though and it actually flew in. I have to admit though it’s really weird being at a wedding and not seeing any kilts. If we could have afforded the hire of one for the week I’d have been showing it off. In saying that though the newly married couple looked great even if the only tartan near the place was on my daughters dress curled up in the creche. The choir were fantastic and really made it for me as although I’m a card carrying athiest you can’t beat a bit singing in a place that sounds that good.
After the ceremony I went to get the kids back from the creche and despite all the noise Erica was still fast asleep. We made our way out of the church past the bride and groom to be greeted by a wall of sunshine and loads of people smiling and chatting away. We hadn’t arranged transport to the reception but there was a Routemaster bus put on to ferry folk to Pimlico. As I walked over towards it I started singing a song that I love but it was a really strange place to start singing that particular song. It wasn’t until I stopped singing but it carried on without me that I realised it was coming from the festival. It turns out King Creasote were playing that day and just at that time started belting out Hamish Imlach’s Cod Liver Oil And The Orange Juice. It somehow put me in an even better mood than I was before.
The Routemaster bus was a nice touch. I’d never been on a traditional style London bus before unless you include Edinburgh bus tour buses but I can see why people get nostalgic about them. The driver had parked the bus on the pavement before everyone clambered on so he hit the kerb as he drove off and there was one hell of a grinding noise. Nothing fell off and we got away OK though. At one point he took a wrong turn and ended up having to make a detour round some roadworks when the road we were on was closed but somehow they made it through the side streets without hitting anything.
Despite the rain threatening to appear the weather stayed nice all through the reception at Pimlico Gardens. when we arrived it was Pimm’s and champagne in the gardens. Vonnie mingled and met several people that she knew online from Live Journal while I tried to juggle some drinks, taking photos whilst keeping an eye on the kids. Talking of the kids they enjoyed every second of being outside. They got on great with all the other kids that were there and spent most of the time either running about the grass or climbing on the statue at the far end of the gardens. There was an incident with one of the bride and grooms kids falling asleep under a bush which in turn led to a few comments afterwards about the suitability of the location. My personal opinion? I thought given the weather the location was an inspired choice. The kids loved the place and would probably have preferred playing out there all night if they didn’t have to go inside for dinner and it was perfect for the adults to mingle get to catch up with people before the meal.
The location for the meal and evening reception was great. If you’ve ever watched Love Actually the wedding reception scene at the start was filmed there. Whilst it had been a while since I’d watched that particular film, well 7 months actually as I’m sure it is on every Christmas, and I didn’t recognise it when we were there when I look back at the film it brings back memories of that day now. As the building was an old boathouse and not designed for a hundred of so folk clapping and banging their feet during speeches everyone was given a squeaky rubber duck to squeeze instead. The kids loved them and by the end of the night I think we had about 20 of them stashed in various bags as they kept coming back with more of them and refusing to part with them.
Everyone around our table were great although I’m not sure just what Zara meant when she named it ‘London Zoo’ on the seating plan! Actually I take that back as we had all three kids on our table so I know just fine where it might have came from. After talking for a while we somehow found out that two of the people at our table know Mo from his time in London which was very surreal. The meal came and went and like all wedding meals I enjoyed just a little to much of it and the speeches were great which isn’t the norm for most weddings I’ve been to where I don’t know anyone. We even got a mention in the bride’s speech!
The evening went by in a blur with Vonnie meeting more Livejournal friends and the kids just being great in general. Greer was on top form and loved the attention she was getting. Erica was a star and kept everyone including the other guests amused. Nairn spent most of his evening either at the craft table or dancing with the bride and groom and Findlay spent his evening building a fishing rod from the craft materials that would reach the Thames. He even tried to find some bait at one point.
Unfortunately I had a little to much to drink at one point and thought it would be a great idea to dance with Erica. I believe a Prodigy track came on which we caught the tail end of but Rammstein and The Ramones followed it up and I think we had cleared the floor by the time those tracks finished.
So anyway the end of the night arrived and we decided to head back to the hotel and get some sleep. Unfortunately the Victoria Line was still off so we decided to start walking to Victoria to get the district line back across to the hotel. We got about half way to the tube station when Vonnie decided her new shoes meant she wasn’t walking any further. The only sticking point was that with the bar being free all night and we weer using oyster cards for traveling on the tube we only had £15 on us. We hoped that it would be enough but as with everything in London money disappears fast when it’s being spent. We hailed a Hackney and managed to get the pram into the back of it and got a very friend driver who said he’d do his best to get us as close as he could to our hotel. He actually got us to within 100 yards of the hotel but on the wrong side of the road so he turned down towards Earls Court and dropped us just after the traffic lights. It seemed to be a day of cutting things fine but everything working out in the end.
We’d had a great day and another late night so we just hoped Greer would sleep though and let us prepare for the next few days traveling and camping.
I sometimes wonder if everyone else can see the same kids I see when I look at my family.
This past weekend we were at a wedding in London where, apart from the bride and groom, we had never met a single person.Our kids went into the crèche during the ceremony and at the dinner and reception afterwards we basically let them run riot around the place. When you’ve got one or two you can keep on top of them but once you hit that magical number of three they learn that in order to get to do what they want they just scatter in random directions. By the time you as the adult and authority figure work out which ne to go after they are all long gone.
Anyway I barely seen our kids for most of the night what with them spending a lot of time at the craft table or on the dance floor. But when they were not doing that they were doing what all young kids do and that’s just run wild. Findlay managed to fashion together a DIY fishing rod and was managing to get the end in the Thames from the decking of the boathouse we were in. At one point he came round the tables looking for something to use as bait.
Nairn just turned into a thief. As the boathouse wasn’t really designed to have a couple of hundred people stamping their feet during the speeches everyone was given a squeaky rubber duck instead and so after our dinner was finished he went around every table lifting the ducks people had left behind. We had over 20 of them at one point.
I think it was Erica that managed to let them get away with it. She was running interference by being as cute as she could be on the dancefloor or talking to anyone and everyone. As soon as Nairn had all the ducks back at our table though her true colours came to the fore and pretty soon they were having a heated discussion over who could have the largest mound of rubber ducks.
It wasn’t until the end of the night however as everyone started to leave that we started getting comments on our kids. I couldn’t believe it. Apparently our children are a credit to us and were simply wonderful. Erica had a few huge goth blokes wrapped around her finger and Nairn was getting on well with the ladies. Someone even commented on how they had never seen a bunch of kids get on so well together and not end up falling out with anyone by the end of the night. Everyone else’s kids were fantastic so maybe mine actually lived up to the hype?
It has been a while since we just jumped in the car and went on a trip. But we’d been talking for a few days about taking the babies on a drive but couldn’t quite work out where to go. We had the option of Tobermory (the home of the kids TV show Balamory), Arran or Millport. Tobermory was completely out though as we had to wait for the health visitor to drop by for her first visit now that Greer is with us and it’s a hell of a long drive.
So the health visitor came and went and we jumped in the car. I trust Vonnie’s driving and general sense of direction but after 15 minutes of driving it’s a bit of a surprise to hear her say “I guess this is a bad time to tell you I’m not sure of how to get there.” Now to be perfectly honest I hadn’t decided where ‘there’ was at this point but they both lay in roughly the same direction. It wasn’t until we were coming up to the junction for the Ardrossan Harbour that we took the decision to go to Millport rather than Arran. I love Arran to pieces and I will be taking the kids there one day but £50 to take the car over on the ferry is a bit much for a day trip and so we’d be stuck in Brodick rather than getting out and seeing the island. So that left Millport as our destination. We drove up past the nuclear power station in through West Kilbride and arrived in Largs just in time to see the ferry leave the slip so we had to wait for the next one.
When we were on the Calais-Dover ferry last year Nairn really didn’t like going outside but when I took him onto the observation deck for the 10 minutes or so we’re actually out on the water he loved it. In fact he refused to come back down to the car without a fight and even tried to storm the bridge at one point. It’s been about 25 years since I last visited Millport and apart from the cars parked outside the shops almost nothing has changed. The toy shop where I would buy all my jokes for that summer whenever we visited was still there and if truth be told some of the tricks in the shop window look as though they have been there for those 25 years! The crocodile is still there on the beach but we never managed to get the kids along for the traditional photo opportunity.
So we stopped for lunch and despite Erica screaming the place down for almost the entire time we were in the cafe it was nice. I’m sure Vonnie thought differently though. Once that was over we walked along the beach and let the kids play on the sand for an hour or so. It took me a while to get Nairn to understand that he shouldn’t pick up the jellyfish and sea urchins that rolling about in the surf. We bought ice cream for the kids and climbed on the rocks and all in all I felt about 10 years old again. On the way back to the car we stopped and let the kids have a go on the trampolines which, aside from the joke shop, is one of the few memories I have of the place as a child.
As we headed off home we drove clockwise around the island which I’ve never done before. And by that I mean I’ve never went around the island and not that I’ve only ever went anti-clockwise around it. There are a couple of beautiful wee beaches about 15 minutes walk from the town and no one was there! I also found something that possible inspired the Lost creators and writers. As you drive around the back of the island you come across a face staring out at you from the rocky ‘cliffs’ overlooking the road. It’s freaky just thinking about the unblinking thing staring back at you.
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