Have you ever had one of those mornings where everything just goes a bit wrong?
Yesterday was an absolute prime candidate, although there’s arguably not much that can go wrong in my life on a day to day basis.
It used to be that a ‘bad day’ in my old life as an investment banker would have meant that I had lost a client a few hundred thousand pounds and I was due for a meeting with some Executives where I would be summarily run down by a group of old men. As fearful as I was of such an eventuality, it only occurred two or three times in my decade long career as a money-shifter. Today, my sole responsibilities are to my home and to my family. If the house doesn’t stay clean, my kids will get grubby and my wife will get angry. Do you see the causal relationship there?
Whenever I talk to any of my ex-colleagues, still furiously cutting deals and snatching investments in the Big Smoke, they tell me that they can’t imagine leaving the job, that a life without work would be one of endless ennui. I always ask them if they still enjoy working 10 hour days and never seeing their family, to which they reply that they haven’t started one yet. That’s when they tell me they have to go because they’re heading out to Coq d’Argent for a Chataeubriand steak and I suddenly get very jealous and start thinking about coming out of retirement.
But I don’t, of course, because my life here in Kent is good and I’m happy – for the most part at least.
My happiness does get infringed on at certain points.
My ‘bad day’, the one day in a hundred that fails to go to according to plan was heralded by the fridge giving up the ghost at some point during the night. The old girl had been with us for a while at this point and clearly decided it would be better for everyone if she was to go peacefully during the night. Her last gift to us? Shorting out the electricity in the house.
My wife has been using the same digital alarm clock for the past 8 years. Its suffered a similar level of wear and tear to the fridge, although it shows its age merely on the surface level. The snooze button has been eroded down on one side and the cheaply printed labels for the buttons have long since worn away. The one thing it does need to work is power.
I was woken at half 8 by the sound of Constance swearing loudly. This is usually an amusing sound and much cause for ridicule. Her Public School background, far loftier than my own, prohibited any kind of cursing, as a result she has maintained a solid vocabulary of Primary School level swear words that even my boys find amusing. Hearing real vehemence behind the cursing, I woke abruptly and wondered why the sun was shining so brightly outside.
That’s when I clocked that if my wife was late, then I was probably late. A quick glance at my phone confirmed that the kids had 10 minutes to change and eat before running for school. It was then my turn to start swearing, a much more colourful string of syllables left my mouth, quickly stifled by a pillow thrown by my loving wife who has no time for the dropping of the C-Bomb under any circumstances.
Within 5 minutes I’d wrangled uniforms on the boys and frogmarched them down to the kitchen, to find that the milk had taken on a solid form over night.
Cereal was out the window, toast would take too long, so I prepared possibly the worst breakfast imaginable for my growing lads. One handful of dried Cheerios with half a banana each. They had no time to complain as I ushered them out the door, along with my wife who had managed to frantically smear lipstick onto her chin.
With that they were gone. Their rushed mornings would continue whereas mine seemed to grind to a halt. Cheerios scattered the floor, our room upstairs was a mess, a rancid food smell lingered in the kitchen and I searched for way to solve all the problems all at once. I had the lingering feeling of being in the eye of the storm. Home appliance repairs have never been my strong point, so I Googled for a solution until I was bored of reading dry articles on how to fix fridges.
Instead of sorting any of the problems, I opened the fridge and started to consider what kind of breakfast I could make out of three varieties of cheese, 3-day old bacon and last night’s tuna pasta bake.
Children thrive off of routines. During term time, as long as you’ve got a solid ‘Bedtime Plan’ in place, you can pretty much get them to dress and feed themselves. However, once you step into the Twilight Zone of Half-Term (let alone the truly frightening expanse of the Summer Holidays) all the rules go out of the window.
Don’t let them drift into Half-Term with no plans, this will inevitably lead to hours spent in front of video games and Netflix. Get them involved the week before and plan out your time together. If you’ve got no big holiday plans, try asking them where they would like to go.
Far be it from me to tell you how to raise your kids, but I’m a firm believer in not forcing them into working during their holidays. ‘Chores’, as they’re known in American Pop Culture, don’t teach children the value of hard work and teamwork. All they tell them is that you’re in charge and that housework is boring – two undeniable truths that bring them no joy whatsoever.
Most working parents dread Half-Term as a logistical nightmare – a time-based conundrum that crops up twice a year to cost them a bomb in Childcare and leave them scrambling back from work every day to pick them up.
The most important thing to remember when preparing for Half Term is that this should be a special week for them. Any spare time that you can glean with your children, sans electronics devices and other such things, should be treasured. Try something new with them: go out for dinner, bake a cake, buy them a new game or ball. After this week, they should be breathlessly eager to head back to school and tell their friends about all the week they’ve enjoyed.
Firstly, pack all your things well in advance and ensure that you leave early. I mean really early. We leave an extra 3 hours earlier ahead on every journey to allow for the second part of our smart solution. With a little luck your kids will have passed out in the car for the first hour or so of your journey – this means you can make good ground in relative peace and quiet.
Of course there are a few downsides to utilising this plan; frequent stops usually entail a more expensive trip, you also run the risk of tiring out your kids before you get to where you need to go.
Its a rare occasion that Waitrose will be the only Supermarket in a town or city, there is almost always a cheaper alternative. I know what you’re going to say: ‘But you can’t put a price on quality Harry.’ You’re right. I can’t. Neither can you. The retailers do that and they also know full well that they can stick a huge markup on any imported brand or ‘Extra Special’ product and excitable ‘foodies‘ (like me) will throw money at them until they hand them over.
There’s something very alluring about dipping your toes into the Forex Market. Much like online gambling, it requires no formal education. As long as you’ve got some money in a bank account somewhere then the good men and women of the Market will always be happy to take it from you. It is, of course, a completely feasible way of making money, thousands of people do it every day. But for most, it simply amounts to an excuse to look very smart with a load of graphs in front of you, whilst getting a slight buzz from risking your money.
I know it’s not been long since I was ripping into the aggressively pervasive nature of the Internet, but there’s something so perniciously greedy about it that its always worth reminding people that there is an option to simply not get involved. Prime time television, which is watched by mostly middle-aged people now, is chocked full of opportunities for hungry middle-aged people to ‘create-your-own-website’. The hyphens are the important thing to note there.
There is an argument that the majority of electronics products are not ‘built to last’. Conspiracy theorists attest to Apple’s faulty design of the iPhone, claiming that the hugely popular £700 handset is only built to last two years at most, whereas less reputable companies have been accused of building their budget items to last even less time than that. I love iPhones so I’m not about to slate them here, what I will say is that, if you’re in your forties and you think buying a bread maker is a sounder option than simply buying a loaf of bread or baking one from scratch, then you need to take a long hard look at yourself.
I understand kids of their generation have grown up watching their parents incessantly tapping on electronic devices of progressively slimmer stature, they see it as the gateway to their adulthood.
Whilst Constance patiently pried precious pieces of information from our boys, I slyly kept one ear open to the World Service playing in the kitchen. The News has been particularly fantastic recently. Admittedly, the World may be collectively holding its breath for the the first sign of a Nuclear Holocaust and Racial Tensions have arguably never been more fraught, but its made for some of the best news that I’ve seen in a decade.
Since leaving my job in Investment, some 7 years ago or so now, I’ve been struggling in vain to still feel a part of the world at large. In my days, pre-Fatherhood, I would be meeting bankers and businessmen on a daily basis. Titans of industry would know me by name and I felt like the decisions that I made, from the pattern of my tie to the choice of my words, had a significant effect on the World.