Grandparenting in ‘me too’ times

It was ‘metoo’ time during my most recent visit to the grandkids. 

Elliott, whose language progress is startling, has learned that immensely useful expression. By which I really mean ‘me too’. ‘Hashtag’, though it may of course come later, is still a little beyond him for now.

And ‘me too’ doesn’t even always mean quite what you might think. It may be because big sister Matilda has something, or is doing something, that he thinks he could profitably partake of too. Literally, then, ‘me too’. Sometimes, on the other hand, it really means ‘me instead’. 

Like when Matilda got the last yogurt. The message of his ‘me too’ was clearly “I can give that a much better home than she can”. Swiftly followed by “Send it over this way, pronto.”

Still, there are plenty of adults who don’t really distinguish between ‘me too’ and ‘me instead’, aren’t there? One was recently President of the United States, another Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. Elliott strikes me as having a better character than either of them, and just needs to take his educational breakthrough with ‘me too’ a step or two further.

Talking about educational breakthroughs, I had my own during this last visit. 

Elliott has mastered the notion that peeing in a toilet bowl is a pretty damn clever thing to do. So, as we were getting ready to go to a birthday party – that was for a 49th birthday, not for someone in their peer group – he announced that he was going to show me how he’d mastered that process.

“Just push his nappy to one side,” Sheena, his mother, told me. “You can pull it up again afterwards.”

It was a fresh nappy – OK, OK, diaper if you prefer – which she’d just put on him. I pushed it down. He performed, admirably I should say. And I pulled it back up again.

Except, unfortunately, that the nappy had come undone and, when I closed it again, I got it wrong. An error for which I was the one to pay. At the party, Elliott, who gets on well with Dad-dad (why bother with a complicated word like ‘Granddad’ when everybody understands ‘Dad-dad’?), was sitting on my lap. A disconcerting sense of wetness began to spread up one of my legs. And, yes, when I looked, I discovered a tell-tale soaking on that side of my shorts.

“I thought putting a nappy on would be a pretty intuitive job,” my son Nicky told me later, after he’d put a new one on Elliott.

Well, I’m glad to say that it is intuitive, and when I undertook the task on two later occasions, it worked just fine. My only defence? Putting a nappy on from scratch is one thing, re-fixing one that’s been taken down is another.

That may not be much of an excuse, but I don’t have another, so that’s the only one you’re getting.

Interestingly, this wasn’t the only unconventional use to which my shorts were put. One of my grandparental duties was taking the kids to school each day. This was more enjoyable than in the past, because they both walk now and I didn’t have to push them in a pram or pull them in their favourite wagon (tough on the way to school, which is almost entirely uphill). As a rule, I made sure that I had tissues in a pocket in case either of my charges needed a nose blowing, but on this occasion I’d forgotten. And Matilda was now demanding a nose blow. As I searched my pockets in vain, she came up with a solution.

“It’s OK,” she said, “I’ll use this.”

And before I could stop her, or even react, she’d wiped her nose on my shorts. That left the nose beautifully clean. And, to be honest, so were my shorts as soon as I could get back home and wash them off a bit.

On the way to school

Taking the kids to school was a lot of fun. The first stop is Matilda’s, since she’s at the big school (she’s rising four, after all). Outside there are some nice rocks Elliott can clamber over to his heart’s content, since walking along the pavement is just kind of safe, kind of dull. 

That’s the Elliott way, incidentally. There’s little pleasure in anything if there isn’t just an edge of danger to add spice to it. I discovered that when I took them to a local playground. They were both fine on swings and safe things like that. But they didn’t want to stick with those unchallenging experiences when they had the opportunity to run a few risks instead. 

Fun but not really the challenge we were looking for, is it?

There’s a skate park next to the playground. There were no skaters around so I was happy to let them play there. Elliott led the way, sliding down curved surfaces designed for skateboarders to make daredevil turns. There was a perfectly safe way to get back to the top, and a rather riskier one that involved climbing up a stepped partition wall, with a good chance of falling off either side.

No need to tell you which Elliott chose.

The safe way? You’ve got to be kidding. Much too tedious

Still, I have to say that he’s generally good with not pushing himself too far beyond what he can manage. Matilda’s got good at moving, at some speed, across a rope bridge in the playground. With his ‘me too’ outlook, Elliott made it clear he wanted to do the same. But I was impressed that he surveyed the challenge, then stopped and waited for me to come and help him across.

Angels rush in where the daredevil wisely fears to tread

Sensible fellow.

Then there was the moment when Matilda showed us what it means to be a big girl of nearly four. The sad part is that being a big girl means being exposed to peer pressure. “Big girls don’t…” has become a bit of a phrase for her, and it’s a pity when what completes the sentence is something she obviously likes.

For instance, she has for years had a sock puppet which is vaguely like an elephant, if you can think of elephants as very small and with no legs. For reasons that remain mysterious to me, she has always called it ‘Adge’. Because she likes it so much, there are several of them in the house, so one or two can be washed – like my shorts after a nappy fiasco – while others remain available for use. She knows very well that there are several, but always treats the one she happens to be with at any time as though it were the single individual she’s always known and always called ‘Adge’. 

Adge
One of them. Though in some special sense,
they’re all the same one

Incidentally, she knows that ‘Adge’ means ‘elephant’. We discovered that when, on a visit to Valencia, we took her to the zoo and she saw some real elephants. She immediately pointed at them crying ‘Adge! Adge!’

Anyway, the other day she announced that ‘big girls don’t have Adge’.

Peer pressure. Inescapable. Painful.

Still, she had the sense to stick with Adge and enjoy the company still for a while, at least while at home. But I couldn’t help sensing she wasn’t entirely comfortable about it. Still three but already learning that not all forms of behaviour will be acceptable to her peer group.

Ah, well.

Incidentally, she’s also pretty good at ‘me instead’ behaviour. One of the things she likes about Dad-dad visits is that she gets multiple opportunities to steal my glasses. Her instead of me, you see. And very fetching she looks too.

They may be my glasses. 
but they suit her far better

If the kids have decided that the name ‘Granddad’ is one to modify, to ‘Dad-dad’, they feel much the same about their Uncle Michael. Oddly, they’ve adopted the same name for him as my other granddaughter did at their age, though now she’s a young woman about to start college. 

All three of them decided from early on to dispense with the word ‘Uncle’. Instead they call him ‘Michael Michael’ (well, I don’t think Aya still does, you understand, but the other two do). And Michael Michael is someone whose visits are always particularly exciting. 

Michael Michael
His visits never disappoint

He is, indeed, always greeted with great joy.

Finally, I can’t close this without a reference to food. I cooked only once and, as usual, I made pasta with a tomato sauce. Those two little sophisticates have developed a major liking for pesto, so they’re always disappointed with what I prepare. That made it particularly gratifying to have it confirmed that, despite his initial lack of enthusiasm, Elliott really got a lot out of eating a plate of my pasta. As he demonstrated when ‘Michael Michael’ picked him up after the meal.

OK, OK, the pasta wasn’t too bad after all

That particularly sophisticated diner, Matilda, has developed a liking for a new kind of fruit. Most of us call them ‘red currants’. That, I’ve now learned from Matilda is entirely wrong. They’re called ‘sour things’. And she can’t get enough of them.

Sour things
Much appreciated new delicacy

So I whenever I could, I would feed her some.

And, in smaller quantities – I don’t think he likes them that much – to Elliott too. Because, naturally, once he saw Matilda eating them, he had to burst out with his favourite new saying.

“Me too! Me too!” he called out.

Eat your greens

The haematologist may not have been physically sucking her teeth as she looked over my blood test results, but metaphorically she was doing it in spades. Tut-tutting even. You know, like the electrician looking around your wiring and saying, “what cowboy put this lot in for you, then?”

“You need to eat more greens,” she told me, sternly, like a judge not satisfied with the stiff sentence just pronounced who decides to add “without possibility of parole”:

She didn’t actually use the word ‘greens’. Being Spanish, she said ‘verduras’. However, you can see that the word is just a derivate of ‘verde’, green and means the same thing.

It’s obviously sound advice. It put me in mind of a fine episode of The West Wing. That’s The Supremes (season 5, episode 17, if you really want know). Commenting on the death of a Supreme Court Justice, Owen Brady, the Chief Justice tells Toby Ziegler, “Brady was your age. Eat your greens”.

Chief Justice Roy Ashland: “Eat your greens”

If the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, even a fictional one, confirms my haematologist’s advice, that’s good enough for me.

Well, I’ve been following her injunction, like the well-behaved convict I am, anxious to establish my good behaviour even if I have no hope of parole. In fact, parole is available for no part of my sentence. For instance, another worrying element that my blood test led to was a further rise in the number of pills I have to take. 

This seems to be one of those milestones (or do I mean millstones?) in the ageing process. For nearly thirty years, I was taking one pill daily. Then last year, following the weird experience that various neurologists have decided must have been a TIA – a transient ischaemic attack or mini-stroke – the number grew to three, increased by my GP to four, with the extra one there to try to counter the noxious side-effects of one of the others.

Now the number has increased still further to five, with a sixth added two to three times a week. I feel there’s a bit of a race on. Will I go to my grave out of natural causes first or will I succumb to strangulation by excessive pill consumption before that happens?

Anyway,  back to the greens. I’m now consuming a lot more than ever before. Dutifully. Daily. Diligently. 

It’s actually not such a bad thing to do. But that’s chiefly because I don’t stick to what are strictly greens. Fortunately, I’ve discovered that in Spanish as in English, the word ‘greens’ isn’t restricted to green things. 

Fortunately, it also includes reds and yellows and oranges and purples, and no doubt others besides. This means I can get my ration of greens not just from peas and broccoli and lettuce, but also from cherries (just as well, since the season here isn’t quite over yet), black figs (season well under way and more purple than black), nectarines (one of my favourites and now hitting the shops in large quantities), to say nothing of lemons and bananas, mandarins and oranges (sadly out of season locally but available from abroad), both kinds of grapes, alongside carrots and tomatoes and beetroot.

A selection of greens

That’s one of the things I like about general language. That’s as opposed to lawyer-speak or scientific jargon. It’s fluid, it’s wide ranging, it allows bending to cover far more than its literal meaning. 

As a result, while still enjoying spinach and celery and cucumber, I can also go looking for variety, by choosing other fruits and vegetables of as many colours as in Joseph's famous coat.

I can do that while continuing to obey, and strictly obey, the spirit, even if not the letter, of the instructions of that wise though severe haematologist.

Draining the swamp

“Until this moment, Senator, I think I never really gauged your cruelty or your recklessness.”

With these words the lawyer Joseph N. Welch punctured the brutal self-importance of Senator Joseph McCarthy, at a committee hearing McCarthy chaired on 9 June 1954. 

“Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last?” Welch would add, a devastating blow to the brutal campaign of persecution that was McCarthyism. One from which it would never recover.

Decency. That’s a far more important notion than the word perhaps suggests. It means dealing with people, even adversaries, in a way that respects their humanity, their dignity and their rights. It seems a key ingredient in democracy, ignored by the autocrats of this world, such as Putin or Xi Jinping, and the would-be autocrats, such as Donald Trump or Boris Johnson.

Trump and Johnson. What price decency?

There’s one issue on which I agree entirely with Donald Trump. His call to ‘drain the swamp’ was, I felt, entirely right. Of course, the agreement went no further than that, since to me he was himself the biggest inhabitant of that US swamp, a view he certainly didn’t share, preferring to see himself as the drainage-engineer-in-chief, and the swamp as the habitat of his critics.

That makes it all the more ironic that the principal focus of his attack at the time was Hillary Clinton, in particular for having dealt with confidential information insecurely (by using a personal email account). The accusation would be greeted by his adoring worshippers chanting ‘Lock her up!’. 

Now, of course, he stands accused – indicted, even – for his irresponsible handling of confidential information, by storing top secret documents in an insecure location (his Mar-a-Lago golf club). Indeed, his offending went far further than hers. It seems he showed secret military documents to unauthorised people. He also refused to hand back the secret documents when the authorities demanded their return.

It is, on the other hand, no surprise that his behaviour has led to no chants of ‘lock him up’ from his worshippers.

Still, at least this kind of behaviour is so indecent that it might well repel the independent and undecided voters any candidate needs to win the presidency. Nor is he going to be helped by his other kind of indecency, his appalling behaviour towards women, in one case at least now fully established in a court of law.

Suburban Americans, whose support he needs to get back to the White House, take a dim view of that kind of behaviour.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the Atlantic, Britain had its own champion of indecency in the form of Boris Johnson. This was a man brimming over with charisma, itself living proof of just how dangerous a quality that can be, who would deploy all his charm and good cheer when telling the public that he had always followed the Covid confinement regulations that he’d introduced himself, when there were photos of him breaking them brazenly. I’ve even seen it plausibly argued that he has become so dissociated from reality that he can genuinely convince himself that he’s telling the truth when he’s blatantly lying. He’s not actually peddling a lie because he genuinely believes it to be true, even though he knows how overwhelmingly the evidence proves it false.

That may explain why he’s so upset that the parliamentary committee investigating him didn’t accept his arguments. “I believe myself,” I imagine he assures himself, “so how can anyone else disbelieve me?”

He’s resigned from parliament before the committee could submit its report to the House of Commons, with its recommendation of suspension. That spares him the humiliation of having a House with a Conservative majority voting against a former Conservative leader that won a landslide majority for the Conservative party.

Just like Trump, he blames everyone else for his misfortunes. The Committee was a kangaroo court. Its chairman, the Labour MP Harriet Harman, was biased against him. He attacks the committee for having decided in advance that he was guilty, ignoring the fact that it has a Conservative majority, including MPs who previously backed him.

Attacking his opponents is exactly what we could expect from him. “Well, he would, wouldn’t he?” we might reply, just like Mandy Rice-Davies did back in 1963, when told William Astor had denied having an affair with her.

The scandal in which Rice-Davies was caught up spelled the end of the career of another leading Conservative, John Profumo. He hadn’t become leader of the party or Prime Minister, which Johnson did, and which Profumo was widely tipped to do. But like Johnson, he lied to parliament and, in a time when most people found such an offence against decency unacceptable, he had to go.

Well, few but the members of the Johnson cult, as blinkered as the Trump cult in America, can be in any doubt that their boy lied to parliament too. 

Like Profumo, he’s gone. That, along with the indictment of Trump, suggests to me that maybe, just maybe, decency is making a bit of a comeback at last. What a huge advance that would be for us all. Mandy Rice-Davis and Joseph Welch, such different people with such diverse histories, might both be delighted.

As should anyone who believes that respect for institutions and for other people, as well the upholding of some basic standards, matter in politics. Anyone, indeed, who really believes the swamp needs draining. Anyone who realises that top candidates for flushing down that drain are precisely the Trumps and the Johnsons.

Maybe then we can move on, to see what can be done about the likes of Putin and Xi Jinping around the world.