Dogs, kids and powerful people

The thing about dogs is that they’re often just like kids.

Sometimes it’s their most endearing characteristics that are the most irritating. Take, for instance, Toffee, our apricot toy poodle (she’s called Toffee because she’s toffee-coloured, unlike her older and slightly bigger black companion, called Luci, who is of course Luci-coloured). One of Toffee’s favourite pastimes is to have us throw one of her soft toys across the room so she can scamper over to it, skidding and sliding on the floor, to retrieve it and bring it back to us.

She then sits on the sofa next to us with the toy at her feet. I mean paws. She waits for a while. Then she starts to whimper discreetly. Then the whimper becomes a lot less discreet. Finally, she starts to bark. And, if none of that works, she gets up on her rear paws and scratches my shoulder with her fore-claws.

That’s fore-claws, not four claws. There are actually eight of them.

‘So I’ve got the toy and I’ve got it subdued. Now throw it again.’

They’re painful. Besides, they’re not good for concentration. At least, not on anything else, which I suppose is Toffee’s point. But it’s not helpful if you’re watching, say, one of those incredibly dense Nordic thrillers, where you miss one subtitle and you’re struggling to catch up for the next twenty minutes. Worse still, you may have been distracted at just the moment when one of the 87 characters – that feels like something of a minimum for a Nordic noir – has been introduced, so you spend the next two episodes asking ‘is he the boyfriend of the photographer, then? Or the father of the little boy who went missing from the playground?’

This is the point where I make my error. What I should do is tell Toffee to settle down. 'No, Toffee,’ I should firmly say, ‘that’s enough. No more playing now.’

But what I actually do is throw the toy again.

You see the mistake? By throwing her toy I’m doing exactly what she wanted. I’m rewarding the very behaviour that annoyed me so much. So, naturally, she’ll do it again. To buy myself a few seconds of peace – and it really is a few seconds, because it doesn’t take her long to return with the toy – I’m condeming myself to hours more of the same exasperation.

Well, kids are often just like that.

Though the reason they’re like that is that all humans, adult or child, are like that. Reward a form of behaviour and you encourage its continuation.

Take, for instance, three generations of a family of hereditary Korean autocrats. I suppose the fun to be got from generally oppressing, frequently imprisoning and occasionally torturing your unfortunate subjects doesn’t last too long. So you long for something else. Namely, recognition. You want a seat at the big boys’ table.

Imagine how wonderful it must be for such a man to have a US President, no less, invite him to sit down with him at a conference table. As equals. With the same number of flags for each of them. With great imposing motorcades to get to the venue and back from it. And, on top of all that, to have that same US President saying nice things about him, even declaring what a tough job he has, keeping his people starving and downtrodden, and how well he’s doing it.

And all he has to do to get all that is develop a missile and a nuclear warhead that can hit the United States. To get all that applause and smiling recognition. All the delightful baubles that eluded both his daddy and his granddaddy.

Wow! A Kim like a big boy! A proper politician!

Now, here’s the question: will he, as a result of all this fuss, decide to do away with his nuclear arsenal? Or will he, Toffee-like, just keep right on going, perhaps doing away with a few little bits but keeping enough to make sure that he keeps being glad-handed by the US President?

I leave you to answer that for yourselves.

All this might naturally change when there’s a new president with working neurons. But for now, with his own personal Trump to play with, I can’t see what could possibly stop Kim Jong-un carrying on with the fun.

Just like Toffee keeps on wrapping me around her little finger. Or claw, at least.

Good combinations

Certain pairings just seem to work, don’t they? Fish and chips, for instance. Or spinach and egg. And, of course, gin and tonic.

The same is true, or ought to be, about kids and dogs. It isn’t always. Our dogs, Luci and Toffee, are toy poodles, which means they’re smaller than our cat. He’s a big cat, admittedly, but hey, he’s a cat. The domestic kind. Not a leopard or anything.

Providing my readers with a sense of scale:
Toffee with our cat, Misty

And yet I saw a child – and not the tiniest but a seven or eight-year-old – burst into tears the other day and rush into his dad’s arms when he was approached by Toffee, the smaller of the two. She thinks that kids were only placed on earth for her entertainment. She balances that apparently egotistical view by the belief that her only purpose in life is to entertain kids. So if she sees one she runs joyfully over and tries to leap all over them.

Leading in some case, most strikingly in the one I mentioned, to deplorable results.

So when three kids came rushing up to us in the park today and asked to play with Luci and Toffee, I explained carefully that Luci was timid and wouldn’t want to play, but that Toffee would be only too pleased.

“If you run away from her,” I told them, “she’ll run after you but she’ll never catch you. Basically, she’ll run with you. She won’t bite you but, if you let her, she might lick you to death.”

The joy of being chased by Toffee
Potentially never-ending as she never catches up

To my delight, and even more to theirs (and I’m including Toffee here), these kids were bolder than some, and quicker on the uptake than most. They took off and let Toffee chase them. They screamed a bit, much like the screaming you get on a school playground at break time – with nerves certainly, but with a lot more pleasure mixed in – which only added to the fun.

One of them even worked out a way to persuade Luci to play a little – by chasing her, rather than expecting Luci to do the chasing.

Go about it right and even Luci can be got to play

And, as I warned them, the only real danger with Toffee was being licked to death. A danger heightened when your big brother (I assume that’s what he was) is egging Toffee on.

Toffee being over-affectionate
And is that a failure of sibling protection?

W C Fields may once have said (or it seems it may have been said about him) that, “a man who hates dogs and children can’t be all bad”. Oh, well. At least children and dogs can get on just fine if they learn to overcome their fear.

And have a lot more fun with each other than Fields ever gave either.

Helping a stranger's child: a challenging experience

It’s a little difficult these days to work out how to behave with children one doesn’t know. That’s not a complaint: I regard society’s resolve to eradicate child abuse welcome and long overdue. But it does mean that men, in particular, have to wonder how their behaviour towards a stranger’s child is going to be interpreted, even if their motive is to help  rather than harm.

Years ago, when one of my sons was four and had just fallen flat on his face in Grafton Street, Dublin, he was picked up and put back on his feet by a young man going the other way, who didn’t even break step let alone pause to be thanked.

Today, I’d hesitate to do anything similar. Indeed, I try to avoid any kind of contact with a child I don’t know. It just isn’t worth the suspicion it raises.

A week’s holiday in France, however, reveals that attitudes there remain more traditional. In a restaurant, a woman asked me whether I would mind keeping an eye on her three children for a few minutes. It was as though I was being asked to keep an eye on a suitcase, except that had it been a suitcase, I would probably have refused – they’re a lot more dangerous than kids these days.

The biggest surprise, however, came when we were standing at the bottom of a chairlift in the ski resort where we spent most of the week. A young ski instructor appealed to our party, asking that each of us in turn travel in the lift with one of the four-year-olds in the group he was teaching.

“Come on,” he told us, “don’t be shy. They won’t do you any harm. And they know how to handle the chairlift.”

I’d forgotten that there was a limit (of height, actually – 1.25 metres – rather than age) on kids taking the chairlift unaccompanied by an adult. How does a teacher, alone, get a group to the top? Like Blanche du Bois in A Streetcar named Desire, he had always to depend on the kindness of strangers.

So we each took a kid and went up.

It was a terrifying experience, though not in fact because of any possible suspicions of our motives. No, it froze the blood for reasons of simple physical safety.

While the bar at the front the chair was plenty to stop an adult slipping out, and probably any child down to the age of seven or even six, for a four-year-old it would have been… well, child’s play, to slide under the bar and off the chair, falling ten or twenty metres to certain injury if not death on the ground below.

That might not have been too bad had they sat quietly in their place. But these were four-year-olds. How could they possibly take a chairlift ride without twisting around in their seat and waving to their friends behind them? And each time they did they slipped forward on the chair and closer to destruction.

So what was I to do? Grab the child? Hold him forcibly in place? Not a chance. I’ve been bombarded for years with clear messages that I was to do nothing of the kind with a child not my own, or without the authority of a parent.

So I sat there frozen to the spot watching every movement the kid made, making no motion to touch him unless it became the only way of avoiding disaster.

I’d made a couple of attempts at conversation, but there were pretty well six decades between us. We didn’t have an awful lot in common to chat about. So we travelled in silence, petrified silence in my case. Just before we reached the top, I did, however, have one key question to ask him.

“Do you know how to get off the chair?”

“No,” he said, with an air I can only call expectant. Clearly, as an adult, I was going to have a solution.

I racked my brain.

“Shall I hold your hand as we get down?”

“Yes,” he said, “hold my hand.”

The words, and the smile that accompanied them, convinced me that this constituted permission.

So, with the barrier up and the mound of snow to ski down approaching, I held out my hand and a little one was thrust into it. And the whole operation was a brilliant success! We were straight up onto our skis, sliding down the far side of the snow mound towards the group.

“I’ll leave you with your friends, then,” I told him as I let go of his hand.

After the event: they ski off with never a care in the world...
Filmed by Danielle

But by then he had other things to think of. Friends to catch up with, who he hadn’t seen for minutes and minutes. He slid gracefully in amongst them and took up his normal preoccupations.

And I moved away pleased that what could have been a harrowing experience, for more than one reason, had turned out so easy after all.

Parenthood: pure delight at minimal cost

For some reason, I seem to be surrounded these days by people who have young children or are thinking of producing some.

In my usual spirit of dedication to public service, I feel it’s time to add to my previous store of invaluable advice on the art of parenting by addressing some of the frequently asked questions that come up in discussions of this thorny subject.

1. Will having a child change my life fundamentally?
   There’s no reason why the impact should be at all significant if you have already moved all breakable objects to at least one metre above floor level, are indifferent to how much sleep you get at night, aren’t interested in going out or even relaxing in the evenings, don’t care how stained your clothes get and have decided to break with any childless friends who might be upset if their precious crockery gets damaged.

2. Does the difficult period last a long time?
   Not at all. 25 years can flash by. You’d be surprised.

3. Is it expensive to bring up children?
   Far from it. Compared to things that we take for granted like a manned space programme, it barely registers. Why, there are football players who are paid more than it costs to raise a child.

4. Will the presence of children means an end to all tranquillity? No reason to think so, if you can just learn to be tranquil when surrounded by hordes of children – and three kids make an impressive horde – who are rushing up and down your stairs, watching your TV and eating your food. Birthday parties are the real test of your Zen qualities. Indeed, once your kids are into their adolescence your adherence to Buddhist principles may be such that you will be fully ready to abandon your attachment to the wheel of being and, indeed, help several other people to abandon theirs.

5. Is it true that kids are always ill and always complaining?
   This is a particularly vile slander. I know many children who are well and pleasantly disposed for several days a year.

Aaah...

6. Is it rewarding?
   Of course it is. All you have to do is survive long enough to see them produce kids of their own, make all the same mistakes as they criticised you for and be subject to the same responses as they made you suffer.

Nothing to it, you see. Can't see what holds anyone back.

What’s in a name? If it's Nicky, then a propensity for getting lost

A strange set of conflicting emotions seizes a parent who has lost a child. I mean ‘lost’ in the literal sense, of ‘mislaid’.

On the one hand, there is the feeling of dread that the loss may prove permanent, for which the counterpart is of course the painful hope that it will actually turn out to be temporary; on the other hand, there’s the sense of indignation, if the child indeed turns out to have been temporarily mislaid, that he or she has put you through all that suffering. Needlessly.

The worst of it is that no child is ever responsible for getting lost. It is always the fault of the parents and any other family member present. All those other people may distinctly remember saying ‘we’re going this way – here – through this door – and down that street’; the child who got lost – or rather who the others lost – knows perfectly well that they really said ‘just go that way and we’ll follow along shortly.’

The first child specialist of this kind of phenomenon in my experience was my brother Nicky. Have you ever been to Sveti Stefan? It’s one of those wonderful places like St Michael’s Mount or Mont St Michel (incidentally, those really are two different places, opposite each other across the Channel, though few people know the smaller, English version, in Cornwall). Sveti Stefan is an island off the coast of Montenegro linked to the mainland by a causeway. It has the beauty of its equivalents in the Channel, but far better weather.

My brother got separated from us in a shop on the island. The three of us are convinced to this day that we had told him we were about to leave through the main door, but it’s amazing how one can fall for a communal self-delusion of this kind: it appears we actually told him to leave by the back door, which is what he did.

A couple of hours later, by which time we had given up searching and repaired to a café on the mainland from whose terrace we could keep an eye on the causeway, with the weight mercifully off our feet, a disconsolate but clearly disgruntled figure appeared from the gate of the town and started to trudge angrily across. For a moment that is so deeply seared into my memory, I’m amazed that I can’t remember which of my parents set out towards him, but I know that when they met it was like one of those cosmic catastrophes when galaxies collide, from whose violence the observer is only shielded by distance.

Decades later, Danielle and I had our final son. Now given the history with my brother, you might feel we should have known better, but we decided to call him Nicky too. And blow me down if he didn’t take a leaf out of the book of his uncle and namesake.

One of the three best moments took place in southern Alsace, and we really can’t blame him. I was mercifully spared the pain as I was in England, but Danielle and our middle son Michael were wandering through glorious woods towards a well-known site for visitors, the Dwarves Grotto. Nicky was in a hurry and Danielle gave him permission to go ahead, as long as he faithfully followed the arrows helpfully tacked to trees and rocks along the route.

Unfortunately, unbeknown to her, the routes and their markings had all been changed. The arrows he was following no longer led to the Grotto.

There followed a several hour period of complete panic, and I’m still grateful to Danielle for not having phoned me until it was over. Fire brigade and police came out and as night fell, so did their morale as they began to switch from optimism to grave countenances and serious whispered conversations. Suddenly, however, a couple in a car emerged from a track.

‘Who are you looking for?’ they asked.

They were told.

‘We’ve just seen him!’ they said, ‘but when we tried to talk to him he ran away.’

They turned the car and drove back into the woods, where they quickly found him again near the spot where they’d seen him. Carefully sticking to the injunction not to get into a stranger’s car, he refused to get too close until they told him ‘your mother – Danielle – sent us to fetch you.’

All was well as ended well. Nicky got to climb up into the cab of a fire engine and wear a fireman’s helmet. And Danielle never really got the full urge to strangle him: the worry had been too great and he really hadn’t been to blame.

In the second event, the urge to strangle wasn’t directed at him, but at me. I lost him on a ski slope. He’d wanted to go down a red route, but we were with his cousin who was a beginner and didn’t want to chance anything tougher than a blue one. It looked as though the two would meet at the bottom, so I went down with my nephew and let Nicky take his route on his own.

The routes didn’t meet.

Back in the apartment where we were staying, the atmosphere became increasingly frosty as the night fell. The rescue services refused to act on the grounds that it was still too short a time since Nicky had disappeared. Finally I could take Danielle’s looks, with their threat of imminent divorce, any longer and as much to escape them as in the hope of finding Nicky, I left the flat and set out to walk through the village.

And there on the central square I found him. Very dutifully he had simply stood there, in increasing cold, and refusing the help of any passersby on the grounds that his ‘daddy would soon be along to collect him.’ Very sensible of him. And he was right – though it wasn’t that soon.

But the third moment was entirely of his own doing. Chronologically, it was actually the earliest of the three. He was five. It had taken us hours to find Camber Sands, in Sussex, a lovely beach on the English south coast. We finally got there, hot, irritable and longing for some relaxation.

Nicky was gone in about thirty seconds.

We spent the next two hours wandering up and down the beach asking if anyone had seen a little boy in a yellow tee shirt and red shorts. No-one had.

It turned out that this wasn’t in the least surprising. When we finally did track him down, he was stark naked. All he was wearing was an expression of hurt innocence and surprise at our fury. ‘What on earth,’ he seemed to be saying, ‘are we expected to do, when we’re five years old, and on a beach, but to get rid of our clothes and start enjoying ourselves?’

We never did find the yellow tee shirt or the red shorts.