School Trip

Stolen from Tropical Fish Forums UK

The Kids Are Alright

I'm knackered.

Over the weekend, Dungroanin' played host to an old schoolfriend of Mrs Wife's, accompanied by her two-year-old son.

It's been the best part of 23 years since I lived with a two-year-old boy, and at that time Baby Brother was more of an apprentice than a hindrance.

I've been up more climbing frames, down more chutes and round more roundabouts in the past two days than in the previous two years.

And our little visitor is at the stage where he needs to know what everything is, why everything is, where everything is and who everyone is.

Mrs Wife's rabbits, Pepper and Dylan, have now been rechristened Paper and Dinnae, and were a source of much excitement. As was the local park, the beach, dogs in the park and a football-shaped bottle opener that emits a crowd noise every time it's used.

But the 5.30am wake-up calls have taken their toll, and I'm now feeling more exhausted than I did at the end of the working week.

Just as well we were able to send him home today....

To The Highest Bidder

Today, to pass a few idle web-based minutes, I dropped in on Ebay, the world's online car boot sale.

Ignoring my usual haunts of the CD, DVD, computers and sportwear sections, I threw caution to the wind and ventured into the uncharted territories of the "Other" section.

Considering that almost everything you can imagine fits neatly into one of Ebay's thousands of existing categories, for something to slip between the cracks is quite impressive. Or so you would have thought.

But there are hundreds of pages of miscellaneous rubbish being touted by the strange denizens of the worldwide interweb.

Amongst the tempting items on offer when I looked today were a bag of reindeer food (which, having read the listing, includes glitter - that must be what makes reindeer fly and shit silver stuff).

One inventive chap simply offered to sell you something worth the same amount of money you send him. Send him one single penny, and you get something worth a penny. Send him 30,000 pounds, you supposedly get something worth 30,000 pounds.

And another web-based emporium sold bondage ropes in a variety of colours and lengths, obviously intended for the more discerning pervert.

Unfortunately, I didn't come across anyone trying to sell their virginity, their wife or themselves. I say unfortunately, but to be honest, I'm not looking to acquire a virginity (I had a hard enough time shifting the first one I owned), a wife (the one I already have is costing quite enough on her own without an assistant) or another human being (unless they want to clean the bathroom and cut the grass).

But it's got me thinking - what could I sell to make some money? I reckon that I could sell the rights for any football team in the world to sign my first son. Admittedly, the complete lack of Jocklings means that I wouldn't be able to deliver my side of the bargain for a long time yet. But surely having first option on an UNBORN superstar would be worth a million or so to Barcelona, Manchester United or AC Milan?

I will discuss the idea with Mrs Wife and report back.

Kidding On

Sometimes, I think I'm 27 going on seven.

Take last night for example. I get home to find Montrose basking in warm sunshine, a condition which I believe was known as summer in days gone by.

Joining Mrs Wife in the garden, the conversation goes something like this:

Mrs Wife: "Perfect weather to cut the grass"

Groanin' Jock: "Yep"

MW: "Are you going to cut the grass then?"

GJ: "Nope"

MW: "Why not?"

GJ: "I'm playing Football Manager and reading a magazine."

This is a fairly common conversational thread at Dungroanin'. Typically, Mrs Wife will suggest I partake of a thrilling activity such as cleaning the bathroom, washing the car or picking my clean clothes up off the floor and putting them in the wardrobe.

I will then usually explain that I am already engaged in an activity, such as filing my CDs in alphabetical order, scanning photographs to put on Bebo, attempting to download Laurie Anderson's O Superman from the internet or kicking some serious dinosaur ass on Final Fantasy X2.

Is it normal for a fully-grown adult male to spend whole days and weeks engaged in such infantile pursuits? In the past few days, for example, I have spent a couple of hours dicking about on Ebay looking at Transformers toys and comics and researching the history of the Autobots on Wikipedia. I have easily devoted more hours to thinking about the way forward for my Everton side on Football Manager than I have on mortgage repayments and car insurance, and I've been more absorbed in repeats of The Simpsons than in the day's news headlines.

And if, in the next few years, Mrs Wife decides to pop out a Jockling or two, will this situation improve or worsen? Would the sleepless nights, nappy changes and feedings adultify me, or would the easy access to toys and Teletubbies send me closer towards the point of no return, when I quit my job so that I can devote more time to my more favoured pursuits?

Buy A Babymop

Kids nowadays don't know what a hard day's work is. Our culture of computer games, lounging in front of the television and instant gratification through ever-increasing debt means that children at the dawn of the 21st century have no idea that they need to work for their keep.


So I'm all for this Japanese invention that teaches children to graft from day one. Bizarrely, I found this photograph a while back whilst searching on the worldwide interweb for "dog mop slippers". A colleague who owns a dog was complaining that her pooch's pawprints were always muddying her floor. It was then that I remembered (or thought I remembered) seeing a photograph somewhere of a dog wearing "mop slippers", which cleaned the floor as the dog wandered around the kitchen.


I never did find any reference on the worldwide interweb to mop slippers for a dog, which makes me think that I either imagined it or dreamt it. In which case, I have seriously strange dreams.


Anyway, if in the future I am blessed with a Jockling or two, I will most certainly be investing in a Babymop. If I'm going to spend 18 or more years looking after kids, they can at least look after the laminate flooring at Dungroanin'.