Parents

The plumber was shouting hysterically at me down the phone because I had asked him to install a heated towel rail. ‘Towel rail? Towel rail! Armageddon is coming! Did you fill your oil tank up? It’s tripling in price by Christmas! I’ve got 40 jobs piled up! Forty jobs!’ ‘So are you saying I can’t have a heated towel rail?’ I said. I know the plumber only too well. Many a time he has sat at my kitchen table chain-smoking while rambling about the devil, and how the world is coming to an end. If that is his default setting, you can imagine how he reacts to things going very badly on a global scale. He lives on his nerves at the best of times. Major world events are apt to put him in a particularly nihilistic mood.

The oil delivery man had way too much swagger and, as he waved his nozzle about, I realised that he might be expecting a little something. Oh dear, I thought, as he pushed the nozzle into my oil tank, pressed the button on his lorry and spent less than ten seconds giving me the amount of oil I could afford. Oh dear, what if the oil crisis is now at such fever pitch that desperate housewives in remote places are offering a little something on the side to get more oil? Ten seconds’ worth of oil did feel like the end of the world. Usually, I can afford to let the lorry fill the entire tank and it comes to about a grand.

‘I want to learn Iranian,’ said my father, resolutely, as he watched the bombing on the television. ‘Farsi,’ I said, thinking I would talk to him about that very happily on the basis it was better than helping him contact the Ukrainian government so he can fight the Russians. ‘What’s that?’ he said. ‘Farsi,’ I repeated. ‘Parcel?’ he said. But it was pointless trying to explain, for he was up and looking out of the window and telling me to look in the parcel box. We were waiting for the special food I had ordered for the new cat someone irresponsibly rehomed to my parents and which already has a stress condition from living with two dementia sufferers.

After a week in Coventry dealing with two parents with dementia, it would have felt like a nice spa break to go to Guantanamo Bay. The smallest cell at Gitmo and a pair of sensory deprivation earmuffs would have been sheer bliss. I got back from not picking up my father’s car from the garage and my mother was standing in the doorway crying. In the time it had taken me to drive three times the distance to the MOT test centre in a circle of unfathomable six-lane 30mph Midlands bypasses, because that was the way my father wanted to go, the garage had shut and his car was locked up on the street outside. I was rocking backwards and forwards slightly in the car seat making a humming sound as my father stood arguing with the closed shutters.

Bank on it Does the August bank holiday actually celebrate anything? – When bank holidays were first established in 1871, the August bank holiday fell at the beginning of the month, allegedly because it was an important week for cricket in Yorkshire, the home county of MP Sir John Lubbock, who introduced the parliamentary act creating bank holidays. – It was moved to the Monday after the last Saturday in August as an experiment in 1965, largely because early August coincided with the annual factory closure, and many workers were on holiday then anyway. – In 1968 and 1969 the holiday fell in September, so in 1971 it was fixed as the last Monday in August. Except, that is, in Scotland, where it remains in early August.

Forgive me, I’m not going to go through all the tragedies of the pandemic in this piece, not because I don’t care, but because I've got no time and I’m writing under very harried circumstances: the kids are still up, my deadline's looming, and my wife keeps sending me WhatsApp messages about emailing the headteacher again. Oh boy. Things are very tense for parents. My wife’s been googling when she should be sleeping. I wake up to emails about my schedule or screenshots of government guidance, which is what this article’s about: we read this guidance, which is published for parents, and we listen to what politicians say, and we read the news, but the things we hear and read do not match reality.

During a recent webinar with MPs, I learned that parents in Bradford were up in arms because their children had not received their free spectacles. On a visit to the optometrist, organised by the school, the children had been diagnosed with failing eyesight. Why had the school failed to follow up in providing these near-sighted children with the spectacles they were entitled to? I was not sympathetic. When my daughter was nine, I spotted that she was near-sighted because she kept squinting as she struggled to read the road signs in our new neighbourhood. Her (state) primary school had nothing to do with our visit to the optometrist, or with Izzy’s (free) spectacles. I felt that was my responsibility. It seems this is a minority view.