Don't hit your face with a door and expect family sympathy
Ithink I might be going senile. I walked in the kitchen the other night where, as usual, Mary and Wilf were eating their tea – or, more accurately, pushing their peas and chicken nuggets around the plate without actually putting any of it in their mouth.
This is one of the weirdest things about kids. Can you imagine, as an adult, walking into a restaurant, ordering a nice dish of, say, gammon and chips, spending the next 45 minutes prodding it with your fork and then, when it’s completely cold and tastes disgusting, finally eating it, but only because the waiter is standing over you shouting about how you can only have pudding if you finish what’s on your plate?
There is nothing more demoralising than spending two hours of your Sunday slaving over a roast dinner and placing it in front of the kids, only for them to pull a face and say in a sulky spoilt-brat voice, ‘don’t want it’.
I have so far resisted the urge to pick up a roast potato and smash it into their faces but for how much longer I cannot say.
Mary – now six – wants sausage every night while her younger brother demands only fish fingers, or fish with fingers as he calls them.
It is demoralising when friends of ours, after I enquire what their children are like at meal-times, reply with a self-satisfied chuckle, ‘oh Sebastian’s great. His favourite’s sea bass, but he’s an absolute glutton for feta and peach cous cous too. We can’t stop him guzzling it.’
Sebastian will no doubt live till the age of 125 whereas my kids will die in their early 40s from acute heart disease caused by fat-blocked arteries.
(‘Mr Canavan, we’ve never seen anything like it. Your daughter’s heart stopped because it was actually clogged up with pork sausage. I know you’ve only just lost her, but would you mind if we used her corpse in an advertising campaign warning parents about the dangers of giving their children an appalling diet?’)
Anyway, as I was saying before you interrupted, I walked in the kitchen and as I did so Mary told me our cat – Bobbie – needed feeding.
'But I fed her last Tuesday, surely she doesn’t need any more?' I remarked.
‘Daddy,’ replied Mary, who at the age of only six is already fed-up with my lame attempts at humour, ‘stop being stupid and feed the cat’.
I duly opened the cupboard door and reached in and took out the bag of cat food (carefully checking it was sealed because Mrs Canavan has an incredibly annoying habit of not bothering to close it properly, so that when I grab the bag the contents spill onto the floor and I spend the next five minutes cleaning up with a dustpan and brush while muttering expletives and wondering if a divorce is acceptable or would cause too much distress to the children).
Then, as I closed the cupboard – and this is the reason I believe I may be going senile – I inexplicably leant forward so that the door I was shutting smashed into my face.
It struck the bridge of my nose and such was the pain I yelped and staggered backwards. I felt something running down my nose, touched it with my fingers, and saw it was blood.
'Help, help, I’m dying,' I begged, lurching around the kitchen, holding my face in my hand.
Neither of the kids looked up from the TV. In fairness, it was a pretty exciting moment in Paw Patrol – Mayor Goodway (mayor of Adventure Bay, a small town policed, as implausible as it may seem, by a team of dogs and a pre-pubescent boy) had invented a machine to control the weather and had just started a hurricane which was threatening to destroy the town.
'Oh my god. I can’t see,' I whined. 'There’s so much blood.'
Without looking at me, Wilf said, ‘daddy, get me an apple juice’.
Because the sympathy and concern wasn’t quite the level I’d hoped, I wobbled into the hallway and shouted up the stairs to Mrs Canavan, 'I’ve just broken my nose and there’s blood everywhere.'
‘I’m on the phone to Becky,' she replied. ‘Can you make sure the kids eat their tea?’
It does make me worry about what would happen if I suffered a cardiac arrest and lay prostrate on the floor.
I daresay the rest of the family would carry on with life for at least three hours before noticing, and even then they wouldn’t call for help but would simply push me to the side of the room so they didn’t have the inconvenience of having to step over my body.
I felt blood running down my nose