Hi, and welcome to Tales of a Middle-Aged Dad. I’m your host, the eponymous M-AD, and if you’ll indulge me for just a moment, I’d like to set the familial scene for you.

• I’m the M-AD in question, a late-thirties software engineer, married for eight of those years to…
• Mrs M-AD, my wonderful, beautiful, wife, with whom I currently have one child…
• Junior, a five-year-old boy, just into Year 1 at school, and soon to be older brother to…
• The as-yet-unsexed (um…) Junior Junior, due in January, 2016.

We’re a two-car, north-of-England, semi-detached kind of family, which by my reckoning make us fairly average.

So why Tales of a Middle-Aged Dad? Well, a couple of reasons, really:

Firstly, we live in age where the entirety of the knowledge of the world is available to use 24/7 (well, unless the WiFi goes down, perish the thought) at the touch of a button. The internet is a fantastic, democratising, force for good. It gives everyone who wants one a voice, a voice with which they can scream, laugh, and lecture to the rest of the internet-dwelling world. For we parents, this resource should be neither overlooked, nor under-utilised. Many times have my wife or I turned to the internet for answers or advice about whatever bizarre, unforetold predicament Junior has found himself in, whether medical, behavioural or other. Usually, you can be reasonably sure to find another lost soul on the internet who has suffered the same outrageous fortune as you have, and will handily provide a solution for removing Play-doh from noses (answer: carefully, with tweezers, or by nose-blowing. Caution, I am not a doctor, so go see one), or whether you can give a child both Calpol and Nurofen at the same time (spoiler alert: probably not). However, there are times when your predicament proves to be somewhat unique, where there isn’t a pre-existing answer out there on the internet, ready and waiting for you. This blog is to add our family’s experience to the mix, to hopefully be that answer for some other frantic parent Googling “Should my child’s poo be orange?” (I don’t know the answer to this, I’m afraid – try Googling it.)

Secondly, this is a little bit of a backlash against the Mumsnet-type fora, where raising children appears to be a competition. If it’s not DD learning to swim at 12 months old, then it’s DS being potty trained at 6 months and oh isn’t your child maybe there’s something wrong with him. Raising a child isn’t a game or a challenge. It’s a long, hard, enjoyable, wonderful slog, that will make you cry and laugh in equal parts for most of its duration. If you’re not crying and laughing in about equal parts, then I’d say you’re doing something wrong.

So that’s the reasoning behind this self-indulgent little corner of the internet. If I can write about my experiences as a fat Dad to soon-to-be two kids, and that writing in any small part helps or reassures some other fat or thin Dad or Mum, then I’ll be content.

And with that, I’m off to Google orange poos. Not a problem now, but forewarned is forearmed.

My pal Matt telling it like it is in his review of Stephen King’s Danse Macabre:

Seeing what’s behind the curtain isn’t for everyone. Shitty metaphors aside, some people have no problem with appreciating art purely on the technical ability and execution.  I’m less inclined towards this.  Similarly with music. Virtuoso instrumentalists and muso-wankers bore me senseless.

via The King Long Read: Danse Macabre: 28th Nov 2010 – 13th Aug 2013.

I’ve just taken a call from 01925 354565 on my mobile phone. The chap on the other end knew my name and told me he was from <garbled company name>. He asked me about a recent car accident I’d had, and that, as the other driver had accepted full responsibility, there was a payout I was yet to claim. Exciting times for me! Well, no. I’ve not had an accident recently, and told him so. Oh, he said. Had I been involved in an accident recently as a passenger? No, I said, and enquired ‘politely’ as to where he’d got his information. He told me that “several of the top insurance companies” supplied this information to <garbled company name> and he couldn’t pinpoint the exact one from his records. I pressed on and asked him to give me the details of this accident – the vehicle registration numbers, the date etc. He told me, due to data protection regulations, he couldn’t tell me that information. Well played, sir. I told him to take my details off his system and to not call me again.

That was a Public Service Announcement. Thanks for listening.

tl;dr – If you get a call from 01925 354565, you’re in for an attempted vehicular scam.

Being a hypochondriac of outstanding proportions, I spend a lot of my time convinced that I’m about to be killed by a horrible and as yet not officially diagnosed disease, a disease that usually manifests as “a slight ache in the chest”, or “a funny feeling in the leg”, or something equally ominous-sounding. This quite often leads to me pondering my own mortality, in a fashion that ranges from the sobering (“My child will grow up without a father!”), to the practical (“I hope the life insurance is sufficient that Kath will lead a financially comfortable live from here on in”), to the absurd (“I hope Kath remembers that the green bin gets emptied every four weeks – miss that collection and the bin’ll be piled high and overflowing by next collection”). Sometimes, this pondering and musing transcends my potentially imminent death by an unrecognised illness, and I end up having an existential breakdown: what would I leave behind once I shuffle off this mortal coil that would be evidence for me having ever actually existed?

It’s unfortunate for me that the few friends I have are extremely talented, artistically. I have traditionally artistic friends who can draw or paint or shoot photos. I have musically talented friends, who can sing or play or write (or combinations thereof) far better than the auto-tuned-to-high-hell bullshit on the radio. Disappointingly, I have no artistic bent. My skills, limited as they are, are technological. I’m engineer, and more specifically a software engineer. I can write Hello, World! in a plethora of programming languages. I’m pretty good with a debugger. My object-oriented skills are there or thereabouts; my knowledge of the Gang of Four’s Design Patterns is sufficient, but improving. However, my skills are transient, and will not stand the test of time. A hundred years from now, a great song will still be a great song, and a well-executed painting will still be that, as art, as a corpus, accumulates over the years. Technology isn’t so lucky. As the years go by, and the advances occur, technology is replaced by the next generation, rather than be allowed to coexist. I can go to the National Gallery and take in the nearly 500 years old The Ambassadors by Holbein the Younger, and can still be wowed by the skill and talent it took to manifest that skull. However, send the average person to a computing museum and show them a ZX81, and one would suspect that the reaction would be akin to “Huh. Look at that crappy old tiny computer,” before said average person pulls out their iPhone to play a quick game of Temple Run 2 (or whatever the temporary game du jour is) on a device that’s likely double-digit orders of magnitude more powerful.

So if I lack any meaningful or tangible skill that’s going survive long after I’m worm food, what else is there? Well, one could say that a person’s experiences are their legacy – the tales they tell of their life, fat with excitement and adventure, are the things that they will be remembered for. My Dad is a prime example of this. Whilst whiling his days away being an exceptionally (exceptionally) talented engineer, he’ll occasionally regale us with stories of his youth that equal, or dare I say surpass (in my impressionable and hero-worshipping eyes), the feats he’s accomplished as an engineer. Every so often I’ll bug him to tell me the stories of when, in his early twenties, he was a test driver for the Ford Rally Team, for whom he’d take a week off work and go drive a prototype car across the dunes of the Sahara. Whilst barbecuing a couple of weekends ago, he was lamenting the lack of heat coming from the crappy old charcoal I’d supplied to cook our meat feast. I jokily threw in the idea that I’d go start my car and we could cook the sausages on the engine block. “Oh, we did that once with some eggs in the middle of the Sahara on one of the Ford test cars,” he casually, and non-egocentrically, replied. “We had to decide whether we were going to use the little remaining fresh water we had to drink, or to cool down the overheating engine after the eggs had finished.” Unbelievable. Same day, we were chatting over dinner about Paul McCartney singing at the Olympics closing ceremony, and how bad he was. This led to Dad proclaiming that “He was never any good back in the day, either,” and then telling us about the times his band shared a bill with The Beatles in Hamburg in the early sixties. Remarkable.

So where are my tales of adventure and derring do? Sadly, nowhere to be found. I spent my teens and early twenties drunk, what remained of my twenties sober and betrothed, and the start of my thirties attempting to be some kind of parental figure. I seem to be lacking an exciting back story that would serve as my legacy. Excepting, of course, all the usual drunken tales of a student, which are generally of no interest to anyone outside of the tale itself.

Maybe our legacy isn’t what we’ve done with our lives, more how we’ve set up the next chapter of life in general. Maybe our legacy is realised by the path that our children forge in the world, and that it is our sole objective to equip them with the best tools possible to achieve greatness in this task. If, perchance, my son goes on to cure cancer, or set foot on Mars, or solve nuclear fusion, then history may look fondly on me and proclaim my legacy of creating, nurturing and setting free a world-changing individual as one of note. Does that reduce us to merely vicarious hangers-on, whose only chance of being remembered is through the actions of our dependents? Probably not, but it’s another way to feel like a contribution has been made in the face of a dearth of notable, tangible personal achievements.

Or does it really matter at all? Is legacy only something that matters to the self-absorbed and self-obsessed? As long as one’s life is lived honestly, truthfully and with a heart of love, will that suffice to leave one’s mark on the world? I suspect so. Indeed, I think I’ve probably over-thought and over-typed what should have been a simple eight word thesis on legacy:

Forget legacy. Just be excellent to each other.

There’s not a situation imaginable for which Bill & Ted (or Rufus) don’t hold the inalienable truth.

(But that doesn’t mean I don’t still want my Dad to rock my world with awesome stories. There’s another tale he tells about the time he was rallying an overnight stage in the middle of nowhere in some snow-covered clime, when he encountered a queue of rival cars queued up at the bottom of an icily unpassable hill. Each team syphoned a small amount of petrol from their cars, providing sufficient fuel in total to cover the equivalent of two car tyre-width tracks up the hill. They all stood back, lit the fuel and, in a manner only slightly less spectacular than the end of Die Hard 2, watched the ice melt sufficiently that the cars could then ascend the hill on the freshly-exposed tarmac, and subsequently carry on rallying. Amazing. I can only assume Dad stood back and shouted “Yippee-ki-aye, motherfucker” whilst this was happening.

I really, really, hope all my Dad’s stories are true…)

For some, inexplicable reason, I’m addicted to the New York Times Crossword. For the past three-and-a-half years, I’ve sat down every day and found 10 minutes to attempt it. Some days I finish it, and some days I don’t. Well, for a lot of days I don’t. What’s most peculiar about my addiction is that the New York Time crossword is incredibly slanted towards, well, Americans. There’s copious questions about baseball players, college football teams, rivers in sparsely-populated states and US daytime soap operas. So why the hell do I subject myself to it?

There’s a couple of reasons, I guess. The first is the reason that I suspect most people attempt crosswords: bragging rights. Well, not directly bragging rights, I suppose, but the ability to stretch oneself mentally sufficiently to finish a crossword is a most enjoyable feeling that can manifest itself in myriad ways, the least of which isn’t adding a little pep to your step. Many a times I’ve walked, nay swaggered, down the street, having polished off the Wednesday crossword in 10 minutes, looking incredulously at people who don’t seem to realise that they’re in the presence of crossword genius. The poor fools. I offer them the hem of my garment to touch and they don’t even know.

I suspect that feeling of awesomeness at completing the New York Times crossword doesn’t have the same impact in the suburbs of Leeds as it does on a commuter train out of Manhattan of an evening, or of finishing the (London) Times cryptic on the overground to leafy Surrey at home time. No matter, the New York Times have us covered. The iPhone app with which one can solve the crossword is Game Center enabled, meaning I can compare the size of my wang, sorry, my time for the day with all manner of people around the world. Unfortunately, this isn’t as satisfying as I’d have hoped for. It would appear there’s nefarious work afoot with the iPhone app – suspiciously low times (3 minutes for the Sunday puzzle that took me over an hour? Come on…) imply someone solving on paper and merely entering the answers in to the online version for kudos. The cads.

So I guess I don’t get bragging rights, then. So I guess the real reason I do the New York Times crossword is that’s it’s a thing of beauty. Yup, I said it – it’s beautiful. Whilst each puzzle is generally designed by a different person, the puzzle editor is Will Shortz, who ensures that each puzzle, whilst wildly different, keeps to the high standard of its forebears. Most of the time, the puzzle is an engineering miracle. Most crossword puzzles require you to know every answer in order to complete the grid; not so with the NYT puzzle. The grid is laid out such that each answer can be revealed by simply knowing a number of answers in the opposite orientation that cross it. It’s in this layout, and the skill required to pitch the level of difficulty of these crossing clues, that the genius lies.

Add on to that the usual panoply of crossword tricks (themes, pangrams, rebuses (man, I hate rebuses), word ladders etc.) and the NYT crossword is remarkable. The difficulty level of the puzzle increases as the week progresses: Monday’s is a gimme, 7 minutes tops. Thursday is just about the limit of my solving ability, and I usual have to cheat only a little to finish that. Friday and Saturday puzzles are ridiculous. I’m constantly in awe of the crossword puzzle sites (yes, there are websites devoted to solving the NYT crossword, with my favourite being Rex Parker) that manage to post sub-10 minute times on Fridays and Saturdays. I’m lucky if I manage a handful of answers. Sunday is the doozy. Sunday is a substantially larger grid, and is comparable in difficulty to a hard Wednesday. It’s usually heavily themed, and the finesse of the theme (and it’s familiarity to me) usually dictates whether I’m going to solve the Sunday puzzle. It usually takes me slightly more than an hour, and finishing it is always exciting as it sets me up for a potential 5 puzzle streak, if I can successfully complete and submit the Monday-to-Thursday puzzles. A 5 puzzle streak week is a good week in my books.

So that’s my confession. I’m a tragic New York Times Crossword geek, who now knows the following:

• Mel OTT was a famous New York Giants baseballer.
• EMIL Jannings was the first Best Actor Oscar winner.
• The ESPYS are an ESPN award ceremony.
• An OLIO is a mix of things.
• NABISCO make Oreo cookies.

I’ve made it my aim this year to try and write more. Not through any misplaced sense of self-importance that what I have to say is interesting, more that any flexing of the creative muscles can only be good for you, and writing has a lower barrier of entry than, say, painting. For the record, I’m not taking up painting. Moreover, there’s few easier ways than blogging to get one in to the writing habit. So here we are. I’m going to do my utmost to commit my only-vaguely coherent thoughts to e-paper as often as is appropriate. I’m not setting myself an agenda or theme about which I should write; on the contrary, I have no extensive knowledge on any topic that would lend itself to a single-subject blog.

So, in lieu of not being able to write about what I know (as the old adage goes), given I don’t really know shit about shit, I’m going to valiantly attempt to write about what I’d like to know. A subtle distinction, one which will become all the more evident as I attempt to wax lyrical on a subject about which I know precious little. I suppose there’ll be posts reviewing films or books, posts about technology, and possibly posts about politics or sport (I’ll really be pushing the bounds of what I know with those last two), but most all of them will be written with the purpose of furthering my knowledge of the subject in question. And, of course, with providing all (both?) of you lucky readers with a witty, erudite, informative commentary. Lovely.

And after that well-meaning and intentioned introduction, I suspect I’ll disappear into months of writer’s block and not post again until this time next year. You’re welcome.

So my movie numbers for 2011 were just as piss-poor as those for 2010. 73 flicks in total for the year, up 4 on the previous year, representing a 5.8% increase. Better than inflation, I guess. However, that still only averages at 0.2 movies a day, or a movie every 5 days. This is no good. Once again, I’m going to blame the glut of awesome TV that seems to have evicted films as our go-to downtime medium of choice. Treme, Boardwalk Empire and Game of Thrones were the standout shows this year, with HBO churning out hit after hit. I think I’m as excited about season two of Game of Thrones this spring as I am about The Dark Knight Rises. Which is saying something, as I’m really fucking excited about that.


Anyhoo, TV aside, there was some good, some bad and some downright ugly on the movie list this year. Check out m’list:

05/07/2011 The A-Team

I think 2010 will go down as the year that I lost interest in music. Well, maybe that’s a little sweeping; more like the year I lost interest in new music. My desire to hunt out new bands diminished in proportion to the reduction in my free time. And you know what? It feels great. I can now quite happily listen to my current mammoth music collection without feeling like I’m neglecting the new crop of songsmiths trying to inject their tunes in my ears. To paraphrase a Dara O’Briain riff, if new music is good enough it’ll eventually become ‘classic’, and I’ll buy it then.

That’s not to say that all I did was listen to my existing music collection. Nope, I found my music listening in general decreasing considerably in 2010. I just wasn’t that into it. Podcasts become slightly more prominent, but mostly I found that I just appreciated the peace and quiet. Lovely lovely middle age. Anyhoo, here’s the list, extracted from iTunes, of stuff I purchased in 2010:

All Pigs Must Die EP – All Pigs Must Die
Only Revolutions – Biffy Clyro
Planets of Old – Cave In
There Is Nothing New Under The Sun – Coalesce
Diamond Eyes – Deftones
Blessed & Cursed – Devil Sold His Soul
Inside Embers Glow – Earthtone9
At Night We Live – Far
Lords of Oblivion – G.U. Medicine
Coextinction Release 2 – Goes Cube
At Both Ends (single) – Grade
Seeing Eye Dog – Helmet
American VI: Ain’t No Grave – Johnny Cash
Only By The Night – Kings Of Leon
Mothership – Led Zeppelin
Revenge Gets Ugly EP – Mastodon
Black Holes & Revelations – Muse
Origin Of Symmetry – Muse
The Resistance – Muse
Bleach (20th Anniversary Deluxe Edition) – Nirvana
The Best Of – Radiohead
Teargarden by Kaleidyscope – Smashing Pumpkins
Telephantasm (Deluxe Version) – Soundgarden
Coextinction Release 1 – Unsane
Hurley – Weezer
Collisions and Castaways – 36 Crazyfists

And, providing you don’t count Journey’s Don’t Stop Believing, Cake’s Short Skirt/Long Jacket and Massive Attack’s Teardrop (all from TV shows), that’s it.

The new Far album was the highlight. I’ve loved Far for a long time, and it was ace to see them bringing an new album out. I’ve only just discovered how good Zep are, so Mothership blew me away. Muse are also something I’ve only recently got into, but they’re exceptional. The Soundgarden best-of and the Bleach remastering were both like slipping on a comfy pair of slippers. The new Helmet disc still features Page’s awful vox, but rocks like a mother. The new Weezer album is interchangeable with the last few. Kings Of Leon is something I’m not afraid to admit I really enjoyed.

Beyond those, I’m having trouble remembering what most of the other stuff sounded like. Sorry, new music, but it would appear that I’m just not that into you.

My year in books takes a quite similar path to my movie-watching: a dearth of reading after 12th June. However, here’s the list for the year:

The Lost Symbol – Dan Brown
My Shit Life So Far – Frankie Boyle
The Greatest Show On Earth – Richard Dawkins
An Utterly Exasperated History of Modern Britain – John O’Farrell
It’s Only A Movie – Mark Kermode
Making History – Stephen Fry
Generation A – Douglas Coupland
Stephen Fry In America – Stephen Fry
Why Does E=MC2? – Brian Cox & Jeff Forshaw
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo – Stieg Larsson
The Girl Who Played with Fire – Stieg Larsson
The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest – Stieg Larsson
The Seashell on the Mountaintop – Alan Cutler
The Fry Chronicles – Stephen Fry
Hitch-22: A Memoir – Christopher Hitchens

Of those 15 books, 11 were read in the first half of the year, prior to the boy being born. Both the last Larsson book and the Hitchens autobiog took me 2 months – the former due to immediate child-rearing duties, the latter due to its immense wordiness.

The list appears to be split evenly between fiction and non-fiction. Of the fiction books, the Millenium trilogy stood out, despite a quirky style (see Nora Ephron’s parody here). I’m now officially bored of Douglas Coupland. Dan Brown novels are still entertaining reads, despite all their flaws.

Of the non-fictions, the pop-sci books by Dawkins and Cox/Forshaw were excellent, and Hitchens’ memoir was also stand-out. Avoid Frankie Boyle, however.