Pointless rituals
James Delingpole
The other day my boy Ivo did something incredibly brilliant, but none of you will think so unless you're my wife or one of his grandparents because a) the exploits of other people's children are quite fabulously boring and b) because you'll think it's a weird thing not a healthy thing and you won't quite see the point of it.
Anyway, this brilliant thing was that, when he thought no one was looking, he re-arranged a glass on my bedside table so that its position was more symmetrical. I knew then that he had inherited one of my obsessive compulsive disorders, the one where I can't eat off, say, a gingham tablecloth without ensuring that the knives and forks are exactly vertical and that the bottom of the glass goes exactly in the middle of the check pattern. 'That's my boy,' I thought. 'Soon he'll find it impossible to walk down a corridor without touching the walls using the same amount of pressure with both palms. And his whole life will be encumbered by pointless rituals, just like mine!'
Now it might sound sick wishing one's neuroses on one's children — almost as bad as the blind couple who tried to guarantee themselves a blind child — but it's surely the main reason why we breed them in the first place: this urge to ensure that when we die (or rather 'if' in my case — I'm still hoping to find the escape clause) there will remain behind this younger, perhaps slightly better-looking and betterendowed version of us to carry on all our good work.
Suppose I ought to work in some sort of TV element at this stage, and I can, because it gives me the chance to talk about Crocodile Hunter (Discovery, Sundays), which, much to my joy, has taken over from Tweenies as Ivo's favourite programme. His second favourite is Captain Scarlet (Sky One) which pleases me too, especially the fact that he has recognised the seedy hipness of Captain Black. 'I like evil people,' Ivo said the other day. 'Evil people are cool.' Quite pleasingly warped, I reckon, for a nearly-four-year-old.
Crocodile Hunter is about the adventures of terminally enthusiastic Aussie herpetologist Steve Irwin. who has intense, beady almost snakelike eyes, a handful of cultish catchphrases like 'he's getting a bit cranky', and two special powers which always make for useful television — an ability to jump sideways very quickly when attacked by an Estuarine crocodile and a marvellous facility for picking up poisonous snakes in the wild without getting bitten.
When I first discovered him on terrestrial TV programmes like The World's Ten Deadliest Snakes (which all live in Australia), I thought he was mainly a British phenomenon. Only after seeing him sent up on The Simpsons and watching his Discovery programmes did I realise just how enormous he is. I seem to remember reading somewhere that he has an audience of 50 million (or maybe it was 15 million — still pretty big either way) and he's now starring in his own feature film. The hummer was that when he came over to promote it no one asked me to interview him, which is so annoying because I'm probably his biggest English fan and I already know quite a bit about his subject.
The reason for this is that when I was a child we had a reptile house in our garden. where we kept lizards and snakes (including a 9-ft boa constrictor) and baby crocs. When we went on holiday, my father and I would spend most of the time on lizarding expeditions, capturing them with a bucket of rotting fruit with a greased rim. Once on a flight back from the Seychelles they escaped on the aeroplane, which wasn't popular with the stewardesses.
So really I'm in the wrong job. My father is too — he would have been much happier as a naturalist than he is in nuts and bolts. Perhaps, though, we may yet be redeemed by the third generation. With all those viewers Steve Irwin must be coining it in — and it's not like he has any major outgoings: just endless pairs of khaki shorts and shirts, as far as I can tell — and if Ivo could take over where Steve leaves off, well, maybe I might yet end up in a halfway decent retirement home.
But that's not the only reason I'm encouraging Ivo to watch Crocodile Hunter. Another is that it's not something crap like Digimon (like Pokemon but worse) or Barney The Dinosaur (Barney is vile. He's this purple dinosaur who ponces around like Liberace, corrupts our children with his American English and PC ways and is generally very lame). And another is that I like it and can watch it with him.
It's great when your children get to an age when they watch the same TV programmes you do, because when their mother sees you slobbing with them on the sofa she thinks it counts as parental bonding and doesn't tell you get up and do something useful for a change. But I'm afraid I can't be arsed to think up a clever final line because I've just come back from The Big Chill at Eastnor Castle and my brain isn't up to it.
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