It's Martha's World.

When Martha was a tiny newborn, and mum and I were actually still in control of the TV remote, she would stop whatever she was doing when she heard the theme tune of The Big Bang Theory on TV, and just stare at the screen for its duration. Now that she's five, our chances of choosing TV viewing are definitely remote, and Martha has definitely developed several Sheldon like personality traits, the most obvious being that she has a favourite spot on the sofa that nobody else is allowed to sit on. Like Sheldon's, Martha's spot to sit is on the left hand side of the sofa. She also has a cushion that she likes that nobody else is allowed to use. It’s a Habitat cushion in a classic mid century modern design, so I get why she loves it. I paid for it, so I don’t get how I’m not allowed to use it.

This morning, Martha sat on the right hand side of the sofa and began crafting a miniature top hat out of several Post-it notes and seven rolls of Sellotape. Standard Martha. I sat down next to her in an attempt to collaborate on the hat project, which meant I was sitting in the designated Martha spot.

She looked around at me said "dad are you in my seat?"

I replied with a very factual response. "Yes Martha, because you're sitting on the other side of the sofa, and I don't want to squash you".

"Are you touching my cushion?"

Focus on the facts dad. Stay strong. "Yes Martha, because it's behind me".

I got the dead eye stare. "Don't touch my cushion dad".

"You are not using it Martha, and it's comfy on my back".

"I KNOW that dad, but that's MY cushion".

"Do you want it Martha? I'll swap with the one behind you".

"No. I just don't want you to have it".

"OK" (time for a subject change) "Do you need any help with your hat?"

"Erm NO. Just move my cushion please".

I moved Martha's cushion. Hilariously, we have two of these cushions, identical in every way, one on each of our sofas, and mum had to move Martha's precious cushion last week after aunty had committed the heinous crime of cushion touching. Mum simply swapped Martha’s special cushion with its poor unloved twin. And hasn’t swapped it back since. Martha told mum that she knows which of the identical cushions is hers as she has written an M in pen on the inner cushion. She obviously didn’t know it had been swapped out, and has taken the placebo cushion as the real deal since then. I made a mental note to tell Martha the hilarious tale of the swapped cushion when she was older, making sure that I'd clearly point out that umm had done the swapping, not me. When Martha announced that she was going upstairs for her morning poo, I went over to the other sofa and unzipped the cover of her beloved cushion, the one that had been subject to a sneaky switcheroo. No letter ‘M’. Aha! She was bluffing.

Or was she?

For my 50th birthday, my lovely work colleagues got me a huge box filled with vegan foodstuffs, and a family ticket to Knowsley Safari Park. We had a whole year to use the ticket, and obviously rocked up at the safari park the day before my 51st birthday, the very last day that the ticket was valid. As you do. We had ordered a guide book, but already had our own on board guide, sat in her car seat behind mine. Martha has always been a good reader, but recently she has taken a step further and combined her love for following rules with her reading abilities. Martha makes sure to read every sign that we see out loud so that we all know which regulation it is that we are meant to be following at any given moment in our lives. She had pointed out ‘DO NOT STOP YOUR CAR IF A LARGE ANIMAL APPROACHES’ as someone in front of us with on in-car Martha decided to stop their car as a white rhino and its baby walked towards it. I guess they assumed that a mother rhino wouldn’t be in protective mode near its child or anything…or THEY DIDN’T READ THE SIGN. Martha LOVES rhinos. They are her absolute favourite animals, but her love for following rules superseded even her adoration of the tank like horned vegan beasts.

As we drove through a worryingly unmanned gate after the first electrified fence on the way to the lion enclosure, she pointed out that ‘LIONS LIVE HERE’ and that we must ‘STAY IN YOUR CAR AT ALL TIMES’. Erm, yes, I think we are good with that rule. It reminded me of a story that a friend had told me about her mum escorting a group of kids from a class with special educational needs. As they drove round a lion enclosure in the school minibus, a couple of the kids decided that they really REALLY needed a smoke, and proceeded to jump out of the rear door to spark up. In a lion enclosure. In nanoseconds, a Land Rover with a park ranger flew towards them, loudly urging them to “GET IN THE FUCKING BUS, THERE ARE LIONS HERE”. One of the kids shouted back at the ranger “WE’RE NOT GOING TO GO UP TO THE FUCKING LIONS AND STROKE THEM, WE ARE HAVING A SMOKE”.

Thankfully, all members of The Hursthaus Safari Squad are non smokers, so we were going to remain firmly ensconced in our vehicle. We drove past a pack of wolves, who were obviously less of a flight risk than the lions, and then approached a second fence, which Martha pointed out was electric, just like our car, and then she went deathly quiet. I thought that Maybe Martha had made some kind of link between the electricity in the fence and our car, and was suddenly worried about our means of transport shocking us. I turned to the back seat and asked if everything was okay.

Martha looked terrified. Had the fact that we were literally about to enter the lions’ den hit her? She was looking down at her grey LOL Surprise doll sweatshirt, feeling its texture and pulling her incredibly accurate sad emoji face.

“What’s up Martha?”

“I just saw that the sign says ‘keep doors and windows closed, do not stop your vehicle and...”

“…yes love?”

It was a rare sunny April day, and after school, Martha asked if we could go for a walk round the graveyard. This used to mean us grabbing the dog and doing half a lap before Martha got into some kind of role play leaving a very bored non-role playing pooch wanting to go home for a sleep while Martha was a princess in a maze made of headstones (including that of David Bowie's paternal grandmother, Zillah Hannah Jones). You know, standard 5 year-old activities.

Now that our poor pet was buried in her own private pet cemetery under the trampoline in our back garden, trips round the graveyard were less stressful in terms of animal boredom, but now an open ended proposition timewise. Going to the graveyard at 3:30pm, could mean no tea on the table for when mum returned from a shift at the hospital, and a feeling of failure on my part. After a walk round, Martha stopped at the small area of graves that flanked the old chapel, which was being restored into a home. I guess that the neighbours would be quiet. This section of the cemetery was usually Martha's 'Labyrinth', due to her love of the 1980s Bowie movie of the same name. I spent a third of such games apologising to the dead people that I was standing on.

Labyrinth wasn't on the agenda this time. Martha sat on the edge of one grave and I on another, as she declared "I want to make a small house dad".

"Errrm okay". I immediately became more a grave borrower than a grave robber, finding four flat pieces of quartz form atop a grave and using thme to form some rudimenatry insect house sized walls. I topped mty 'house' with a piece of bark off the floor, and presented my building to my child with a flourish of my hands. It looked uncannily like Fred Flintstone's house, but from far away.

Martha and mum sometimes go away to a relative’s caravan for a long weekend during half term holidays. Working always means that it is a girls road trip, and I am left in the Macaulay Caulkin role of coping with life Home Alone. This usually involves ordering pizza and writing this book in the attic room whilst listening to my record collection at high volume.

This time, I arrived home after my Thursday shift (the girls were away Thursday morning to Sunday afternoon) to a ‘Sorry we missed you’ delivery leaflet through the letterbox. I had ordered a new carpet runner for the stairs, as the last one somehow got covered with loads of black paint when I had recently painted the stairs black. They’d left it with our tiny elderly neighbour. When I knocked on her door to collect the carpet, she tried to become a mini Arnold Pensionegger, and pick it up this object that seemingly took up the same volume of planet Earth as she did. I grabbed it off the floor instead and took it home. My pottering around had taken an unexpected busier turn.

The existing stair runner was fixed in place with a decent quantity of carpet tacks, and the new one would require similar fixing. Try as I might, I just could not locate a hammer. We have three hammers and a rubber mallet in the house but I couldn’t find any of them. I did eventually manage to locate one hammer. The only problem was that it was a 12” tall poseable Mattel MC Hammer doll. He was NOT going to spring to life to pull carpet tacks out of the stairs and store them in his little shiny Hammer pants,so I REALLY needed to find a non-MC type hammer.

In desperation I messaged mum, listing the many many different locations that I had visited on my thus far fruitless quest. She replied with a very cryptic “well if you promise to put it back and act surprised, if you look in your birthday present parcel, there MAY be one there. Martha wanted to get you a personalized hammer as part of your gift.” A padded envelope had been delivered a few days previously, and had sat on the dining table ever since. I hadn't peeked, because (a) I am 50, not 05, and (b) I assumed it was some kind of incredible custom made Etsy Bob Dylan birthday topper with bees coming out of his nose.

Martha was on a video call to mum, who was charging her car at a local speedy charging point in preparation for a girls only road trip to a family member’s caravan for a half term long weekend break. Martha got up and walked away from the screen in mid sentence, leaving mum sat in her car on her phone talking to nobody and looking at nobody.

Mum said “right Martha, I'm gonna hang up now”.

Martha shouted from the far corner of the room. “No mum, don't hang up…I'm just getting something”. She returned with a pencil and a piece of paper, and asked mum to stay very still while she drew her. Mum kindly complied.

By the time mum came home Martha greeted her brandishing the the sketch. “Hi mum, I've done a picture of you. I'm sorry your body looks like a poo. The reason it looks like a poo mummy is because I was going to do a picture of you having a poo…”

“But I wasn’t having a poo in the car Martha…”

”…but instead of that I ended up drawing your body as a poo so you look like a poo mom. So here's a picture anyway”.

“Oh thanks Martha, that looks lovely” said mum, “I thought it look like you gave me some nice curves”.

Half term holidays mean a few rare but cherished daddy and Martha days. This particular one started at 7am with Martha saying “dad DAD I’ve got chickenpox!” Motherclucker. The weather forecast was for springtime sunshine. We had a trip to the library planned, and I was going to see if we could maybe buy some strawberry plants and do some daddy daughter gardening. This was prevented by the pox, as we were placed under house arrest by our resident healthcare professional (i.e. mum) before she left for work. I had covid PTSD, trapped again.

Martha said she was feeling a bit tired, and wanted to have a sofa day. She had ditched her obsession with repeat binging the Wizard of Oz as soon as I decided to spend £7.99 purchasing it on Amazon movies. Today was a PJ masks kind of day. If you haven’t been subjected to the show before, the titular Masks are three school chums who go to school during the day (often discovering some knocked over paint cans or the mysteriously missing innards of a remote control) then get into their pyjamas (or PJs, geddit?) and spend the entire night gently fighting crime against one of three pint sized pre-pubescent baddies. They then seem to be back at school the next morning in the following episode, right as rain, not a yawn or eye bag in sight. I think they just neck a tonne of amphetamines between them in the closing credits. I can’t see it working out long term for these drug addled young ‘uns. Come to think of it, PJ could stand for ‘Phetamine Junkies.

A PJ Masks day meant Martha watching a series or three of the insomniac kid superhero cartoon before morphing herself into a variety of evil villains and making a lot of cardboard or paper remote controls to control the superheroes and make them do ridiculous things (the basic premise of at least 34.8% of the episodes). Once the first remote was manufactured, Martha asked which superhero was going to be controlled. I looked around. I was the only person there. Bad odds. Martha then threw a curveball, pointing to two invisible friends or Victorian ghosts at the side of me. “Will it be daddy, or medium girl or this little baby?’

I grabbed the crucifix and holy water from our exorcism drawer (located between the man drawer and the tea towel drawer) and doused the Persian rug before Martha announced “It will beee….daddyyyy!” I was glad that the ghosts had been busted, but kind of wished that we were inhabiting an actual haunted house so that I could be freed from the ridiculous clutches of the remote control. My spirit was crushed slowly over the next thirty minutes of ‘left, right, jump, backwards, freeze, unfreeze’, until the evil villain said that she needed a wee. I asked if I could be remote controlled to unload the washing machine and hang the laundry out. This was met with approval, and villain sent me on my way to the garden via the utility room.

It takes about three and a half minutes to hang out five work polo shirts and two pairs of jeans. I came back in and there was no sign of Martha. I looked up to the living room ceiling in case her spooky spectre sisters had levitated her in my absence, but no dice. I called up ‘Martha are you okay love?’ More silence. Silence is never good. It’s either a blunt head injury that results in loss of consciousness, or mischief. I feared the worst. Mischief.

I called out again as I turned to go upstairs. Martha was at the top of the stairs, in front of a 1950s G Plan full length mirror that she is single handedly on a mission to cover in fingerprints every 24 hours, despite my protestation. She really didn’t look well. She looked like she was a severe case of hypothermia. Or dead. I dialled 999. Then I noticed the blue marker pen in her left hand. I told the operator that I required no emergency service, unless cleaners were an emergency service, then I really REALLY needed a cleaner. She told me that cleaners were NOT an emergency service, like those lying bastards in the AA, sighed and hung up on me.

As I reached the top of the stairs , I saw that Martha had coloured her entire face in blue pen. Eyelids, lips, EVERYTHING. I felt like papa Smurf clapping eyes on Smurfette for the first time. Or an extra in a live action, lower budget remake of James Cameron’s zillion Dollar cartoon, ‘Avatar: the Way of Daughter’. Martha dropped the pen on the floor and stuck out her tongue. That was blue too. My kid had turned into Violet Beauregarde. I waited for her to inflate and float away to a restricted area of the chocolate factory, but she didn’t. My instant reaction was to laugh out loud whilst thinking ‘oh shit. We are BOTH in so much trouble’. We went straight into the bathroom for a good scrub and wash. Which removed about 90% of the pen, leaving Martha with the distinct look of a corpse. All she needed was a ruffle collared Victorian dress and she could have joined the spooky siblings in the line up for the next game of “who am I controlling now?”

Martha and I were nearing the end of one of our regular early morning pre-school time YouTube boy band marathons. I guess that a 5 year-old girl being into boy bands is a normal thing. But this is Martha’s World. She currently loves both New Kids on the Block and Backstreet Boys. Only not the multibillion selling early stuff. That would be too predictable. Martha likes the recent output from both groups, definitely in the 'men' side of the Boyz II Men divide.

She loves watching the video of NKOTB dressed as (even) old (er) men doing a music history lesson in a high school for the track ‘Boys in the Band’. In the middle of the song, Donnie Wahlberg raps a list of boybands. Martha always joins in for this bit, opening one of her brain boxes and reciting it in unison with Donnie.

80s teen pop sensation Debbie Gibson makes an appearance as a milfy teacher in the hallway flanked by a gaggle of cheerleaders and lip syncs “we like the boys, the boys in the band” to a singer with a really broad New York accent. Martha loves the crazy lady. She’s as yet unaware of Debbie’s pre-milfy days, and I am staggered that YouTube hasn’t thrown ‘Shake Your Love’ or similar onto our screen with its all encompassing algorithm.

Her favourite Backstreet Boys videos go from the sublime to the ridiculous. The most played video is a live set from 2017 in a TV studio to mark their Las Vegas residency, and close second in the running is a 1993 news segment from a Florida news channel, where the boys made their debut with an incredible effort. The then barely teenaged Nick Carter attempted to thrust his prepubescent pecker at the audience of screaming daughters of TV weathermen and sportscasters, while Kevin (who was already the grand old age of 22) looked very awkward and acutely aware of the Savile scale of the dance routine. The song never appeared on any Backstreet Boys album. Go and take a look. You’ll see why.

Sometimes a song called ‘Get Down’ (You’re the One for Me) appears on YouTube. It is a 1996 classic, with little Nick carter in full on bleached blonde curtain hair mode. The boys are precariously balanced on a floating, rotating circular platform similar to the one that Flash Gordon had his scrap with Timothy Dalton on. The floating platform is surrounded by thousands of screens with girls dancing while they watch the boys. Martha seemed concerned watching ‘Get Down’. Stupidly, I asked her what the matter was.

“Dad, do the Backstreet Boys have sore penises?”

I hadn't given much (okay, ANY) thought to the penile health of the Backstreet Boys, but Martha may well have actually been on to something. I imagine that young virile men in Globally famous pop groups at their peak of popularity, with girls in every city in the World flinging themselves at their feet, may well have had sore penises, through overuse if nothing else. “Ummmm I don’t know Martha, I’ve never really discussed it with them, even though they are obviously my close personal friends. Why do you ask?”

“Well, they keep touching them, like when I have a sore lip and you tell me off because I keep picking it like you did when you were a boy and it made it bleed.”

“Ummm, I don’t know the answer. I’ll ask them next time I see them...”

Martha chuckled. “Silly dad!” Shit. Was my ruse blown? Had my daughter realised that I actually bought the tickets to take her to see the Backstreet Boys on their last tour in Manchester, and that Nick Carter didn’t really send them to us as a gift for his close personal friend and occasional stunt double? “Just message them and ask.” Phew. I pinky promised to message the Backstreet Boys in our Whatsapp group chat ‘the boyz’ and ask if they collectively or individually had sore penises.

Martha’s bigger concern than the health of the members of her favourite band members was who they were singing the song to. “Is it to the girls on the screens dad, or to me? Because they are looking at me.”

“I think they are singing to everyone, Martha.”

She rolled her eyes. Martha has never used the actual internet, but had recently undergone an online safety session at school. “But they have to be careful dad, because they don’t know who they are talking to on the screen.” So far, so good. “And if they are singing it to more than one girl, it could be very bad because they would need to get an extra chair if they went out on a date. And if they had kids, the kids might call the wrong person ‘mummy’, which is not good. Annnnnnd They would be tired going from one house to the other ones all the time, so they really should just choose one person to sing it to.”

“I think that the Backstreet Boys have also had their internet safety lesson at pop star school. I think that they are probably just singing it to you then Martha.”

“Silly dad. This isn’t real. This is old Backstreet Boys when they were younger. Look, there’s classic AJ. And that’s baby Nick Carter. It isn’t now.”

I sighed and wished for Peppa Pig. Coming swiftly to my senses, I came up with a far better distraction. I made a semi-realistic 'PING' noise and instantly looked at my phone. "Oh Martha, Howie D has replied in the group chat! He says that his penis is fine, thanks for asking. Let's get your coat on and get to school please."

Martha came home from school and asked if she could put on one of her blue and white gingham summer school dresses. I scratched my head and explained to her that, in this house, we normally put a school dress on BEFORE school as opposed to after school.

"Silly daddy". how wrong I was. Martha wanted the blue summer dress because she wanted to dress up as Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz and play Wizard of Oz after school. OZBVIOUSLY. I dug out one of the summer dresses (which are a lot smaller than they were last summer when she was 4 and a half, and may well not actually fit her properly when summertime eventually rolls around), Martha took off her regular school uniform and activated gingham summer mode, then grabbed a toy dog which was christened Toto. I had to sit downstairs on the sofa (one of my dfavourite parts of Martha's games...until things like street feathers make an appearance), and read the Wizard of Oz book. Martha then magically appeared out of the book, really confused that she was no longer in Kansas, but on our Persian rug in Doncaster via the power of a fictional tornado.

There was one tiny detail that ruined Martha's gameplay. 'Dorothy' had her dog, her pigtails, her blue check dress and confused mental state, but no ruby red slippers from the corpse of a squished wicked witch. I explained to Martha that we didn't HAVE any ruby red slippers in the house, and maybe her LOL doll fluffy slippers with a non-slip grip would do the job instead.

"Dadddddd...that's really silly. They NEED to be ruby red slippers. Dad can you buy me some ruby red slippers now PLEAASSSSEEE?"

"No Martha, I can't because it's teatime and I haven't even started ot make our food yet and, more importantly, we don't have a ruby red slipper shop in town".

"I know what I can do! I will just message mummy and she will buy them for me". She sent a voice message for mum on her tablet clearly stating the situation. "Muuuuuuuum, dad can't get me any ruby red slippers and I need to be Dorothy, so can you please get some on your way home from from work yes thank you OK bye love you".

I then told Martha not to be upset if mum didn't return from work with a pair of brand spanking new, sparkly ruby red slippers, as I didn't think there was a ruby red shoe shop on her route back from work. It was then I heard a 'PLINK'. It was the sound of a penny dropping. We had been crafting a wooden egg (being a non-egg household) into King Charles for a school Easter egg decorating competition where first prize was a non-vegan Easter egg*. Despite the brilliance of our collective effort, I kind of hoped that we wouldn’t win it, as I'd have to add the incident to the ever-growing list of anti-vegan discrimination at school. I was turning into one of THOSE vegans. We were using a large sheet of red felt to make Charles’ coronation cape. I had never made shoes before, but hey, how hard could it be? The answer is not very hard at all.

Martha stood on the red felt and I drew round her feet and made a template to make some kind of slipper cum moccasin cum shoe cum ruby red slipper. After almost an hour ofmore cutting, templating, trying on and stitching, tea was not ready and mum was on her way home, but 'Dorothy' had a pair of ruby red felt slippers that were very pointy, more like an elf shoe or something Noel Fielding would wear than a ruby red slipper that Dorothy pried from a poor flat dead witch, but I think I did really well with the material and time constraints before me. I warded myself six dad points. Martha told me that she could now really become Dorothy, and that she was going to cry some happy tears because I had done exactly what she wanted for her. I also cried a few happy tears because it was 6pm, which meant that it was far too late to make tea, so Martha voice messaged mum to ask her to get chippy tea on her way home. Magic.

Before Martha was born, my wife and I made a conscious decision to keep her free from phone and tablet screens for as long as we could, pledging to keep our offspring engaged with us rather than zoned out on Peppa Pig in her pram. I think pre-birth Martha had overheard our conversation, and staged an in utero sit in protest, eventually coming out sixteen days after her due date, only after I had spent fourteen of those days skim reading the FBI hostage negotiation handbook before I spoke directly to mummy's tummy using a bullhorn and assured pre-Martha that she would still be able to watch TV, a good while before she knew what a TV was. Unfortunately, Mr. Tumble and Iggle bloody Piggle were both still viewable on a TV screen, so we didn't get to skip them through toddlerhood. He was always so weird and otherworldly looking, with that funny shaped head and nonsensical speech. Iggle Piggle was a bit strange too.

Once Martha had cast off her selection of wooden rainbows and the like, we purchased a Kindle tablet for the long car journeys to Butlin's, and filled its meagre megabytes of memory with an assortment of animation in order to avoid the "are we THERRRRRRRRRRRE yet?" game. Apart from the Butlin's road trips, Martha just left the Kindle in a drawer and happily made fully functioning medical kits and prototype nuclear weapons from an assortment of cardboard, pipe cleaners, tissue paper and string. At age five, she suddenly began asking for her iPad. I explained the not so subtle differences between iPads and Kindles (i.e. one is expensive and pretty awesome, and the other is the Kindle), but this was lost on her. The generic name for a tablet in Martha's World is officially 'iPad'. It's her more technologically advanced equivalent of my 'Sellotape' or 'Hoover'. She uses the tablet to video call grandparents far too often, and to leave voice messages if the grandparents don't feel like partaking in their 57th video call of the day, as Martha fails to get ready for school at 7:43am. Along with video chats, she became briefly engrossed in Hello Kitty’s nail salon game, which was just like the real world, but without that nose tingling acetone stench. You could upgrade to get the acetone smell feature, but I didn’t think it was worth the extra £3.99 per month.

One day after school, Martha came home, threw her coat on the floor at the door, kicked her shoes into next week, and sat on the Persian rug. She crossed her legs in a perfect Lotus position, made circles by joining her thumbs to her forefingers on both hands and exhaled a ‘namaaaaaaasteeeeeeeehhhh’ so soothing that I had to check behind the sofa to make sure we hadn’t got lost on the way home and ended up in a Yoga studio. We hadn’t. All I found behind the sofa were a thousand germ-riddled street feathers. I asked where THIS had come from, and Martha told me that they did yoga at school. She grabbed the TV remote (as this was the only piece of technology that she had used since early on, she navigates round it like a pro), and she opened up YouTube. Within seconds, we were lost in a world of Backstreet Boys videos and 'classic AJ'. Several hours later, Martha introduced me to the world of Cosmic Kids Yoga channel. It features a woman named Jaime, who somehow piggybacks the popularity of Spiderman, Minions, Encanto, Star Wars and many, many more in order to magically trick hyperactive school kids into chilling the fuck out and working through an interactive story that she tells via the medium of a million yoga poses. She signs off with a ‘nnamaaaaaaateeeeeeehhhh’. Of course she does. Jaime and her Cosmic Kids have 1.6 MILLION subscribers. I’m guessing that 1.599 million of those are knackered schoolteachers who just want to have a break from wrestling sharpened spoons from tiny ruffians for up to 31 minutes. I was introduced to Cosmic Kids through Jaime’s loose ‘interpretation’ of the Disney megafranchise 'Frozen’. Jaime turned it into some kind of Frozen/Yoga hybrid, a Fro-Yo, if you will. Or a half hour state of Fro-Zen.

Last Sunday, mum was in the kitchen when she heard Martha talking. Assuming it was some kind of cross-generational video chat, she popped her head into the living room. Martha was watching a Cosmic Kids yoga workout video on her ‘iPad’. Only she WASN’T. Martha had propped her ‘iPad’ up and set it to record video in selfie mode. She then recorded a sixteen-minute video of herself as a breathy yoga instructor taking her audience through many moves, ranging from the classic entry-level ‘standing up’ to the trickier ‘balancing on one leg’. She offered encouragement to her audience throughout, and didn’t once feel the need to pretend to be a fast hedgehog or a boy who had been bitten by a radioactive bastard spider to hook in her viewers. MetaMartha was balancing on one leg in the middle of the Persian rug, paying careful attention to Martha Motivator on the screen. At one point in the class, Yoga Instructor Martha told Martha the actual real world child to balance on one leg, and then told her she was going to try to blow her over. On screen Martha blew at the camera, and real-World Martha wobbled and chuckled.

The clocks went back last week. Hoorah! Spring has sprung, Daffodils are everywhere, lambs are frolicking straight onto people’s Sunday dinner plates, the baby Jesus is busy making chocolate eggs for kids. the World seems a brighter place. I absolutely DESPISE it.

I despise it because without fail it absolutely fucks Marthas body clock and bedtime routine right up. For the first couple of nights, we try to wing it, and actually enjoy that she has a ‘lie in’ until 6:40am. Then it inevitably goes sideways. The combination of evening light creeping sneakily through Martha’s newly installed and non-blackout roller blind and the squeakiest floorboards known to man that are sited directly outside of Martha’s bedroom door mean that she is drifting off at 8:30 now, only to wake up at least 4 times as soon as mum or myself step on the non-explosive land mines in the hallway.

I got picked up from work on a Saturday evening, and was asked by Martha to get her cats out of the boot of the car when we got home. Cats. Plural. I know that Hursthaus had one pet cat, but he had never been to the vets in his life because we cannot physically manhandle him into a carry case, so I knew that he was definitely NOT in the boot of the car. I opened the boot, and there were indeed two black bin bags in there. If they contained cats, then they were most definitely inhabiting the theoretically dead half of Josef Schrödinger’s boxed kitty conundrum.

I picked up the bags, ready to get the shovel and dig a feline mass grave in the back garden but, thankfully, the bags were as light as air and contained no fur. When we got into the house and Martha had kicked off her boots at the doorway and flung her coat on the floor directly in front of our specially sited Martha height brightly coloured, kid-engaging, Montessori friendly coat pegs (standard operating procedure), she ripped open the bin bags and released the cats. Or several million balloons with the faces of cats drawn on them.

I was relieved because I didn’t have to be daddy gravedigger, but filled with dread as I knew that we now had to live with what looked like upwards of forty fully inflated balloons in our living room until they ended up shriveled, wrinkly and sad, like an octogenarian’s balls. Next step in the cat game was being told the name of every single cat as Martha vaguely pointed in their direction (just the once, and very swiftly), then being tested by Martha in angry teacher mode on how well you remembered the names, and also the (as previously not mentioned) familial relationships between the huge cast of balloon cats that lay bobbing around with their cute smudgeable biro-drawn feline faces on the expensive Persian rug that Martha seems Hell bent on destroying. I remembered the names of the first two cats, Martina and Meow Meow, and failed at the rest. My ‘reward’ for scoring two out of forty-three was to officiate at a cat balloon wedding ceremony. Which was exactly as much fun as it sounds.

The dad of one of the boys in Martha’s class at school had messaged my wife on behalf of his son. He said that his son had asked him to ask Martha if she would be his girlfriend. Martha’s predictably grown up response was to tell mum that she wouldn’t be able to be Boy’s girlfriend as she was already in a serious relationship with First Crush.

After school the next day, Martha came out of the classroom, swiftly followed by Boy, who ran up to her and whispered in her ear “you’re my girlfriend”. Martha’s look was a mixture of absolute pity and “nahhhhh”. She didn’t reply, and just stood there until Boy flew off at 100 miles per hour. When the courtship coast was clear, I asked Martha why she hadn’t put Boy straight when he had claimed to be her love interest.

“Dad, I didn’t want to hurt his feelings”. Aahh, my daughter the empath.

“Actually Dad, Shavesh also asked me to be his girlfriend”.

“okay...”

“…and so did Tomas”.

“Is he the one who wears jogging bottoms to class and claims to drink a double espresso at lunchtime every day?” Uh oh.

“Yeah dad”.

“What about Bromar?”

“Don’t be SILLY dad. Bromar will NEVER be my boyfriend”.

At that moment, I was extremely thankful for the smallest of mercies.

“So, Martha, with all those boys wanting to be your boyfriend, which one do you think you will choose? Or will you stick with First Crush?”

“Well, I had a good think about it, and I’ve decided I’m going to have a LOT of boyfriends, like the woman in the song I heard on the radio in the car. She is a maneater. I’m going to be a maneater, dad.”

Martha being Martha enjoys listening to Bob Dylan. Her take on his unique vocal stylings was “Dad, Bob Dylan sings like he has bees in his nose. Does Bob Dylan have bees in his nose?”

“I dunno Martha, he’s never let me look up his nose”.

 “I think he does have bees up his nose”.

One of Martha’s favourite musical pastimes is to shout "ALEXUHHHH, play Blowin in the Wind", and then play along with Bob Dylan’s harmonica breaks absolutely perfectly, note for bloody note. When I asked how she could do that without anyone teaching her, she replied “It’s in one of the boxes in my head, so I just open the box and do it”. I immediately dug out my old tour manager contact book and started booking her first arena tour with promoters. Of course I was realistic. I wasn't stupid. I knew that my five year-old, no matter how precocious a talent, would not be ready to be playing arenas. I booked it to start the day after her seventh birthday.

At one point, Martha loved Elvis Presley. She then discovered that this devilishly handsome hip wiggler who sang about his pet hound dog had been dead for 40 odd years. This led her to ask about the pulse or lack thereof whenever she discovered a new musician or band.

“Is Bob Dylan still alive? Or is he dead like Elvis?”

“He’s still alive, but he’s three hundred years old, like Yoda”.

“Does he still play concerts dad?”

“Hmmmm…I don’t know Martha, I’ll take a look”. The all knowing Google informed me of two things. Firstly, that Bob Dylan DID indeed still play concerts, and that very week was playing in Hull, the closest city to our home on his latest World Tour. And secondly, that my offspring seemed to possess some kind of inbuilt Bob Dylan radar. I thought ‘what a first gig THAT would be to talk about when she was older’ as I clicked on a link for tickets. Upon seeing the cheapest ticket priced at over TWO HUNDRED FUCKING POUNDS for an obstructed view, and reading a review that said Bob spent the whole evening hidden behind an upright piano, giving even the front row an obstructed view, another thought crossed my mind. What a first gig we could PRETEND that was. Knowing Martha and her ridiculous memory (she still talks about spotting a turtle through a glass bottom boat on a holiday to Cyprus when she was 18 months old), I knew that she wouldn’t be fooled, so closed down the ticket site and continued listening to her play the harmonica along with Bob for another thirty minutes before bedtime beckoned.

With my birthday on the horizon, Martha opened the party planner box in her head, and decided to inform mum that the theme for dad’s 51st birthday would be a Bob Dylan party. Definitely a step more appropriate than last year’s Sonic the Hedgehog bash. She wanted to fashion a Bob Dylan cake, and decorate the living room with lots of balloons with Bob Dylan’s face on them. The party planning force is also strong in mum, and she jumped firmly on board the Bob train. After some specific searching, mum told Martha that she couldn’t find any Bob Dylan balloons, and that she didn’t think that they existed, as probably not many people wanted a Bob Dylan party with Bob Dylan balloons. Martha was horrified.

“But mummmmm, ALL old men love Bob Dylan”.

She then hunched over, looking like a cheekier version of Yoda, sporting an invisible walking stick, put on her best ancient person hobble and said, in a fading croaky voice of near death “I looooove Bob Dylannnnnn”.

Mum asked who that was meant to be. It was meant to be me. Brilliant. Martha repeated her impression to me the following day, because she didn’t want me to miss it. I threw the harmonica in the recycling bin and cancelled the arena tour.

A week away from children for half term simply wasn’t enough for Martha’s teachers, who followed it up with an immediate post half term teacher training Monday. Fuckers. Martha wanted to go to the Library. She wisely decided to pack a unicorn backpack full of snacks (for her exclusive snackage, not poor dad’s), as a trip to the library usually meant a journey akin to the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy (supermega extended director’s cut with Gollum commentary), usually with some kind of multi level treasure hunt up and down and up again in the lifts.

Martha had successfully completed the latest hunt during half term, but wanted to do it again. Bollocks. I wanted to just grab up to six stories and go to eat lunch, not navigate four storeys for seven hours. We started with clue number one, but thankfully she gave up pretty swiftly and we went back to the Children’s Library space. Martha was desperate for a pen and paper. Almost as desperate as she was for a wee every 10 seconds which resulted to several trips to the gent’s toilets and our usual cubicle. Martha’s take on urinals was “dad why are those buckets just open?" I had zero answers.

Upon our return to the Children’s space, I said that she could have a pencil if she was brave enough to ask the librarian for it. She was. Hoorah. I thought that the pen and paper sourcing meant that the adventure treasure hunt redux part deux was back on, but no. Martha started writing down a list of letters. B DD EE GFGFGFG DDE. Even without the Enigma code cracking apparatus that I usually carted round with me in a little…erm…cart, on trips to town, I immediately recognized this sequence of block capitals.

“Martha, are you writing down the notes of the main melodic guitar and vocal riff to Iron Man by Black Sabbath?”

“Yes dad. It’s in one of the boxes in my head and I wanted to write it down”.

It was 6:34pm on a Tuesday. I was basking in the glorious post teatime, pre bedtime golden hour, a time to reflect on the day and do the dishes or coral a billion toys back into their clearly labelled boxes, where they would languish until 5:59am the next day, when their great Liberator would once more grant their freedom to lay on the floor under dad’s feet. Martha had turned the bathtub into a ‘spa’. Poor mum had been in the bath with Martha for about twenty-three hours as usual. Once a penguin floated past her face on a tiny iceberg, she decided that it was time to get out. Martha didn’t follow suit. She shouted “DAAAAAAAAAAAAAAD”, which was normally the signal to tell Alexa to cease playing some maudlin Radiohead B-Sides on the kitchen smart speaker while I washed up, and head up to get her out of the bath and ready for bed. Today was different. In a bad way. I got up to the bathroom, and saw my Smurf blue wife wrapped in a bath towel, and my daughter still in the bath. “Dad, come in to my spa, it’s still open”. Oh fuck.

I went to our bedroom and hopped into my flamingo patterned swim shorts, then physically and emotionally took the plunge.Martha the Spa owner told me to relax in the ice bath. Once she could see that her spa client was suitably ‘relaxed’ (i.e. in the early stages of hypothermia), Martha promptly placed a wet flannel over my face and proceeded to get all Guantanamo on me by pouring a plastic measuring jug of cold water over the flannel ‘to relax you daddy’.I told her it was NOT relaxing, but a thing called ‘waterboarding’ or simulated drowning, and actually in direct contravention to the Geneva Convention, ESPECIALLY in a household setting as opposed to a Dark Ops site in an isolated shipping container in some far-flung land, manned by shadowy CIA operatives with an agenda, and a list of confessions to tick off. She didn’t care. The Geneva Convention did not apply in Martha’s spa.

I never thought that a shortage of cucumbers would ever have an effect on me, but since Martha asked for giant African land snails named Fred and Martha for her fifth birthday, a cucumber a week has been added to the shopping list. Fred and Martha munch a slice each every night. The cold spell has led to our heroes in a hard shell forming a crusty doorway over their shells and going in to hibernation, despite me spending approximately £256.70 per night in electricity usage on a heating mat in an attempt to replicate the African climate in midwinter Doncaster. The big news of the moment is a shortage of salad items in all supermarkets, a tomato travesty, a a veritable cucumber catastrophe. We had managed to snag a cucumber on our last trip to the shop, but I was keeping a close eye on it, as I was sure that neither Fred nor Martha had a tiny ration book.

After picking Martha up from school, I was ordered to lie on the sofa. Martha swiftly told Alexa to play a soundtrack of horrific new age hippie dippy spa music, and removed all cushions so that it wouldn’t be a pleasant experience. “You’re going to come to my spa”. I broke out in a cold sweat, having flashbacks to Guantanamo Bath and the Martha state sanctioned waterboarding incident. She trotted off to the kitchen.

“Dad, where’s the cucumber?” I heard the sound of some very sleepy snails panicking. It was a very quiet sound.

“It’s in the fridge, but please don’t waste it, it is all Fred and Martha eat”.

“I’m not going to waste it, silly dad. It’s for your eyes. To RELAX YOU”.

A minute later, the spa owner appeared with two slices of cucumber, and told me to remove my glasses and close my eyes. I was filled with dread. Martha gently placed the freezing cold slices of cucumber over my eyes, and then pressed down on them just to make sure they were set to maximum relax mode. I felt like a spangle leotard clad pro wrestler in the USA mid title match, getting his eyes gouged by the ‘bad guy’. Except this shit was REAL.

“Ummm, Martha, that’s enough now, it’s hurting my eyes”.

“No it isn’t dad. It is RELAXING you”.

I submitted to the latest torture session and lay still, hoping that feigning death would lead to a cessation of the brutality. Thankfully, the cucumbers rested.

I then felt something on my nose. Then IN my nose. Then in my mouth. It tickled. It was a street feather. You’ve never heard of a street feather? Let me enlighten you. Whenever we go anywhere, we do not return empty handed. At some point, Martha will spy a pigeon feather laid on the street. Martha fucking LOVES pigeons, going as far as becoming best friends with one called Pin. Pin was a pure white bird, who sat on our neighbours roof and looked in at Martha’s window every morning, then flew into our garden top eat seed at Martha’s feet. At some point, Pin the pigeon had been mauled by a cat (probably ours). She had lost an eye, and we feared for her demise. Somehow, she made it through, and lived a happy, half zombie faced life with an open eye socket. This led to a literal blind spot on her right side, and one day, our cat took full advantage and pounced. I screamed at him and chased him away, but pin was in a bad way. She managed to fly off, and came back into our garden the following day to see Martha, then vanished. Every white pigeon we see now is confirmed as an offspring of poor Pin.

Once Martha had accepted that Pin was not going to come back to the garden, she adopted another one. This poor bugger made made Pin look like Doncaster’s Next Top Avian Model. This one had been more likely mauled in the jaws of a dog, and had a gaping hole where its throat would have been. Martha took pity on this one, and kept feeding it. It kept coming over, and eating loads of seed, which instantly fell out of it’s throat hole onto the floor again. This went on for a few days. Martha even hatched a plan to cover the poor bird’s throat hole with either a bandage or some sellotape. I had thought of feeding it a spinach leaf, which would hopefully sit in front of the hole and allow seeds to pass to the belly. Neither happened.