#andrewkhurst

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.

We had returned from walking our old and permanently tired dog around the local graveyard for an hour in the unseasonal and, indeed, decidedly non-British late March sunshine. This entailed an hour of either Martha or myself having to pretend to be a dog while the non-pretend dog of us threw a stick, and the non-pretend actual real life dog ignored every hurl of the stick, preferring instead to sniff round in search of tiny round nuggets of wild rabbit poo to devour and clumps of fox shit to drop her shoulder in and lay on her back to really get the fox shit embedded into her fur, wriggling around like something very excited to be covering its back in actual faeces. Delightful. On more than one occasion, I had to remind Martha dog that, while I applauded her commitment to the role (and I don’t mean the roll in fox shit), the stick DID NOT belong in her mouth. In terms of enthusiasm for the role of pretend dog, Martha definitely beat me. My apathetic mutterings of ‘woof woof’ as I walked in non-dog like fashion to bend over and pick up a stick whilst being as human as I could to passers by didn’t go unnoticed by Martha the drama teacher.

“Daaaaaad?” The elongated dad was always framed as the vaguest of questions.

“Yes my dear?”

“You can’t speak. You’re a dog”.

I cranked up my best Scooby Doo (or, more phonetically, ‘Rooby Roo’) impression. “Rat’s right Rartha, ri’m a rogg”. I was so pleased with its accuracy That made one of us.

“You’re being a rubbish dog. You need to try HARDER Dad”.

“Ruck off Rartha, ruck right off”.

Half way round the graveyard, Martha spied some daffodils. Now she LOVES a good daffodil. She even loves a bad daffodil.

“Daaaaad, can I pick those flowers?”

“No love. They have already been picked, and then bought from a shop by a person who has put them on the grave of where someone is buried, so that they can remember them. It wouldn’t be kind to take them”.

“Okayyyyyyy. What about THOSE flowers?”

“Well, they are not picked, and are not growing on a grave, which means that they are wild so, yes, I guess so”. Martha picked 3,463 wild daffodils and carried them home to give to mum as a Mother’s Day gift.

We followed the poor non-pretend, real life actual dog-tired dog home, and Martha went to set up a tea party in the back garden while I prepared her current favourite tea - pizza. This is Martha, so it was never going to just be as simple as making a bog standard circular pizza. Her brief this week was for me to get a sharp knife and cut around the shape of my hand, then do the same with the other hand, creating a left and right hand shaped pair of pizzas for her plate. I uttered a half arsed protest about being made to wield an extremely sharp blade in my non-cutting hand and trace it in close proximity to the delicate digits of my actual useful hand, knowing that the suggestion of using my left hand to cut around my right hand twice and then flipping the base over to create a left hand, with the added bonus of not losing any fingers would be dismissed in an instant by the tiny food prep dictator currently standing on her bright yellow modified Ikea Grundfaar (or some such like name) step stool, supervising my pizza cutting with a laser focus.

“Daaaaad, the knife isn’t close enough to your fingers”.

“Sorry love, I’m not used to really using my right hand, because I’m left handed”.

“That’s fine dad, just practice. Is that tomato sauce?”

“No Martha, it’s a teeny bit of blood”.

“Yeeeeeeeuk”.

“It’s okay, I’ll cut that finger off the pizza, just like I’ve done with my actual hand”.

“Thanks dad”.

I was left to finish making the pizza and self-administer first aid, while Martha set up the tea party. About three minutes later, Martha appeared clutching a posy of artificial flowers, looking to all the World like a kid from an NSPCC fundraiser (‘little Christabel will never get to smell flowers, because her dad sold her nose to buy booze. With YOUR help, we can stop this’.) She had her ‘big idea’ face on. I waited to hear what the big idea was.

“Daaaaad?”

“Yes my little pumpkin?”

“When you are ready to die, I am going to bury you in the graveyard and put these flowers on your grave”.

Many questions raced through my mind. Was my four-year-old daughter plotting to euthanize me? Were my groans of “oh dear” when forced to carry her my shoulders interpreted as a sign of my rapid decline to the warm embrace of death? What the actual fuck? I thought it wisest to let her know that I was onto her evil plan.

“That’s nice Martha, but I’m not quite ready to die yet”.

“Yes dad, I KNOW THAT. But you will be ready one day, and I’m going to bury you and put these flowers on your grave”.