#daddiaries

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?

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.

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.

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”.