Tag: Parents

Guest Post: 7 Reasons Having No Mobile Signal is Worse Than A Zombie Apocalypse

Needless to say, it’s only a matter of time before the zombie apocalypse (I’m guestimating at around three to four years) but a world populated with angry, brain-obsessed shufflers needn’t be the end of the world (although that’s pretty much exactly what it is). There are plenty of things that are more of a hindrance than those stupid slow-coach zombies – such as having no mobile phone signal. Let’s take a look at the most obvious 7 Reasons (there are hundreds to choose from) that a having no mobile signal is, in fact, considerably worse than a world beset by grey-matter gobblers:

1. Inconvenience. Just imagine how angry you’re going to be when you get home from the pub, filled with Guinness (there are other beers available. They’re just not as nice) and you have a craving for a pizza. You whip out your mobile phone to ring the local Papa Johns and, lo-and-behold, no phone signal! Call me crazy but, in my book, this is much more of an inconvenience than having some undead chap shuffling after you trying to get their takeaway of choice i.e. brains.

2. Social Media. Picture this – you’re being chased by a zombie and the poor unfortunate ghoul trips over whilst he is chasing you. How annoying would it be not being able to upload “LOL – Epic Zombie Fail. Tripped Over…” as your Facebook Status because your phone has no signal. That, my friends, is a world not worth thinking about.

3. Popularity. If you’re anything like me, your mobile phone will constantly be ringing off the hook with requests to go to fun social events or just out to the pub but ever since I’ve moved to an area with no mobile phone signal, I’ve not being get such invites. I didn’t get them before either but there must have been some other reason for that. At least, with the zombie apocalypse, you can try and befriend some of the less “bitey” ones.

4. Emergencies. Needless to say, in a world ravaged by zombies, you’re probably going to have to ring the emergency services from time to time with issues such as:

999 Operator: 999, what’s your emergency?

You: Errrrm, yeah, so there’s a zombie eating my Shih Tzu.

999 Operator: That, sir, is not an emergency. Goodbye.

Or something like that.

5. Pranks. Obviously, the mobile phone is integral to many pranks and if you’re unfortunate enough to live in an area which is utterly bereft of phone signal, your pranking capabilities will be severely inhibited. Having zombies clawing at your door will obviously be a bit annoying that but an inability to phone up the local takeaway restaurant with the name Joe Mama is patently much, much worse.

6. Boredom. As you may have noticed, people are now more or less tethered to their smartphones and it could be potentially difficult to spot the normal from the zombies in this post-apocalyptic world as we’re slaves to our phones and they’re slaves to their insatiable desire to chow down on brains. Without our phones, our propensity to get bored increases significantly and this, my friends, is another reason that having no phone signal is worse than a zombie apocalypse.

7. Parents. Even if there’s a zombie apocalypse, your parents are going to still be sitting at home wondering why you’re not calling them. If you live in a mobile phone area with no reception you can use that as an excuse for not calling but a zombie apocalypse? No, that won’t fly with the old parental units. They’ll want their Sunday phone call still.

Have you got concerns about an impending zombie apocalypse? Rightly so. It prepares to be ready for such an eventuality so you can sort out your mobile phone receptions problems with a LiGo BlueWave Mobile Hub which will get rid of those pesky “dead-spots” for mobile phone signal. You can find this product online at LiGo Cordless Phones.

February 27, 2013
7 Reasons To Be A Father

This piece is entitled 7 Reasons to be a Father. It is not 7 Reasons You Fathered a Child, we all have our own reasons for that, often involving a combination of beer and lust or – for the less fortunate – calendars, timetables, fatigue and oh God, it’s bloody sex again. This is a plea to bring back into popular usage the title Father. It’s important that women read this too, as it’s mostly from them that children learn how to address their fathers. I’m printing this piece out and posting it all around the house when I’ve finished it for my wife to see because I, more than almost anything else, also wish to be addressed as Father. Here’s why.

1. Fathers Have A Day. Dads and daddies don’t have a day, but fathers do. It’s called Father’s Day, and it’s a whole day devoted to the celebration of fathers. Less formally titled male parents have nothing similar to Father’s Day. The nearest thing they have is Daddy Day Care, which is a film starring Eddie Murphy from 2003, made a mere eighteen years after he ceased to be funny.* If you want to be celebrated, you have to be a father.

2. It’s Not Mentioned In The Phrase “Who’s The Daddy”. I have an irrational hatred of the phrase “who’s the daddy” that borders on the pathological. I don’t know why people ever need to say this (actually, it’s usually bellowed, boorishly) but they do. I dislike this phrase so much that my (fortunately resistible) desire on hearing it is to beat the sayer around the head with the nearest sturdy but moveable objects to hand – which today, would be a large beige parasol and a teacup** – while saying “who’s the father“. This is problematic as the best known user of this phrase is Ray Winstone (in the film Scum), and in terms of people you’d be ill-advised to assault with a beige parasol and a teacup, he’s right up there with Sebastien Chabal and the hairy-armed woman from my local branch of Superdrug. If more people used the word father, I’d be in less danger.

3. It’s Your Duty. While my son and I were playing our version of peek-a-boo that bears the catchy name, Where’s Father? My visiting mother-in-law looked at me aghast. “He can’t call you Father” she said, “that sounds horrible. Fathers are remote and distant”. While I agreed with the first part of what she said (he can’t call me Father. He’s a baby. He usually refers to me as Agoo-Agoo), I wholly disagree with the latter part. Fathers are not remote and distant; bad parents are. Father is just a name associated with another age when the social norm was for parents (especially male ones) to be more distant from their children. Were all fathers cold and distant? No. Were all of these men bad parents? No. But they’ve been tainted by the modern distaste for the word father. Don’t we owe it to people who will be forever associated with the word father to reclaim the name, to show that being addressed as father and being a good parent are not exclusive? Yes. I think we do. Being addressed as Father, rather than as Daddy could be seen as performing a civic duty. A very untaxing one at that, which is by far the best sort.

4. The Name Father Lends Itself To Formality. If you ever ask a child what their dad has been up to, the answer is never good. It’s usually, “Daddy drank too much and fell asleep on the kitchen floor.” Enquire after a father, however, and surely you’ll get something more formal and considered: “Father imbibed injudiciously and was importuned adjacent to the pantry” or “Father’s club won a tournament of association football and, on his return to the familial abode, he was so awash with joy and hubris that he swooned in the scullery”. The more formal account of your character and your recent occurrences will give everyone a much better impression of you.***

5. Father Is Right For Our Era. It’s been a trend in recent years for children to be named more traditionally and formally and Britain is now teeming with Samuels, Lilys, Lottys and Benjamins. With superb irony, there was even a flood of Noahs two years ago. What better fit for the era then, than to be known as Father? Can you imagine any conversation beginning “Hephzibah.” “Yes, Dad”? No of course you can’t. Gary has a dad. Jeremiah requires a father.

6. The Word Father Is Synonymous With Excitement And Adventure. The word father is redolent of suitably-attired men drinking port in their oak-panelled libraries; of men that had rounded the horn six times afore the mast when they were scarcely twenty; of men that invented telephones and telegrams and multitudinous things that don’t begin with tele; of men that built vast industries where once there had been nothing; of men that – with scant regard for the peril they placed themselves in – explored and charted the world that was their plaything; of unreconstructed men that sallied forth to ride atop elephants and take pot-shots at tigers whilst clad in crisp linen; of men that reposed languidly – though impeccably – in the leather armchairs of their clubs and in the saloons of well-appointed hotels; of men that wore a panoply of hats – tall and short, soft and hard, cloth and silk – for every occasion, but never indoors; of men that marched long in shambling, hobnailed ranks to their capital when their families fell hungry; of bewhiskered men that shrank their world, bringing far-flung and wondrous exotica and ephemera to and from all the ends of the earth; of men that unsealed newly-received missives at their breakfast tables with a silver letter opener and a flourish; of good men whose reliability, indomitability, solidity and sheer bloody ability went unremarked upon though thoroughly remarkable; of men for whom adventure, discovery, conquest, knowledge, power, expansion, great works, boundlessness and greatness were commonplace. Those men were fathers. And dad? Dad drives to B&Q on a Saturday morning in his people carrier, puts up shelves in the afternoon, drinks crap lager while watching Britain’s Got Talent in the evening and then falls asleep at night during Match of the Day. And Saturday is the highlight of his week. Being a father is so much more exciting.

7. It’s Rare. There just aren’t many Fathers out there so you’ll stand out. This has other benefits too. Should you find yourself in a beer garden populated by the balding, the pudgy, the badly-attired and the bloodshot of eye, observe what happens when a child calls out “Dad”. Everyone stops what they are doing and looks around, certain that their progeny is in urgent need of their attention, only to discover that it’s the child of someone else who then announces to the assembled company that they have done a big plop. If your child calls out “Father”, you’re likely to be the only person that looks around so it’s not just more individual, it’s more sociable too, as no one else has their conversation about how much of Match of the Day they missed last night when they dozed off disrupted, and no one gets to hear about the big plop. Except you.

So, who’s the daddy? Who cares? Who’s the father? It’s me. Indubitably.

*Oh God. I’m old enough to remember when Eddie Murphy was funny. This is a truly horrific watershed moment.

**Note to self: Sit near more manly objects when writing.

***This may be fanciful. Learning to crawl up the stairs would be more efficacious.

June 28, 2011
7 Reasons Blackout Blinds Are Surprisingly Effective

My wife and I are trying to train our child to recognise the difference between day and night at the moment and the latest weapon in our armoury is a blackout blind: a blind which prevents any light coming through the window. This, we not unreasonably thought, would prevent our six-week old son waking up at 5am when sunlight streams through our East facing bedroom window and would help him get into a settled routine of sleeping at night. So far, it has proved effective (after a fashion).

1. Fitting. As the member of the 7 Reasons team that is competent at DIY I envisaged that there would be no problems installing our blind, and I was almost correct. It was incredibly simple to fit, with only a bit of light drilling required. And it was simple right up until the moment – while I was balanced precariously atop a step-ladder – that everything went dark. Not just dim, you should understand, but dark. Preternaturally dark. Darker than spending a dark night in the darkest room of the Prince of Darkness wearing a sleeping mask. Darker than anything ever. There was no light. “Help!” “Help!” I called until my wife came up the stairs and opened the door, flooding the room with light from the hallway. “It all went dark”, I explained to a sceptical wife who couldn’t comprehend – or didn’t believe – that something as insubstantial as a piece of material could block out all light. I climbed down from the ladder with my reputation for DIY prowess, if not my dignity, intact.

2. Baby’s Bedtime. In the evening our son fell asleep before we expected him to and, rather than look a gift horse (or a sleeping baby, which is a very similar creature to a gift horse) in the mouth, we decided we would put him to bed right then. We gingerly carried him up the stairs and swaddled him in his cot. We began to sneak out of the room and paused to close the blind on the way. Everything went black. We couldn’t see a thing. We partially raised the blind again so that we could find the light switch and turned on the light so that we could see the door and find our way out. This woke the baby. Bugger.

3. Mummy’s Bedtime. Eventually, we were able to get our son back to sleep and, quite soon after, my wife snuck up to bed. I have little idea what happened, but after a couple of minutes, from my position in the room below, I heard a loud bang, followed about thirty seconds later by the noise of the baby crying. Then I heard the sound of my wife trying to placate the crying baby with a cuddly toy, before my parental selective deafness kicked in and I returned to what I was doing.

4. Daddy’s Bedtime. Eventually, the baby became quiet again and, having spent the remainder of a fascinating evening reconfiguring the 7 Reasons W3 Total Cache plugin and our email servers*, it was time for me to go to bed. I went up the stairs and changed in another room, so as not to disturb anyone. Then I snuck across the landing into the bedroom and closed the door noiselessly behind me. Where once there would have had been some residual light filtering through the blind to aid my navigation across the room, now there was none. I knew roughly where the bed was though, and I took several tentative steps toward it before stumbling over something and letting out an involuntary scream as I lost my balance and landed in a heap on the bed.

5. “AAAAARRRRRRRRGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!” Shrieked a lump in the bed from beneath me as, in the pitch darkness, a screaming and unknown assailant pounced on her. I groped around for the switch to the bedside light and, finding it quickly, turned it on. I looked behind me to see what was on the floor. “Are you drunk?”, the now slightly calmer lump in the bed enquired. “I fell over an owl,” I replied.

6. “WWWWAAAAAHHHHH!!!!!!!” Said a tiny voice from the other side of the room reacting to the sudden light. Eventually we were able to get him back to sleep.

7. Sleep. I was unaware of what occurred during the remainder of the night. I have since been told that the usual cycle of the baby waking up and requiring feeding and changing carried on unaltered by the loss of the light. I was told that this morning when, after what I can only describe as the most blissfully tranquil sleep of my life, my rather tired looking wife shook me awake and informed me it was 11am and that we were going to be late for our lunch appointment. “But it can’t be”, I replied, “It’s still pitch black”.

So there you have it. Blackout blinds do work, and you can use them to lull the unsuspecting into sleeping longer and later. They just don’t work on babies.

*I had hoped to watch a couple of episodes of Bergerac. We sacrifice a lot for 7 Reasons.

May 11, 2011
Guest Post: 7 Reasons To Shop At Ikea

Another Saturday comes by and with it another chance for Marc and I to get up from the sofa and stretch our legs. I am stretching them quite far today. From Fulham to some place in Kent. I’m moving you understand. But that’s enough about me, let’s focus on the issue in hand. Today’s 7 Reasons piece comes from regular 7 Reasons contributor, Simon Best. Who, when he’s not writing for us – or shopping in Ikea – can be found writing on twitter. He also does some other things that no one quite understands.

1. Names. Everything they sell at Ikea from the largest kitchen unit to the smallest tealight has a name, the vast majority with a Scandinavian touch, some with more imagination than others: the ‘Dimma’ lamp, the ‘Pyra’ wok, the ‘Slitbar’ knife. I doubt that ‘Slitbar’ is actually the Swedish for knife but it is not beyond the realms of possibility. The names are also the answer to parents who don’t want to name their offspring Apple or Chardonnay – Knubbig, Gnistra and Ivar offer perfect alternatives – it’s only fair after Ikea stole the name ‘Billy’ for their best selling item – it is now more widely associated with a bookcase than a boy.

2. Showrooms. Much of the space in Ikea is taken up with showrooms displaying Ikea furniture in various combinations: kitchens, bedrooms, offices, living rooms. They’re often given a lived in look which reassures you that it is not just you that left your bed unmade and a pile of washing up in the sink. They also show you how the furniture you buy will never look in your house, after all if they lose bolt E or joint B then there is a shop full of them, then there is a shop full of them.

3. Pencils. Everywhere you look in Ikea there are little wooden pencils. They’re handy for writing down measurements or noting down the location of things you want to buy. They’re also perfect for sticking behind your ear which is essential for making you look as if you are competent at DIY. The reality is that most men walking round Ikea with a pencil behind their ear are there because their wives have sent them out of the house while a professional comes round to fix the damage that they did the previous weekend with their drill. The preponderance of pencils in Ikea is mirrored by one in my house. I don’t buy pencils any more, I just go to Ikea, stick one behind each ear and forget they are there until I get home.

4. Lack of piped music. One of the things I hate about going shopping is the musak that pervades high street stores and shopping malls. When I go to the supermarket I don’t want to listen to THIS [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oofSnsGkops] I want to listen to Test Match Special so that I can hear England slump from a respectable 70 for none (by the cheese counter) to a disastrous 104 for 5 (while I’m deciding whether to buy Braeburns or Granny Smiths). Ikea has no music, which is a relief because I don’t think the world could cope with a cover of Waterloo or Super-Trouper played on Guatemalan panpipes.

5. A masterclass in bad parenting. Most of the people shopping in Ikea are families. People go at the weekend and take their children. Now Ikea stores are big but they’re not a park or an adventure playground.Children spend most of their week in pre-fab buildings with bright furniture and at the weekend they should be outside playing football or building treehouses or riding their choppers (oh, sorry I forget it wasn’t 1985 anymore). When children are taken to ikea they get bored – which is understandable as the only interest they have in furniture is its capacity to be adapted to a pirate ship or be used to shut their younger sister in. As a result parents get angry and shout. Go to Ikea on a weekend and you will observe a masterclass in bad parenting.

6. Trolleys. When you enter Ikea you’ll see normal shopping trolleys by the door. My advice is to leave them where they are. When you get to the warehouse where all the furniture is stacked you’ll find much more exciting flat-bed trolleys. While you are looking for Aisle 4 Section 17 to pick up your table they make excellent scooters – that is until you collide with a large woman carrying four pot plants and a selection of candles. You might even find the bored children following your example. Something that their parents will doubtless thank you for.

7. Meatballs. Quite possibly the best thing about Ikea is the restaurant – and specifically the meatballs with lingonberries Where else can you find delicious international cuisine for astoundingly good value. People go to Ikea at dinner time just to have some meatballs with the furniture being a side attraction.* You can even take some meatballs home with you to microwave which is a good thing as there is no way you’re going to have that kitchen unit assembled and be able to cook dinner in the space of a day.

June 19, 2010