11:20am Thursday 7th January 2010
IT’S so much easier to make New Year resolutions for others. This way, I can still gorge on all those leftover Christmas chocolates while dreaming up challenges for my boys:
THE 18-YEAR-OLD
THIS boy won’t go to music festivals because he says camping is cold and smelly. He’d rather stay in a five star hotel nearby. He likes a couple of hot showers a day and panics if he is ever separated from his hair gel. He doesn’t believe in getting a bus when he can call a taxi (especially when I’m driving). And he’s always trying to cadge money to go to places like Pizza Express. “What’s wrong with McDonalds, or just hanging around on street corners like I used to do?” I ask him. He plans to leave home and go to university in 2010. The joys of student life, such as sharing your digs with cockroaches and mice and living off beans and stale bread, are going to be such a shock. My resolution for him is that he needs to learn to rough it. Perhaps I should drop him in the North York Moors with a nothing but a bivvy bag. He could spend a week sleeping under the stars, washing in cold streams and eating rabbit that he has caught and skinned himself. I’m sure he’ll thank me for it - eventually.
THE 16-YEAR-OLD
UNLIKE his older brother, this boy would never make it over the threshold of a five-star hotel. The doorman would call security. With his jeans hanging halfway down his backside and his hair a matted mess, he looks as if he has slept all night in a skip with a family of badgers. We thought he was making a real effort recently when he started dating and actually asked me to iron a jumper and shirt to wear on New Year’s Eve. But then I took one whiff and nearly passed out. “You can’t pull things from under your bed where they’ve been lying since you last wore them and think ironing them is going to make them clean and fresh again,” I explained. The following week, he was taking his girlfriend out for something to eat. “Where did you go?” I asked him next morning. It turned out he bought her a pie from a fast food stall: “We just ate in the street.” My resolution for him is to smarten up, and to eat with a knife and fork occasionally.
THE 14-YEAR-OLD
HE has recently lost the ability to speak in clear sentences. He now communicates in grunts, rarely making eye contact. You can just about make out a few familiar words and phrases, such as ‘whatever’, ‘not bothered’, ‘dunno’ and ‘snotfair’.
And he can never hear a thing we say to him. If he’s not glued to his laptop, talking to his friends on Facebook, or watching a TV programme on his iPhone, he’s walking about the house in a trance like state with his iPod plugged into his ears. It’s like he’s living in a virtual world, removed from the rest of the family. How do we get him back? Cold turkey would be too much of a shock, so my resolution for him is to gradually wean himself off the technology.
Perhaps he could aim for at least one real conversation a week and occasionally join the rest of us to watch Coronation Street.
THE TEN-YEAR-OLD
THIS boy has spent 2009 building up a small business empire. His moneymaking schemes have included making biscuits and smoothies to sell by the roadside. He and his friend Lewis have also dropped leaflets round the village offering their services as dog walkers. Then they set up a gardening and odd jobs business. As if that isn’t enough, at his friend James’s house last week, James’s mum wondered why they kept falling down the stairs and tripping up over things outside in the snow. It turned out they were filming their stunts to send into the TV show You’ve Been Framed, which pays £250 for every catastrophe broadcast.
Unfortunately, they weren’t ready with their camera when James’s dad slipped on a skim board they had left outside and snow surfed across the garden, tearing a ligament in his leg in the process. My resolution for this boy is to be careful. And perhaps he should consider giving his old mum and dad - who, after all, pay all the set up costs of his business ventures - at least ten per cent.
THE SEVEN-YEAR-OLD
JOOLS Holland said recently he wished every family in Britain would ditch their flat screen TVs for pianos.
Brilliant. But how do you get youngsters to play them? There are tears and tantrums every week as I drag this boy, kicking and screaming, to music lessons.
Sometimes we haven’t made it. But 2010 is the year I get tough. My resolution for him is that he must learn to play that huge great piano which now takes up half our hall. It was he who persuaded us to buy it after starting lessons. But then he decided he liked football instead.
There are so many boys who want to be the next David Beckham or Christiano Ronaldo. I tell him to dare to be different. Think Fats Domino or Jerry Lee Lewis. Perhaps Jools had the right idea - if all else fails, the TV gets it.
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