Jeremy Clarke
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Next comes Scott, aged eight. Scott is such an aggressively out-and-out male, he’s a credit to us all. He likes to dress from head to toe in army combat gear. His main interests are death, violence and poo. His unbelievably appalling, slightly weird behaviour led to talk of attention deficit disorder until it was belatedly realised the poor lad was half-blind. Has terrible nightmares. Wears a nappy at night.
Then there’s Molly, aged seven, who is the silliest, most selfish creature in the United Kingdom possibly. The sole purpose of her pea-sized, vestigial brain is to help identify which of her wants and appetites needs satisfying next, and then to devise an uncomplicated means of obtaining its immediate gratification. When Arthur Schopenhauer was composing his notorious essay ‘On Women’, he must have had someone very like Molly uppermost in his formidable mind. No detectable soul. Sometimes I look at Molly and pity her. And then I realise that in evolutionary terms she is actually the perfect model for a human being of the next generation.
Then comes golden-haired Oscar, nearly three, my eldest grandson, light of my life, bringer of hope, and a future charismatic leader of the English resistance. Small, frail, asthmatic, but with lightning wit, charm and intelligence, he runs effortless rings around his thuggish elder brother and sister. A devoted bibliophile. Current favourite book: We’re Going on a Bear Hunt. Also loves tractors and spiders.
And finally there’s little one-year-old Jack, my other grandson, a sturdy chap, but an as yet unfathomable personality. Jack appears to exist entirely in a blithe and beautiful world of his own making, that bears little relation to the fraught, contentious and sometimes violent atmosphere of the reality surrounding him.
So that was the line-up (plus my boy and his partner) at our remote Dartmoor cottage last weekend, which fell, let me tell you, far short of my antiquated fantasies of dens and campfire singsongs and treasure hunts. How far short, I shall illustrate with just one instance.
Unless forced outside, these kids refused to set foot beyond the thick cottage walls. So finally I ordered them, like some furious, red-faced Colour Sergeant Major, on a route march with me up to the top of the nearest tor, which was Hound Tor. We took binoculars. Their inane and selfish chatter all the way there, and their complaining, and their incessant bickering about who was going to hold the binoculars next, drove me to such a state of apoplectic, eyeball-popping fury that, near the top, I finally lost my temper. Scooping a large and crusty cow pat off the sward, I lifted it above my head and hurled it at them, screaming, ‘If you lot don’t stop arguing about those FUCKING binoculars, someone is going to get killed.’
As I say, that was just one instance. The little shits.
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