Toby Young
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But I don’t suppose my kids would have understood it in this way if they’d read it. Irony isn’t their strong suit. Not a problem at the moment, obviously — they take even less interest in my work than Caroline — but what about the future? After the piece was published, it dawned on me that it will be preserved forever on the internet.
What if Ludo starts Googling himself when he’s 15, as I undoubtedly would have done had Google been around when I was 15? Ludo is a fairly unusual name and he’s bound to stumble upon this article. How will he feel when he reads that hearing him say ‘I love you’ after I’ve put him to bed and turned out the light ‘produces almost as much euphoria as the first glass of wine’?
There’s an additional risk with children, which is that they will pretend to take everything I’ve written about them at face value in order to cast themselves as the victims and thereby occupy the moral high ground. My political opponents do this all the time. I once wrote a column for this magazine in which I pretended that a lachrymose account of a school assembly during ‘LGBT History Month’ by the chair of governors at a Stoke Newington comprehensive was actually a hilarious send-up written by Michael Gove. Since then, not a week passes without a gay activist sending an angry letter to the Department for Education claiming I’m not a fit and proper person to run a school because I’m a ‘homophobe’.
In order to protect myself, I’ll soon have to start asking my children’s permission before I write anything about them and I know where that will lead. Nicola Formby, A.A. Gill’s partner, told me that whenever his two children from his second marriage do anything remotely embarrassing at the dinner table, they immediately point at their father and say, ‘You can’t use that, Dad.’
My children won’t object to my recording their antics on invasion-of-privacy grounds — they’re all flagrant exhibitionists. Rather, they’ll insist that I pay them as a condition of use. If I know Ludo, he’ll offer to perform various column-worthy stunts for cash up front — £10 for attempting to cut his own hair, £20 for throwing a tantrum at a society wedding, etc. Before long, I’ll be handing over half my income.
I expect the only solution will be to impose a blanket ban on writing about them. Rather than admit it’s for complicated reasons to do with family politics and wanting to avoid large therapy bills, I’ll pretend it’s because they’re too boring. That way, when they point at me and say, ‘You can’t use that, Dad’, I’ll look at them with disdain and say, ‘Use what?’
Which is what I do at the moment whenever a D-list celebrity accidentally on purpose lets slip some ‘scandalous’ fact about his own life and then begs me not to use it. Which, when you think about it, is more or less what Hugh Grant is up to with Hacked Off.
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