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Sunday 5 July 2009

Status Anxiety

Spending time with my children makes me appreciate my wife. How does she stand them?

I am so strapped for cash that I have been forced to give up my outside office and start working from home. With three children under five, this is far from ideal, but at least there’s a small window in the afternoon when the eldest is at school, the middle one is at nursery and the youngest is asleep. It is during these precious few hours that I have to write my various newspaper columns, juggle the household accounts and work on the novel that is going to secure my family’s future.

At least, that was the plan. Unfortunately, my move coincided with the start of the Easter holidays and the upshot is that my ‘window’ has closed. For the next three weeks, I will no longer be a freelance journalist. I have embarked on a new career as a full-time househusband.

What makes this particularly trying is that my children are at that stage when they’re mad about board games, but hopeless at playing them. I don’t mean unable to give me a decent match, I mean completely and utterly useless. For instance, three-year-old Ludo is forever asking to play ‘Noply’ (Monopoly), but has yet to grasp that the object of the game is to bankrupt your opponents. During a typical game, he will bring proceedings to a halt by scooping up the array of banknotes I have placed before him and passing them out to the other players. ‘Here go, Mummy,’ he will say, handing over a couple of £500 notes. Caroline’s response is to beam enthusiastically at him — ‘Thank you, Ludo’ — which just adds to my annoyance. I feel like Jack Nicholson in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.

My daughter, who is four, prefers Snakes and Ladders — or, rather, the version of the game that Caroline has taught her whereby you go up the ladders and up the snakes. When I play with her, I insist on sticking to the rules which means that whenever she lands on a snake she bursts into tears and accuses me of ‘cheating’. The solution is to get Ludo to join in. His idea of how to throw a dice is to hurl it across the room as hard as he can. With a bit of luck, it ends up under the stove and play has to be abandoned.

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