How do you stop children fighting on long car journeys? With three boys aged six and under, not to mention an eight-year-old tomboy, it’s getting to be a serious problem. Every journey seems to end in the vehicular equivalent of a cage fight, in which all four frantically try to undo their seatbelts so they can pile into the mêlée. No quarter asked, no quarter given. The fights are getting so vicious that instead of breaking them up I’m tempted to start filming them on my iPhone. A greatest-hits compilation on YouTube would get a million hits in less than 24 hours.
My initial solution was to get a bigger car. I reasoned that the more space I had, the easier it would be to separate them. So I went from a Skoda Octavia to a Vauxhall Zafira to a VW Caravelle — all in vain. What I needed, I decided, was an eight-seater so I could stick all four in separate corners. That meant trading in the Caravelle for a Transporter (more of a van than a car) but to no avail. I’m beginning to think that the only thing that might work is one of Boris’s new Routemasters.
On the way to lunch with a friend in Hampshire last Saturday I tried to distract them with a game. As regular readers of this column will know, I Spy has not proved a great success in the past, largely on account of Charlie not being able to spell and Freddie always saying the same thing, namely, ‘I Spy with my little eye something beginning with “chocolate”.’
So I plumped for Animal, Vegetable or Mineral instead — one of you thinks of something and the others have to guess what it is by asking questions that can only be answered ‘yes’ or ‘no’, apart from the first question which is always ‘Animal, vegetable or mineral?’ Eight-year-old Sasha got it straight away, but the rest of them had difficulty grasping one of the basic rules, which is that you have to be thinking of a specific thing that occupies a unique set of spatio-temporal co-ordinates.
To illustrate the problem, take Ludo’s first attempt. After establishing that he was thinking of a domestic animal, I asked if it was a dog.
‘Yes daddy, that’s right,’ said Ludo. ‘Your turn.’
‘No Ludo, you have to think of a particular dog, not just any dog,’ I said. ‘Try again.’
He did — and this time I thought he’d got it because when I asked if it was a dog he nodded enthusiastically, without indicating he thought his go was over.
‘Okay, Ludo, is it a dachshund?’ I asked.
My sister-in-law owns a dachshund, but rather than identify him by name I wanted to tee up the answer for one of the others.
‘Yes daddy, that’s right,’ said Ludo. ‘Your turn.’
Oh Jesus.
I patiently tried to explain the difference between a set, a sub-set and an individual member of a sub-set and, when I thought he’d got it, asked him to have another go.
‘Wait!’ said Freddie. ‘How come Ludo gets three goes? I want a go.’
‘Okay, Freddie, animal, vegetable or mineral?’
‘Onion,’ said Freddie.
‘Is it “onion”?’ asked Ludo.
‘Yes,’ said Freddie, amazed that Ludo had been able to puzzle it out so quickly.
‘Okay, my turn,’ said Ludo.
‘NOOOOO,’ said Freddie.
Seconds later, seatbelts had been un-popped and Ludo and Freddie were going at it like Dereck Chisora and David Haye after the Munich fight. They were literally making moves that would have been beyond the pale in an Ultimate Fighting Championship contest. Caroline had to vault over the front seat and do her best to break it up before one of them lost an eye.
‘Sasha, why don’t you have a turn?’ I said after things had calmed down.
Now Sasha is pathologically competitive and, as far as she was concerned, the object of the game was to make it as hard as possible for the others to guess what she was thinking of. Unfortunately, that meant Sasha’s go took over half an hour — with Ludo and Freddie constantly complaining that they weren’t getting a turn. In the end, we gave up and she revealed that she was thinking of one of the tiny glass panels in the disco ball in her bedroom.
‘That’s allowed, isn’t it, dad?’ she asked.
‘Well, I suppose so, yes.’
‘Okay, my go again,’ she said — at which point, bedlam broke out.
Toby Young is associate editor of The Spectator.
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