What have I done now?

It’s an odd emotion, guilt.  People refrain from committing many misdemeanours for fear of either getting caught or that their own conscience will betray them.  Stealing a few sweets from a shop is no different to pinching a box of pens from your work place and they can both hang on your conscience.  This is truer when you are young, although parents had strange methods of dealing with misbehaviour.

My particular favourite parent-ism was when they’d threaten to do to you what you were planning to do to someone or something.  For example, you’d say something like, “I’m going to cook my tea” and they’d reply, “I’ll cook you in a minute” or “I’m going out” and they’d yell back, “I’ll going out you in a minute.” Apart from making no grammatical sense, you can only assume they are trying to mess with your head enough to confuse you into rethinking your intentions.  You could play this to your advantage if the offending parent was in a bad mood by saying something like, “I’m just going to make tea for”, to which the response would be, “I’ll make tea for you in a minute!”

Another favourite threat was, “I’ll knock you into the middle of next week”.  I was particularly keen for this to happen as I would have gotten my pocket money early and repeated beatings would have resulted in me being extremely well-off and a few years nearer my 18th birthday.  Turning up for school a wealthy twenty-four year old while all of my friends were still eight, would have been weird.

I’m 14 and I’ve got £45!!

Of course, parents shouldn't hit their children, which is wholly positive and therefore means alternative punishments have to be meted out to children for their misdemeanours.  Sending a child to its room no longer has the effect it did when I was young.  Invariably, every child has a DVD player, computer, games console and an exotic pet in their bedrooms these days.  Surely it makes more sense to send them to a different room in the house for a few hours - the bathroom for example.  Not a lot of entertainment in there apart from perhaps using a towel as a Toga and re-enacting the last days of Rome in a role play with themselves in the bathroom mirror.

They say if it’s not broken, don’t try to fix it.  In Dads’ cases it should be if it is broken, don’t try to fix it.  If something was broken, any child in the household would invariably get the blame for ‘fiddling’ with it.  It’s ok though because all Dads are trained electricians and carpenters; they all have sheds with tools in that they have no idea how to use and a tool box full of things that just go rusty through lack of use and a hole in the shed roof.  They take the cover off the broken electrical item, stare into it for a few moments then start jabbing around at the circuitry with a screwdriver and no agenda.  They then make noises that lead you to think they’ve found the problem, poke around for a bit longer, perhaps even remove something then put it back in, replacing the cover with a satisfied nod.  They plug it in, switch it on, wait - then say, ‘It’s broken’.