Rod Liddle - Selfish Whining Monkeys - How we Ended Up Greedy, Narcissistic and Unhappy

But actually I shouldn’t worry – because there are three cupboards upstairs full of discarded toys with corroded batteries, and three more full of toys which are still, intermittently, used. The occasional duff present is of absolutely no consequence to my children. The problem these days is wondering what the hell I can buy the little bastards that they haven’t already got, wandering confused and desperate through Hamleys and Comet and Dixons, while they themselves are disconcertingly blasé about presents: nothing you can give them excites them, no matter how much you spend. At Christmas and on birthdays I check with the mother of my two boys – we’re divorced – and she’s as much at a loss as me. What can we buy them that will induce that immensely gratifying gaze of awe and delight, that look you want to see on their little faces on Christmas morning? A Ferrari, maybe, or their own country. Buy them Chad, or Belgium. Would that raise a smile, get them excited for a moment? But on Christmas morning what they really want is a lie-in, just to sleep ever onwards. And it’s not their fault, any of this. They don’t clamour for gifts; quite the reverse. They don’t clamour like I used to clamour, back when presents were exceptional and therefore it really mattered what you were given.

The plane banks sharply to the left, too sharply for my liking. My plastic beaker of warm chemical urinous white wine and half-empty packet of bowel-racking nicotine-replacement gum slides across the plastic tray table and I see the cheerful gay cabin steward with his impeccably neat number-one cut frown suddenly halfway down the aisle as he temporarily loses grip of his big trolley of scratchcards and duty-free chavgifts and booze and the whole thing careers onto the shoulder of some placidly dozing woman to whom he copiously and noisily apologises. You watch their faces, the cabin crew, and when they look worried, when they look startled, you worry too.

I don’t fly well. I have to suspend my disbelief when I get on a plane. Here we are, 38,000 feet above Paris. The weather was fine when we left Freiburg, it was predicted to be OK at Gatwick; but there’s always that mysterious clear-air mischief lurking in between, up here beyond the clouds in this desolate and silent realm – a ‘bad, evil and dangerous place’, as some sixty-year-old American crop-duster pilot told me when we were thrown together in cattle class on a scheduled flight to San Francisco not so long ago. He never flew above 10,000 feet. Up to that level, he knew where he was; beyond it he was lost and scared – it’s too cold and too weird up beyond the clouds.

So I watch the cabin crew and listen for a change in the timbre of the engine noise, which might well mean we’re fucked, or – this always has me frightened – after the distinct lack of emphasis with which the landing gear supposedly locks itself into place, when the tray tables have been obediently stowed and we’re nearly at the end, that prolonged muffled whirring and growling and the lack of that satisfying click.

I don’t fly well. Like everyone – nearly everyone – I don’t want to die, and flying all over the place seems to be tempting providence, to be tweaking the tail of death. It seems to be, you know, pushing it a bit. At least on a plane I am so terrified by the prospect of airborne death flapping its big black wings above my head that I temporarily forget the stuff that plagues me the rest of the time: the black crab in the brain, the sterol noose around the heart, the scarlet blood in the stool, the sudden lurched slump and slurred diction occasioned by rapidly detonating blood vessels, the fire in the basement, the flight of piss-stained concrete stairs, the mugger’s knife.

My kids – well, the two boys – sit strapped in next to me, oblivious and insouciant, one of them reading Lord of the Flies (and identifying, I fear, with Jack), the other one trying to fashion a paper aeroplane out of his boarding-pass stub. They fly very well indeed, never a complaint from them, packet of pretzels and a Coke and they’re fine for however long – an hour, thirteen hours, you name it. CAT makes them grin and take the piss out of their father for the beads of sweat which line up sentinel-like on my brow, for the suddenly gripped armrest, dry mouth and hyperventilation. They’ve been doing it for so long now, since they were born, I guess. Long and short haul, across the world and back in time for The Simpsons . Lucky, lucky, boys. Their mother isn’t with us – we’re divorced; did I mention that? – she’s on a different plane, heading for New York. Their stepmum and stepsister are somewhere in the middle of the plane, where it is technically slightly safer if we land on water, but also where the stale flatus tends to congregate, I’m told. This was an Easter break, Vienna and the Black Forest. A treat for them, we explained. A bit of culture, a modicum of fun here and there, the opportunity for the kids to absorb a broader perspective on foreigners than the one with which I was raised. And it works, I think. Although the boys are still prone to say something embarrassing about Hitler very loudly in German restaurants.

My long-term memory, which used to be pretty good, has become, of late, frayed and elliptical, its edges gnawed away by increasing age and a continual drip feed of alcohol. My short-term memory, which was never terribly good, is pretty much shot to fuck, for presumably similar reasons. The distant past, which I was once sure of, has become a sly and shifting place, a different country in which not only do they do things differently, but they also do things differently as to how you think you remember them doing things, if you get my drift. Now only the generalities remain, along with one or two flashes of total recall – like the toy plane, and the dog bite – so bold that they almost blind, so perfectly brought back that one begins to get a bit suspicious, to doubt their veracity. Sometimes, too, I remember stuff without recalling where it is I remember it from, some strange electrical impulse in the synapses, much like the one that made my old half-breed dog Skipper, when he was especially tired, circle the carpet wearily three or four times and then paw compulsively at the shagpile, as if it were a shallow, dusty depression in the Serengeti surrounded by lethal enemies a million or so years ago, rather than covering the floor of a 1950s-built semi-detached house in Middlesbrough with The Likely Lads about to come on the TV and an almost unending supply of Rich Tea biscuits.

It would be easy, given this conveniently acquired vagueness, to be nostalgic about my childhood and – contra Sartre – all that remains of it. Given, too, the fact that I was undeniably happy as a kid. But when I look back, nostalgia is not the first emotion which makes its damp and cloying presence felt – although nostalgia is always hovering somewhere in the background, like a flatulent ghost, and I suppose that from time to time it will need to be banished with a big stick. No, the primary emotion I feel, looking back at the years when I was a child, is one of immense guilt: that I do not do things as well as my parents did them; that my basic sense of morality is unhinged and at best equivocal, whereas theirs was, essentially, anchored, and furthermore anchored in decency. No matter how many places I fly to with an agreeably open mind, and with the kids dutifully in tow.

I suppose this seems a strange thing to say, given my parents’ views on a whole bunch of stuff, not least the poor old wogs. I don’t possess their views about wogs, or at least not all of them. In fairness to my mum and dad, their opinions were not quite as bilious as I may have implied; it was a more nuanced thing, more subtle. My mum, for example, quite liked Caribbean people, because she considered them to be ‘cheerful’ – and even Malcolm X and Papa Doc didn’t serve to disabuse her of this notion. On the other hand, she couldn’t abide ‘Indians’, by which she meant everyone who lived between Aleppo and the Burmese border just east of Cox’s Bazar, at which point they promptly became jabbering, slit-eyed, robotic and cruel Chinks. Chinks, then, were quite bad, although not so bad as Japs. Japs were cunning and cruel automatons.