Power Vacuums, Power Tools, The Void

Thursday, 16^th March 2020

The power vacuum created by Boris Johnson’s illness and now recovery from Covid-19 is matched in some way here in our house. None of us is ill but in this strange twilight zone, where we are all neither at school nor at work but still studying and still working, the usual systems of parenting have broken down.

Nature might love a vacuum but in the absence of any meaningful routine, and with time filling the house like an invisible flood, rising higher and higher, things seem to be fraying at the edges. When we all had a routine of school and work, I knew what I was expected to do as a parent: make vague noises about homework being completed, pretend that hard work is the answer to everything, hide my addiction to alcohol.

I think the kids knew what was expected of them, too: make vague noises about having done their homework, pretend that they were working hard, hide their addiction to alcohol/skunk. But lockdown has blown the whole charade wide open. Teachers aren’t really teaching, most of us aren’t really working, and death is the bogeyman, the fucking enormous elephant in the room which renders all activities meaningless.

Now, the Screenager might have got the rather raw end of my blogging attention lately but that is mainly because he is very visible in his inactions. When he finally rises from his bed, wearing an expression somewhere between confused and afraid, he will head straight for the sofa, grab the iPad and PS4 controller and pick up where he left off yesterday. He will spurn food and drink until nagged into the kitchen, iPad still clutched in his grimy paws, where he will eat a bowl of cereal filled to the brim before returning to the sofa, establishing his routine for the day: Screens, Food + Screens, Screens, Screens + Foods, Screens, Bed.

What do these kids dream of? I imagine the Screenager’s unconscious being a strange melange of American football players and Central Perk. Unfortunately, to deal with this in-your-face lethargy, my new parenting style seems to fall under the umbrella term ‘Heavy Sarcasm’ (liberally deployed). I know I am annoying but I just find it incredibly infuriating to be almost 50 years old and to have more energy and enthusiasm than my teenage children. I am sure it doesn’t help the Screenager when I knock on his door at the ungodly hour of 11am, as happened yesterday, to see if the beast can be woken before midday. I waltz in to stand by his bed with my arms wide.

ME: Behold, it is I, your father, come to rouse you from your slumber.

HIM: ….

ME: Your hero has arrived to greet you on this fine day.

HIM: Go away. Shut the door.

ME: But it is I. Behold me standing here.

HIM: Go away! You’re so annoying.

ME: Alright, it’s eleven o’clock.

HIM: Why did you wake me? Shut the door.

The Screenager will not now talk to me at all for this heinous crime. By about dinner time, he will acknowledge my existence by calling me ‘Fat tits,’ whenever I dare to cross the space between him and the PS4. I call this progress.

Occasionally, my wife or I will attempt to pin The Angry Moustache down to a vague promise of the one physical activity he is willing to attempt that day. We have worked out that there is a window of opportunity between 3 and 5pm when this is most likely to come to fruition. In Screenager time, this is just after lunch but before the really big meal. It still takes a good deal of encouragement/sarcasm.

ME: Come on, you big whale. Let’s see if you can beat your hero – me – on the rugby pitch.

HIM: You’re not my hero. Manu Tuilagi* is.

ME: But after him, it’s me, right?

HIM: No, it goes Manu Tuilagi, everyone else in the world, then all the animals, then all the non-living organisms-

ME: By definition, an organism is a living thing-

HIM: Alright, all the animals, then every inanimate object, then you.

ME: But I’m on the hero list, just near the bottom.

HIM: At the bottom. Beneath toenails.

(*Manu Tuilagi is a Leicester and England rugby player, a kind of smiling ball of Samoan destruction)

Now that I have distracted him, with an actual conversation with a living organism, he will usually go upstairs to get dressed, carrying the iPad at his breast in case it needs feeding. Half an hour later he will return, sometimes with socks, often without, sometimes wearing clothes matching the actual weather conditions, but often not because he hasn’t lifted his eyes over the top of the iPad to see what is happening in that place his parents refer to as ‘outside.’

Today, some 70mm wood screws arrived in the post which meant pallet furniture building work could resume in the garden. At 3pm, he agrees to such work in principle (this may be because he has finished all 236 episodes of Friends). At 3:45, work begins. This is because there is always a lacuna in lockdown between something being agreed in principle by a teenager and it actually taking place.

Down the end of the garden, there is a brief, scary but enthusiastic series of moments when he discovers power tools – a drill, a saw – but treats them like weapons, waving them around in the air with a strange smile and pulling the triggers to make the noisy, sharp bits go round and round. He is less enthused when I explain how the tools plus him might actually combine to make something useful happen.

At 5pm, the Screenager clocks off. In an hour and a bit, he has drilled exactly three and a half holes, cut through one piece of wood, and joined two bits of wood together using the wood screws. In between these violent bursts of activity, he has bounced up and down on a length of 2 by 4, disappeared for a poo, deadlifted some of the railway sleepers and done some weird dancing. It is hard to ignore the fact that, alone, I would get a lot more done but lockdown parenting (here, at least) seems to consist of setting low targets and then trying to be astonished when they are met. If it was Reception class in primary school, he would get a sticker but all I’ve got is sarcasm.

‘Great work, today, Noah. Same time tomorrow.’

Anyway, Teen 1, or Cine-Teen, gets a lot less abuse. One, because he is nearly an adult and two because he hides in his bedroom. When he was still at college, he managed his time effectively without any input from us, keeping up with his studies, having an amazing social life (in that aspirational Atlanta rapper way of life they aspire to: smoking blunts and drinking lean), and doing his part-time job.

Now, in lockdown, what he is actually doing is probably not a lot different to the Screenager. When pressed, and feeling defensive, he brings out his language ‘study’ which is five minutes on Duolingo. The rest of the time is vague and unaccounted for. I know that he hasn’t finished The Magus by John Fowles, one of my all-time favourite books, even though he has been reading it for a year. This is a child who we could barely keep in books during his childhood. He literally devoured them. This seemed to peter out as adolescence went on and almost came to a complete stop when he began his English ‘A’ level. I suppose, things are so post-modern, now, that texts are all a bit last millennium and language is deconstructed into emojis and rappers using symbols in their names.

With endless amounts of time, he watches Netflix documentaries or drama series which he can then discuss in great detail and aren’t very different to what I watch but still the hours go by and no end product is visible. In desperation, I suggest we look for a camera to buy so he can film some of the pandemic lockdown. Two weeks later, and despite reminders every day, he has still not managed to find a moment when we can sit down and find a camera he wants.

But what I am vaguely circling around is trying to determine what actual part I am playing in their lives right now. With the Cine-Teen, I have established a weekly routine of a screenplay challenge whereby we pick three Tarot cards from the major arcana then roll a dice to determine which of 6 nominated abstract nouns (hope, joy, loss, despair etc) is the theme. Using the Tarot cards as characters we then write a 500-word screenplay and share them with each other. Like any father-son activity, it is not meant to be competitive but of course ends up that way. I consider myself a writer and a veteran of the world and scorn his inner life as inferior to mine. Unfortunately, he has watched a lot of films, studied film to A level standard and writes to a very high standard.

What is odd, like with my urging Screenager to humiliate me with chess boxing or rugby, is that I have to instigate these activities and then oversee their completion. Yesterday, I took the brave step of knocking on the door of Cine-Teen to see if he wanted to pick the three cards and roll the dice to get the new challenge started for this week. Admittedly, I caught him on the hop, sat on his bed with his laptop open at about midday.

ME: Do you want to start the next screenplay and pick the cards?

HIM: (Pulling a face like I’ve just shat in the corner of his room) Can we do it on Thursday?

ME: Well, I thought if we did it now, we could mull it over for a couple of days before starting.

HIM: Can we just wait until Thursday when I’m not working?

ME: Alright, if you’re too busy…

Boom! Sarcasm deployed and I can back out of his room with this most shallow of victories. I am the USA and he is Iraq.

Some of us are coping with lockdown and some of us are not. Personally, I like the lack of pressure from work and the general easing back from the daily grind but the overall air of life on hold creates a weird mindset. If we knew we were going to die tomorrow, today would be pretty vivid and packed with meaningful engagement with the world. Now the possibility that we will all die tomorrow has, instead, resulted in an awful kind of stasis. The future is such an empty place, a kind of black hole, that our intentions seem to be sucked into the void.

What, as the Screenager said recently, is the point?

            For once, I had no answer.

Latest data for the UK (as of 9pm):

Infected: 103,093

Deaths: 13,729

Celebrity Deaths: 3

People I know who are infected: Back to zero (the Icke is the Messiah!)

Song of the Day: ‘Reasons to be Cheerful’ – Ian Dury