Parental paranoia fuelled by Korean tragedy

Yesterday morning, before the rain came, Izzy was hunting in the garden for chocolate eggs. As I watched her giggling with excitement and screaming at every new discovery, I felt strangely uneasy. 

I’ve had this sense of anxiety since Wednesday, when the world ended for 300 people on a boat in South Korea. The story of the capsized ferry has combined a terrible sadness for the fate of children I’ve never met with a fear of how I could ever completely protect my own. As I watched the videos of obedient students, many the age of my youngest son, huddled in corners waiting for the instruction to disembark that never came, I shuddered and thought: what if one of these were my child? 

Should we move Christmas?

Last Tuesday I celebrated Christmas with my family. 

A fortnight late, I know, though not according to my Serbian builder. Zoric (his real name is Velibor, but everyone calls him by his surname) observed his Christmas on Tuesday as well. In Serbia they use the Julian calendar, so his celebrations are always two weeks late, a bit like his building work. 

While Zoric was supposed to be chopping down an oak branch and spreading straw on the floor of his house (a Serbian tradition I doubt he transposes to his flat in Tottenham) I was a few miles away in the Groucho Club, surrounded by children, presents and bemused celebrities.

A new Mrs Gutteridge

Another Mrs Gutteridge entered the world on Saturday. 

This time I wasn’t responsible – my eldest son, a film director, has finally tied the knot. 

The wedding took place at the home of an ex-Mrs Gutteridge, Jilly, my first wife and mother of the groom. It’s always nice to see the by-product of one of my divorce settlements: in this case, it's a picture-book beautiful farmhouse in Sussex, a perfect setting for any wedding.

The Space Precinct Legacy

The cinema billed it as “the story of the most ambitious television series ever made”. Outside, the hoarding lit up the night sky: Space Precinct Legacy. 

I can’t believe that anyone actually remembers Space Precinct, the 1994 sci-fi series I co-produced with Gerry Anderson, let alone that it has any legacy, other than grey hairs on my head and a big red loss on the books of our backers.

The Wedding

“We’ve settled on June 8th 2013,” said Ben. He paused and waited for my reaction. 

The finality of his words aroused excitement, satisfaction, relief, but also, deep down, a slight twinge of regret. This date marks the end of the first part, and the beginning of the next. The age of dependence has passed. My son is becoming a husband. 

“We’ve booked the Church near Mum’s house, with a marquee; my friend Stu is doing the music and Izzy will be flower girl”. It all sounded so grownup and organised. So very unlike Ben. 

His life started in a panic, and he’s managed to live in a state of frenzied confusion ever since. He was almost born in our old Volkswagen camper van because his mother and I were late leaving for the hospital – we hadn’t reckoned that London’s roads would be gridlocked because of the royal fireworks event for Charles and Diana’s wedding, so we drove on the pavement hoping a policeman might arrest us and give us an escort through the traffic. My wife’s waters broke on Hammersmith roundabout. 

We finally made the hospital and Ben’s head popped out just as the first firework exploded. Since then, Ben has managed to learn from his parents and be stylishly late for everything in life. 

 I nicknamed him Tig because that was his first decipherable sound as he crawled round our sitting room in Putney. I still call him that, just as everyone still uses the name that Ben called his baby sister – he couldn’t quite say Rebecca, so she has lived happily with Rocca ever since. Ben transforms everything he touches. 

He is loving, handsome, adorable, with more creativity and talent in his little finger than I have in my entire body. I cried when I saw him win the backstroke title in the primary schools’ swimming gala; I cried when he appeared in his first school play; and I cried again last year when I saw his first television credit, as the director of Casualty. 

Far too clever to bother with good exam results, he had a deliciously rebellious streak, which marked him out at boarding school. In his first term he broke the house record for flooding his dormitory bathroom – the water reached ten inches before streaming down the walls of the room below, narrowly missing a priceless Gainsborough. He caused a sensation by going out with a sixth-former when he was just 13 and later dated a Prussian princess. I frequently had to send compensation to disgruntled taxi-drivers for cleaning up their upholstery after his illegal nights in local pubs. The school was unamused: I spoke sternly, but quietly rejoiced at his independent spirit. 

My only really painful memory was seeing him wheeled out of the operating theatre in Barcelona where they’d patched him together with metal bars after his road accident – never, ever, let your children ride motor bikes, however much they plead. 

For years I’d been pushing him to propose to Natalie. They first dated and then lived together in a tiny flat in Barcelona; then they painfully split up, before easing themselves back into each other’s lives. Now they’re taking the plunge into the warm comforting waters of matrimony.

So on Saturday Jo and I drove to Edinburgh to meet the in-laws. Nat’s mother is German and her father is something big in the US military. They sounded formidable, but in reality are as delightful as their daughter. Beautiful, witty and clever (she is a media lawyer), Natalie has thankfully inherited her parents’ organisational skills. A perfect foil for the Gutteridge chaos.

“You’re early”, exclaimed Ben, when he arrived half an hour after us. 

“You’re late,” I said. 

“No I’m not, I told you the wrong time on purpose,” he said, then confided: “It was Natalie’s idea – she does it to me all the time”. 

“That’s why I was so early,” I said, pointing at Jo, “She told me the wrong time too.” 

The two girls winked at each other, then huddled in the corner to discuss wedding dresses.  Order, thy name is Woman.

Chip Off The Old Block

When my eldest son Ben was little, he became a magician.

He called himself Benjamin Bonkers and would entertain our friends’ younger children with toy rabbits and hats. Until, one day, he accidentally set fire to his sister’s hair and Mum banned him from further performances. So instead, Ben set his heart on becoming an actor.

We did all we could to dissuade him. As a producer and director, I know how difficult it is to scratch any sort of living on stage or in front of the cameras. Did he want to be unemployed for most of the rest of his life? The producers have the creative ideas and do the hiring, I told him, the players are mere employees at the bottom of the creative food chain. That’s not strictly true, of course – a good actor can be the making of a successful project – but his mother and I were getting desperate.

After enduring several years of interminable school plays, during which we failed to discern the slightest hint of latent stardom, we finally suggested he might consider following his Dad into a career behind the cameras. Ben snorted with derision at the suggestion. I produced popular down-market shows like Challenge Anneka and Star for a Night: fit only for BBC1 on Saturday nights. He was an artiste. Visits to television studios and location left him cold. We sighed and waited.

Sure enough, after A-Levels, the inevitable happened. He announced that he’d decided to study film and television at university. And, to my great relief, he shone. He has a cinematic eye I never quite developed, and he’s great with crew and actors. He’s directed commercials, won prizes for his short films, and he’s very good with comedy, perhaps the most difficult genre of all. He has a penchant for the surreal which more than matches my own, and this year he finally achieved his first major goal when he was asked to direct an hour-long network television drama. Sure, it was only BBC1 on Saturday night, but his episode of Casualty was a tour de force. It made me cry, and that was the programme, not just the sight of my son’s first onscreen credit.

Last week, en route to the Edinburgh Film Festival where he’s making contacts for his first feature film, he dropped off in Newcastle to give me my Father’s Day present. It was the ultimate gift: he directed one of my films.

It was just a short project (I say “just – in this recessed climate, any work is useful for a production company), but it was pretty ambitious. It involved all the things Ben is good at, like comedy, actors, and a surreal script. In the kitchen of a dingy basement restaurant in the city centre, with the cast caked in fake blood and sweat, I heard him shout “Action!” for the first time and I can’t begin to measure the pride. We were, for one day only, a father and son team.

It’s hard to express quite how that feels. Working together with your firstborn is something that transcends ordinary human endeavour. Now I think I understand the satisfaction that butchers and grocers must feel as they add “& Son” to their own name above the shopfront. As an old block, it was great to see my young chip bossing around the actors and crew just like his Dad. The weirdest feeling was that he now has my voice. In the edit a few days later, it was impossible to tell us apart.

"Best Leave It To The Expert, Dad..."  [all photos by David Bridges]

The final result is as good as I could have hoped for. Viewing one particularly nice shot, I asked Ben, “How did you do that?” Quick as a flash came the response: “It’s not magic, Dad”.  Quite.

Germany 4 England 1

It’s tough enough playing a sport against the world’s finest; having an entire nation screaming at you must require the utmost mental discipline.

Sometimes I wonder if we ask too much of our young sportsmen. Nearly-fully grown men, whose only talent in life is to kick a ball in the right direction, find themselves the objects of derision and hate, or can be raised to god-like status, in the twinkling of a goal net.

My eldest son is becoming a film director. He’s training himself by making commercials. He’s young, fresh, and in demand and hopes to become the Rooney of his industry. Every now and then he pitches an idea to a client, competing against other directors at the very top of our advertising industry.

I try to think what his life would be like if, every time he writes a script, 10 million people were sitting in pubs watching him type, drunkenly criticizing every line.

“That’s a rubbish strapline; why on earth did he pull focus there; he should have cut to the girl three seconds earlier”. Imagine his mental state if he knew the newspaper hoardings would scream Ben’s Blunder when he fails, or Ben’s Blinder when he succeeds. When he goes onto a film set, perhaps the youngest and yet most senior member of a 50-man crew, what if his producer roared out instructions and obscenities from behind the camera, echoed by 60,000 cheering, jeering spectators? No 20-something could cope with that kind of pressure, so it’s no wonder our England players haven’t had the easiest of rides.

Despite being a Scot, Andy Murray must have been saying prayers for England to keep on winning. As long as they survived, he’s been playing his games in a sideshow, relegated to the back pages. This England defeat means, once the nation has sunk its gloom in alcohol and recrimination for a few days, the pressure will turn on him. We love sporting heroes. We have so few of them, sadly, that when an event comes around where we can get behind someone, we do it with such passion, we often forget that the object of our support is a real human being.

They say the most valuable item in a sportsman’s kit bag is the ability to overcome fear of failure. Being able to control that fear is as important as maximising skill. The moment fear begins to manipulate the mind, confidence folds, the service ball hits the net, the open goal becomes a fortress. And once the fear of failure leads to failure itself, something we became only too familiar with at St James Park just over a year ago, then losing becomes inevitable.

It’s one of the reasons I was never any good at any sport at school; that and arrant laziness. My father was a professional football referee and played cricket for Surrey. There’s no way I could kick a ball or pick up a bat without it becoming some sort of professional trial. I know I was a bitter disappointment to him and I can still recall my fear of his frustration. Today I still can’t throw, catch or kick a ball, but boy can I shout at our national team.

It’s a big ask, but we, the fans, can help. Our honour’s list of sporting heroes hides many tales of depression and mental illness. Their fear of letting people down; their fury at a body which, through injury or fatigue, fails to fulfil overblown expectations; their lack of support from the pundits whose only advice is “pull yourself together”, has often led to serious problems, particularly for young men trying to live up to headlines and hyperbole.

Come on Rooney, we shouted today over our beer bellies. But at the end of the day, he’s only human.

The Vet's On Standby

Dr John Braxton Hicks first observed them in 1872. Observed? Surely they were bleeding obvious. You certainly couldn’t miss them in our house on New Year’s Eve as Joanna writhed in agony on the floor. “Braxton Hicks” are the bane of pregnant women. They’re bogus contractions that nonetheless feel extremely real. Just two weeks off her due date, despite the pregnancy manuals’ reassurances that “you’ll know a real contraction when it comes”, these false alarms are disturbing. Although Izzy will be my fifth child, I found myself counting the breaks in the pain and planning the fastest route to the hospital. Childbirth is the most inexact science. Despite millennia of practice, it’s extraordinary how hit and miss the whole process is for the female human.

27 years ago, when my first child was due, my wife and I twice piled her hospital bag into the boot and dashed off to the maternity ward, only to be greeted with weary mockery by the nurses. “Oh, they’re only Braxton Hicks”, they said and sent us packing. The second time we felt truly ashamed.

It was on the eve of Charles and Diana’s wedding when she felt the contractions for the third time. “They’re only Braxton Hicks”, we chorused, cracked open a bottle of Moet and switched on television to watch the fireworks in Hyde Park. A couple of hours later we were merrily toasting the royal couple as the BBC prepared to light the hilltop beacons around the country. But despite the champagne, Jilly was in serious discomfort. I timed the gaps and picked up the car keys. “No rush – but maybe we should get ready”. We had another glass for the road, then climbed into our battered old van.

London was strangely silent. The reason became apparent as we reached the high street. The entire city was gridlocked. Over a million people were trying to get to Hyde Park and the roads were jammed solid. The hospital was four miles away across the Thames, and hundreds of stationary cars blocked our way.

At that moment Jilly’s waters broke. No time for an ambulance, we needed a police escort. So whether it was the alcohol or just sheer panic coursing through the veins, I decided to try to get arrested. On the wrong side of the road, horn blaring, I weaved through the oncoming traffic. Storming along the pavement, across a bowling green, down a shopping mall, I roared up to the local police station. It was shut; every policeman in London was in Hyde Park. It was the longest four miles of my life, with Jilly in the back screaming obscenities at me like women in labour always do in the movies.

We arrived with minutes to spare. As Ben’s head popped into the light of the delivery room, we heard the first bars of Handel’s Royal Fireworks music from the nurses’ lounge next door, and a hundred rockets exploded in the sky.

This time I’m determined things will run a little smoother. The calm, possibly hung-over telephone voice of Jo’s consultant on New Year’s Day (“They’re only Braxton Hicks”) has condemned her to another fortnight of discomfort.

Don’t believe anyone who claims pregnancy is a joyous experience. I reckon it’s an unpleasant process from start to finish. Jo’s body is absurdly distended, Izzy’s feet are somewhere under her mother’s chin, and neither has had a decent night’s sleep since August. You’d have thought women would have evolved a more user-friendly reproduction mechanism by now.

Jo says men have no idea what women go through. That of course is a great blessing, but it’s also a frustration, as I’d really like to be sharing our most important event of 2009. Meanwhile I’m taking no chances. Our next-door neighbour is a vet, and I’ve put him on standby, just in case the Braxton Hicks turn into the real thing.

Sweet Dreams in Disneyland

I’m writing this in a medieval castle. Sitting in my turret room, I look out over lush gardens resplendent with topiary and a lake. There are servants dressed in flowing uniforms. The idyllic style winding its way through the entire castle conjures memories of times long past. The walls are adorned with beautiful frescoes and the building itself is an expression of the most important elements of French history.

Those last two sentences are not mine, of course, but quoted straight from the brochure of the Dream Castle Hotel in Disneyland Paris. A dream castle that’s probably my worst nightmare. I have a fleur de lys wallhanging in my room next to a picture of a princess kissing a frog. Built in 2004, it’s one of several “theme” hotels that have sprung up around Disneyland. This one is a cross between King Arthur and The Three Musketeers. Joanna and I have brought Sam and a 10-year-old classmate to celebrate the start of the summer holidays. Last night we endured “culinary delights in a historical environment, an authentic buffet selection of French and European regional cuisine”. I think you get the picture: all you can eat for 25 Euros. Last night was “Italian night” and Mussolini must have been turning in his grave.

Why is it that hoteliers assume that if you cater for children you have to throw style, quality and good cooking out of the window? The Italians have it sorted: from the cradle children accompany their parents to proper restaurants in the evening. They eat adult food or they starve. We British only feel comfortable with our children in “family” restaurants, where we are forced to eat bland overcooked food which we accept because the kids are having such a ball. The consequence is, our children end up with picky tastes, don’t eat their vegetables, and this morning Joanna and I have indigestion. I guess the Dream Castle Hotel can be forgiven, though. It is owned by Austrians, so it’s unlikely that they’ll ever allow haute cuisine to permeate its castle walls. Austria: home of schnitzel and strudel. Enough said.

Sam’s friend is vegetarian, which is a bit tricky in a chicken nugget laden place like Disneyland. I felt rather sorry for him as he pushed his “authentic” cheesy pasta (more flour than cheese) and soggy broccoli round his plate. I just hope there’s a decent vegetarian alternative to “Cattleman’s Chili” at Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show tonight.

I wouldn’t know what to do if my child turned vegetarian. Boarding school, probably. My eldest daughter has contracted the disease, but thankfully she waited until she left home. Like all flesh-eating parents, I still hope it’s just a fad, and whenever she stays I provocatively cook bacon in the morning to try to awaken her comatose taste-buds.

Scotland cured my first wife. Jilly had been a veggie for six years before we met and all my attempts at healing had been in vain until one summer we went to the Edinburgh Festival with our first born. Ben was just six weeks old, and we were staying on the top floor of a rather smart hotel overlooking the Castle. On Sunday lunchtime we carried the baby in his Moses basket down to the Carvery. While Jilly inspected the cauliflower cheese, I sliced off a solitary doorstep of Aberdeen Angus. That did it. She took one look at the beef, and dived in. After six huge portions she hauled me back to our hotel room to sleep it off. It was two hours later that we realized we’d completely forgotten the baby. We dashed downstairs to find him still happily sleeping in his basket under the restaurant table.

With another baby on the way – my fifth and Joanna’s first – I regret this won’t be my last trip to Disneyland. I’m not sure I’ll be doing Space Mountain at 65, but I guess there’ll be at least one more of these theme hotels to suffer. Unless someone has the bright idea of creating an adult-friendly hotel at Disneyland, complete with Gordon Ramsay restaurant and a swimming pool they don’t allow children to urinate in. Now that really would be a dream castle.