The Life of Kai

The sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach tells me that Christmas is on its way, and with it the same old, same old ridiculous family rows.

It wasn’t always like this. I am naturally a huge fan of Christmas. I love going carol-singing, I love going to mass on Christmas Eve to see my cousin’s daughter in the nativity. I love playing stupid party games to entertain the kids – from the relative normality of charades, sardines and twenty questions to the more bizarre Kazoo Name That Tune and Humbug Rapper. Most of all I love the feeling of togetherness and closeness as a family.

When I was a kid we would go to a favourite aunty on Christmas Day. We would arrive around 6ish and be home again by 10. My brother and I were allowed to take one present to show everyone, and it quickly became a way to tell which presents held our imagination the longest. We would sing songs, play games and eat turkey sandwiches spread thickly with piccalilli. As we were leaving each kid was allowed to take one novelty from the tree. Every year I would choose a chocolate umbrella. They were home-made, and although they were made from Scotbloc (bleurgh) you got loads of chocolate as they were solid. I’ve always been the type to go for quantity over quality!

When I was in Uni my aunty died. Another aunty stepped in to host Christmas, but it just wasn’t the same (as it was the most miserable aunty in the world who volunteered). My parents and I started taking holidays over Christmas and new year in order to avoid spending Christmas at my aunty’s and New Year at a country and western holiday camp (I kid you not).

Sod me, just as we’re getting into the swing of things my dad buggers off, leaving me and my mum to shift for ourselves at Christmas. By now my mum’s family have settled into a routine. A tooth-grindingly, toe-curlingly awful routine.

Christmas eve: 6.00 at my cousin’s for a hot buffet and to church for 7.30 ready to see my cousin’s daughter in the nativity. Back to my cousin’s afterward. This is possibly my favourite evening of the whole Christmas family spectacular.

Christmas day: 11.00am at my aunty’s to cook Christmas dinner for five. Dinner at 2.00pm sharp. Clean up afterwards, then cook buffet for thirty and lay it out before escaping home at around 6ish. 7ish, back to same aunty’s for evening spent entertaining my least favourite cousins. Just to make the festive mood complete, the entire family hates my aunty’s husband and spends the whole evening wondering if they could murder him without being tied to the crime.
Ho ho ho.
11.00pm, tidy up and put the house to rights before we are allowed to go home.

Boxing Day: 2.00pm to another aunty’s for my cousin’s birthday party, which normally spreads into the evening. Home for around 11.00pm.

27th: 12.30pm at a cousin’s house for lunch and to make a fuss of her kids (very easy since her kids are absolutely adorable and we go home before they start kicking off).

28th: 5.00pm at another cousin’s to prove that the cousin from the 27th is not actually our favourite and we love them all (no mean feat as the cousin from the 27th actually IS my favourite).

Fortunately, they then all go away for new year, and we couldn’t possibly go because of work commitments. Well, that and the fact that we don’t want to.

In a normal family, this would be a strain. In my mum’s family, this is worthy of a horror movie. Five days together, when none of us do anything in between visits, so have run out of things to say by Boxing Day. Then it starts...

My mum is the baby of her family (and she is in her late fifties – we’re not talking about a gang of teenagers here).
“Do you remember when I was ten Dad came upstairs ‘cos he could smell ciggie smoke and you threw your fag end under my bed and told him it was me smoking and he gave me a hiding?”
“Well I wouldn’t have had to do that if you hadn’t shouted him.”
“But I only shouted him because you were burning the eyes out on my Cheyenne posters!”
“Yes but he always took your side since you were the favourite.”
“No, YOU were always the favourite, little miss prissy. He gave me a good hiding because you were picking on me!”
“Oh yes, of course I was the favourite. Who got whole packets of custard creams to herself? Was it me? I don’t think so”.

After fifty years you would think they could move on, get over it. The worst thing is, my cousins seem to be intent on repeating the pattern. The two children of the aunty who died are both in their early forties, and have fallen out over who was offered babysitting when their kids were little (nearly twenty years ago). Little wonder that, according to the Samaritans, 60% of the population said they find Christmas stressful or depressing.

Tidings of comfort and joy anyone?

So... a survey out today has shown that since Jamie Oliver's campaign to make school dinners healthy started in September, the number of children having school meals has fallen by between 5% and 30%.

I hate to say I told you so (actually I lie. I love to be able to say I told you so. I even have a little I told you so dance that I like to do.), but I have been telling everybody so, loudly, for months.

I appreciate School Meals is woefully under funded, and for the most part, ridiculously understaffed. My mother is a chef who, for her sins, works in a school kitchen (presumably as a punishment for spending a past life pushing pins into the eyes of fluffy little kittens). Fair play to them - every day they turn out 250 meals with only 15 man-hours. That is no mean feat, especially when you consider that in order to break even, the food content of each meal must cost just 30p.
Luckily, the companies employed to provide lunches have found a quick, cheap way to provide these meals: feed kids crap. Mechanically recovered mystery meat in the shape of a dinosaur anyone? Yummm... On the plus side, the schools didn't have to worry about the mad cow crisis, as the closest their "beef"burgers ever got to a cow is the leather shoes worn by the immigrant packing them up in the factory.

Bearing this in mind, I applaud the work Jamie Oliver has done to raise the awareness of child nutrition and to increase the amount of money used for school meals in an attempt to improve their nutrition. I can't help feeling however that he is missing a vital fact: kids currently choose what to eat and they appear to like eating crap.

So, as I said, my mum works on school meals. Up to two years ago, around 70% of kids at her school had a school dinner. Two years ago the LEA issued a dictat to the effect that chips should be served a maximum of once weekly. As soon as the rules came into force the number of kids having a school meal dropped sharply. Within walking distance of the school there are two chippies and a McD's. This is where the kids now go for lunch (McCrappy meal, anyone?).
Since that worked so well and the kids were so much healthier, the LEA decided to capitalise on this success by banning chocolate and fizzy drinks vending machines. Now at break times the kids cross a busy road to get to a newsagent where they buy all the sweets and pop their podgy little overstrained hearts could desire. Not only are they no healthier, but the school is missing out on a revenue stream. No matter, they can make another dinner lady redundant and that will help financially...

Have I mentioned that my mum is a chef? Once or twice? Well she is. Growing up she taught me a lot about nutrition (not that you'd know it when I appear to be living on cheesy wotsits but that's another story), and taught me how to cook, where my food came from, knowledge and skills which only a couple of generations ago would have been passed on as a matter of course. Sadly at my school our cookery lessons were very limited (we made sausage rolls using frozen pastry and ready-cooked sausages in one memorable lesson), as we were expected to take on good careers and therefore would have neither the time nor the inclination to cook (the headmistress' attitude, not mine).

We now have kids (and for that matter adults) who don't understand where their food comes from, what is in season when, how to prepare a meal from scratch. They live on take-aways. Kids know what a curry is, what a pizza is, what a burger is, so that's what they eat. That's all they eat. If they aren't on offer at school then the kids simply choose to buy them elsewhere.

So what is the answer? Don't look at me, I don't know. For me personally, the answer was to meet a meat inspector and to visit an abattoir. It was such a harrowing experience that I started to learn about how I could eat meat (which I love) without the animals having to suffer unnecessarily. From there I started to talk to farmers, particularly organic farmers, and to get a feel for my food. I have grown my own fruit and veg, and am passionate about sustainable farming methods, which in turn led to an interest in biodiversity. No, I can see that it's not a route for everyone.

In the meantime, Jamie's "revolution" in school meals will make absolutely no difference to the health of our kids, unless we can go back to old fashioned school meals where kids have no choice - there is one meal and they are all forced to stay in school and eat it.
Try doing that and they'll have you in court - it probably breaches their human rights to a McD's...

Wow... so much to say today I may have to split posts.


Firstly, today is one of my absolute favourite days of the year. The child in me loves yesterday: bonfire night - the fireworks, the charred potatoes cooked in the bottom of the fire, the fun of making a guy and watching it burn. When I was a child I lived on a council estate that had a playing field at the back of it, and (bliss for bonfire night) a fair amount of scrub land to the side of it where we could build the biggest bonfire we were capable of with no fear of it burning any of the houses to ashes.

Backing on to our estate was another estate - an older, more run-down, rougher estate. During October we kids would hoard anything remotely burnable (of COURSE shoes will burn...), filling our gardens with all kinds of broken chairs, bits of wood and cardboard boxes. At the start of November we would gather them all together and build our bonfire, competing with the neighbouring estate.
Competition was fierce, to the point of regular raids being made on the other estate's bonfire to steal their hoard of litter. Eventually the realisation dawned that if we were stealing from them then it was not outside the realms of possibility that they would steal from us. Each following year we would organise security, where we would take it in turns to stand guard over the precious mound night and day (though I only joined in through the night, being far too chicken to skip school during the day).

Eventually things changed. We moved home, and although I lived less than a mile away it may as well have been on another continent. I was too far away to take a turn on guard duty, and although we could go back and watch the fire burn it was somehow not the same when I wasn't involved from the start. In our new street there was no patch of scrubland we could make a bonfire on, and the kids didn't knock door to door asking for any burnable rubbish - a huge shame as we had replaced doors, floorboards, furniture and hardboard panels which the kids on the estate would have sold their souls to get.
Gradually the appeal of bonfire night dimmed.

I still like bonfire night. Last year I got tickets for the Mersey Ferry bonfire night cruise, where we had the most fantastic view of the fireworks being set off on the river as well as all the displays lighting the Liverpool skyline. This year I didn't bother much. I had a walk along the shore when it got dark, but then tucked myself up on the sofa with a giant mug of coffee and a guilty pleasure film (Shining Through - Melanie Griffith makes an entirely believable secret agent in war-torn Germany. No, honestly...).

My pleasure in bonfire night as an adult is almost entirely based around the morning after. I love getting up really early and going for a walk before anyone is around. The acrid smell of gunpowder and smoke is still heavy in the air and seeps into my clothing, making me smell like a slightly overcooked smoked chicken.
My dog was a joy on these morning tramps. He would find the remains of last night's rockets and bangers, and would bound up to them sniffing hungrily only for the smell to make him sneeze non-stop for minutes at a time. Wouldn't stop him doing exactly the same thing to the next one though!