The luggage carousel moved. I said to my daughter: ‘Now – watch for the mud stains.’
And then, a minute later, the suitcase appeared. I pointed excitedly as it nosed through the black plastic flaps. ‘See? That’s mud from when it fell off the back of a Jeep in Uganda.’
Feeling proud that my blue Samsonite case is still red-brown with the road dirt it fell into when I covered a story in 1999, I turned to Anna, 18, for affirmation. She pulled off her headphones.
‘Sorry?’
‘I’m just saying, that dried mud on my case is–’
‘Dad, you’ve told me that five times before.’
When you have teenagers, you have to communicate against headphones, in soundbites, often through a closed bedroom door. I worried that I was seeing a living example of the recent Financial Times report on teens – less ability to concentrate than ever, less use of the eyes to see beyond the phone at the end of their arm. But then I thought, calm down, this is not her problem. It’s your problem for telling the same boring story six times.
The experience seems universal. I was staggered when my own parents offered me advice of any kind. What could I learn from people who thought the Sex Pistols should be disbanded? But advice-rejection still comes as such a painful shock when your child turns into a teenager. I asked Anna: ‘Can you tell me what good advice I’ve given you?’
It was the same morning as the carousel incident, so I accept I might have exhausted her. Off came the headphones. ‘Sorry, what?’
‘Advice. What have I told you that’s helped?’
‘Er – I dunno. Can I have more time?’
This is hard to take, because in the early years your little ones worship you. Daughters, dare I say, worship dads especially.
When my girls were four and six, I was given a brilliant book called Great Lies To Tell Small Kids by Andy Riley. I happily trotted them out: ‘Batteries get their power because they have tiny pedalling mice inside.’ ‘See my mug saying World’s Greatest Dad? There are no more than three in existence, because they are only awarded once every hundred years.’ They believed my every word.
During a street party for the Queen’s 60 years on the throne, Martha, now 21, then eight, was walking alongside the trestle tables hand-in-hand with me. She was holding five helium balloons, and I said, ‘Just watch you don’t let anyone hand you more than two extra balloons. Children with seven helium balloons sometimes float into the sky.’
We walked a bit further, and then a neighbour gave Martha another balloon – number six. She took it, but her grip on my hand tightened, and I loved that feeling.
But then something changed.
One day I walked into the kitchen with a pair of Y-fronts on my head. ‘Right,’ I said authoritatively. ‘Who’s been throwing pants?’
The joke had worked before, with socks. On this occasion, instead of the heart-melting, ‘Not us Dad, we promise!’ my eldest, Martha, now at the grand old age of nine, said firmly: ‘Dad, you keeping doing the same thing.’
I was crushed. The mystique was gone. No longer was I being listened to just because I was their father.
The BBC used to have a generation of old blokes who positively boasted about having missed their children growing up. Their attitude shocked me. I resolved not to be the same absentee dad. And I wasn’t, but it only makes the pack-it-in-Dad moments harder. Your heart breaks, not just for the children you have lost, but for the rose-tinted glasses they saw you through. Can’t I just be someone’s idol again? I really enjoyed my hero years.
As Martha and Anna reached their teens, I realised I could no longer be chief clown; they wanted more serious commentary. When Anna asked, ‘Dad, was it Bowie or Nirvana who wrote The Man Who Sold The World?’, I realised there was more credit to be had from knowing Bowie’s back catalogue than from placing my underpants on my head. I had to up my game.
What I worked out is that there are two principles of parental advice. First, it needs to be illustrated in real life or it just doesn’t land. ‘Don’t tilt a strimmer sideways to cut your hedges’ is great, learned the hard way in my case, but only really works if the kids have to visit you in A&E. I lucked out when I went over the handlebars of a penny farthing – knocked out, brain-addled for two hours, it really taught Martha and Anna about the dangers of riding too high.
The second principle is that the apertures are so narrow for offering emotional advice, you have to make sure not a word is wasted. What do I really want my daughters to know? I want them to know their own self-worth; never to feel they get their value from another person. I don’t want them to end up with someone who makes them unhappy. So, I take all the advice and all the clowning and every single thing I’ve ever heard or experienced, and I’ve boiled it all down to a single sentence: never be with someone who makes you feel bad about yourself.
Eleven words. Now I just need a moment to unload them.
Jeremy Vine’s crime fiction debut Murder On Line One (HarperCollins, £20) is out now. To order a copy for £17 until 29 June, go to mailshop.co.uk/books or call 020 3176 2937. Free UK delivery on orders over £25.
