I turn to remonstrate with the youngest one, the oldest leans across the table and sticks the point of a chopstick in my ear. This, I decide, is a step too far.
I accept that there must be something inherently amusing about my sense of humour deserting me. I don’t know why this is. No one laughs when my wife has a sense-of-humour failure, sometimes not for the rest of the week. But the children are hysterical, giggling maniacally and poking me over and over again with chopsticks, in the ribs, in the arms, in the side of my head. I am hissing for them to stop, and doing my most threatening eyebrows.
More than once I try to restore order by saying, ‘OK, I’m serious now’ but this only makes them laugh louder and poke harder. If I’m quick enough I can snatch a chopstick away – after a few minutes I have a big handful – but this is a noodle bar; there are lots of chopsticks lying around. At one point the youngest child actually goes to the counter to ask for more.
Before long I have completely lost control of the situation. Everywhere I look I catch the eye of someone staring at me with either pity or scorn, or some sieved mixture of the two. None of them is our waiter. My debit card has been sitting on the little dish for fifteen minutes, and still he hasn’t appeared.
I look at Mark, who is also looking at me with pity and scorn, and clearly wishing he was doing it from farther away. I shrug my shoulders at him wearily, and then recoil as the point of a chopstick stabs into my neck.
‘It’s because you gave them iced tea,’ he says.
When you have young children in London, most weekends break down into a basic binary choice: Science Museum or dinosaurs. Because the Science Museum is right next to the Natural History Museum, it’s an argument that can continue for your entire journey there. The choice never mattered to me, because I came to hate both places more or less equally. Once a PR person offered me the chance to spend the whole night in the Science Museum with my children and a bunch of other kids and parents. It sounded like some kind of community punishment order. I’ve never done anything wrong enough to deserve that.
There is, of course, a wealth of culture on offer in London, much of it child-friendly. Over years of weekends I enthusiastically made the case for many enticing alternatives: plays, galleries, street parties, food festivals, exhibitions, one-off happenings. And every time I did, my three children would look at me blankly. Then two would say ‘Science Museum’ and one would say ‘dinosaurs’.
Eventually I learned to lie about where we were going.
‘This is boring,’ says the youngest one, slumping against a temporary fence. He has a point. My three sons and I have made a trip to see the Serpentine Pavilion in Kensington Gardens, the majority of us under protest. The temporary pavilion – they put up a new one every spring – architecturally intriguing though it may be from the outside, is presently closed for some private event. Through its glass walls we can see someone giving what appears to be a lecture to a seated audience. I tell the youngest one he’s lucky, that it would probably be even more boring if we were inside.
‘Can we get an ice cream now?’ he says. As I look round for the nearest ice cream van I spy a poster for the adjacent Serpentine Gallery, which is currently exhibiting recent work by the US artist Jeff Koons. I had been planning to see it anyway, but I don’t imagine I’ll be back this way on my own any time soon.
‘Let’s go in there first,’ I say. ‘Just for a bit.’
The Serpentine Gallery has always been, to my mind, an easy-going cultural venue. As well as being a showcase for new and sometimes challenging art, it’s also free and in a park, and consequently full of sticky toddlers at weekends. They know their audience, and are correspondingly accommodating. But today things are different: gallery staff are holding people at the entrance in order to deliver a stern warning about the fragility of the artwork on display. My children chat all the way through it. Once inside we gather round a sculpture consisting of a large inflatable cartoon caterpillar poking through the rungs of a folding stepladder, and stare.
‘I’m really not impressed by this,’ says the middle one. ‘What’s so great about a pool toy stuck in a ladder?’ I explain that with this sculpture, as with much of the work of Jeff Koons, all is not as it seems.
‘It may look like an ordinary blow-up toy,’ I say, ‘but it’s actually made of metal.’ I begin to doubt these words even as they leave my mouth. I must have read this fact somewhere, but the caterpillar before me looks exactly like an inflatable toy, with perfectly puckered seams and a familiar plastic sheen. All three children immediately reach out to touch the sculpture. ‘Don’t!’ I hiss, slapping at their fingers. A gallery guard is already coming towards us.
‘What’s the point of making metal look like plastic,’ says the oldest, ‘if you can’t touch it to see it’s not plastic?’
‘It’s partly about raising the banal, the everyday, to the level of high art,’ I say. ‘But it’s also challenging our ideas about what art is supposed to …’ I realize I’m alone. The children have disappeared into another room, in order to touch some sculptures. By the time I get to them the middle one is circling a stack of plastic chairs pierced by two seal-headed swimming rings, his fingers splayed. Another guard is following him round and round it, trying to keep his hands in sight.
‘Let’s look over here,’ I say, grabbing the middle one. We now seem to have our own personal guard, silently shadowing us wherever we go. The children accept this escalation as a challenge.
‘You distract her,’ says the oldest to the middle one, ‘and I’ll touch the lobster when she’s not looking.’
‘No one is going to touch anything,’ I whisper. ‘Don’t you have any sense of …’ The three of them scoot ahead of me, and the guard passes by in pursuit. I catch up as they are bearing down on two blow-up turtles fixed to a chain-link fence, and gather them by their wrists.
‘I think we’ve seen everything now,’ I say, herding everyone towards the door. ‘Time for ice cream.’ As we reach the exit I find myself calculating the extent to which my children’s behaviour can be blamed on my singular lack of authority, and how much of it is the fault of the artist Jeff Koons. A light rain is falling in the park.
‘I actually brushed the caterpillar with the back of my hand on the way out,’ says the oldest.
‘What did it feel like?’ I say.
‘Metal,’ he says.
For obvious reasons I prefer to do most of my child-rearing in private. I can do it in public if I have to, but it takes a lot out of me; parenting is largely a process of trial and error, and I don’t like other people seeing the error part. Frankly, I find being in public on my own stressful enough, and for that reason I am only too happy to use my children as an excuse to stay in. Unfortunately this is not always possible.
Somewhere in my pre-Christmas clutch of invitations is one for a book launch. Although it is organized by friends of mine, I have already placed the event in a mental box marked ‘optional’. This is because I don’t know the author and because you never know how you are going to feel about going outside on a random day in the future.
I have forgotten all about the book launch when, a few weeks hence, with my wife away in Amsterdam, one of these friends rings in order to ensure my attendance that evening.
‘I can’t,’ I say with what I hope sounds like dejection. ‘I mean I would, but I’ve got the kids and no one to baby-sit.’
‘Bring them,’ she says. Her tone hints that non-compliance is not among the available alternatives.
‘Really? OK, that sounds great.’
I scroll back through my inbox to find the details. The book is called Once More with Feeling and the launch is described as ‘a festive evening of hymn and carol singing at St James’s, Piccadilly’. I may as well extend my sons an invitation to be nit-combed.
‘Guess what?’ I say. ‘We’re going to a party, which won’t end until past your bedtime.’