It’s Friday morning, I sit in silence and it is just plain weird. For the first time in three months, the house no longer has a non-adult presence and I don’t mean those precious moments when the kids are outside playing on the street, I mean full-on somebody else’s responsibility absent. I can actually gather my thoughts and make a plan for the week, well only the one week between now and Easter holidays. Of course during the Easter holidays the kids get a full fortnight to fall back into old patterns again. But what an interim week that will be!

Sure there are some downsides to the kids returning to school, the main one being that I have to drag them out of bed at the ungodly hour of 7.30am! To be fair I only have to drag one of them out, Aaron, Lochlan and Ella are normally decent early risers with Aaron usually being the first one up in the morning even ahead of yours truly. He clearly inherits his early morning fondness from my Dad, a notorious early morning person who would regularly wake me and my sister with verses penned by Gilbert O’Sullivan or was it Donovan. Oscar, our 8 year old, on the other hand is definitely not a morning person (apparently he gets this from his mother). Our first interaction of the day normally goes along the lines of this:

“Hi Oscar, it’s morning and time to get up for school”.

Grunting noises from under the covers.

“Oscar, your brothers are all up, the sun is shining and it’s a school day so you need to get dressed”.

“I’m not going to school”.

“Oscar you know you have to go to school and besides you enjoy it there. Also it’s the law and if you don’t the guards will take mommy and daddy away and put us in prison”.

“I don’t care, I’m not getting up”. Covers are grasped tightly like a hedgehog defending itself.

At this point I can feel the red mist descending as Roy Keane would say, so I exit to start the packed-lunch making process while Niki takes over the negotiations with Oscar.

But these little traumas aside, the transition to mornings sans enfants has been a smooth one. The amount of shouting between the hours of 9am and 2pm has certainly decreased dramatically. I mean how many times can someone forget when they are due to have a zoom call with their teacher, it was at the same time every day for god’s sake. Also what is it with older siblings getting distracted by telling their younger brother how to do his school-work. They certainly seemed to be way more invested in this than their own work. Originally I was under the misguided illusion that this was done in the name of helpfulness but soon realised it was more along the lines of “I’m so much cleverer than you”, I think it was the repeated use of “idiot”, “eejit” and “dumbass” that tipped me off to this.

So instead of roaring and raging while trying to remember my 12 times tables and “cupla focal as Gaeilge” from my youth (this inevitably ends up with me telling stories about my days in the Gaelteacht to my bemused offspring), I now have time to catch up on world events (not that much better to be honest) and scour the internet for online short story competitions. I think my niche is flash fiction, I mean how far wrong can you go in less than 500 words!

Then there is my quest to complete as many jigsaws as possible in a rolling 12 month period, or my attempt to read every Booker prize winner since the competition’s inception in 1969 (15 down, loads to go) and not forgetting my never-ending Ultimate 90s dance music playlist on Spotify. Niki thinks I should probably start looking for a job now, but whoa there is way too much uncertainty going around for that. What if a fourth wave hits and we are back to homeschooling in May (screams silently).

Of course it would be nice if this new found freedom was accompanied by the ability to sit down in a cafe somewhere or meet up with friends for a chat but hey that’s the new normal as they say. Just for now I’m thankful that I can hear my own thoughts.

And most importantly of all, for the first time in ages I have the couple of hours of silence required to write this blog!

It seems like such a long time ago now but staggeringly, it was less than a month ago that I was crouching in a woodland field in Longford, eyeing a seven year-old through my cross-hairs, wondering about the moral complexities of gunning him down in front of his parents! Naturally my competitive instincts kicked in and I let fly with an infra-red barrage of destruction, not ceasing until the electronic cry of “Medic I’m down” had been emitted from my target’s device. The briefest of smirks appeared on my face before I moved onto my next target, a mother wearing a luminescent scarf, the fool!

I should explain that just before Christmas, we spent two nights in Center Parcs Longford. We had booked the trip as a treat for the family back in September in order to have something to look forward to after a pretty discouraging year. Little did we know how quickly things would go downhill post our trip, back then COVID cases were still in three figures and travelling between counties was not some narco-esque pastime. Sure, we were denied the full Center Parcs experience in all its glory as the tropical swimming paradise including the water slides was closed and the zip-line experience developed a mysterious technical fault but hey at least we were able to go to restaurants and have food served to us.

I must admit I wasn’t sure what to expect from a holiday resort in Longford, my previous recollections of the county were limited to viewing a grey St Mel’s Cathedral through a damp car window (it always seemed to be raining in Longford) as I passed towards the more pleasant environs of Westport or Ballina or even Belmullet. I’m pretty sure I have never been on the road to Ballymahon (for this is the nearest town to Center Parcs) before and I was very impressed by its straightness, in fact I did wonder if it had been enhanced to attract the resort. However a quick check on wikipedia informed me that the R392 (for that is the road’s official title) closely follows the ancient ceremonial route known as the Slighe Assail, as such it formed one of the legendary Five Roads of Tara. This largely accounts for the remarkable straightness of the R392, so no Padraig Flynn style influencing here!

Anyway I digress. My initial impressions of Center Parcs were positive, our accommodation was very clean and of good standard (to be expected since the place only opened in the summer) and everything was clearly sign-posted. The hub of the resort is beside a small lake and it is here that most activities take place. Indeed the lack of traffic, the cleanliness and the constant sound of music (Christmas carols of course) brought to mind Disneyland (albeit a colder and wetter one than I had experienced previously). Another enjoyable part of the experience was the ability to walk along the tree lined paths without the constant hum of traffic (cars are only allowed into the resort for check-in and check-out). We even managed to spot a few red squirrels, something that is a bit of a rarity in Dublin where the larger grey squirrels reign supreme.

The boating on the lake was good fun as was the slightly water-logged mini-golf, the food was decent although I simply enjoyed the fact that we were able to go to a restaurant and Ella really liked the Christmas village including the animatronic singing reindeer. The highlight for me was undoubtedly the aforementioned laser-tag which luckily we kept until the morning of our departure so we were able to finish on a high. I got to be on a team with the three boys so while they ran about like lunatics helpfully distracting enemy fire I was able to pick off opponents with ruthless efficiency. The battle where I eliminated 7 out of our 8 opponents remains a personal (err, I mean team, well done my sons) highlight for 2020.

One month later it is such memories that help sustain me through multiple google meets sessions, endless homework exercises and not forgetting the excruciating Joe Wick’s sessions. Who’d have thought that nostalgia for 2020 was possible!

Now a number of years ago, I made the decision to go against tradition (and according to my wife Niki, all things natural) and buy a fake plastic tree. I dreamt of a time when pine needles were no longer a feature of the festive period and I thought by making a wise investment this utopia would be within reach. Indeed for six or seven years this was the case, the hoover lay silent just like Jesus in the manger.

Sure there was the odd difficulty getting the overweight lump of plastic in and out of the attic. And there was that time when the stairway carpet received a slight incision as I tried to slide the thing downwards without fully assessing the consequences. Boy do I never get to live that one down!

But over the last few years Niki has mounted a very successful political campaign to get the children on board (bloody snowflakes) with her idea that natural trees capture the true essence of Christmas, i.e. celebrating the birth of a baby in a stable in the middle east with a gaudy evergreen bush! So slowly but surely the natural tree (and the associated pine needles) has made a return to our household. Well at least I thought that would spare us the ordeal of getting the fake one (I swear it gets heavier every year) in and out of that attic hatch (I swear it gets smaller every year). But oh no, now we have a situation where we are doubling up on trees, twice the fun for all!!

This year, not happy with rubbing my nose in it about our double Christmas tree situation, Niki decided to raise the stakes even further. This year we were going to chop down our own Christmas tree, when I say chop down I mean watch a man chainsaw it in front of us. So last weekend we headed north to somewhere between Swords and Ashbourne to track through a muddy field and choose our own tree (Niki and the kids chose the one the farthest distance possible from our car) to be slaughtered in front of us. It felt a bit like choosing a lobster from a tank before eating it. I think Niki was trying to make an argument that this was more environmentally friendly, a bit like a hunter eating his own prey but I was too busy listening to the tree screaming as it was ripped from its roots. The kids seemed to enjoy it though!

Previous trips home with a Christmas tree had been of the very short variety so there was a quite a bit of hand-wringing as we strapped the tree to the roof of our car and headed back home. I say “we” but really Niki strapped it while I just stood there going “I’m not sure we’re going to make it on those bumpy and winding roads of north county Dublin, we might as well just donate the tree to the people of St Margaret’s!” This improved Niki’s mood enormously, not! Thankfully after only a slightly stressful journey we made it intact back to Glasnevin.

It was at this point that I took control, ferociously wrestling the tree off the roof-rack and carrying it slung over my shoulder into the house like a mountain buck! It was then that we discovered it wouldn’t fit into our Christmas tree stand, damn those wide trunked north Dublin trees! Out came the saw (probably for the first time in a decade) and we took turns to hack away at the very sap heavy bark. A good half an hour later we managed to just about wedge the tree into the base (although probably not far enough in to reach the water reservoir Niki had prepared for it, this remains a bone of contention). At this point we decided to take a break for lunch.

After we had our fill of luncheon meats and cheeses we returned to the fun part of the day, decorating the tree. As Niki was cutting through the netting to allow our tree to emerge from its man made chrysalis, Oscar (age 7) noticed that the inhabitants of the tree, mainly small flies but also a beetle and a ladybird or two, were now happily settling in to our living room, well mainly the ceiling. Our kids, being very definite city-types and not likely to be in a field unless it has goalposts at each end, are not big fans of creepy crawlies so this immediately sent them into fits of wailing and hair pulling (themselves and each other). It was then that Niki issued the immortal and highly exasperated line “I don’t care about the bugs on the ceiling!” She may have followed up with something along the lines of we are going to enjoy decorating this tree if it’s the last thing I ever do but I was too busy sitting and singing sweet melodies under my fake plastic Christmas tree to care!

Editor’s (Niki’s) note: we are very happy with our Christmas Tree and would recommend Wade’s Christmas Tree Farm!

Time is a funny old thing and I say that as someone who has placed great store in the concept of time, I still remember my first watch with great fondness, a navy digital thing with a spaceman on it. Indeed I am always at a bit of a loss if I don’t have a watch on me, even in these days where the mobile phone is a constant reminder of time, I like to be grounded by a watch on my left wrist. Although I must say that in the past couple of years this faith in time has been shaken first of all by my change in working circumstances, do weekends still hold the same magnificence when you don’t work Monday to Friday? Secondly this unease has been exacerbated by the emergence of Covid 19 with everybody including my wife, working from home, summer holidays being cancelled or foreshortened and of course lockdowns that are forever extended with restrictions heightened. What use is time when it can’t even tell me if the football season will start or end anymore?

I used to like the whole package around Time and I mean not just Time defined as the indefinite continued progress of existence and events in the past, present, and future regarded as a whole, although I am big believer in that also. But Time as the measure of when and indeed where we are at any point in the day, month or year. I like the way Time grounds us within our universe, how a birthday represents another trip around the sun.

Needless to say, this reverence for Time means that I am generally regarded as a prompt person. I can definitely say that I inherited this characteristic from my father and not my mother. I know this because my childhood is littered with occasions of waiting with my dad! Normally this waiting would occur at a shopping centre. The Ilac centre springs to mind, endlessly waiting by the indoor pond with the fountains that sprayed water like see-through toadstools. Staring at the nearby ice-cream counter with all those exotics flavours while the scent of cheap donuts filled the air. Watching the world go by and waiting for my sister and mother to return from Arnotts, Roches Stores, M&S or some other equally diabolical place.

This desire for promptness has caused some friction in my relationships over the years but has also given me plenty of scope for what the modern wellness gurus would call self-analysis, in other words wishing I hadn’t forgotten my walkman / discman / ipod / mobile phone so now I have to think about the state of my life while waiting for my girlfriend / friend(s) / wife to arrive! Obviously I try to not to meet my girlfriend and wife at the same place!!

So back to the current situation and 6 weeks of Level 5 lockdown which coincidentally has aligned itself with the moment when we put our clocks back by an hour. Usually I would be delighted for the extra hour sleep but not this year. Yay, even darker evenings when our kids can’t go outside and play with their friends. Days merge into days and the only way of telling where we are in the week is from the memes on the internet, you know the ones where Tina Fey goes “what a week, huh?” and Alec Baldwin replies “it’s Tuesday”, this informs me that it is Tuesday!

The kids seem remarkably resilient around this discombobulation. I mean Oscar (7) never seemed to know what day of the week it was anyway. Five out of seven days he’d be disappointed to find out it wasn’t the weekend, tough odds! But this week they took to writing Santa letters in October without a complaint. In fact they seemed to attack it with relish, perhaps this is because Oscar now believes that Christmas has been brought forward this year! There was a further element of confusion in that the boys managed to unearth last years Smyths’ catalogue and had already prepared a draft of their letters before I spotted this year’s version lying at the bottom of a shelf in their bedroom. This was followed by an in-depth discussion around why Santa would require us to use this year’s catalogue, but I think we got away with it on the grounds that Santa is insistent that he only produces the latest models otherwise the elves might get confused around specifications!

So now we head into the mid-term break and I can’t believe that we’re already halfway between the start of the school year and Christmas. I also struggle to believe that this will be the only break we’ll have before the end of December. In my gut I felt that we should have kept going with school as now we are out we may never get them back in but maybe I am being too pessimistic. Only Time will tell!

Well it has been over 20 months now since I started my own site and went down the route of blogging. My stats tell me that I have published 49 posts (this one being the landmark 50th) and achieved almost 6,000 views (including nearly 100 from China, hey if I can make it there I can make it anywhere). My blog is viewed most frequently on Mondays and the most common time of day for catching up on my words of wisdom is 10pm, so straight after Monday night football then! I now have a merry band of 53 followers (thanks guys and gals) who occasionally cause my phone to beep with a much appreciated “like”. My most popular post was a tribute to Drumcondra library which at one point looked like it was going viral but then lost momentum when it became apparent that it was only of real interest to the library-goers of Drumcondra! So I must admit that I’m far from the Kardashian levels of followership that I aspire to and even my brief dalliance with tik-tok dance routines hasn’t elevated me to influencer status yet! Given my lack of appearances on The Late Late Show to date, I do sometimes ask myself the question why am I putting all this out there into the online universe? Occasionally there is a little nagging voice on my shoulder (or as I like to call her, Niki) saying why are you doing this for no financial gain (or when you could be doing housework)?

In response, first and foremost I find the whole thing kind of therapeutic, something which has become particularly relevant in the era of wellness, especially during the last six months when social interactions have been reduced to a minimum. Just arranging my thoughts in a matter fit for general consumption has allowed me to put things in perspective and hopefully put a humourous slant on otherwise humdrum or potentially worrisome matters. Sure, occasionally I do get the odd tinge of doubt about whether putting my family’s lives out there for everyone to see is a good way to go. I do have strange visions of my daughter Ella approaching me in 20 years time sitting me down gently and then giving me a good slapping while demanding I delete my life’s work for GDPR reasons! This is indeed a very concerning prospect for me given that she doubles up as my youngest child and my only daughter and is therefore most likely to be the one caring for me in my old age. I only write the good stuff about you honey!

Asides from my family, there is also the understandable worry about who and what topics I can write about, furthermore recently I have received a complaint from a group of friends (who shall remain nameless) as to why I never write about them “I mean you find time to write about storage space and overfull weekly schedules but not one mention of your friends of 40 odd years!”. Don’t worry, a blog about pals who I only interact with via WhatsApp is coming soon.

Of course there are upsides to blogging – myself and Niki no longer need to provide an introduction as to what is going on in our lives when we meet friends on the street as they are already up to speed via my blog. Although I’m not sure that Niki appreciates being blind-sided on work zoom calls where participants seem to know just as much about her children’s daily lives as she does! On a more serious note, I’m very glad that these blogs will provide a record of this period of my life, particularly the interactions with the kids. I know how the wheel turns and how a manic household can turn into a quiet household and having these blogs as a journal will be something to cherish (assuming Ella hasn’t made me delete them all first). On a slight tangent, I used to send weekly group emails when I spent a year in Australia and New Zealand during my twenties and made the far-sighted decision to save all these emails for posterity. So every now and then when I need a bit of nostalgia I dip into those emails and am transported back to sunnier, more carefree and more adventurous times, in fact I’m just reading one now, what, I actually jumped out of a plane! Hope Lochlan doesn’t get his hands on these!

So what do the next 50 blog post have in store. Well hopefully I’ll have the time to write a few short stories, I have one nearly finished and boy is it much harder to write than a blog, it actually needs a structure, not my strong point! Maybe I’ll reach 100 followers and get a few more “likes” from China. Or maybe she who pays the bills will call time on dublindad.com and send me back to earn a few shekels. Only time will tell.

A special thanks to my editor-in-chief Niki who keeps these posts on the straight and narrow, and spots the odd typo along the way. She also has the odd grumble about the 100% veracity of some of my tales but as a wise man once said “never let the truth get in the way of a good story!”

As you will have gathered from last week’s blog, I am constantly on the lookout for ways to keep my four kids occupied during lockdown life. Those of you who know me will also be aware that I have a certain penchant for table quizzes which I appear to have passed on to my kids, genetics eh! So you can imagine my delight when Kahoot was introduced to our lives. I mean it’s a “make your own quiz” site (apparently it can do other things related to so-called “learning technology” but that is definitely not relevant here), where you can either act as a contestant or a quiz-master. As a quiz-master you get to set your own questions and then provide 3 to 4 possible answers (obviously including the correct one as an option). In the past, I was never a fan of multiple choice questions as it tended to introduce some randomness into the purity of table quizzing (even if you hadn’t the foggiest idea where the Battle of Trafalgar took place, you had a 25% chance of getting it right, off the coast of Spain near Cadiz by the way) but given the option of coming up with witty incorrect answers it suddenly becomes a lot more fun e.g. where did mommy live before she met Daddy? (a) Heartache Hill, (b) Despair Drive, (c) Love Lane, (d) Grumpy Grove! I’d have loved the answer to be (d) but it was in fact (c). While I have learned to tolerate multiple choice questions, I have drawn the line at the option of True or False which I regard as the true nadir of table quizzes, something my fellow housemates / family should take note of (you know who you are). You can also allocate the amount of points which are available for each question so I like to finish off all my quizzes with a double points “daddy round” which usually covers my favourite topics of Liverpool FC, Dublin GAA and computer games! Unsurprisingly Niki (my wife) normally comes last in these rounds!! Once you have formulated your questions, you send a code to your participants who then get to answer on their mobile devices in real time, the quicker you answer, the more points you get. The advent of Kahoot has led to some epic battles in the Doyle household and for a moment it overtook the PlayStation as the boys favourite form of evening entertainment and that is saying something. Needless to say I am undefeated as a contestant and as a quiz master I am now working on a 100 question mega quiz for when the weather actually remembers that this is Ireland and not St Tropez!

On Saturday myself and my wife celebrated our 12th wedding anniversary. Well I certainly celebrated that Niki has been able to put up with me and my foibles for that length of time. Given the current circumstances we were a bit stumped when it came to options for marking the occasion. Last year we took a trip to Paris and strolled around Le Marais but malheureusement that clearly wasn’t going to happen this time round. Instead we decided to go for the slightly less exotic option of a takeaway from Kinara, one of our favourite restaurants and a consistent source of lovely date nights. Now normally the takeaway routine involves the retrieval of the food and a return home to consume it, but we have found that with certain youngsters around the place it is very difficult to have a quiet and calm time while eating your Tikka Masala or whatever. So this time we tried a different approach, thankfully we had auntie / saint Orla ready as babysitter, which allowed myself and Niki to actually got dressed up for a night out, I even shaved for the occasion, a definite rarity in lockdown! We packed our plates and cutlery and headed for Clontarf (where Kinara is located). Once we had picked up our food from Kinara’s highly efficient collection system we were then faced with the quandary of where we were going to eat it. We had harboured (excuse the pun) ambitions of eating by the Clontarf seafront wall but the continuous drizzle and gale force winds put an end to that idea so we found a “public” car park near Clontarf yacht club with nice sea facing views and opened up our tasty grub. Well I had thought it was a public car park but only later realised it was the Dublin Bus overflow car park for the Clontarf depot. This became quite evident when a double decker bus pulled up alongside and loomed over us as we chewed through our nan bread! Not quite the ambiance of the Place des Vosges but hey we managed to swallow it down without getting any sauce on our clothes or on the interior of the car which was a win as far as I’m concerned! For dessert Niki decided that she had a sudden yearning for a sundae from McDonalds so we drove to nearby Artane Castle (one of the 6 McDonalds back in operation as a drive-thru) and were laughed at by the voice taking our order as the sundae had been discontinued back in 2018! We take it as a badge of pride that we did not know this!! Oh well, a McFlurry will have to do then! We returned home about 90 minutes after we had left (there is only so much driving up and down Griffith Avenue you can do, but with the added bonus that St. Orla had put the kids to bed so we avoided the usual pandemonium associated with bedtime chez nous. For that alone our anniversary was regarded as a huge success and will be remembered fondly for years to come!

Well it’s been a while since my last blog in early 2020 and boy has the world changed in the meantime. The advent of Covid-19 has turned everything on its head, in particular, gone are the leisurely brunches with my 3 year old daughter Ella. Trips to the wonderful eateries and cafes in Glasnevin, Drumcondra and Phibsboro are a thing of the past replaced by, jigsaws, online quizzes and copious amounts of baked goods produced by my lovely wife. Now don’t get me wrong, the cakes, scones and sour dough bread are all delicious and I have consumed significant quantities, but perhaps the fact that I am now always surrounded by young children fighting for a place at the baking trough rather than enjoying it all served with a side of clotted cream has slightly tainted the overall experience!

So apart from sour dough struggles, what has life during lockdown been like at home with 4 children of 10 and under? Before I start listing off my perceived gripes I would have to acknowledge that as a family we have come from the envious position of one full-time stay-at-home parent (me) before this whole thing started. Crucially this meant that I was already well accustomed to the level of schoolwork that each of the boys were being assigned and most importantly had also familiarised myself with the diverse (and often exasperating) food requirements of the kids. These range from Aaron who is 10 and an average eater (in fairness to him, probably a better eater than I was at his age in that he tolerates healthy foodstuffs such as onions, tomatoes and garlic), Lochlan (8) and slightly picky but will probably make a good attempt at his meal if he can cover it with grated mozzarella, this does not just include typical Italian dishes where mozzarella would seem to be a natural accompaniment but also includes curries! Then we get onto the tricky ones, Oscar (7) who protests vehemently if anything which isn’t beige or white is placed in front of him and Ella (3) who is petite so doesn’t eat significant amounts of anything. Forewarned is forearmed, I can only imagine what it would be like if I was dealing with this afresh.

In general if there was one word I could use to describe life during lockdown it would be “manic”. There is always somebody requiring something to be done urgently, whether it be logging on to the latest app to find out what task / project / activity / experiment / “pain in the ass” learning opportunity has been allocated to one of my boys, or tidying up after another spillage of milk / juice /  or bringing Ella to the toilet – an activity that seems to have increased exponentially since her mother has started working from home. I think this is because she believes that by wearing me down by infinite trips to the loo I will eventually have to reach out to my better half and then Ella will get to spend more time with her mommy! A large part of the day is taken up helping the boys with their schoolwork and for this, access to online content is both a blessing and a curse. Each of my sons has access to multiple apps and / or websites for learning, these can be either general in nature such as for allocating and correcting homework or topic specific  typically English, Irish, Maths. Each of these has their own specific password with password retrieval now requiring a database system which would make the pentagon proud. Ever since I watched that tv programme about hacking, Mr Robot, I have become increasingly paranoid about passwords and their storage but there are only so many tattoos that a man can put on his body particular when I’m doing it myself!!

Once the passwords have been retrieved, there is generally a time period of quietness until it becomes time to correct and then upload the various pieces of schoolwork. I’m always in a quandary about how much correction I should do, I mean how many mistakes can you leave in your son’s work before it becomes damaging to your own sense of intelligence. It is at this time that I realise that I see my children as an extension of myself and therefore anything that gets sent out from our house is an indication of both my ability to teach and probably more importantly the quality of my DNA! Am I making this too much about me, should Aaron’s project include an extra slide on The Renaissance, should Lochlan’s creative writing provide a more detailed description of the African savanna, should Oscar re-record his reading 5 times so that he gets his intonation correct or the background noise isn’t quite up to standard? Most importantly by the time this is all done will all our devices have run out of battery or will the wi-fi be strong enough?

Amidst the mayhem I must admit that one of the benefits of the lockdown is that I have rediscovered my love for jigsaws (strictly in the 500 to 1000 pieces range before you start thinking I’m a 5000 piece lunatic). It is definitely a pastime that is ideally suited to lockdown life, requiring minimum space combined with the ability to occupy significant quantum of minutes if not hours. Not everything has gone smoothly though, originally I had high hopes that I would be able to pass on my affection for all things jigsaw-ish to my own children just as my mother had passed it on to me. Unfortunately as part of the “snowflake” generation they do not seem to share my ability to work through 100 pieces of blue sky over a Venetian canal in a methodical and forensic fashion! However when it comes to completing the last 10 or 20 pieces for the glory of placing the final piece then the boys descend like a pack of vultures or even worse they’ll sneak into the jigsaw room while I am otherwise occupied and finish the bloody thing off without me. I can’t believe that I have raised a bunch of traitors, time to put the parental lock on the PS4 again!