Being Grown Up (An Occasional Series)

With his parents having moved to Nairobi recently, I may have mentioned that I have been feeling the need to step up my godfatherly duties for my eleven year old godson who is at a very posh boarding school in Oxford. So this weekend, mrs househusbandnot and I organised to down to Oxford for the day on Sunday to hang out with my godson and to attend an open evening for parents - or parent substitutes - whose kids are being taught musical instruments at the school. (My godson is being taught electric guitar.)

Me having spent much of Friday manicking around London trying to buy suitably respectable clothes for this parents evening, mrs hhn and I headed off to stay at a bnb in a village outside Oxford on the Saturday evening, and have supper with some mrs hhn work contacts who live locally. This was one of the strangest evenings I have ever had, mostly - well entirely - because the couple we had supper with are BOTH life coaches, a dynamic which I just couldn't get my head around really, mostly because I spent the whole evening being asked open-ended questions by both of them, and not getting a single straight answer out of either of them. How long it gets them to both get round a supermarket I dread to think. ("Should we get some apples?" "Hmm, Apples? What do you think of apples?" "Apples? Look there are some over there. Do you really like apples?" "NLP has a p in it. So do apples? Do you like words with ps in them?" "Why do you mention that?" "I didn't you did. Go on?" etc etc etc etc.) At one point during supper, I got into such a lather about what I was supposed to be being and saying and trying to work out about myself that I had to go outside and bay at the half-eclipsed pink moon - which was kind of satisfying since it gave me a reminder of primordial life before life coaching was invented.

Anyway, thanks to me and some fantastically crap map reading, we arrived late to take my godson out the next day. He didn't seem to mind, and was happy wandering around Oxford for the day, which we did as the rain gradually turned our parent-evening-friendly smart clothes into sodden shadows of their former respectable selves. (mrs hhn also has hair that turns all Slash from Guns And Roses when it gets wet, which gave an added edge to the whole trying not to look too dishevelled/rained upon for the parents evening thing later.)

I think the day went okay. Over lunch, I tried asking my godson what he wanted me to ask his music teacher about his guitar playing. He wasn't that interested in making things that easy for me, but later did confess that he can play Hey Joe with his guitar behind his back, so I figured his guitar teacher was probably a pretty cool guy. By the time we needed to return him to school, we had filled my godson up with bagels and ice cream and bought him HMV vouchers and a new game for his PS2, so I think we got away with it.

Having dropped Jim Hendrix back at his school house, mrs hhn and I went to The Morse Bar at The Randolph Hotel to try and smooth out our wet clothes and wait - as I have often done in wonder - to see what effect the rain would take on mrs hhn's hair. Providentially, mrs hhn was spared an 80s perm attack, and we sat and drank tea in the bar, marvelling at a series of completely bewildered locals milling around like stoned sheep trying to work out how the hotel worked - where they should sit to have a drink or eat, where to put their coats, whether or not to talk ot the attentive hotel staff etc. I think it must be an Oxford intellectuals thing, and all the people who came into the bar had spent the afternoon in deep conversation about Greek poetry, and then thought it would be fun to try and interact with the real world again. I have never seen such gentle inability to deal with that real world and its related accessories like arm chairs and menus and waiters and doors and gravity. mrs hhn and I and the three Russian mobsters in the bar enjoyed this evolving balletic display of incompetence for an hour, before she and I headed back to the school and the music evening. (I considered inviting the Russians, but got a look from mrs hhn.)

Early, we sat in the car outside the music schools, with me eating crisps and trying to figure out how to be grown up, having just forced mrs hhn to have a game of which animal's tail would you have if you had a choice. While we were waiting, I was accosted by some nutter - who turned out to be a teacher at the school - who told me his life story in four seconds [this happens to me a lot btw] about a recent six months he had had on a camper van in Italy. Deciding that he had been checking up on us to see if we had a legitimate reason for loitering around the school grounds in a car at 5.30 in the evening, we steeled ourselves and went into the parents evening.

Much confusion at the registration desk where a small man who looked like Captain Manwaring from Dad's Army barked at me in some sort of welcome, and mrs hhn staring at me to calm me down. (We'd had a long conversation earlier about me not being allowed to be frightened of teachers anymore.) And we were pointed to the room where 20 or so music teachers were huddled behind desks, nervously awaiting parents.

There are many of mrs hhn's skills and qualities I take for granted, not least of all her capacity to stop me from bolting for the nearest exit any time I am expected to be normal. While I was desperately trying to avoid eye contact with any teachers in case it showed on my face that I got a D at Maths O level and own a Stone Roses album, mrs hhns dragged me over to where my godson's guitar teacher was waiting and sat us down and had a normal conversation with him about...well normal stuff like how my godson is getting on and if he is turning up for lessons and if he needed a new guitar etc. (At one point, I think I made a rather feeble remark about Suede or something.) I guess we were there for 15 minutes. We got away with it too, thanks to mrs hhn (who has already sent a two page email report on the meeting back to my godson's parents in Nairobi).

It may be an occasional series, but I do try and thank God regularly that mrs hhn is there to make me appear vaguely grown up to the outside world. And with that thanks in mind, I am prepared to go on socialising with life coaches - as long as there is a moon I can howl at occasionally.