One of the greatest things about being a dad should be seeing your child experience things for the first time. First time at the seaside, the cinema, the pantomime, the betting shop and so on. Their little faces should light up with wonder and gratitude that you’ve shown them a whole new world of sand, celluloid, ugly sisters and accumulators.
It should be like this, but it isn’t. Ever. Children, like people meeting for the first time, form almost instant, carved-in-stone opinions. Usually bad. At the seaside my little girl got sand on her toes in the first minute. She now views Croyde Bay as we’d view Guantanamo Bay.
The cinema and panto first times can be lumped together – the fools who write these things cling to the concept that if something loud, interesting or confrontational happens near the beginning, we’ll all want to stay and find out what happens next. OK, that’s been a mainstay of storytelling since the birth of language, but Annabel reacted by simply spending the next hour or two with her hands over her ears, wishing the interesting thing hadn’t happened and asking in a too loud voice (she’s got her hands over her ears, remember) why it did.
I’m now toying with the idea of never letting her experience anything new at all. But after so many new experiences, just denying her any new experiences would itself be a new experience, so it’s a non-starter. And speaking of non-starters, don't worry, she doesn’t really go to betting shops. After all, they’re places you enter full of excitement and hope, only for it all to be dashed, leaving you to walk out poorer and in tears, saying you’ll never return.
On second thoughts, she’d fit right in.