Rod Liddle - Selfish, whining monkeys: how we ended up greedy, narcissistic and unhappy

Home is so sad. It stays as it was left,

Shaped to the comfort of the last to go

As if to win them back.

Philip Larkin

I got an aeroplane for Christmas when I was six years old. Not a real one, but a heavy tinplate thing with chunky red flashing plastic lights on the wings and some sort of noise box which made a sound like one of those heaving 1950s vacuum cleaners, a piercing shriek like it was undergoing a hysterectomy without anaesthetic. Id seen it in, I think, the toy department of Selfridges in Oxford Street on the annual trip to town where I got to visit Santas grotto and choose my present for the year. I can remember right now standing by the counter piled up with all these unimagined and beguiling toys and seeing the aeroplane up on top, lights flashing, screaming away a big BOAC passenger liner and being utterly, if momentarily, captivated by it.

Why would you want a plane? my mum asked with a sort of perplexed distaste as we stood there. None of us had ever been on one, nor were likely to. Aside from the unimaginable cost and the fear of flying, my family didnt really hold with abroad on account of it being too hot and full of wogs. My dad had been abroad only once, briefly, to shell bits of Belgium during those interminable, drawn-out final stages of the Second World War. I still have a replica of the MTB he served on, carved with rough approximation to detail out of the brass casing of a German shell which had hit his boat but mercifully, for my dad and by extension me not detonated. They shelled Belgium after it had been liberated, according to my dad, because they simply couldnt abide the Belgians, devious and bitter people and, if were being honest, far, far, worse than the Krauts. So in early 1945 Dads MTB anchored in some Belgian port, I forget which, and took potshots at the church tower from the stern cannon, and when they went onshore they pissed in the streets because thats what the Belgians were habituated to, apparently. Awful people, almost as bad as the French.

Many years later, when I went on a work trip to Antwerp, I kept my eyes trained upwards in case they started throwing buckets of piss out of the windows, as my dad gravely assured me they would. No proper sanitation in Belgium, you see an echo, in my dads mind, of John Betjemans bitter little list of stuff which made Britain distinct:

Free speech, free passes, class distinction,

Democracy and proper drains.

My mum had never been abroad, not even to kill people. A little later, in the early 1970s, she said she quite fancied visiting Egypt because they were at war with Israel and she didnt much like Jews. But she never went.

So, anyway, after this short cross-examination in Selfridges I got my plane, pulled off the wrapping paper on Christmas Day and ran around the house with the thing with its lights on and the engine making that fucking demented noise, swooping down every so often to attack our amiable half-breed dog Skipper who, after a few moments of this torment, bit me deeply on the arm and then cowered behind the settee, tail wrapped underneath his arse and backbone curved almost in a semi-circle, because he knew he was in the shit, with me howling holding up my arm for all to see. And yet as it turned out Skipper was exonerated, my mother correctly assuming that the dog had been provoked beyond all reasonable limits and I had got what I deserved. So I stood there crying at the injustice of it all while Skipper out of contrition or hunger, who knows? licked away at the blood still pouring from the gash on my arm, the edges of the wound slightly blueish where his dumb and blunt half-Labrador teeth had merely bruised, rather than cut. But the licking was OK, because dogs tongues were antiseptic, according to my mum. Better than Germolene, a dogs tongue. You dont need a bandage, she had said. I dont know why, but Ill always remember that purple-blue colour around the wound. It seemed exotic and in some way more severe, more of a grown-up wound, than if it had just been blood.

The plane lasted maybe three days before the huge clunking batteries gave out and my interest in swooping around with it carefully avoiding the dog now gave out too. And I had a sense, by about tea-time on 28 December 1966, when the family at last scuttled itself gratefully back from the sitting room which would next be used twelve months hence; hell, you could still smell the pine needles in June to the warm cluttered chaos of the parlour, that it had been a wasted opportunity, this growling, flashing plane. One trip to London every year we lived twelve or thirteen miles away in Bexleyheath, and my dad worked in town during the week, but aside from Christmas we never, ever, went in ourselves and one big present every year, and Id chosen this thing that just made a noise and flashed its lights. I wasnt sure what I should have chosen, but the plane definitely wasnt it. The plane was, I thought to myself silently, shite.

Its very shiteness, of course, is why it sticks in the memory, a forlorn disappointment and also a warning. It nags away at me now when I buy presents for my own kids and they express the mildest interest in something which I know will hold their attention only briefly and will consequently be, for them, a source of long regret. Toys which are flashy, superficial and demand nothing from their owners, like those rides at Alton Towers or Thorpe Park in which you queue for hours to be strapped down and flung somewhere for twenty seconds, maybe through water if youre lucky, and you end up wondering what the fuck it was all about, all that waiting, with the furious wasps buzzing around a thousand hideous onesies smeared with ketchup and the dried-out sugar from soft drinks and the whining, the incessant whining, about how long we have to wait for stuff.

But actually I shouldnt worry because there are three cupboards upstairs full of discarded toys with corroded batteries, and three more full of toys which are still, intermittently, used. The occasional duff present is of absolutely no consequence to my children. The problem these days is wondering what the hell I can buy the little bastards that they havent already got, wandering confused and desperate through Hamleys and Comet and Dixons, while they themselves are disconcertingly blas about presents: nothing you can give them excites them, no matter how much you spend. At Christmas and on birthdays I check with the mother of my two boys were divorced and shes as much at a loss as me. What can we buy them that will induce that immensely gratifying gaze of awe and delight, that look you want to see on their little faces on Christmas morning? A Ferrari, maybe, or their own country. Buy them Chad, or Belgium. Would that raise a smile, get them excited for a moment? But on Christmas morning what they really want is a lie-in, just to sleep ever onwards. And its not their fault, any of this. They dont clamour for gifts; quite the reverse. They dont clamour like I used to clamour, back when presents were exceptional and therefore it really mattered what you were given.

The plane banks sharply to the left, too sharply for my liking. My plastic beaker of warm chemical urinous white wine and half-empty packet of bowel-racking nicotine-replacement gum slides across the plastic tray table and I see the cheerful gay cabin steward with his impeccably neat number-one cut frown suddenly halfway down the aisle as he temporarily loses grip of his big trolley of scratchcards and duty-free chavgifts and booze and the whole thing careers onto the shoulder of some placidly dozing woman to whom he copiously and noisily apologises. You watch their faces, the cabin crew, and when they look worried, when they look startled, you worry too.