#4 Gina Ford, She Who Made This Site Possible

As a bright, angry young thing, you may build up an impressive athenaeum of improving, highbrow texts. Later, as a parent, you might as well stuff them into cardboard boxes and ferry them off to your good friend Sue Ryder.

Nietzsche could well have been on to something with that radical perspectivism thing, but if there’s nothing in Der Antichrist telling you how to make your (or is it Rosemary’s?) baby sleep like an, erm, baby (yeah, I know) seven through seven, it aint worth a hill of rubbish antihistamine chill pills.

This is where Gina Ford comes in. Before I go any further, I should explain that I’m a big fan of Gina. In fact, the missus and I have become mild Gina evangelists. I wanted to get that in early should any of Gina’s lawyers be reading who are, by all accounts, no slouches.

The top and bottom of Gina’s philosophy is “get baby into a routine from day one”. Many, like us, pick up her book and implement her strategies a couple of months later: from day one of feeling like doing a bus-stop belly flop.

Her routine for the suckling evokes a day in the life of a Foreign Legioneer. Exact timings for when you should put your “drowsy” baby down for a nap (if I’ve followed the steps to the letter, how come my baby is not so much “drowsy” as “Chucky on amphetamines”?) make a lot of detractors point to a lack of freedom. But the alternative is winging it, never being able to predict when she’ll (a “she” in my case) kick off next. Trust me, that’s no freedom when you’re out and about. Or in bed. Parents of near-newborns will never have much freedom, but a modicum of control is the closest we’ll get.

Gina polarises people. Those who don’t get on with her output express very robust opinions. Somebody told me that her sister told her (sound familiar?) that Ford’s work is the biggest contributory factor to post-natal depression.

I can’t imagine anyone who really (and I mean, really) gives Gina a fair crack of the whip not ending up with a more contented baby and a more contented soul. And there is room for manouevre despite preconceptions to the contrary. Some take it wholesale, others use it as a framework and adapt, but a few take out their frustration with accusations of child cruelty. Jibes about her not having any of her own are pointless and mean. I feel sorry for mumsnet. A couple of bad apples...

Ford’s tone has been described as patronising. But if you can get past that, the reward is often a harmoniously sleeping household. And that can't be bad.

Talking of patronising, when I filled in the form for Gina’s site (I was later put off by the less-than-paltry forty quid fee) it said, helpfully:

Surname (Like Ford) :
First name (Like Gina) :

Cheers, Gina.

Mind you, mumsnet asked me if I was pregnant.

#3 Alan Ball, and Alan Ball

God wants his Ball back.

That was a headline in the Sun today. Appropriately, it’s a deft touch, but it falls down on two counts for me: 1) I’m an atheist, and 2) I’m a Evertonian. So if God ever existed, He was Alan Ball. Dixie Dean was Everton’s first legend. But Alan Ball was Everton’s first God.

This is the third time God has wanted his Ball back in the last quarter-century. Around the turn of millenium, Bally’s wife and daughter were both diagnosed with cancer: his daughter won the battle ; his wife lost. His dad, Alan Ball, Sr., died tragically in a smash in Cyprus in 1982. The culpable cabbie got a one-year ban, and Mrs Ball, Sr. was awarded a whopping twenty-five grand compo. Alan Ball Jr. sold his World-Cup winner’s medal in 2005 for the family. Yesterday, he suffered a heart attack whilst reportedly fighting a rekindled bonfire in his garden. If there is a God, he’s been a real tw*t to the Ball family.

Bally’s dad, the other Alan Ball, is less famous than his mercurial son, but he had a critical part to play in football. He didn’t exactly set the world aflame as an inside-forward (a position that has gone the same way as orange footballs on snowy pitches) in stints for Bolton, Southport, Brum City, Oldham and Rochdale “The Dale” AFC. Nor were his managerial years at Halifax and Preston the stuff of folklore. But he did an amazing thing. He got his son a job.

Three cheers for nepotism. When clubs wouldn’t give Bally a proper bite of the cherry on the grounds that he was too small and too ginger to play professional football, dad called in a favour at Blackpool. In that struggling, unfashionable line-up, he was noticed by Sir Alf Ramsay and adorned with a cap. And the rest is, as the Germans say, Geschichte.

I remember watching a documentary about Alan Ball (Junior), and the fondness with which he spoke about his ol’ fella. He related the tale of when Everton wanted to flog him to Arsenal (sniff) ; how gutted he was, having been so happy as one third of the Holy Trinity with Howard Kendall and Colin Harvey. He sought his dad’s advice because, he asserted, his dad always gave great advice. And not just the advice most people’s dads are good at – tips on stud walls and repointing.

“Son,” came his father’s words down the blower, “when you’re not wanted, you must go.”

He was right, Bally. His dad did give great advice.

And as the tributes fly in like Bally’s low cross for Hurst’s discredited 1966 World-Cup Final goal, let’s hope one shows restraint when it comes to using words like “enthusiastic”, “industrious” and “engine”. They don’t do the man credit. His skills were an inspiration to every midfielder that followed in the dainty steps of his white boots. A wonderful family man, and an icon for narky, helium-voiced short arses everywhere.

#2 Cho Seung-hui, The Old-School Oldboy

It was an odd decision by murderous fruitcake Cho Seung-hui, shipping his multi-media PR package to NBC. And not only because it feels a bit old hat in this cyber age. Nor do I highlight the financial folly of paying fourteen dollars for a courier (Money’s not a hot issue for a crazy ready to turn a gun on himself). What I mean is, he was taking a risk.

Let’s say, for the sake of argument, NBC hadn’t turned out to be such a bunch of vain, insensitive scoop-whores getting a semi-on because he chose them (“Gee!”) – say they had taken a couple of weeks or even months to call this, rather than the “full day” which NBC advertises like we’re supposed to coo at their syrupy compassion (it takes me a full day to choose a new electric kettle from the Argos catalogue). America might have been buzz...sorry, weeping about the next big middle-American studocide by then.

The question that slaps us in the face, like a chubby, gold-trimmed fist of a jock striking the cheek of a socially inadequate oriental for talking funny, is this: why didn’t he upload to the net? This would have left the very real, disturbing possibility of a global audience, chortling away at this loon’s manifesto on YouTube as he went about his homicidal business. That would have bumped up his infamy rating a bit, something he clearly cared deeply about.

Anyway, shame on NBC for spraying all that steaming manure about insights into the mind of a killer blah blah bloody blah. The police had already dismissed the video nasty as being “as much use as a glass cricket bat”. (Okay, that’s not a real quote.) The film, along with the cringeworthy cinematic poses and the mind-numbing text, was designed with one purpose only: publicity. NBC couldn’t resist giving it the old oxygen.

Mind you, neither could many other news networks. Responding to Paxman’s judgemental sneering on Newsnight, NBC’s big cheese quite reasonably pointed out that extensive footage had been shown on that very show prior to the interview.

“You put it out there,” was Paxman’s retort, sounding rather like a toddler insisting to mum that he started it.

And because I am no different, here – purely because it’s in the public interest – is a chunk from Cho’s rant.

“You had a hundred billion chances and ways to have avoided today. But you decided to spill my blood. You forced me into a corner and gave me only one option. The decision was yours. Now you have blood on your hands that will never wash off.”

So there you go, students of Virginia Tech. That’s cleared that one up. Apparently, it was all your fault. You made him do it. Obviously it’s a tough time right now, what with so many innocent friends losing their lives, but I’m sure you can take some peace away now you profoundly understand the notoriety-hungry mentalist that took them.

God bless America.

And God bless NBC.

#1 Samantha Seager

You probably don’t know who Samantha Seager is, do you.

Get a grip.

No, don’t google her. I’ll tell you in a bit. But first I’ll explain the premise of the Nap Time Five Hundred. In the two hours of my daughter’s midday nap, I am devoting half an hour to the jobs my wife left (“clean kitchen floor” ; “iron tea towels” ; “endorse direct bilateral negotiations between Israel and Palestine”) and the remaining ninety minutes to spewing exactly five hundred words of my brain on to Microsoft Word.

Anyway, Samantha Seager. She’s just surfaced on Britain’s Favourite Soap as Jodie Morton, daughter of the bloke who used to be Sinbad in Brookside.

I was chuffed to see Samantha on Corrie, for I, the wife, and the bairn know her best for her jaunty portrayal of Bobbie in CBeebies offering Me Too. I always thought Samantha was by far the most talented of that ensemble cast, and it surprises me not in the least she’s hit the big time.

Me Too, for the uninitiated, is the less famous urban sister of Balamory. The setting is downtown Riverseafingal and its aim is supposedly to reassure infants that their parents think about them when they’re at work – a message that went over this thirty-two year old’s head, so how many four-year-olds got this, I wouldn’t like to say.

Samantha’s Bobbie is a contemporary working-class hero. She’s a chavvy northern single mum many Daily-Mail readers would expect to be hibernating on benefits. But no, she pays for (what looks like pricey) daycare out of the miserly sum she draws in scrubbing buses at the crack of dawn. How much net can she be in pocket for bothering to work? A tenner?

Yet somehow, Bobbie resists the temptation to play the martyr or wallow in self pity. Her lust for life and work is heart-roasting. She makes me proud to be of proletariat stock. When she sings On My Way To Work – which extols the virtues of being en route a pied to a hard day’s yacker – she means it so much more than the other mediocre luvvies making up the numbers. The cartwheel Bobbie throws as she approaches the depot raises the neck hair. It’s so unexpected. And, slickly, she falls back into her consonant strut, perma-grin still beaming at the camera. Sigh.

I’m delighted for Bobbie to be a role model for my daughter. These days, a job which involves dorkily prancing around and constipatedly gurning in risible clothes is seen as “high status”, whereas getting your hands dirty for an essential, punishing day’s graft is sniffed at. I’d sooner my daughter turn out more Bobbie than Kate Moss.

More power to your gymnastic arms, Samantha. And I suppose it’s goodbye to Bobbie. Surely we won’t see her again if Samantha becomes part of the furniture in Weatherfield. Accordingly, in anticipation, I mourn.
So, farewell Bobbie. As the buses of Riverseafingal will gleam a little less, so will the days of many stay-at-home parents.