Bringing up boys: Hello. Are You Receiving Me? Over.

It has to be just boys doesn’t it? You know this selective hearing thing.

Holler: Tidy Up! And you get no response. Nada. Nothing. Not even a twitch when you yell directly in their ears.

Whisper: Shhh don’t tell the kids, here’s a chocolate and BOING!!!!They pop up under your feet like magic even if they happen to have been the other end of the garden.

I have tried to whisper tidy up just to check whether it’s the words or the hearing they have a problem with and I was told to stop kissing their ears. In fact I was swatted away like a fly so that experiment came to nothing.

I have been told especially by my Mum that my Dad had selective hearing. Personally I thought it was because he was deaf in one ear due to the fact that in the bad old days before elf und safety he was allowed to shoot rifles without ear defenders.

She just gave me a pitying look and shook her head. “Your father,” she said “had perfectly good hearing when he wanted.”

Obviously not at lunchtime then I recall but perhaps that had more to do with my Mum’s cooking than my father’s deafness (Mum ran the family kitchen as the “Like It or Lump It Café”).

Dad is a bit deaf now. And as he IS in his 70s (if only just) I suppose that is allowed. I fear though that he hasn’t always been very honest about the degree of his deafness. Certainly it has proved a useful ploy especially if there were any TV programmes we wanted to watch that clashed with his – all he had to do was turn up the volume so he could “hear” and it being SO loud we would vacate the room leaving him in splendid isolation to enjoy any programme he wished.

Perhaps I should take a leaf out of his book; he’s clearly onto something here. I, like him, am vastly outnumbered in my household and it won’t be long before I will be forced to watch all manner of “Boy” programmes when I would much rather be watching something else….

You don’t get to his age without learning a thing or two….