That's not funny

My son's first academic essay met with mixed success, he tells me as we're headed to Glasgow University Library to find the books he needs to help him write his second.

"I passed," he says. "But the tutor didn't like my 'regrettable attempts at humour'. That's worrying. I didn't know there were any. Must have sneaked in when I wasn't looking."

"Humour does that," I say. "I used to get 'You are childish and unfunny' from my English teacher at school. And my former wife, come to think of it. Usually followed by 'Put your clothes on.'"

"Your teacher?" 

"My wife. Now I get told my writing is 'useless drivel'. I once got a rejection letter from some snot-nosed punk straight out of journalism school, who told me he aimed to discourage 'tired jokes and hoary old clichés'.

"The column of a colleague, which I always enjoyed, was dismissed by one reader as 'worthless and uninteresting small talk'."

"Pompous people are scared of humour," he tells me, stepping unhindered through the turnstile and continuing talking as he fades in the distance, while the metal bar catches me in the fleshy parts, setting off a siren and causing armed guards to erupt from the door behind the desk.

"On the ground!" the first one barks out the side of his mouth, flexing a bicep like the dome of St Paul's. "Show your ID!"

"Oh bugger," I think to myself. I was supposed to get a new staff card ages ago, so the electronics in mine must still be using valves instead of transistors. Also the photo of my face has faded so it's just a dim, grey, shapeless blob.

"Good likeness," the guard says, studying the card. "You may enter."

"What was that about?" my son says, when I catch up with him in the short loan section.

"Dodgy admin again," I say. "I need a secretary."

"Me too," he says. "What books are you looking for?"

"Got an article to write on the science of pain," I tell him. "Actually not just the science. They've had me talking to scientists, engineers and philosophers around the Uni, all researching aspects of pain."

"I like philosophers," he says. "The Art School is big on Michel Foucault. One of his critics called him 'an intellectually dishonest, empirically unreliable, crypto-normativist seducer of Postmodernism.' So I guess you and I got off lightly."

"I studied philosophy for a while," I tell him. "We had this lecturer who'd go 'What do we mean by pain?' Then he'd stop and scratch his big, bushy beard. Then he'd go 'What do we mean by mean.'"

"See that's the trouble with philosophy," my son says. "You can easily disappear up your own Aristotle."

"Regrettable attempt. What's the brief for your essay?"

"'Discuss with examples how maps reflect power over space, materials and people," he says, glancing at his notes and grimacing. "What is that about?"

"I wonder if we could combine our research and find maps of pain," I say.

"Like those sensory homunculi you get in science centres," he says. "You ever notice their hands and lips are huge, but other parts that seem sensitive aren't shown that way. Is that censorship or is it true?"

"These are deep waters, Watson," I tell him. "You'd need to ask Rachel. She's set up science centres around the world. So how are you going to keep humour out of this essay, when you come to write it, especially if you don't know you're doing it?" 

"I've been reading this article on how to stop yourself laughing at inappropriate times," he says. "It's packed with great suggestions. So when I start writing I plan to bite my lip and sit with my feet in a basin of icy water. That'll keep me serious." 

"I doubt it," I say. "What do you get from sitting on the ice too long, taking photographs?"

 "Polaroids," he says. "What's an ig?"

"A snow-house without a loo," I tell him, shaking my head. "Regrettable. Deeply regrettable."

It's all about ambience

"I never thought I'd hear you say that," I tell my son as we're catching up in his white room, before heading off to lunch. "Run it past me again."

"It's an idea that comes from a French, Marxist, neo-Dada art group," he says, listening to his own words then grinning. "Yeah, I see what you mean. That stuff's starting to trip off my tongue, isn't it?"

"Didn't mean to make you self-conscious," I say. "You got to learn the jargon. Just took me by surprise. Seems only yesterday you were babbling baby talk and pulling Weetabix out your hair. All of a sudden you're Brian Sewell."

"I like him," he says. "Sounds posh but he's a good laugh."

"So what's it about?" I say.

"Psychogeography," he says.

"I had a psycho geography teacher," my sister says. 

"Mad bastard, was he?" says my son, always happy to stroll down conversational side roads. "What did he do?"

"Nothing useful," she says. "Spent all his time talking to the domestic science teachers. So I learned by heart everything he taught us but failed the exam."

"You look like it's still annoying you," he says. 

"It is," she says and seethes quietly for a while.

"So what's it all about?" I ask. "This psychogeography."

"The sudden change of ambience in a street," my son says. "The path of least resistance you take in aimless strolls." 

He scratches his nose. "Kinda how the different parts of a city impose a flow on you, as you wander aimlessly around it." 

"Sounds a bit vague," I say. 

"It's totally vague," he says. "Guy Debord was one of the French Marxists that started it and he got pissed a lot. So maybe it's just drunken rambling. But it's been picked up by more interesting guys, like Will Self and Alan Moore - who wrote Watchmen and V for Vendetta."

"I'm still not getting what you have to do," I say.

"Site, place and content around the Queen's Cross area of Glasgow," he says. "Psychogeography. It's our first art project of the new term. So we've been wandering around, absorbing the ambience like nobody's business."

"We did that sometimes with the kids," my sis says. "We'd take them out and look at the lights and statues and buildings. We called them street furniture."

"Funnily enough we found a couple of old sofas, when we started psycho wandering," he says. "Carried them back to the studio. I fell asleep on one and they painted a moustache on me." 

"Is it sofa, couch or settee?" sis says. "I got laughed at the other day for calling it a settee. That was old-fashioned, they said, and I should call it a couch."

"See that just gets on my tits," my son says. "You can call things anything you want. I'm going to call this project "Ambience: sofa so good." 

"Is there a point to it all?" I say.

"You know better than that," he says. "Is there a point to particle physics? Is there a point to people? Alan Moore says magic is art and art is magic, and both come down to "the science of manipulating symbols, words or images to achieve changes in consciousness."

"Do you think we should magic ourselves off to lunch?" my sister says.  

"I do," he says. "I'm going to absorb all the ambience I can get from two fried eggs and a tattie scone."

Always an artist

Welcome to the January 2014 Carnival of Natural Parenting: The More Things Stay the Same
This post was written for inclusion in the monthly Carnival of Natural Parenting hosted by Hobo Mama and Code Name: Mama. This month our participants have talked about the continuity and constancy in their lives. Please read to the end to find a list of links to the other carnival participants.
***

Louise Bourgeois is best known for her spiders, particularly the monstrous but strangely comforting Maman, whose bronze, high-stepping legs I walked under several years ago, in the turbine hall at Tate Modern. 

But it's not her spiders that have been inspiring my son. "I was at an exhibition of her work in Edinburgh," he tells my sister and me, in the sculpture department at Glasgow School of Art. "She had some spirally drawings I liked. So I came back and did all these," he says, strewing sketches all over the table and the floor. 

"I was listening to Moby Dick when I did this," he says, picking one out with a pointing finger.

"Doesn't look like a whale to me," I say, and he glances at me with some scorn.

"It's not supposed to," he says. "You're not getting this. It's all part of my artistic process."

"What do I know about artistic process?" I say. "I drew a robin once and my teacher said it looked like a dead wasp. I never tried to express myself in art class again, resorting instead to sullen non-cooperation."

"I did that in every subject in school," my son says, looking stressed for a moment.

"The point is you're not trying to make something good right away," he says. "You're exploring the material. You throw these off fast, then lay them out and go, 'I like the way that's working' or 'I love how this curls around here'. Then you turn it into a sculpture."

"Is that one connected with this?" my sis says, holding up two similar-looking sketches.  

"They're all connected," he tells her. "Everything's connected."

"Why does everybody sounds like a hippy these days," I say. "Do you always start with painting and drawing then?"

"It varies," he says. "I started splitting planks of wood with a knife recently and a week later I was still at it. It's amazing how much you can learn about a material by doing the same thing to it, over and over.

"Eventually the sense of that substance gets into your brain. So you don't just see an image when you think of it. You also get its touch and texture. You feel the flow of the grain and the force it exerts on your fingers."

My sister smiles across at me as my son talks fluently and articulately about aspects of art we know nothing about. As he leads the way from the workshop, half an hour later, she and I lag a little behind. 

"That was great," she says quietly. "He's so enthusiastic and interesting. You know who'd have loved that if she was still alive?"

"Yes I do," I say. 

"She was always talking about what he was like as a wee lad. So happy and outgoing, she'd say. So creative, artistic and full of fun." 

"Then he went to school and struggled badly," I say. "It took us ages to get him diagnosed as dyslexic. By that time the damage had been done. He was a bad boy, the teachers said, surly and uncooperative. The constant criticism squelched his personality for years."

"But he is back, isn't he?" my sister says. "Twenty years later. Mum would have been glowing. Her grandson is an artist now."

My son hears the last part and calls up to us from a dozen steps below, "I'm an art student not an artist yet," he says.

"You are an artist," my sister says. "You always have been."


***
Visit Hobo Mama and Code Name: Mama to find out how you can participate in the next Carnival of Natural Parenting!
Please take time to read the submissions by the other carnival participants:

• Always an Artist — Some kids take longer than others to come into themselves, so you have to stick with them, as a parent, long after everyone else has given up, writes Douglas at Friendly Encounters.
• Not Losing Yourself as a First Time Mom — Katie at All Natural Katie continues to stay true to herself after becoming a new mom.
• Using Continuity to Help Change {Carnival of Natural Parenting} — Meegs from A New Day talks about how she is using continuity in certain areas of her life to help promote change and growth in others.
• Staying the Same : Security — Life changes all the time with growing children but Mother Goutte realised that there are other ways to 'stay the same' and feel secure, maybe a bit too much so!
• Harmony is What I'm After — Tribal Mama gushes about how constant change is really staying the same and staying the same brings powerful change.
• A Primal Need For Order and Predictability – And How I Let That Go — Jennifer at Hybrid Rasta Mama shares how she overcame her primal need for order and predictability once her awareness shifted, opening her eyes to the impact this had on her young daughter. Take a short journey with Jennifer and she bares her soul, exposes her weaknesses and celebrates her new outlook and approach to living life, even in the face of total chaos.
• Breastfeeding Before and After — Breastfeeding has come and gone, but Issa Waters at LoveLiveGrow finds that her relationship with her son is still just the same and just as good.
• A Real Job — Back in high school That Mama Gretchen had a simple, but worthwhile career aspiration and today she is living her dream … is it what you think?
• Comforting — sustainablemum never thought she would want things always being the same, but she explains why it is exactly what her family wants and needs.
• 'The Other Mums' and The Great Illusion — Marija Smits reflects on the 'great big magic show of life' and wonders if it will continue to remain a constant in our lives.
• Unschooling: Learning doesn't change when a child turns four — Charlotte at Winegums & Watermelons talks about the pressure of home education when everyone else's children are starting school.
• Finding Priorities in Changing Environments — Moving from Maine to a rural Alaskan island for her husband's military service, Amy at Me, Mothering, and Making it All Work found that keeping consistent with her priorities in changing environments can take some work, but is vital to continuous health and happiness.
• Keeping it "Normal" — Kellie at Our Mindful Life has moved several times in the last two years, while doing her best to keep things stable for her kids.
• The Evolution Of Our Homeschool Journey — Angela at Earth Mama's World reflects on her homeschooling journey. Homeschooling is a constant in the life of her family but the way in which they learn has been an evolution.
• Sneaking in Snuggles: Using Nurturing Touch with Older Children — When Dionna at Code Name: Mama's son was a toddler and preschooler, he was the most loving, affectionate kiddo ever. But during the course of his 5th year, he drastically reduced how often he showed affection. Dionna shares how she is mindfully nurturing moments of affection with her son.
• Steady State — Zoie at TouchstoneZ writes a letter to her partner about his constancy through the rough sailing of parenting.
• A Love You Can Depend On — Over at True Confessions of a Real Mommy, Jennifer has a sweet little poem reminding us where unconditional love really lies, so it can remain a constant for us and our children.
• Same S#!*, Different Day — Struggling against the medical current can certainly get exhausting, especially as the hunt for answers drags on like it has for Jorje of Momma Jorje.
• New Year, Still Me — Mommy Bee at Little Green Giraffe writes about how a year of change helped her rediscover something inside herself that had been the same all along.
• One Little Word for 2014 — Christy at Eco Journey In The Burbs has decided to focus on making things this year, which is what she is loves, as long as she doesn't kill herself in the process.
• The Beauty of Using Montessori Principles of Freedom and Consistency — Deb Chitwood at Living Montessori Now shares the continuity of her teaching, parenting, and grandparenting philosophy using a combination of freedom and consistency.
• My Husband's Mini — Crunchy Con Mom shares which of her sons looks more like her husband's baby pictures — and the answer might surprise you!
• Growth Happens When You Aren't Looking — Lori at TEACH through Love is treasuring these fleeting moments of her daughter's early adolescence by embracing the NOW.
• A New Reality Now - Poem — As Luschka from Diary of a First Child struggles to come to terms with the loss of her mother, she shares a simple poem, at a loss for more words to say.
• Making a family bedroom — Lauren at Hobo Mama has decided to be intentional about her family's default cosleeping arrangements and find a way to keep everyone comfortable.
• New Year, Same Constants — Ana at Panda & Ananaso takes a look at some of the things that will stay the same this year as a myriad of other changes come.
• I Support You: Breastfeeding and Society — Despite how many strides we've taken to promote "breast is best," Amy at Natural Parents Network talks about how far we still have to go to normalize breastfeeding in our society.

Who needs normal anyway?

Photo by Dug Blane

My son has always sung from a different hymn sheet. He was special in the modern sense of the word that in less enlightened times would have been labelled backward or delinquent. 

He was none of those. He was dyslexic and he was thrawn, which is one of those old Scots words that has no exact translation into English. Stubborn, obstinate, determined to do things his own way. All that and more. A battle of wills between a mum and a one-year-old should end in mum's will prevailing, the child-rearing manuals tell us. Aye right. 

From an early age he was always breaking things. If he didn't break them he bent them out of shape. We gave him a Rubik's cube once and within an hour it was a bunch of brightly coloured bits, aesthetically arranged on the kitchen floor. A trike became a dismantled wheel and pedal mobile, suspended from the ceiling.  

His mum said he was a vandal but I figured him for a young engineer, taking things apart to see how they worked. The same idea occurred to him, so he studied car mechanics at college for a while. He was good at it but it wasn't really him. 

"I see being an artist hasn't made you less annoying," I tell him in the St Louis café bar at the far end of Dumbarton Road, as he shoogles our table and keeps on shoogling it, long after anyone else would have folded a menu and shoved it under the short leg.

"Just the opposite, as it goes," he says. "Thing is I've been hearing that from people all my life: "'What's that you're doing?' 'Stop it now!' 'Don't be so bloody annoying.'"

"Did you ever consider not being so bloody annoying?" I say. 

"I did, but it's like that writer's mum who said, 'Why be happy when you could be normal?'"

"That's a coincidence," I say. "I was talking about that with Carol the other day. Are you telling me you tried to be normal?"

"I wouldn't go that far," he says. "But if everyone tells you to stop doing stuff for years and years and years it has an effect. You do that stuff less. Which was all wrong for me."

He angles his head back so he can see under the table, then tries shoogling it from side to side, instead of back and forth. "Is it going to take years and years for you to stop doing that?" I say, as my coffee sloshes over and spreads across the surface.

"Sorry," he says. "The thing is, this is part of my artistic process."

Photo by Dug Blane

"That's becoming your answer to everything," I say. "'I'm sorry I burned down Westminster, your honour, with all the MPs inside it. It was part of my artistic process.'"

"Cracking idea," he says. "But listen. I'm only just getting this myselif. I've discovered there's different stages to fiddling with things - which I've done all my life without knowing why.

"First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then you annoy them, then they try to make you stop."

"Then you win?" I say. 

"Then you get art," he says. "Not always but often enough to make it worth sticking at it. That's what I've discovered. It validates all that fiddling I used to do, without knowing why I was doing it."

"Now that is really annoying, " I say. 

"What is?" he says. 

"As a dad who wants his son to succeed, I can't tell you to stop shoogling the table now, can I?"

"You can't," he says, giving it an extra shove that tips my cappuccino into my lap. 

"Performance art?" he says, looking pleased with himself.

"Behavioural science?" I say, smacking him gently round the head.

Postscript

"They're your nail-varnished hands in the photo, aren't they?"

"They are."

"I don't want to sound stupid but what were you holding the camera with?"

"My other hand. I took two shots then photoshopped them together. If you look carefully you can see the join. A bit like the back of your ..... "

"Don't push your luck, son."

Tales of love and chocolate

"She's taking you the wrong way again," my niece says, as we're headed to the garden centre for a coffee, a chat and a chocolate cake, and my satnav starts telling me to turn right.

"My grandma used to say the longest way round is the shortest way home," she adds.

"Grans always have daft sayings that sound profound," I say. "Mine used to tell me not to sit with my back to the fire because it would melt the marrow in my bones." 

She chuckles. Cathy has an infectious laugh and lovely eyes that sometimes look sad when she thinks you're not looking. I've enjoyed making her laugh since I first met her, a fortnight old.

We saw less of each other than I'd have liked, as she was growing up, because my own kids were young and she lived a long way away. She still does, so we catch up when we can.

"I miss my grandma," she says, and I give her hand a squeeze and we drive in silence for a while.

"When I worked at Rolls-Royce there was this guy called Colin who'd come out with total gibberish," I say. "Then he'd blame it on his gran. So he'd go 'A nod's as good as a wink to a ripe banana - as my old granny used to say'."

"My grandma used to say, 'Don't put dogs in windows,' Cathy says and goes quiet. "I have no idea what that means."  

"The chocolate cake is nice here then?" I say, as we turn into the car park at Woodlands Nursery. 

"You'll love it," she says. "They make it with chocolate. Then they mix in chocolate and put chocolate on top."

Sure enough a powerful chocolate theme is evident in the cakes and cookies displayed in the nether regions of the sprawling garden centre, where their little cafe is located. 

Inside the glass display case, walnut fudge, black forest gateaux and chocolate layer cake occupy pride of place, like battleships defending the Dardanelles, while the lower shelves are densely packed with éclairs, brownies, macchiato muffins, millionaire shortbread and thick chunks of rocky road. 

I order a slab of cake the size of a door wedge, while Cathy goes for ice-cream and one of the lighter sponges, decorated with hazelnuts and summer berries.

"I'm not going to get out of here alive," I tell her. "If we sit too long I suspect they'll coat us with chocolate and sell us to somebody."

"What kind of chocolate would you be?" she asks.

"Hazelnut cluster," I say. "Sweet and wholesome-looking, but hard inside. What about you?"

"Cherry liqueur," she says, chuckling again. "Rich, satisfying and slightly piquant."

"It's nice to see you, kid," I say and this time she gives my hand a squeeze. 

"You should visit more often," she says.

"If I knew there was this much chocolate here I would," I say. "I've got a problem though. The cake on my plate is scrumptious. But all those still on the shelves are catching my eye and making me wish I'd picked one of them."

"You'll never be content if you keep looking over the fence and coveting your neighbour's house, or his wife or his ox or his ass," she says.

"That's very true," I say, giving the waiter a little nod. 

"My grandma used to say the grass is always greener on the other side of the fence," she says. 

"Mine used to say there's no sense risking a cholesterol deficiency," I say, and order a large portion of walnut fudge, two hunks of rocky road and a chocolate-topped cappuccino to go.

Dance me to the end of love

Another Saturday Night

So we're at the Jack Vettriano exhibition in Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Sis keeps asking my son what he thinks of the glossy images of men and women in dark, dramatic poses. And he keeps trying to sidestep the question.

"They're very evocative," she says. "Like scenes from the Hollywood films on TV when we were young. What do you think, Doug?"

"I can see why people like them," he says and I glance at him, wondering why the evasion.

The Singing Butler

Vettriano is a self-taught artist from Fife, who found overnight success when almost 40, by displaying his paintings for the first time and discovering they sold faster than ice-lollies in the Sahara.

Prints of The Singing Butler now net him a quarter of a million a year and the original - one of a hundred the Kelvingrove borrowed to create the first major exhibition of his work - went for three quarters of a million in 2004. He is Scotland's most successful artist ever.  

And the art critics hate him.

Soho Nights

"He can’t paint; he just colours in," said Sandy Moffat. Duncan Macmillan called his work "dim erotica". Jonathan Jones said his paintings were "brainless".

The criticism hurt the working-class guy and sent him south to live in London. But there has been a backlash. "People don’t like being told their taste is crap," reported The Scotsman. 

So craven critics, once happy to badmouth Jack in print, now ask not to be named. And prominent people are starting to get behind him. There is an emotional content to his paintings, says writer A.L. Kennedy. "There's a sexuality that's really sexy."

 Le Déjeuner sur l'Herbe 

Complaints that he objectifies women come mainly from men, she says. "It's not a subordinate thing. It's not naked women under a tree surrounded by men in suits, who are ignoring them while eating - which is just rude. They should at least chat to them or offer them a sandwich."

So an hour after entering the crowded exhibition we emerge into the dim October day, and cross the road to the little cafe where my son and I had chatted about the Tao.

Love Story

"Tell us what you really thought," Sis says and he looks uncomfortable.

"And why you wouldn't tell us inside," I say.

"I wanted to like them," he says, still hesitant. "I really did."

"But you couldn't?" she says.

"Not much. But with all those people around trying to enjoy his paintings, I'm not going to go, 'I'm an artschool student and Vettriano's crap'. Nobody needs to hear that." 

The Arrangement

"Why didn't you like him," Sis says.

"His technique isn't wonderful and the content is kinda repetitive," he says. "Maybe people read meaning into them that isn't there. Seems to me to be all on the surface. Anything deeper is in the mind of the viewer."

"Did none of the paintings work for you?" Sis asks, and he tugs on the lobe of his left ear. 

"The self-portrait was interesting," he says. "There was real feeling in that one."

The Weight

"Ah ha," I say. "I think I know why. In Vettriano's mind he is the only person in the world who possesses depth, substance and genuine emotion. Everyone else has a role, like buyer, critic, model or sex object. But they don't have an interior life. He does. What do you think?"

"Well let's see," he says scratching his chin and smiling. "Good with words, no talent, talks bollocks. I think you should be an art critic."

Octopussy

"Stick some of these under your arm, will you?" my son says, indicating a pile of bendy grey cylinders in the corner of his kitchen, each about ten feet long and made of polystyrene.

So I grab an armful and so does he and we wachle them downstairs and try to pack them into my car. It's like wrestling an octopus.

"You've done that, have you?" he says, as we stuff them in and they bounce right back out again.

"In my youth as a deep-sea diver," I say.

"Tentacles would be great for an artist," he says. "You can use them as arms or legs. I could paint a picture while having a coffee and a sandwich and hanging from the ceiling, looking cool. "

"The male octopus even has a tentacle that's a detachable penis," I tell him, as we finally get them penned up in the back and take our seats in front. "It's called a hectocotylus. Octopus sex consists of him pulling it off and presenting it to her"

"That's drastic," he says. "Does she like it?"

"She loves it. 'What a beautiful gift for a girl,' she goes. 'Was it expensive?'"

"And he goes, 'Cost me an arm and a leg.'" he says. "Have you been saving that up all your life, waiting for an octopus conversation?"

"Pretty much," I say. "You don't get many. Where is it you want me to take yours?"

"Macintosh Building," he says. "It's going to be the branches of an artistic tree for this group project I was telling you about."

"What's the topic?"

"St Enoch."

"Ah, the ancient Celtic princess," I say. "Sounds like a guy but she's not."

"Isn't she?"

"St Enoch was St Teneu," I tell him. "Raped then condemned to be thrown off Traprain Law for getting pregnant. Survived and was taken in by the abbot Serf, who cared for her and her son Kentigern, later called Mungo. He founded Glasgow."

"You know lots of useless shit, don't you?" he says.

"I do."

"Is there a tree in the story?" he says.

"There is. A hazel tree that Mungo prayed over to make its branches burst into flames, so he could relight a holy fire. The tree's now part of Glasgow's coat of arms."

"Great!" he says. "I've been telling the guys we should set ours on fire for artistic reasons."

"What artistic reasons?"

"Go right here to avoid the one-way system," he says. "It's this 'What is art?' question again. I reckon things not being what they are is part of it. Like I did a cast of the coffee cup in my bag during a workshop and got lots of coffee cups made of plaster.

"I thought they can't be art - they're coffee cups. But then I filled one with hot coffee, set it up overnight and took a series of photos. First wee beads of coffee came through, then they puddled out and the cup went all brown. So now it is art because it's no longer a coffee cup."

"That's the opposite of what we were saying earlier about architecture, beauty and function," I say, pulling into a parking space on Hill Street.

"There's a lot of art like that, though," he says. "Take away the function from something and it becomes art. Like Yoko Ono did a nice piece with a nail and a glass hammer."

"She's not an artist," I say. "She's just the chick that broke up the Beatles."

"You're wrong," he says. "Her stuff's got a light touch I really like. Then there's Tom Friedman who did a piece that's just a blank sheet of paper he stared at for a thousand hours."

"That's not art," I say. "That's bollocks."

"No, I get that stuff," he says. "It's like an idea taken to an extreme. It's the essence of something. It's hard to explain but it makes sense to me."

We get out and I give him a hand to shove St Mungo's tree under his oxters. "I'm starting to see art everywhere I look," he says. 

"I see it in buildings and discarded objects. I see it in people's faces and down deserted alleys in the dark." 

"That must be good." I say.

"It is," he says, balancing himself so he doesn't goose people with his bendy tentacles, then heading down the hill. "I even see art when I look at you," he says over his shoulder.

"Leonardo's Mona Lisa?"

"Tracy Emin's unmade bed."

Artification

My son is wrestling with the same questions as Grayson Perry in the Reith Lectures. The difference is he's not doing it in a dress, and I must admit I'm grateful for that.

There is a time and place for being a transvestite and one in the afternoon at Sweeney's café, Maryhill Road is neither.

"I'm not sure what Art is," he tells me, as we study the menu. 

That was Art with a capital A, wasn't it?" I say.

"It was," he says. "Take this group project I'm working on. I'm building the props for it because I'm good at woodworking. It's great fun but it's got me wondering. Where does woodwork end and art begin?

"I'm also looking at fractals and making little machines that generate patterns. But how do I know that's art and not physics or engineering? You see what I'm saying?"

We pause to take delivery of a fried egg roll for me and a macaroni cheese and chips for him, which gives me time to dredge up Marcel Duchamp's "Art is whatever an artist says is art."

"But that doesn't get me very far," he replies. "I've been asking artists around the College. They all have a different story. One claims science looks for answers while art generates questions. Another says an artist spends his time trying to understand things.

"That was Dean Hughes. He's an art lecturer who's been bought by Saatchi, so he's a recognised artist. When you look at it, his process is sound, his methods are valid and there is an integrity to his approach."

He pokes his pasta with a puzzled fork. "But the stuff he's producing is ... kinda crap," he says.

"That must be confusing," I say.

"It is," he says. "Normally confusion is good. But I would like some straight answers to this. I want it nailed down in my head so I'm not just pissing about with stuff."

"You're not," I say. "You've been an artist since you were born. Remember the time you made a model spaceship out of two dog biscuits and a postcard from Paris? Or that ice sculpture of a polar bear that gradually morphed into Marilyn Monroe's face? You even built little Mongolian yurts from rusks when you were barely out of nappies."

"I don't remember any of that," he says. "But you're right - being at Art School is helping me validate a lot of the stuff I've always done. But I still don't know what makes it art." 

"I'll try another thought," I say. "Frank Lloyd Wright. 'Art is a discovery and development of elementary principles of nature into beautiful forms suitable for human use.'"

"That's fine if you're an architect," he says. "But he's saying it's about beauty and function. Plenty of modern art has neither. Grayson Perry was talking about this. He said beauty is 'a constructed thing built on shifting layers'. 

"And another thing," he says, whacking his macaroni with his fork for emphasis, in much the same way as I'd hit the guiro. "A lot of exhibition people are elitist, arty and wanky. I don't like that."

"So you aren't enjoying the course?" I say.

"I'm loving it," he says. "I just have to get this straight in my head now, because I can see a danger in the future."

"What's that?" I say.

"I go to Art School, have a great time, get my degree and emerge into the real world in four years time as an artified, wankified, unemployed joiner."

Barely controlled chaos

Having successfully completed the portfolio preparation course, and been offered a coveted undergraduate place at Glasgow School of Art, my dyslexic son, whose reward for 12 years of schooling was three Standard Grades, a swimming certificate and a bad attitude to adults, has been asked to deliver a presentation to the new intake of fresh-faced, aspiring artists.

It's a massive leap beyond anything he's ever done. But he seems cool with it. "I know what I'm going to say," he tells me, in the kitchen of his Garnethill flat, as he rustles us up some pasta and quick-fried sprouting seeds.

"In the morning you make a list of things to get done during the day. You mostly ignore it. But it's there to stop you floating off and writing wee poems on banana skins."

"What kind of idiot would do that?" I say, having a fair idea of the answer.

"I was completely lost one day," he says. "Hadn't a clue what to do next. So when I'd written on the bananas I got yellow tape and stuck it all over my face. Then I went home."

He looks out the window at the steep banking, overgrown with grass, that passes for a garden in these parts. "I've had better days," he says.

"Worse too, I'd imagine," I say.

"Oh yeah," he says. "It's ups and downs as an artist. You have to like the rollercoaster."

Grabbing the frying pan, he decants a heap of still-sizzling seeds onto my small pile of penne pasta. "This is a great way to get good food fast," he says. "Bit of olive oil, dash of soy sauce, salt and pepper, fry for a few minutes. Fantastic."

"So what else are you going to tell the new intake?" I ask. "You want my help, by the way? I've been doing presentations forever."

"Nah, I've got it covered," he says. "If you're doing art, I'm going to tell them, you get lost all the time. How you deal with it is the thing.

"Some students in our class kept asking what they should do next. But that's not what the tutors are there for. Their job is to create an atmosphere of barely controlled chaos. And give you paint."

As I masticate his mung beans and pasta, and savour the surprisingly satisfying mélange of curly, crunchy, soft and squishy, I ponder this core message he's planning to convey. I'm not sure "barely controlled chaos" will go down well with the Art School staff.

But my experience is engineering, so I know about people, politics, deadlines and delivering. I know nothing about the art world. He does. Or seems to now. 

"Will they be happy with you saying that?" I ask.

"Yeah," he says. "They told me I'd got it, when I was doing the course. They said I was one of the key students, a benchmark."

He tosses this off casually. But to someone who got plenty of pain at school and very little pleasure, that has to feel good.

As I listen to him speak with some authority, I realise it also feels good to a dad who attended untold meetings of teachers, psychologists and school management, none of whom had a good word to say about the lad for 12 long years.

"Nice that, intit?" he says, nodding to my emptying plate.

"Lovely," I say. "Must try making it myself. So you were a benchmark?"

"Yeah," he says. "The tutors would quite often say, 'Take a look at what Dougie is doing'. Or rather 'Duggie', because they're English and can't say 'Dougie'."

"Did that annoy you?" I ask.

"Nah," he says. "I answer to anything - Doug, Doog, Duggie, Dougie, Dingly, Dongly. It creates confusion. I like confusion."

"Me too," I say. "A benchmark? Well, well. That sounds great. Is it something to do with you being a long, flat piece of wood?"

He laughs. "That'll be it," he says, picking up my empty plate and dumping it in the sink.

"Just call me 'Duggie the plank.'"

Satyagraha

See all that stuff about a problem shared being a problem halved? Not in my experience, it isn't. More like a problem shared is a good laugh for your mates.

"So you don't have mice now but you do have slugs?" Rachel says, over a pizza in Gambrino's.

"Maybe just one," I say. "Found it on the kitchen floor a coupla times when I came down in the night for a glass of water. I think it lives under the sink. Leopard slug. Quite pretty when you look close."

"If it's only one that's not so bad," she says. "But if you've an infestation you should get rid of them. Your visitors won't think they're pretty."

"I know how to tell if there's more than one," my son says, lifting a floppy wedge of pizza and lowering it into his mouth."

I give him a moment to chew then ask him how. "Write a name on its shell one night," he says. "Like 'Bob'."

"Slugs don't have shells," I say. "You're thinking of snails."

"Use post-it notes then," he says. "Point is if it says 'Alice' the next night, you've more than one slug. Then you can start to worry."

"I'd be more worried about the psycho who lives under your sink and writes "Alice" on slugs," Rachel says. "I take it you're not going to kill them?"

"I am not," I say. "Why would I?"

"Some people think they're disgusting," she says. 

"I think some people are disgusting," I say.

"What are you going to do with them?" my son says.

"Same as I did with the mice and the fruit flies," I say. "Satyagraha."

"Passive resistance?" Rachel says. "Sounds wimpy and pathetic."

"That's not satyagraha," says my son, ever the expert on Eastern philosophy.

"No?" Rachel says.

"No," he says. "Passive resistance is a weapon of the weak, Gandhi said. It could be violent and didn't always stick with truth. Satyagraha is only for the strong. It insists on truth and never uses violence. Big difference."

"What did Gandhi say about slugs in your kitchen?" Rachel asks him. But his mouth is full of chilli-topped pizza, so he gestures at me and they both wait for my words of wisdom.

"Not much, obviously," I say. "But we're talking principles here. If you understand those you can apply satyagraha to anything. It's about truth, firmness and non-violence."

"So you're going to take the slugs outside, like you did with the mice?" my son says. "And as soon as you turn round they'll be back in the house again."

"And I'll put them out again," I say. "And again. In the end I'll win, because I understand the principles of satyagraha. So I'm strong. I'm persistent."

"Remind me how long it took to get the mice to stay outside," he says.

"Five years," I say. "But in the end they got the message."

The two of them nibble their thin pizzas thoughtfully and sip their coffees, and I begin to think I might have convinced them. "There's a fatal flaw in your plan," Rachel finally says, and my stomach sinks. 

"I was afraid there might be," I say.

"It works only if the slugs don't understand satyagraha too," she says. "If they do they'll be as persistent as you are. It'll be a standoff. You'll never get rid of them."

My son is nodding. "She's right," he says. "Which means it's more important than ever to check their name-tags. If one of your slugs is called Mahatma, you're screwed."