Habits

My Mum tells me that before he had kids, my father was an easy-going man. He was, by her accounts, laid back and even-tempered. Apparently, it was shortly after I learned to walk and talk that he became the inpatient dad we all came to know and love. Subsequently, we, his children, found several ways that we could inadvertently work together to encourage his distemper. The one that seemed to work above all else in promoting a fiery response, that I am sure many parents can relate to, occurred during any moderate to long journey. We, as a unit, would wait until he had loaded the car, placed all of us in our seats and headed off in our destination’s direction, before demanding the toilet.

On occasions, having allowed just one of our three into cajoling my father to stop for a comfort break, we would refuse any offer to go ourselves. Only to request our own stop some minutes after leaving the service station, or whatever toilet providing facilities we had used. I will acknowledge that this was not peculiar to our household. At the time, one only had to gaze at the exposed behinds of children urinating merrily into the verges of any part of the extensive UK road network, to understand that this was a common problem.

Father Diot, recognising this, developed a sensible system to prevention, through enforced toilet visits preceding every journey we made or every stop on it. With bags packed and car loaded, he would make the call ‘final wees’ and insist that none of us could board the vehicle until we had expelled every drop of fluid from our bladders. Any exit from a service station or restaurant was treated in exactly the same way.

Some of you reading this will see this as a sensible approach. And perhaps it was, in the short-term. But the long-term impact of the final wees protocol must now be acknowledged. As such behaviour has become ingrained within us all. Even though we are adults, it seems impossible for my siblings or I to leave the house, or get into a car, without first visiting the toilet. Irrespective of how much we have drunk, or the time since our last visit, the sounds of an engine revving, or the sight of someone lifting a suitcase into a boot, will turn all of our thoughts to urination.

This has led to a slightly irritating routine. Especially if we are all together as a family, as it can encourage a lengthy queue for the facilities. To those currently screaming at the page, questioning why we don’t just stop doing it. I will remind you of the largely accepted adage that old habits are hard to break. Ask any long-term smoker, nail biter, or constant phone checker why they can’t stop themselves and you may receive a curt reply. Once the foundations for a habit have been established, they can be hard to dismantle. Partly because they are so ingrained as to almost seem central to who we are, but also as we often barely notice them, so aligned have we become with them.

This is never truer than when it comes to our food. You may find that many of your eating and cooking behaviours are fixed. They are established, accepted and often unintentional. So unintentional that it may take someone else to point out that they are there. Normally at the result of our irritation.

Such food habits can include how we eat, what we eat, with whom and when. But they can also stretch to include how we buy, keep and dispose of our food. For example, I am sure there are some people out there who eat their gammon without cauliflower cheese. Perhaps even whole families who don’t put ketchup on their cottage pie. Similarly, there may be houses that don't open a pack of biscuits every time they make a cup of tea or reach for a bag of popcorn every time a film starts. Perhaps there are people out there who leave enough time for breakfast, such that it can be enjoyed at leisure rather than hurriedly shovelling it into their mouths, whilst exiting the house partly dressed, after having a final wee. There may also be those who don’t visit their local supermarket late on a Sunday afternoon and fill their trollies with everything that has a marked down, or price cut, label. But none of them will be found in the immediate ancestry of the Diots.

Our particular combination of food practices and customs may be unique to us, but the fact that we have them is not. After all, we all have habits. And If you think you don’t, it is more likely that you just haven’t noticed them. Fear not though. Having such patterns and routines is not necessarily a bad thing. Habits are central to how we live our lives. We all have them and in many instances, they help us manoeuvre the trials and tribulations of our day to day existence.

Some habits, however, are not so helpful. As they support and establish actions and behaviours that may not be in our best interest. Although it would be good to discard those that are a hindrance and keep only those that prove an aid, this may be an overly simplistic aim. After all, the distinction of good and evil habits, may not reflect our ability to discard them. The reality is that the longer a habit has been in place, the harder it can be to dislodge. For those who love an analogy, the deeper their roots, the more challenging it is to dig them up. For long held and well-established habits, it is far easier to change them gradually and gently, than it is to remove them completely. So maybe it is time that you took to pruning and shaping those habits which are creeping onto the more cultivated parts of your life. The sooner you start doing this, the lesser the chance you’ll find yourself stranded on the hard shoulder, peeing into the grass.