Bedtime is a special time for parents when we ease the little ones into the hands of the night gods. With quietness and routine we send them to the dark, lonely and yet magical world of sleep where they are on their own, save for the Bunny, Foxy, the Frog, Snuggles the Monkey, Polo, Finn the Rat and the other bears, and at the mercy of their dreams – bad dreams and good ones.
That’s not to say that sometimes a parent could do without reading three seemingly endless bedtime stories after a long day at work. And you dare not surreptitiously skip a word, a page or a chapter so you can creep down stairs a few minutes early.
That’s also not to say that there aren’t arguments when people are “too tired” to brush their teeth, or want to watch “just one more cartoon, please” before hitting the hay.
And that is also not to say that sometimes you would be fit for bed as soon as they’ve been put away for the night.
And all of this is also not to say that you wonder when they’re small if you will ever get an evening just to yourself again. Apparently, and I have this straight from the little horse’s mouth, the golden rule is: short story, long snuggle. Long story, long snuggle.
But the truth is, and you may not always realise it at the time, that the bedtime routine is precious time. It’s the review of the day, the look-forward to the following day, the stories and the random conversations and questions as little minds go misty and eventually switch off.
Around the time of the general election this year, my five-year-old would regularly quiz me up and down about what was happening in the country. "Dad, why are you always talking about Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael. Do you love it?" I was asked. "Well, why are you always talking about it?"
And then there’s the whole issue of religion in a still fairly religious world but in a pretty non-religious house. It has come up around bedtime a lot lately. I have been asked the following last thing at night “When you’re dead do you turn into an angel? Is God Jesus’s husband? Before I was born, did I live with the dinosaurs? Do pheasants eat strawberries?” I haven’t a clue about most of this stuff.
But that's enough about all that. Let's move on to the man who would have been 100 next week. I asked the older children about their memories of Roald Dahl the other day.
The eldest remembered illegal late-night book reading and recalled placing “decoy” books for his parents to find and confiscate when it was lights out time.
Once we had smugly left the room thinking we had defeated him in his efforts he might whip out his favourite book, maybe a Roald Dahl, and read away with his little torch until who knows when. Parents none the wiser (or so he thought). All of which speaks to the spirit of Dahl’s underdoggery and one-upmanship especially when it comes to the olds.
Another small person recalls The Twits. The smelly bearded, beer-swilling man and his ugly child-hating (except when making boy pie), wart-ridden wife are still stuck in his thoughts. What horrible people to be infused in the mind of one so young. But, of course, that’s the attraction of Dahl to little (and not so little) minds – his ability to avoid fairytale and cliché, his ability to engage with unexpected characters and language.
My own memory is of Danny the Champion of the World. It is one of a very small number of works of fiction I have read – the other notable ones being JD Sallinger’s Catcher in the Rye – given as I am to reading works of non-fiction, news and current affairs.
The extract that stands out for me is where Danny tells us how his father would invent stories to tell him every night even though Danny’s father “was not what you would call an educated man” and that he had probably not even read 20 books in his entire life. God only knows what Paddy Logue’s children think of him in that regard.
“He used to make up a bedtime story for me every single night and the best ones were turned into serials and went on for many nights running,” Danny says.
So we are back to bedtimes and bedtime stories. There comes a time, and it’s really sudden, when the little ones don’t want a grizzly old grunion invading their space too much at bedtime and maybe they want to plant a decoy book and be alone with their thoughts.
But the grizzly old grunions are always happy that their surrogate, Mr Dahl, is upstairs with the little ones sparking just a little bit of magic as they drift off to be with the sleep gods.