Would you like to play global thermonuclear war?

"No! NAUGHTY trees!"

This is the sound of the preamble before my daughter goes Fukushima. In this particular example she was throwing a tantrum because the wind was blowing the trees. Its fortunate that she's a reasonable child..

Nothing makes you feel more impotent as a parent that a proper, full on, industrial grade paddy. And the Girl has set a particularly high standard. Remember that advert where the child throws a tantrum in the supermarket and his mum lays down and throws a tantrum too? Seems like a good idea, and it is, if you like to be dragged out of the freezer section by a humourless security guard. Naturally, I speak from experience. So, I'm here to give you some advice;

Nothing works.

I've already mentioned in the first blog the "Southwold Incident." Neither the wife of myself have any clue what started the tantrum, other than the Girl sitting down in the high street and refusing to move. Then screaming. Then biting the Wife's ankles (still not funny, apparently). I was on the other side of Southwold, with the Boy and his ice cream which he insisted on displaying to passers-by. They smiled sweetly at him. It was all going so well until the Wife phoned and called me back. The next time those same passers-by saw me, I was carrying a weighty ball of auburn fury, wild eyed, kicking and scratching and screaming like a cat being strimmed. And the street stopped to watch us. Four pensioners on a bench, leaning on their walking sticks, scrutinised our faces. I suspect it was so that when we appeared in the local newspaper ("Couple arrested for child murder") they could gloat at the bridge club "I bloody knew it. They looked the type."

Of course we looked the type, I was on the verge of murder. But short of picking her up, wedging her into the car seat and playing the stereo very loud, there was nothing else to do.

In Lyme Regis I ran half a mile up a very steep hill to get her dummy from the car. On returning I found the Wife, surrounded by staring eyes, with a face like Freddy Kruger's wet dream. Around her were parents clutching their crying children, or wives clutching their crying husbands -such was the horror they had seen. The Girl was asleep and (having rolled on the sand shortly after being covered in factor 50) looked a bit like a doughnut.  When we got her back to the camp site she woke up, and because she loves us, she threw another tantrum. We left her to it, and she rolled a hundred yards across the camp site before she came out the other side and asked for a banana. Which we didn't have.

She did a similar thing in the Lake District. I had thought it was impossible to ruin a trip to the pencil museum. I saw the world's biggest pencil. It was a good day in my life. Then she head butted me in the genitals. In fact, the only time she went quiet was when we drove over the mountains and the Boy insisted on pointing out "if we go off the road we'll fall off the mountain and die." Sadly we couldn't enjoy the peace because we were screaming.

The good news is that she's not as bad as she used to be. I mean, she's only thrown one tantrum in her sleep. That's pretty much impossible to deal with. And now she can talk, and more importantly understand, she tends to argue with us. And that's a vast improvement.