This Is Guernsey

By Shaun Shackleton

Illustration by Sheena.

BOTH my girls – Princess C and Little Red – look completely different but both of them look just like their mother.

Neither has the faintest trace of me. Which, seeing as they’re lasses, is a very good thing.

Just as no one ever thinks they have an ugly cat, I think that both my daughters are beautiful (I wonder if Mrs Kellett, mother of the late, great wrestler Les, believed her son to be anything less than handsome?)

Somewhere in there there’s a hidden compliment to my wife, but I’d hate for her to think that I was after something, because I’m not.

I just want to know why my two lasses don’t look like me.

There was always that joke in the 60s and 70s, no doubt perpetuated by Benny Hill, Robin Askwith and his Confessions films, On the Buses and more than likely the Carry Ons, that if your kids didn’t look like you, they looked like your milkman.

I wouldn’t know because I’ve never seen our milkman.

He arrives silently in the wee hours of Monday, Wednesday and Friday mornings, drops off two packs of blue milk and then soundlessly goes on his way.

He’s a ninja milkman.

I can imagine him wearing an all-black outfit, a hood with just his eyes showing and a stripy milkman’s apron.

He’ll also have a stealth milk float, painted black for camouflage purposes and it must hum just under the range of human hearing.

His urge to whistle aimlessly must have been stifled early on in basic training and cartons rather than bottles must make his job a damn sight easier.

But back to kids looking like their parents – or my kids not looking like me.

My wife obviously has the stronger genes. And that is a blessing, really.

The picture at the top of this page and Sheena’s finely crafted artwork do not in any way lay the groundwork for the sheer half mirth/half horror of encountering me in the flesh.

Remember the poster for The Exorcist?

It just featured a bloke stood next to some railings looking up at a lit window. But when you saw the film you had to leave the cinema and immediately go to buy some new trousers.

That’s what that photo and Sheena’s cartoon are doing. Masking the brutal reality.

I have a strangely huge head.

A vast forehead that ants would get lonely looking at, bulbous nose, eyes like an English bull terrier with conjunctivitis and you see between these two hyphens – these words here? – that is the actual size of my mouth.

Inside it is a miniature Foulon.

My excuse for a body is like a Spacehopper playing hide and seek beneath a xylophone while my legs resemble two ladles dangling out of the back of a chuck wagon.

I have hairs where I should have smooth skin and bumpy skin where I should have hairs (don’t ask), wrists like a Thai bride and big toes the shape of clawhammers.

If this were 1808, I’m sure I’d be touring the seamier British and Eastern European towns and cities as part of a carnival sideshow.

‘Roll up, roll up, gather round all gentlefolk to see the dormant horror that is Shackleton, the human second-hand settee suite!’

I wouldn’t even wish that upon sons, let alone daughters.

So thank God they look like their lovely mother. (Now there’s a definite undisguised compliment. But I still don’t want anything.)

My wife has strong Irish looks in her family. Her mother, from Cork, is dark with noble features and her father is fair, freckled and redheaded.

Ever since I was 11 and fell in love with Ann-Margret in Viva Las Vegas during some summer holiday Saturday morning

Elvis season, I’ve loved redheads. So I married one.

It must be their fire and their passionate nature – it’s certainly true of my wife (honestly, I’m not after anything).

I’ve been called many things in my life. Nicknames have included Shack, Shacky, Shackers, Shacks, Shackattack (after the 80s soft-funk ensemble) and the very strange, almost science fiction, Shackalacka.

I’ve been accused of or complimented on resembling Rodney from Only Fools and Horses (when I was young), Neil from The Young Ones (when I had long hair), Jeff Bridges, Mickey Rourke (when I had a quiff) and more recently, Ray Winstone.

The one I try to forget happened when I lived in London. I walked into my local, The Bedford Arms, and a drunken Asian lass laughed and said: ‘Ha, ha, it’s Russ Abbot.’

‘It’s Gita from EastEnders,’ I threw back.

She wasn’t happy and accused me of being a racist, which I’ve never been. She accused me of resembling a gangly white man, which I did, and I accused her of resembling a small Asian woman, which she did.

(Actually, I think I hit a nerve – her reaction suggested the resemblance had been mentioned more than once.)

I’m happy with all the other lookalikes, despite the fact that Ray Winstone is about five foot two and a tubster. Then again, maybe I’m shrinking and filling out.

But who you look like is a funny thing.

I once had a mate called Steve who had tremendous pulling power despite dressing like Worzel Gummidge’s younger brother.

‘Yeah,’ said his girlfriend at the time. ‘But it takes him ages in the morning to look that dishevelled.’

I look at my two lasses and I wonder how they’re going to turn out. Kathy Burke or Keira Knightley? Scarlett Johanson or Pat Butcher?

Princess C is the tallest in her class (and one of the youngest) and is at that age when her teeth are dropping out (I couldn’t find a quid when the first one did so the fairies ended up giving her a fiver – which was damn generous of them) and her face is starting to change.

Little Red’s losing her toddler chubbiness and is stretching out, too. In fact, she may even be taller than C at her age.

So whatever happens, at least they’ll have a career in the world of basketball (or fashion modelling – at £10,000 a day, they can live at home for as long as they want).

I’m a believer in the old adage, ‘so long as they’re happy’.

And I hope they will be. And as they are as confident, witty, intelligent and as stunning as their mother, there’s no reason why they shouldn’t be.

(All right, all right. I am after something. Any chance of me getting a new guitar, love?)