About A Boy: Year One

June 5th, 2010 by

1275768105 69 About A Boy: Year One
Blog 45: Saturday, June 20 2009

EVEN the most devoted parent can occasionally be found offering a plaintive plea for their old life back. Well this week I got mine – temporarily – and it turned out to be a mixed blessing, to say the least.

Last Sunday, Rachel and George departed for a few days’ visiting family in Kent and Sussex. G had an absolute blast, especially hanging out with his big cousin Joe (a worldly wise year and five months), who quickly became his new best friend (they even held hands in the double buggy – aaaaw).

Not that I was there to witness it: I was home alone with the curtains drawn, guiltily watching illicit videos (more on that later) and trying to remember: What did I actually do in my old life?

Because freedom of choice is a bit like Amanda Holden – attractive in theory, but liable to leave you feeling a bit sick (I believe Kierkegaard made a similar point, though possibly not in those exact words).

For example, I keep telling myself it’s only my hectic schedule that keeps me from achieving my true potential, like finishing that Great English Novel I’ve been working on since around the time Laurence Sterne came up with the idea for Tristram Shandy, or making progress with that screenplay, which Microsoft Word mockingly informs me was “last modified on May 21st, 2007″.

So here I was, with three free evenings to get cracking. And what did I do? I did what any dad with three days to himself would do: Got takeaways in and watched telly.

Trouble is, I’ve got so many DVDs piled up on my “to watch” list, I didn’t even know where to start on that. So I just sort of moped about in a fug of indecision, before giving in to the inevitable, and watching Doctor Who.

Actually, that doesn’t even begin to touch the sides of my geekery – what I in fact watched was a DVD extra documentary about the effects of hyper-inflation during the Callaghan government on the budget of Doctor Who’s 16th and 17th seasons. Yes, people actually make this stuff, and people like me actually watch it. (In the depths of my isolation-induced depravity, I even found myself watching an episode of Torchwood; I bet even Jacqui Smith’s husband wouldn’t have dared put that on his exes claim.)

And that’s when it struck me: If I didn’t have George and Rachel, this is what I’d become, and in 40 years’ time I would die alone and be found months later, wearing only a stripy scarf, being nibbled by a mangy dog, probably called K-9.

Then, in the deafening silence of my own mortality, I accidentally nudged G’s toy box, and from its depth came a muffled but joyous chorus of: “Flap your ears, swing your trunk, come along with me, I love my little elephant, we’re happy as can be.”

And I knew everything was going to be okay.

Blog 44: Saturday, June 13, 2009

GEORGE and I are friends again. I think last week’s naming and shaming must have done the trick, because now he’s been back to his old self: grinning, giggling, affectionate, easy going and – yes! – sleeping right through the night until 7am.

In fact, he seems to finds everything funny at the moment. Which is gratifying when you’re trying to make him laugh with, say, an early morning Riverdance impression (harder than it looks – I have a new found respect for Michael Flatley, and that’s not something I ever thought I’d hear myself say), less so when his hysteria is directed towards my repeated attempts to swat a fly, or parallel park.

Hopefully it’s a sign that his teeth are bothering him less at the moment, but I think the real key to his mood is the change in the weather. Because, like Garbage, G is happiest when it rains. Or at least when it’s cold and grey – the recent hot spell really did seem to make him grizzly and restless and unable to sleep. Maybe he’s going to grow up to be a Goth? He’s certainly got the eyelashes for it. And he was born to the sound of The Cure, after all.

Meanwhile, he’s been making progress in all sorts of areas. He’s currently obsessed with his newfound ability to stand up – ironic, as I’ve reached the age where nothing pleases me more than a nice sit down.

He doesn’t care where he stands, as long as he’s standing somewhere – at the bookcase, at the telly, at the sofa, in the bath, in his cot. (The latter is particularly disturbing when you creep into his room, thinking he’s fast asleep, only to find him standing straight up in the darkness, staring out at you like a young Hannibal Lecter.)

He’s also big on pointing at the moment. In fact, he points pretty much all the time, though there doesn’t seem to be much logic to it. Ask him where Daddy is and he’ll just as likely point at the toaster as me. At least it’s not the postman, I suppose. (Incidentally, according to old-fashioned etiquette, I ought to be telling him that it’s rude to point, but I’ve never really bought that one. You might as well say it’s rude to wear socks.)

Most exciting of all, though, G can now say his first word. If “uh-oh” counts as a word. He sort of uses it in the right context – normally when something’s fallen onto the floor. But as he’s usually the one who threw it there – for a laugh, basically – I’m not sure there isn’t an element of faking going on.

And I don’t know what it says about our parenting skills that the first thing he’s picked up is an expression of something going wrong, but at least it shows we’ve managed to modify our language since G was born. Because, a year ago, if I’d accidentally emptied a jar of powdered milk all over the kitchen floor at 3 o’clock in the morning, I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t have responded with “uh-oh”.

Blog 43: Sunday, June 7, 2009

YOU know those stories you read about babies being swapped at birth? I think ours been swapped at 11 months.

I won’t sugar-coat it: It’s been a trying few weeks. The combination of teething, the hot weather, a stomach bug and a growing awareness of the value of getting his own way has seen George turn from the relaxed, giggly, happy-go-lucky chappie we’ve all grown to know and love into a grizzly, stubborn and increasingly voluble little screamer.

To make matters worse, he’s started waking up ridiculously early – as early as 4am, though sometimes allowing us the luxury of a 5.30 lie-in – so we can all enjoy his bad moods for even longer. Getting out of bed on the wrong side is one thing – screaming your head off so your parents have to come and do it for you is just sadistic.

And once he’s up, he’s still so tired he doesn’t know what to do with himself. Sometimes I can’t even plonk him down on the floor – he just straightens his legs and arches his back and wails. So I carry him around for a bit, look out of the window and contemplate how my life reached the stage where I’m praying it’s bin day, just to give us something to watch.

And to cap it all, G has made it quite clear that he doesn’t really want me around at the moment. Of course, you can’t take it personally – every child goes through stages where only mummy will do – but it’s difficult not to feel a bit put out when you walk in the door and go to give your wife and child a kiss, only for him to push you away because you’re invading his personal space.

Sometimes, I only have to look at him for him to start crying – which is a bit rich, frankly, when he’s the one who’s got me out of bed at such a ridiculously early hour.

I mean, we all need a bit of positive feedback now and again, don’t we? Has George never heard of the praise sandwich? I’m not asking for much – a smile, a hug: some small token that says my efforts and sacrifices are appreciated. I’m sure even Superman’s patience would be tested if every time he swooped in to rescue Lois Lane from a burning skyscraper she just looked really disappointed. And then threw a soggy rusk at him.

Not that I’m suggesting parenthood’s heroic. But it is hard work. We haven’t had a full night’s sleep in a year, we’ve only had two evenings out in that whole time, and I’m starting to look at Susan Boyle’s sex life with something approaching envy.

What makes it all this worthwhile are those little moments when George flashes me his cheeky grin, clambers up for a hug or laughs at my dumb-ass efforts to entertain him.

And if at the moment it seems like it’s all sleepless nights and early starts and screaming and tantrums and incoming food projectiles, with little in the way of quid pro quo – well, maybe I should try seeing it from his angle. I’m unbearable to be around if I’ve got mild toothache, let alone brand new chompers pushing their way through his gums all hours of day and night.

Besides, Rachel assures me it’s just a phase. Then again, so was the ice age.

Blog 42: Friday, May 29, 2009

GEORGE went to his first wedding last weekend. Or, at least, that was the plan when we woke up on Saturday.

The day started with us choosing him an outfit from the three Rachel’s Auntie Anne had brought with her from the States (the ladies having already overruled my objection that dressing babies up as mini adults is just a wee a bit… well, creepy).

The first creation he tried on was a stripy blue Andy Pandy affair that had clearly spent the last 90 years lying abandoned in the wardrobe of an Edwardian nursery. When we took his picture, I half expected it to come out in sepia. It also had a bow tie, and everyone knows they look ridiculous on adults, never mind a 10-month-old.

Option two came with a suit jacket that I just know would have made him look like a cross between Verne Troyer and a ventriloquist’s dummy, so we didn’t even bother taking that one off the hanger.

In the end, we opted for a peach shirt, waistcoat and clip-on tie combo that I know sounds absolutely horrific on paper, but actually looked quite sweet. No, really.

The wedding was in London at 3pm but, as everything in our lives now revolves around G’s sleeping and eating patterns, we decided the best thing to do was get to the hotel by 1pm, give him his lunch there and then head off to the nups with time to spare.

What this foolproof plan failed to take into account was that 1) with a baby, nothing is as quick or straightforward as you expect and, 2) in London, paying a hundred quid for a hotel room does not guarantee you anything so wildly extravagant as a parking space.

When I enquired at reception if there was anywhere I might leave the car, the woman fixed me with a look that suggested I’d just asked to sleep with her daughter and told me, with the casual contempt only living in a city of 16 million very angry people can engender, that I could park at Blackheath Station.

On top of having to commute back and forth to our own car, George decided he was in no mood for grabbing a quick lunch – unless you count literally grabbing it in his fist and chucking it all over the hotel room like a young Keith Moon.

And that’s when it suddenly struck me that the wedding venue was actually six miles away from the hotel. That’s six London miles, which is roughly equivalent to 30 miles anywhere more civilized (like, say, the Helmand Province). And so it was that we found ourselves running through Blackheath Village, frocks and coat tails and clip-on ties flapping, with only half an hour to spare.

Needless to say, we spent that half hour sitting on the South Circular admiring the edifying sights of Lewisham, while the event one of our party had traveled six thousand miles to attend went ahead without us.

We eventually arrived just as the bride and groom were signing the register. But hey, we made it for the good bits, right? The photos and the food and the speeches and the cake and stuff.

George, for his part, had an absolute blast. Come the evening, he was up on the stage of the banqueting hall, tie long since discarded (if it hadn’t been clip-on, I swear he’d have tied it round his head), living it up with all the other babies and children drunk on nothing more than the limitless possibilities of life.

Blog 41: Sunday, May 17, 2009

SOMETHING I’ve often heard parents talk about over the years – but was still surprised to find happening to me – is the way having a child impacts on your tolerance for bad news.

I’ve always been a bit of a news junkie – there’s a clue in the fact I work for a newspaper – albeit strictly of the Bloke News stripe (wars, disasters, Westminster tittle-tattle) as opposed to Girl News (missing teenagers, tragic honeymooners, stuff about fat kids). I read No Logo before it became a brand in itself, and I was on the first Iraq war march – the one before it became really popular; it was me, Ken Livingstone and George Galloway, basically – so you can’t accuse me of being politically disengaged.

Ever since George (Kirkley, not Galloway) was born, though, I’ve found myself increasingly turning away from news of all kinds – easier said that done in the 24/7 global media age, when you can’t even switch your phone on without your service provider breathlessly trying to tell you who’s been voted out of Big Brother – and adopting a rough approximation of an ostrich with its head in the sand going “lah lah lah lah can’t hear you” (or “mmppfff mmppfff mmppfff mpf mpff mpff”, to be more accurate).

Some stories are worse than others: Anything involving children is a no-go, obviously, because, sappy as it may sound, the child you end up seeing is not the one in the paper or on the screen, but your own. And that extends to the wider family, too: every father-of-four shipped back from Afghanistan in a body bag, every mother-of-two senselessly wiped out in a head-on smash.

And now, even if I choose to avoid radio and television and newspapers and news websites, we’ve got leaflets coming through the door warning us we’re All Going To Die (or something like that – I haven’t read it, obviously).

Leaflets! From the Government! The last time I saw one of those it was telling us to paint the windows white and hide under the kitchen table. Actually, that doesn’t seem such a bad idea these days.

A year ago, I’d have approached the whole swine flu hoo-ha (is that a bit of a mimsy description for a potential pandemic?) with something of a Gallic shrug. But thanks to my new neurotic parent gene, I reacted with a mix of mounting panic and personal indignation. (“Typical – I finally get to the stage where I’m feeling happy and contented with my beautiful family, and the human race has to go and get wiped out.”)

Part of me suspects my self-imposed news blackout us just an excuse to stop bothering with a media that has long chosen to bury all the important stuff – global warming, corporations with more power than governments, the 850 million people who don’t have enough to eat, stuff like that – in favour of a frivolous sideshow of wheelie bins, petrol prices, celebrity PR opps and that shrill rallying cry of the terminally unimaginative, “political correctness gone mad”.

But there’s a genuine fear there, too, mixed with the nagging doubt engendered by that other clichéd conundrum: What kind of a world is this to raise a child in?

The answer, of course, is a world as full of light and life and love and kindness and a million tiny miracles as it is death and darkness and hate and greed and decay. A world where my son can grow up to achieve great things; to make his parent’s proud and entire nations grateful for our selfless act of procreation.

It’s just it’s a lot easier to see it that way without Huw Edwards and Fiona Bruce acting like the two anchors of the apocalypse every night. Which is why, for the time being, Newsnight is out and In The Night Garden is in – at least until the day the Ninky Nonk derails and ploughs into the Pontipines’ house. That’s when I’m selling the telly.

Blog 40: Sunday, May 10, 2009

RACHEL has had to go into work for the day, leaving me in charge of G. Luckily, my Mum is around to offer moral support and look after him while I do important stuff like showering and shaving and checking Facebook.

In the morning, everything goes swimmingly – G has his breakfast, plays happily for a bit, goes down for a sleep and then eats all his lunch. This is a doddle, I think.

The sun is shining so, in the afternoon, we decide to go for a walk around Milton Country Park. I’m careful to pack his bag with everything he might need (sun hat, snacks, nappies, changing mat) and quite a bit that he won’t (a complete change of clothes, half the contents of his toybox).

Mum and I spend a pleasant hour pushing him around the lakes, while he gurgles contentedly in his buggy and enjoys watching me bend down to pick his hat off the ground every seven seconds. We idly speculate over whether his afternoon nap might coincide with a relaxing cappuccino on the lakeside terrace.

And that’s when things start to unravel. Suddenly, it occurs to me that I never gave him his post-lunch bottle of milk. This is serious: He always has a bottle of milk after his lunch – Rachel’s quite OCD about the number of ounces he consumes per day. She’s got charts and everything.

Coffee by the lake is cancelled. Instead, we dash out of the park and move straight to phase two of our afternoon plans – a mad dash round Tesco to buy him some milk, plus new bottles to replace the ones we left on the train. Okay, that I left on the train.

But it turns they don’t stock the ones Rachel told me to get. Panic. What do I do? Obviously, I phone Rachel, but her phone’s switched off. Bl**dy career women.

We get the milk, and head for the checkout, but the woman in front is moving at a glacial pace, chatting to the girl on the till like there’s an invisible garden fence between them. And then, inevitably, she starts rooting about in her purse for coupons.

Back home, I leave mum to unload the car while I frantically make up a bottle. I put G in his sleeping bag so he’s good to go straight into his cot afterwards. By the time he finishes his milk, it’s 4.45. He should have had his sleep at 3.

He starts crying. He probably needs a clean nappy, I think, so I scoop him out of the cot, unzip him from his sleeping bag and whip him into the bathroom for a quick change (not much to report, probably shouldn’t have bothered).

I pop him back in the cot, but he still won’t settle. I look at the clock: Rachel will be home any minute, he hasn’t had his sleep and it’s only two hours from bedtime.

And now it’s technically teatime. He starts wailing. “He’s probably hungry,” says Mum. So I scoop him out of the cot again, unzip his sleeping bag, get him dressed and put him in the high chair. But it turns out he’s not that hungry – which is no surprise, as he’s just had a full bottle of milk.
When Rachel walks through the door five minutes later, I look like I’ve been caught watching porn.

“How’s he been?” she asks brightly.
Mum, G and I share a conspiratorial look.
“Never go to work again,” I say.

Blog 39: Monday, May 4, 2009

Dear all, having a lovely time in Rock, where the sun is shining, the beers are on ice and it’s still too early in the season for the poshos to spoil everything by driving their dirty great 4x4s all over the beach (not that I’m bitter, you understand).

Journey was good – in a bid to avoid George having to spend the entire day in his car seat, before being hammered back into shape by a team of Cornwall’s finest osteopaths, we decided to hop on the train (as much as you can “hop” on anything with a buggy, travel cot, baby carrier, five bags and two massive suitcases weighing roughly the equivalent of a dwarf star; incidentally, memo to London Underground: There’s no point having a lift down to the platform if you haven’t got one to get back up again at the other end. I’m sure Newton had a law to explain this sort of thing).

The route from Paddington to the West Country is among the finest in the country, cutting through golden haze on meadow and corn as high as an elephant’s eye (sorry, that’s Oklahoma, not Berkshire) before joining the coastal line of the historic South Devon Railway as it hugs the vertiginous red sandstone cliffs at Dawlish and finally crosses the Tamar over Brunel’s magnificent Royal Albert Bridge into Cornwall.

Granted, G is a bit young to fully appreciate England’s green and pleasant land and fine industrial heritage, but all boys love trains, right? As it turned out, he was much less impressed by the world whooshing by the window than the endlessly fascinating Passenger Safety Information leaflet on the back of the chair in front. This proved particularly entertaining when Daddy hilariously poked it up through the gap behind the fold-down tray. Which Daddy hilariously did for several hours.

Without so much as a single tantrum in the eight hours it took to travel from Cambridge (well, not from G, anyway) the only really challenging bit of the journey was changing his nappy while rattling along at 90mph, which was a bit like that scene in Octopussy where James Bond has a fight on the roof of a moving train, only way, way messier.

Anyway, thanks to the largesse of one of Rachel’s relatives, we have the use of one of the best-situated holiday homes in the county, offering floor-to-ceiling panoramic views of the Camel estuary across to Padstow, the popular fishing village-turned-Rick Stein theme park.

Not that G has noticed, of course – he’s too busy playing with the radiator valve or, better still, working himself into a frenzy of excitement over the fire extinguisher on the kitchen wall (don’t knock it – it’s a lot cheaper than Disney World).

Yesterday we hit the beach – literally in G’s case, as he managed to pitch face down in the sand within five seconds of arriving. I mentioned to Rachel that perhaps we should have brought a blanket somewhat larger than a ladies’ hankie. She mentioned to me that perhaps I could have made these helpful suggestions at the packing stage, instead of leaving everything – including my own underwear arrangements – to her. So I shut up.

Apart from that little drama, the only thing stopping us unwinding and enjoying the perfect relaxing break is G’s refusal to sleep in his travel cot, which means we’re actually getting less rest than a typical work week. (We suspect the mattress might be too thin for the little prince – and people worry we’re raising a generation of cotton wool kids.)

The other night, I went into the bedroom to find he had unzipped the netting at the front of the cot and climbed right out. No problem, I thought – I’ll just zip it right to the top. Which I did, only to come back five minutes later to discover him zorbing the whole cot across the room like a contestant on Total Wipeout. Which, after five broken nights, pretty much sums up how Rachel and I are feeling.

Anyway, wish you were here, etc.

Blog 38: Thursday, April 16, 2009

YOU’VE heard people talk about babies being “into everything”? Turns out it’s not just a figure of speech; now that he’s discovered the liberating possibilities of the commando crawl, George is literally trying to get into everything, including cupboards, boxes, wardrobes and, given half the chance, the washing machine.

And, once he’s there, he likes nothing better than to make a big old mess. This week, he pulled all the books off the bookshelves, and even managed to rip the front off the stereo speakers (that’ll teach Rachel to sneak on that Enrique Iglesias CD when I’m not there).

He also discovered daddy’s pile of “special” magazines hidden under the chest of drawers. (Don’t worry, Rachel knows about them, but she doesn’t want the rest of the world knowing her husband reads Doctor Who Monthly in bed, does she?).

We assumed we’d at least be safe leaving him in his Baby Einstein activity gym (basically a Disney-approved child detention centre) but, in the 30 seconds I was out of the room, George somehow succeeded in reaching over and demolishing my DVD collection with all the devastating power of a rhino on the loose in Blockbusters.

That’s when we can get him in the Baby Einstein, of course. Lately, he much prefers crawling into the space underneath and scratching about on the plastic base. Where he usually gets stuck. And cries.

This shouldn’t come as a surprise, though – for as long as he’s been able to hold things, G has been obsessed with getting behind the scenes and figuring out how things work. Give him any sort of electronic toy and he’ll immediately flip it over and start examining the back, as if to say “What do you take me for? I know there isn’t really a lion in this thing.” If he’d been in The Wizard of Oz, he’d have whipped back that curtain and rumbled the old fraud before Dorothy’s feet had even touched the ground.

He’s also obsessed with rivets, screws and bolts (especially the ones on the base of the toilet – eeeuw) and he loves Dalek balls (sorry, Dalek sense hemispheres) – but then, what son of mine wouldn’t?

In a bid to try to close him down, I decided I’d better make a start on G-proofing the house by fitting a safety gate across the hall at the bottom of the stairs.

Now, as regular readers will know, I’m more Andy Pandy than Handy Andy when it comes to DIY, but things were going surprisingly well until I tightened the horizontal bar just that one notch too far – and punched a hole right through the wall. (Honestly, where did the builders of these new developments learn their trade? Japan? I’ve had thicker custard than the walls in our house.)

Despite this little setback, however, the gate seems to be doing the job, in so far as George has been effectively contained and, so far, I’ve only tripped over it twice. Though one of them was in bare feet.

Blog 37: Thursday, April 9, 2009

HERE’S a terrifying new dimension to parenthood: George has started sleeping on his face.

It happened in increments. For the first few months, he was happy to sleep on his back, like every midwife, doctor and guidebook says he should. Then, gradually, he started shifting more onto his side – which, fair enough, is how most of us sleep. Now that he can fully flip himself over, though, he’s decided the most comfortable position is laying on his belly with his face buried in the mattress.

Okay, so buried is a slight exaggeration. He always leaves at least a nostril’s worth of airway. And every health professional I’ve spoken to assures me it’s no big deal – he’s old enough and strong enough now to know what he’s doing and, if he were to get into distress, he’d either be able to get himself out of it or scream until someone else did.

Which is fine in theory. But theories don’t make for restful nights, do they? And, to make matters worse, if he is sleeping soundly on his back, it’s likely he won’t be by the time I’ve creaked across the landing to check that he is.

In fact, tiptoeing across his room the other night, it struck me that this is the nocturnal equivalent of Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle.

For those who don’t know what Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle is – and, as this is Cambridge, I have to ask, where have you been? – it’s basically (and I’m paraphrasing here, so don’t write in) the bit of quantum mechanics that says you can know the position of an electron, and you can know where it’s headed, but you can’t know them both at the same time.

Or something like that. Anyway, the important bit here is that the effect of observing said electrons can itself upset their atomic apple-cart, because the photons we need to see them would alter their formation. In other words: you view it, you skew it. Thus, in the slightly less theoretical world of G’s nursery, the very act of coming in to check his position is likely to change his position.

The only alternative, then, is to lay in bed and hope he’s okay, which puts me more in the realm of that other quantum conundrum, Schrödinger’s cat – i.e. until I see evidence to the contrary, I have to assume that George is both on his back and on his front.

(At least I think that’s the lesson to be drawn from Schrödinger’s cat – I flunked GCSE physics, so quantum superpositions aren’t really my strong point, as you’ve probably gathered.)

So there’s George, possibly face up, possibly face down, sound asleep and dreaming of a world made entirely of stacking cups (I’m guessing, of course, but I’m pretty sure that’s what Utopia looks like to him).

And there’s me, sometimes on my back, sometimes on my side, sometimes creeping about like a burglar in my own home, my head buzzing with night terrors and half-remembered scientific theories and generally in a state that even Heisenberg and Schrödinger, with their pathological inability to commit to anything either way, would be happy to describe as Definitely Not Asleep.

Blog 36: Friday, April 3, 2009

IT’S been a long week, and I’ve been looking forward to spending the weekend with the family.

“What do you fancy doing?” asks Rachel on Saturday morning. “We could go to the Thriplow Daffodil Festival. G will enjoy looking at all the colours.”

“Well, yellow,” I say, grudgingly.

In the end, like every other consumer zombie in the country, we decide we really ought to do A Big Shop shop at Tesco.

“I hate Tesco,” I say.
“I know you hate Tesco,” says Rachel. “I hate it, too, but it’s the nearest supermarket.”
“Tesco stands for the worst excesses of corporate Britain. We should be supporting local independent producers and retailers,” I declare.
“We could go to Waitrose,” suggests Rachel.
“I can’t be bothered driving right across town,” I say. “Let’s go to Tesco.”

When we arrive, there’s a queue to get into the car park. Having inched our way forward, I spot a space with just enough wiggle room to get G’s car seat out.

“We should grab it while we can,” I say.
“Let’s just see if there’s a parent and child space,” suggests Rachel, ever the optimist.
“There won’t be,” I say, miserably.
“Let’s just check.”

We drive around. There are only a handful of parent and child spaces, and they are all full. We drive some more. I eventually squeeze into a space that’s much narrower and much farther away than the original one. The sky is as dark as my mood and, when I get out of the car, it starts raining. Then it starts hailing. Hard.

I get back in. “What shall we do?” asks Rachel. But I don’t know – I feel paralysed with inertia. Outside, a mother is trying, and failing, to shelter her small child from the biblical deluge. In front of me is a shop called FISH’n’CHICK’n which, for some reason, really depresses me.

We sit there a while. G is quietly cooing to himself. “His first hail storm,” says Rachel, always one to take a positive from any situation.

“We could try the parent and child spaces again,” she says, breezily.
“There won’t be any,” I grumble. I’m starting to think we could be trapped here for days, possibly forever.

“How about,” I suggest, after another silent interlude, “I get the rain cover from G’s buggy and we put it over his car seat long enough to dash to that covered bit, by the FISH’n’CHICK’n?” The words are like ashes in my mouth.

“He’s got a cold,” says Rachel. “And the rain cover wouldn’t really fit the car seat. I just don’t want to risk getting him wet.”

We wait some more. “I’ll drive round to see if there’s a parent and child space,” I say. But there isn’t.

In the end, I pull up in the motorcycle parking bay long enough for Rachel to find a trolley with a car seat attachment. It’s too far to make a dash for the entrance, so she waits her chance and ducks in through the exit. I drive off to find a parking space that I will later spend 15 minutes trying to find again.

Inside, the store is like a cross between a refugee camp and an airport during a baggage handlers’ strike. People are swarming everywhere, many of them – men, mostly – looking utterly bewildered. Children are screaming, and an automated voice repeats a warning about the approaching end of the world… sorry, end of the escalator over and over and over again, like some sort of experimental torture method, or a track by Brian Eno.

“Oi!” one woman shouts, trying to get her husband’s attention. “Yes my darling,” he replies sweetly. Another man is telling the checkout girl he is “close to suicide”.

And George? He is sleeping soundly in his car seat, a smile on his face, dreaming of daffodils.

Blog 35: Sunday, March 29, 2009

LAST weekend, spring finally arrived to put flight to the longest, harshest winter of my life.

On top of the freezing weather and deepening recession that plunged the whole nation into a collective gloom, the protracted, heartbreaking loss of my dear dad, George’s recent sickness, anxieties over a ridiculous number of other family illnesses, job worries and the natural exhaustion and broken sleep of new parenthood have all taken their toll.

(Though, with the exception of his own poorly spell, G has giggled and grinned his way through the bad times and kept all our sprits afloat, that new “grizzly phase” I talked about a couple of months ago turning out to be a complete false alarm. G doesn’t have time for grizzly – not when there’s a big, shiny new world to look at, play with and, more often than not, eat.)

To celebrate the arrival of the season of rebirth, renewal and, most importantly, sunshine, I decided to treat my mum and G’s mum to a Mother’s Day weekend break at The Grand Hotel in Brighton. Okay, so when I say “treat”, our room was a press freebie, and I managed to get mum’s at the staff rate, but it’s still more thoughtful than a box of Ferrero Rocher, so cut me some slack here.

And guess what? The sun actually got the memo, told winter to “do one” and proceeded to blaze magnificently for the whole three days. In England. In March. It’s a miracle, I tells yer.

With its sweeping white Italianate Victorian frontage, The Grand still makes its presence felt on Brighton’s jumbled, architecturally confused promenade (you’d never guess I’m filing a travel piece at the same time, would you?).

Pulling up at the entrance, we couldn’t help but feel an echo of the many well-heeled feet to have trod those miles of floral carpet or stepped out of its famous “Vertical Omnibus” lift – a phalanx of retired army majors, grand dames of the stage and obscure European aristocrats.

Meanwhile, the concierge, used to discreetly unloading matching monogrammed luggage and Versace suit holders, tried to hide his disapproval when he opened our boot to find it spilling over with G’s toys, buggy, travel cot, food, bottles, steriliser and various other baby paraphernalia shoved into assorted (and definitely not matching) supermarket carrier bags.

We were shown to our fabulous connecting rooms, which turned out to be bigger than the square footage of our entire house, much to the delight of G, who soon discovered the thrill of rolling over and over without bumping into the furniture or walls he normally encounters in our Wimpy box.

The rooms were also situated right at the front of the hotel, opening out on to elegant wrought iron balconies overlooking the seafront. (We took G out and showed him the view a couple of times, but felt frankly nervous, hugging the back wall like all those minor royals from Kent you see lurking behind The Queen on the Buckingham Palace balcony, as opposed to giving it the full Michael Jackson.)

Friday also saw us enjoying our first meal out without George since he was born. I say enjoy – Rachel couldn’t stop looking at her phone (which was on the table – surely not the done thing at The Grand) and texting her sisters upstairs to make sure everything was alright.

It turned out G wasn’t asleep like he was supposed to be, but he wasn’t crying for his mummy and daddy either: he was happily sitting up playing with his aunties, taking as much advantage of our night out as we were.

At breakfast the next morning, G put the whole “phone on table” scandal into context by chucking bits of food around the dining room (“Sorry, Colonel!”) and going beetroot red while he squeezed out a poo in his high chair (I blame the parents).

But he saved his best trick for the following morning, when he surprised Rachel with a lovely Mother’s Day card and some novelty Yummy Mummy gifts that, coming from me, might have looked suspiciously like tacky, last-minute tat from the late-night Tesco but, from him, seemed incredibly cute and thoughtful. So well done G.

Blog 34: Friday, March 20, 2009

ACCORDING to a report in the Cambridge News, the country’s plunging economic fortunes have helped spark a baby boom in the city, with people giving nights out and exotic holidays a miss in favour of making their own entertainment. Which is fine, as long as you remember that, just like that week on the Algarve you bunged on the credit card, at some point you’re going to find yourself surprised by a massive bill.

Because babies, let me tell you, are not cheap. Takes shoes – this week we took George to Clarks to get his first pair, something that’s been a rite of passage for generations of British children. He had his souvenir picture taken by the nice lady in the shop, and we got a booklet explaining how, erm, shoes work.

(It’s more complicated than you might think, apparently. According to the booklet, there are shoes for every stage of development – crawling, cruising and walking. Hang on, back up a minute: Cruising? Cruising what? Strip joints? Also, according to Clarks, “feet are as individual as faces”. Which is technically true, though I suspect you’d have trouble recognising even your closest friends on Footbook.)

Anyway, his shoes are adorable – £18 worth of adorable, since you ask. But that’s okay, because they’ll last him a while, right?
“Six to eight weeks,” said the shop lady, casually.
Six to eight weeks? I’ve had colds last longer than that. That’s how long I’d expect a yoghurt to last. But apparently kids will keep growing, so what can you do?

It’s not just shoes that burn a hole in the budget, of course. The other day, Rachel spent more than £100 in the supermarket, and all she and I had to show for it were some sprouts and a few tins of soup. That’s because there was no room in a trolley packed with baby milk, baby food, nappies, nappy cream, wipes, bibs, vests and all the other stuff we seem to run out of every four hours.

And it’s not like the food is cheap. Oh no, His Lordship has decided that, after much consideration, he really only likes the massively expensive organic range, actually – you know, the ones that cost about a fiver for a pipette-full of braised wood pigeon with confit of apples. Try giving him the standard stuff or, worse, something his mum has dutifully blended herself from the freshest, healthiest ingredients in the land, and he clamps his mouth shut and turns his head away with haughty disdain.

Luckily for our bank balance, the hand-me-down culture is very much alive and well on the baby circuit, and we reckon we must have saved thousands from the piles of clothes, toys and accessories people have given or lent us over the past year. (One couple, in particular, have been so generous, I’m starting to suspect they’re claiming it against tax as a charitable donation.)

We also had the foresight to stockpile enough stuff to survive a nuclear winter at an NCT sale last spring. (These are fantastic for bargains, providing you can get to them; it’s one thing spotting a nice coat, quite another actually reaching it through a sea of 600 pregnant women .)

So by all means make your own entertainment, but just remember – if you’re doing it for financial reasons, it might just be cheaper to jet off to Monte Carlo for the weekend instead.

Blog 33: Friday, March 13, 2009

GEORGE is pretty much back to his old self after last week’s little drama. In the end, the hospital doctors said he wasn’t dehydrated enough to need a drip and, after a few days of barely wet nappies, by the weekend he was back to peeing like Seabiscuit.

All that remains now is a particularly phlegmy cold and a rattly cough that sounds like a cross between an old tramp hawking up phlegm and someone starting a petrol lawnmower underwater.

So anyway, with all that safely out of the way, Rachel and I, like the good aspirational middle class parents we are, have moved on to a new anxiety – that George isn’t developing fast enough.

I don’t mean physically – according to all the charts, he’s right where he ought to be. But when it comes to learning new skills and tricks, we’re worried he’s just not keeping up with the Junior Joneses.

Actually, that’s not strictly true. I think he’s doing fine – it’s more a case that his best friend, Tilda, is turning out to be a child genius and, frankly, it’s making George look bad.

For example, G has only just started to sit up unsupported. And he’s still a bit wobbly at that, to be honest: leave him long enough and he’ll eventually start listing to one side, before collapsing into the cushions and lying there wriggling about like a stranded dolphin. Tilda, of course, has been sitting up for months – probably because her parents were dutifully training her to do it while we were still letting G roll around the four corners of the room like a human pinball.

Tilda, who has a mere two weeks’ age advantage, can also clap her hands, while George shows his appreciation by jiggling his whole body around like a demented puppet.

She also has a rather elegant way of pushing buttons; G, by contrast, tends to lash out at them, often picking up the whole toy and slapping it onto the ground like a WWF wrestler in order to produce the desired sound effect.

And she’s virtually using a knife and fork and dining à la carte, whereas George is still smearing soggy rice cakes all over his face like Marlon Brando in Apolcalypse Now.

I have no doubt that, before long, Tilda will be sitting her A-Levels and solving major crimes, while G is still struggling to fit some wooden shapes through the right holes.

At the moment, we’re busy trying to encourage him to crawl, but it’s a slow process. The other morning, Rachel constructed a tower of building blocks in front of him. “It’s good practice for him,” she said. “It will encourage him to crawl towards it.” G then slithered forward on his belly, knocked down the tower and all the bricks landed on his head. He cried. As a motivational exercise, it clearly needs work.

But what the heck, we still love him, even if he is a bit slow on the uptake (after all, so am I, and Rachel still loves me). And besides, because Rachel works for the University, G has got his name down for a place at that fine institution’s nursery, which means, however smart or otherwise he is, we’ll still be able to say we’ve got a son at Cambridge. Beat that, Tilda!

Blog 32: Friday, March 6, 2009

GEORGE has been, as we say back in Yorkshire, proper poorly this week.

It started on Sunday night with diarrhoea and vomiting and, as I write, he is currently at Addenbrooke’s getting checked out by paediatricians.

The five days in between have been miserable for the poor little guy. If it’s not coming out of one end it’s coming out of the other – though not, frustratingly, out of the one we actually want it to (he hasn’t properly wet his nappy since Tuesday – a clear sign of dehydration, hence his visit to the hospital).

Because he’s not getting any energy, he’s also incredibly listless and drowsy, and keeps falling asleep mid-nappy change. At least he does when he’s wearing a nappy. In the middle of the week, his diarrhoea was so bad it gave him awful nappy rash, turning his bum an angry, British holidaymaker red.

The solution to this, of course, is to keep his nappy off. That’s a baby with diarrhoea, going commando – you do the math. (In one particularly graphic incident – and readers of a sensitive disposition may wish to look away now – he managed to fire a jet of watery poo right through the bars of his cot and up the wall, like some sort of prison dirty
protest.)

It also meant we quickly ran out of clean towels and changing mats to put him on.
“He’s fallen asleep on the towel,” I told Rachel at one point.
“Not the new towel?” It was a question, but she delivered as a statement, with an unspoken “obviously” left hanging heavily in the air.
“Ummm…”
Still, at least it was a brown towel. If only his poo hadn’t been bright yellow…

It doesn’t help that every doctor we’ve seen has said something entirely
contradictory: One told us to keep feeding him his bottle as normal, another that milk would make him more sick; one prescribed anti-biotics, another blamed the anti-biotics for making his predicament 10 times worse. And another basically admitted that the entire profession relies on patients coming in and telling them what’s wrong with them, which makes diagnosing babies next to impossible. Cheers.

As parents, it’s unbearable to witness. As well as the physical strain (the lion’s share of which, as usual, has been borne by Rachel – that’s why she’s at Addenbrooke’s now while I’m here wittering on to you), there’s the emotional trauma of seeing our little boy, usually so happy and cheeky and full of life, so distressed and bewildered and so, so weak. And the fear, always the fear, that it might be more than “just a bug”.

Because, while these columns may have chosen to exaggerate the pitfalls of parenthood for comic effect, the truth is I am overwhelmed, and not a little frightened, by how much I love my little boy. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have a date at the hospital.

Saturday 2pm update: G was discharged from the hospital yesterday afternoon and is making a good recovery. He decided to cry for two hours solid between 2 and 4am this morning, and is a bit more clingy and grizzly than usual. His bug is also coming out as a cold (hence his latest nickname, Ilya Nastikof), but generally he’s starting to look and feel a lot more like his old self. (I, on the other hand, feel like microwaved death, with a sickly headache and aching limbs, but I’m under no illusions anyone wants to hear about that…)

Blog 31: Friday, February 27, 2009

LATEST dispatch from the weaning front line: George is now eating solids. Well, not eating so much as sucking his food into a pulpy mess then smearing it all over his hands, face, clothes, high chair and parents.

So far, he’s not progressed much beyond small rice cakes, which is probably just as well until he learns to bite things instead of just shoving them into his mouth whole.

It’s all quite nerve-wracking – especially the awful choking noises he makes every time he realises he’s got what, to us, would be the equivalent of a whole Wagon Wheel in his mouth.

While I’m panicking and reaching for the phone, Rachel – already a battle-hardened mealtime veteran – blithely assures me this is all perfectly normal* – his gag reflex is much further forward than ours, and it’s all part and parcel of learning how to chew. Which seems a bit like learning to fly by jumping out of a 51st storey window, but there you go.

Of course, my own dietary needs have now firmly taken a back seat. When I went to the biscuit cupboard earlier this week, I discovered it is no longer the biscuit cupboard at all, but George’s food stores.

The freezer has been similarly requisitioned to make room for 800 individually frozen, sealed and labelled meal solutions, the product of Rachel’s – frankly slightly hysterical – nocturnal puréeing sessions, which regularly sees the blender whirring away until 11pm.

And last night, I couldn’t help but notice there were only four bits of meat in my casserole – the rest, apparently, had gone into a braised beef and sweet potato creation with George’s name
on it.

These recipes aren’t just thrown together, either. According to Rachel, G needs to have fish twice a week (for his omega 3) and at least two portions of carbs and one serving of protein a day. This is because, and I quote, “a baby’s brain triples in size in the first year and deficiency in iron can have a profound affect on learning in later life”.

Which is interesting as, just the other night, Rachel was telling me about a fascinating article she’d read on a real life “slumdog” who, despite spending his childhood scavenging in the streets of Mumbai living on sparrows and chicken heads plucked from rubbish bins, had gone on to win a place at university and build a successful business.

“Doesn’t that suggest you can chill out a bit about the whole protein-omega-3-carbs balancing act?” I enquired innocently.

For a moment, I could see she was wavering. But only for a moment. “You go on up,” she said. “I’ve just got to blend a quick mango.”

* Consult an expert before trying this at home – Rachel could have read it on Wikipedia for all I know.

Blog 30: Saturday, February 21, 2009

LIKE most kids, I used to dream of being a rock star. Then I realised I didn’t have the hair for it – or an ounce of musical talent, for that matter – and had to learn to content myself with being a rock anorak instead. But now even that’s under threat as the soundtrack of my life slowly transforms from Green Day to Ten Green Bottles, from One Love to One Finger One Thumb.

Yes, like every other part of me, the bit of my cerebellum reserved for storing pop trivia (i.e. most of it – it certainly takes up a lot more space than the bit that retains practical information about mortgages, car maintenance and family birthdays) has slowly started to succumb to the ravages of baby brain.

Whereas once my shower-stall repertoire might have consisted of choice selections from the oeuvres of The Cure, XTC or Belle & Sebastian, these days I keep finding myself in the midst of a full-throated rendition of Chook Chook (“Chook chook chook, good morning Mrs Hen, how many chickens have you got? Farmer I’ve got ten” – not exactly Leonard Cohen, though it’s still a lot better than Oasis) or idly humming my way through all 10 verses of Over in the Meadow.

Then there’s the omnipresent chime of tracks from George’s cot mobile (I don’t know what any of them are called, but they all appear to be played on the pan pipes, so probably something to do with a condor) and his jungle gym.

Drifting tinnily from G’s baby monitor wherever you are in the house, the former makes you feel like you’re on permanent telephone hold, while the latter offers a choice of nursery rhymes or Mozart who, 200 years after his death, might be a little bemused to learn he is now a bigger hit with pre-schoolers than Noddy and the Teletubbies combined.

Or, at least, he’s a big hit with their parents, who are repeatedly told listening to Wolfie can have a positive impact on child development. I asked a classical music expert friend why this was. “Probably because they’re very pretty, undemanding major chords,” he said sniffily, invoking a mental image of his own offspring being weaned on a challenging diet of atonal avant garde minimalism, probably played on eggboxes and a car battery.

Even that, though, would be more musical than the book of nursery rhymes someone gave George at Christmas, in which a clearly suicidal woman tunelessly intones the first few bars of each rhyme as if someone’s holding a gun to her head. Which, if I ever meet her, there will be.

Even more alarmingly, the fuzz of parenthood is starting to creep into other areas of my (admittedly tepid) rock and roll lifestyle. Several of this week’s Brit nominees have long been the subject of specially adapted George-themed lullabies, including Elbow (“What made G behave that way?”), Girls Aloud (“The promise G made”) and, most appropriately, the Ting Tings (“They call me G, they call me Unit, they call me Eggbound – that’s not my name!”).

And that’s not to mention the original compositions inspired by my infant muse – let’s call them songs in the key of G minor – including George, George, He’s Inestimably Gorge; You’re So Cute, Yes You Are (that one needs work, I’ll admit) and, a current favourite, George Alagiah Is Gonna Take You Higher. (George Alagiah being one of G’s nicknames for obvious reasons. Obvious to me, anyway.)

Blog 29: Monday, February 16, 2009

RACHEL looks after George without the aid of a safety net for an average of 60 hours a week. I fly solo for about 10 hours, tops. So guess during whose watch the little fella took a headlong dive off the sofa this week?

Before you call social services, let me stress I didn’t leave him alone, even for a second. All I did was turn my head away to fold out his jungle gym – at the exact moment he appeared to discover a whole new set of muscles, pitched forward into a vaulting somersault and landed on his bonce on the living room carpet.

I don’t know which of us was the most shocked – although I know which one recovered the quickest. After a bit of a cry and a cuddle, George appeared to have forgotten the entire incident in less than a minute, while I’m still wracked with remorse several days later.

The worst thing was, I saw the entire thing happening, in slow motion, but was unable to do anything about it because, while I have cat-like reflexes, the cat in question is Bagpuss. (Well, that was the worst thing for me – the worst thing for George was landing upside down on his head, obviously.)

This little drama unfolded thanks to George’s new-found mobility, which ensures every week is now a rollover week. He may not have mastered crawling yet, but that’s not about to stop him exploring the four corners of the room any which way he can; Bob Dylan might think he’s like a rolling stone, but he’s got nothing on G.

Last week, for example, he was happily kicking about on his gym one minute and, the next time I looked up (I know, I know – that really should have been the wake-up call I needed about keeping an eye on him at all times) he was over by the TV mucking about with various bits of video equipment. From this, I was able to discern that a) he’s clearly his father’s son (except I’d have stayed on the sofa and used the remote) and b) he may only be seven months old, but he can already work the DVD recorder better than his mum.

Anyway, having learned my lesson over sofa-gate, I am now taking no chances, which is why, this morning, in a bid to stop him flopping off his changing mat and rolling under the toilet, I found myself trying to shave while simultaneously keeping George in place with an outstretched leg.

Clearly, this can’t go on, so I’ve told Rachel we’re either going to have to buy some sort of play pen or, more radically, she’ll have to get up when we do. She scowled, muttered something about this being the only free hour she has all day, and went back to sleep.

Which is fair enough, I suppose. And besides, George’s new-found roll play does have its upsides: If he wakes up at 6am and comes into our bed for a bit of a snooze, he’s taken to turning onto his side so we’re lying face-to-face, reaching out his hand and resting it on my cheek while he sleeps.

Life, let me tell you, really doesn’t get any better than that.

Blog 28: Friday, February 6, 2009

I know all there is to know about the crying game, Boy George once said (and if he didn’t then, he certainly does now). But when it comes to our boy George (you know, the one who doesn’t tie people to radiators – though he does keep Rachel pretty close to the washing machine) the crying game is all new. Because, after seven months, G is finally discovering what those lungs are for.

I’ve said it before but, compared to some of the horror stories we’ve heard from other parents, we’ve definitely come up trumps in the baby lottery. On the whole, George’s temperament tends to swing between ‘placid’ and ‘giggly’, he’s incredibly adaptable to new people and situations, he’s a good traveller (he’s slept in more beds than Goldilocks on a backpacking gap year, without ever complaining, like his dad, that he “likes to have his stuff around him”) and he smiles on cue at strangers.

Added to that, he’s never been much of a cry baby (except, for some reason, when you try to put his arms in his sleeves – G has been avidly sleeve-phobic since birth. In fact, he’d be happier not wearing any kind of top at all, even in this weather; maybe he’s got a bit of Geordie blood in him?). All of which, aside from some predictable fretting on my part about whether he might be autistic, has only served to increase our insufferable smugness.

But I think that could all be about to change. Over the past couple of weeks, George has been showing definite signs of increasing grizzliness. This is hardly an unknown phenomenon: Call it the Seven Month Itch but, as babies get older, they basically start getting wise to their parents’ dirty tricks, and there comes a point when the old distraction techniques just won’t wash any more. For example, G used to play happily in his baby gym for ages, but lately he’s started to adopt a “been there, done that” attitude to it, having apparently decided that batting a toy monkey back and forth doesn’t have unlimited appeal after all.

And we now have a new daily ritual in which Rachel brings him wailing into our room at 5am, and lays him beside me so he can scream in my ear while she goes to sort out his milk. (I’d complain about it, but I’m worried she’d suggest I get up and make the milk, so least said, soonest mended and all that.) I suspect this is because G is starting to enter that clingy phase, where only mum will do, so we can no doubt look forward to some socially awkward scenes where friends and relatives come round to cluck and coo over him, and he reciprocates by screaming in their faces. (“No, it’s nothing personal – he just hates you.”)

Of course, it’s all my fault. According to my mum, I bawled solidly for two years whenever she or my dad tried to put me down. But what can I say? It was the 70s – everyone was miserable. At least George isn’t growing up in a country in the grip of recession, mass unemployment, civil unrest and… oh, hang on a minute…

Blog 27: Friday, January 30, 2009

GEORGE has got himself a case of viral gastroenteritis, which means he’s spent the week projectile vomiting like those two old ladies out of Little Britain, while at the business end . . . well, let’s just say Rachel and I can now write “diarrhoea” without the help of Microsoft spellcheck.

For the past seven months, whenever G has brought back his milk (about every 10 minutes, on average), people have said to us: “Don’t worry, you’ll know when he’s really sick.” And they weren’t wrong: Imagine someone pressure-hosing a patio with chicken soup, and you’ll get a rough idea of what projectile vomit actually looks like.

On Saturday, we took him to the out-of-hours doctor in Leeds, who diagnosed the gastroenteritis. She also told us, cheerily, that now that his starter pack of antibodies was running out, and Rachel had stopped breastfeeding, we could expect a lot more of this sort of thing. Oh, and that all three of us will pretty much have permanent colds from October until March. Happy New Year to you, too.

When we got back home (following a brief delay at a service station near Grantham, where G made his mark by yakking all over the floor of Costa Coffee), I had to go to the surgery to collect a pot so we could submit a stool sample. Being British, I felt terribly self-conscious saying the word “stool” out loud in a public place. But I got away lightly – Rachel was the one who had to scrape said sample out of George’s nappy like a scene from CSI: Girton.

And G? He’s his usual, cheery self, and seems largely oblivious to the fluids geysering from either end of his body. He’s obviously too young to know that, being a bloke, he’s supposed to milk being ill for everything it’s worth – lying on the sofa, whimpering and generally feeling very sorry for yourself. That’s certainly what I’ve been doing, and I’ve only got a bit of a cold.

(In fact, George is so chilled, this week he even sat patiently at the dentists’ while Rachel was having a filling, apparently unfazed by the whining drills, smell of anaesthetic or even the sound of local commercial radio.)

Unfortunately, being a bit poorly meant George missed his weekly swimming lesson. Again. So far, he’s only made it to two of the four sessions – but that’s still better than his dad, who’s only managed to show up once, despite shelling out for the full 12-week course.

I hope I’m not turning into one of those guys you see in Hollywood movies – you know, the sort of corporate hustler who always misses his kid’s baseball game because he has an important meeting (“I’ll be there next time, Jimmy, I promise”) before a life-changing epiphany makes him see the error of his ways.

Because at least they usually have the excuse of needing to close a multi-billion dollar deal or something, whereas I’m more likely to be delayed researching Ten Things You Never Knew About Custard.

Blog 26: Friday, January 23, 2009

NOW that George is nearly seven months old, people are starting to ask if we’re going to have him christened. But only people who don’t know us very well – everyone else should know better than to use the C word in our proximity, especially with a young baby around.

I’m sorry, each to his own and all that, but I actually find the idea of christenings quite offensive. Well, not so much the ceremony itself as the idea behind it – the assumption that every child is born full of sin which needs casting out in order to avoid an eternity screaming in agony in fiery damnation.

I mean, what sort of sick puppy would come up with a story like that in the first place? It’s an appalling piece of emotional blackmail invented as a way to strong-arm people into the Church from an early age – the ecclesiastical equivalent of those chain letters which urge you to forward it to 10 people otherwise your house will blow up.

It’s being forced to take out a policy by the world’s pushiest, most sinister life insurance salesman (“Hello, I represent Fire and Brimstone Mutual, and I was just wondering if you’d considered looking at ways to avoid spending the afterlife in deathless agony on the sharp end of Satan’s toasting fork?”).

You can see why this might have been an effective recruitment strategy in less educated, more superstitious times. But somehow, it’s a superstition that’s not only endured, but now comes with its own range of silverware from John Lewis.

If people grow up and make a conscious decision to be baptised, then that’s their choice, and good luck to ’em. But attempting to attribute religious beliefs and choices to someone who’s not old enough to hold a cup without pouring half of it into his ear is patently ridiculous. As Richard Dawkins points out, you can no more label an infant a “Christian child” (or any other religious denomination) than you can call them a Tory, a Marxist-Leninist or, indeed, an atheist.

And my son, I can assure you, was not born full of sin – he’s as fresh and innocent and beautiful as sunrise. (Here’s hoping I won’t be forced to eat my words when he hits the Terrible Twos and turns into the kid from The Omen.)

Many people, of course, are driven to have their children christened not by any deep spiritual convictions, or fear of eternal damnation, but because its traditional and, let’s face it, a nice day out. And I’m not here to pass judgment on anyone who chooses to do that – I am, in fact, a Godfather to no fewer than four children myself (long story but, if you want to call me a hypocrite, I won’t argue with you – I’ll do anything for a few sausage rolls, basically).

It’s just that, personally, if I want to dress George up and parade him round all the relies, I’ll wait until his first birthday (or, if that’s too much effort, just stick some pictures on Facebook or something.)

Still, at least the desire to show off your new hat-and-baby combo is a better excuse than that modern middle class stunt of getting your baby christened just so you can get it into the local church school.

This makes absolutely zero sense to me, as I can just imagine the conversations that must take place in the farmhouse kitchens of Middle England every September:

“Now listen Trixie, we’re sending you to the local CofE school because mummy and daddy want you to have the best of everything, and this is absolutely the best start you could have in life, so listen carefully to everything your teachers tell you, and do exactly what they say. Oh, apart from all the bits about God and Jesus – they make all that stuff up. And I’d quite like to run my eye over your science homework, if that’s okay.”

So no, George won’t be getting christened – partly because I have absolutely no fears for his immortal soul and partly because, these days, I can afford my own sausage rolls.

About A Boy: Year One