this quintessence of dust

a community support officer comments on my beard

2011-10-21T16:32:00.001+01:00

Today, a 'community support' officer approached me and said, "Your beard is looking longer than the last time I saw you."

The final six words made me realise I had met this man before.

Indeed, on that occasion the officer, witnessing my retirement from the building of a publisher, waylaid me for the purpose of enquiring how one achieved a foothold in such an industry. Apparently his cousin, having failed to attract the patronage of several publishers, had set up a printing press in his bedroom. "I don't know how he affords to pay the bills," the officer told me. "Perhaps he is printing money," I ventured. He laughed nervously and ambled off.

Now he was telling me: "Let it grow, I say, let it grow." He added: "Let's see how long you can grow it." And then: "Do something funky with it."

"Perhaps," I replied.

He laughed nervously and ambled off.

how not to change the fuel sender unit on a Volvo V40 (2003 model)

2011-09-14T12:05:00.002+01:00

I know you have been having sleepless nights worrying about the malfunctioning petrol gauge in our Volvo V40 1.8 (2003 model), so I am pleased to be able to give you a comprehensive update on the situation. Someone with oily hands suggested to me that I might locate something called a "fuel pump" concealed in a cavity accessed via the luggage compartment or, failing this, beneath the back seats, which apparently could be removed with relative ease thanks to the inclusion of flaps constructed from a durable and tight weave of unspecified fabric.

I was informed that attached to this pumping device I would observe what the chap referred to as a "sender", which, it was suggested, I should replace as this component was the likely cause of the malfunction. Having removed the boy's copious possessions from the luggage compartment and lifted every piece of cheaply applied cosmetic carpeting to reveal nothing more than a spare wheel, something called a "jack" and what looked like a spanner, I retired to the rear seating, which indeed was removed with relative ease.

Imagine my malcontent upon discovering herewith a semi-evaporated, milk-based liquid giving off the incomprehensible odour of sour pap juice. I shooed the majority of this away with my Phillips screwdriver and proceeded to open a lid located therein which, despite its lack of labelling or even a hint of its purpose, I suspected concealed the mythical "fuel pump". Indeed, below it I did happen upon what looked to me like the central part of a Dyson vacuum cleaner, and on it was sat a spider, which with prompting from the screwdriver scuttled off with gay abandon.

It was at this moment that I realised proceeding further would necessitate the disconnection of hoses containing flammable liquid; furthermore, it was quite obvious that this so-called sender could only be replaced by unscrewing the entire "fuel pump" in the manner of the brave, ill-fated Spock removing the nuclear rod within the engine room of the Enterprise in The Wrath of Khan. I now hoped that the mere removal of the spider would have resolved the electrical fault, so I put everything back where it was and went for a sit down.

It still isn't working.

the guilt of ignoring a stranger having previously engaged him in conversation, albeit briefly

2011-09-02T12:06:00.003+01:00

I entered the alley that leads to the platform to discover a bevvy of businessmen stomping towards me. Something was wrong; they were stomping in the wrong direction.

"Is there something wrong?" I asked the first man to reach me.

"The train has been cancelled," he replied as he passed me with no retardation to his stride. Perhaps because this information elicited no response from me, he then slowed slightly, swivelled gracefully and, now trotting backwards with no deletion of purpose, nodded to the pursuing business folk in confirmation of the fact.

Soon enough I was in the car with the wife and the boy to seek out an alternative station. As we negotiated a junction, I spotted my informant on the pavement and, just at that moment, he spotted me. He was also seeking out the other station, but the train would leave in six minutes' time. There was no way he was going to make it.

I briefly considered ordering the wife to stop the car so that we might give this man a lift, but I couldn't bring myself to do it. I imagined winding down the window as we matched his pace at the kerb, leaning out and saying, "Hello there, come and have a ride with my wife and my baby."

As we mounted a speed bump at 40 miles an hour, I emerged from my fantasy pregnant with the realisation that no such winding down of the window would be necessary, sitting as we were in a Volvo V40 (2003 model).

I imagined depressing the button in the passenger-door armrest as we trundled in the gutter, leaning out and saying, "Hello there, do you like our Volvo? Come and have a ride in our Volvo with my wife and my baby."

I eyed the man's hand gripping his briefcase. It was the kind of hand one might expect to see grasping a lead attached to a brown labrador on Sunday mornings. A hand that has only once been raised in anger to the cheek of its owner's wife, and that was when the silly woman disposed of the weekend newspaper's property section before he'd had a chance to read it at his leisure.

I boarded the train with a heavy heart.

teaching a two-year-old new words

2011-05-04T10:25:00.001+01:00

"Look Kingsley, a kite. What is it?"
"A cunt."

omnibus sloppage

2011-05-03T20:08:00.002+01:00

Dear Mr Young,

Thank you for your e-mail of 26th April 2011 passing on Mr Titchener’s comments regarding two new bus stop signs that have been erected with the incorrect spelling of the two roads concerned.

As the manufacture and erection of bus stop signs are the responsibility of Transport for London (TfL) and I have informed our Group Planner for Transportation who liaises regularly with them so that the errors can be rectified as soon as possible.

Thank you for letting us know……

Yours sincerely

Executive Assistant

To whom it may concern,

I am writing to draw your attention to malappointed signage at a brace of omnibus stoppage points in your borough. The two bus stops concerned are Granard Road, misspelled as "Grandard Road", and Bolingbroke Grove, misspelled as "Boilingbroke Grove".

To have misspelled these names in the drafting of the signage may be regarded as a misfortune; to fail to notice the errors at the proofing stage, to commission the production of the nonsensical signs and then to erect them in situ looks like carelessness.

Perhaps the misappellation "Grandard" is a deliberate comment on our ageing population; if that is the case, why not lose the second r and illustrate the bus stop concerned with a photograph of Clive Dunn, who played Lance-Corporal Jack Jones in the popular TV series Dad's Army and recorded the novelty chart song Grandad?

One might assume that "Boilingbroke" is a reference to global warming; be that as it may, witnessing this sign has not improved my appreciation of planetary conservation, yet it has made me rather hot under the collar.

Please confirm that the relevant authority will rectify these problems as soon as possible,

Yours sincerely,

Mr P. D. Titchener (AutoCad qualified to Level 1, PowerPoint and Word),

Dictated but not read to

His secretary,

Mr Christopher Young

Kingsley Can't Swim and Other Observations (part 4)

2011-04-19T15:58:00.004+01:00

Part Four

i
Living with the boy's au pair had its difficult moments. Her English was less than good, so everything had to be either repeated very loudly and slowly or be translated into French. As I did not speak French, this meant I spent much of the time sounding like the confused resident of a care home. "How was the boy today?" I would ask. She looked at me, blankly. "HOW WAS HE TODAY?" I shouted back at her non-comprehending visage. "I am fine," she replied, adding "thank you" as a little flourish that showed off how much her English was progressing. "No," I corrected her, "le garcon!", demonstrating that in actual fact, I could draw upon my GCSE French when in a tight spot. This, though, was as far as the conversation went in her native tongue, largely because I could not move the topic into those limited areas in which I was fluent, such as je voudrais un top up (your French beer is rather frothy), ou est les chariots? (where are the trolleys?) and non je suis remain chagrin avec tu pour trop long temps (I can't stay mad at you for long).

When she arrived, I hardly gave the impression that I was the man of the house, to be respected, if not feared, certainly obeyed, and definitely not laughed at behind his back. Helen pulled up in the car, having rendezvoused with the au pair at the ferry port. I bustled out of the house shouting "Hello! How are you?". For some reason, I then repeated the salutation a number of times, shouting: "How are you! How are you!" She said hello and I made to shake her hand, but as she reached out her own paw I remembered she was French and that we should be kissing cheeks. Leaving her hand in limbo, I went for her left cheek, and successfully made contact. As I went to repeat the action on her right cheek, she had already begun to move away from me, I think recoil is too strong a word, but seeing me pouting at thin air and realising that I was making a fool of myself, she rescued the situation by returning to where she had been standing so I could complete the traditional welcome.

Undeterred by the less than perfect start to proceedings, I shouted again, "How are you!" It did not even sound like a question, which is probably why she simply nodded slightly and went to collect her suitcase from the car. Now in the house, I was at a loss as to how to make our new servant feel at ease in our home, so while Helen filled in the conversational gaps by jabbering away at her about something in French, I moved from room to room, sweating, picking up things and putting them back again for no obvious reason, occasionally saying "good", "right" and "hmm" to no one in particular. As it was unlikely that their dialogue would soon move on to a question about the location of our trolleys, I decided to leave them to it and hovered in the background drinking a can of Stella from the fridge, which might have looked like I was trying to convey an appreciation of Continental beverages, but which in reality did nothing more than make me look like a British holidaymaker in Tenerife. The poor girl no doubt expected me at any moment to hurl a chair through the window and start shouting "Get yer tits out!" at her, "for the lads".

I did, however, eventually gain the upper hand. I asked her how the ferry trip had been and she replied that it was fine except that it was cold and windy out on the deck. This sliver of information told me that she was a smoker, for why else would she brave the elements of a night-time Channel crossing in autumn but to enjoy a cigarette? Knowledge being power, I revelled in my control over her when I then asked if she smoked. Being an au pair, she knew she was not meant to smoke, and stuttered "eh... eh..." in a particularly Gallic manner. As she squirmed and visibly attempted to translate the lie she had formed in her head from French to English, I wondered how long I should let this charade continue. I felt like a teacher who had caught a pupil red-handed and was interrogating him with leading questions, knowing full well that the child could not bring himself to admit to the misdemeanour. I was sculpting my role of parent, practising for when in years to come I would confront the boy on his own indiscretions. At the second round of "eh... eh..." I decided to climb down from my high horse and put the girl out of her misery. I told her it was fine for her to smoke, so long as she did not do so in the house. The look of relief and thankfulness on her face as I nodded on authoritatively confirmed that I was the master of the house and she was merely the help.

One might suspect that the worst aspect of living with the au pair was my failure to find justification for the use of the word pampelmousse, which I wanted to do because I liked the sound of it. As I did not like watermelon, I could hardly walk up to her and say "Je voudrais un pampelmousse". At best she would think, "Why has this tosser just come up to me and demanded a watermelon?" At worst she would happen to have a watermelon among her things and produce the item for me all cut up on a plate and ready to eat. No, the worst aspect of our new arrangements was that I no longer had only the boy sleeping with a bit of plasterboard between his small head and the loudest toilet in the world, for the au pair's bedroom also happened to share a wall (a very thin wall) with the bathroom. If my bodily functions had not been restricted before, they certainly were now, as the last thing I wanted was for the staff to walk out citing amplified bottom noises in her agency's exit interview. Eventually though, something had to give, and that something was my derriere. As they say, when you've got to go, you've got to go, and I found myself needing to go rather badly some time during the au pair's first Tuesday. I did not know if it was the Greggs sausage roll complaining in my nether regions or the Polish falafel wrap from yesterday, but it wanted out regardless of the fact that the boy's slave was ensconced in her room, merely feet from the trumpet box. I huffed and I puffed like the four winds, but soon knew that it was no use keeping everything bottled up; the devil was in me, and some bastard of a priest was driving him out. I rushed to the bathroom and in a single motion closed the saloon doors, pulled down my undergarments and sat upon the throne. At this moment the music that had been wafting from the au pair's room stopped. I had only seconds to spare as I thumped my brain trying to think of a way to disguise the foul noises that lay inside me with brown kinetic energy. I considered belting out Land of Hope and Glory, or even Rule Britannia, but neither was appropriate in the circumstances. For a start, I did not know all the words to either song, so most of the passages would have had to be hummed, which would have made me sound like a defecating Winnie-the-Pooh. Also, I had yet to ascertain the au pair's political leanings, and surely only the most patriotic and conservative warble "How shall we extol thee, who are born of thee" while pebbledashing the porcelain – I did not want to frighten the poor girl into thinking I was a member of the BNP or Front National. I considered drowning out the horrible hubbub that was about to occur with something more modern that she would relate to. But like those moments when one wanders aimlessly around the aisles of the record store, having forgotten the reason for going there, the only pop song I could think of was No Limit by 2 Unlimited, and it did not seem appropriate to holler "No no, no no no no, no no no no, no no there's no limit!" as my innards plopped and sputtered around me. Thus it was that, in the silence of the echo chamber, I crossed myself like a good Catholic, muttered "Fortune favours the brave" and let all hell break loose.

It was the first time I had heard my bottom whistle, and the au pair spent much of the rest of the day in her room.

When she did emerge from her hiding place, I commented that the weather was particularly unpleasant out. She nodded in agreement, but when she added "It is windy", I was uncertain whether she was referring to the inclement conditions outside the house or those inside my trousers. While ruminating on this, I suddenly had the urge to try something out on the girl, whose name was Noemie (pronounced no em ee). I wanted to say to her, apropos of nothing, "Noemie knowing you, aha!", before I realised that Alan Partridge was probably unheard of in France, and I had no idea of the status of Abba among eighteen-year-old European girls. Had Mamma Mia! reignited the popularity of the Swedish quartet in France or were they old hat? I did not know. I could have Googled "Abba France popular now", but frankly, I could not be bothered. So, we had no common ground. I remembered the story that someone told me about Silvester Stallone – that the Rambo actor was a prima donna on set, and one of his demands was that no one in his entourage was allowed to look at him; if he made eye contact with the make-up artist, she was fired on the spot. I felt like that make-up artist, and the au pair was Silvester Stallone. I skulked around her looking at the floor, and even during our brief interlocutions made my eyes stare at something over her shoulder, or else I picked up the nearest object and implied I was examining it. I had read that it was common for fathers to feel uncomfortable around the au pair, and that they barely dared look at them for fear of being accused by their wives of perversion or, worse, actual adultery. But I was not avoiding looking at the boy's slave in an enactment of meek chastity, I was just scared that if I saw her face, I would realise that it was laughing at me, or, worse, staring on in horror.

Even before she arrived, she made me feel uncomfortable, although admittedly this was through no fault of her own. I was at work, having left the boy's mother and his paternal grandparents in charge of rearranging the spare room in preparation for the au pair's arrival. This involved the moving of the bed to a more favourable position, and the transition of my junk from under the spare bed to somewhere else. I was just finishing my lunch when I received a text message from Helen saying “Your parents have found your porn collection". This, of course, made me feel uneasy, but worse was to come. That evening I was informed that my father, picking up the DVD case of Sweet Black Cherries, had remarked to Helen: "It's like doing it to a Brillo pad." My mother then interjected with: "Put it down, Mark, you've got plenty of those at home." It was with this information in my head that I sat down to dinner with Helen and my parents, hoping to God that the conversation would not touch on scourers or anything related to the colour black. I had been fully exposed. I might as well have dressed for dinner wearing nothing but a sock on my willy.

To make matters worse, I finished typing the previous sentence and began to contemplate making a cup of tea when I detected a presence behind me. I turned around. There was the au pair, staring at the computer screen over my shoulder, reading the words ‘nothing but a sock on my willy’. She coughed. I coughed. "I go pick up Kingsley," she said. "Yes," I replied. "Go and get him."

ii
Two swallows do not a summer make, so the saying goes, and one son does not a poet make, so I now discovered. Having been nurtured on AA Milne and Roald Dahl, whose classic works were inspired by their children, I felt the need to create my own work of fiction for the boy. I could invent the next Christopher Robin, or a latter-day Big Friendly Giant, something the boy could read when he was older and say, “My dad wrote that.” Except that he wouldn't, because the best idea I could come up with was a story about a working labrador who, behind the back of his severely disabled owner, runs his house by day as a coffee shop, called Starbarks, and by night a bar, called All Bark One. So I turned my hand to poetry, and with the aim of devising a witty nursery rhyme, came up with this masterpiece:

The policeman gave the woman his hat,
Just you fancy that – he gave her his hat!
"Tell me copper why you gave her your hat!"
Cooed the pigeon to the copper below.
"'Cause a child inside pressed on her tum so,
She needed to go – listen to her splat
In my hat, my hat, my policeman's hat."

I was not sure whom I thought this was aimed at, and both children and perverts seemed like potential target markets. At the end of the day, I had written a nursery rhyme about public urination. I imagined the conversation in which a publisher asked me what I had written and I explained it was a little ditty about a policeman who allowed a woman to wee in his hat; even in my head, this conversation was a short one, and the publisher ended it by putting down the phone and calling the police – the real police, not the abettors of water sports described in the rhyme.

The boy would have to do something really special to inspire me to write my way into literary history.

iii
From the day the boy popped out until his ninth month on Earth, I had spent most of the time either fully bearded or engaged in the act of growing a beard. The result was that his impression of me was of a hairy man, a man with facial hair, which was sometimes short and sometimes long, often out of control and on special occasions trimmed into a semblance of neatness. Then he – the boy, not the beard – grew to the stage where he found entertainment in the practice of touching the faces of his parents. For me this meant I received a gentle stroking of my facial furniture when the boy was placid, and a vigorous tugging of it when he was feisty. It is a compliment to Helen's hairless face that she did not experience the same pleasure when the boy was friendly, or suffer the same molestation when he was boisterous. For the boy, then, my frontispiece was a plaything, but this is not why I consigned my fuzzy experiment to the barber shop floor of history.

Let me tell you something about the death of my beard.

Soon after the liberation of my chin follicles, I was quite pleased with the result: the hair was acting as a perfect cover for the double chin I inherited from my grandmother, and it fermented a willing illusion that I was entering the realms of manhood previously explored by the likes of Tom Selleck, Carlito's Way-era Al Pacino, and Father Christmas. But then I noticed a remarkable phenomenon. Bearded strangers were smiling at me on the street, like we were masons greeting each other secretly through the covert hail of the lip caterpillar. One gentleman in Hammersmith was particularly disturbing. I was waiting at a zebra crossing, and he was standing at the opposite traffic lights – spreading his gob, like a fool. My chin-warmer at this stage was not outwardly amusing, and indeed was not eliciting grins from other members of the general public. The hairy idiot was happy to see me because he thought he recognised a new member of his club: like he was Ernesto 'Che' Guevara, and I was Fidel Castro; the number 295 bus parked up nearby was the Granma yacht, waiting to sail us from Mexico to Cuba to instigate a 50-year social revolution.

I wanted out of this tacit acceptance into the realm of the bearded man, so I determined to style my tongue-tickler in a manner that would tell such gentlemen: yes, I have facial hair, but no, kind, smiling sir with a beard, I am not 'one of you' and reserve the right to remove my hirsuteness at any point in the future without warning or regret. I retrieved my Gillette and lathered up. Perhaps making the moustache less handlebar would deter the interest of other beardos? While convincing myself that I was Magnum PI, not Freddy Mercury RIP, I malshaved a strip of face. Must even it up, make it symmetrical. A bit off the other side. Still wonky. Shave off a bit more...
Having washed the foam from my cheeks, I surveyed my creation. I looked like an Elvis-Hitler – a mutton-chopped and toothbrush moustachioed singing-dictator hybrid. Could I go to work looking like the King and the leader of the Third Reich had been zapped through Jeff Goldblum's Fly Machine? Was Burning Love a subtle nod to the Holocaust?
Troubled by these thoughts, I whipped the remaining fuzz from my face.

Thus the boy awoke one morning to find his father figure, his role model and his guide smooth of visage. Now when he stroked and patted my face, he gave me a look as if to say, "You, sir, have the face of a lady", and was generally rather dismissive. After all, there was nothing to grab onto, except of course my nose, but, to be honest, a nose is a poor substitute for a bristling beard, if grabbing clumps of the stuff and yanking it out is your game. I tried to imagine what this must have felt like for him. Perhaps he now knew what Tony Blair went through when Peter Mandelson shaved off his moustache.

This situation with the beard only added to a worry that had been troubling me for some time: that the boy did not look at me as his father, king and god, but instead thought that I was just another baby. This thought first occurred to me in the bath. Having been bathed by me as per tradition, the boy was retrieved by his mother from the tub, in which I still sat, watching on. Enrobed in his bath towel and in the arms of his mother, the boy looked down on me as I sat there, thigh deep in the water, and gave a sneer. He was saying, "Ha! Mother prefers me to you for she has taken me from the bath first. Now I shall dine on milk while you wallow in the tepid water." This impression of his, that we were both babies (to his credit, he was half right) was augmented when Helen got me into the practice of waving at him whenever he was about to leave the room. The purpose behind this was to encourage him to wave, but it meant that now I was not only sitting in the bath looking sheepish – because the water was at a less than optimal temperature for a man to enjoy and most of my body parts were exposed – but also waving like a gaudy mechanical cat in the window of a Thai restaurant. This might have made me seem a bit Thai, but it also made me seem utterly babyish. No one waves at someone when they are only three feet away; this was an absurd practice.

Making matters worse was what happened after the boy was gathered in the middle of the night to feed on his mother. The boy, who as he ate saw me laid beside his mother (facing towards her for warmth), thought, I am sure, that I was not asleep but having a nibble on one of the baps myself – because it was time for all the babies in the world to have their midnight feast, and I was as hungry as the rest of them. This explains why he paused in his sucking every so often to fix upon me a look of obstinate defiance. He was saying, "Ho! The breast in my mouth is bigger than the titty in yours. I am drinking the most milk and it is the creamiest too." I was too tired to argue with him so I turned over and went to sleep.

The fact remained though that although I had shaved off my beard for good reasons, it was confusing for both the boy and me. So, the big question on everyone's lips was whether I regretted removing the fuzz from my face. Yes, I had quit the underworld of the bearded man, but I had added to the boy's impression that I was just another baby. Thus there was an element of regret there, but it was certainly not the biggest in my long and varied career as a man. There was the time, for instance, when at the age of 18 I went on holiday with my parents to somewhere in the Caribbean. I was young and naive, especially so when a woman wearing a rather slight bikini appeared beside my sun lounger. She complimented the book I was reading (Howard Marks' Mr Nice, which is rubbish) and crouched down so her head reached the level of mine. She started talking about how she had just met my parents at the bar and they had told her I was studying journalism. I noticed she had recently been swimming because a pool of water was collecting on the hot floor below her crotch and around her feet. She told me she was a journalist and would be happy to give me some advice – not now though, but later, in her room, where she had a pen and paper and a bed. She told me her room number, rose and padded off to the pool. As I watched her swimming about I thought, "She's the wrong side of forty but I'd really like to screw her. However, there's no way she'd be interested in me. And I'm not going to her room – I'm on holiday and the last thing I want to talk about is my homework." Only many years later, I think I was in my late twenties, did I recall this incident and conclude: you fool, she gave you her room number for Christ's sake! This, then, is why these pages cannot be mistaken for lost chapters of Giacomo Casanova's Histoire de Ma Vie. It is also why, in the grand scheme of things, the boy's reaction to the loss of my beard was small-fry.

iv
The boy received a gift in the form of what can generically be described as a baby walker. It was essentially an upright trolley with wheels and a handle that the boy could push around. Attached to its front was a box of tricks that featured buttons and switches and nobs and nozzles in many colours which played noises and songs when pressed. Every time this machine was turned on, it sounded rather pleased with itself – a dog yapped twice before a woman sang: "Hello puppy calling me I want to play with you, let's have fun together as we learn our ABC."

As I heard this uplifting ditty many times a day, many days a week, it got lodged in a part of my brain I had no access to. I would be walking to the shop to get some milk. I passed an old woman with her dog, which barked at me: "Ute! Ute!" Suddenly I was continuing my journey while singing "Hello puppy calling me I want to play with you..." in my head in an annoying American accent. While in the shop trying to remember if I should be buying full-fat or semi-skimmed milk, someone's mobile phone started playing a tune, and I nearly said out loud: "Puppy says 'Clap your hands'." And I was close to putting down the carton of milk I was holding so that I could better clap my hands as instructed. Later, while paying, I was pretty sure that I actually wiggled my bottom, instinctively, when the cash register opened.

With all its whirring controls, spinning fruit and plinky-plonk electronic sound effects, the boy's machine was like a one-armed bandit on wheels. I searched the back of it to see if the stated manufacturer was Ladbrokes, but couldn't find it. Of course not, they had made it quite clear with their pushchair-unfriendly doors and vociferous staff that they were against gambling babies.

Then we were in the car on a roundabout and I nearly had to pull over and stop because all I could think of were the words, spoken over the kind of noise a Catherine wheel might make, "Twisting and turning around and around." As we drove on, Helen informed me that we had taken the wrong turning. "Let's wiggle," I replied.

To be fair, though, I preferred all this to Michael Barrymore's bleeding anus.

v
Having an au pair had many advantages, including a newfound ability for Helen and I to go out in the evening, unencumbered by the lack of a babysitter. Unfortunately, people who knew we now had an au pair started inviting us to dinner parties, and we could no longer use the boy as an excuse to not attend, or to at least leave early. So it was that I discovered myself being herded into a room one evening, handed a glass of wine and left to mingle with my fellow guests, most of whom were doing a better job than me at hiding the fact that they would rather be somewhere else. For me, that somewhere else was the safety of my own home, and as I sipped the beverage in my hand and smiled inanely at some prattling fool, I envied the au pair, who we were paying to do exactly what I wanted to be doing at that moment – that is, sitting on the sofa in our house watching rubbish television and stalking people on Facebook.

Soon the horror dawned on me that everyone in the room was a parent. This was likely a deliberate ploy when the host devised the evening, thinking perhaps that the fact that we had all spawned would provide a common ground, as if parents were like the patrons of Alcoholics Anonymous meetings who need to be with fellow addicts in order to open up. It would not have been contrary to the evening if, after all the guests had arrived, we were sat on chairs arranged in a circle and encouraged to introduce ourselves one by one – "Hello, my name is John, and I am a parent… Hello, my name is Clare, and I am a parent" – with claps of applause greeting each confession.

Things did not much improve when the conversation was diverted away from the fact that we were all parents, which meant we had children, which are expensive, and woe are we. The gentleman sat to my right, who to my disgust I learned was called Chris, ingratiated himself by turning to me and saying: "You're ill at ease, aren't you. I can tell you don't like being in a room of strangers. You're ill at ease. You don't know where to look or what to say." This made me feel rather ill at ease, and I did not know what to say. "I've just been talking to your girlfriend," he continued. "She's wonderful: funny, attractive, interesting. What is she doing with you?" I surveyed the man's patterned shirt, which betrayed his paunch and burgeoning breasts and was evidently intended for a model many years his junior, such as me. "I like your shirt," I told the fool, who I now noticed was looking at me with unconcealed malice. "You're so cool," he resumed. "You walked in here ill at ease. Why be ill at ease when now you are the cool man. Why is your girlfriend with you?" "I like your glasses," I replied, in reference to the faux-trendy transparent frames wedged into his meaty, glowing face. "They are not as good as yours," he said. Then, after taking a swig of whisky and plonking the receptacle onto the table, he added: "You've got a centre parting, your glasses are aggressive, your shirt has a penguin stitched into the right cuff, I am married but open to offers male or female."

I turned my attention to the gentleman sitting to my left, who was busy telling his other neighbour that he had bought his flat in Chelsea a number of years ago for seventy-thousand pounds and it was probably worth, what now, four-hundred-thousand? He was completely bald like Duncan Goodhew, and I spent some considerable time wondering if he actually was Duncan Goodhew.

I stood up and decided to mingle. "And what do you do?" asked someone arriving in front of me. He said it as Prince Charles might ask the question of a guest at a special event attended by the Royal Family. The question hung in the air between us as I asked myself, "Does Duncan Goodhew have children?" The au pair would now be sitting in front of Come Dine With Me, tucking in to our big bar of Cadbury's Caramel, the lucky bitch. I looked around the room and imagined I could smell the thoughts of my fellow parents bobbing around in their heads like festering turds in a row of poorly flushed toilets. The Prince of Wales was still standing in front of me and I considered how I should win him over, lest he accuse me of being an ill-at-ease mute. I was on my early morning paper-round once at the age of thirteen when a deer ran into the deserted road just ahead of me. Many years later I watched The Queen, in which Her Majesty, played by Helen Mirren, has a similar experience. Elizabeth Regina was not doing a paper-round but engaged in stalking stag when one of the beasts appeared before her, undetected by her fellow hunters. "Shoo, scram… be orf with you," says the Queen, or something like that. I began constructing this tale in my head for Charles's benefit – of how me at the age of thirteen had had a similar experience to a fictional Queen – when I noticed the berk was no longer in my midst but nodding and rolling his eyes at the other Chris, who was opening and shutting his mouth in a horribly wet way. At this moment, the au pair was sitting in our bed, eating my porridge.

I then placed the cherry on the cake by deciding to talk to one of the women. Having learned that a nearby mother had a son with a unique name – let's call him Pluto – I approached one of the women with this opening gambit: "Pluto is a strange name isn't it? Do your children have normal names?" As she prattled her reply into my ear, I spotted Pluto's mother standing a few paces off, looking at me like I had just banged a gong and declared to the room: "Rape? There is no such thing as rape!"

When we arrived home I decided to check on the boy. I opened his door and walked straight into a small wooden trike which rebounded off my ankles and into the radiator. As it clattered to a stop I hopped towards the cot with a muffled "Arghh". The boy sat bolt upright and made it clear that he was unhappy at his rude awakening in the witching hour. I plucked him from his bed and took him into our room, where I placated him with a bottle of left-over milk. I apologised to him for bumbling into his room, but he seemed to have already forgotten about it. As he sucked his way back to sleep, I listened to his mother express her dislike of mixing wine, port and coffee-flavoured tequila into the toilet pan. Thus ended a terrible evening.

On the plus side, the au pair was not asleep in our bed beside a bowl that previously contained porridge.

vi
As we have seen, being a father brought new responsibilities and expectations to bear. To add to these, I was suddenly required to improve on my appearance and general demeanour, despite the fact that time and financial constraints were having a negative effect on both. Whereas before the boy never a bad word was said to me in relation to my attire, countenance and personal hygiene, Helen now started conversations with statements such as "That coat is much to big for you. You look like you are wearing your dad's coat". One evening, the last thing she said to me before falling asleep was "Get a haircut". Sure, she tried to soften the blow by following up with "I love you", but that was rather akin to shooting your dog in the legs before giving it a comforting hug as it lies whimpering, wondering what it had done to so anger its previously benevolent master.

Before the funeral, Helen even advised me to remove my beard, which, she said, "would not be understood" by the older generations present. As the growth of my facial hair had hitherto been actively encouraged by the boy's mother, I found this new instruction startling. As fate would have it, I did in fact shave due to other considerations, so felt no prolonged slight at the newfound need for a smooth face, but I was nonetheless troubled by the accusation that I was wearing my dad's coat and that my haircut was so poor it required comment at bedtime.

On the subject of my countenance, I could have pointed out that I had always been gloomy and disconsolate, that she knew what I was like when she married me, but the problem here was that she had not married me, and scowling at the floor did not exactly corroborate my statement that I was "having a good time" and "everything is OK". Luckily, the experience of the aforementioned dinner party, where Helen had also spent much of the evening at the receiving end of verbal farts, proved me right in the opinion that such social occasions were not all they were cracked up to be. Having endured the accusation of being "anti-social" only days before the party, I now sat on the sofa smugly as Helen, nursing a hangover, vowed never to drink again and described the event as "rubbish". I took this to mean we would never leave the house again, which made me happy, but I was still concerned that my coat made me look like I was buying my clothes second hand from MC Hammer, and that my haircut was worse than the side parting I sported in my school photographs.

Perhaps I deserved these criticisms. I had, after all, compared Helen's snoring to the noise made by a walrus (in mating season) and agreed – why? why!? – that her woollen hat did indeed make her look like Sue Pollard. And I had started breaking wind in bed. But then, so had she.

Around this time, Helen started coming home with items of clothing she had bought for me, unprompted – cardigans, shirts, trousers. Being showered with sartorial gifts had never happened when we were boyless, but now it was a regular occurrence. Justifying her new purchases, she walked into the bedroom one afternoon with one of my favourite shirts, a shirt I referred to fondly as my Disco Shirt. It was more than a few years old, but it had retained its fish-scale-effect sheen. "That's one of my favourites," I said as the shirt shimmered in her hand. "It makes you look like a date rapist," she said, before throwing it into a bin liner destined for the charity shop.

To be fair, my own recent purchases had done little to maintain whatever confidence Helen might have had in my fashion sense. There were, for instance, the braces which, when combined with the pair of trousers two sizes too big for me, made me look, as I pushed the boy along the seafront, like an off-duty clown. "Poor clown," I imagined passers-by commenting to each other as I strode on behind the chair with a rolled-up cigarette hanging from my mouth and the shoes I bought from TK Maxx three years ago disintegrating around my feet. "Poor clown, the recession must have hit him hard," they continued, before going on to lament the general demise of Britain's seaside resorts.

One morning, as I pulled on a pair of pants that ripped into three separate items of underwear around my nether regions, I revealed to Helen that I had bought them seven years ago in Heathrow Airport, having booked a flight to Cuba but forgotten to pack anything. "I must buy you some new pants," she said. And she did. She never would have bought me pants before we were parents. Our relationship had progressed: I was wearing the trousers, but she was choosing them for me.

vii
The elderly and infirm of mind, it has been documented, often treat their pet dogs as if they were children, speaking to them in conversational tones that go beyond the normal man-to-dog commands, and sometimes, in the most extreme cases, dressing them in clothes. "Hello Tiddles, how are you this morning?" they say, as their Welsh terrier rouses itself from its basket, ready for its breakfast and to be dressed in its Tartan pullover. Members of this generation, not always the same ones, also exhibit strange behaviour in their interactions with small children, especially those babies who have yet to master the power of speech. But instead of anthropomorphising their subject, as they do with their dogs, with babies they provide a running commentary on everything the baby is doing, from the point of view of the baby.

So, the boy might pick up a toy and put it in his mouth, and his grandmother would provide the following voiceover: "Yes I just think I'll put this in my mouth to see what it tastes like." She would say this in a different tone of voice from the one she usually used, not exactly trying to impersonate what the boy might sound like if he was able to speak for himself, but nonetheless providing a jaunty narration. "Oh yes I'll just crawl over here to see where the cat's gone." The effect was of being inside an episode of You've Been Framed dedicated to us on that particular Tuesday, but with Omar Sharif, instead of Harry Hill, providing the witty remarks. It was not a particularly good episode of You've Been Framed, and we would not be sent a cheque for two-hundred-and-fifty pounds from ITV for our contribution. "This feels nice," said the grandmother as the boy glided his hand across a piece of soft material. "Yes this is nice and smooth, oh I think I'll just put this in my mouth to see what it tastes like." At this point in the action, of course, the boy had moved on from feeling the material and was now stuffing it into his gob, which is what he invariably did with everything he could get his hands on, the predictability of which required no narration.

This apparent need to orate the boy's possible thoughts reminded me of the Describer, who worked behind the till at my local supermarket. As she scanned my items with the barcode reader, she would minimally, but factually, describe each one as it passed through her hands: "Tomatoes… toilet roll… beans… Jelly Babies…" When this was done, she would tell me the total and ask me how I wished to pay. By card, I told her. I always paid by card. "You're paying by card," she repeated. I gave her my card. "That's your card," she said, putting it into the card reader. As I entered my PIN, as prompted by the reader, the Describer continued: "You're entering your PIN." Finally, the receipt printed, accompanied by the words: "Your receipt is printing." I now wondered if this woman had children, or even grandchildren, and had transferred her desire to narrate their every action to the workplace. She would have been a good contestant on Catchphrase, where the host encouraged participants to "Say what you see".

Now I had made an association between the boy and Catchphrase, whenever the grandmother piped up with "Yes I think I'll stand up here to look out the window", I half expected Roy Walker to ask over a public address system, "What's Mr Chips doing?", before pepping us up with "Fingers on buzzers folks, it's the ready-money round".

For some reason, this also made me instinctively wiggle my bottom.

viii
Helen had come down with a cold and was in bed beside me, coughing. And coughing and coughing and coughing. I did not know what time it was, but it had definitely been more than an hour since I had discarded the Telegraph crossword. Since then, I had been lying in the darkness, drifting into sleep only to be startled by a new bout of coughing.

Until now, this kind of situation would have merited spending the night in the spare bed. In fact, this exact situation still merited spending the night in the spare bed, but there was a problem, in that the spare bed was now occupied by the staff. Neither the au pair nor Helen would react kindly to any attempt by me to reclaim the spare bed at one o'clock in the morning. From Helen's point of view, it simply would not look good if I was discovered the next morning stretched out beside an eighteen-year-old French girl. "Er, your coughing was keeping me awake" would not cut the mustard, and neither would "I got lost on my way back from the bathroom". From the au pair's point of view, my best explanations for my appearance at the foot of her bed in the middle of the night, wearing nothing but a tight-fitting pair of Marks & Spencer boxer shorts, would not have cut the French mustard. Je suis mal de mer (I am seasick) was the nearest my French got to describing my complaint, and throwing in the occasional saucisson (sausage) and la guerre est finie (the war is over) would only make things worse.

I recalled my mother telling me that when father snores, she decamps to one of their three spare bedrooms. Three spare bedrooms. You bastard, I thought. And then I realised that I had called my mother a bastard, which made me feel like a bastard. So, just because I was finding it difficult to get to sleep, I had contemplated infiltrating the au pair's bed (platonically) and called my mother a bastard. The guilt I felt now was immense. If guilt was a 70-stone man, he had let himself into the house, walked up the stairs, entered our bedroom and was now sitting on my face, grinding his hips. The plus-side to this was that I was overcome by the weight of guilt and slept soundly till daybreak.

ix
Only weeks after we introduced the boy to food, he developed what can only be described as an eating disorder. No, he was not forever asking "Does my bum look big in this?" when we put on a new nappy. Nor was he a frequent patron of McDonald's and KFC. His disorder took the form of turning his head away when a spoon of delicious foodstuff was proffered before his mouth, and sealing his mouth shut to ensure no amount of benevolent prodding could force the spoon into it. My mother said he was testing us, which to me seemed unfair, as I did not like tests. In any case, I gave up on this one pretty quickly.

The boy's breakfast routine soon descended into the following farce. I would make up his porridge, which was not the kind of horrible porridge not eaten by the likes of me but yummy porridge with bits of blueberries and other stuff in it eaten by the likes of him. Having gobbled up three spoonfuls of it, the scrumptious pudding turned before our very eyes into a foul gruel, and the boy began his act of turning away his head. At first it took me a while to work out that he was refusing to eat his breakfast, for he was not merely looking away and growling in protest, as one might expect a belligerent child to do. In fact he nonchalantly gazed at items of apparent interest in the room, tricking me into believing that he was simply taking in the sights. He would stare fascinated at the light above the dining room table for many minutes, as if transfixed by its alien glow, or look down from his chair at the sheets of newspaper on the floor, which had been placed there to catch the breakfast jetsam. But he was not taking in yesterday's reports on the refuse collectors' strike in Brighton and Hove, or perusing the letters page in order to gauge local opinion on the proposed changes to cycle lanes.

I had been outsmarted by him, a fact that became apparent when I tried to interrupt his reveries by presenting the fourth spoon. At this he moved his head to a fresh position, still keeping up the pretence of observing an object of interest in the room, such as the inkjet printer on the occasional table or the discarded handbag beneath the radiator. Again I offered him the spoon, this time making "choo choo" noises, hopeful that my rendition of a puff-puff would delight him into opening his mouth to receive the breakfast. It did not work. On the next attempt I attracted his attention by snapping my fingers before gliding the spoon from a high position towards his face, accompanied by a "Neee-owww" noise. My approximation of a swooping propeller plane also failed to elicit an opening of the gob.

I decided to take stock of the situation and reassess my tactics. As the boy now returned to an article on the floor about changes to local planning laws, I wondered what other sounds were emitted by spoons at breakfast time. As far as I knew, their repertoire extended only to trains and planes. The train goes into the tunnel, the plane dives from above. But there must be more. I considered moving the spoon towards the boy's mouth in a see-saw motion while whinnying and neighing, but this seemed to be asking too much of his infant imagination. Adding clipperty-clops did not convince me of the tactic's merits either, as the main problem here was not the sound I intended to make, but the movement of the spoon, which was proving difficult to manoeuvre in a realistic portrayal of a horse.

In the end I thrust the spoon at his mouth while emitting a raucous and prolonged raspberry with my tongue and lips. The boy looked at me like I was an idiot, and returned to his piece on the planning laws. This would not do. I had volunteered to give the boy his breakfast, and so give the boy his breakfast I must. I wondered aloud whether I should hold his nose as the need to breathe would compel the boy to open his mouth, allowing me to deliver the fourth spoon of porridge. Helen, who heard this from the kitchen, was not enthusiastic about this planned approach to getting the boy to feed. The tone of her voice suggested I had recommended a kind of waterboarding technique used by the CIA to force information out of international terrorists.
Instead, then, I got out of my chair and walked around the boy like a moron in a circular egg and spoon race, following his head as it shifted from left to right and up and down. It had now been some while since the third spoonful was gobbled. The boy was testing me, and I was failing the test. What were the answers to the test, that's what I wanted to know. I had tried imitating two forms of transport and considered introducing a horse to proceedings, not to mention the temporary blockage of his nasal passage. Then I realised there was one thing I had not attempted, and it now seemed the most obvious solution of all. I had been a fool, this was bound to work, I had even seen other people do it with their children and it had worked for them.

Making sure the boy was looking at me and not an inanimate object, I dipped his spoon into the bowl of delicious, fortifying porridge, opened wide my mouth and took in the generous helping. My god it was disgusting. The time elapsed with the choo-chooing and potential whinnying had caused the porridge to go cold, and to my disappointment the blueberries were less abundant and flavoursome than they appeared on the side of the box. "Mmm," I mumbled, swallowing down the tepid mush, "Yum, yum." Once again my acting skills were under the spotlight, which the boy was now gazing at with renewed interest as it hung uninterestingly from above the table. I scooped up a helping of breakfast and placed it before his mouth, which, encouragingly, was partially open. He closed it instantly and went to look at the printer. At this point the staff walked in. I relinquished my chair for her, handed her the spoon and left the room with a jaunty "Bon chance", which I had once heard a BBC presenter say to the French golfer Tomas Levet at the start of a big tournament.

If the word 'breakfast' was replaced by 'lunch' and 'dinner', and the porridge in the bowl with sloppy but tasty vegetables, an appreciation would be gained of how this palaver transposed itself to the other main mealtimes of the day.

x
The boy and I became separated at bath when I took the decision that it was time for him to make his own way in the tubby world of suds and plastic ducks, and bathe alone. This decision was not taken lightly. As he approached his tenth month, the boy became increasingly observant of the things and people around him, and increasingly dexterous with his hands. He now knew not to try and grab a bottle of hair conditioner from the side of the bath, having eaten some on a previous occasion, and used his new skills to pick out the items that were designated for his enjoyment and distraction, such as the plastic duck and a waterproof book of animals that squeaked. The book, although giving the impression that crabs, dolphins, sea horses, shell fish and other fruits of the underworld all emitted an ear-piercing shriek when squeezed, was the boy's favourite bath toy for many weeks. He did not seem to mind that my powers of description tended to dissolve in my fug of tiredness. Turning the pages of the book and alighting upon the sea horse, I would forget that a sea horse was called a sea horse and tell the boy that he was observing an illustration of a "water neigh" or an "ocean camel". On one such occasion, I inexplicably described the jelly fish as a "sea melon".

Eventually the boy grew tired of his aquatic education, and this is where our problems began. Now ignoring the book and his boats and bath pipe, the boy took great pleasure in splashing the water about the bath and beyond it. As he had gained a mastery of his hands, this splashing was not a mere pummelling of the surface with his fist – the boy, with cupped palms, was scooping the water and hurling it into the air, as if we were in a sinking dingy and he was determined to save us by returning as much water as possible to the bathroom floor. The difficulty of this situation was that, with his new observance and trance-like interest in the way he was able to fling water in the air, the boy noticed everything and nothing escaped his attention. As I was in the bath with him, my presence, and that of my body parts, were no exception to this rule.
At first, I was able to cope with this situation because the initial object of the boy's fascination were my legs, which he spotted lurking just below the surface like somnolent hippos. Unfortunately for me, these hippos were hirsute to the point that I resembled a half-man half-goat. The boy yanked at the hairs on my thighs and knees, and I discovered something new – that the most painful place from which to have hair tugged is one's thighs and knees. It did not help that on the rare occasions he was successful in removing a few of the hairs that he instantly put them in his mouth. Having already introduced the boy to the taste of hair conditioner, my parental instinct told me that moving him on to my leg fuzz was less than ideal.

Even less ideal was when he turned his attention from the hippos to a much more sinister animal lurking in the soapy depths, that is my trouser snake, which lay in its watery hiding place oblivious to the vicious attack that was soon to befall it. For the boy, perhaps assuming that the creature, like the jelly fish and crab in his book, would squeak in delight, grabbed the snake and throttled it. The snake did not squeak, but its owner did – a sound he continued to emit as he spent the next few moments prising the assassin's grip from the doomed animal.

If I was a dog, I would have licked my wounds, but as I was merely a man, the best I could do was to brush myself down and be thankful that my ordeal was over. Naively, as the boy returned to his splashing game, I considered the incident a one-off, a quirk of fate that happened when my snake was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Oh, the ignorance of man! No sooner had I regained my composure and settled into a watch of the boy as he made merry with the water when something caught his eye. Before my tired brain could cogitate what was occurring, the snake-catcher swivelled his head and focused his stare on the submerged prey. Forgetting his game and determined to kill, the boy struck his hand into the water and grabbed the unsuspecting beast that lay dormant, still stunned from the previous attack. He squeezed it even harder than before as if expecting an even louder squeak to result. He was not disappointed as the roar of ten thousand mice erupted from somewhere deep within me and filled the room. Startled by the noise, the fisherman let go his catch and mercifully watched on as it sunk solemnly to its terrible resting place beneath the frothing suds.

That was the end of the boy's aquatic education, and the last time he would ever take a bath with his father.

xi
Winter was approaching when the boy developed another cold accompanied by a horrible cough. Undeterred by his ailment, and conscious of our being driven slowly mad by a prolonged stay in the house, Helen and I decided to brave the elements and give the boy some fresh air, believing it would do him, and us, some good. Thus we wrapped him up warm, wrapped ourselves up warm, although he looked warmer than us in his chair with his duffle coat and blanket, and stepped outside.

We made for the beach, where among the pebbles I spotted a star fish that had been abandoned on the shore by the retreating tide. I remarked that it was still alive because it looked soft and glistened, unlike the hard and dead star fish I had on my window sill as a child. Helen picked up the animal and declared that she would return it to the sea, so off we set to the foot of the shore, where the froth fingered its way up the stones.

Although ignorant that I had ended my part in the boy's aquatic education, Helen delayed the star fish's repatriation to the sea by placing it on the blanket wrapped over the boy's lap. For Helen this was another photo opportunity, and she produced a camera seemingly from nowhere – she had no bag and there was not a single pocket in any of her clothing – and began taking shots of the boy and his new creature. For me this was an opportunity to reflect on my bathing experiences with the boy, the good times and the bad, the wet and the painful, and I regretted that this evening ceremony had come to an end.

For the boy this was an opportunity to prove that he was an inquisitive fellow, and that his curiosity was often to the detriment of nearby eyes, spectacles and other parts of the body, whether the body belonged to man, woman or echinoderm. The latter was the latest potential casualty, as the boy now reached out for the star fish and, grabbing onto one of its five arms, began to lift it towards his open mouth. Mindful of the fact that I had already overseen the boy's consumption of hair conditioner and a generous portion of my leg hair, I looked on in horror at the scene being played out before me, but I stood rooted to the spot and did nothing, for I was also intrigued to discover whether he would actually go through with his proposal and try to eat the star fish. We would not find out, however, because Helen had also spotted what was happening and sensibly intervened. She managed to wrestle the beast from the boy's grasp just as it reached his lips, and he and I both looked on as Helen placed it carefully in a shallow pool.

Our adventure with the sea star over, we returned to the Esplanade and continued our walk to nowhere in particular, saying "woof woof" for the benefit of the boy whenever a dog approached, and pointing out to him the murmuration of starlings above the shell of the burnt-down pier. Soon, though, his coughing became more frequent and severe than we had ever known it, and we pulled up at a café to take in a mug of tea and a choc-ice before our venture home.

As Helen nibbled her choc-ice and I sipped at my tea, we took it in turns to hold up a bottle of milk to the boy's mouth, so that he too could gain sustenance after his toil with the sea monster. I had barely taken a few sips, and Helen’s choc-ice was largely intact, when the boy pushed the bottle away from him and opened wide his mouth. "He looks like he is going to be sick," I thought. I was about to give him the benefit of the doubt, and began to wonder if in fact he was performing an impression of a bird, when a jet of white liquid spurted from the boy's throat, through his open mouth and onto the blanket across his lap. This violent regurgitation seemed to last for a full hour, but of course that would be impossible, and the quantity was impressive, if one is impressed by the vast quantity of part-digested milk with bits of lunch floating in it. I estimated, as the evacuation came to a close and the jet of liquid became a less startling but steady trickle from his mouth, that the boy had presented us with at least a pint of foul-smelling sick.

The projectile vomit had initially landed on the blanket over his lap, but this sturdy quilt could only absorb so much sick so quickly, and soon the stuff had pooled on the sodden top sheet before splashing the continuing supply of juice up the boy's chest. This pebbledashing was then supplemented by the dregs that flowed steadily from the boy's chin, down his neck and into the inside of his clothing, and I learned my first lesson of childrearing all over again: if the boy looks like he is going to be sick, he is probably going to be sick.

After a few ahs and ums I spotted a dog trotting towards us and was going to say "woof woof" before I checked myself – I did not want to give the dog the impression that the boy had just served up its dinner and would be happy for it to lick him clean. Later, I realised this would not have been a bad solution, as it would have been an efficient way to mop up the boy as well as demonstrating a kindness to animals. What's more, it would have been the more environmentally friendly option, for now I found myself dabbing at the boy with baby wipes, and cursing the makers of the baby wipes for producing them in the size of small tissues when what was needed here was an absorbent beach towel. We must have used ten-thousand baby wipes in our effort to cleanse the boy, and afterwards he was still sporting, and smelling of, the previous contents of his obviously enormous stomach.

It was in this state of ill-repair that the boy was pushed home, and when we got there it was time for his dinner. I was not in the mood for trying to turn spoons into galloping horses, and the boy was not much in the mood for eating. After twenty minutes of the usual stalemate, I had managed to cram ten spoonfuls of delicious foodstuff into his gob and was about to give in and go and run his bath when the boy fixed on me a curious look, opened wide his mouth and with not so much as a "Would you excuse me I think I'm going to be sick" let forth a brown torrent of sloppy matter.
The ten spoonfuls had evidently multiplied in his never-ending stomach. There was pints of the stuff, on the table, soaking into his clothes, collecting on the floor and, somehow, matting the hair on the back of his head. The sick was everywhere, but worse was the fact that there was so much of it. It was as though the boy had been storing up every bottle of milk and every meal he had eaten since birth for this very moment. I resigned myself to the inevitability of having to come into contact with the vomit and plucked the boy from his chair. As I took him upstairs for a thorough hosing down in the bath, which he would endure alone, bits of regurgitated matter transferred themselves from the boy to my clothing. This was disappointing largely because I had hoped to get one more day's use out of my maroon cardigan.

Later, as I lay on my own in the bath, I reflected on something my brother once told me with his head down the toilet – that when someone is sick, they are always sick three times. I had just completed massaging Head & Shoulders anti-dandruff shampoo into my hair when Helen called me from the bedroom. The boy had been sick for the third time, all over her, but she would have to write her own book if she wanted people to know about that.

xii
We were running out of money as we discovered that when people say children are expensive, they are not lying or merely repeating a well-worn phrase but speaking pearls of wisdom. We had no pearls, so we could not sell those. Naturally for a man in this situation, I found myself fantasising about how we could make the boy pay his own way.

I had recently read some Charles Dickens and wondered if we could send the boy out to work as a chimney sweep's assistant. After all, he frequently made for the cast-iron fireplace in our living room when given the liberty to scramble about on all fours, so the idea had evidently not escaped the boy himself. We always stopped him on his approach to the gratings, in fear that he would injure himself upon them, as they were sharp and he was soft, but I was certain that given free rein he would lift himself into the hearth and clamber up the flume. He would do this just for the fun of it, and giving him a brush would only add to his enjoyment as he found entertainment in all utensils either given to him or stolen by him. I was worried about his cough though, and exposing him to soot did not seem to be fair. There was also the chance that he would get stuck somewhere out of reach within the chimney, which was too narrow for a man to enter. On the assumption that we did get him out though, I could use this to my advantage and cite the narrowness of the chimney as evidence that Father Christmas would not be visiting our house this year, as he was fat and the boy's parents were poor.

I considered farming him out as a child model, but babies only advertise baby food and nappies. As the boy had a well-documented eating disorder, advertising baby food would be out of the question as he would simply turn his head away in disgust, which was not likely to be the image sought after by the brand in question. Even when food was successfully deposited into his mouth, he often munched on it for a few moments only to let it reappear at his lips, where it gathered in a mush before falling to his chin, from which it dangled before falling to the next nearest surface. Again, this was not likely to be the required image, and a soundtrack featuring me braying and choo-chooing would probably not help much either.

As for advertising nappies, I just did not like the idea. Changing the boy under normal house conditions was increasingly becoming akin to a task on The Crypton Factor, on account of his persistent attempts to avoid being changed, which included instantly turning over on to his stomach when put on his back and, when put on his back again, waiting until the second and final strap of the nappy was very nearly fastened before undoing the whole thing by rolling over onto his stomach, standing up and threatening to walk off the edge of the changing mat and into the abyss beyond.
(He could not actually walk yet, but stepping off things high up with utter disregard for the consequences was definitely a skill he had acquired – only recently I had interrupted a dive from the changing mat by catching the boy by his ankles, a move which ended in him swinging upside down with his head an inch from the floor. He did not appreciate the potentially lifesaving task I had performed and was soon swinging upside down with his head an inch from the floor while crying. That will teach him, I thought. Hours later, we found ourselves in the same position when the boy attempted to repeat his daredevil act. This time, as the boy swung from his ankles, looking at the floor as it shifted below him, crying, I said to him in stern terms that "This is what happens when you walk off things that are very high up". He did not seem to be listening, though, and I knew he could not understand a word I was saying.)

So, changing the boy's nappy had become a challenge that would test the most dexterous and patient of fathers. Carrying out this task under the hot lights of a film studio did not appeal, no matter how many complimentary cans of Dr Pepper and bags of Big Eat Quavers I imagined the runners would procure for me.

Child labour, then, in both its legal and illegal forms, was out of the question. Perhaps I should write a book, I thought, and it sounded like a good idea until I realised that even when concerned with the innocent subject of childrearing, the narration would contain references to Yoko Ono's fanny, and my bottom.

There were only two options left: either make old people pay for the privilege of cooing at the boy and telling us their inane stories; or let men pay to have sex with the au pair. The first of these had insurmountable problems, the worst being that we would have to listen to old people give us hopelessly out-of-date and frankly rubbish advice on childrearing, such as it is OK to let boys smoke after six months and that girls must have everything in pink or the BBC will stop showing repeats of Last Of The Summer Wine. Furthermore, old people were likely to be even poorer than us, and they had grown used to prodding babies and disseminating their views to strangers free of charge.

As for turning the au pair into a hooker, this, like sending the boy up the chimney, was a mere fantasy. Yes, if I was a pimp it would make it more likely that my dream of Nathaniel springing to life and referring to me as "boss man" would come true. But knowing my luck the whole affair would end with the au pair becoming a second Belle de Jour and selling more copies of her book than mine because hers contained frequent references to sexy sex and, ah, eBay. Why did I not think of that before?

xiii
The bad advice disseminated by other people left me flummoxed. There was the time, for instance, when Helen's father and I, left in charge of the boy, asked ourselves if we could nip to the pub for a quick pint. My contribution to the plan was to enquire whether any of the local public houses looked kindly upon the presence of small people in babygrows. The grandfather, though, rebuffed me for even thinking that we might take the boy into the bar. He suggested we should leave him in the car outside the pub. "He will be fine, won't he?" he asked. I replied that the boy was only a few months old and we could not leave him in the car alone, even for the short time it would take us to down a pint. He suggested providing him with a bag of crisps, "or something to nibble on", in order to distract him from his proposed predicament. I pointed out that hitherto the boy had tasted nothing but his mother's milk, and a sudden progression of his diet to a cheese and onion potato-based snack would be distressful to him, although the bag itself might entertain him for a short while.
Concerned that the latter part of my statement might encourage the grandfather to propose leaving the boy in the car with an empty bag of crisps, I quickly added that going to the pub at all was out of the question. Seeing that the grandfather was disappointed with my conclusion, I further added, in order to make it appear that I was constrained by modern best practice in childcare and not by my own over-protectiveness, that we could have left the boy in the car if we were living in the 1970s. This successfully diverted the grandfather's attention away from the pub and onto the grander theme of the decline of risk in modern society and the pursuit of bureaucratic health and safety laws.

Some time later it was reported in the news that a petting zoo had been closed down after children contracted the e coli virus from infected animals. Without being urged to offer his views on the subject, the grandfather, a country man, suggested that the shutting of the zoo just because a few children had become ill was an outrageous overreaction on the part of the authorities. When Helen pointed out that one of the children had suffered kidney failure as a result of the virus, the grandfather instructed her to take the boy to our nearest petting zoo and let him embrace some animals with e coli. That would stick it to The Man, he no doubt thought. No it would not, we definitely thought, striking the pub car park and petting zoos from our to-do list.

The bad advice that really riled was the one most frequently given, seemingly by everyone, even people without children, which was to let the boy cry when in the midst of a prolonged vocal protest because, eventually, he would stop crying and go to sleep. Contrary to the wisdom of these wise men and women, however, the boy did not stop crying and go to sleep if left to his own devices, so taking their advice involved listening to the boy scream blue murder for eternity, as 'eventually' was not on his agenda. Telling someone to let a baby cry is one of those things that is easier said than done, regardless of whether or not it is the best thing to do. It is equivalent to telling someone to let the postman prod them through the letter box with a hot poker because if they just stand there and take it, he will get bored and go away eventually.

"Well, I just don't know how you survived," huffed Omar Sharif when we questioned the quality of her pearls of wisdom. She insisted, for instance, that we should not try to be quiet in the presence of the boy when he was sleeping because exposing him to noise would condition him to it, so no amount of hubbub would bother him. This advice was plainly wrong, as I proved by vacuum cleaning the upstairs of the house while the boy was in bed. Giving Sharif the benefit of the doubt and suspending my disbelief in her theory, I threw caution to the wind and turned the power of the cleaner to its highest setting. The machine efficiently sucked the dust and debris from the carpets and emitted an impressive whirring noise like a jet engine. However, neither my appreciation of the vacuum's usefulness as I watched my toe-nail clippings spin around its central chamber, nor my hypnotic trance induced by the power of the engine at my command, were enough to hide from me the fact that the boy was now crying his heart out.

I abandoned the cleaning, wound the vacuum's power cord around the plastic clips on its side designated for the purpose, and went to boy. He had set his lungs to their highest setting, and as I comforted him I marvelled at my foolishness with the Hoover. This is what happens when you listen to other people instead of thinking for yourself, I thought. What next? Would I, inspired by a black-and-white photograph of matrons brandishing Chesterfields in a 1950s maternity ward, turn the boy's nursery into the designated smoking room? Install a pool table and a one-armed bandit, and attach one of those claw machines from pleasure arcades right above the cot so players could try their luck at grabbing one of the boy's teddies as he slept among them?

I wondered if our parents were issuing us with these commands in personal acts of revenge, to get us back for all the trouble we had caused them as children.

xiv
One consequence of having children is that the associated stress tends to expose any weaknesses in the parents' relationship. Fortunately, the genesis of the boy did not bring to light any flaws in his parents' cohabitation. I did, however, having given up trying to work out how the cleared funds in my bank account would pay for the following month's rent, which was twice as much as the balance – a task similar to attempting to fit a square peg into a round hole – ask the boy's mother why she had deemed it necessary to purchase a stuffed stag's head mounted on a plaque.

The quality of the taxidermy was poor, and the stag had seen better days. His hair was falling out, which meant we soon had a nearly bald stag's head mounted on a plaque. The sight of an almost hairless stag's head was not a pleasing one, and again, remembering The Queen in The Queen, I encouraged the beast to make good its escape before further harm came to it: "Shoo, scram, be orf with you." Being dead, the stag did not follow my command, so I asked Helen what she planned to do with it. "I am going to paint it pink," she said.

There was no response to this so I merely pointed out that the stag was too enormous to fit anywhere in the house. In fact, the only conceivable place it could be mounted was the outside of the front door, and displaying it there would inevitably dissuade well-wishers from calling on us and give the impression that we were running a Masonic lodge. Helen was obviously already aware of this and had positioned the animal in a corner of the back garden. She had also taken the precaution of shrouding the beast in an old blanket, in case the appearance of the ruminant's severed head startled the neighbours.

As the beast rotted between its antlers, Helen revealed that she had her own questions for me to answer. Why, for instance, had I started wearing Velcro shoes, which made me look "like a retard". I had located the footwear where Helen had hidden them and, remembering how easy it was to put them on and how comfortable they were to walk in, rescued the lost items. When I persisted in stepping out in the shoes, Helen repeated her desire that I take them to a charity shop, but I ignored her. Then one morning I noticed Helen wince at the crackle of a Velcro tag being ripped open. As each of the remaining three tags were opened, her wince became a glare in three stages, but I was taking too much pleasure in the putting on of my shoes to be bothered. "I hate those shoes," she said as I stood up to my full height, proud and confident in my favourite shoes. Would you prefer them if I painted them pink? I thought of saying by way of a riposte, but decided it was a bad idea.

So we were as solid as a rock. I was Paul Burrell to her Princess Diana, not that I planned to steal her dresses in the event of her untimely death and wear them around the house. And she was Margaret Thatcher to my Denis, not that I planned to dedicate my leisure to playing golf and drinking gin, as I was too busy sweeping stag hair from the kitchen floor.

xv
Believing I had given up too easily, I devised a fresh attempt to conquer the boy's eating disorder. Knowing that he loved drinking water, at dinner time I placed a beaker on the table just out of his reach, and let the boy take in the presence of the thing as I stirred his supper. I scooped up a spoonful of the stuff and presented it to his mouth.

By now he wasn't even humouring me by taking in a few mouthfuls before engaging in his hunger protest. As the spoon neared his mouth he shut tight his lips and turned his head to the side defiantly. It was no use bothering with my special noises or following the ever-changing location of the mouth with the spoon as this only elicited doleful whinging from the non-eater, who, when pressed on the matter, quickly progressed to distressed wailing. This is where the beaker came in. I nudged the receptacle to within reach of the boy's hands, and he excitedly grabbed hold of its handles. Then, as he raised the beaker to his mouth and opened wide to receive the spout, I pushed a spoonful of supper into the gaping hole.

It worked. The boy swallowed the food and washed it down with the water. He did not look overly pleased about the situation, but I had eventually outsmarted the ten-month-old and felt pretty good about it. This ploy continued to work for another five or so spoonfuls, and when Helen checked up on us I was able to report that I had vanquished the boy and reclaimed my place as master of the dining table.

Yet I had spoken too soon. On the sixth approach the boy took up the beaker as before, but this time, instead of stupidly opening his mouth and leaving it vulnerable to attack from fathers with spoons, he turned away his head and sealed his lips around the spout beyond my reach. I wrestled the beaker from his grip, which was rather difficult as the boy had the strength of seven lions, and placed it back on the table before him. We tried again, and like before he made it impossible for me to get the food into his gob. He had grown wise to my strategy and was taking evasive action. I was humbled that it had taken him only a few minutes to outwit me.

Once more I fought him for possession of the beaker, from which he was drinking as if it contained the elixir of life. He did not appreciate my use of force, but I had to do it, otherwise we would have been sitting there until the cows came home. "Look here," I told the boy, who looked like he was wondering what time the cows would be arriving. "If you eat some food, you can have some water." As I said "food" I tapped the bowl, and as I said "water" I used the spoon to rap on the lid of the beaker. The boy's countenance suggested that he understood every word I was saying, but an inner voice was pointing out to me that I was attempting to engage in conversation a person who had never spoken a word in his life. Putting a lot of confidence in the boy, I presented a spoonful of food to his lips. He turned away his head, screaming.

This was not working at all. In the end I picked up the beaker and smothered the spout in the mushy food, thinking that at least some of it would end up inside the boy's mouth when he took his drink. But this is what actually happened: he retrieved the beaker, wiped the spout all over his face – every part of it, that is, except his mouth – and then wrapped his lips around the clean nozzle. As the boy sat there drinking contentedly, with supper smeared on his forehead and hanging from his eyelids, I conceded defeat.

Then, there was a glimmer of hope. Noticing that I had discarded the bowl and spoon within his reach, the boy removed the beaker from his mouth and let it drop to the floor. I could see he was eyeing the supper with enthusiasm. He is hungry at last, I thought – now, finally, he will eat his dinner.

The boy slapped an open hand into the centre of the bowl, sending its mushy contents flying in all directions. Some of it landed on the wall, a lot of it ended up on me, but none of it finished anywhere near the boy's mouth. Then, spotting that I was in a state of catatonic shock, he picked up the spoon by its handle and catapulted supper through the air and onto the wall and me but not his mouth.

As I sat there dejectedly letting long breaths leave my lungs, the boy held the spoon aloft like a trophy and used his other hand to swill the remaining food about the bowl and squelch it between his fingers.

xvi
Now that the boy bathed alone, the tub was a more dangerous environment for him than it had hitherto been. Of course, he was not completely sans padre, but, positioned as I was on the outside of the bath, I had less influence on the boy's movements within it. This had the pleasing consequence of keeping my snake out of harm's way, but the downside was that the boy, given free reign of the tub, often seemed to be up the creek without a paddle.

I looked upon this turn of events philosophically because in my previous role of alpha bather and protector, the charge had consumed a Pantene vanity product and become acquainted with a snake, albeit a benign one, all on my watch. In other words, I was thinking that he was probably better off without me. He would benefit from the experience of free play uninfluenced by the hindrance of his father.

Initially, the boy hated being forced to bathe alone, and he had my sympathy. When he had been accompanied by me, the tub was filled to the brim. Now, though, concerns for the boy's safety meant that only a few inches of water were prepared for him. The first time he was lowered into this environment, he screamed. I could not blame his disquiet, because the small amount of water sitting at the foot of the tub, with its great white sides reaching upwards emptily, did give the impression that we were lowering the boy into an enormous toilet. The boy knew what the inside of a toilet looked like because a short time earlier, while I was engaged in running the bath, he had got up from his laidback position on the bathroom floor, crawled to the toilet, pulled himself up to the rim and, holding onto the seat with both hands, peered, fascinated, inside.

After these early misgivings, though, the boy re-learnt to love the bath, and soon he appreciated being allowed to scramble about inside it, climb up the sides, splash at will and, when I was not paying close enough attention, reaching for the loo seat. I reflected that the toilet gods really had treated us unfavourably, for not only did the bathroom share a particularly thin wall with the nursery, with the plumbing contained inside it, but the loo itself was positioned only inches from the tub. This meant it was within easy reach of the boy when he climbed up the near side of the bath, and it was a constant battle to divert his attention from the seat, which was not an ideal plaything for him, and onto the plastic boats and squeaky animal book.
The boy, now loving the bath, abandoned himself to it wholeheartedly and gambolled about as a frisky otter might do when, having spent some time in captivity, it is released into the wild. His swimming powers though were not equal to those of the otter. One evening, as he raced from the tap-end of the tub to the rear, the boy lost traction on the belly of the bath, which no doubt had become lubricated with women's vanity products, and he came a-cropper. It all happened so quickly, the incident is hard to describe, but this is what happened: finding his forward movement hindered by the slipping of his knees upon the bottom of the bath, the boy made an extra effort with his arms in a bid to resume his propulsion; yet his front limbs also found the going hazardous, and after a few moments of thrashing about on the spot, the boy became so unsteadied that he nearly capsized himself; now listing precariously to his port side, the boy admirably tried to rescue the situation by continuing the vain movement of his arms and legs, but this only made matters worse; his continued effort added to the momentum of his rotating hull, and before he had a chance to issue an SOS message the boy became completely capsized; on his back now and shocked by what had befallen him, the boy began to sink; he was soon submerged and with a flurry of kicks and splashes made it quite clear that he could not rescue himself; I raced to the scene, plucked the boy from his watery predicament and held him to my chest, patting him on the back to encourage him to cough up any liquid he might have swallowed.
Thankfully, he made a swift recovery. In fact, I returned him to the tub a few seconds later, and this time paid closer attention to his endeavours lest again he needed to be righted.

The boy seemed to learn from this experience and was from then on more careful with his frolicking among the plastic boats and other things – he did not capsize again. I came away from the incident with a rather wet cardigan.

I did not mind having a wet cardigan. After all, it was not as if I had been walking along the pavement only for a passing car to plough through a kerb-side puddle and drench me with the spray. That would have been unfortunate, and could even have spoiled my evening. As it was, I had sustained a dampness of upper clothing by correcting the boy's position in the bath, an action I was only too happy to perform, and the torso-clinging consequences of which I was prepared to endure. I did, however, consider whether next time I should oversee the boy's bath topless. This would ensure that my clothing remained dry, but I was concerned that the presence of my exposed nipples, which as we have seen resemble Terry Nutkins, might distract the boy and increase his vulnerability to the dangers of the tub. There was also the problem of the au pair being in the house – specifically in parts of the house I did not expect to find her in. She would put me down as a swaggering buffoon if, happening to be on the landing engaged in draping her lace knickers over the banister to dry, she observed me striding from the bathroom naked from the waist up.

So, all in all I decided it was best to remain clothed at bath time, and if a wet T-shirt exposed my nipples then so be it.

xvii
We know that names are important. They are so important that they can even help to determine one's career and other life choices. For instance, you will not meet many plumbers called Quentin Bumblebee-Trouserpress, and the electorate of Great Britain would never vote for a prime minister called Dave.

I first realised the importance of names at school when I was given charge of a boy in the year below as part of an experimental mentoring scheme, devised by people with beards and corduroy trousers (and that was just the women, hahahahahahaha). This boiled down to me taking my charge to one side at an allotted time every so often and making sure everything was OK and his parents were not planning on suing the school. My lad, whose parents were from somewhere in India, was called Farhad. The way he said it though, I thought his name was Rhubarb, and this is what I called him for the duration of the year we were compelled to occasionally spend together. He was timid and, perhaps out of respect for his elders, did not correct me when I greeted him with "Hello, Rhubarb". Neither did he make an audible comment when I left the room with "Goodbye, Rhubarb". In fact, I did not realise my mistake until the end of the year, when us mentors were asked to write a report on our experiences and findings. When my 500-word exposé was handed back to me by the teacher, I discovered that she had written across the top of it, "Who is Rhubarb?". This was followed with the more ominous "See me".

Who knows what Farhad is up to now? As soon as I thought this, I immediately then thought: and what if he doesn't even like rhubarb?! This irony, though, displeased me, as I am an aficionado of rhubarb, especially in a crumble pudding, and I would not want Farhad to be denied the pleasure of enjoying its tangy taste as much as I do.
When the boy goes to school, he will certainly not be mistaken for an inflorescent perennial. The worst that can happen is for someone to confuse him with King's Lynn, the town in Norfolk. But when he goes to school he will soon be marked out by his name. While his class mate, Dave, dreams of being prime minister in between munching on a scotch egg, Kingsley, a future scaffolder, will be eyeing the teacher's tits from behind his falafel wrap.

In the earliest years of this century I frequented a pub called The Eagle. Opposite it was a rival boozer called The Gardener's Arms. This place, and I think I have added the possessive apostrophe myself, was a home from home to the ruddy-faced peasants who lived locally – men who looked like they had spent the whole of the preceding day having a heart attack in a down-market betting shop, and women who looked rather like the men but with blonder hair and fewer clothes. Every so often, a taxi driver would walk into our pub, The Eagle, and announce that Quentin's car had arrived. Unfortunately for the driver, there was no one there called Quentin – the regulars at The Gardener's Arms had made the call for a laugh. Look at the poshos who drink in The Eagle, they were saying. There really was a class divide, with Barry and Sharon on one side and Boris and Cordelia on the other. It would be interesting to know if Boris would be spending his nights in The Gardener's Arms if his parents had called him Barry, with a gold link chain around his neck instead of a pastel sweater over his shoulders.

I was reminded of this cold war between those pubs when the local paper reported that parents were picking fights with other parents outside the gates of a school in a run-down part of town. The bellicose parents lived near to the school and had done so all their lives – it was their local. Now they were shouting abuse and even jostling the parents from the more salubrious part of town whose children had missed out on their first choice of educational establishment and been diverted to the school on the edge of the council estate. This story made me think of two things: first, that I dreaded the day we would have to send the boy to school; and second, that perhaps we should move to King's Lynn.

Romeo, of course, pondered the significance a name has in the intrinsic qualities of a thing that exists on a plane separate from the meaning given to it by words, and he was right to do so because Shakespeare would not have been able to buy a house if he had named his most famous romance Gavin and Stacey. Marvel also at the prospect of Britain being led to victory in World War Two not by Winston Churchill, but by Barry Gibb. And The Almighty not being rendered in scripture as God, but as Ooooo.

Thus the children of the parents picking fights outside the school gates, children called Chardonnay, White Lightning and Special Brew, have had a large part of their destiny marked out for them on their birth certificates. It is the same for Quentin Bumblebee-Trouserpress. One might remark that the latter was born with a silver spoon in his mouth, while Chardonnay was born with a Wetherspoon in hers.

And then I remembered that we used Paddington for the boy's second name. Oh, bugger.

xviii
The boy woke at three in the morning. It was definitely my turn to deal with him because I had spent the previous two weeks pretending to be asleep. Helen was awake, and she evidently agreed that it was my turn to get up. She was looking at me with mild contempt. So I got up, attached a dressing gown to my person and, bypassing the nursery from where was being emitted the noise of an infant, entered the bathroom, through the saloon doors, to relieve myself. I had decided to solve my own problems before tackling those of the boy because I knew from experience that it was difficult to aim accurately while holding a six-month-old boy, and I supposed that it would be even more difficult to do so with a ten-month-old under one's arm (albeit a different arm to the one attached to the hand responsible for the aiming).

As I had passed the nursery on the way to the bathroom, I had turned on the light without letting the boy know I was there, as doing this in the past had often turned his crying to squeals of delight as his toys became revealed to him and the prison of his cot metamorphosed into a play pen. This was not working now, though, and I listened to the mewls as I attended to my task in the next smallest room of the house.
Then, to my horror, I heard Helen leave our bedroom and take to the stairs in order, I assumed, to make the boy a bottle of milk in the kitchen. I was particularly concerned when, as she passed the nursery, she paused in her stride and uttered "No no no", as if beginning a rendition of 2Unlimited's No Limit. I knew, however, that she was cursing me for having turned on the light, for although this trick had worked in the past, it was evidently not working now. This was my fault, and I had been informed of my mistake with not one "no", but three of them.

I went into the kitchen to find Helen indeed engaged in the act of preparing a bottle. I asked her what she thought she was doing. "Making him a bottle," she replied. But why, I asked her – after all, I had got out of bed to perform this task myself, and she had watched me as I did so. "I assumed you were just going to the bathroom," she said, huffily. I informed her that indeed I had visited the bathroom, but this was only a hiatus on my more important errand of tending to the boy. "Well," she said, "I didn't know you were getting up to make the milk. You didn't say." I did not say?! I was up. I had removed the quilt from my body, removed myself from the bed by using my right elbow as a lever, walked across the bedroom and retrieved a dressing gown from the hook on the back of the door before wrapping the garment firmly around my waist and securely tightening the belt. As far as getting up was concerned, I was most certainly up. It did not occur to me that I had to announce the fact as well as perform it. I did not say?!

I felt aggrieved at having gotten up in the middle of the night to make a bottle of milk only to find Helen already doing it. I expressed this emotion to her, adding a description of the futility of two people trying to perform a task best done solo when dogs are sleeping and owls are hooting. My message was that too many cooks spoil the broth, but she was disinterested in this observation and seemed to think I suffered from a slack bladder, my preoccupation with which prevented me from performing the duties of the devoted father. She had stopped breastfeeding but was still the giver of milk; I was just a man shivering in a dark bathroom, trying not to piss all over the seat.

This, however, did not develop into an argument, largely because I was wearing Helen's silk dressing gown and although everything I said might have been based in fact and good common sense, everything I looked like was certainly foolish. I let her finish making the milk, and did not even bring up the subject of the three no's on the landing. Then, in peace, she followed me up the stairs, watching my firm buttocks bulge in the silk gown which glistened roundly in the moonlight.

As she had made the milk, it was only fair that she delivered it, so I let Helen collect the boy and deal with him in our bed. I went back to sleep and did not bother to get up at the sound of crying for many weeks.

The next time I got up in the middle of the night, things had changed so much that I felt like a coma patient waking from years of slumber into an unrecognisable world. For a start, the boy seemed much bigger than the last time I fed him in the dark. He was actually so heavy that I quickly gave up cradling him and laid him on his back in our bed. I thought this rather gave the impression that I was giving midnight sustenance to a slug, as the boy was in his sleeping bag and looked in the dusk to be without legs. Thankfully, though, he was a hungry slug and gobbled the milk more quickly than I remembered, which was good news for my aching back (although my arms had been relieved from cradling the boy, feeding him in the new slug position transferred much of the burden to my spine).

What's more, Helen had added decorations to the nursery wall (how long had I been asleep? Was Charlton Heston running around outside fighting a monkey?). These decorations were stars which glowed in the dark. I remembered buying those things seven months previously. Then I noticed some of the animal letters on the door had fallen off so the boy’s middle name read "ADDI TON". I had worked too much, slept too much, and done too little DIY. The nursery, despite the pretty stars, looked from the outside like a dilapidated yet colourful kebab shop.

xix
Following an afternoon of solo action with the boy, who I had saved from the trauma of Christmas shopping with his mother by agreeing to look after him at home, both of us were tired, especially the boy – for although I was tired, I was not so tired that a quick bath and a bottle of warm milk would send me to the Land of Nod.

Having determined to run him a bath, I deposited the boy in his cot so that I might have both hands free to operate the taps, place the plug in the plug hole and monitor the temperature of the water. This simple series of tasks was made rather troublesome by the presence of the boy, whose new size made him cumbersome to carry under one arm while performing manual duties; and when placed on the bathroom floor, he would make a mischief of himself by scurrying directly to the loo brush, cleanliness unknown, and treat the thing as if it were a nursery curio, attempting to lick the bristles and poke out his eye with the handle. When the loo brush had been lifted to an unattainable shelf, his attention would instead be devoted to toppling Nathaniel, the Caribbean banana boy, by grabbing hold of his elbows and letting himself fall backwards onto the floor. Worrying Nathaniel was less offensive than worrying the loo brush, but neither was an ideal accompaniment to my bath-making. Thus it was that the boy found himself in his prison as I prepared for his ablutions.

I had left him on his own for a matter of minutes, but when I returned to the nursery I was greeted with a startling sight. Somehow the boy had gained access to a nappy bag, the contents of which were variously in his mouth, in his hands, upon his person generally and strewn across his bedding. Unfortunately, the bag he had located, using a power undetected by me, contained a nappy of the foulest variety. Why this bag had not been placed in the bin or incinerated at the time of its closure would have to wait until a full investigation was launched into the matter. Why the bag had instead been discarded on the nursery chair, which was located within arm’s reach of the cot, would also be the subject of this inquiry. Now, though, I faced the bare facts of the matter as they presented themselves to me: the boy was covered in his own bottom plops, and judging by the marks on his hands and chin, might even have eaten some of them.

Remarkably, the consumption of the nappy was not the most pressing problem, for the plastic bag itself had been torn to shreds, most of which lay scattered among the teddies, but one of which was dangling from the boy's mouth. Standing in the doorway, staring at the scene within, I experienced one of those emergencies when multiple traumas are happening concurrently and it is impossible to decide which to prioritise: you are Alan Yentob, and Terry Wogan and Bruce Forsyth are sitting in your office; suddenly, Wogan and Forsyth's wigs both spontaneously combust – there is a fire extinguisher under the desk, but whose crackling toupee do you try to save first, Wogan's or Forsyth's? Now, in the doorway, I faced a similar dilemma: what was worse, the boy eating his own bum sausages or the boy gargling on a plastic bag? It occurred to me that I had solved nothing by keeping the boy from the bathroom while filling the tub – I had removed the conflict between the loo brush and Nathaniel, only to replace it with this new disaster.

Suddenly, I made my decision and raced into the room to pull the bit of bag from the boy's mouth, calculating that neither poo nor plastic would taste very nice or do one any good, but the latter had the added danger of the potential to choke. After collecting up the rest of the detritus from the inside of the cot, I reflected on how wise I had been to first remove the plastic from the boy's mouth and gloated for a moment in my fatherly, superhero brilliance. Then it dawned on me that I would later have to tell Helen that on my watch the boy had eaten his own chipolatas and a carrier bag. It was thus a humbled me that carried the boy to his bath that evening.

xx
Sometimes people would say the boy looked like his mother, other times they thought he was the spitting image of his father. Frequently, they would comment on his blond hair, and point out that his mother's was black and his father's brown. Although his mother dyed her hair, this did not explain the boy's blondness, as her natural colour was brown. Fortunately, we did not need to send off a sample for a DNA test to prove his paternity, or investigate whether the maternity ward had made a terrible mistake and swapped the boy with an impostor, because he had other features that illustrated his provenance.

His moustache, for instance, although infantile and blond and downy, and visible only in a certain light and with the boy's face at a particular angle, showed the potential to grow into the kind of lip-tickler often sported by his father. His paternity was further proven by his piano-man fingers, which his father also possessed and, like the boy, did not put them to the use of banging out a bit of Bach on a rainy afternoon. Instead, the boy used his probing digits to adroitly pick things up and put them in his mouth, as well as trying to pick the nose of whoever happened to be holding him. He would also attempt to rip off the nose from the face of whoever happened to be holding him, and scratch their cheeks with interminably sharp nails. He was given a toy xylophone for Christmas, but this held less interest than the soft flesh of his elders. Likewise his father had shown little interest in learning to play an instrument, and used his extended fingers to pick his own nose and roll cigarettes, as well as continuously moving things around the house whenever the boy noticed them and decided to engage with the objects in a way damaging to all parties, both the crawling biological and the Fast Moving Consumer Good.

He also sneezed so much that it seemed as if he was sneezing nearly all the time. This was a trait he had inherited from his father, whose marathon bouts of the sniffles were sparked by the consumption of Guinness and Extra Strong Mints. These liquid and sugar-based refreshments did not have to be ingested together to cause an extended series of a-tissues, and a few doses of either in isolation were enough to turn the paternal nostrils into spitting, cacophonous geysers. For his part, the boy would give out more a-tissues than were necessary morning, noon and night, and it was impossible to tell what was provoking the reaction. When he had a cold, of course, his sniffles were attributed to this. A-tissue, he would shout, and then four more times a-tissue. Ah, would say his parents, he has a cold. Yet the sneezes were no less frequent when the boy was in rude health, and at these times his parents did not know what to attribute them to. He was certainly not drinking any Irish stout, and we were quite sure that the Extra Strong Mints were located in a drawer beyond his reach. So we just let him get on with it, and used the phenomenon as another proof of his lineage.
Then there was his sveltness and general good humour, but we won't go into that for the reader would be bored with descriptions of the father's slender frame and the mother's penchant for dinner parties. Our attention, though, had now been turned to the boy's appearance and, by association, that of his parents and grandparents. It was noted, then, that his paternal grandfather, in his younger days and when his hair was blacker and bushier, more than resembled the serial killer Fred West, and these days, with his hair more wirey and face puffier, looked rather like Saddam Hussein after he was captured from his hole in the desert by the Americans. In fact, the underpants worn by the deposed Iraqi president-in-hiding – for he was photographed wearing nothing else while in prison awaiting trial – reminded me very much of my father's Marks & Spencer cotton Y-fronts, which were more often seen on the washing line than they were on the grandfather. When I saw the front page of The Sun carrying the story of Hussein's imprisonment, I genuinely thought for a moment that my father had been photographed in his underwear, perhaps on holiday somewhere because it looked nice and hot, and this somehow was a national news story.

The boy has all these things to look forward to as he grows into a man.

His maternal grandfather, on the other hand, resembled an ageing Hugh Grant who had spurned Hollywood at an early age to work on a smallholding in rural Herefordshire; thus, rather than the actor's Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck when portraying a man late for a wedding, the grandfather would more likely say What what what what what what what. The boy might prefer to obtain the Hugh Grant genes than the Saddam Hussein ones, but his enthusiasm for them could be tempered on the discovery that despite his dashing good looks, the maternal grandfather suffers from a clawed hand – so that on a bad day, with his hand clenched menacingly into a mendacious fist (perhaps all the pigs have dropped dead from bird flu), he could be described as the Abu Hamza of Ludlow.

There is no need to extend this foray into the family tree to the female branches, lest we get bogged down in an appreciation of the hippopotamus and the walrus (in mating season). Yet the record should show that the boy's paternal great-grandmother was akin to the Queen, if one could imaging Her Majesty falling on hard times and moving from Windsor to suburban Eastbourne. It is likely that the boy, as his father did, will inherit the pauper Elizabeth's double chin despite there not being another ounce of excess fat on his whole body. In her later years she also sported a fine moustache and always appreciated the company of dogs, both of which are positive traits for which the boy should be thankful and which will more than make up for the unfortunate turkey's wattle.

The boy's gene pool, then, was a very mixed bag even before the inclusion of his mother's glancing resemblance to Boy George and his father's proclivity for saying things that get him into trouble.

xxi
The smoking ban in England had the beneficial effect that I could wear my favourite shirts and trousers on consecutive days because they did not give off a scent that revealed I had spent previous evenings in bars and public houses. This saved me time spent ironing and meant less washing had to be done. The boy, though, was determined to scupper my sartorial slovenliness, and I often arrived at work in yesterday's corduroys only to discover, under the revealing striplights of the office, lumps of partially chewed Weetabix on a thigh and, on one occasion, a head of broccoli in a pocket.

On the days I recycled the laundry pile into acceptable attire, I now gave off a wheaty and vegetable smell. These odours were innocuous enough, and I don't think anyone noticed but me, yet the associated stains were more troublesome. The browns and beige of congealed Weetabix make for a suspicious presence on one's trousers, especially when they are located around the crotch. It was also difficult to explain away the retrieval of a vegetable from the pocket in which one expected to find his wallet.

I wondered if my food-laden clothing was also putting me in danger of attack from wild creatures on my route to the office. I imagined owls swooping down to peck at my person, before further thought threw doubt on the legitimacy of Weetabix as an owl's food item of choice. But what about urban foxes, goats and the other scavengers? These beasts will eat nearly anything, probably even warm regurgitated broccoli. Eventually I gained the habit of giving myself a brush down before leaving the house each morning, and when this swiping of the hands had dislodged the lumpiest and loosest of matter, there followed if necessary an application of the baby wipes.

These wipes, originally purchased in the early days of the boy's life to perform the task for which they were intended, had latterly been adopted for an array of unusual uses. When attaching a new toilet seat to the bowl, for instance, it were the baby wipes that came to my rescue after I found that the concealed areas of the toilet needed sanitary attention. In fact, when any cleaning product in the house had either run out or gone missing, the wipes were called in in its stead, often performing a function – such as the polishing of a tap – more effectively than the thing they had replaced. One morning I even used the things to rub over the hairier parts of my body after oversleeping and finding this quicker than having an actual wash. I would have been happy if all cleaning products in the house were permanently replaced with the wipes, which seemed to be suitable for application on windows, hobs, porcelain, tiles and, in an emergency, flesh.

On the occasion I did turn up to work having washed myself with a baby wipe, and wearing a shirt bearing a dollop of Ready Brek that covered most of the upper part of one arm, I decided I had to turn my life around. The trouble was that I had slipped from the old routine and was missing my evening Churchillian baths. The secondary source of this problem lay in the boy's passive-aggressive technique of humiliating me at meal times, and this showed no sign of abating. Other than squirting pepper spray into his face, I could not think of how to get the boy to pay attention at the table and actually eat his food instead of either flinging it at me in defiance or simply turning away his head in stoic protest.

Even when I thought I had discovered the solution – covering everything he ate in strawberry-flavoured yoghurt – the boy countered with a devastating blow. At first he took the spoonfuls of spaghetti bolognese shrouded in pink yoghurt with promising hunger. He soon learned, though, what was afoot and before long was sucking off the yoghurt before spitting the meat and pasta back into the bowl or down his front. The food war dragged on.

xxii
One afternoon when not at work it was suggested that I take the boy out to an establishment calling itself Monkey Bizness. I was alarmed to find that these people also referred in their literature to children as "kidz", but I was calmed by the discovery that people under the age of one could gain free admittance, and that I would only be charged one pound sterling.

So it was that we turned up at this place, located on an industrial estate amid carpet warehouses and the kind of businesses that sell miscellaneous piping to the trade. We walked in – or, to be more accurate, I walked in; the boy sat in my arms, looking about nonchalantly as a member of the Royal Family might do when led on a tour of a less salubrious part of town – and I paid my pound. “Let the monkey bizness commence,” I nearly said out loud. I initially felt ashamed that I had been sucked into the lexicon of this establishment so willingly, and I was glad that the boy had yet to gain the power of reading and would not be contaminated by the liberal bandying about of the letter zed. Then I wondered whether the place was run by Mr Dizzee Rascal, and this amused me as we pushed through an overly stiff door and into the hub of supervised fun.

There was some kind of school holiday occurring, and the place was a maelstrom of toddlers high on Ribena and crisps. The management had marked out certain areas for boisterous play and others for more relaxed, less life-threatening adventure. I headed for the latter. Here I alighted upon a kind of giant play pen with roped walls and a floor four inches deep in plastic balls. This seemed an ideal place to introduce the boy to the realm of the monkey children, so I slipped off my shoes and prepared to go in. Entrance was gained by two holes set into the walls about a foot off the ground, led to by a step fashioned from some kind of beanbag. I used the hole that was not being dived through by the small stoned psychopaths and sat myself down among the balls, as close to one of the corners as I could get.

Although I was accompanied by the boy, I immediately felt out of place. I had taken off my socks, but I still had on my Marks & Spencer overcoat and scarf. This was because there was no obvious place to put them. The children running about through the balls were not so encumbered by outdoors clothing, and had obviously left their more burdensome attire and accessories with parents and guardians, wherever they might be. I had no such parent or guardian present, so I reasoned that my coat and scarf would be better left on, rather than discarded onto the ground where miniature rampaging oafs would trample over them. Despite sitting four inches deep in balls, I remained taller than most of the little people gambolling about in the pen. I really did stick out like a sore thumb.

Very soon I actually had a sore thumb after some turnip launched himself headfirst through one of the holes and belly-flopped into the balls, which happened to conceal my hands. There was no point in remonstrating with this fellow for he was after all only three years old or so and anyway, if anyone was to blame it was me, for the pen was designed for kids, smacked off their little tits on Quavers, to abandon themselves to the balls – it was not designed for fully grown men to sit about in as though waiting for a magic bus.

The injury did make me more aware of the boy's precarious position. He was by far the youngest person in the pen, and the one least able to defend himself from flying monkeys. I therefore spent the remainder of the time crawling about behind him in order to shield him from attack, and this made me look even more ridiculous. Although my former position seated in the corner was absurd, it at least enabled me to retain a small amount of dignity as an impartial observer of the circus I had wandered into. Now I was on all fours and moving hither and thither, often losing traction in the plastic balls. To the beasts rushing around I had become a legitimate moving target, and they ricocheted off me in various trajectories.

After half an hour or so of this I decided the boy had spent enough time being pursued by me in the Temple of a Thousand Balls; what's more, I had nearly been toppled by an unusually large girl who slid into me with a two-footed tackle. If we had been on a football field, she would have been sent off by the referee for unsporting behaviour, and I might have been carried off by the stretcher-bearers. Here though, in the kingdom of the ape-children, no one seemed to be in charge.

Having retrieved my shoes I carried the boy in search of a more sedate pen in which to continue our experiment with fun outside the home. It was here that I noticed The Mothers – there was no man in sight – sitting on the outskirts of the great hall at tables, supping tea and coffee, eating cakes and perusing magazines with titles like Take A Break and Now. They showed no concern for the fact that their critters were wreaking havoc beyond their sight, but then, I reasoned, they had paid nearly five pounds for this privilege, even before the cover price of the magazines and the extortionate price of the coffee were taken into account. I, on the other hand, had paid only one pound, and probably deserved the injuries I had sustained and the humiliation in the ball pen.

Apropos of muffin, I decided a cake and a cup of tea might prepare me for further fun, but as I approached the tables, the looks given me by the women – which ranged from the startled to the faintly amused – made me think again. We continued to the next appropriate play pen, the walls of which were adorned with distorting mirrors and things to turn and pull and push and press. These all kept the boy amused for another half an hour, and I was mighty glad when he became bored of the whole thing and we were able to make for home without a protest.

xxiii
It was midnight and I was just going to bed when I heard a banging noise coming from the nursery. Alerted to the potential that the house might be falling down, I went to investigate. When I got to the nursery door I halted. If the house was not coming down, I did not want to wake the boy for no good reason. As I stood there in the cold, the banging continued. I put my ear to the door and listened more closely: what I heard was the boy, in the pitch black of his room, hitting together a pair of plastic cups – as a sound effects person might do with two halves of a coconut to give the impression of a cantering horse.

The au pair must have left the cups in the cot, and the boy was now making merry with them. I thought of leaving him to it, but I knew from experience that this frivolity would soon sour and that I would be awakened from a deep sleep by infantile appeals for food. I was also concerned that in the unlikely event of the boy going back to sleep, he might lay his head against one of the cups and present himself the following morning with an unsightly circular impression in his face. So I crept into the room to see what was afoot.

As soon as I entered, which I thought I had done silently, the boy sat bolt upright and began to whimper. I turned on the light then, as there was no use prolonging my attempt at invisibility. The boy's countenance gladdened when he saw me approach, and then he said: "Harrow, dad." These, then, were his first words. More remarkable, though, was that the boy had developed a Korean accent. "Harrow, dad." he said again. "Hello, Kingsley," I replied. "Harrow, dad," he repeated. "Hello, Kingsley," said I. His vocabulary was evidently slender, for when I asked what he meant by recreating the sound of a horse in the middle of the night, he said: "Harrow, dad."

The clipping and clopping from the cot reminded me of something. I turned to the boy and said: "I passed a depressed horse on my way home this evening. He was reciting some lines from Hamlet: ‘To be or not to be, that is the equestrian.’"
The boy stared at me in silence.

xxiv
One advantage of the boy waking in the middle of the night was the opportunity it afforded me to experience the world usually hidden from view to all creatures except the nocturnal animals, such as badgers and owls, and shift workers.

At four o’clock in the morning I was sat up in bed. The boy had woken up and I was feeding him from the bottle. Some time into this, I heard the electric whirring of a milk float pass by our house. This was the first milk float I had witnessed for many years and I thought they had been consigned to the history books – specifically those books dedicated to the history of milk consumption and distribution in Western Europe. Yet here was a milk float going about its business. Either that, or Clive Sinclair lived in the neighbourhood and was popping to the 24-hour dispensing chemist in one of his C5 electric cars.

I wondered if the noise of the vehicle had awakened the boy and, like Pavlov’s dogs who salivated at the sound of the dinner bell, he had become hungry for milk. This, though, was unlikely as we did not receive milk bottles on the doorstep, favouring instead the convenience of the local supermarket. Perhaps the boy had been a milkman in a previous life and the sound of the lorry had stirred latent memories of his old round. If he wished to rejoin this career after leaving school he would find the going tough and business slow – most of the streets round here now have traffic-calming measures such as speed bumps, which would make the crates of milk bounce around precariously, and most people, like me, don’t even know that the milkman still exists, let alone that the service he offers is competitively priced and convenient.

It could have been that the boy had awoken from a nightmare, for only recently he had been exposed to a situation that made even me, a fully fledged man, recoil in fright. For as well as the betting shop on the corner, out of necessity I had taken the boy into another inappropriate building – the public lavatory. At the time it seemed innocuous enough. I was pushing the boy along the Esplanade early one Sunday morning when I suddenly needed to relieve myself. I tended to avoid public conveniences at the best of times for they are dirty and smelly and one does not know who, or what, might be lurking within. The last thing I wanted to do was take a pushchair into one, but there were few options available to me.

Fortunately the sun was low in the sky and the local tramps and weirdos were still slumbering on benches and within their asylums respectively. The gentlemen’s lavatory, then, was empty. I parked the boy in the centre of the room, chose a urinal at my leisure and went about my business. When I returned to the chair, the boy was eyeing hungrily a yellow urinal cake in a nearby bowl. It might have looked to him like a slice of pineapple, and the bluey-white lumps of freshening bricks around it like pieces of marshmallow. In fact, as I considered these associations, I actually became a bit peckish myself. I turned the chair around a hundred and eighty degrees and we made for the closest coffee shop. Here I ordered a hot chocolate and was asked if I would like marshmallow lumps as an extra. I declined, and gave the boy a breadstick by way of compensation.

xxv
The date of the Christening was approaching and we needed a vicar to perform the ceremony – a vicar with a modern outlook on life, rather than one for whom all non-believers spend the afterlife in eternal damnation. This was because the boy’s parents lived in sin, being unmarried, and our chosen godparents were either homewreckers (the women) or heathens (the men).

As luck would have it, Helen found a more laissez-faire man of the cloth to do the job, someone who turned a blind eye to all our indiscretions in such a blasé manner that he might have actually been Ted Danson playing a vicar in Three Men and a Little Lady.

In preparation for this man’s visit, Helen attempted to give our home in Sodom-and-Gomorrah-on-sea a more ecclesiastic feel. For Christmas we had bought the boy a wooden ark, and this, with all the accompanying wooden animals, was given pride of place on the mantelpiece in the front room. Coincidentally, the wall above the mantelpiece featured a painting of the same Biblical scene – all the animals in pairs waiting to be rescued by Noah. These touches, though, were unnecessary, for the vicar proclaimed himself not much interested in whether or not we were married, and we did not bother to concern him with the goings on of the godparents. Church numbers were dwindling and, like the local milkman, he was desperate to add to his flock. He agreed to drive the Devil from the boy before Helen even had the chance to say “More tea vicar?”.

Interestingly, this accommodating man of God was not the most forward-thinking vicar in the area. Nearby there lived another servant of the church whom I once saw emptying a dustpan and brush into the bin in his front garden. He was wearing yellow rubber gloves, which were unremarkable except for the fact that they contrasted starkly with his black PVC kilt and knee-high leather boots. From his waist there hung a silver pendant, which jittered around his thighs as he shook the contents of the pan into the bin. The ensemble was completed with a tight-fitting black T-shirt and dog collar. These men usually prefer the term ecclesiastical collar, but in this instance dog collar was surely the accurate phrase. Through the front windows I could make out three men sitting on chairs around a table. God knows what was going on, but He will have to write His own book if He wants us to know about that.

xxvi
Suddenly the boy was a year old. A birthday party was arranged in his honour and, although he was oblivious to the significance of the occasion, he put on a good face. This face contained only two and a half teeth, which is fewer than average for a one-year-old, but we were not in the business of comparing the boy with his peers. His teeth were nearly as rare as hen’s teeth, yet he was still able to bite off the end of a breadstick like Clint Eastwood chomping off the end of a cigar.

He had a fascination with beer and wine bottles and telephones, and if he had his own way would have been a raving alcoholic and a dedicated call-centre employee, but we had higher hopes for him than that. Back when the boy was kicking about inside his mother, the hoi polloi prophesied he would become a footballer. As a man, I was supposed to be happy with that. His mother, a womb-man, wanted him to be a ballet dancer. I have not seen Billy Elliot, but I am told it has a happy ending.

Who knows where life will lead him. Perhaps he will befriend a captive whale and inspire the zookeepers to release it back into the wild, or take into his confidence a tame kangaroo, dolphin or dog and exploit the relationship for the greater good of the community, solving crimes and helping others in trouble. He might open a wardrobe door one day to find an extra-terrestrial sitting there in a dress, or discover the wardrobe empty of anything but clothes and walk through it to another world where the White Witch will tempt him with Turkish Delight.

At the party, the boy scrambled straight for the balloon suspended above the floor. He tugged at the string that dangled from it, bringing the red balloon to his face. Now holding the thing in both hands, he buried his face in it and nuzzled the inflated surface. This was how he showed his affection for all the things and people he loved: Mr Bear, his mother and his father, and the soft blue rug that covered the blemishes on the sofa.

He let go of the string and watched the balloon rise back up into the air. Then, under the watch of this magic star, the boy performed a primeval dance to it, a secret dance we did not know the meaning of but which gave us a glimpse of how things used to be for all of us.

Kingsley Can't Swim and Other Observations (part 3)

2011-04-19T15:54:00.004+01:00

Part Three

i
Three things happened that made me think I was not very good with small children, aka cacophonous plop shops, or, as they are known colloquially in France, les boutiques plop bruyant, and in Germany, laut plopperschmidt ladens. The first incident occurred in the bath, where the boy was playing with an apparently empty bottle of hair conditioner.

The routine of the bath now consisted of me entering the water with the boy and then trying to wash his face before he noticed the bottles. The bottles, containing various vanity products, came in a rainbow of appealing colours and myriad shapes and sizes, mainly, it is thought, to draw the attention of shoppers to their presence on supermarket shelves, but also, I now knew, to excite the curiosity of the boy. There was no point trying to stop him from retrieving these bottles because once he had spied them, which he did within moments of entering the bath, he would not be satisfied until he had one of them, and would whimper and struggle until this end was achieved. And there was no point in moving the bottles from their position along the side of the bath because they were many in number and there was nowhere else to put them. So, it was inevitable that soon after entering the bath, the boy would be in possession of a bottle containing a vanity product. The best I could do was steer him away from the ones with congealed gunk around the lids and towards the one that looked like it was empty. This was the aforementioned bottle of hair conditioner, which, seemingly empty of Pantene's competitively priced product, had been transformed from toiletry to toy.

The boy fumbled with the bottle in his hands, let it drop into the water, picked it up, clamped his jaws around whichever end of it was most forthcoming, and then fumbled with it in his hands again, repeating the series of actions over and over like they were the most interesting and satisfying endeavours known to child. One evening, while this was going on, I noticed a string of bubbles trickling from the boy's mouth and down his chin. At first I discounted them as the product of drool, and assumed the boy was verily frothing at the mouth in excitement at once again being allowed to play with his bottle. After a few moments, however, I decided that the bubbles had a rather soapy sheen to them, they were gathering in number and the rate with which they exited the boy's mouth was increasing. Then he started pulling a face I had not before witnessed – he looked like a very wet cat trying to cough up a fur ball. I collected a cluster of bubbles from the boy's face and popped them onto my tongue, which confirmed my new suspicion that this was not saliva but the dregs of the hair conditioner. The boy was now doing a kind of tutting movement with his mouth, and his face was contorted into such an expression that one did not need an abundance of empathy to realise he was eating something disagreeable. Indeed, for once he did not fight me when I took the bottle from his hand; holding it up to the light, I now saw that it was not empty of hair conditioner, but only half empty. Being a glass-half-full kind of father, I decided not to inform the boy's mother that he had preceded his evening feed with a side order of Pantene.

The second incident concerned the filling in of an application form for the boy's nursery. His mother was reading through the questions, one of which asked us to select the boy's religion from the list provided. The options included Christian, Jewish, Islamic, Buddhist and ‘Other (please specify)’. I suggested that the boy was a Sikh, because he was being Sikh all the time – only a short time ago he was Sikh on the floor after eating too much milk. My belly shook with laughter after I said this as I thought it particularly amusing. Helen confirmed this by also making the bed shake with her stifled mirth. Then the form asked us to select the language spoken in our home, from the list provided. The options included English, French, German, Mandarin and Other (please specify). Barely managing to conceal howls of laughter, I suggested that in our home, we spoke in baby talk, as the boy had yet to begin his studies in Latin and Ancient Greek. Helen filled out the rest of the form without calling for my input. I supposed that the nursery would not have found it funny when, having made arrangements to accommodate the boy's religious beliefs, they discovered that "Sikh" actually referred to his propensity to vomit. They might, for instance, have bought in some turbans especially, and that would be a terrible waste of money, not because the turban lacks intrinsic value, but because the nursery could otherwise have used the budget to buy bouncy balls and wooden toy caterpillars.

The final incident occurred when I agreed, more out of politeness than desire, to not only look after the boy while his mother went to the gym, but another baby too. The latter was the spawn of a friend of the boy's mother, who, in the tradition of women taking part in the most mundane of activities en mass, was accompanying Helen to the gymkhana. Everything was fine for the first forty minutes or so – the extra baby had not yet worked out how to crawl, and for forty minutes had laid on her back like an upturned turtle, distracted by wriggling and chiming things dangling from the play pen. This enabled me to interact with the boy, who was much more demanding of my time: as well as crawling, he had also worked out that no matter how new or exciting the toys in the room, there was more interest to be found in the stereo, magnums of champagne, scattered CDs and the hard corners of antique furniture. Thus the rubber centipede distracted him for only three minutes, before it was discarded in favour of a headbanging session against the sharp-angled legs of the arm chair. The plastic turtle on a string persuaded him to delay his journey to the stereo, where he would retune the dial from Radio 4 to a random number emitting white noise, by only five minutes. The bell chimes held his fascination for one minute, before he made for the champagne. So, when the extra baby decided that forty minutes was quite long enough for lying on one's back beneath second-hand toys sourced on eBay, and made to communicate this sentiment through the medium of crying very loudly, I was presented with a dilemma. There were two babies in my care: the boy and the other one. The other one was appealing to be picked up, but doing so would leave the boy free to compromise David Bowie's back catalogue and, worst-case scenario, tune the stereo to Radio 1. Which was worse – the extra baby screaming with increasing ferocity, or the deejays of the BBC's foremost radio station blathering on about bands with names like The Passion Pizzas? As it happened, I decided to pick up the extra baby and risk the boy embarking on a perilous adventure on all fours; luckily he ignored the stereo and made straight for the magnums of champagne, which was fortunate because I would rather witness his misadventure with sparkling wine than hear a single sentence uttered by Jo Whiley. But then the boy decided that I was coping too well with rearing two children simultaneously and began to protest at being left on the floor to his own devices. This acted as a catalyst for the extra baby to start making free with her lungs. This in turn seemed to encourage the boy to raise his protest to the next level, and he was now not only screaming, but kicking his legs and flailing his arms. Realising that blood is thicker than water, that the early bird catches the worm, that one should never look a gift horse in the mouth, bite the hand that feeds or leave for tomorrow what can be done today, I placed the extra baby back onto the floor and picked up the boy, who thanked me by headbutting me in the chest and trying to scratch out my eye. The extra baby was thoroughly unimpressed with this and changed the pitch and volume of her cry to one resembling a seagull being worried by a fox. Deciding that a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush, that one should never a lender nor borrower be, are we nearly there yet and that you should have gone before we left, I strapped the boy into his rocking chair, placed twenty rubbery manifestations of insects on his lap, and retrieved the extra baby. As luck would have it, the boy's mother and her friend chose this moment to return from the gym, and the friend, seeing me holding the extra baby, which to her was The Baby, assumed I was the perfect house husband and had been favouring her child, for which she showed much gratitude in the form of a kiss on my cheek, which made me blush.

ii
One afternoon I regained consciousness to discover my tongue feeling like it had been cut out and replaced with a slice of warm Spam and my head devoid of any thought other than this one. In other words, the night before I had been as drunk as a deep-fried otter, and my body had yet to return to its former state of man. I raised myself from the bed, draped a dressing gown mostly over my body, and stumbled downstairs into the lounge. There is no point in recording Helen's reaction to my appearance and animal-like grunting. It would be a waste of ink to reproduce her assessment of my glowing head, increasingly foul smell and evolutionary reversion to the most basic biological function of simply ingesting oxygen. The boy was there, I was aware of that, but I had managed to turn an almost literally blind eye to this. He was in his mother's arms, that was all I needed to know. So I had reduced his essence to a handbag slung over Helen's shoulder. I had seen the handbag, I knew Helen had the handbag, nothing wrong with that, women often carry handbags, it was in the periphery of my vision and I had no need to look at it for any length of time, why would I? My only concern was that the bag should not be transferred to me, for no man likes to be seen standing with his wife's handbag. There was no need for her to give me her bag. Then the bag started making noises, and again, although I was faintly aware of them, I blanked them out, like the time when the barbecue party next door was getting rowdy and I valiantly ignored it because I didn't want the disturbance to spoil my day. I felt like I was under water, things moving slowly, sounds muffled – one part water to two parts vodka. Then it registered that Helen had left the room and not taken her handbag with her, and it wasn't just sitting there in the corner, waiting to be picked up again, but moving with impossible speed across the floor to all the places it wasn't supposed to go to if only for its own safety. My heart, which had gained access to my mouth by rising up through my throat, nearly fell out onto the carpet when I stood up from the sofa. I sat back down again. Helen returned, picked up the bag and was wearing it again. Everything was OK. "Are you alright?" she asked. Some vowels fell out of my mouth and she left the room. As she did so, I noticed the bag smiling at me, and I realised I was not only tasting Spam, but also a generous helping of guilt. Then the bag was on the floor again, and the noise from next door's barbecue was getting louder. I thought with horror that the handbag was inviting me to next door's barbecue. The idea of eating charred sausages almost made me sick. I hate the summer, I thought. All of a sudden there was a bowl of hot tomato soup in my lap, and the bag could have shouted "Daddy, I love you" and run up to me holding an intricate reproduction of a B-29 Superfortress he had fashioned from ten-thousand matchsticks and I would not have cared. Nothing mattered but the tasty, reviving soup.

That evening, Helen suggested that beer and wine were not an ideal combination, and beer and wine and the boy were an even worse one, and that next time we went out with our friends, we should return home right after dinner.

iii
One evening Helen told me a horror story, which I later entitled The Baby That Helped Itself. It concerned a woman who sometimes popped into the local mother and baby group, and who was known by Helen and her friends as Weird Wendy. Among the oddities attributed to Weird Wendy, one stood out more than the others: that her baby, about the same age as the boy, did not sleep in a nursery but in a kind of hammock attached to the side of the parental bed. This in itself was weird, and I told Helen so, but she informed me to wait because there was more weirdness to come. The reason the baby slept in a hammock attached to the parental bed was not to assuage any fears the mother might have had about leaving the baby on its own. No, the sleeping arrangement was so devised that the baby, by turning itself towards the mother who laid beside him, could “help himself” in the middle of the night. The mother, apparently, did not wake when this feeding ceremony took place, for the baby did not call out to express his hunger; and because the mother slept with the breast closest to the hammock exposed, she did not have to perform any conscious action. The baby simply turned onto the appropriate side, leaned forward, engaged the waiting nipple and sucked until it was sated. Thus concluded the tale of The Baby That Helped Itself.

My only footnote, based on pure speculation, was that The Baby That Helped Itself was bound to grow into That Weirdo Who Used To Live Next Door And Is Now Doing Time For You Know What, based on the fact that his mother, Weird Wendy, allowed her infant to gobble upon her willy-nilly. It is well known that psychopathic killers often have troubled relationships with their mothers, and when I say well known I mean that I have seen Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho. It is inevitable, therefore, that in a couple of years, The Baby That Helped Itself will be running the wendy house at the end of his garden as a motel, where horrible things happen in the shower, and where Weird Wendy's skeleton hangs from the rafters, draped in a 1950s dressing gown.

I was pleased that we had removed the boy from our room to the nursery after only a few weeks, and glad that his mother slept with both breasts covered up, and thankful that the milk within them was only available to the boy if he used the proper appeal process – that is to holler and cry, which was better than murdering us both in our beds.

iv
I found myself in a predicament while taking the boy for a stroll in his chair. Passing Ladbrokes, I decided that I would quite like to place a small bet on the day's football fixtures, a practice known in my bachelor days as placing a coupon; the odds were long, I never won, but it seemed a more intellectual pursuit than simply buying a lottery ticket for a pound. I had been inside this particular branch of Ladbrokes before, and eyed warily the heavy swing door with the stiff opening action. Opening the door required a strong pull on its vertical metal bar, and there was no prospect of keeping it either ajar or agape if one were weak of arm. In a nutshell, the door to Ladbrokes was not pushchair-friendly, and noting this I determined that only a fool would try to negotiate the entrance with a pushchair. So the dilemma was that I found myself outside the betting shop and desiring to place a coupon, but I neither wanted to try to enter the shop with the pushchair and risk a humiliating encounter with the door, nor leave the boy outside unattended as I went about my business within.

Finding the boy asleep, the street quiet and my desire to place a coupon strong, I applied the brake to the chair, furtively looked around to make sure no one was observing me, and entered the betting shop. Once inside I dashed to where the coupons resided in racks on the far wall, trotting across the worn carpet like a man who has emerged from the sea naked to find his clothes are not where he has left them. I plucked the coupon from its receptacle, ensuring I retrieved the one entitled Strike It Rich, and trotted back to the door, clutching the paper in my hands with anticipation rarely felt since the publication of my GCSE results. The whole manoeuvre took less than thirty seconds, and the boy was oblivious to my fleeting absence. We returned home, where the boy awoke and his mother expressed disapproval of my actions.
A week later, I again found myself outside Ladbrokes with the boy in his chair. Wanting another opportunity to Strike It Rich, but not wanting to bear the lashes of Helen's metaphorical whip, I now decided that the predicament of the door was the lesser of two evils. Prepared to take on any challenge the door presented to me, I yanked the thing open with one hand while maintaining control and position of the pushchair with the other; with a skill that was based more in instinct than training, I guided the vessel through the entrance and into the Ladbrokes lobby – it did not even touch the sides. Pleased with this result, I confidently sauntered across to the far wall, propelling the chair with one hand; the other was in my trouser pocket. There was no need to rush this time; I might even have stayed in the shop and filled out the coupon there, rather than having to take it home and return later. This would have had the added advantage of giving me the opportunity to steal one of Ladbrokes' miniature ball-point pens, which come in useful for the filling in of crosswords and for the retrieval of things that have become lodged in small gaps. However, no sooner had I lifted a Strike It Rich leaflet from its plastic envelope when a woman started to shout at me. Looking across to her, I realised from her red Polyester polo shirt and position behind the counter that she was employed by Ladbrokes, and she was saying: "You can't bring children in here!" I had been caught red-handed, but it had never occurred to me that the boy, as young as he was, would be barred from a gambling establishment. "Right-o," I told her by way of reassurance, and I waved the coupon in the air, remembering Neville Chamberlain with his letter of Peace In Our Time.

I attempted to give off an air of nonchalance as I pushed the chair to the door, an action that was observed by every gambler in the shop. They all sort of leered, and I imagine they are still tutting at me in their local Wetherspoons to this day. I doubted I would ever attempt to take the boy into Ladbrokes again, or leave him outside with the brake on. It was a no-win situation.

v
At seven months the boy began to attempt his first word. Because the noise he made was "da-dad-dad", I informed Helen that I had won. The boy obviously preferred me to her, for his noise must have been his attempt at Dad. It certainly was not an attempt at mummy. My victory was a Pyrrhic one though: very soon Helen was commanding me to change the boy's nappy, "because he prefers you to me"; mop up his sick, "because he prefers you to me"; and bear the burden of his trust-fund contributions, "because he prefers you to me."

This turn of events made me wonder whether "da-dad-dad" did refer to me after all. Perhaps the boy was commenting on Britain's foreign policy, and suggesting that rather than Afghanistan, we should be concentrating our military efforts in Iraq, specifically Baghda-dad-dad. This reminded me of the grandmother formerly known as Osama Bin Laden, and who now went by the name of Omar Sharif. According to Helen's memory of childhood, Sharif once drove a car nicknamed The Ayatollah. This story made me cock an eyebrow in Helen's direction as I mulled over the irony of a woman, who had once named her car The Ayatollah, later being transformed into the CIA's most-wanted man after attempting to disguise herself as a Danish grandmother. It also made me think that I was perhaps including too much global politics, which had so far ranged from Nazi Germany to international terrorism, in the potted history of the boy's first year. Furthermore, it compelled me to ask, What did Helen's mother say when she lost her car, The Ayatollah? The answer: Dude, where's my shah?

Maybe, more interested in interior design than current affairs, the boy was expressing the opinion that the walls of his nursery would be more aesthetically pleasing if decorated in a dado effect, with a strip of wallpaper giving the appearance of a wooden border – da-dad-dado. This made me suspect that Helen had spent a large portion of her maternity leave watching lifestyle TV programmes of the sort presented by Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen, and home-improvement shows of the type featuring Tommy Walsh. When questioned about this, she denied everything.

Or perhaps the boy, observing me totter into his room after not enough sleep, was describing my da-dad-daddle style of walking.

Other than something to do with a daddy-long-legs, I could not imagine any other object of his outburst. Incidentally, I ate a daddy-long-legs at the age of about five. The minibeast had flown into the glass I was drinking from, and I had continued drinking, oblivious. My mother spotted half a dozen legs dangling from my lips, but before she could say anything, the insect had been consumed. I have since attributed my irrational fear of crane flies to this incident, and would like to think that I have murdered enough of the buggers to cause a fundamental change to the ecosystem of south-east England.

I also don't have much time for caterpillars, since the hairy one I was permitted to keep as a pet caused me to break out in a nasty rash. And wasps. They are bastards.

vi
The boy had suddenly become remarkably accident prone. He was no longer content to lie beneath the rubber minibeasts within his play pen, and at every opportunity scrambled across the living room on all fours in order to hit his head against the corner of the armchair, or perform a kind of backwards flop, which involved sitting up contentedly before falling backwards and smashing his head against the floor – a manoeuvre which resulted in mild whimpering when rested and sated, but gale-force wailing when slightly tired or a bit peckish. Added to his newfound proclivity for hitting his head against things was my own carelessness and, sometimes, incompetence, and, rarely, neglect.

So there was the time I picked up the boy from his changing mat and carried him into our bedroom. Just inside the door of our bedroom was located a sturdy chest of drawers. Due to his powerful wriggling, writhing and worming about in my arms, the boy was perpendicular to me as I entered the room, with his head sticking out from my left side and his feet protruding from my right. His head thudded against the corner of the chest. Fortunately, it was dinner time, and I had a bottle of milk ready to stop up his protesting mouth.

Another time the boy was scrambling about on the floor, ignoring his toys in favour of the Sky remote, when I heard a loud thud. I looked over and saw him on his back, with his face contorting into the shape most appropriate for issuing a prolonged vocal complaint. While I was not looking, he had evidently gotten himself into at least a sitting position and performed the aforementioned backwards flop into the ground. Of course, I immediately felt guilty at having let my attention wander from the observation of the boy, but I tempered this emotion by asserting the fact that, while momentarily distracted, I had been engaged in signing and dating a copy of the last will and testament sent by my solicitor; as the boy was a stated beneficiary in this document, its timely ratification was in his best interests. I guess that what I am trying to say is, no pain no gain. Anyway, he did not cry for long because it was lunch time and I had a bottle of milk ready to feed to him.

On one occasion the boy was inching himself naughtily towards the table that acted as a beacon to him because on top of it sat the television and beneath it were located the stereo, Sky box and DVD player. "He is going to hit his head," I warned Helen, who was also sat in the room. "I know, I'm watching him," she said. We then both observed in silence as the boy, who was now at the table – a solid, unvarnished oak affair – reached the inevitable tipping point and, in trying to mount the object, slowly but surely thudded his head against a corner. I blamed both Helen and me in equal measure for this oversight. Fortunately, as well as absorbing fifty per cent of the guilt, his mother was there to comfort the boy when he began to cry like there was no tomorrow. Little did he know that tomorrow would be the day that I would carry him length-ways into the bedroom and hit his head against the chest of drawers.

Unfortunately it was suggested, by me no less, that the boy's verbal regression – after two days of "da-dad-dads", he had ceased speaking – had something to do with his head's frequent contact with the floor and various items of furniture. I wondered if, when he did decide to resume communication with his parents, the boy's next words would be "ouch", "aghh", "yikes", "Christ" and "Childline".

It was also noted around this time that the boy had a short attention span, "like a goldfish", his mother said, which came in useful in a number of ways. First, it meant the boy did not hold a grudge after his head had encountered solid oak furniture or exposed oak floorboards. He immediately looked appalled after such misadventures, but was quickly appeased with tricks such as giving him his dinner, or tickling him in the ribs. Second, he was probably not committing to memory the image of his mother and father smoking, drinking and watching daytime television. Third, he was probably not committing to memory the content being broadcast by our television in the daytime. Fourth, he was surely too young to be aware of any noise of any nature emanating from his parents' bedroom, which, he probably had also forgotten, was where we kept the chest of drawers. Fifth, he had no idea that he had been left at the age of six months to fend for himself outside the local betting shop. Sixth, he was not aware that when taken into the local betting shop, his father had been reprimanded for doing so by an employee keen to point out Ladbrokes' strict stance on gambling children. Seventh, he will never know that his mother dressed him in a vest that made him look like a gay cow (I shall erase all the photos). And eighth, he will never know that his mother once put a sock on his willy so that he "looked like a Red Hot Chili Pepper" (I will keep these photos, they might come in useful one day).

vii
It occurred to me that Omar Sharif, the grandmother formerly known as Oma, might, in the assertion of her new name, which she claimed was Dutch, have been trying in her own unique way to get down with the kids. I wondered whether Oma was an abomination of OMG. So, instead of Oh My God, she was exclaiming Oh My Ayatollah. This gave fresh meaning to the letters she had written to the boy, which could now be interpreted to read, "I hope you like the jumper knitted by Oh My Ayatollah", and "the weather was nice here today so I did some gardening, all my love, Oh My Ayatollah". This, though, made the boy's maternal grandmother sound like a West End musical based on the Iranian revolution of 1979. And what were the X's after her name? Kisses? Or a topographical indication of where Iran was hiding its nuclear weapons facilities? After all, there was the name she gave to her car. Perhaps we should have called her Igran, seeing as she seemed to have an obsession with the former Persia, but Igran, or iGran, sounded like Apple had branched out into virtual retirement homes staffed by Bob Monkhouse and Jamie Oliver holograms.

But this was all nonsense, there was no need for me to become obsessed with the names the boy's grandmother had invented for herself, possibly under the influence of the painkillers prescribed to her in the run-up to an operation on a malfunctioning shoulder. After all, I had no justification for speculating that Jenny was a colloquial form of Jen, or, to be more accurate, Gen, aka The General, other than the fact that she sported a fine set of moustaches and barked out orders to her subordinates (anybody in her presence) with military zeal. I was equally without supporting evidence to suggest that her shoulder was injured by the kick-back delivered from a Palestinian rocket launcher, which she had been using to fire missiles into the Promised Land (although the moustaches atop her mouth were accompanied, if one looked at her in a certain light, by a downy beard hanging from her chin).

Now, though, I felt l had overstepped the mark. Although certain that Oma would never overhear me refer to her by her pseudonyms, Osama Bin Laden, Omar Sharif, Oh My Ayatollah and The General, I was concerned that the boy would one day pick up on the associations himself and provoke his grandmother's terrible wrath and righteous fury. Then I remembered that, because he kept banging his head into things, for him none of this ever happened. Everything was going to be OK.

And ninth, he will not recall that I vowed to hit his grandmother across the face with a Denon stereo speaker, or that she went by many names, only one of which was related to bridge, which is a game old women play.

viii
We had been invited to a wedding and were on the way to the church when the boy made a dirty protest in the back seat of the car. We knew it was going to be bad because before yesterday, when he breached his nappy and soaked his clothes in effluence, the boy had been constipated for five days. I had the good fortune of not being there yesterday, so his mother dealt with the situation and reported back: the brown sludge had not only seeped from the boundaries of the nappy's inner pants-like compartment, but had reached the boy's armpits. The problem we had today was that the bride and her father were only five minutes behind us, and the etiquette of holy matrimony stated that she should not enter the church on her wedding day closely pursued by the third bridesmaid, her plus one and their dirty son.

We pulled up outside the church. If I was Hugh Grant, I would have dashed about saying fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck. As it was, I said "fuck" only once, a pre-emptive expletory as I removed my seatbelt and opened the car door, resigned to the horror that awaited me in the back seat.

I extracted the boy from his car seat. "It's leaked!" I shouted at Helen, who was scrambling in the boot while exchanging flip-flops for high heels. As I surveyed the tell-tale moist patch on the boy's flank, a packet of babywipes appeared beside him. This was my cue to begin.

I undid the poppers to the babygrow and pulled apart the frontage. The crap was everywhere: down both legs to his toes, across his stomach and, yes, into his armpits. A pool of it collected in the crotch of the babygrow, and anyone watching would have seen liquid chocolate spill onto the gravel path leading to the church as I gingerly but shakily removed the soiled clothing from the car.

Any wedding guests lingering before the House of God would then have heard me shout "It's fucking everywhere!", soon followed by "I'm going to need a bag!". I looked at the palms of my hands: both of them were smeared with the sludge. I kept repeating to myself: do not scratch your nose, do not scratch your nose.

It was difficult to ascertain who I should clean first: the boy, who looked, to be honest, beyond help; or me, who was wearing a newly bought suit unbecoming of my soiled hands. I stood there, and he laid there, the two of us looking at each other with expressions that asked, What next? To an onlooker it might have seemed that Willy Wonka had just rescued an oompa-loompa from his Chocolate River. Do not wipe the sweat from your brow, I told myself, do not wipe the sweat from your brow.

Twenty or thirty wipes later, the boy looked more pink than brown, and I held out my hands for Helen to clean. "Nice," she said as she did so, no doubt feeling like the least glamorous of the three bridesmaids. Helen took the box of confetti from the boot, and I filled the vacated space with the bag containing the fallout from the boy's dirty protest. "I'll burn it when we get home," I said. "The bag of crap," I qualified after a silence, "not the boy."

Now, there was one benefit to being in charge of the stinker on such an occasion. As I was of the opinion that all church weddings in England were essentially the same – if not exactly the same, then pretty much the same – I was not disappointed to effectively miss the entire proceeding. The usher directed me to the hindmost pew, where mothers and fathers before me had already been sent, as far away from the altar and the meat of the affair as it was possible to be without actually being barred entry. From this distance, all I could see were the backs of the heads of the nineteen rows of people before me, and all I could hear were the whimpers and gurgles of the boy and his peers. As I had seen it all and heard it all before, I do, I do, et cetera, I really did not give a monkeys. At least I didn't have to look like I was having a good time.

Another advantage was that I got to avoid singing the hymns and reading the prayers. Most important of the two was the avoidance of the singing, and the boy, as if knowledgeable of my plight, immediately snatched the hymn sheet from my hand and began to eat it on the opening lines of All Things Bright And Beautiful. I let him chew it through the entire song and the Lord's Prayer. I did not even bother to try and mime the words. I stood up with the rest of the congregation, but that was as far as I went – after all, I was holding up the boy so he could get a better view of the backs of the heads of the nineteen rows of people before him. If anyone noticed me not singing – and the only people close to the back were the usher and a sleeping toddler in a pushchair – they would have dismissed the transgression with the thought, "Well, of course he's not singing, he's holding a baby and look, it's eating his hymn sheet. How sweet."

I had the foresight and decorum necessary to ensure that while the vows were being read the boy was sucking at his bottle, thus ensuring that rather than interrupt the service with an attempt to say "Blair got it all wrong by following the Yanks into Baghda-dad-dad", he merely emitted the occasional stomach rumble and belch, both of which I was prepared, if questioned later, to blame on the old duffer in front of us with the bad comb-over, and who kept shouting to his neighbour, "I can't hear anything!"

Best of all, though, was the opportunity the boy afforded us, not too late into the evening reception, to make good our escape on the ground of it being well past his bed time. Thus we missed the woman in the black dress with the pot belly who squatted on the ground to urinate ("With all her bits hanging out on show," according to the usher) and the spectacle of everyone else dancing to Black Elvis.

I ended the day by forgiving the boy for his dirty protest, even though I knew he could not understand a word I was saying.

ix
If I were to shoot the boy's maternal grandmother and then sing about my crime under the influence of Bob Marley, the world would hear how “I shot the Sharif”. One afternoon, Sharif revealed to us, while reminiscing about her breastfeeding days, that she wished "my milk would come in again", and wondered out lout whether "my milk will come in if I tried to feed him [the boy]". The comments were harmless, except that they conjured up the image of the sixty-year-old waving her whoppers in the boy's face and saying to him, "Here you are, lad, have some of this." And what, at her age, would 'this' be exactly, but a kind of rancid curd. I had a vision of flakes of cheese falling from the nipples of Omar Sharif, like cheddar from a grater. Cheese made me squirm at the best of times, but now even a dish as inoffensive as Welsh rarebit inspired the thought that rather than hailing from a village in Somerset, the cheese had originated from that sexagenarian's antiquititties.

Thus I felt distinctly uncomfortable, having heard the above, and thought the above, when the following incident occurred. We had taken the boy to Sharif's bridge club near the Welsh border, where we spent much of the weekend wondering why the frying pans in her kitchen cupboards numbered fourteen in total and one corner of the house had become an immense shrine to Tupperware. Helen had gone into town on an errand, leaving me with the boy in the house, the inner recesses of which hid Sharif, who was engaged in the toil of quiltmaking. While his mother was out, and with no sign of her imminent return, the boy began to appeal for food. I put up with this as best as possible within my powers, which did not grant me the ability to lactate at will. However, the boy's cries had evidently reached every nook and cranny of the house, for eventually Sharif appeared and expressed her desire to take him off my hands. As he had been screaming in my ears for some time, I gladly gave him up, and off they went into the garden. I took this opportunity to make myself a cup of tea and look for the biscuits. Ten minutes passed, during which time I consumed the Shropshire Star, which informed me of the important news that a local woman had had some food gone missing from her freezer. I wondered where the boy had got up to, and gave a look around. I could not find them in any room of the house, or any corner of the garden. Thinking of the cheese, I began to worry. She wouldn't, would she?

I had mixed feelings when Sharif finally returned with the boy. On the one hand, he was no longer crying, which was a relief, until it occurred to me that when famished, nothing would calm him but the presentation of milk. While Sharif explained that they had been for a walk along a nearby lane, I inspected the boy's mouth for signs of foul play. As I saw nothing untoward, I had no choice but to assume that it was in fact the walk which had done him good, and not a generous helping of curds and whey.

During her recollection of breastfeeding, Sharif also reported that the thing she missed most was being stroked by the baby as it suckled. I thought of this when, one evening with Helen not home, I found myself performing the duty of giving the boy his bedtime feed. As we had just had a bath, I was wearing nothing but a towel around my waist. The boy took this opportunity, while sucking furiously at the teat of the bottle, to stroke my exposed nipple. Readers may remember that when wet, my nipples resembled Terry Nutkins on a windy beach, but thankfully I had had time to dry my torso before feeding began, saving the boy from this further embarrassment. Nonetheless, his fingers glided over my teat repeatedly, an action that was accompanied by his satisfactory grunts and hums. My mind travelled to Sharif's mammaries, and, like her, I wondered – unlike her, to myself and not aloud – whether my milk would come in. I remembered watching a wildlife documentary in which some bovine creature licked the bottom of its newborn young to stimulate it to defecate. Suspecting that his stroking might have a similar effect on my Terry Nutkinses, I calmly moved the boy's hand to a less titular area of my torso, where he found the going rough, but was soon munching on the baps of Morpheus.

x
The parental clichés began to fly out thick and fast. On one occasion, as the boy writhed about while I attempted to change his undergarments, I scolded him with the words, "The more you wriggle, the longer it will take" (despite him not being able to understand a word I said). At other times, I simply sounded like a parrot, churning out "Who's a clever boy?" and "Who's a big boy?" and "Who's a strong boy?" depending on whether the boy had performed an action that proved his cleverness (by, say, pushing over a tower of blocks), bigness (just existing, really) or strength (hitting me in the eye). It would not be long before I would be informing him that if the wind changed, his face would stay like that, that lies make baby Jesus cry, that only good children receive presents at Christmas, and that watching too much television would make his legs fall off. As disabled children are always the target for the worst abuse at school, the latter would definitely make him want to watch less television.

No doubt he would return the favour by asking, "Are we there yet?", which would provoke the assurance that a watched kettle never boils, a watched phone never rings and a watched clock never tells the time. I was already prepared to be asked why they killed Christ – because he didn't eat all his vegetables; and what happens when you die – everyone goes to Hell, except children who remember not to swear in front of their grandparents. I was determined, though, not to accuse the boy of being a dirty little Arab, although this appellation would likely be agreeable to both his grandmothers.

xi
We were in Boots queuing at the prescription counter for the boy's bath cream. An elderly gentleman came into the shop and joined the line behind us. The boy, who had become bored of his current circumstances, began to protest. The gentleman, who had hitherto been silent, took this opportunity to engage the boy's mother and I in conversation. "I know how to keep him quiet," he said. We both looked at him, neither of us interested in how the old man thought he could keep a baby quiet. Undeterred by the blank expressions that met him, the man continued: "Put a pillow over his head." To emphasise his point, the man then mimed the action of smothering a child with a pillow. He showed no evident pleasure in doing so, but rather gave the impression that he was performing a great service for us, and that it cost him no small effort. Seeing that our blank expressions had turned to mild horror, the man ended his mime, and returned to his monologue. "That would shut 'em up," he said. "Pillow on the head, yes." Helen laughed nervously, and I regretted that she did so, as I suspected that even this basic utterance would encourage the potential child murderer to dispense further pearls of wisdom. "Not that I don't condone having 'em," he continued, morosely, again as if he had been called upon, against his will, to engage strangers in a public forum on the art of childrearing. "Got two of 'em myself," he said. Then, seeing we were unconvinced of his parenthood, based on what he had said previously, the man added: "Got two grandchildren, too." I, who had maintained a bemused silence throughout this encounter, continued to hold my tongue, preferring to appear rude than goad the man into further revelations on his thoughts and private life. Thankfully, Helen had also realised the merits of keeping her lips sealed. To which the man concluded, as we collected our package from the counter: "Yes, pillow's the best way. Not that I don't condone the having of them though, got two of them myself."

Remarkably, a short time later I bumped into a sometime work colleague on a train station platform. He asked me how things were going with the boy. I told him the boy had started waking in the middle of the night, and subsequently his mother and I were quite tired. This man, who had no children himself, advised in a tone of voice that left it far from clear whether he was joking or being sincere: "Put a bag over his head." Not sure how to respond to meeting a second potential child choker in less than a week, I wondered aloud whether the train we were waiting for was on time. Undeterred, he returned to his theme. "Yes, a bag over the head. He won't make much noise when he's dead." Fortunately, whatever he was about to add was interrupted by an announcement over the public-address system, and we were both distracted from saying things we were bound to regret by the inanities of London's transport network.

xii
I was in the bath with the boy when something terrible happened. Within minutes of his entering the tub, his face went a peculiar red colour, a visual phenomenon which was accompanied by an odd guttural noise. "Helen!" I shouted from my watery prison, suspicious of what was occurring within the boy's body. "I think he's trying to do a poo!" When it sounded as if Helen was making a less than speedy approach to the bathroom, I added for emphasis: "He is definitely about to do a poo!" Goaded by my desperate plea for help, Helen rushed into the bathroom and lifted the miscreant from my lap. "Has he done one?" she asked, noticing that the boy looked rather relaxed, and not at all like a person engaged in the act of defecation. "I don't think so," I said, surveying the surface of the water, and my lap, for evidence.

Helen took the boy away to prepare him for dinner. It was now that the most awful flotsam presented itself in the water – a floating turd, about half a foot in length and with the thickness of a standard sausage, was riding the current and making its way at speed towards my half-submerged face. I was at eye level with the thing, and I jumped from the water like my life depended on it. "Helen!" I shouted from the safety of the bath mat as the turd disappeared beneath the surface. "He did do one!" And then, stressing the need for her to attend to me immediately: "I've seen it!"

She returned to the bathroom with the boy, looked at the bath and asked what all the fuss was about. "It has sunk," I told her. Noticing that she remained unconvinced, I instructed her to "give me the boy", and, when she enquired why, told her that doing so would enable her to locate, and then retrieve, the missing turd. Amazingly, she agreed to this strategy, and I watched on with the boy in my arms as his mother fished about in the water. "How big is it?" she asked. "Massive," I told her, "a foot long at least. And just as wide." Helen decided that the job would require additional apparatus. Subsequently, it was with a hand wrapped in a plastic bag that she retrieved the turd, which had become lodged, upright, in the plug hole. Luckily for her, the item had broken only into two pieces, and not much more delving was required for its emigration to the toilet bowl. The boy had observed the whole of the proceedings nonchalantly, as if unaware of the part he had played in them.

The following day, despite having had a fresh bath in the wake of the incident described above, I regularly became paranoid that the smell of the boy’s turds was wafting out from within my clothing. It was little comfort to think that such feelings were natural in a person whose ablutions the previous evening had been interrupted by the bobbing to the surface of a miscellaneous man-sausage.

xiii
It was someone's thirtieth birthday party and we had been invited to the pub. Obviously we brought the boy with us as we could hardly leave him at home on his own, but that did not seem to matter, it was evidently a child-friendly establishment, if the continuous stream of screaming kids running in and out of the garden area was anything to go by. The small people in our party were not old enough to make a nuisance of themselves by running around like retarded chickens, but they did make their presence keenly felt through a general but loud whinging, which, as they could not verbalise their disquiet, consisted mainly of "AAHHHHHHHH"s, "RRRRRRRRRRRRRRR"s, "WAHHHHHHHH"s and "MAAAAAAAHHH"s.

I was not having a good time. I could not see the point of going to the pub with people whose ages ranged from eight months to ten months. Surely it was the equivalent of inviting one’s friends (the cool ones, the ones with iPhones and albums by the Kings of Leon) over to watch SpongeBob SquarePants on the TV. Indeed, I felt great sympathy for the gentleman who appeared at the entrance of the pub and commented "It's like a bloody wendy house in here". He actually said this to the cigarette he had come outside to smoke, as if none of the people present were worthy of being engaged in discourse. These people were, after all, parents who had ruined the last bastion of enjoyment in his life, the public house, by bringing their children there. The bastards. I considered telling this man that it could be worse – he could spend all afternoon in his favourite pub, having his pleasure tainted by the presence of screaming children, only to go home in the evening to be shat on in the bath. But I thought better of it. The way he said "wendy house" had a remarkably bitter tone to it, like when a Holocaust survivor remembers the "death camps".

This taking of one's children to the pub business struck me as rather symptomatic of our have-it-all society. After all, these days we not only want our cake (personally, I prefer cheesecake) but to eat it, too. So, people want to pay less tax but receive improved public services, sexy career women in their forties want to start a family, and parents take their children to the pub. This phenomenon has, of course, contributed to the lamentable decline of the old man's pub, where the landlord is rude, his television made of wood and his female staff grubby but attainable, if possibly underage. The last old man's pub I frequented had, as one might expect from such an establishment, an old man who sat at the bar from eleven in the morning to eleven in the evening, mumbling nonsense and stinking. The brewery must have decided he was putting off the other customers, because they upped their prices, stuck a flat-screen telly to the wall and upgraded the salted peanuts to roasted meats with butternut squash and potato dauphinoise. Now the place is frequented by babies (a young man's pub, if you like) who mumble nonsense and stink. They must be putting off the other customers, one of whom just came out of the pub and described it as a wendy house.

xiv
The instructions on the side of the box of formula milk were written to strike fear into the hearts of unconfident parents. It warned that not measuring the correct dose of powder exactly "might cause harm to your baby", and suggested that even a little too much, or a little too less, of the powder would be a disaster, although it did not specify what form this disaster might take. To reinforce this theme, the box included not only a scooper to dig out the powder (very useful), but also an inbuilt "scraper", as it was referred to in the instructions, for the levelling off of the powder once excavated. The commandments on the box said this feature was essential, and its use ensured that rather than heaped scooperfuls of powder being plonked into the milk bottle, aesthetically pleasing, spirit-levelled scoops would instead be deposited. This scraper was a piece of plastic wedged into one of the corners of the top of the box.

I was flummoxed by the sentiment behind these instructions and the scraper. Of course, one would be foolish to tip up the box and randomly fill the milk bottle with powder in the same way as one might prepare a nice bowl of piping hot Ready Brek on a winter's morning. But it did not take me long to discover (about three seconds) that simply shaking the scooper, once loaded with powder, had the pleasing effect of depositing the excess stuff back into the box, leaving the scooper with a finely levelled burden of foodstuff. I considered drawing a diagram of myself shaking my wrist with the scooper in my fingers, so I could send it to the formula milk company for consideration as a replacement form of instructions on the side of their boxes. However, my drawing skills were nothing to write home about, and I knew before I started on such an endeavour that the result would be crude. Worse, it might look like I was accusing the formula milk company of onanism. As the boy seemed to enjoy their foodstuff, this was the last thing I wanted to happen.

So, I was grateful not to be a paranoid parent who measured everything by pipette and magnifying glass, and who insisted on using the elbow to test the temperature of the bath water. However, I did check my nonchalance after becoming convinced that I had poisoned the boy with old water. This occurred when, having arrived home with him from his child minder, later than his bed time and after a long day at work, he began to crave food in a manner that suggested he wanted his request fulfilled either immediately, or very soon indeed. His mother was not home, and there were no bottles of formula milk prepared in the fridge. Due to the pressing nature of the boy's request, there was no time to defrost the breast milk in the freezer; nor was there time to prepare a fresh bottle of formula milk to the letter, which stated that first the kettle, having been filled with fresh water from the tap, must be boiled and then set to rest for half an hour, before one should go about the nonsense with the scooper and the scraper and the spirit level. The boy had no concept of what half an hour would feel like to endure, but I was fully aware of the experience that awaited me if I were to go down that road. Hence I decided that the water already in the kettle, of which there was little, and which had been sitting in it for at least twelve hours, would be fine, give or take the occasional presence of flakes of limescale. This, then, was the old water I used to mix with the powder, giving more skilful flicks of the wrist to toss off the excess granules than ever before. If the BBC replaced Strictly Come Dancing with Strictly Come Scooping, I could have been a contender.
The boy took this concoction like he had done all the others before it, and soon he was asleep in his cot. I turned a blind eye to the presence of gooey-looking globules stuck to the inside of the bottle after he had finished his meal, and put this down to the water being cold, rather than old. Yet when, a short time later, the boy developed a nasty, hacking cough, I assumed I had been too laissez faire with my milk-making, and had done him harm. So sure was I that I was the cause of his ailment that I chose to hide my guilt from his mother, who did not seem worried about it at all. Many a moment I laid awake at night, cursing myself for not having boiled the kettle afresh and waited for the prescribed thirty minutes.

It was a great relief to me when, a week or so into the boy's throaty malady, Helen announced that two of the little man's contemporaries also had the disease. I was glad that these two small people had also been struck down with it, but I hid my pleasure behind vocal concern for their welfare. Importantly, I was in the clear: there was evidently a cold going around the baby community (that would teach the critters to frequent social occasions such as Baby Boogie), and it was this from which the boy was suffering. From this moment on, I shook that scooper with even greater flourish than before, as if my fingers were wearing tights and my hand was performing a shadow mime of Michael Flatley's River Dance.

xv
The sleep deprivation began when the boy decided to renege on eight good months of sound unconsciousness at night time and awake at four-hour intervals. He did this to demonstrate the persistence of his cough, which at first I had thought was my fault but then concluded was the result of his interaction with other small people. Although I let Helen bear the brunt of this situation, and lay in bed pretending to be asleep while she collected the boy to soothe and feed him, it soon became clear that this brought little benefit to me, as pretending to be asleep was not as revitalising as actually being asleep. Furthermore, I was more tired than usual because I had started working overtime in anticipation of the mounting costs of childrearing, which would soon include the remuneration of an au pair, whom Helen stipulated should be French and I that she should be aged between seventeen and eighteen.

This new strain manifested itself in midnight mutterings from my drooling mouth, when my brain, off guard, spilled its innermost beans – rotten beans that usually lay festering deep within the cauldron of my mind. Thus I would awake to find myself making statements such as "Yoko Ono's fanny", "Will the au pair change my nappy?", and, more worryingly, "Michael Barrymore's bleeding anus". I was so startled at the latter sentence that it stuck in my head more than the others, the effect being that I ended up thinking it almost constantly. Sometimes, for instance, during extended moments of dullness, it became a kind of upbeat ditty. So I would be on the train, which was sitting at a failed signal outside East Croydon. While my fellow commuters read their newspapers or the latest Dan Brown novel, I hummed to myself, jauntily, "Tum te tum te tum, Michael Barrymore's bleeding anus…" By the end of one such delay on the train, which had lasted more than half an hour, the song had gained a cockney feel, and the lyrics were pronounced as Dick Van Dyke would have performed them. So, as my fellow commuters tapped their feet in time to their iPods and gazed wistfully out the window, I sat among them, nearly singing out loud, "Chim-chim-eny, chim-chim-eny, Barry-more's bleedin' an-us!"

Obviously this had to stop. It was not appropriate for me to be commenting on Yoko Ono's fanny as the boy contentedly gobbled milk beside me, and I anticipated serious trouble with the guard or the British Transport Police if a fellow passenger were to overhear my new opera, Michael Barrymore's Bleeding Anus.

The best remedy I found was to replace the offending material with more benign alternatives whenever thoughts about Yoko Ono or Michael Barrymore entered my head. I could only perform this action while awake, of course, but the hope was that my unconscious self would be influenced. Thus, I spent much of the following weeks, at home, at work, on the train, and in bed, singing gaily in my head, "Tum te tum te tum, Rupert Heseltine's wendy house." Then, even better, the Polish operator of the office lunch trolley provided me with "sandy witches… please, please… sandy witches". He was referring to the sandwiches within his cart of comestibles, but anyone overhearing me in bed, woman or child, would assume I was reciting a magical fairy tale, and wonder at my special brand of fatherhood.

By concentrating on Rupert Heseltine's wendy house and Polish Boy's sandy witches as I fell asleep at night, I was also able to lessen the chance that I would, in my unconscious state, attempt to engage Helen or the boy in a conversation about the pornographic films I planned to make in the unlikely event that making pornographic films became socially acceptable and all the best porn actresses wanted to star in mine. After all, the woman and the boy did not, I assumed, want to hear, at three in the morning, my scene-by-scene description of Willy Wanker's Chocolate Fetish or, with apologies to the actress Michele Ryan, The Ryan, The Bitch and The Whoredrobe, starring the actress Michele Ryan.

xvi
It was decided that we would need an au pair. Helen had printed off the résumés of some candidates from the local agency, and was reading them out to me in the kitchen. I was staring at the floor, idly wondering whether the recorded voice of South West Trains' automated messages was provided by the same man who narrated the original TV series of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. My appetite for the task at hand was whetted, however, when Helen handed me the documents, which I quickly discovered contained photographs of the potential au pairs. Noticing that one of them looked rather like Charlotte Gainsbourg, the French actress, I decided she would do.
"How about Charlotte?" I asked, handing Helen the résumé.
"Who?" she asked, confused.
"I mean Sylvie… she seems… nice. And experienced. With looking after children. Sensible too. Good references."
Will the au pair change my nappy, I thought to myself.
"Rupert Heseltine's wendy house," I said. Helen, though, was not listening. She had put Charlotte to one side – on the hob, actually, which was quite disrespectful to the boy's future au pair as it had not been cleaned for a few days and carried the stains of last night's spaghetti bolognese – and was leafing through the other candidates. Then she handed me another résumé, saying, "I like this one." I perused the papers: she was fine, eighteen, supple and experienced with children, but she was no Charlotte Gainsbourg. "She's too young," I said, handing her back, like an official at an important checkpoint in the Second World War might hand back a poorly forged passport. "And she hasn't got enough experience with children." Helen replied "Yes she has", before beginning to read out the girl's curriculum vitae. I interjected: "But she's only eighteen. She will be out every night getting drunk and taking drugs with all her French friends." This seemed to hit the mark, and Helen agreed we needed someone older. "Fine," she said, "we'll give Sylvie a go."

Who's Sylvie, I thought. And then I saw the picture. Ah, yes, Charlotte.

Unfortunately, when we phoned the agency, it turned out that Charlotte Gainsbourg had already been placed with another family, so we threw caution to the wind and plumped for the eighteen-year-old instead. She seemed enthusiastic enough, and when she accepted the position of au pair to the boy, she told us in an email: "I think i'm abble to look after your baby ! Now i've got the habbit with the little one." I was not sure to whom "the little one" referred (we assumed it must be a small garcon), or whether the aitch in "habbit" was silent. But she was willing – "I'm very interesting to work in your family" – and observant: "In fact Brighton is very closed by the ferry."

She was due to start in two weeks, which would give me enough time to practise my good moaning and who do you dee, although the door bell was not working and seemed beyond repair, so searching for a chime that played the 'Allo 'Allo theme tune would be pointless.

xvii
Babies and funerals do not mix well, and we were advised not to take the boy to his great-grandmother's send-off. We took this advice, and the advice seemed good, until silence and serious reverie descended upon the pews. The problem was that I had eaten a meagre breakfast and had missed lunch, and now, two rows from the pulpit, my stomach was complaining rudely. As the vicar related the highlights of the life of the deceased, his solemn words were accompanied by grumbles, rumbles and gurgling. There was a short relief during the first hymn, when the sound of moving furniture emanating from within my trousers was drowned out by enthusiastic singing, but soon we were listening to a passage from the book of Revelations, which was not made more portentous by the apocalyptic earthquake rising from my person.

It was now that I lamented the absence of the boy. At the wedding, his babbling and frothing had been accommodated with sympathetic and amorous looks from the congregation. These countenances would have been more stern at the funeral, but the boy would have served the purpose of disguising my personal plumbing malfunction. True, I would not have been able to belt out Row Row Row Your Boat during the Lord's Prayer, but all of my inappropriate noises could instead have been passed off as the boy's. Later, the commiserating "I'm so sorry for your loss" could have been accompanied with the apologetic "I'm so sorry for the bottom noises. It was the boy".
Admittedly, it would have been selfish of me to use the boy to such ends. Being honest, the boy liked to call a box a box, and the wooden coffin up the front would, for him, have been nothing more and nothing less. I pictured him breaking loose and making for it as he did his mother's shoe boxes, and upon reaching it, trying to prise off the lid to worry the contents inside. This, though, would have been less embarrassing than the reverberations of my abdomen, for which the mourner to my right was nudging me in the side and whispering "What is that?" and "Is that you?".

Later, at the wake, the boy was the star of the show. Having been conspicuous by his absence at the funeral itself, he was now being passed around the mourners like a packet of cigarettes in the days when smoking was compulsory, each recipient of the parcel having their fair share of it before proffering it to the next in line. By now, though, the food and drink were abundant and my stomach was soon sated, rendering the presence of the boy pointless, other than its consoling effect on those who had lost a loved one to the grave. He was particularly popular, as always, with the older members of the party, who saw in him the symbol of regeneration and the future of mankind. For me he was just a cover for my windypops.

xviii
There is a group of people who have nothing better to do than spend all day on parenting forums such as Mumsnet, sharing their misinformed, unwanted opinions with the world. Even worse, there was one person, me, who had nothing better to do than wind up the people who spend all day on parenting forums by posting silly problems that required their advice to solve.

I posted the following message one day in a section of a popular parenting website labelled 'Potty training': "My eight-month-old son last night did a big poo in the bath. I assume he is too young to be potty trained, so I picked up the log and threw it into the toilet (located next to the bath), which he found most amusing. Is this the right thing to do? Perhaps I should have shouted 'naughty boy' or 'dirty boy' while disposing of the log, in order to persuade him not to do it again. My main concerns are: 1. I am not a very good thrower, and there is a danger that I will miss the toilet when lobbing poos into it from the bath; 2. My son is performing a dirty protest – perhaps he is annoyed with me over a perceived slight and is taking his revenge by plopping onto me (I bathe with him). Help!!"

This seemed to annoy someone going by the name of ProfessorLaytonIsMyZ..., who replied: "In what possible way could shouting 'naughty boy', 'dirty boy' or anything else you care to shout ‘persuade him not to do it again?’."

I felt I needed to clarify matters, so I added: "To persuade the boy to connect soiling the bath with doing something wrong."

This did not calm down ProfessorLaytonIsMyZ..., who replied: "If every time you hiccupped I shouted at you that you were a disgusting girl, would that help you avoid the next hiccup, even if I convinced you to the deepest fibre of your being that hiccupping was wrong?"

I was going to respond with, "Yes", but I was concerned that the potential insults might move on from disgusting girl and into more harmful territory. These were people, after all, who had nothing better to do than sit in front of their computer and be wound up by people like me.

Another talkative member, under the pseudonym PacificWerewolfwoohoo, evidently had a crazy sense of humour. She suggested: "Scoop and smile and be grateful when it is formed, is all I'm saying." This was immediately followed by a smiley face, winking.
PacificWerewolfwoohoo was obviously an oracle of parenting technique who added a lot of value to the forum of which she was a member. I was glad to have her on side and keen to discover what further pearls of wisdom lay hidden in the treasure chest of her maternal ken. I wrote the following message: "My husband suggested holding him [the boy] over the toilet when he goes red in the face, ready for the poo, but I am worried I will drop him in the loo as he is slippery from the bath."

This seemed to alienate PacificWerewolfwoohoo, who replied: "Eh??"

However, after a facetious posting by someone called Bessie123, who suggested that I "keep a net by the bath", the interest of PacificWerewolfwoohoo was reignited, and she came back to me with the wholly sensible rhetorical question: "Swim nappy?" One sensed that all questions from PacificWerewolfwoohoo were rhetorical, as she knew everything there was to know about parenthood, or at least parent-woohood. She stalked online parenting forums like a Citizens' Advice Bureau version of Batman, waiting for the call to use her super-powers of encyclopaedic knowledge to save naive questioners from the perils of doubt and the evil forces of indecision. Because this hero, apparently a parent herself, spent all day online disseminating her benevolence, it is only practical that she had a butler, like the real Batman's Alfred, but in her case called Winifred, in order to look after her own little mites. (I use the phrase 'the real Batman' advisedly.) Perhaps, like the bat sign projected into the skies of Gotham City to alert the Caped Crusader of the need for his assistance, the glowing Apple symbol on the back of our hero's Macbook beamed a giant tit onto her ceiling whenever someone new logged in to Mumsnet.

My final interlocutor was Ches, who was less interested in helping me and more concerned with spreading nonsense about her own son. I discovered, like I wanted to know, that her lad "can hold it in like a champ". Luckily, I had already finished eating my sausage sandwich, and I read on: "Now he's older he's happy as long as he's got his own toilet seat." I was horrified. This Son of Ches, who by the sound of it was transported to the loo in a sedan chair, could not perform the royal stool without being seated upon his personal lid. I had entered the realms of the weird, and, although I was tempted to enquire whether Ches was one half of a two-man band called Ches and Deve, I decided that now was the time to take my leave, lest some of the advice being put before me actually sunk in and I nurtured the boy into a latter-day Howard Hughes who went to work with his own loo seat in his briefcase.

Furthermore, I was troubled by the use throughout the forum of the abbreviations "ds" and "dd", which I discovered referred to the posters' "dear son" and "dear daughter", in a similar way in which North Korea's Kim Jong Il is portrayed in official propaganda as "our dear leader". This, though, was probably appropriate, as Kim Jong Il, like the children who share his "dear" epithet, is also small, and is the kind of second-world nutcase who would carry around his own toilet seat. Perhaps he is misunderstood and wears bibs at dinner bearing the legend "I love cuddles", and vests that read "Mummy's little helper". That would explain why the proliferation of nuclear weapons seems like a big game to him: he is really four years old. He doesn't pronounce "laugh out loud (LOL)" as "raugh out roud (ROR)" because he is Korean, but because he is four. He likes nothing more than being tickled and being read Fantastic Mr Fox at bed time.

I was sure PacificWerewolfwoohoo could enlighten me with her theories of children as little dictators.

xix
There was a document lying around he house somewhere which a well-meaning person had sent us with regards to the boy's teeth. He did not yet have teeth, as the document patronisingly anticipated, but one day he would have teeth, a fact also helpfully referred to by the helpful document. The point of it all was to remind us to look after the boy's teeth, which were currently non-existent, and an important part of this was to instil in him a love of dentists. Many children, it informed us, gain a fear of going to the dentist by witnessing their parents' own dislike of having their teeth ripped out and needles inserted into their gums. (Their parents particularly disliked this being done by someone who couldn’t be bothered to become a proper doctor and lacked sufficient love of animals to become a vet, and who spoke in code to a girl sitting in the corner with a notepad who looks like she should be washing cars either topless or in a very wet T-shirt indeed.) The solution, we were being told, was to let the boy accompany us on our visits to the dentist, where he would observe the calm demeanour of his parents as they were worked on in the chair, and come away with the impression that rather than a chore, it is all a bit of fun, and anyway that green mouthwash looks tasty (it isn't) and that high-pressure hose thing they use to remove the evidence of you having consumed regularly all the things that will make you die of cancer sounds exciting (it isn't).

Shortly after reading this vital piece of public information, I happened to find myself with an appointment at the local dentist. She had managed to lure me from the wilderness of oral hygiene, where I had spent many a happy year going about my business as if the world would not end if every dentist in the country decided to retrain as a scaffolder, chiefly because she was an NHS dentist, therefore cheap, and I had little better to do on the day she wanted to see me. It was a good job I did not take the boy, assuming one of my missions in life was to instil in him a love of dentists, because he would have come away from the encounter with the distinct impression that although their assistants are young, comely things whose uniforms are very becoming, the dentists themselves are beings to be feared, like Satan, the ghost who walks around the attic at night, and Peter Andre's dripping, slimey face.

She began by telling everyone who wanted to know – that is, Little Miss Lips in the corner – how many of my teeth were missing ("B2 missing... C4 missing...") before proceeding to describe how disgusting were the survivors: "A lot of plaque build-up and... um... stains." Stains? She made it sound as if I had skid-marks in my mouth. I could not correct her by orating the word "staining" because her rubber fingers had clamped open my jaw. At this point, as at the funeral, I started to wish for the presence of the boy, first, because I would not have been the person in the room with the fewest teeth, and second, because I would not have been the person in the room contributing the most drool to his chin and upper clothing.

The pleasantries done with, the dentist, who, contrary to the public information leaflet, should be feared by children as much as they should fear the Poltergeist, tarantulas and Gary Glitter in Speedos, suddenly approached me with the high-pressure hose thing. As the device attempted to make the inside of my lower jaw look less like it belonged to Keith Richards and more like it was attached to Cliff Richard, I again pined for the presence of the boy. His gurglings and other innocent sounds would have masked the nearly constant "neughhhhhh" noise coming from my abused mouth, not to mention the more shameful "oof, thath hurth" and the later "Ahh!".

The writers of the useful pamphlet telling us to take the boy to the dentist had evidently never been to the dentist themselves, or were without teeth. What good would it have done the boy for him to witness a woman in a white coat and heavy spectacles wield a tube about my mouth while I moaned and whimpered uncontrollably. Did he need to see me being dominated in this way, by a woman no less?

"That was horrible," I told her as she packed away the tube. If the boy had been there, I would probably have been expected to say, "Marvellous, can we do that again?"
If, for reasons of convenience – not for reasons of taking the advice of public information leaflets written by people with no teeth – the boy had been present, I suppose I would have been grateful that he was nine months old. His tender years would have made it improbable for him to have asked, "Daddy, why are you shaking?", thus rendering it unnecessary for me to reply, "Daddy hasn't taken his pills today." The sun being out might have explained the sweat on my brow, but anyway, he was too young to comprehend the relation between heat and perspiration, and there would be plenty of time in the future for me to lie to him, both white lies, black lies and all those in between.

"Marvellous, can we do that again?" This is me now, in the fantasy world imagined by the public information department, which is run by PacificWerewolfwoohoo. Having spoken these words and wiped the bloody spittle from my lips, I can't help noticing through the window that it's a particularly nice day out. Mopping the sweat from my brow, I bang out The Sun Has Got His Hat On (Hip Hip Hip Hooray!), before telling the boy, conspiratorially, "One day, you can sit in the magic chair too."

The next time I go to the dentist, the noise of the high-pressure hose thing will probably be accompanied by the theme tune to Bob The Builder.

xx
Anthropologists might like to class human beings according to their race, colour, religion, culture and country of origin, but there are basically two kinds of people: parents, and people without children. Only a parent knows what it is like to be absolutely busting for a crap, while in one's own home, yet be unable to actually do a poo because the bathroom shares a wall with the nursery and the toilet has the loudest flushing system ever heard, which is even loud in the day, and even louder in the dead of night when nothing is stirring, not even the boy. The worst part of this is that the parent has reached this state having been unable to relieve his bowels all day, because the boy was unable to be left to his own devices due to risk of electric shock from alluring and conveniently placed plug sockets (at the eye level of the crawling boy, with their metal contact points glinting enticingly from within) and other hazards of the house. The alternative would be to strap the boy into a chair, but he had developed some kind of aversion to being deserted, so this plan necessitated the placing of the boy and the chair in the bathroom, where he would not be alone, yet would have a very good view of his father performing the stool. This would probably go unmentioned by the boy, indeed he might even have found the situation entertaining – lots of new things to see and smell – but it did not sit well in the conscience of the father, who suffered from performance anxiety (he could not even bear to use a urinal if another nearby was also being used, let alone sit on the trumpet box in front of a captive audience, albeit an audience of one).

So, I had been unable to take advantage of all the gastric windows opened to me during the day, but not only this – the discomfort of the colonic build-up was made worse by the constant reminders of that most relieving of bathroom pastimes; for nappies had been changed all day, and many of them contained solid matter. And this was not all. Even when the boy was not doing a poo, or had evidently already done one, I was often wondering if his pensive countenance gave away the fact that he was thinking of doing a poo, or whether the ever-reddening of his face meant he was dealing with a particularly stubborn one. All the while, then, conscious of wanting to spend some me-time in a small room, I had contemplated stubborn sausages and disposed of easier varieties, but none of them mine. Then, with the boy finally sleeping the kind of sleep that only people who have pooed four times in the day can enjoy, I faced the problem of the unnecessarily loud flusher.

There were alternatives available to me. Mindful of the toiletry paraphernalia that accompanied the boy wherever he went, I knew two potentially useful objects were close at hand – nappies and plastic nappy bags. I could not, though, bring myself to do it. The thought of the boy's mother walking in on me crouched over one of the bags or an open nappy was irreconcilable with my list of excuses: "What? When you need to go, you need to go." And: "I was busting." A solution might have been to use gaffer tape to create a big, man-sized nappy from many of the boy’s nappies and then go about my business in the privacy of my own trousers, but this would not do: after all, I was meant to be bringing the boy up to my level, not descending to his.

A colleague told me that he answered a knock on his door one Saturday afternoon to find an old friend, who had disappeared to have children, standing on the step looking bloated and dishevelled. Having invited him in, the colleague asked his old chum if everything was alright. He said he was fine and asked where the toilet was. Twenty minutes later the friend left the bathroom, walked out of the flat, and has not been seen or heard of since.

Apparently, in Scotland, householders are legally obliged to let strangers into their home if they ask to use the toilet. It is likely that the streets are filled with wandering fathers on their way to the nearest house that is not theirs where they will, under the protection of law, be able to do a poo in peace, undisturbed by their children or the person whose house it is.

As Duncan Bannatyne leaves his big house with seven toilets, his wife asks him where he is going. "Ah em gooin ta yonder shed ta take e doomp o me troosers well be doomed," he replies. "Ahn fer thayt reason, ah em oot."

"Och!" Bannatyne's wife retorts. "Whet aboot t wee bairns?"

But he does not hear her as he shuffles across the land toward his outhouse, which will be the scene of Bannatyne's impending performance: "Plop... ah em oot. Plop... ah em oot. Plop... ah em oot."

This, of course, made me wish that I lived in Scotland, that car seats had holes in the middle with buckets underneath (basically moving toilets) and that it was acceptable within our household to be discovered next to the kitchen bin, squatting over a small plastic bag. Most of all though, it made me wish that our flusher was not so loud, and that I had the guts to flush it anyway, come what may.

xxi
Taking time off work to look after the boy exposed me to the world as experienced by the stay-at-home parent and the unemployed. The negative aspects of this included watching far too many television programmes in which people auctioned off the junk stored in their attics; getting excited every time something was pushed through the letterbox, only to rush to the door to find a leaflet from a local estate agent saying it was better than all the other local estate agents; and staring at the cryptic crossword for hours without finding the solutions because they were too clever for me. The positive aspects included discovering that the plumber, a burly man in his thirties, refers to the landlord, a swarthy man in his thirties, on the telephone as "princess"; discovering that there was a cat living in the storage box outside the back door; and discovering that the bin men actually seem to enjoy their job, judging by their enthusiastic strides and jaunty whistling, which could be useful to know if I became unemployed or fancied a career change.

One afternoon, having put the boy to bed for his nap, I found myself utterly bored and at a loss at what to do to fill the time between now and his awakening. I wandered around the house, on the look-out for Ming vases that had previously escaped my attention but which would, according to The Antiques Roadshow, solve our pecuniary problems if sent to auction. There were none to be found, especially not in the bathroom, where I did however alight upon Nathaniel. This was a life-sized porcelain reproduction of a Caribbean boy in working clothes wearing a straw hat and carrying a bunch of bananas. He looked rather lifelike, and I spent many moments fantasising about him coming alive and fulfilling all of my household chores, while referring to me constantly as "boss man".

I was just wandering if Nathaniel would also be able to help me with the crossword and teach me how to make a really good fried banana sandwich when the boy ended his nap.

Kingsley Can't Swim and Other Observations (part 2)

2011-04-19T15:44:00.004+01:00

Part Two

i
A new nightmare, or, to be more precise, daymare. I get off my train, usually the one that brings me home from London in the evening, and make my way along the platform; the doors hiss shut and the carriages begin to move. Then I panic: I've left Kingsley inside the train, my god, I've only gone and left the boy in the carriage or the loo or on the drinks and snacks trolley and now he's half way to Southampton.

It takes a few moments, but the realisation does take hold that no, he is not on the train, I did not take him to work with me, and anyway, look on the bright side, being half way to Southampton is better than being all the way to Southampton – trust me, I have been there.

So, the paranoia continued. I texted Helen to tell her not to leave the boy unattended on his changing mat, which we had placed on top of an awful piece of furniture given to us by my parents. It was a polished mahogany cabinet, so polished by my mother over a number of years of obsessive cleaning that it had reached a state of prime slipperiness. It was only 15 years of Mr Sheen that was saving the heirloom from disintegration.

Before now, the boy had laid on his mat peacefully, or if not actually peacefully then at least with arms and legs generally motionless. Now he tended to punch with his arms and kick with his legs, before, during and after his nappy change. Sometimes this evolved into a punting-like movement of the legs. He was like a Venetian gondolier pushing himself closer to a great precipice – that is, the edge of the best-polished piece of furniture in England.

The point is that Helen was equally aware of the boy's development, and I had no reason to text her my warning, other than for the sake of humouring my paranoia.
Anyway, I was determined that we would soon take the cabinet to the municipal tip, it really was ghastly. And very slippery. I would have to emphasise the slipperiness, rather than the ghastliness, when explaining to Mother why the destruction of her cabinet was overseen by men in fluorescent yellow waistcoats.

ii
Kingsley Paddington had, for better or for worse, a distinctive name. At least, it was more distinctive than Dave. In years to come, the boy will no doubt find himself fielding questions about the origins of his name. Obviously, he could make something up: "I was born in Peru and abandoned by my mother, a revolutionary guerrilla who left the country to fight Saddam Hussein in the Bongo Bongos. It was around this time that I was approached by a family of bears. Over the days, weeks and months that followed, we gained each other's mutual trust and respect. In effect they fostered me, yes, I was brought up by the bears and, being cleverer than them outwitted the alpha male to become their king. When Prince Charles heard of my plight while on the Inca trail with his new wife, Brian, he found me and brought me back with him to live in his replica Georgian shed in Poundbury, where the authorities took inspiration from my regal status among the bears and the fact I had been nurtured by them to call me Kingsley Paddington, which is Poundbury Latin for King of the Bears."

Or he could just say, "That's what my parents called me." Yes, his parents: Helen and… Chris. At least Helen could be associated with, say, Helen of Troy. But Chris? Not a name in myth, Greek or otherwise. Not very interesting at all.

I hoped the boy made something up, it would be good for him to have an imagination. Perhaps he could add a 't' to the end of my name and claim I was the son of God. But that would not do, mainly because it would make the boy the grandson of God, and no one has even heard of him.

iii
'Baby on board' signs were starting to annoy me. I had not really noticed them before, but now I had, and they were annoying. What was the point of them? I was going to tailgate your family saloon for the next five miles before ramming you off the road and into a lake, but oh, look, you've got one of those signs in the back window, you must have children in the car, I will remember that only a fool breaks the two second rule and for evermore keep my distance.

Sometimes we saw a variation of the message, such as 'Little person on board' or, even more annoying, 'Cute person on board'. I guessed these more elaborate signs were meant to make me go "Ahh" and vow to adopt a polar bear at the earliest opportunity, instead of retrieving a machine gun from the glove box and opening fire at the car in front until it careered into a tree and exploded.

One weekend, a friend of Helen’s travelled with us to Osama Bin Laden’s hideout in rural Shropshire. Manuela, who doted on the boy in a way unique to Italian women, rather resembled an au pair on this car journey, largely because she was foreign and sitting in the back. I mocked up a sign for the rear window of the car which read, in black on a yellow diamond, 'Manuela on board'. We are certainly sticking it to the hoi polloi with their generic 'baby on board' signs, I thought to myself as we bombed it up the M40. Another advantage of my sign was that it could be tailored for all eventualities. When I was driving alone, it would read 'Man on board'. When I was walking down the street, it would read, simply, 'Man'.

iv
The boy was 14 weeks old when I first noticed it. It had, of course, been building up for some time, but reached a critical mass at 14 weeks. It being all the stuff we, or, more accurately, Helen, had acquired since the birth of our son and left lying about and stacked up willy-nilly in various rooms of the house.

I came downstairs one morning and, while sipping at a mug of coffee, wondered whether one of Helen's friends had left her husband and was storing fifty per cent of the couple's possessions in our kitchen, dining room and sitting room, nursery and spare bedroom, not to mention all the bits of the house in between, such as corridors, steps and our own bedroom. But no, these were not the worldly goods of a friend with a broken heart. The play mat, second push chair, rattles, squeaky balls and books and things that played music when touched (and sometimes, unexpectedly, when merely breathed upon) were patently designated for the boy.

Yes, a second pushchair. What was wrong with the pram we already had, which transformed, through Swedish ingenuity, into a perfectly good pushchair, I asked. "It was in the charity shop," Helen said. "It was only £5, so I bought it." A second pushchair – like we had bypassed the second car on the driveway and instead decided to flaunt our wealth through the medium of multiple pushchairs.

The pushchair was the final straw really, or at least the thing that drew the incessant accumulation of inanimate objects – no, not inanimate, their animation was half the problem – to my attention. There were two doors to our dining room, one from the kitchen, one from the hallway. And, as we have seen, there were two pushchairs, one in the kitchen, one slap bang in the middle of the hallway entrance to the dining room. We had actually lost the use of a doorway.

So we had moved from a shoe box in London, where there was not enough room to swing a foetus, to a family house three times the size, and still we did not have enough space. There is a line in Jaws – "You're gonna need a bigger boat." There is a line in the under-rated Kevin Bacon classic Tremors – "You're gonna need a bigger truck." There is a line in this under-rated Christopher Michael Young classic – "We're gonna need a bigger house."

v
Fortunately, I missed the boy's first three rounds of injections, thanks to not being able to afford taking the time off work. So, his mother accompanied him on every occasion. The first time, Helen reported tears (from the boy); the second time, tears again (from, in order of quantity of tears, the boy and Helen); the third time, tears again (from, in order of quantity of tears, Helen and the boy). I expected to hear that even the doctor had cried, but apparently he maintained his professional detachment throughout.

Watching a man in whom one really has no choice but to trust – he is a qualified doctor, isn't he, those certificates on the wall did come from a university, not the internet? – put a rather long-needled syringe into the foot of one's child – that is the right medicine, isn't it, doctor… Jones, it is the right dose? – is an experience I was grateful to have missed out on. So far. Helen promised me that "Next time, you're bloody doing it!"

vi
We had already encountered dad jokes, and then we encountered mum jokes. During the car journey home from Bin Laden’s training camp near the Welsh border, Helen piped up with a string of puns which I shall not defend but merely paraphrase: the boy's mother, perhaps jealous of my ability to produce owl- and dog-related puns, suggested through the jocular format of question and answer that Sir Patrick Moore buys his electrical goods in Comet, Mahatma Gandhi gets his refrigerators from Currys, Dionysus acquires his household nick-nacks from Argos, Morrissey purchases his books in WH Smith, and the Duke of Wellington sources his medical supplies from Boots.

My only response was to declare, again through the jocular format of question and answer, that Rod Hull's favourite band is My Bloody Valentine, because he is an emu, I mean emo.

As soon as he can comprehend the idea, the boy may well suggest that his mother and father trade in their family saloon for a black cab with thick, soundproofing plastic dividing the front and the back of the car into separate compartments.

My only regret was that the decline of the British high street during the recession would render a number of my best puns obsolete. For instance, I would not be able to announce through the jocular format of question and answer that dogs get their pick 'n' mix from Woolwoofs and their furniture from M.F.I.D.O.

Thank goodness for the continued retail presence of Barks & Spencer.

vii
There was swine flu in the air, if the media were to be believed. Thankfully, the boy had been so well inoculated that he was the least likely member of the family to succumb and, taking all 15 injections to date into account, would probably have survived a nuclear fallout. Him, Bruce Forsythe and the cockroaches.

The same certainty of health could not be attributed to OBL, who informed us on one visit to her cave that she intended to purchase a personalised number plate for her car, one that read OMA 123 or some such variation on the Oma theme. As if knowing what could come to pass, the boy bawled for England when the terrorist, who had him in her arms, waved a photograph of her vehicle before his innocent face.

Luckily, we were spared the prospect of Bin Laden riding around the Midlands with bespoke plates. The price tags associated with OMA 123 et cetera contained too many noughts, and her war chest was wanting.

viii
One of the things dads do, are meant to do, is jobs around the house, involving the banging of nails into bits of wood and the maintenance of white goods such as the washing machine. Oily rags should be at their disposal, probably in the garage or the shed, where one is also likely to find every conceivable tool, from the humble trowel to the mighty lawn mower. More adventurous dads might extend their selection to the chainsaw, and the more timid limit theirs to the trowel, but the point is tools, lots of tools, tools everywhere, knowing how to use the tools, wanting to use the tools, spending every daylight hour using the tools or buying new tools, and telling children not to touch the tools, do not even look at the tools because the tools are dangerous and expensive and the paragon of Man.

Now, I was not the most practical of people, let alone the most practical of dads, but there was an expectation for me to be so, like one expects a good bedside manner from a doctor and a reserved dignity in funeral directors. So it was that since the arrival of the boy, a weight had been lifted from Helen's shoulders, well, womb, and placed onto mine. My shoulders, not my womb. Thus, all of a sudden, I was compelled to perform tasks such as the taking of an antiquated strimmer to OBL's unwanted garden weeds and the borders of her lawn.

After an hour or so of one such strimming session, the petrol-powered machine expired. I went to the garage, retrieved a can of petrol and poured it into the tank of the strimmer – which, I should also add, was unwieldy and heavy; the respect I had gained for it during our recent foray in the nettles was a grudging one. Having completed the refuelling, I had my hand on the starter cord when Helen happened to walk past. She commented, much as Chris Packham might remark to a child that Robin has a red breast, that the strimmer had a two-stroke engine. I tried to contort my face into an expression that suggested I understood the implications of the strimmer having a two-stroke engine. Helen was obviously unconvinced of my engineering qualifications and made off to consult Osama. The information came back that the engine was indeed of the two-stroke variety, which required a different type of petrol to the stuff I had used, and that, Allah willing, the strimmer was not irreparably damaged. I contorted my face into an expression that hid my righteous fury at the fact that Bin Laden had not pointed out the different fuel types to me at the beginning of my adventure with the strimmer. The woman was suggesting that I was a fool for not having inferred the technical information myself, for I was Man and, what's more, Dad.

Allah be praised, the strimmer worked fine once the right fuel was in it. I returned to my chore with a new vigour and the choke turned to ten, imagining that every nettle was another demanding grandmother.

ix
Some ceilings are higher than others. I demonstrated this architectural fact at my parents' house where I lifted the boy high into the air, into the ceiling actually, because my parents' ceilings were lower than those in our house. The boy's head made a solid thud, he thought about the situation for three seconds, decided that some ceilings are lower than others, and demonstrated the architectural fact through the medium of crying.

The boy was OK though really. His head was pulsating beforehand and continued to do so – one could observe a throbbing in the soft spot at the front of his head; normal, apparently.

After this incident I found myself paying a lot of attention to the height of other people's ceilings.

x
Accompanying Helen to the maternity clinic where she would be given her ultrasound scans and other tests was no laughing matter. The first scan, although providing us with the first image of the boy, had its wonder tainted by the lack of reassurance from the midwife. At 14 weeks, and thanks to the machine being unable to produce a clear image, it was too early to tell that everything was alright. He, or she – or, indeed, it – had a head, two arms and two legs, but how many fingers and toes and all the other bits?

In fact, that first scan was so poor that, as well as the feeling of joy I was experiencing at the glimpse of the child, I was reminded of the Saturday afternoons I had spent watching my grandmother's wood-panelled TV set, which emitted the programmes of Channel 4 in ghostly black and white.

We had to wait another eight weeks for the next scan, the last, to find out that the creature who lay inside Helen had a healthy heart, a proper backbone and grey matter between the ears, of which there were two. Now we could relax. We would not be taken into the ominously titled Condolence Room down the corridor, which seemed to exist as a walk-in memorial to the randomness of life and luck.

Later, on a day off work, I went with Helen to one of her routine check-ups at the clinic. The nurse put a microphone to Helen's stomach so we could hear the baby's heartbeat, but all we heard was crackling alternating with silence. It was a tense moment, not least because the nurse was visibly worried. Luck was on our side though, and it was the machine, and not the boy, that was broken. The nurse discarded the microphone, which looked like it should have been plugged into a ZX Spectrum manufactured in 1989, and produced a much more modern-looking one. The heartbeat it detected was powerful, and so was our relief.

It was around this time that I realised I would spend the rest of my life worrying about my children.

xi
Helen using her electric breast pump was a remarkable sight. Her nipple poked in and out of the suction cup's piping like the nose of a mechanical mole, and the effect was more than mere lactation – she verily ejaculated the white stuff in jets, which originated not just from the nipple itself but also imperceptible holes in the areola. In fact, the impression was of a cow being milked industrially, the truth of this being so blatant that my comment to Helen, "You are a cow", was met with utter agreement, if not udder acquiescence.

This, and the noise the pump made as it went about its extraction – it sloshed like a small dishwasher – made an earlier epiphany more pert, I mean pertinent: that Helen's breasts were no longer mine, if they ever were, which of course they weren't, not literally, but erotically I mean – I had lost them to the boy.

I certainly steered well clear of them while they had the potential to spray cow juice across the room like milky sprinklers. Helen is one of the most practical people I have known, and could reverse-park a family saloon more efficiently and accurately than even my father. It should have been no surprise to me when even her breasts became a utility.

xii
During Helen's protracted labour I spent a lot of time rushing in and out of the hospital to move the car, which was parked either in a space near to A&E reserved for ambulances or in a metered space with a time limit of only two hours. So, instead of fulfilling duties such as holding a hand, procuring grapes and liaising with the nursing staff, I was often reverse parking, staring at ticket machines trying to comprehend their rhyme and reason, and abandoning reverse parking manoeuvres having selected a space that turned out to be too small for an Audi A3 Sportsback.

This was largely the fault of the Royal Sussex County Hospital, which had a permanently oversubscribed car park. I say largely the fault of, because for all I know the doctors could have been refused planning permission to build a whacking forty-storey monument to car-parking on top of the maternity wing. But the fact is that there was always a queue as long as one's arm, if one were to have an arm approximately the length of many cars lined up in procession – these cars containing anxious visitors to the hospital and, of course, anxious patients, who probably didn't mind being late for their quintuple heart bypass, gender-realignment or even, maybe, labour.

The road leading to the barriers at the foot of the car park was long and narrow, with one lane for people going in, or waiting to go in, and another for people coming out, which they tended to do smugly. On one occasion as I sat in this queue, having left Helen rolling about in a bed moaning on the twelfth floor of the hospital, a stereotype relating to gender and hair colour was confirmed when a blonde woman drove towards the barriers in the wrong lane, past the 50 or so waiting cars. As the occupants of the waiting cars stared on in disbelief, and as the deep-vein thrombosis gathered in their legs, the miscreant overtook the chap at the front of the queue and plonked her vehicle by the ticket machine in front of the barrier. Fortunately for my blood pressure, a stereotype relating to gender and hair colour was contradicted when a blonde woman left her car in the queue to make a few things clear to the blonde woman at the barrier (Lord knows what she had thought we were all parked up for, tapping our steering wheels while looking longingly at the barrier and urging Chris Moyles to either die or shut up). As the confirmation of the stereotype made an eight-point turn and quit the scene of her folly, I found myself feeling sorry for two people – Helen, who was writhing on a bed, grapeless, and the mystery patient who would not now be visited by the leggy blonde bombshell with the wobbly whoppers.

My absence from Helen's side was also largely, much more largely this time, the fault of Brighton & Hove City Council, which had designated ticketed parking spaces on the streets surrounding the hospital but enforced a time limit of only two hours. It quickly became obvious that two hours would not be sufficient to settle Helen into the maternity ward, listen to Spunk Monkey's tales of gas-and-air-induced debauchery and give birth to, and witness the birth of, the boy. And I was not alone. The streets were full of slow-moving male drivers wearing two-day-old shirts and four-day-old beards, looking for somewhere to park.

I returned to the vehicle at one point in this local-authority-sponsored game of musical cars to find a traffic warden standing by the bonnet and writing in his book. "Look," I told him, striking a pose that I thought accentuated my ruffled, my-girlfriend's-in-labour appearance. "My girlfriend's in labour," I said. He stopped writing and peered up at me, for he was a totalitarian dwarf in both spirit and stature and I was a towering, morally and physically, Man Whose Girlfriend Is In Hospital. "In the hospital!" I bellowed, as if he might have thought she had her legs spread out on the counter of the local chippie. The warden, who continued to look up to me like I was a god and he an oompa-loompa – it helped that I was on the pavement, which was raised by one foot above the road on which he stood – informed me that he had yet to write out my ticket, that if I had been twelve seconds later he would have had to issue me with one, so on your way now sonny jim, and so on.

Later, much later, when the boy had been born and I was leaving him and Helen in the hospital to return home alone, I found the barriers at the exit of the car park – I had finally found a space – in the raised position. And there was a note on the ticket machine basically saying that it was broken so on your way now sonny jim, and so on. I got into the car and sauntered out of the hospital, feeling like that man in that film where all the traffic lights turn to green as he approaches them.

xiii
While returning to the hospital from a car-parking session I passed a woman outside A&E, heavily pregnant and smoking. I could tell she was heavily pregnant because there was a gross swelling of her abdomen, and I could tell she was smoking because there was a cigarette in her hand which she repeatedly lifted to her mouth so that she might suck on it to inhale and then exhale smoke, the smell of which lingered around the ambulances. I was not shocked to see a pregnant woman smoke, but found it remarkable that she would do so right in front of the hospital where she was, by the look of her, soon to give birth – and right next to the ambulances no less.

I suppose I admired her in a way, her defiance in the face of the inevitable wagging fingers, tuts, rolling eyes and admonishing, shaking heads. If I was pregnant, I would probably smoke too, and definitely would smoke if I was heavily pregnant, but I was not sure I could bring myself to engage in the act within spitting distance of the hospital's most ominous portal and its wailing chariots.

I gave up smoking reluctantly and only a few weeks before the boy was born, so I did not have the moral authority to condemn the woman who now stood before me, smoking like a chimney – actually, like Father Christmas in a chimney, because she was big and round and wearing a red dress. But no beard. Imagine if I had come across a pregnant smoking woman with a beard. I might have phoned The Argus, and would certainly have texted Helen, or someone less in labour, with the message that "there is a pregnant smoking bearded woman outside the Royal Sussex County. LOL."

So, this champion of a foetus's right to smoke passively was clean-shaven, or not shaven at all if we assume she did not grow facial hair in the first place. Maybe she wanted a small baby. I heard that certain celebrities puff away during pregnancy, and are even advised to do so by their private doctors, so that the baby will have a lower birth weight and, therefore, cause less unsightly stretching of the abdomen during gestation. I also heard that even NHS doctors had been known to advise a mother to continue smoking if the trial of giving up might cause her, and by proxy her unborn child, an unhealthy amount of stress.

As I walked through the sliding doors and into A&E, I wondered if this woman was a local celebrity hoping for a small baby or a local member of the public pursuing a pregnancy ameliorated by the smooth tobacco delivery of a Marlboro Light. It was likely that she simply did not care what I thought about anything at all, let alone her.

xiv
One day, Helen purchased a sling. To be fair, this cotton contraption looked fine on her, the boy liked being carried about in it, close to a warm body, and he usually fell asleep within moments of being inserted. However, an aesthetical problem presented itself when the role of baby carrier was assigned to me. The sling made me look like I lived in a hessian wigwam, that my favourite film was Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth, and that the magnolia walls of my Clapham flat were smudged with newsprint from The Guardian.

Oddly, given that the proof of my virulent heterosexuality was bound to my chest in the form of the boy, the sling made me feel rather camp. Not quite Freddy Mercury mincing to Morrisons to buy a bag of organic turnips, but camp nonetheless.

After seeing a photograph of myself dressed as Father Earth, I dodged the sling like a dog escaping the noose of its lead.

xv
Now, here was a message to dash one's Friday-night hopes: "Hello, light of my life. I am looking forward to seeing you this evening, but it will only be brief as I think I will end up going out around 8ish. I will pump out some milk for you to give to the boy. Then I will be home later."

xvi
There was no privacy in being the father of a young child. I felt like I was being watched all the time. For instance, one evening I settled into a nice hot bath after a long day at the office. The water was soapy, bubbles were milling about my toes and the boy was absent – in a break from routine, his mother had already bathed him. I reclined into the warmth, let the rising steam obscure my spectacles, and began to ponder how it is the simple pleasures of life, et cetera, when Helen barged in through the bathroom's saloon doors with the boy in her arms. I was startled. What if, instead of my innocent repose, I had instead been engaged in reading the copy of Chat magazine that Helen had left on top of the laundry basket, or, worse, OK!'s special edition on Jade Goody's funeral? Thank goodness, I thought, that I was tired enough to find entertainment in suds and steam, and then I thought, hang on, she's just barged in here like nobody's business, who does she think she is – and why did I not lock the door?

The fact is that before the boy's arrival, a bath could be enjoyed in peace, without fear of interruption or rude awakenings, which are quite rude when one has saloon doors for a bathroom entrance. Now I was fair game, no matter what I was doing or where I was doing it. I would not have been surprised if I were to look up from a reverie on the loo to find Helen ushering in her aunts and uncles to witness me perform my stool. Look, it is the father! See him atop the trumpet box. Plop, plop, plop, plop, plop. Ah! Five chipolatas…

The next time I shaved, would telegrams have been sent to whom it may have concerned, announcing the event beforehand? "We invite you as the mother of Christopher Michael Young to attend his shaving ceremony on Sunday morning at 10am. There will be a champagne reception and canapés in the bathroom from 9.30am."

Gather round everyone, I have an itch gathering intensity on my right buttock and pretty soon I am going to have to… ooh, that's better, ah yes, yes.

xvii
I arrived at work one morning feeling stiff of joint. My knees were aching, my back was nearly killing me, my legs felt like jelly and my feet were sore. All this because, between the third and fourth month of his life, the boy had had his vehicle upgraded from pram to pushchair. The design of the latter was, obviously, different from the former, the upshot being that in pushing the pushchair I had to adopt a walking stance different to that used when pushing the pram. That might sound unremarkable, but over a distance of a number of miles, walking in a new way, with apologies to Monty Python's Ministry of Silly Walks, meant using different muscles and putting new strains on the old ones.

So, the boy's transport had changed, and it meant I had a bad back, knackered knees, et cetera. I explained my pains to a colleague. Ah, he said, rolling up his sleeves to reveal bruises and grazes. He had also endured a weekend which had taken its toll on the body, by playing a full game of competitive rugby. Scrums, line-outs, skidding-through-the-mud tries, bone-cracking tackles. "So," he asked me, "how did you get your injuries?"

"Pushing a pushchair," I told him. He seemed unimpressed.

I was reminded of The Sultans of Ping's homage to life in the middle of the road, Let's Go Shopping: "You can buy crisps and I can buy jam. You push the trolley, I'll push the pram."

xviii
A calamity befell Helen when she was pregnant. She was in a local charity shop searching for tat with which to fill our house when an elderly woman on one of those mobility scooters drove through the entrance. The woman was obviously unimpressed with the bric-a-brac on offer and made a swift retreat, which ended with her scooter becoming wedged in the doorway to the shop. Helen found the turn of events amusing, until she realised that the scooter had blocked the only exit from the shop and she was increasingly in need of the loo.

The daughter of the wedged invalid, who had evidently accompanied her mother into the shop, now began pushing the stricken vehicle from behind, while her mother barked instructions at her. After a minute or two of this, a passer-by tried to become a have-a-go hero by tackling the machine from its front end. Helen watched on, ever conscious of her bladder, as the scooter was pushed and pulled, and pulled and pushed, as if the passer-by had taken it upon himself to re-enact Rudjard Kipling's story of how the elephant got his trunk, with himself in the role of the crocodile and the scooter in the role of the elephant.

Having dismissed the feeble efforts of the crocodile to remove her from the threshold, the beached behemoth moved the scooter forwards and backwards by degrees of centimetres, a protracted manoeuvre which left the vehicle exactly where it had started. Helen, who by now had had enough of all this amateur dramatics, clambered over the mobility scooter, and its gob-smacked passenger, and into the street beyond. Helen and the boy, aged minus three months, were free, and beat a quick retreat home. The moral of the story: do not patronise your local charity shop – everything on sale is rubbish, the volunteers won't let you use their bathroom, and the threshold is not wide enough to accommodate some types of mobility scooter.

xix
The boy preferred his mother to me in more ways than I was probably conscious of. She was, after all, the giver of milk, of life itself in fact and, because she stayed at home while I went to work, the chief guardian of the child, and the main rearer. That might sound like I am saying her rear was bigger than mine, which it was, but that was fine and, anyway, not the point. Among other things, the boy preferred his mother to sleep on, either flat on her chest or propped up on her shoulder. He would not fall asleep in the same positions on me, no matter how I arranged myself and my clothing, sometimes even taking some of it off, sometimes even taking all of it off – remembering, of course, the midwife's words about the importance of skin-to-skin contact, not, of course, pursuing an insatiable appetite for nudity.

The thing is that Helen was, naturally for a new mother, how can I put it delicately, er, er, flabbier than me. Yes, her chest and shoulder had, um, flab, where I had skin and bone. No wonder then that for the boy his mother's torso was a luxurious mattress, and his father's a cold slab of concrete. On a very few occasions he was so tired after waking, from complaint of wind, nightmare or a neighbour's hubbub, that he did, on being picked up and comforted by me, fall asleep upright in my arms, my collar bone acting as his impoverished pillow. But generally the role of midnight comforter could only successfully be performed by the boy's mother, leaving his father free to ponder such conundrums as: I have just used the loo, but flushing it might wake the boy because Fate has placed the noisiest elements of the plumbing in the walls of the nursery. What should I do?

In consultation with Helen, it was decided that while the boy was asleep, the loo should remain unflushed following the evacuation of the bladder but to hell with the consequences if the bowel was involved. While staying with us one weekend, my mother felt the need to commemorate these instructions with a rhyme, for the purpose, apparently, of helping us all to remember them. I cannot now recall this charming ditty, but I think it involved the phrases "number ones" and "number twos", the latter of which was rhymed with "loo". Or was it "yellow" and "brown", rhymed, respectively, with "hello" and "gone down"?

I considered constructing a sign for the bathroom doors: ‘Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.’

xx
Two man-made objects: one is upright, 114cm high, 35.5cm wide and 34cm in depth, has a standard filter, consumes 1400 watts, has a hose length of four metres, a cord length of 9.3 metres, weighs 8.2kg, is bagless and comes with a surface adjuster as standard but no pet-hair tool. It has a large debris channel, a crevice tool and a five-year guarantee; the other is upright, 5 feet 11 inches high, has a waist measurement of 32cm and an unremarkable inside leg, consumes a recommended 2700 calories a day, has a hose length that has not generated any complaints, weighs 11 stone, has a man bag attached and comes with a beard as standard but no pet-hair tool. It has a large debris channel, a crevice tool that has not generated any complaints and no guarantee.
Which one did the boy prefer to talk to – I mean make noises at – when in the mood for banter? The vacuum cleaner, which for him was a strange messenger from another star. I, after all, was just a man.

xxi
Picking up the boy was no longer like lifting a baby, but more like lifting a person. He was no longer supine in body or soul, he did not just lie there staring at the ceiling waiting to be fed or changed or manhandled by relatives; he had, in fact, become a little person, reacting and talking to things and people like a madman. He was aware of his being plucked out of his cot, as one's line manager would be aware of being hoisted by the armpits from his office chair.

This newfound awareness meant more care had to be taken in the picking up, manoeuvring and placing of the boy. For instance, if for reasons of somnolence or haste I accidentally pinched him while raising him from his chair, the boy looked at me in a way that suggested he knew the contact number for social services; only a month or so previously, he would have turned a blind eye. And we now had to be more choosy with our selection of television and radio programmes – we did not want to be reminded by our son one day that he was nurtured within the glow of Ross Kemp On Gangs, or be told by a child psychiatrist that the boy's obsession with cows could be traced to his exposure of The Archers.

But perhaps what I was most concerned about here was the fact that I was definitely not a people person, and here we had a little person, not a baby who merely wanted to mind his own business and consume sleep and milk. There was only one solution – I was going to have to learn to start liking people; at least little people. For he was no longer a being, but a human being. From a distance the world looks blue and green. I believe the children are our future…

But seriously, the boy had crossed a line and was striding towards greatness.

xxii
We know that babies become upset when they are hungry, too hot or too cold, tired and soiled. Apparently, they also cry when they are bored. I was staggered by this information. The boy was not yet five months old and already he suffered from ennui? There are only so many things one can do to entertain a 19-week-old person when the novelty of the vacuum cleaner has worn thin.

If it was a nice day, I might have carried the boy into the garden and pointed out the plants and birds. But the garden was small, there were only so many plants and birds, and I was not Sir David Attenborough. So I found myself talking to him about the items on the washing line – "Those are mummy's pants… oh, look, socks… your bath towel, Kingsley!… socks… what is this, a napkin of some kind… look at the napkin, Kingsley…"
When a man is bored of laundry, he is bored of life, so we went back indoors, where I embarked, for the boy's benefit, on an inventory of the house – "Who is that in the mirror? Yes, it's you… and me… ah! The washing machine! See how it tumbles our linen!… socks… hmm, the bathroom… there's the bath… must give it a scrub… and whose room is this? Yes, it's your room…" – and then he started bawling because he thought I was going to plonk him in his cot and go downstairs to smoke. And he was probably as bored as hell.

xxiii
There were things my mother and father said and did to me as a child that to say and do today would be deemed at best politically incorrect and at worst outright abuse. For example, if I soiled my clothes with the mud pie I had been concocting in the garden, mother would accuse me of being "a dirty little Arab". If I was insolent to my father, he would drag me up the stairs by my shirt, yank down my trousers and underpants and administer a prolonged spanking with his open hand as I cried out for mercy.

Now, I cannot imagine, when the boy is of an age to be consciously naughty, that I will be able to, without shame, inform him that he is, say, a small, filthy Pole, especially not in Tesco. Likewise, I would like to think that his mother and I will be able to persuade him of repenting his sins without recourse to corporal punishment. Perhaps we will issue solemn vows, such as to refer to the boy by his middle name in public at every opportunity unless he stops stamping his feet and comes here at once. The danger here, though, is that the boy's middle name, through frequent use, will become shortened to Paddy because his parents belong to the MTV generation and have short attention spans. This will make him sound Irish, which is fine, of course, but I once heard a girl of easy persuasion say that all Irishmen are players, and we can't have that, not when he is two.

xxiv
As the boy’s arrival became imminent, and in the aftermath of his birth, the gifts showered upon him and his parents were myriad. This did not last long. After a few months, friends and relatives did not exactly lose interest, but they did lose generosity. This was fine by us. Most people don't have much taste anyway and seemed to think, on the evidence of their initial gifts, that we desired to dress the boy as a miniature sailor.

It did occur to me that there was one benefit of this latter sartorial folly – it would allow for a dad joke of dad-sized proportions. Picture the scene: the boy, in his sailor's suit, soils his nappy. The father enters and, referring to the smell, declares there is "a hoy in the air". He turns to the boy and hails him: "Ahoy there, sailor!"

I wonder if this masterpiece will sell as many copies as Angela's Ashes.

xxv
"Massage your breasts for a few minutes. Use flat of fingers, and gently move around the breast, gradually work your way towards the nipple and areola," it says here. "Do not drag your fingers over your skin. Some women spend 5-10 minutes on this. Hair brushing and shoulder massage before and during your expressing will relax you and increase Oxytocin levels. This will help the milk to flow. Some women make a fist and gently knead the breast, not dragging the skin and moving around the breast in circular movements, gradually working down to areola. Rolling your nipple between your finger and thumb stimulates Prolactin output."

The boy's mother had been leaving literature lying around again.

xxvi
We booked the boy onto a course of swimming lessons. It did not really dawn on me until the first session was imminent that this meant we had also booked me onto a course of swimming lessons. The words swimming lessons, though, were disingenuous. Organised by a company called something like Nipper Dippers, the sessions largely involved parents throwing water at their baby's head, dunking the baby in the water and, worst of all for fathers with an acute dislike of singing in public, singing.
In fact, the whole thing might not have been for the boy's benefit at all. I initially suspected we had signed up to the local swingers group, one which catered specifically for new parents – killing two birds with one stone, for what do you get if you combine singers and swimmers but swingers? After all, the sessions involved eight men in shorts wading about in chest-high water while their partners watched on from the side. Take away the babies and what you had was an octet of gents mincing about, or, in the eyes of their audience, strutting their stuff. Even the water was heated to sauna-like temperatures, making for a steamy atmosphere. I would not have been surprised if Tina Turner had strutted onto the poolside, belting out Steamy Windows or What’s Hove Got To Do With It?

Actually, the pool was heated not to make me lose pints of water through pores on every part of my body containing hair (nearly all of it), but to make conditions more comfortable for the babies, who get cold quickly. Fine. I get hot quickly, and irritable quickly.

The first lesson confirmed many of the anxieties I had about taking the boy to an event where I would be compelled to share my nakedness with other, close members of the general public. Having left Helen to loiter in reception among the discarded pushchairs and a couple arguing with a secretary about whether or not Cosmo was on the register, I entered the changing room with the boy in my arms. The first thing I saw was a bare pair of buttocks, which, as I averted my gaze in order to find an appropriate spot to set down our things, began to shudder in the corner of my eye as their owner performed a towel-drying routine that he seemed to have picked up from an Arabian belly-dancer. One part of me was chanting internally, "The floor is wet and slippery, everything is wet and slippery, do not drop the boy, do not drop the boy", while another part was pleading, "Do not look at the bottom, do not look at the bottom." Thankfully, and despite the impression that the steam crawling in from the pool area was the Mist of Time and I had stepped back 15 years and into the changing rooms of my secondary school, I managed to not only take off my own clothes and put on my swimming shorts without flashing anybody, but also put the boy in a water-tight nappy and pair of trunks without dropping him on the floor. I left the changing room and entered the pool area with a triumph only slightly tarnished by the conviction that my mobile phone and wallet were currently being snaffled by the man with the wobbly bottom.

Walking into the pool area was quite like opening an oven door only to be blasted in the face by air measuring 220 degrees Fahrenheit, which is an unsettling experience when one is carrying a small person who responds to fluctuations in temperature as quickly, but more noisily, than mercury. The impression that I had entered the fiery gates of Hell was reinforced as, one by one, the other seven fathers entered the pool area, each new entrant looking more like a former, hated boss than the last. In every sense of the phrase, I stood out like a sore thumb. The other men all had carefully maintained haircuts that belied a career at the hot end of customer relationship management and a weekend life in charge of a small baby at a second home in the country. I, on the other hand, looked like I had attempted to fashion an Elvis Presley quiff only to give up when I realised that the best I could hope for was Elvis Costello. What's more, I was the only one with a beard, if you exclude the man with a sort of manicured stubble-goatee who bore more than a passing resemblance to Billy Joel, aka the Piano Man. And I was the only one with tattoos. None of the other fathers, not even Billy Joel, had ‘Charlie don't surf’ in military font on his upper arm; and none had a cat's face which in Russian prisons denotes a thief. So, there were the Seven Fathers, striding pool-side with chests glistening and haircuts slicing wakes through the steam. They looked like they were auditioning for the role of English Boyfriend in an episode of Sex and the City. And there was me, ruffled, inked up with references to Apocalypse Now and Soviet death camps, in the corner, trying to stop the boy from slipping free of my increasingly sweaty grasp. The temperature was now 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit.

When Helen entered the pool area to take her place on the observation bench beside the Carrie Bradshaws, I would have shot her a glare that told her, "You signed me up to this?", if my full concentration had not been required to keep the boy, exponentially salamander-like, from escaping my embrace. Indeed, I had to spend the next five minutes before the lesson started ignoring the Mr Universe competition taking place around me while grappling with the wriggling, slimy eel. An onlooker might have assumed that a member of Motley Crew had broken into Nipper Dippers and was basting a small child.

Then the lesson started. It consisted of tipping a handful of water over the boy's head while shouting "Ready! Go!"; carrying him through the water on his stomach while shouting "Kick kick kick kick kick kick kick kick"; fully submerging him; trying to reassure his bawling face with an expression that communicated my complete calm at his controlled drowning; and encouraging him to hold on to the side of the pool while shouting "Hold on! Hold on!". So far, so good. The boy was getting used to the water. This is what we had paid for. Then the singing started. As if suddenly noticing that I had not yet been humiliated enough by the presentation of the bottom in the changing room and the parade of life's winners by the poolside, the instructor commanded us to place our babies on a mat floating in the middle of the pool. "Altogether now," she commanded. This was the fathers' cue to walk around the mat in a circle while harmonising to Twinkle Twinkle Little Star. Luckily I did not know the words to the song beyond "twinkle twinkle little star, how I wonder how you are", which enabled me to walk in the circle in silence, while miming badly. The instructor noticed this, and her look of disapproval returned me through the Mist of Time to secondary school, where my P.E. teacher had informed me during a cricket game that I threw the ball "like a girl" (the fucker is dead now). Nonetheless, I reassured myself that there was little point in me contributing to Twinkle Twinkle Little Star when the Piano Man himself was in the pool. And anyway, I was put off by the thought that a rousing chant of "In out, in out, shake it all about" was imminent, what with all those gruesome groins and wobbly bottoms lurking under the surface.

After the lesson I carried the boy back to the changing room. Just as I was beginning to make a success of changing the boy and myself while keeping him from crying and my socks from getting wet, I looked up to see a penis swinging towards me. I looked away for reassurance to find Billy Joel's bare arse bent over his child. The rest of the getting dressed was a blur. I could not locate a fresh nappy in the bag that had been packed by Helen. Perhaps she was testing me. Not only did I have to sing nursery rhymes with He-Man, Lion-O and the rest of the supermen, but I had to devise alternatives to a nappy from the bare ingredients in front of me: a pair of wet socks, my flip-flops and a slippery boy. Thankfully my desperate cry of "There is no nappy" – with the "no" part sounding like Frodo's lament for Gandalf's demise in Lord of the Rings ("There is NOOOOOooooooo nappy!") – was heard by Billy Joel, who, being a Perfect Father, of course, had a spare one to give me. Then, just as I thought it was all over, with man and boy fully dressed, the male model poncing about to my right declared that he had lost his towel. "Where did you see it last?" I ventured, before following his gaze to my bag, the top of which was open and displaying his towel in all its stolen glory. I must have mistaken it for my own in my haste to get away from the stubble, swaying willies and shivering buttocks. "Sorry," I said, handing him his towel. "I'm a bit disoriented." As I made my final preparations to leave, I wished I could whistle like a plumber.

Later, I asked Helen: "Is it your turn next week?"

xxvii
Grandmothers, inexplicably, tend to claim to be able to divine the gender of an unborn child, not necessarily through the laying on of hands or the dangling of a pendant over the belly to see which way it rotates, but often because they "just have a feeling" and "I've never been wrong yet". This talent does not manifest itself in grandfathers, who take a much more hands-off approach to pregnancy. If they did have such otherworldly powers, one assumes they would put them to better use, such as for the placing of large sums of money on the Grand National.

On the Christmas Day before the boy's birth, when he was eight months in utero, a friend of the family revealed he had a party trick. He could divine water, he told us, with the aid of a V-shaped stick or pair of metal rods. What's more, he could use the same tools to map the electric circuits within the walls of a house, and, the cherry on the cake, use the rods to ascertain a person's "aura". Everyone, he told us, gives off a field of energy, and he could analyse this to tell us certain things about the person undergoing trial by rod. Having drunk a few glasses of wine, I was willing to suspend my disbelief and humour this man, who was friendly enough and well-meaning. After all, I thought, if dogs can sniff out cancer in a man, why should not a man measure another man's energy field? It all sounded quite Chinese, and anyway, it was Christmas. The upshot of all this was that he wanted to test his powers on Helen's bump.

As a warm-up, the witchdoctor – I forget his name, let's call him Ken – obtained two L-shaped rods from somewhere and pointed them at a wall. They swivelled outwards within his fingers, then inwards, where they remained. "I'm picking up an electric current," said Ken confidently. He had every reason to be confident, I thought, noting that he was stood opposite the light switch. Then Ken let the rods guide his arms as they traced the wires feeding the switch. "Those are the wires," he said. Perhaps so, Ken, or maybe you are just a little drunk.

Noticing that we were thus far unimpressed as we stared on in silence from the sofa, Ken walked over to Helen and pointed his rods at her. One moved outwards, then the other one moved outwards, then the first one came back in a bit. The last action obviously concerned Ken, and he repeated the manoeuvre from the beginning. Again, one rod moved outwards, then the other one moved outwards, then the first one came back in a bit. We all looked at Ken, who furrowed his brow. "These aren't my usual rods," he said. "Helen's aura is interfering with the baby's… the rods are confused… but I think they're saying it's a boy." Either that, I thought, or Helen’s womb was harbouring a ladyboy.

Actually, it turned out Ken was right. But, like all good grandmothers, he did have a 50:50 chance.

xxviii
Parents are meant to blow raspberries, not smoke, in their child's face, which presents ethical issues for a father who has broken his cigarette fast. In my defence, I did so as a measure of self-prescription – I had picked up a horrible cough after months of not smoking, and decided in lieu of professional medical advice that a dose of the cancer sticks might kill off the lingering germs. And make me look cool.

However, walking behind a pushchair while smoking is not a good image, and the looks one receives from fellow pedestrians and loitering shopkeepers are not good either. The pleasure of smoking was lessened by my suspicion that everyone was watching me, and that all of them worked for social services. The feeling was worse when I had to stop the pushchair in order to drop and extinguish my cigarette: for those moments I was a sitting duck for scornful looks, real or imagined. It was best to keep moving.
Obviously I never knowingly let my smoke waft into the boy's face, but after a few weeks of faithful puffing in the opposite direction the guilt was too much and, once again, I packed it in. It did not help that there was a TV ad running at the time which featured children pleading with their parents to stop smoking so they would stay alive long enough to witness next week's egg and spoon race. Also, my cough was cured. (Please note: this does not constitute professional medical advice. Your doctor may prefer to prescribe Benylin, rather than Benny Hedgehogs.)

I also wanted to stop smoking to avoid the travails endured by my father in his relentless pursuit of Saint Nicotine. When I was small, he smoked in the lounge: there was an ashtray on his armchair, and the curtains and ceiling had a tarry tinge. Then, after new curtains were bought and the ceiling repainted, mother relegated him to the kitchen, where he puffed into the extractor fan above the oven. Then, after the kitchen was refitted, mother exiled him to the garage, where he fumed into the saws and screwdrivers hanging by nail on the chipboard. He was the first member of our household to be relegated to the outdoors since the cat fell out with my mother.

Back in those early days, of course, one could even smoke on airplanes. My mother and brother would sit in the last row of non-smoking, father and I in the first row of smoking, the two sections of the family, the uncool and the cool, divided by a mere curtain. Now Her Majesty's prisoners are the only people allowed to smoke indoors, which could be a sign of how far civilisation has come. This sense of progress, however, was somewhat compromised by the existence of armrest ashtrays on the last flight I took. I decided that I could use this to my advantage. Not wanting to get on a plane with the boy, who would likely scream and soil himself regularly throughout the flight, I could scare his mother into agreeing that a Winnebago in Bournemouth would be preferable to two weeks at an award-winning spa in St Lucia. "Look," I will say, "the planes still have ashtrays in the armrests, they must be older than the hills." "OK," she'll reply, "let's go camping!"

xxix
The security guards at supermarkets know to be on alert for mothers with prams frequenting the wines and spirits aisle – for it is an old trick to place expensive liquor in the luggage tray beneath the baby (if indeed there is one present) and then 'forget' to pay for it at the till. If detected, the guilty parent can act dumb – "My basket was full, so I put the bottle of Pol Roger in the pram." To which the jolly security guard might reply, "Surely you should be drinking Mumm champagne?"; to which the serious security guard might reply, "You're nicked."

The closest we came to grocery theft with the aid of pram as getaway car was less salubrious. The shop was Lidl, and instead of stealing champagne, we nearly forgot to pay for a 79p packet of extra mature cheddar. Luckily, Helen spotted the cheese partly concealed under the boy's feet and presented it to the checkout girl before she had a chance to call in reinforcements.

But security personnel can rest assured that, despite the incident with the cheese, the boy's pushchair, besides being his pushchair, had more innocent alternative uses for his parents. I preferred to see it as a Zimmerframe, and when on long walks with mother and boy, and sometimes on short ones when feeling fuzzy of head, I would ask to push the chair, not out of chivalry, but for want of something to hold on to. Pushing the chair was not only stabilising, it also provided an occupation for one's hands – particularly useful for a recently reformed smoker whose pockets, before now a safe retreat for fidgety hands, were brimming with squeaking and mooing plastic contraptions and an assortment of wiping devices.

More importantly, though, the pushchair gave one power of the pavement. Even whippersnappers in hoods who looked like they had skipped bail for selling their grandmother's dog respectfully stood aside for the chair. The result was that the pusher – that is, me – carved a wake through the busiest of high streets. I did not fidget with my trousers or stumble towards my destination like my legs had evolved into flippers.

The Americans like to call this device a 'stroller', but it would better be termed a Dignity Preserver. One afternoon I was standing with the chair quite happily in the designated section of the bus. Suddenly, a 14-year-old boy with a pathetic attempt at a moustache offered me his seat. I declined – after all, I was still enjoying being propped up by the chair's handle, so had no need to sit down on a seat covered in gum and the detritus of a McDonald's Happy Meal. He even called me "mate".

Helen later opined that my newfound friend offered me his seat out of respect for my moustache-and-beard combination. But I knew better – it was respect for The Chair.
At home, too, the chair had multiple functions. Helen got into the habit of using it as a temporary laundry basket. "Do I have any clean pants?" I would ask, apropos of not being able to find any clean pants to wear to work. "Try the pushchair," would come the reply.
"I need a clean shirt for tomorrow."
"There's one in the pushchair."
"Ironed?"
"Fuck off."

In fact, the only time we seemed to use our wardrobes and chests of drawers was just before taking the boy for a walk, when the necessity of putting him in the chair meant taking our clothes out of it.

xxx
Clothes became an issue after the novelty of the boy had worn off and friends and family were no longer keeping us well stocked through the Royal Mail. The boy’s friends – well, the children of the mothers who were friends with his mother, his chums, his associates, his foetal fraternity – were dressed like people. That is, their parents no longer put them in babygrows, but made them wear miniature versions of the adult clothes they were wearing – jeans, shirts, dresses, et cetera. On our arrival at an aunt's house, the relative took one look at the boy in his romper suit and exclaimed: "Oh my god, he's still in his pyjamas." No, we told her, those are his clothes, he is a baby.

For the boy’s male peers it was all chequered shirts and denim. They looked like very small cowboys, midget John Waynes with muslins instead of cravattes, chewing and spitting Rusks instead of tobacco. For the girls it was all billowing dresses and floral blouses. They looked like dolls that had been dressed by a five-year-old.

We were determined to keep the boy in his 'pyjamas' until at least his first birthday. But even here there were pitfalls. One day his mother dressed the boy in a white vest covered in black patches. He looked like a cow. Still, I would rather my son resembled a farmyard animal than a very small John Wayne – a cow rather than a cowboy – and the noises he was producing were at least appropriate. His gurglings had evolved into all manner of "hmmms" and "ooos" as he attempted, now trying to crawl, to communicate his four-legged view of the world. No doubt Ken would have predicted the weather according to the boy-cow's position on the floor. If he lies flat on his stomach, bring in the washing, it's going to rain. Wiggling his bottom? There's a storm brewing. Rolling onto his back and screeching with delight: the sun has got his hat on. "Ooo" was not quite a moo, but it was close enough.

xxxi
The boy's gravitational pull on old people was, in the main, harmless, but sometimes traumatic. Helen returned from the library one afternoon to report that an elderly, haggard woman had appeared from behind a bookshelf and, without encouragement or permission, began to poke the boy's cheek with a warty finger. When the hag started tugging on the interminable line of questioning that begins with "And how old is he?", Helen manoeuvred the boy from the reach of the finger and declared that it was time for him to feed and they had to leave immediately. But they had escaped one warty woman only for another to appear and make clear her intention to poke the boy while delaying his mother with inane interrogation. Perhaps remembering the scene in Rosemary's Baby in which Mia Farrow is handed a book entitled All Of Them Witches, Helen quit the library before more members of the coven had the chance to corner her.
Later I found myself in Tesco, where I had been sent with the boy to procure our comestibles. On entering the store, the boy began to wail – a performance he maintained for the duration of our adventure. With one eye on the shopping list written by his mother, and one eye on the reddening face of my charge, I first negotiated the fresh produce section. Somewhere between the bananas and broccoli, a contact lense became dislodged to my great discomfort, and I parked the boy beside a bucket of spinach in order to prod my afflicted eye back into vision. Helen chose this moment to phone me on my mobile. Assuming the matter was urgent, and assuming my fellow shoppers did not want to endure the approximation of birdsong emanating from my trouser pocket, I answered the call. The boy was screaming even louder than before, my eye was causing immense pain and Helen was issuing additional shopping instructions down the phone when, from among the throng, a middle-aged woman appeared by my side. Indicating the shawl covering the pushchair, she said, like a contestant on Catchphrase who has been asked to “say what you see”: "Your baby is all covered up."
My irritants were now multifarious, and, indeed, nefarious: the caterwauling boy, the needle in the eye, the barely audible shopping instructions issued by phone and the well-meaning, interfering old bag. I did not have enough control of my senses at that moment to tell the woman that, contrary to her accusation, the boy was not crying because his view of the lemons was compromised, he was simply protesting at being inside Britain's biggest supermarket. "Oh, fine then," she tutted at my silence and twitching eye. Thankfully that was the last I saw of her.

Having regained my composure and completed the shopping, I proceeded with the screaming banshee to the till. By now I had withdrawn the shawl to no remedial effect at all – the action had simply served the purpose of allowing the boy to focus his rage at passing faces, and for passers-by to witness the source of the hubbub which they first caught wind of seven aisles away and were now experiencing first-hand. As I unloaded my items onto the conveyor belt, the elderly woman before me in the queue took one look at the red rager and declared that "It's his lunchtime", before adding (in the general direction of the pushchair), "You're hungry aren't you?", and then, "Yes, you are, yes, you are." If I were not a pillar of society I would have interjected: "He is crying because he hates old people. He can smell death." But I did not say this. The woman, although as unhelpful to my situation as it was possible to be without taking the carrot from my basket and sticking it in my eye, obviously had good intentions. Luckily her interest waned when I vocalised the suggestion that the boy's nappy was fit to burst and that when it did, it was likely "to leak. Everywhere."

She turned her attention to packing her tomatoes.

xxxii
People kept asking us what nicknames we were using for the boy. "The boy," I informed them, and they seemed unimpressed. His babysitter vowed to shorten his name to Lee, which was annoying, as it made him sound like a plumber. Worse though was when we first announced the birth. An uncle posted messages of congratulations on Facebook in which the boy's name was spelt ‘Kingsleigh’, which, frankly, gave the impression that his parents planned to nurture him on KFC buckets and drive him around in a stolen Vauxhall Nova.

The uncle got his comeuppance. When the boy took a liking to him, it was suggested that he was merely responding to the uncle's utter baldness, which made him look like a big baby. The uncle was subsequently referred to as a big baby and, whenever the subject of the boy's hair was introduced, someone would always say, "Well, he has more hair than his uncle." Whenever the subject of the uncle's hair was introduced, someone would always say, "Well, you have less hair than your nephew."

At first I resisted humouring other people's desire for the boy to be given a nickname. After all, that will surely be the job of his school peers, and I did not know anyone with a nickname coined by their parents. The best I could come up with were Laddie and Boyo, but they made him sound like a sheep dog and a Welshman respectively. Then it dawned on me that a nickname would actually be of use. Indeed, there would come a time when I would need to use either the full name or the nickname depending on whether the boy had been naughty or good. So, if he had been bad: "Kingsley! Stop smoking mummy's cigarettes!" And good: "Kingers, these eggs are poached to perfection!"

His mother, though, did not approve of Kingers. Likewise she had never warmed to my pet name for her in the later stages of pregnancy: Fatty Fatty Fat Fat. Similarly, she requested that her mother, the self-crowned Oma, should no longer be referred to as Osama Bin Laden. In pursuit of a more benign sobriquet, the best I could come up with was Omar Sharif, the moustachioed Egyptian actor, and Barack Hussein Obama II, the 44th president of the United States. There was continuity here in the Arabic-sounding names, but clearly the star of Doctor Zhivago and the leader of the free world had more positive connotations than the CIA's most-wanted man. However, Sharif and Obama were both men, and the boy's grandmother was patently a woman. I overcame this problem by applying the fact that the actor was famed for his bridge playing, and the president was not. Bridge is something old women do, too. Which is why Helen's mother was now known as Omar Sharif.

xxxiii
One morning I was getting ready to leave the house for work – a rushed affair that depended on the regimentation of procedures such as brushing one's teeth for no longer than 30 seconds – when Helen hailed me from the nursery. "Come and look at this!" she shouted. "Now!" Only ten seconds into my brushing, I continued at the task for the remaining 20 seconds of my schedule, during which time I heard shouts of "You must come now!" and "Quick, this is important!"

Having satisfied the requirements of my oral hygiene, I glanced at the time and realised I was late. Something must have happened to knock me off course. I lingered in bed too long, perhaps. I fumbled repeatedly with my underpants, maybe. "Why didn't you come and look?" Helen now demanded, visibly furious. I felt guilty, and for a few moments sidelined the morning routine. Had I missed the boy speak his first word? Was he crawling? Walking!?

"He did a massive poo," Helen explained. And then, as I refocused my efforts on getting out of the house on time, she added in a disappointed tone: "I wanted you to see it."

If a thousand babies were given mushed-up sprouts and cabbage to eat for a hundred million years they would eventually fart like trumpets the opening notes of Richard Strauss's Also Sprach Zarathustra: "Ba, ba, baaaa… BA-BAHH!… bum-bum bum-bum bum-bum bum-bum bum-bum bum-bum bum-bum bum-bum. Ba, ba, baaaa… BA-BAHH!… bum-bum bum-bum bum-bum bum-bum bum-bum bum-bum bum-bum bum-bum."

Now that would be worth being late for.

xxxiv
When the boy's mother asked me to write her a poem, she ended up being disappointed. "Roses are red, violets are blue," I said, and then thought about the composition for 20 seconds. "…And so are you."

Despite such blundering in the field of poesy, I felt compelled to write a nursery rhyme for the boy, partly because even Row Row Row Your Boat had left me flummoxed in the pool by the second verse.

The following should be sung to the tune of Michael Jackson's Billy Jean:

Willy Clean

Cots are more like a prison cell, and they make me yell
For my next bath, mum what do you mean I am the one
Who will splash on the floor in the bath?
She said I am the one who will splash on the floor in the bath.

My mummy wanted my willy clean as it has always been,
Then my daddy turned on the taps so bubbles did float in the bath,
Who will splash on the floor in the bath.

Daddy always told me be careful of what you do
And don't go around breaking smelly farts,
And mummy always told me be careful in slip'ry baths
And be careful of what you eat 'cause you do not yet have teeth.

Willy clean I feel much better,
Mummy's a girl who claims that daddy's the one
Because Kingsley is his son,
She says daddy's the one because Kingsley is his son.

xxxv
There will come a time when the boy will approach me for help with his homework. The fact is, I am woefully unprepared. History, for instance, is not my strong point, largely because my long-term memory is nothing to write home about. I think I sustained brain damage in my teens during a deep-sea dive in which a flipper fell off and I swam in descending circles for 30 minutes unable to equalise my pressure. And I find it difficult to remember names and places and times and dates, and when I do remember them, tend to get them in the wrong order. This is something I may have inherited from my father, who still refers to ITV as ATV. More worryingly, he often refers to me, thirty years after naming me Chris, as Stuart.

So, it might interest the boy to learn that Buzz Lightyear was the first man on the Moon, a feat he achieved in the USS Enterprise. His co-pilot on the mission, Mollie Sugden, was the second man to set foot on the lunar surface, on which he erected the Hammer and Sickle.

The boy was born in the reign of Babs Windsor, the Queen of England, who was seated on the throne after winning the TV contest It's A Knockout. Her husband, Richard the Lionheart, lived in London Zoo, from where walkers in Regent's Park could often hear him roar. Known affectionately by the tabloid press as Top Cat, his dung was collected daily by London’s park rangers, who distributed it in public gardens to ward off the Blue Peter badger.

After the Big Bang, television was invented by the Dalai Lama, who, in his autobiography, Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code, declared Noel's House Party to be the best programme ever broadcast. He subsequently changed the name of Tibet to Crinkly Bottom.

Then came the Middle Ages, when Jesus killed Judas after selling his soul to Gandalf the Grey. World peace was eventually restored when Princess Diana married Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in the Bermuda Triangle, a place named after the bride's preferred style of merkin.

xxxvi
I had mixed feelings when a work commitment meant Helen and the boy would be away from the house for three nights. At first, I felt like a bachelor again. How would I occupy my time and take advantage of my newfound, albeit brief, freedom from the chores of childrearing and girlfriending?

On the first evening of my liberation, I spent the train journey home listing all the possibilities: sit in the bath for two hours, not letting the call of nature interrupt me; listen to that Sultans of Ping album I bought a few years back; have a Ginsters ploughman's sausage roll for dinner; eat three Müller Fruit Corner yoghurts for dessert, each of them apricot flavour, which is the tastiest; smoke in the dining room; retrieve that copy of Escort magazine from under the spare bed; retrieve the Lubed Girls 2 and Sweet Black Cherries DVDs from under the spare bed; what is the name of those free porn websites I used to use?; trawl purposely through Facebook for 45 minutes without feeling guilty about not having a real conversation with someone; watch The Good, The Bad and The Ugly – need to get back in touch with my masculine side; find myself flipping through the Sky channels at the saucier end of the spectrum to which I do not subscribe but which show free previews on the hour; write a book, I don't know why, no one will ever read it; devise a sure-fire winning gambling strategy for the upcoming football season; sleep in the middle of the bed, not right at the very edge of it, an area to which I have been shepherded by an L-shaped breastfeeding pillow that occupies twice the volume of physical space than a standard-sized and regular-shaped pillow; sell that Sultans of Ping album on eBay; let nature's gasses flow from me in whatever room I happen to be in; have a Cadbury's Creme Egg for breakfast; retrieve Japanese Teenage Sluts from under the spare bed; meet up for drinks on Tuesday night, Wednesday night and Thursday night; don't go home; try on that green dress in the wardrobe – what would it actually feel like?; do we have a full-length mirror?; phone in sick and sit on the beach all day instead of going to work; retrieve Euro Slit from under the spare bed; sleep in the spare bed just because I can and am not doing so to escape Helen's snoring – are our guests comfortable?; ignore Helen's request to get the landlord to fix the broken fridge; watch that documentary about lumberjacks, instead of Masterchef again – need to get in touch with my masculine side; apricot-flavoured Fruit Corners might go off – tell the landlord about the fridge; watch Ross Kemp in Search of Pirates, could it be as good as Ross Kemp on Gangs?; write intriguing vignettes on my life and post them to my excellent blog, This Quintessence of Dust; accept invites I would normally refuse and which, if I thought about it, I know I should refuse because I won't be able to honour them; agree to go out next Tuesday, a school night, and next weekend, when I know full well we are expecting a visit from Omar Sharif; carry out all the tasks I don't have time for any more, such as cut my toe nails, shave the increasingly thick hair from my shoulders, pluck my nasal hair; defecate without a time limit – and with the door open, so I can hear the radio in the kitchen; Ice Road Truckers – need to keep in touch with my masculine, truck-driving side; idea for a sitcom: within out-of-town shopping plaza Greensleaves, four shopkeepers – Jefferey Liddle Phelps, Max der Azda Price, Rye Sonting Newton Day and Morris Öns – engage in a turf war and vie for the ultimate prize: a personal profile in Mall Teasers magazine; look for that AJP Taylor book, I need to brush up on my history; send my Architects' Biscuits idea to Fox's – a presentation box featuring Bourbon Foster Cremes and Jammy Rogers…

I arrived home. It was empty. It was horrible, I was lonely. So I went to bed.

xxxvii
The appointment of the boy's godparents was necessitated by our decision to have him Christened. We were not religious, we just wanted the boy to receive as many presents at Christmas and on his birthday and on his Christening as possible, preferably in the form of cash, which is why we thought he would need two godfathers and two godmothers. That's a lot of potential presents, or a lot of potential horses’ heads in the beds of the boy's enemies, depending on whether or not one is familiar with the work of Mario Puzo.

The non-religious nature of this future Christening was emphasised by the backgrounds and lifestyles of the godparents-to-be. Of the four, only one had been Christened herself – baptised, actually, for she was a Roman Catholic Neapolitan – which pretty much put paid to any idea that they would be responsible for the boy's spiritual education. What's more, both of the godmothers were mistresses to married man (the godmothers were not married to the godfathers, another ploy to ensure the maximum possible income of gifts – that is, one gift on each occasion from each godparent, rather than one from each couple of godparents). As we were not planning to stage the ceremony in France, we were certain that the vicar would not approve of the godmothers' predilection for sugar daddies. So, one thing was clear: in front of the vicar, there would be no talk about God, no talk about marriage, and no talk about Christening.

But we felt we had chosen the right people for the job – of all our friends and family, they were among the highest wage earners. One of the godfathers asked if he could be in charge of sport, cricket specifically, while the other just seemed embarrassed to have been asked, and responded to the request with a look that seemed to say, "You're asking me? I'm the last person I'd ask to be someone's godfather." I supposed that with sport already taken, this one could be responsible for guilt – compensating the boy for his lack of personal involvement in the role of godfather by showering him with gifts, hopefully cash. I did, though, wonder what the godmothers would be in charge of. Free love?

The boy could have done much worse out of the situation. One man, whom Omar Sharif suggested would be a perfect godfather and was, in her eyes, the very salt of the earth, was revealed to have a dark side. For he had a few years previously daubed a swastika on his bedroom wall in fluorescent paint (apparently it still glows nice and bright with the light off) and more recently voted for the British National Party in a local election.

So I reckoned the boy was better off with the homewreckers and heathens.

xxxviii
"Who is in your book?"
"Osama Bin Laden."
"Who is that meant to be?"
"Your mother."
"You can't call her that."
"Why?"
"She'll read it."
"I use the name affectionately."
"Osama Bin Laden, affectionately…"
"OK, how about Omar Sharif?"
"That's another man."
"Dr Zhivago?"
"You're going to have a lot of explaining to do."
"I know. I'll speak to her, it will be fine."
"Am I in the book?"
"Yes."
"Do I come across as a nagging bitch?"
"No, of course not."
"Oh, I do, don't I? I come across as a nagging bitch."
"No."
"Are you in it?"
"Yes, of course… bugger."
"What?"
"When you told uncle Michael that I was writing a book, I told him that he was in it."
"So?"
"He isn't in it. I'm going to have to write him in."

Uncle Michael
The boy had a great-uncle. His name was Michael.

xl
Women tend to make friends more easily than men. Or, to be more precise, mothers tend to make friends more easily than fathers. Within days of the boy's arrival, Helen had nestled herself within the bosom of a coterie of ladies, whom she met at a mother-and-baby group. Let’s call them Barbara, Sandra and Brian. They did not include Big Fat Wendy, who, apparently, was disgusting and, I was told, "probably has a freezer full of crap from Iceland". This assertion was backed up with the comment: "Even Sandra, who is kind to everyone, said Big Fat Wendy was disgusting." Yet despite this, the mothers made friends more easily than the fathers, who, if they were honest, would rather not have bothered.

When Helen invited her coterie and their boyfriends and husbands (BAHs) to our house for dinner, the contrast in the way the different sexes behaved was marked. Immediately on arrival, the mothers went into the sitting room, for birds of a father flock together, to update each other on the minutiae of their biology – I understand that the subjects discussed required the use of words such as "prolapsed", "painful," "during" and "intercourse", as well as "started", "lactating", "while", "he", "was", "playing", "with", "my" and "tits". The fathers meanwhile removed themselves to the garden, where they engaged in small talk about cars, bikes and the weather.

After ten minutes in the sitting room, Helen knew more about the intimacies of the women's recent existence than even their own mothers and general practitioners. After forty-five minutes in the garden, I had ascertained that the weather was predicted to turn sour on Sunday, that one of the BAHs enjoyed cycling, and that the other drove a jalopy.

I got the feeling, though, that the fathers were united in their sense of having been forced to take part in the social occasion against their will. For while the mothers had sought each other out during Baby Boogie and Sling Group – yes, there was organised support available for mothers who wanted to learn the one hundred and one ways to carry a baby in a sling – the fathers had no intention of ever meeting, let alone stand in a semi-circle in someone's garden to swap tales on the joys and miseries of childrearing.

Perhaps, to even the balance between the maternal and paternal level of disclosure, the BAHs, prompted by their partners' undoing of braziers in anticipation of breastfeeding, should have dropped their trousers and continued their conversation sans pantaloons. It might have broken the ice more easily and given the men an idea of what it feels like for a mother when she has to get them out in public. It might also have enabled, in response to the maternal statement "I've seen such-and-such's tatties", the paternal declaration "Well, I've seen what's-his-name's John Thomas", before the supplementary: "It's much smaller than mine."

One more thing united the BAHs – there was a definite spirit in the garden of 'look at us men, we're young, the kids are asleep, we're drinking beer and the womenfolk are just in there, comparing breasts'. I think we all drank to that, albeit subconsciously.

xli
I could no longer announce my imminent visitation of the loo as "going to the little boy's room" because the little boy's room was now the nursery and I did not want to give the impression that I was off to perform a dirty protest in the chamber in which my son slept and dreamt. This is not to say that I had started referring to the nursery as "the little boy's room", because to do so would be to equate it with the loo, which would also be wrong despite the acts and smells that often occurred within.
One solution would have been to rename the loo the "big boy's room" when in polite society, but this might have given the impression that I had 'come out' and moved in with Billy Joel from swimming.

Perhaps "plop shop" would be better. Plop shop has an onomatopoeic quality that children respond well to when learning new words, so it could come in useful when potty training. Although, to avoid confusion, a distinction might need to be made between the potty itself and the loo, between the plop pot and the plop shop, the first being a little boy's plop pot and the latter a big boy's plop shop. If the boy makes a mess of proceedings, we could say that things have gone to pot; in my own department, during an anus horribilis, I could be all over the shop. When holidaying on the Continent, it will be useful for us to know that the Italians might call the potty a pentola ploppa, the French a pot plop, and the Greeks a δοχείο plopalopalous.

xlii
Some people soothe their screaming babies to sleep by putting them in the car and driving them round the block a few times. Others swear that placing the child in front of an active washing machine will hypnotise it to somnolence. And my mother claims that laying the child on top of the tumble drier is the most effective method, as the vibrations will rock it to sleep. None of these tricks, however, were guaranteed to work on the boy, who, when in full throttle, would only be placated by a rather odd song played through his mother's mobile phone.

As a bachelor, for want of anything better to do, I once engaged myself in the art of the amateur deejay. One resulting creation from many hours of toil at my computer's virtual mixing desk was We Dislike To Party. I conjured up this monster of a tune by, to use the parlance of our youth, mashing up The Vengaboys' We Like To Party with the Manic Street Preachers' version of the theme from MASH, aka Suicide Is Painless. Now, a few years after my magnum opus had been discredited as a folly of misspent youth, we were using it to calm down the wailing boy. Nothing else, whether it was the washing machine thrashing a full load or the family saloon navigating the vicinity, worked to the same effect. And no other tune, be it Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata or the latest offering from The Killers, was good enough.

It was as if the boy's screams to the gods were code for: "Please, father, play We Dislike To Party again, for I am in mean spirits and this song speaks to me like no other. And turn it up to ten, for everyone should hear it and share in my pleasure."

Every girl, and the boy, loves a DJ.

Kingsley Can't Swim and Other Observations (part 1)

2011-04-19T15:23:00.004+01:00

The car carrying us to the hospital did not swerve desperately between the other traffic on the road. The car was not driven by a stunt man, and the traffic was not spaced conveniently to lend extra suspense to our choreographed dance to the labour ward. I was not being played by Hugh Grant, and my girlfriend was not a leading American actress. I did not faint during the birth. She did not vow to never let me touch her again. This was not a film written and directed by Richard Curtis, this was Life – no, not the award-winning documentary series narrated by Sir David Attenborough and featuring rutting deer and boisterous badgers, but my life, starring the occasional stationary deer (one stuffed, decapitated) and the one known around the world and through the ages as puer, il ragazzo, die Bube, 'r bachgen, le garcon – the boy.

Part One

i
Let me tell you something about the birth of my son.

The maternity room window rattled in its frame twelve storeys above Brighton, where the pier's dim lights flickered below. The city was in storm, and the wind howled up from the sea and crashed against the pane.

One of the midwives asked me to close the window. The rain was getting into the room, and the wires to the machines were swaying. I told her I found the scene… atmospheric. She told me that the previous night she had watched The Omen, and the maelstrom was giving her the willies.

Helen, whose waters had broken 40 hours previously, lay back on the bed, looking unimpressed. I suggested it was a shame the moon was not in full bloom, on account of the fact that I had tried to persuade her to call our first son Wolf, assuming, of course, that she was about to deliver a boy. On learning that Rudolf Hess, the deputy leader of the Third Reich, had named his son Wolf, I was later glad to have been over-ruled on this.

Then, not quite half an hour old, the boy was in my arms, bright red and opening and shutting his mouth like a fledgling gagging for worms. "I think he's going to be sick," I said. He projectile vomited what looked like blood and crap into the air. The spurt of matter landed on my shirt, and I learned my first lesson of childrearing: if a baby looks like it is going to be sick, it is probably going to be sick.

But blood and crap? We called in a nurse – the midwives had clocked off from their shift minutes after the delivery and left us alone with our son. The nurse seemed amused at our concern, and stated his diagnosis like it was the most obvious and innocuous thing in the world: "Your baby ate some blood. That is fine."

It turned out that the blood was eaten in the birth canal during labour, and the crap was blood, too. Unpleasant stuff, but that's life. Later, I found the flush on the loo adjacent to the delivery room did not work properly. Unpleasant stuff indeed.

As another nurse led us from the room, Helen in a wheelchair, Kingsley – for it was he – in a sort of incubator on wheels, we could hear the resigned sighs and the thrashing of a brush as some poor cleaner dealt with the problem in the U-bend. And I remember thinking, God bless the NHS.

ii
Helen was soon cursing the National Health Service. She spent two nights on the ward, where the nurses slammed doors at all hours of the day and night and served up food which included sprouts, diced swede and a pasta dish that looked like it had been fed to, and then regurgitated by, the hospital cat. (I must stress that the Royal Sussex County Hospital did not officially house a cat, for to do so would probably be contrary to best practice in healthcare).

The rationale behind this poor service was not made explicit, but could be guessed at. Sprouts and cat sick would not be most women’s first choice from the menu as they recovered from labour, but were the food to arrive piping hot and delicious three times a day, and the nurses to come and go silently, the patients would never leave. It was a policy of simple efficiency.

In fact, the only real problem with the maternity ward were the patients themselves. Take the fools located in the curtained-off area opposite (the ward housed four women and their babies to a room). Having successfully cajoled their small daughter into going to sleep, the father would either cough loudly, like he was trying to rather unsubtly send a secret message to someone in the next room, or unzip the mother's night bag so loudly that I genuinely thought my own flies were being ripped open. Their baby would wake up, prompting such comments from its parents as "Maybe she is cold" and "Maybe she is hot".

I would like to point out that 'unzip the mother's night bag' is not a euphemism.
On Helen's final morning in hospital I earned brownie points by bringing in a breakfast I had prepared at home: a bowl of Sugar Puffs, sealed with sheets of kitchen towel, and a mayonnaise jar half-filled with milk. I thought it was a nice touch that I Selotaped a spoon to the cereal bowl, and Helen seemed impressed – and did not mention again the fact that I had failed to bring her flowers the previous morning, contrary to custom and the experience of every other mother on the ward, whose bedside tables were adorned with flora.

Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of the maternity ward was being allowed to leave – with the boy. We had no experience of rearing children. Neither of us had eaten or slept properly for several days. It was public knowledge that we planned to use Paddington for his second name. And yet no one raised an eyebrow when we put him in his car seat, packed our bags, and left the hospital.

iii
For his first journey home, we had dressed the boy in a plain white vest and something called a babygrow. We vowed never to dress him in clothing bearing such legends as "I love my mummy and daddy". His parents were not so emotionally insecure that they needed him to advertise such rubbish. Neither his mother nor his father was a pre-pubescent girl, and the boy was not a doll. Every time I saw a baby advertising its parents’ assumption that “I love my mummy and daddy”, I thought of Philip Larkin – "They fuck you up, your mum and dad. They may not mean to, but they do." Perhaps Baby Gap would use This Be The Verse on their next range of tops for toddlers: This Be The Vest.

We also lacked that strange compulsion to surround the child with everything in pink or blue depending on its gender. At the lift outside the maternity ward we found a couple with a pink car seat. In it sat a baby in pink clothing. A pink cuddly toy rested on its lap. No doubt the poor girl was being whisked off to her pink nursery.

In fact, the boy did rather well clothes-wise from the generosity of friends and family. Of all the vests, shirts, trousers and babygrows sent to us – we soon had enough stuff to open an infant clothing shop that would rival Baby Gap – the only indignities were a vest carrying the words "little star", a suit declaring that the wearer was a "little dude", and a bib stating "I love cuddles". It would have been ungrateful to complain about such gifts, but the boy was handsome enough and did not need twee slogans that attempted to make him more so.

iv
Other people's babies were ugly and gross. To those women who coo uncontrollably at every human being sprung from the loins of friends and family and declare, "Oh my god, he's so gorgeous!" No, he is not. He is fat and ugly and his chin is shiny where the drool has collected. "Oh my god!" they scream, possibly wetting their knickers at the same time, "she is the cutest baby EVER!" No, she is not. She looks like her father – a man – and is cross-eyed. And she stinks.

Stop putting up pictures of her on Facebook. They are making me feel sick.

I walked into the dining room one morning to be startled by the image of some moist-faced, horrific, snarling beast. I actually jumped at the sight of it. Closer inspection revealed that a friend of Helen's had distributed a card heralding the arrival of her daughter. The picture on the front of the card was this creature. There is a phrase, a face only a mother could love, and this was one of those faces. As our house had been invaded by slugs, I wondered if the picture card, propped up on the floorboards, would act as a scarecrow and ward off the minibeasts. Perhaps it could be stuck to the outside of the front door, like the gargoyles on Gothic churches that were meant to keep out evil spirits. No, this was all fantasy. There was no use for this card whatsoever, so I placed it face down on a table. And then piled our heaviest books on top of it.

v
They say that when preparing a bath for a baby, one should test the temperature of the water with an elbow. This is one of those Things Parents Must Do, digression from which provokes consternation, and even rage, in others. I used my hands. I tried the elbow thing once, but felt that as a gauge of water temperature, my hands were a more accurate part of my body. Meanwhile, bending over the bath at an angle sufficient to allow my elbow to find contact with the water put my ribs at risk of catching the edge of the roll-top. Thus I trusted my hands more than my elbows. I suspected that devotees of the Elbow Rule would rather dip an eyelid into the water than resort to their hand, but the latter never let me down. Hands, glorious hands. Talk to the hand, the face is not listening. The hands of time.

Perhaps you do not have hands. If that is true, good luck to you.

Anyway, there was too much obsession with the temperature of the bath water. The boy's skin was not going to fall off if the water was slightly warmer than warm, and water that was too cold was likely to distress him more than water that was too hot. (Please note: this does not constitute professional medical advice. If your baby's skin falls off, please call 074705 11123 immediately.)

No, don't. That's my mobile number.

Call 999.

Meanwhile, I noticed that baby baths were essentially a washing-up bowl shaped slightly differently to make them look a bit like a small bath. Aware of the scam, we initially bathed the boy in the washing-up bowl. After a few weeks, when he got too big to kick about at pleasure, he started taking baths with me. Nice warm baths, the perfect temperature of which I ascertained with my trusty, handsome hand. Although he always reacted to being lowered into the water with a grimace, this did not develop into a full-blown crying session and his skin did not fall off.

The bath gave me physical contact with the boy, and I appreciated the benefits of this for effective man-to-boy bonding. There was, however, one downside, concerning the fact that every time I took a bath with the boy, Helen found the scene worthy of a photo opportunity. Which is fine, until one considers the following conversation that took place one evening on my return from work.

"Hello there," I said, entering the house. Danielle, a friend of Helen's, had come over for dinner.
"Hi, how are you?" she replied.
"Not bad. You?" I replied, wondering if Fyodor Dostoevsky had the same difficulty with writing dialogue.
"Good, thanks. How was the train journey?" asked Danielle, fingering the mink scarf that Rodion Romanovich Raskolnikov had bought her from a street vendor in St Petersburg for 40 kopeks.
"Not so bad. What have you been up to today?" I continued.
"Not much really," she continued.
"OK," I said.
"I saw your penis."

vi
One peril of newfound parenthood was the incessant visits from members of one's family, who one would rather did not visit at all, let alone incessantly. There was only one phenomenon of parenthood worse than this, which was the single visit from Helen's mother, who in the role of mother had always acted perfectly well, but in the role of overexcited grandmother had started acting perfectly well off the rails.

I do not want to embarrass the woman, so I won't name her. But on one occasion her presence made me consider logging on to amazon.co.uk, purchasing a copy of How To Disappear Completely And Never Be Found, and either taking the advice of its author or taking the book to her head.

Sorry, anonymous woman.

This woman, who before the arrival of the boy had behaved normally, bearing in mind that unkempt facial hair and the accidental passing of wind are deemed normal in those approaching retirement, was now acting very oddly indeed. This can be illustrated by two actions she took. The first was to demand that Helen set up an account for her on The Daily Telegraph's dating website, in order that the boy might enjoy the company of an additional and strange grandfather, with the following stipulations: that her profile contained no picture of her, "because I look fat", that all personal information be eliminated, "because I don't want to be stalked", and no contact address made available, "because I don't want to be contacted". Furthermore, she wanted it to be made clear that she was "not interested in sex".

At the time of writing, she is still single.

The second action was her insistence that rather than be referred to as grandmother or one of its derivatives, she would be known by the moniker Oma, which, apparently, is Dutch for grandmother. This woman was not Dutch. Nor were we. No one in my family was Dutch. No one in Helen's family was Dutch. Oma had never been to Amsterdam. She had no intention of doing so. Neither did we.

Every written correspondence to either the boy or us was now signed off with "Oma", which was made all the more ominous by the frequent references to Oma in the body of these letters. The point was really rammed home in the letters: Oma had been doing some gardening that morning, the weather was nice, et cetera; Oma was looking forward to seeing you again, hopefully the weather will be nice, et cetera. If it was intended to be subliminal messaging, it was not very subliminal.

I coped with this development by referring to Oma as Osama Bin Laden. Perhaps unsurprisingly, she reacted badly to this, but the name stuck, with me at least.
The boy was five days old when he was paid a visit by the international terrorist, who, on arrival, declared that she planned to stay with us for an entire week. On the second morning I did attempt to sabotage her visit by turning on the cold tap in the kitchen while she was in the shower, and then turning it off, and then turning it on again, repeatedly. Unfortunately this did not work, despite the cries of "ooh!" and "aah!" and "I will crush the West!" which emanated from the bathroom.

At 3am on the third morning the boy was being particularly rowdy as I, wearing nothing but my underpants, tried to change his nappy. Bin Laden, who had evidently overheard the kafuffle, was making to enter our bedroom. I told Helen in an unhushed voice that her mother was about to receive a wallop across the face with a Denon stereo speaker unless immediate measures were put into action to prevent her planned breach of the sacred threshold. Perhaps sensing danger, the woman retreated to the spare room at the back of the house.

We finally got rid of her by not giving her any money when she returned from the supermarket with our substantial haul of groceries.

vii
We named the boy, who is an Aquarius, after the 19th century author Charles Kingsley, who wrote The Water-Babies; Kingsley Zissou, a character in the Wes Anderson film The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou; and Kingsley Road, the thoroughfare in south London on which his mother and father first met. His second name, Paddington, was inspired by the fictional Peruvian bear created by Michael Bond. (Actually, the first bit is made up. Helen's wicked stepmother asked us, on learning the boy's name, if we had named him after the author. We had not thought of this, and considered it a superior story to some road in London and a film no one else had heard of.)

So I wondered: why do people call their children Dave?

At the town hall in Brighton, where we registered the birth, there was displayed a list of the most popular local names. For the previous five years, the most popular name was Jack. It is a fine name, and I have met a couple of good Johns and a benevolent Jack in my time. But to choose this name, up there at the top of the list, seemed akin to picking out one's furniture from the latest Ikea catalogue.

It is perfectly possible that the boy will grow to hate his name (even I might suggest that at school he denies all knowledge of having been given a second name). He might even change it by deed poll, as soon as he is legally allowed to do so, to Jack. If he expressed such sentiments, however, I would lobby vociferously for Wolf, and point out his good fortune in not having been called Zowie Bowie, Moon Unit Zappa, or Petal Blossom Rainbow Oliver.

During her eighth month of pregnancy, Helen made a work-related trip to France. Realising there was a small possibility that our first child would be born, albeit prematurely, in the country of cheese and champagne, she asked me if her journey had my blessing. I told her I was fine with it, but added the caveat that if she gave birth to a boy in France, we would name him Napoleon.

Interestingly, the French for Dave is David.

viii
Baby photos tend to be rather formulaic. There he is in the bath, here's one of her sleeping, in this one he is either smiling or choking. So we attempted to spice up the album with a bit of variety, which brings me to the subjects of a knitted cigarette, my nipple, and a bath pipe.

1. The knitted cigarette: There is a black and white photograph of my uncle, Philip, 'smoking' a cigarette in his pram at the age of a few months. His father, my grandfather, obviously had a sense of humour, and the result of his gag was the most remarked upon photograph in the family album. The scene was replicated for us by the boy lounging laconically with a knitted cigarette in his hand (yes, a replica cigarette in wool). The woollen cheroot, manufactured by a creative cousin, was preferential in this purpose to grandfather's cancer stick because it emitted no smoke and could not contaminate the boy's small lungs.

2. My nipple: When the boy appealed for food, he was handed to his mother as soon as possible so that he may suckle the breast. However, she was not always present to administer instant gratification. She might be in the kitchen, for example, preparing our dinner, or in the bathroom, engaged in a lengthy soak in the tub. The boy's initial cries were soon interspersed with a kind of mime, where he acted out the scene, with his lips, of Child Feeding at the Breast. When cradled, this re-enactment involved the boy turning his head to the carrier's breast, opening and closing his mouth and, eventually, headbutting the non-existent teat (for the carrier tended to be dressed, and where the boy sought flesh, he found cardigan). During one such play for satiation, I decided to lift up my top and let the boy go for my nipple – my milkless, hairy nipple (which resembled Terry Nutkins when wet on account of the strands of hair falling about it). Helen happened to have the camera to hand and took a photograph.

3. The bath pipe: This was basically a plastic reproduction of a gentleman's smoking-pipe, which was colourfully decorated and whose bowl enabled the user to blow soap bubbles, rather than ingest tobacco. It was a remarkable alternative to the traditional yellow duck at bath time, and carried an amalgamated sense of sophistication and fun. Cue photo opportunity.

ix
One afternoon, when Helen was still pregnant, she received a message via Facebook from an acquaintance and fellow mother-to-be. It said: "Would you like to see my preggie pics?"

No. Why would anyone want to see pictures of your bloated stomach in profile? Perhaps your husband, or those who frequent fetish websites. But not us. Please, put it away.
Soon, despite no response to the first message, there followed a second. "My boy's been kicking loads today – we [the awful acquaintance and, presumably, the equally awful father of her child] think he is going to be a footballer!"

What an original thought. I instructed Helen to inform any well-wishers that our foetus was also kicking a lot, and that we expected him, or her, to be a scaffolder.
Then I was watching Masterchef, in which a contestant was described as a "father-to-be", which I found preposterous. Surely they meant "unemployed"? It is understandable why a woman might be described as a mother-to-be. It could explain her manner or appearance, or lack of engagement in the pursuit of a career. She might be on maternity leave, say, or a housewife who prefers not to be dubbed as such. But what was the father-to-be up to, other than sitting on his hairy arse in front of Deal or No Deal?

Father-to-be? Perhaps he was a trainee priest.

x
Old people love babies. They also have no fear in approaching parents and, uninvited, prodding their infant offspring and asking questions of it. Thus one man approached me outside some shops one afternoon, where I was holding the boy after taking him out of his pram, where he had laid angrily. "He's a small one," said the old man. "Yes," I replied, "he was six pounds ten at birth." I wondered if the ensuing silence meant the pensioner was confused, and that "six pounds ten" sounded to him like an awful lot of money for such a small boy.

Eventually, he piped back up. "How old is he?" he asked.
"Three weeks," said I.
"What's his name?" continued the man.
"Kingsley," I told him.
He looked disinterested and walked off.

Not long after this, Helen was in a supermarket when an elderly woman, whom she described as "a witch", approached the pram, pulled back the blanket without invitation and demanded: "How old?"
"Four weeks," Helen informed her.
"A little one," said the witch, who luckily became distracted by an announcement over the Tannoy about half-price yams or something, enabling the boy and his mother to make good their escape.

There is nothing particularly wrong in any of this. I simply mention it because it is something that happened. The elderly also smiled gummily at us as we passed them on the Esplanade. Apparently they find comfort in the very young. I did not smile back, as only old people and fools smile at strangers.

xi
When Helen's midwife instructed us to attend an antenatal class, my heart sunk. I foresaw other, ugly members of the general public, and cheap plastic chairs.

We walked into our class to find nine other, ugly couples already seated on plastic, schoolroom chairs. We sat next to a large woman and her even larger partner. He looked just like Chief from One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest: enormous, like a Red Indian, with a solemn face and long black hair that reached nearly to his waist. He must have been seven feet tall.

"Hello," said the woman, introducing herself.

I cannot remember her name, but she then said, in reference to the Red Indian: "This is The Chief."

I looked around the room for Ken Kesey but could not find him, so I turned to the big man.

"My real name is Barnaby," he muttered with a strong, possibly eastern European accent (not a Red Indian then).

Later, Helen confirmed that the antenatal class was indeed being conducted on the set of One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest. "He was called The Chief," she said. I reassessed the other fathers in the room to see if any of them was Jack Nicholson, but none of them was. I was relieved when Helen showed no intention of furthering our conversation with The Chief, or starting one with anybody else.

The Chief spent the rest of the session intermittently rubbing his hand over his partner's belly. This display of affection seemed to be spurred by the midwife's mention of the words "baby", "him", "her", and even "it". What a softie this big man is, I thought. The first time the midwife referred to a crude illustration of a foetus as "him", The Chief boomed: "We are having a boy", for some reason now sounding like Arnold Schwarzenegger – "Wee are harving a boyyyy".

Across the room sat two women who could have been mother and daughter, but whose dual pregnancy made this, to my mind, unlikely. They both spoke like Cock-er-neys from a 1960s Disney film set in London, and I was ashamed to find myself suggesting to Helen, under my breath, that they were "slags from the estate". My estimation, perhaps harsh, was nonetheless given some measure of credence when the women, during a question and answer session with the midwife, contributed the following interlocution: "When we're breastfeeding, can we go out and get pissed?"

Judging by the women's ruddy faces and displayed patronage of market clothing stalls, I decided that beastfeeding would be a more appropriate term for their suckling.
(Please note, I am not a snob. In my youth I spent nearly 12 months in the employment of the local Tesco, for which I was engaged in the task of stacking the shelves – including the toilet-roll aisle – in the days before the introduction of the minimum wage.)

Another highlight of this class was the knitted boob, which was used by the midwife to demonstrate effective methods of breastfeeding. Interestingly, these visual aids had been knitted by elderly women and donated to their local hospital. The form of our booby prop and its nipple had evidently been well studied, and the thought of grandmothers knocking them out six to the dozen from their armchairs conjured an interesting image in my head.

I later rued missing the opportunity to steal the knitted boob and take it home with me. It would have gone nicely in the nursery with the woollen cigarette.

xii
By the time Helen told me she was pregnant, she had already been pregnant for eight weeks. However, I had strongly suspected – unsuspected by her – that she was expecting. (This is why I nearly called this book What To Suspect When You’re Expecting). I knew she was up the muff, so to speak, from about the fourth week. This meant that when she did tell me, I had to feign surprise – as well as gently berate her for trying to keep the news to herself for so long.

I am not the most observant person in the world, but when you share a bed, and the occasional pair of socks, with someone, it is not difficult to spot certain signs that certain things might be afoot. For instance, I was highly suspicious, around the fourth week of pregnancy, that Helen had missed her time of the month. In fact, around this time, I boldly asked her "How are things downstairs?" on account of the fact that she was not exhibiting the kind of behaviour I had come to associate with the Red Rage. For one thing, there had been no interruption to the occasional rutting referred to in the Prologue. (Dear reader, try not to be sick. Or turned on.) For another, there had been… no, stop. I am not Jilly Cooper.

I caught her snacking one afternoon on pickled gherkins. Yes, I know it is a cliché to have a pregnant woman crave foods such as the humble pickle, but she was actually eating the things. In fact, I ate some too, and they were very nice, and while I ate I ruminated on everything that was happening.

I noticed that her breasts had grown slightly. She was only six weeks gone at this point, but they had definitely improved, I mean grown. I do not remember mentioning this to Helen at the time, as I was building sensory evidence of a phenomenon she was either unaware of or secretive about. I do, however, remember thinking that an increase in the volume of her bosom was no bad thing, partly because it would enable me to use the word whoppers, which I like.

The announcement of her pregnancy coincided with the 60th birthday party of Osama Bin Laden. My preparation for this ceremony involved wiping ALL the porn from my laptop so it could be replaced with a large, eclectic mix of songs from the sixties, none of which were listened to after it emerged that Bin Laden was in possession of an inferior brand of stereo that was incompatible with my technology. Yet I was in a surprisingly good mood. Largely, perhaps, because I was as drunk as a boiled owl.

The one person abstaining from alcohol was Helen, who usually enjoyed a drink as much as the next man. And when someone at the party took me aside and slurred, "Helen's not drinking, she must be pregnant", my suspicions were confirmed.

The following morning, Helen turned to me in bed and said, "I've got something to tell you." I prepared myself to act surprised. Not Hugh Grant fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck surprised, but surprised nonetheless.

"I think I'm pregnant," she said.

I sort of raised my eyebrows and opened and closed my mouth a couple of times like a fish. Realising that I probably looked like I was doing an impression of Gordon Brown, I quickly put a stop to this.

"Oh my god," I said.

And then, for effect, I said it again. "Oh my god."

In fact, my acting here was proficient enough for me to become genuinely surprised at my acting ability and subtlety. Later, I regretted being like Gordon Brown instead of Hugh Grant. And, bearing in mind her now public condition, I felt guilty that I had let Helen leave the bedroom at 3am to help other members of her family bring a storm-ravaged marquee under control in lashing rain and howling wind.

xiii
As we have seen, names can be controversial. There was the grandmother, now known by the abbreviation OBL to humour Helen, who had grown tired of hearing her mother referred to as Osama Bin Laden. There was the boy himself, whose name started confusing the authorities from the outset. (When the health visitor came to the house on the fifth week, her records showed that the boy lived in Paddington, and it took a lot of persuading to get her to move this word from the 'address' field and into the 'name' one. His great-grandfather, who had traced his own lineage back to the 15th Century, remarked that the boy was the first member of the family "to be named after a mainline railway station". He started referring to him as Mainline.)

Then there were the nicknames given to the boy by his parents. In times of stress, these tended to have negative connotations. Thus I might receive a text message referring to our charge as "grumpy bollocks", which certainly made a change from his mother's usual "little man". Or I might inform him at 4am, while fumbling for cotton wool with one eye closed and my pants wedged into my crack, that he was indeed "a screaming bag of shite".

It is important to note that even the latter barrage of abuse was administered affectionately. I stress the point because I had often come a cropper for making negative associations in my terms of endearment. There was the girlfriend who took exception to me calling her, after I discovered her third nipple, Mr Scaramanga. But there was no such risk of reprimand from the boy. He could not understand a word I said, and saying them was cathartic. This benefited me because it lowered my blood pressure, which in turn benefited the household income because it lessened the chance that I would put on something warm and catch the next train to Gatwick.

Calling one's infant son "a screaming bag" of something horrible only emphasises how naming a child is fraught with danger. One might, for example, have settled on the name Rose in memory of a particularly well-liked great-aunt, only to be told by a friend: "Oh no, that won't do. I went to school with a Rose and she was a right cunt."
All names have associations, so one man's Teddy is another man's Adolf. There is little that can be done here, other than telling people with opinions that their opinions count for nothing, or choosing a safe, neutral name which inspires no emotional response at all, such as James or Clare – the magnolia and beige of names. Readers of The Guardian might find Alfie and Mia more appropriate.

xiv
Another area of delicacy was the child's first words. Parents can be rather protective of these initial utterances, and the conventional desire is for the first word to be either "mummy" or "daddy", or their derivations. This is understandable, but overzealous pursuit of this end smacks of the insecurities manifested in clothing that states "I love my mummy and daddy". Remember, your baby does not love you, he loves sucking tits and pooing.

Obviously I would not have minded in the slightest if the boy's first word was "mummy". I would, though, have minded if it was "Oma". I spent many a spare moment saying "mamma" and "Oma" to myself, because they sounded similar and I did not want to unfairly admonish the boy if I mistook his "mamma" for an "Oma".

But this only made me paranoid that Oma was easier to say than mummy and daddy. There was only one thing for it. The boy's first word, like the baby in Meet The Fockers, would be ‘asshole’. Which is why I could often be heard repeating the word to his non-comprehending face at bath time.

My verbal encouragement of the boy may therefore have seemed low-brow, but I was encouraged to continue this behaviour by evidence that an intellectual approach often leads to failure. For example, I read in one national newspaper about a child prodigy who, at the age of five, was prancing about his grandfather's house reciting the speeches of Sir Winston Churchill. This boy went on to live a troubled adolescence, which involved drugs and mania, before committing suicide at the age of 18 by jumping from a moving car into New York's Hudson River. Then, on the internet, I learned that a victorious University Challenge contestant could read at the age of one. Having watched her performance on the show, I found the girl quite smug. I was riled enough to inform Helen that I wanted "to slap her [the girl] across the face with one of my own turds".

So as we can see, genius in childhood is often followed by misfortune in later life.

xv
The boy was making me Jewish. Well, not really, but he was making me sound Jewish. For a reason unknown to me, when he cried out in distress I uttered what I regarded to be a soothing "oi!". Unintentionally, my pronunciation of this bark soon evolved to sound something more like "hoyyy!" I sounded like a seasoned movie extra auditioning for the role of Jewish Man in New York Street.

Helen, always eager to learn, also started saying "hoyyy!" in an effort to calm the boy. The walls between our terraced house and the next were thin, and the neighbours might have thought a nice young Jewish couple had moved in. Which would have been fine if we were a nice young Jewish couple, but we were not. Danielle could testify to this because she had seen the photos of me and the boy in the bath and knew me to be a Cavalier.

I wondered, though, if I should tailor the door bell so it played the twangy signature tune from Seinfeld.

xvi
How to avoid getting your hands dirty. Sometimes it will be your turn to change the nappy, sometimes it will be the mother's turn. In the case of the former, you will just have to get stuck in and deal with it, and in the case of the latter sit down and have a nice cup of tea. However, there will be many times when you and your partner decide to carry out this task together. In this instance, it is quite simple to ensure that you do not bear the brunt of the burden.

First, make certain that it is you who carries the baby to wherever it is you change him. So, if you are all sitting in the lounge watching Come Dine With Me, and your bundle of hoyyy has compromised his undergarments, react as soon as possible by saying, "I'll take him." This should immediately be followed by the physical action of picking up the child, even if he is already happily sitting in his mother's arms, and making a move to the changing room. Your partner will follow you empty handed, and this is important because it symbolises that you are Doing More Than Her.

When you get to the changing mat, place the baby on it and suggest to the mother that she goes to the bathroom to fetch some warm water, say, or a clean babygrow. She will do this obediently because she is aware that a rebellion would be contrary to the etiquette of shared responsibility. After all, you have already carried the small, smelly, gurgling person upstairs (the baby, not your girlfriend).

While she is fetching whatever-it-is, undress your baby as much as necessary and undo the tags of his nappy. When your partner returns to the room with her water, she will observe that although she has carried out one task, you have now completed three: carrying the baby; undressing him; and undoing the nappy tags. The latter of these can seem a minor, even trivial, task, so make sure you mention it. Say: "I've stripped off his clothes. And I've started taking off his nappy… those stairs are a nightmare."

Then, before your partner can take the initiative, take the baby's ankles in your hands and hold them up in the air. Now you are not only being useful, in that the baby is in a prostrate position ideal for the cleaning of his bottom, but you have also made it impossible to personally carry out any other immediate tasks, because both your hands are occupied.

Now, not only will your partner remove the baby's nappy and wipe the effluence from his bottom, but she will actually thank you for holding his ankles in such a way that is making her task that little bit easier.

It does not matter who finally puts on the new, clean nappy, as all the dirty work has been done. You have carried out more tasks than the mother, thus gaining a moral advantage useful for any future arguments about housework, et cetera, and you have kept your hands clean.

xvii
One evening the boy was screaming down the house. Anyone would think he had not been fed for days, or he was being strangled or dipped into boiling water. I plucked him from the Moses basket, but no amount of rocking, patting, stroking or soothing words would console him. Who is this monster, I wondered, convinced that the child was screaming simply to challenge me. He had recently been fed, he was warm, he was clean, and he was ready for sleep. Perhaps we had created a little Hitler who would grow up to terrorise the world, after he had grown bored of terrorising his parents. “Shh,” I cooed, “shhh”, half sure that the beast would kill us all in our beds as we lay sleeping. He screamed and screamed and screamed. “You are Hitler,” I said to his contorted, frothing face. “You are Hitler.”

And then he burped.

It was wind, after all. The Gathering Storm.

Similarly, the boy's 'first smile', initially met with joy, turned out to be something more ambiguous. The boy was sat on my lap not long after feeding on his mother. He was looking up at me contentedly. I was probably complaining that EastEnders was rubbish or that Celebrity Come Dine With Me was populated with retards when I noticed a grin spread across the boy's face. Either he was agreeing with my critique of popular culture, or he was expressing pure, unbridled happiness and love.

"Are you smiling?" his mother asked, excitedly. "Are you a happy boy?"

He responded by letting a mouthful of semi-digested milk gush down his chin.

Pure, unbridled happiness and love? In hindsight, I could not blame him for puking at my sentimentality.

xviii
When the babies next door cried, which they did nearly all the time, I was reminded that I did not particularly like children, and, if I was being honest, did not particularly like babies. Which would have been concerning for the boy, if he could have conceived of such an idea.

Fortunately though, the boy mewled like a kitten, and even when most distressed made an inoffensive “wah” noise – with the exception of the time I accused him of being the reincarnation of the leader of the Third Reich.

xix
When people are listing the reasons they do not want children, having to change nappies tends to be pretty high up the list. However, it is not as bad as all that. In the first three or four days, the boy's nappy did not smell at all, and even in the first few weeks did not produce an olfactory offence worthy of exclamation.

At first the boy evidently believed we needed a new driveway or garage roof, judging by his production of tar. "This is easy," I confidently told Helen while changing one of these early nappies. I could not see what all the fuss was about. I was right, of course, this was easy, and continued to be so, even when the nappies became fuller and smellier.

The smell of the boy's nappy was comparable on a scale of offensiveness to the smell of my own nappy. If I were to wear a nappy. Which, because I was not a freak who patronised fetish websites, I did not. Imagine, then, the smell of my by-product. It is not pleasant, as a certain NHS cleaner would no doubt agree, but neither is it so repugnant as to repel me from the essential task of performing the stool. I do not savour the perfumes that waft from the bowl below, but neither do I shout "For the love of God!" and storm from the room, vowing never to return.

However, the sight of the boy's freshly filled nappy did put me off ordering a Chicken Madras curry for dinner. Which was OK, because I preferred Lamb Rogan anyway.

xx
Does Father Christmas exist? This vital question had disturbed my sleep since the boy's birth – more so than his crying. The main problem was that, like most people above the age of four, I did not believe in Father Christmas. Yet my suggestion – that the boy be told as soon as he could fathom it that Christmas is a commercial nonsense and its bearded patron saint a work of fiction – was met with universal derision.

This made me incredulous. After all, I had simply proposed not lying to the boy as soon as he was intelligent enough to be lied to. But my detractors were offended that their desire to lie to their children should be challenged. Believing in Saint Nicholas as children did them no harm, they said, when they were not too busy expressing contempt for their parents. And anyway, they said, the story of Christmas encourages a child's imagination and is a source of joy and wonder.

Perhaps I was simply averse to the prospect of performing my role on Christmas Eve – that is, dressing up in red overalls and saying "ho ho ho" through a rug of cotton wool Selotaped to my mouth, and then getting up in the middle of the night to eat the milk and cookies left out on the kitchen table, for Rudolf and Santa respectively. Or is it Santa who drinks the milk and Rudolf who eats the cookies, I must look that up. But no, this did not bother me. If I could play Gordon Brown, I could play Father Christmas. The burden of Christmas weighed heavy with me because it depended on the dissemination of a lie to an innocent soul.

Do not misunderstand me. Yes, it is morally acceptable to lie to children in certain practical situations. For instance, a man is perfectly acting within the bounds of reason and good parenthood when he informs his young children, who have become excited at the approach of an ice-cream van, that the jingle they hear is in fact a warning that Mr Whippy has run out of lollies. It is also OK, in order to promote a healthy diet, to tell children that every time a burger is served at McDonald's, baby Jesus cries.

I was worried that peddling the existence of Father Christmas, no matter what the justification, would result in a disappointed child who would never really trust his parents, or even mankind, again. He might grow into one of those disaffected souls who claim to prefer animals to people. As I did in the early hours of the 25th day of December 1983, having forced myself to stay awake to witness the arrival at our house of Father Christmas (I do not know why, we did not even have a chimney).

When the parents of the boy's friends from playschool take a door persuader to our threshold and demand to know why I have cancelled Christmas, I will point out that their children are now less likely to be sat upon the lap of a fat man of questionable repute giving out presents in his 'grotto'. If they do not quite understand my meaning, I will make it clear that I am equating ‘grotto’ with Josef Fritzl’s garden shed.

xxi
The clothes we received as new parents were remarkable – comfortable, stylish and warm. Unfortunately, the intended recipient was the boy. Take the colourful cotton babygrows designed for people aged nought to three months. I had never had the pleasure, at least not since the age of one or so, of donning such fine costumes. So soft. So convenient (with popper buttons for quick dressing and undressing). So pastel. Yet, search as I might, these outfits, which are apparently known in America as ‘onesies’, and which back in the day were called romper suits, were apparently unavailable to the likes of me. That is, a fully fledged man.

Unfortunately, such attire was available to the perverted. Alas, my own internet browser history bore witness to my innocent foray into the murky realm of fetish porn, particularly that which catered for those who find pleasure in dressing up as a baby. I am ashamed to say that many minutes of my quest for a man's romper suit were spent exploring the pages of websites featuring grown men in cots sucking on, among other things, dummies and generally debasing themselves. I even went as far as to begin to enter my particulars on an order page, and was only saved by the American site's demand for metric measures, which made no sense to me as I had been educated on the imperial system. Thus I did not possess a romper suit that fit me, and a trawl through the racks of my local TK Maxx was equally fruitless.

The boy also received, with increasing frequency, knitted jumpers from the hand of Bin Laden. It was a shame that when she announced her intention to produce these items of woollery, and I requested that she increase the scale of her patterns to accommodate the top half of my own body, Bin Laden took me for a jester. Yet I did not jape. When envelopes from her plopped onto the doormat, their revealed contents were eyed by me with utter jealousy. The jumpers – colourful! warm! fuzzy! – was each a sartorial gem. The nearest approximation that could be worn by a man was the classic Bad Christmas Jumper, but this, in its grossness, lacked… love. Yes, the love of Osama Bin Laden.

Perhaps, I thought, there is nothing for it but to have all of the boy's clothing sewn together. The patchwork suit, as well as fulfilling my desire to wear the boy's clothes while avoiding association with moral degeneracy, would also be an environmentally friendly way to recycle old garments as he outgrew them.

xxii
Everyone wanted to hold the boy. Like the incidence of old people being drawn to infants like moths to a naked flame, this is simply one of those things that just happen. I had never felt the compulsion to pick up other people's babies; even the offspring of close family members were given only a perfunctory, brief hoist. Yet the boy had become a living embodiment of the phrase 'a babe in arms'.

He was carried everywhere, and I assumed he would continue to be carried until he gained enough weight and unwieldiness to make this impossible. Then I would not be surprised if an aunt were to appear at a family function with a sedan chair and a pair of slaves, put the boy inside and have him carried around in her wake.

I guess my problem with this need of others to lumber the boy hither and thither stemmed from the projection of myself onto him. I would not like Helen's great aunt to pluck me from my bed and hold me close to her bosom, so watching the same happen to the boy made me feel more than slightly uneasy. Some might say this unwillingness to share my son points to a possessive nature, but I would suggest it is indicative of my mistrust of others. I always expect other people to fail utterly in everything they do. So I would not have been surprised to watch an absentminded grandparent, troubled by the fact that the champagne flutes are impossible to drink out of for people with big noses, deposit the boy in the microwave as he searched the cupboards for more convenient, larger-mouthed tumblers.

I once witnessed my father take his crying granddaughter in his lap. She did not stop crying, which proved that picking up babies is not necessarily the best medicine. But he then proceeded to stick one of his thumbs into the poor girl's wailing mouth. If anything, her caterwauling worsened, and I was not surprised. My father spent a lot of time in the garden, where he gardened and smoked. His thumbs were soiled and smoky. Would you like to suck on them? Well, would you? No, you would not.

What starts as a lift into the lap can quickly progress to the sucking of an old man's dirty thumb. It is a lucky child who grows too heavy to be manhandled without having had other people's thumbs stuck in its mouth.

xxiii
A colleague informed me about a friend of his whose ten-year-old son was still wetting the bed. Her solution was to purchase a contraption, from eBay no less, which administered an electric shock to the boy's pride and joy on the detection of moisture. Incredibly, the boy apparently attached this machine to his old chap himself – he was sufficiently embarrassed about the bed-wetting to carry out this onerous task, like a condemned man in ancient Rome carrying his own cross on his back. Did it plug into the wall? Was it legal outside of the Soviet Union? My colleague was unable to answer these questions.

The affair made me think of two things. First, that – my god – parents can be cruel. Second, that four years ago, at the tender age of 26, I wet the bed. I cannot remember if I should blame Guinness, the cruelty of womankind or AFC Bournemouth. I decided that I would never tell my parents, for fear of what they might give me as a present next Christmas. The way things were going, by January I would be wearing a jumper made from the boy’s amalgamated cast-offs over a man-sized romper suit purchased from a fetish porn website, with my crotch attached to the mains supply.

xxiv
It is a cliché that nurses are sexually desirable to men and are the subject of many a sordid fantasy. Without wanting to further this stereotype, I feel compelled to admit that one of Helen's midwives was extremely attractive, and is now the subject of many a personal sordid fantasy.

Safe in the knowledge that my words will never make it into print, I can confirm that this nurse was a sex kitten. I forget her name. Let's call her Spunk Monkey.

Having already endeared herself to me by being about 25 years of age, firm of bottom, ample of bosom and minx-like in demeanour, Spunk Monkey further charmed me with the following revelation. While chaperoning Helen and I into the bathroom, where Helen was to take a nice warm bath in a bid to ease her labour pains, we began a discussion on the merits of the various methods of pain relief available at the hospital. Helen stated that she did not want to use anything stronger or more debilitating than gas and air, which came in a tank with a tube and mouth piece and was basically laughing gas. Spunk Monkey praised the choice of drug, before revealing that as a student nurse (I was, at this point, finding it difficult to contain myself) she had fallen foul of her superiors by taking part in a "laughing gas session" on the ward. Naughty Spunk Monkey!

Later, when the labour proper kicked in, I was entertained by the spectacle of Helen's legs, which were akimbo, being held firmly at the calves by a domineering Spunk Monkey. During each push, Helen drove her feet hard into the chest of this dominatrix, who was calmly overseeing the screaming and expulsion of bodily fluids like an experienced director of hardcore pornographic films.

Fathers tend to claim that the birth of their first child was the best day of their life. At the age of 30, I would not want to assume that there will be no days at least as great as the birth of my son. But at the final reckoning, it will definitely be up there with the best of them. And much of the credit for that will go to Spunk Monkey.

xxv
I had never been one to need constant or even frequent contact with my parents, and since leaving home at the age of 18 had tended to phone them intermittently, while ignoring incoming calls likely to be from them. You could say I liked to keep my parents at arm's length, and this worked fine for all of us: they let me do my thing, I let them do theirs, no one interfered and everyone was happy. However, even I was taken aback by the further loss of attention I suffered after Helen became pregnant.

Before, as a childless man chugging pointlessly up the stream of life, I would answer my phone once a fortnight, and my mother – and sometimes my father – would ask me how I was. "How are you?" she would say. "Are you alright?" asked father.

Since the announcement of the boy's gestation, this line of questioning was replaced overnight with "How is Helen?", and "Is Helen alright?" Indeed, I would often receive a maternal email that simply said "How is Helen?" and nothing else.

After the boy's birth, my parents switched allegiance again. Now the emails, entitled "Kingsley", simply said "How is Kingsley?", with the occasional variation of "How is Kingsley? Love Mum." One email, however, sought to branch out with "How is Kingsley? Is Helen OK?"

Still, I should have been grateful. This, after all, was what I had always wanted. The boy had become the perfect middleman (middleboy?). Or, to be truer to his snuffling, pooing self, the piggy in the middle.

xxvi
Telling my parents that I had sired them a grandchild was slightly anticlimactic, largely because Helen's first meeting with them, only a few months beforehand, was so eventful.

She said she was nervous; I said she shouldn't be. It turned out I was wrong. The occasion began in a bog-standard manner. We arrived. Father questioned us about the traffic. We told him it was a bit chocker on the M25 but things cleared up after Basingstoke. He nodded. We supped tea. The small talk continued: cars, magazines, wine, champagne, beards. We ate spaghetti bolognese, which was not as nice as when Helen makes it. "This is nicer than Helen's," I said. Mother knew I was lying. "I cooked it from frozen," she said. So far so good.

Later, in the lounge, I was showing mother how to download pictures to her laptop from an email. Helen had been nudging me for some time, but I ignored her, assuming she had developed a nervous twitch, or was doing something inane such as picking bits of fluff from her clothing and clobbering me in the process. Twenty minutes into my painstaking IT course, which mainly involved showing mother how to move the cursor from one end of the screen to the other without spilling tea into the keys, I relented and made to investigate why Helen was now pretty much thumping me in the arm.

The TV in the corner was displaying hardcore pornography in all its widescreen glory. "Dad is watching porn on the telly," I informed mother. She wasn't listening. "Dad," I exclaimed. "I'm sure Helen doesn't want to watch lesbian porn with you." He wasn't listening. He was watching the porn. The old git had half his head faced towards the TV, and half towards where the rest of us were sitting. I bet he thought this was rather sly; like we would be fooled by the presentation of half his head into thinking that he was engaged in our conversation, while all the time he was actually taking in premium Sky skin on Sir Alan Sugar's time machine. I nudged mother and nodded at the TV. "Dad's watching porn," I told her. She shouted at her husband. He switched over to Newsnight Review, this time watching with all of his face pointing at the screen.

Before this outrage, father had announced that he was responsible for three children with whom he had lost contact. This was news to me, and to mother, who started staring at him and using her fingers to count. We knew there were two 'others' knocking about somewhere, but three? The old man was evidently feeling dangerous in the run-up to his 65th birthday.

The following day, while walking to Bournemouth Pier, father decided to give Helen a brief history of his life. She heard how he once "married a lesbian", to whom he came home one evening only to find her "between the legs of another woman". Keeping her cool, Helen exclaimed that this experience must have been awful, and asked him how he had reacted. Father replied: "I joined in." A man of the world, Helen might have thought, had she not heard him the night before describe Later With Jools Holland as "the coon channel".

To be fair, Helen should not have been surprised with all this honesty. She knew, for example, that I owned a DVD called Lubed Girls 2; that I once engaged in an act of onanism in a South-West Trains loo because my travelling companion refused to lend me his copy of Private Eye and I was bored; that I choked the chicken in an office where I was ensconced for work experience; and that, as a boy, I liked tossing the caber into socks. In fact, her response to the last piece of information was: "Oh, I wish I could catch you wanking into a sock."

So, compared with this, telling my parents that I had sired them a grandchild was a rather flat affair. Mother simply said "I thought so", while father nodded. They were already grandparents, the novelty of which had evidently worn thin.

xxvii
Two things are nearly guaranteed to attract the attention of girls: puppies and babies. Walking along the Esplanade one afternoon, I found myself the object of attention for practically every passing female aged between six and a hundred. The magnet was, of course, the boy, who was dressed in a fleecy, hooded suit with ears on the head which made him look like a tiny bear. As I carried him in one of those back-to-front rucksack things, with the boy sitting against my chest, we cut quite a dash.

I joked with Helen that I should use the boy as a means to pull (not every girl aged six to a hundred, but those within a less wide-ranging age group, say 17 to 17 and a half). Having attracted the interest of a nubile nymphomaniac with the boy and his fake bear ears, I would inform her that he was "my dead sister's", and that I was merely "looking after him".

And if that failed, I could always persuade Helen to let me, I mean the boy, get a dog. A really, really cute one.

xxviii
I was a motherfucker. I was literally a motherfucker. My girlfriend, Helen, was a mother. Quod erat demonstrandum, I was a motherfucker. This was fine with me because referring to myself as a motherfucker in my head made me feel like I was Shaft. If I was a motherfucker, then so be it.

I was less enthusiastic about the following development though. I started calling Helen "mummy". My girlfriend. Mummy. As in, me to the boy, who was being held by Helen: "Would mummy like me to leave the bath water in for her?" So, not only was I referring to the love of my life as mummy, but I was also speaking to her indirectly, through the boy, like we had had a terrible argument, which we had not. "Do you think mummy would like a cup of tea, Kingsley?"

I was reminded of a friend telling me, as his girlfriend cycled past, "God she reminds me of my mother". It is not healthy to consciously associate one's girlfriend with one's mother. Ever since, I had called this friend, in my head at least, Oedipus Rex. And now here I was, an outed motherfucker. (I did decide, though, that being the protagonist of a blaxploitation film made me cooler than my friend, the anti-hero of Ancient Greece – for a start, Shaft gets much more, and much younger, pussy than Mr Rex.)

It was fine, however, that Helen was calling me "daddy" in our diverted conversations. There must have been some gender stereotyping going on here, because being The Daddy was wholly appealing. Daddies sauce: yum yum! Who's the Daddy? Me! (hopefully). And that shirt Dave the landlord of the Eagle wore when America invaded Iraq: 'Who's the Baghdaddy?' And Boney M's Daddy Cool.

So then, daddy: cool. Mummy: not so cool.

xix
When a man becomes a father he is expected to perform certain roles, and these are more varied and important than putting out the bins and doing odd jobs around the house. I expected to not feel like a proper man until I owned a garden shed containing odd bits of wood and a selection of tools, perhaps for the manufacture of a bird table on a Sunday afternoon. What I did not expect was the requirement to humour the boy's mother on Mother's Day.

The boy was only eight weeks old when Mother's Day first reared its ugly head. It had been a while since I had last bothered to send my own mother anything to mark this arbitrary day in the calendar; we were not a sentimental family, and only one year, when I forgot her birthday, did my mother express dismay at my ineptitude in recognising anniversaries.

But birthdays are one thing, Mother's Day, and its paternal equivalent for that matter, are quite another. Like the tradition of 'trick or treat' on Hallowe’en, these are events that, despite the sizeable silent protest against them, seem destined to be endured until the end of civilisation. And I had absolutely no idea that Helen would conform to womanly type and expect a card and gift 'from' the two-month-old boy.

He had no concept of anything – nothing emotional like love, anyway, or the need to express it through the procurement and delivery of sentimental nick-nacks. All he knew were the breast, the bath and the difference between feeling comfortably warm and too hot or too cold. Yet he was expected to present his mother with a token of his love and appreciation for her on Mother's Day. And, of course, it was me who was meant to act on his behalf in this matter, like a ghostwriter penning the autobiography of an illiterate footballer, or Steve Martin's reluctant matchmaker in Roxanne.

So it was that on Mother's Day morning, at around 11am, I felt compelled to ask Helen if she was upset with me; for she seemed to be so. "No," she replied, "I am upset with Kingsley." Why? I asked, genuinely puzzled. "Because he seems to have forgotten that it's Mother's Day," she said, before striding out of the room.

I must admit that for a few moments I was flummoxed as to how she could resent the boy for not having bought her a present and written in a card. Then it dawned on me: that was my job.

At the end of a difficult day, I handed Helen something from my dressing-gown pocket. "The boy told me to give you this," I said. She took it. It was a 'card', which I had made by ripping off the lid to a box of PG Tips tea bags and folding it in half. Inside I had written a message of love from the boy, and drawn a crude stick-person picture of him and his mother. She was pleased, despite the fact that the front of the card, instead of saying "Happy Mother's Day", consisted solely of the PG Tips logo.

It is the thought that counts.

xxx
I met three gentlemen whose partners gave birth to their first child through Caesarean section. Remarkably, each one of them, in telling me his tale, was like an evangelist for some kind of burgeoning C-section movement; Fathers In Favour of Caesarean Deliveries (FIFCD), perhaps, or Daddies who Understand Caesarean Kids (DUCK).

I found their enthusiasm startling, not least because giving birth by having the belly cut open has greater adverse health implications for the mother than does a natural delivery. For instance, many women cannot properly hold their baby following a C-section, and breastfeeding can be impossible, because of muscle tearing in the abdomen. Of course, sometimes it is more beneficial for the woman to opt for a C-section – if, for example, the baby is oversized – and it is often a lifesaving alternative for both mother and child experiencing an abnormal pregnancy.

Yet to advocate such a major operation as a wonderful experience was simply bizarre. One of the fathers actually said he "would recommend a Caesarean section" as more favourable to a natural birth, which he and his wife had not experienced. Another called it "the way forward".

I decided that there must be a lot of insecurity at play here. Perhaps remembering old playground arguments – "my dad's bigger than your dad" – these men were keen to stress, albeit more subtlely, that their girlfriend was in no way inferior to my girlfriend. The partners of these men all went under the knife on medical advice, due to various complications in their pregnancies, and there should be no shame in that. But the DUCKs were acting like the over-competitive fathers who stand on the sidelines at their sons' football games hurling death threats at the referee.

One of the men described with delight how he was still allowed to cut the cord. Which is great. But would it not be better if, next time, his child did not enter the world in a move akin to the stomach-bursting alien in, er, Alien? Or is that just me?

xxxi
I will change my son's nappy, bathe him, wind him, comfort him, take him to swimming lessons when he is bigger, for walks and play games with him, help him with his homework, teach him to drive and tell him the account number of his trust fund, attend his university graduation ceremony, wedding and inauguration as prime minister, and babysit his children.

I would not, however, accompany him to what was referred to on a leaflet stuck to the fridge as Baby Boogie. Nor would I wear sports-casual clothing suitable for light exercise and prance about like, for want of a better phrase, a retard.

"But the woman on the phone said lots of fathers attend the sessions," said Helen, almost hopefully.

"Perhaps it is the credit crunch," I ventured. "Perhaps they have been made redundant and have nothing better to do with their day."

Recession or no recession, I was not taking the boy to Baby Boogie. I would rather eat one of his nappies.

xxxii
Apparently, the boy had an enormous… well, I mean he was said to be rather handsomely hung. Good for him, I said. Such a well-proportioned feature on the male body could surely only be an advantage. However, to paraphrase the claim made in those adverts for EastEnders, everybody was talking about it.

The boy could not yet talk, nor had he any comprehension of what those around him were saying – often while holding the palms of their hands about two feet apart as an exaggerated illustration of size. But one day, I thought, he is bound to realise that every member of his extended family, and many of their friends and neighbours, is aware that his underpants are well stocked.

I arrived home one evening to be greeted with, "I've just got off the phone to your dad, he says every male in the Young family has a big willy." So, I had commuted a great distance from the office to be informed by my girlfriend that my father had been boasting to her about the size of his cock.

Every time she met a new man-child, Helen could not wait to tell me how small his penis was in comparison with that of the boy. "It was like this," she said, bending her little finger at the first joint. And then for emphasis, indicating the boy, she said, "While his is like this", now pointing her forefinger straight into the air, erect.

"So," said Helen's aunt across the dinner table during a lunch with 15 or so members of her family, "I hear your son has an enormous penis." The boy's great-grandfather, aged 92, looked on nonplussed; his 25-year-old second cousin laughed. Everyone else turned to me for some kind of confirmation. "What can I say?" I shrugged, turning the palms of my hands ceiling-ward, the epitome of pride.

Later, during the same meal, another relative sat by my side stopped cutting into her pork to remark: "It really is big, isn't it? I've seen it."

I decided to let this pass because I was effectively being complimented by proxy, as was my father, and my father’s father, and my father’s father’s father, and all the fathers before them.

xxxiii
A particularly cute photograph of the boy in the tub was sent to members of the family and friends. I was holding the boy under the arms, which he was stretching upwards and outwards with a look of pure joy on his face. It was one of his very first bouts of laughter, and Helen captured it perfectly on camera.

Cue the following complaint: "Chris, you have sent me a picture of your thighs."

And: "This would be the cutest picture ever if it wasn't for your man-legs."

Unfortunately, no amount of cropping could remove my wet, matted, hairy legs from the background of the boy's almost religious expression of happiness. The complainers had a point, he did look like he was taking a bath in Narnia with Mr Tumnus the Faun.

Then I saw the picture blown up to near life-size and propped up on a hallway table in the house of my father-in-law. I felt rather exposed, but also grateful that Helen had not chosen to distribute the other pictures on the reel. Helen's family knowing the exact dimensions of the boy's genitals was one thing; mine should be known to only me and Helen. And Danielle, of course.

xxxiv
One day I decided that I needed to broaden my vocabulary when encouraging the boy to talk. Because I initially had one priority in this task, namely to ensure the boy's first word was daddy, and not Oma, my monologue was limited in scope.

Nine weeks after his birth, I could be found in the bath with the boy in my lap, and me saying to him: "Ass… hole, ass… hole, ass… hole, ass… hole, hello, hello Kingsley, hello, hello, ass… hole, ass… hole, ass… hole, ass… hole, daddy daddy daddy daddy daddy daddy daddy daddy daddy daddy daddy daddy daddy daddy daddy daddy daddy daddy daddy daddy daddy daddy daddy daddy, hello Kingsley, hello, ass… hole, ass… hole, ass… hole, ass… hole, daddy daddy daddy daddy daddy daddy daddy daddy daddy daddy daddy daddy daddy daddy daddy daddy."

Sometimes I varied this with "Who's a big boy?" and "Who's got a clean bottom?" For sure he is a poet laureate in the making, I thought.

xxxv
An advantage of being in the company of small children is that they generally give one a greater chance of gaining a seat on the train. So, when a parent enters a carriage with a baby in a rucksack, or leading a toddler by the hand or carrying it in arms, at least one seated passenger tends to stand up in a show of courtesy. As my commute to work was long, and the train busy, I contemplated putting on the boy's carrying rucksack before leaving the house in the morning, but with a lifelike doll inside it, rather than the boy himself. I could thus be guaranteed a seat without having to actually take the boy to work.

The disgrace of being found out, however, would be great. If that happened, the best I could hope for would be to babble nonsensically to my investigator, and make it felt that I was quite mad and should not be approached by commuters. I could pretend to have a strain of that mania which drives some old women to dress up dolls and present them in their living room windows.

This affair is, on the whole, easier for women, in that they are likely to be offered a seat as soon as they are obviously pregnant, with less chance of such chivalry being shown to their suffering partner. Yet this also carries dangers. I often spent much of a train journey staring at the stomach of the woman standing next to me, contemplating whether or not I should offer her my seat; was she pregnant, or simply fat? If she was the latter, then it could be that she would graciously receive the offer of a seat, for that is the etiquette owed to a lady; but there was also the possibility that she, being fat, would take offence at the assumption she was pregnant.

A colleague once made a similar mistake in the office. A secretary was carrying a tray laden with hot beverages. He approached her and remarked that she should not be engaged in such labour "in your condition". Unfortunately, this woman was not pregnant, but chubby. Soon afterwards, my colleague spied the secretary on the train. She was reading a self-help guide to losing weight. He bought her flowers by way of an apology for his conduct, but reckoned the damage to her self-esteem had already been done.

xxxvi
One function of a father is to always be ready with a dad joke – that is, a joke so poor it is termed a dad joke. My father, for example, would every Saturday afternoon point to the football results on the TV and inform my brother: "There you are, Matthew, Queen of the South!" We lived in a town on the south coast, and my father was hilariously joking that my ten-year-old brother was not only gay, but the biggest gay in the south of England.

Father would also entertain us by rewinding in slow motion a video recording of an elephant taking a dump. The gag being that the balls of dung were rising from the desert floor and into the animal's anus. Sir David Attenborough it was not.

The boy could barely hold up his head when I tested my own dad jokes on unsuspecting friends, family and passers-by: What did the head owl say to an escaping clerk while his family of owl robbers held up a bank? Stop, or my mom will hoot! What did the owly schoolchildren call their strange owl classmate of Serbian descent who kept pleasuring himself in front of them? Weird Owl Yankovic. Who is the most revered judge in Britain's Got Talons? Simon Cowl. Who is America's most-wanted tawny terrorist? Owlsama Barn Laden.

Yes, all of those were owl puns. But I did have others.

For instance, someone might have said to me, "Oh, I'm cold!", and I would reply, "I'm Chris."

I could go on.

What was the name of Castro's dog? Chihuahua Guevara. The dog's favourite artist was Labrador Dali, he worshipped Jesus Crufts and voted for Bark Obama. He also listened to the Pointer Sisters.

Yes, all of those were dog puns.

I could go on.

OK.

xxxvii
I had to ask Helen to tell her female friends to refrain from wearing strong perfume when visiting. Being girls, they inevitably wanted to spend as much time as possible holding the boy, who within minutes reeked of their artificial scent, which lingered on him for the remainder of the day and sometimes beyond.

One ill-effect of the boy's exposure to bosoms soaked in Chanel Number 5 was the masking of his nappy smells. Thus the poor boy could soil himself undetected, having been in the arms of a woman, for many hours. The problem here was that baby poo congeals. So I would rather change a two-minute-old nappy than a two-hour-old nappy, the former requiring less dexterity of fingers and elbows, and less wiping and scraping, to keep all parties smelling of roses.

Another ill-effect was picking up the boy only to find him, in the words of my grandmother, "smelling like a whore's handbag".

No offence to Helen's friends, of course.

xxxviii
Is the bugger still alive? This is a question I asked myself more often than one might expect. Carrying the boy around in his rucksack, his face was often obscured by straps and folds, and further investigation invariably revealed his nose to be pressed hard against an impervious-looking part of the contraption. With no signs of life thus far forthcoming, it was time to prod the beggar in order to stir him to some reflexive movement, which he would hopefully perform in his slumber, without waking. Too much prodding and the boy was nearly too alive: screaming blue murder and shedding tears to break his mother's heart. And his head, now lifted from its recline in obscurity, was impressed deeply with the creases and the patterns of the sling so that he looked like a little Maori warrior.

In bed, too, I often found myself rising to make unnecessary sojourns to the loo, in order that I might poke my head into the nursery and hear the boy's soft breaths. Sometimes I craved a noise from the blighter to confirm his health. I always forgot this desire when he was in full, bloodcurdling lung.

It was a strange feeling. Being a parent had made me paranoid. This emotion manifested itself in the shape of a nightmare, from which I awoke at an ungodly hour to find myself searching for the boy beneath the bedsheets. When I could not find him, I looked beneath his mother, and then myself. Convincing me he was in the bed somewhere, this hallucination was quite traumatic, and the search became more frantic as each hiding place was eliminated. Was I lying on top of him? Had he rolled out of the bed and onto the floor?

We never took the boy to bed with us, because of this very fear – and my conviction that unless he learned quickly that he must sleep alone, I would awake one day to find a fully grown man in my bed. Despite this, I was still compelled to get out of bed and go into the nursery to convince myself that the boy was indeed there.

I once had a variation of this dream. Half-awake, I discovered I had a rather damp chest, and that the bedsheet was moist. "The boy has wee'd on me," I declared to Helen. The statement roused her from sleep. "He's wee'd on me," I repeated. "Look." And I turned on the bedside light so she could see. She agreed I was damp, but assured me the boy had not been in the bed. This revelation led me to conclude that I must surely have wet the bed myself. "I think I have wet the bed," I admitted. Thankfully, Helen had a greater presence of mind, told me I was talking nonsense and even licked my chest when I protested my guilt. "It's sweat," she announced.

These horrorshows were made worse by the fact that Helen had previously confessed to having endured similar nightmares. I had listened with mirth as she described her dreams, and later, as I watched her sleeping, wondered if the woman lying beside me was a raving lunatic. Now, I supposed, I was getting my comeuppance.

xxxix
It was good to get the boy into a routine. Bath at 9pm; final feed at 9.30pm; bed at 10pm. At nearly three months, the boy slept from 10pm to 7.30am the next morning, which people told us was remarkable. We were lucky, they said, and to be fair it was hard not to be smug in the presence of parents with much older children who still only slept for a few hours at a time.

It was also good to get the father into a routine. I bathed the boy; made a cup of ginger and lemon tea in the kitchen while he was feeding; and was in bed at 10pm. Any deviation from this and I became agitated, morose, and, finally, completely anti-social.

The most important event in my itinerary was the bath. On the rare occasion that I did find myself in a bar at 9pm, my mind wandered to the bath – from pub to tub. I did not, like the boy, kick my legs and stretch my arms in excitement at the sound of running water, but the effect internally was similar. However, I could not tell my drinking companions at the stroke of 9pm that I must leave, for "it is my bath time". Thus I drank on doggedly; the perils of fatherhood!

And because I was now Tired All The Time, being in bed at a certain hour took on a remarkable significance. Staying up beyond the opening gongs of News At Ten seemed at best decadent and at worst self-destructive. I once stayed up to watch a film beyond the witching hour, and afterwards crawled up the stairs on all fours, feeling like I had spent the previous eight weeks sniffing glue.

I prayed for a Stannah Stairlift, and those beds that contort into comfortable chairs. A pair of slippers and a pipe would have been nice, too.

xl
Having performed the act of giving birth before my eyes, Helen could perhaps be forgiven for thinking that I had 'seen it all', and nothing would shock or repel me. Alas, she was wrong. The fact that I witnessed my first son arriving into this world did not somehow give me an appreciation of female farts in the bedroom.

In between snores and grunts from the sleeping beauty beside me, I was startled in the night by prumps and pops. These alarming sounds were invariably chased by malodours of the bottom variety. The best I could do was turn away and try to return to sleep, only to be awakened by the hallucination that the boy was in the bed, either peeing everywhere or suffocating.

These rectal revues were not limited to moontime, when the perpetrator slept innocently. Ppffffffffp. Pop! Ffffff. Prrrrup! These were the noises that had also been introduced to the kitchen, sitting room and bedroom, even in daylight hours, when their maker was fully aware of her cruel creations.

"Sorry," she would say sometimes, detecting my despair – which manifested itself in my exclamations of "Oh, God!" and "Holy Mother of God!", or the holding of my lower arm over my mouth while staring into middle distance, furtively, like Fiver in Watership Down when the field turns to blood.

Other times she would say, "Kingsley has farted." The flipside of this was that I now had the freedom to carry out any abominable act. I could, for instance, eat the last of the ice cream in the freezer and tell Helen, "Kingsley ate the ice cream", or download copious amounts of hardcore pornography onto the house computer and say, "Kingsley has downloaded Lubed Girls 3."

Every fart cloud has a silver lining.

xli
When the boy was nearing his third month on Earth, his mother decided it was time she went out on the town, and he spent the evening with his father. It was the first time I had enjoyed more than an hour or so alone with the boy, and we were entering uncharted territory.

As the moment of her departure neared, Helen verbally recounted a checklist of everything I would need to safely traverse the evening ahead without the involvement of the emergency services. Breast milk in fridge: check; nappies: check; baby wipes: check. And so on.

Helen left the house at 5.30pm, reminding me that the boy would want feeding at seven, his bath at nine, and bed before ten. This was the routine we had established over the preceding weeks, and there was no intention yet to deviate from it.

Having taken the boy on a walk in his rucksack, I returned home just before seven. He had spent the whole time asleep, and now stirred to a calm wakefulness. I chatted to him, changed his nappy, and sat him in his bouncy chair just in time for The Archers on Radio 4.

It was not long before he made an appeal for food. Unfazed, I retrieved one of two bottles from the fridge (each contained 4oz of milk, and the second was for the post-bath, night feed) and warmed it in a Tupperware dish filled with hot water.

Everything was going according to plan. Helen phoned to check we were OK, and I informed her confidently that she need not worry. The boy was not perturbed by the bottle, and took to it as enthusiastically as he did his mother's breast – although the look he gave me throughout was one of quizzical haughtiness mixed with disdain: "You, feeding me?, like mother. Pah! This is woman's work, and you look like a fool. But continue to tilt the bottle in my favour my good man, for I am thirsty."

The bottle emptied, I sat the boy up and winded him through gentle pats and rubs to his back. He belched in a way that was satisfying to both of us, and I slipped into a reverie of what an accomplished father and house husband I had proved to be.

Then all hell broke loose. The mothersucker was still hungry, and his appeal to be sated was much more boisterous than the first. I went to the fridge, removed the second bottle, made a slapdash attempt at warming it, and stuck the teat into the roaring mouth. He guzzled the lot; I sat him up and burped him.

As the boy lay on a cushion like a fat snake digesting an antelope, I phoned Helen.
"Eight ounces were meant to last the whole night," she said. I felt like I had taken the boy to Burger King and whiled away the evening feeding him saucy chips. "Yes," I concurred.

Following a brief bout of indigestion, the boy was asleep by eight, and remained so until well into the next morning. It was a triumph of sorts, although I felt I had cheated in my experimental role of stay-at-home dad. By a minute past eight I was watching some rubbish on the TV with a glass of amontillado and a mouthful of Double Decker.

xlii
I hated it when people brought their babies into the office. It reminded me that I didn’t like children. If any statement contained here is going to get me into trouble with my loved ones, it is that one. And possibly the bit about slamming a stereo speaker into the back of Helen's mother's head.

Right now, for instance, I am sitting at my desk in a busy office and a woman has walked in with her two-month-old to show off to cooing colleagues. Perhaps she would also like to take us all down to the car park so that we might see her new Audi (oh, I do like the alloys), and usher us across London and into her house, where the builders have just finished installing a new bathroom (good choice of tiles, nice taps). While everyone is in the mood for showing off, I might get out my old chap, slap it on the desk and shout to the manager, "Hey, man, come and look at this!"

So I decided not to bring the boy into the office. There were already circa five thousand photos of him on Facebook, anyway.

xliii
A consequence of being a new parent was that the sending of jokes such as "Elizabeth Fritzl surprised the jury at her father’s trial when it became apparent she’d had a full English breakfast that morning. She had Daddy’s Sauce all over her lips" tended to result in the reply: "You are not a fit parent." To which one might in turn reply, "No, I am not, but Mylene Klass is." To which Helen might reply by slapping me in the face – which is why I would like to point out that Helen is a fit parent.

In truth though, I was a fit parent. For instance, instead of doing the work for which I was paid, I took time to discover anagrams of Kingsley Paddington. My favourite results were: ‘a godsend, tingly pink’ (yes he was, when newborn); ‘a sodden tinkling gyp’ (yes he had been, ever since); ‘a dingdong tinkle spy’ (who did he think he was, the love child of a campanologist and John le Carré?); and ‘skinny got a-peddling’ (which he probably will be, when he discovers the implications of his middle name).

This anagram-related fun may be brought to a close when the boy changes his name to Dave. Good luck to him if he thinks he is going to get an anagram out of that.

inexplicable and ongoing wind

2010-11-03T20:48:00.002Z

Still struggling to find a thread on Mumsnet that will help me with 'a bit of a cough':

3yo old willy hygene
Tiny flecks of blood in baby sick
Regurgitation
Talk to me about poo...
Molluscum
hand, foot and mouth - drooling?
Toddler poo
Ariel Washing Tablets
Rust coloured sick?
Post operation nightmare!
9 year old shattered
not very pleasant at tea time but faecal impaction anyone?
henoch schonleich pupura, HSP
Could it be periods????
1 yr old eaten part of a bouncy ball.....
really dry crocodile skin
Bottom question....
Any experiences of armpit swelling please?
eardrums look dull..... anyone have experience of this
I have a child that looks whiter than Casper...
Mild but prolonged diarrhoea
Do worms wiggle?
Daughters foot, is it infected? picture included
Weird scab radiating outwards - what is it?!
18mth walking on tip toes
Recurrent sticky eye...
Yellow Saliva
Feel like the worst mother in the world - I overdosed my 9 year old on Senna (12 times recommended dose)
Inexplicable and ongoing wind
Use of iPhone near baby's head
Lightning Process in children unethical say charities
Anyone's DS had a hypospadias related foreskin reconstruction..?
sweating on one side of his head.
Foaming at the mouth baby???
Eyelash dilema!
Children not feeling ill when they are?
Does anyone understand eye tests?
chicken pox and lady bits.....
dd8 has recently grown breast buds, and i noticed last week she as a linea nigra! I am so surprised!!
Hand, Foot and Mouth...but without the Mouth?!

excessive blinking

2010-11-02T14:35:00.003Z

I went to Mumsnet because the boy has a bit of a cough. However, I couldn't find a thread entitled "a bit of a cough" as everyone else seems to be dealing with more serious issues:

i am panicking about daughters eye
Constipation after Ovex for worms!
'Impacted' poo? Really need help, I've been crying my eyes out.
Fat toddler wheezey broncholitis - Yes thats a real diagnosis!
very pale/white stools in children
Lice, need advice.
Words of support needed - I feel like a useless wreck
2 year old boy in pain holding penis
Baby - flat head
3 yr old complaining of a "dizzy leg"
Sick son - voilent, hysterical at nights
Strange ear behaviour!
Lump on top of 3 years olds head
vomiting but hungry toddler - bedtime.
Poo problems
so on to movicol again, tried with high fibre diet but still soiling going on
Doc has prescribed daktarin oral gel for my thrushy nips??
Para-Umbilical Hernia
Thrush in toddler - I think.
Bright yellow spit up - help!
Peeling Baby's Bottom
Arrghhh my DD2 has a small head apparently :(
Enemas - please come and talk to me.
Ringworm
White spot in newborn's armpit
Quick question on thrush
omg ds has a temp, belly ache and worms!!!!!
What should I do about this huge veruka???
Toddler with trapped wind at night
itchy bottom
Baby Not Peeing
12 week old's hair falling out!
Judge Knows Best when it comes to Breast
Osgood–Schlatter disease
5 year old pooing in pants!
Baby swimming - I'm freaking out, please reassure me!
Vulvovaginitis
Can someone tell me about slapped cheek?
My 4 month old son's willy balloons when he urinates
How often do your babies wee?
Excessive blinking
I am almost certain my 17 yr old dd has a type of undiagnosed autistic spectrum disorder - what next??
Flying with Glue Ear
Watery nappies
Tickling brain?
Foul-smelling gas/flatulence - serious question
Do kids get moles?
Story books about operations
Really weird poo in 2 year old
Small boy + itchy bum =
Knocks to the head
Worms!
How am I ever going to forgive myself for this?
scabby head!
stupid questions about vomitting children
Red poo in toddler
blood in toilet and bottom (graphic)

a mature analysis of the spending review

2010-10-20T16:59:00.004+01:00

Adding the letter n to the key word in news reports makes the government's austerity measures easier to swallow.
From The Guardian (sort of):

Spending review 2010: George Osborne announces extra £7bn of welfare cunts

Chancellor unveils biggest UK spending cunts in decades, telling MPs 'today is the day that Britain steps back from the brink'

George Osborne today announced an extra £7bn of welfare cunts, allowing him to turn the tables on Labour by claiming reductions in Whitehall departments would be lower than those planned by the previous government...
Alan Johnson, the shadow chancellor, attacked "the deepest cunts to public spending in living memory", which he warned could end up "stifling" the economic recovery...
The extra raid on welfare gave the chancellor a highly political flourish at the end of his spending announcement. Osborne said that extra cunts to welfare meant that departmental budgets would be cunt by 19% over the next four years.
This is one percentage point lower than the 20% cunt implied in Labour's plans to halve the fiscal deficit over four years.
To loud cheers from Tory MPs, who rose to wave their order papers, the chancellor said: "The average savings in departmental budgets will be lower than the previous government implied in its March budget. Instead of cunts of 20% there will be cunts of 19% over four years. So I thank them for their input and look forward to their support."...
In a highly political speech lasting just over an hour, the chancellor said the £83bn public spending cunts over the next four years in the government's most severe financial retrenchment in decades were based on reform, fairness and growth...
But there will be cunts. Police budgets will be cunt by 16% over four years, councils will face cunts of 7.1% a year, and the Home Office and the Ministry of Justice will see their budgets cunt by 6% a year...
Osborne insisted that those with the "broadest shoulders should bear the greatest burden" and said the Queen had agreed to lead the nation in stepping "back from the brink" after agreeing to spending cunts that will help confront a "decade of debt"...
Osborne told MPs: "We have reformed welfare and cunt waste and made sure that we are all in this together. And taken our country back from the brink of bankruptcy."...
For some on the government benches the cunts were an "ideological objective," Johnson claimed.

to be or not to B2B

2010-07-14T14:32:00.001+01:00

Sales gimp 1: "Do animals have souls?"
Sales gimp 2: "What was that – do animals have arseholes?"
Sales gimpess 1: "Horses have souls, don't they."
Sales gimp 2: "Arseholes."
Sales gimpess 1: "And dogs."
Sales gimp 2: "Arseholes."

Sales gimpess 1: "I'm so excited I could squirt."
Sales gimp 1: "Excuse me?"
Sales gimpess 1: "I'm so excited I could squirt. A little insight into my sex life for you there."
Sales gimp 1: "Nice."

Sales gimp 2: Sings The Birdy Song
[Two minutes later] Sales gimp 1: Sings The Birdy Song
[Five minutes later] Sales gimps 1 and 2 and sales gimpess 1: Sing the Birdy Song

Sales gimp 1: "What have you gone for today?"
Sales gimp 2: "A chicken salad."
Sales gimp 1: "I make my own chicken salads."
Sales gimp 2: "Can't be bothered with that mate."
Sales gimp 1: "Nah, nah, honestly mate, listen, listen, right, all you need to do, right, is buy your own chicken and some salad, yeah? What it is, right, is you buy your own chicken and some salad, yeah, and it's really easy. I literally make my own chicken salads."
Sales gimp 2: "Still an effort though mate."
Sales gimp 1: "Nah nah what you do, right, is you go to the shops..."

a woman in a café comments on my beard

2010-04-26T20:12:00.005+01:00

The serving woman behind the counter remarked as I entered the café, 'Your beard, it is long now, yes?'

'Yes,' I replied. I then could not think how to continue this conversation, so I added: 'Like Father Christmas.'

Knowing from previous encounters that the woman hailed from somewhere near Warsaw, I spent a few seconds wondering whether Father Christmas was recognised in Poland. I was not encouraged to elaborate on my simile when the woman resumed her critique of my facial furniture.

'It will soon be down here, like this,' she said, pushing both hands palm downwards to a position just below her tits.

It did occur to me that the purpose of this gesticulation might be to attract my attention to the Polish breasts, which stood firm from within some cheap, stretched material that appeared to have been sourced from Primark. But then she said: 'You will have to paint it.'

We had returned to the relative safety of Saint Nicholas. 'Yes,' I replied, 'I will have to paint my beard white.'

'And it is soon be Christmas, yes?' she resumed. I nodded in a vague way. It was still the month of April, and I no longer knew what the woman was getting at.

By now my falafel wrap had been prepared by the woman's colleague, a greasy fellow of unknown origin who only a few days previously had commented, 'Your beard, it is getting big now', before rambling on in disjointed English about the perils of shaving. He said everything while tittering, and I resented him for drawing the attention of his patrons to my face.

His falafel wraps, however, are second to none, and I still go there.

the nursery gets sarcastic

2010-04-26T10:26:00.001+01:00

high hopes

2010-04-23T12:02:00.003+01:00

Juliet

2010-04-22T17:07:00.023+01:00

This afternoon I was sent the following email:

Hello
My name is juliet, young looking girl, am so much happy to contact you
today for acquittance, l will also like to know you,and i have
someting to tell you.try to write me back so that l can also give you
my picture. I believe we can move from here! I am waiting for your
mail to my email address above. yours new friend Juliet. Remember the
distance or colour does not matter but love matters allot in life.

I am expected to believe she looks something like this...

...but I suspect she looks more like:

Southern Railway's Guide to Parenthood

2010-04-21T20:47:00.015+01:00

You sit down in a public place with your small child

An old person sees the baby and leans forward, all the better that you might hear his pointless advice on the subject of childrearing

Enraged at once again having to listen to this drivel, you break the old man's legs and smite his eyes, as illustrated by the crutches and guide dog

Troubled by your violence, you get drunk, go home and have sex with your wife. She gets pregnant

About nine months later, you sit down in a public place with your small child...

essential eyewitness reports from the BBC

2010-04-20T13:58:00.005+01:00

15 April 2010
Icelandic volcanic ash alert grounds UK flights

One passenger at Glasgow told the BBC: "I'm meant to be going to Lanzarote. We've travelled from Oban, leaving at 3am. Now we've decided we might as well just go home and do a bit of gardening."

15 April 2010
Police investigating the murder of teenager Aamir Siddiqi have sealed off a takeaway restaurant in Cardiff while they search a flat above.

An eyewitness told a Cardiff news agency: "Police have been here all day, I'm not sure what they're doing up there but they're looking for something."

12 April 2010
An animal transporter carrying more than 100 pigs has overturned on the M4 in Wiltshire.

One eyewitness who was stuck in the queue told BBC Wiltshire the traffic was at a standstill.
"There's just miles and miles of traffic in front of us and behind us but we can't see any of the animals here."

12 June 2009
Bird swallows eel after struggle

Eyewitness Antonia Jennings, 18, said at first the cormorant versus eel battle seemed "an unfair fight".
"The eel was bigger, more powerful and looked a lot more dangerous than a bird not much bigger than a duck," she said.

20 August 2008
Public library destroyed by fire

Eyewitness Queenie Spray, who had been out walking her three dogs, said: "I drove past at about half-past-four and there was nothing happening."

8 August 2008
Firefighters tackle church blaze

One eyewitness, Shirley Edson, said: "Thank God there was nobody inside."

16 May 2008
More than 30 firefighters tackled a major blaze overnight in disused industrial premises in West Lothian.

Eyewitness Lindsay Ellis said: "I stayed for an hour and heard a series of bangs, probably coming from the fridges that kept the chickens.
"What probably started as a small innocent fire has now resulted in the place burnt to the ground."

12 May 2008
More than 8,500 people have been killed by a powerful earthquake in China's Sichuan province.

Eyewitness Gilles Barbier: "It was very scary."

1 May 2008
Crocodile sighting in city lake

Stephen Jenkins, from Pontrhydyfen, said: "I was walking my dog and me being a fisherman and being nosy near water - I was having a look and I could see something moving in the water.
"I thought at first it was a fish or something or a log - but there was no wind or anything.
"But I could see the ripples coming off this. I had a closer look and it was about four metres from me.
"I could see the legs and the nose and the tail and everything.
"It just swam down into the deep end, its eyes were just on top of the water as it was moving, the eyes were coming towards me."

A RSPCA spokesman said: "We haven't heard anything more about this but one of our officers went down just to see what is there."

23 April 2008
Investigations are continuing after a major gas explosion at a disused pub in Leeds which left five people injured.

Joe Walsh, 14, who was passing the site with his father when the explosion happened, told the BBC he thought a car had exploded.
He said: "It was really loud."

12 November 2007
The black cloud over London

Eyewitness Paul Hallam, 50, a production worker at a nearby printing firm, said: "We noticed it was getting a bit misty outside and then it was getting more and more smoky. The whole of that building, about the size of a football pitch, went up."

Eye witness Danny Cherry, 30, a print worker, said: "People were saying it was the old bus depot, but I think it's actually an old clothes factory. It's an old building that they were going to knock down anyway."

Retired builder Joseph O'Halloran, from Forest Gate, was going to have a look at the Olympic site when he noticed the smoke. "A bloke told me he saw the roof collapse and the flames were 100 feet high," he said.

Samson Bereket was taking his children Nimrod, three, and Michal, one, to play group close to Victoria Park, when he saw the blaze. "I saw smoke going up and up and then I saw the flames. It looked like a really big fire so I took my kids home quickly," he said.

17 April 2007
Lorry fire at Great Blakenham

Former BBC Radio One presenter Mike Read was at a nearby hotel when the fire broke out: "I've come out this morning and the sky is black. I looked out the window and thought, 'ah it's going to pour with rain'.
"But it's not so much that, as a massive pool of black smoke – there's obviously a major fire. There's been giant flames leaping in the air from somewhere."

16 May 2006
Clean up after tornado hits town

Eyewitness Paul Golthorpe, from Finch Hatton Close in Ruskington, said he had never heard the wind make such an horrendous sound.
A trampoline was also seen by some eyewitnesses flying down the street after it was picked up by the tornado.

11 April 2006
Three workers were injured when scaffolding collapsed at a construction site in the centre of Milton Keynes.

Eyewitness Nick Reynolds said: "It came down like a pack of cards." Others said it sounded like a roll of thunder.

10 October 2005
Pier to cost millions to restore

Mr Watts, a cab driver, said he could see from the shore that the fire was "absolutely huge".

16 January 2005
A man who suffered serious injuries after being doused in petrol, which then ignited, remained under police guard in hospital on Sunday.

Witness David Royale said the man ran into the Museum Pub on fire asking for help. "It was just weird. He was asking bar staff to help so I said give him a bucket of water because he had been set on fire.
"Someone phoned an ambulance and one of the bar staff could smell petrol."

to be Frank

2010-03-12T16:44:00.003Z

I called Samsung today to find out why I had yet to hear from their refrigeration engineer, who was meant to have contacted me more than a week ago.

They told me they had logged my original call under the name "Mr F. Franks".

The operator refused to confirm whether the F. in F. Franks stood for Frank.

I then suggested it had to be either Frank Franks or Fred Franks, as I couldn't think of any other English forenames beginning with F.

This seemed to confuse her, because she then started referring to me as "Mr Franks".

"Fridge," I said. This elicited no response, so I went on to explain my new theory that the F. in F. Franks probably stood for fridge, as my call did relate to a problem with a fridge; this did not though explain the Franks bit.

There was silence at the other end of the line.

"Are you still there?" I asked.

heartwarming advert of the day

2010-02-24T16:49:00.003Z

what eats a fish?

2010-01-11T22:59:00.004Z

Soon after Christmas we met a man of indeterminate age sitting in the corner of a public house with one and a half pints of lager on his table. We had entered the pub to take advantage of its wireless internet access. The man took an interest in our laptop and engaged us in the following conversation.

"Can the world exist on a laptop?" he asked us.
"Er..."
"Can I exist on a laptop?" he continued.
"Yes."
"Can the world exist on the internet?"
"Yes."
"It's Christmas time... mistletoe and wine."
"Indeed."
"Do you like Christmas?"
"I can take it or leave it."
"Are you English?"
"Yes."
"Were you born in England?"
"Yes."
"...Children singing Christian rhyme..."
"Hm."
"Are you proud to be English?"
"I guess..."
"What does Christmas mean to you?"
"Not much really... family... I try to avoid it."
"What is Christmas?"
"It has lost its religious context and become a commercial festival."
"Do you like Christmas though?"
"No."
"Do you like Christmas?"
"No."
"How can the world exist on the internet?"
"Google Maps, Facebook..."
"Where am I going?"
"I do not know sir."
"Can that thing tell me where I'm going?"
"Yes."
"Tell me where to go."
"There's a door just over there..."
"Where will I go?"
"You could catch the bus."
"I've got a bus pass."
"Right."
"Sorry to be philosophical with you but where am I going?"
"Home?"
"If you didn't have that computer, what would you be doing now?"
"Having a conversation with someone."
"And how would you communicate without emails?"
"Send letters. Telephone."
"What did people do before emails?"
"Use carrier pigeons."
"How do you talk to a pigeon?"
"Coo..."
"You can't talk to a pigeon! How else would the letters get there?"
"Carrier dog..."
"How do you talk to a dog?"
"I'm just going outside for a cigarette."
"Who's in charge?"
"The Government."
"Who are the Government?"
"Our elected servants."
"Who are they?"
"The men and women who sit as members of Parliament."
"But they don't represent us do they, they're ripping us off."
"I guess... the expenses scandal..."
"They're ripping you and me off."
"The Government does waste a lot of money it's true."
"Where did it all begin?"
"The Big Bang?"
"No no no. The Government, where did it all begin?"
"I think all civilised societies have had a political elite."
"I'm sorry to bother you, I won't interrupt."
"That's OK."
"I'll just ask you one more question."
"Right."
"What eats a fish?"
"A whale?"
"No no no. What eats a fish?"
"A penguin."
"Look, you've got your otters, and they eat the fish. What eats a fish, it's not a trick question."
"An otter."
"No."
"People?"
"What!?"
"People. People eat fish."
"People, no. What eats a fish?"
"The kingfisher."
"No. I'll give you a clue. It begins with... a 'C'."
"I can't think of any animals that begin with a 'C'."
"What eats a fish?"
"Is it a bird?"
"That's it. What did you say?"
"A seagull."
"It's like a seagull."
"An albatross?"
"No no no, an albatross doesn't begin with a 'C'."
"A cormorant?"
"That's it! A cormorant."
"Right."
"What is a cormorant?"
"It's like a guillemot. It... nests in cliffs."
"What eats a fish?"
"A cormorant?"
"That's it!... what do you call it?"
"A cormorant."
"... a cormorant..."

the sailor who fell from grace with the train

2009-11-19T13:13:00.004Z

As I settled into my window seat I surveyed the man sitting on the other side of the table. He had a full white beard in need of taming and skin like the inside of a pork pie. His sea-green eyes were glazed over, and although he had a full head of hair, the cream-coloured strands threatened to detach themselves from the crust of the pie at any moment. The oily creases in his sixty-year-old skin suggested a working life spent outdoors, and a dampness seemed to rise from his body and make the air around him thick and briny.

I was paying particular attention to this man because I had to climb over his extended legs to get to my seat. Now I noticed that in one hand he loosely held a rolled-up cigarette, and the ends of his moustaches were stained a tarry yellow. He looked straight ahead with dead eyes and did not flinch when a stream of passengers knocked into his arm as they bustled past our table. But he was alive – an enormous globe of a belly pressed against the table, inflating and deflating at regular intervals.

I stopped taking in these observations when I spotted the coarse black hairs springing from somewhere inside his ears. The bristles might have belonged to a brush dedicated to the sweeping of a foul alley, and their blackness contrasted horribly with the white beard and cream hair. The ears themselves, which matched the fleshy nose, gave the impression that a demented butcher had created the face by stitching together pieces of offal.

I shielded my view of the monster with my book, only occasionally glancing down to my right to make sure that the lower tentacles of the beast were not preparing for an attack on my person.

There was a loud groan, a prolonged Hnn noise that the animal was making by pressing its Spammy tongue against the roof of its mouth. Hnn, it said again. I put down my book to reassess the situation.

The thing was now clearly fast asleep. Speckled lids had concealed the murky eyes, and the hand that previously held the cigarette was empty. The roll-up trembled on the floor between us as if terrified of its creator; then, as the train rounded a bend in the track, the cigarette made good its escape by careening towards the back of the carriage.

"Every fucking one of them," shouted the strange man in his slumber. "Arghhh, Hnn."

For the next thirty minutes the man's guttural jetsam alternated between "Arghhh, Hnn" and "Every fucking one of them". The middle-aged and well-dressed woman sat across the aisle was pretending not to notice as she flicked through the pages of a glossy magazine with a serene look on her face. Even she, though, looked over in our direction with eyebrows raised when my travelling companion blurted "Shitting bollocks". Then, raising his face to the ceiling and with eyes still closed, the man let drop his jaw and gave out a continuous stream of babble – "Ho ho HEY! Arghh, Hnn, ho" – pausing every twenty seconds or so to let his terrible balloon suck in more air.

After a silent period of ten minutes, I decided that the creature had successfully battled its demons and was finally resting in peace. "Fuck them all," he suddenly shouted. And then he added: "Arghh."

I left Carriage 5 and found an unoccupied seat in Carriage 4.

matching sign and monk

2009-09-25T14:23:00.004+01:00

Paul has taken a photo of a monk in an orange robe standing near a predominantly orange sign at Clapham Junction.

why did the chicken cross the road?

2009-09-07T16:51:00.004+01:00