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What kind of person would bring a child into this world? Only a fucking idiot. Not only cursed with 50% of my DNA, you will get to live in interesting times. I apologise in advance. I hope that we can all hold it together and steer this ship through the rough seas ahead, but I am not sure we will. In the days after 9/11 when America had the world’s sympathy, it looked for a while like they might turn this act of aggression and hate into a positive thing and do the “Christian” thing and turn the other cheek. But they did what the terrorists wanted and knew what they would do and ultimately used the horrific event as an excuse to go to war. Which created more terrorists.
Maybe they’d have appeared anyway. Maybe we’d have played into the hands of the terrorists either way. Maybe we just have to have this fight for the next hundred years. My baby will not be unlucky to be living in a time of danger and flux, I have just been lucky to live in a time of relative peace.
it’s been a long wait for this bloody lazy baby to arrive and it’s felt like there’s been three months to go for ages. But I looked at the calendar today and realised that we’re now less than a month from the due date. And babies, because they’re all twats, don’t really run by schedule and so can turn up stupidly early, when you’re nowhere near ready, or decide to hang around in their cushy little apartment for much longer than they should. I mean if it can hear the news then I wouldn’t blame it for staying inside. If I was in a womb right now I think I’d probably try and stay in as long as I could, just to break the world record if nothing else. I’d want to beat the gestation period of all mammals. My mum would not be best pleased with that.
It still doesn’t feel real that I will be responsible for some useless little idiot who can’t even talk or walk or go to the toilet properly in a matter of weeks, but every now and again I experience a moment of clarity about it and (ironically enough) almost shit myself. I was reading one of my wife’s ten million baby books today (that in spite of being all about the same relatively simple thing manage to give out exactly ten million different bits of advice about how you look after an infant). This one is quite a good one. I don’t remember what it’s called, but it’s got a baby on the front cover so you’ll probably be able to find it. But it takes you through the baby’s life week by week, with simple instructions of what you can expect and what you have to do and how you feed and clean a baby. I’ve seen all this stuff before in nine million, nine hundred and ninety-nine thousand, nine hundred and ninety nine subtle variations, but this time it did make me sit up and think, “Oh, Ok, so this is really happening isn’t it?” In February I will be responsible for a baby.
Most books you read don’t then come true. Which makes this book something of a magical and horrific thing. But all the arse cleaning, nappy changing and waking up every ninety minutes is not just the crazy, terrifying fairy story that it seems (oh, yeah sure, a human being is going to emerge out of my wife’s vagina is it? Out of all the places it could emerge. It sounds like something dreamt up by Pauly Shore). I am less amazed by the fact that we’re having a baby, than the fact that I am reading an enchanted book that predicts my future. That doesn’t happen too often. I must find the authors and see if they can tell me what the Spurs score will be next week.
Or if they can write a different book for me where my baby comes out able to speak and look after itself and continent and with a big bag of money. Then I can read that one and it will come true and I will be laughing.
Anyway, I am quietly petrified, but I am staying strong and pretending not to be for the sake of my wife. I have done the tricky part of making a baby, but apparently having the child can sometimes be a bit tricky and occasionally take 15 to 20 minutes (not sure about that, I sort of skimmed that part of the book cos I don’t really have much to do. I think I am just meant to say, “Oh come on, stop making a meal of this love. It’s not that bad”). Actually genuinely when my mum gave birth at home (I think to my brother), they were upstairs in the bedroom whilst my dad and grandad were downstairs listening to the cricket on the radio (which is how it was back then) and my mum, for some unknown reason, was making a lot of noise, and the midwife told her that she should be quiet adding, “Think of the menfolk”. What a wonderful place this country used to be. I can see what Nigel Farage is thinking now.
