William’s Progress
Matt Rudd

Another Horror Story

To Freddie and Felix

Table of Contents

Cover Page

Title Page

JANUARY

FEBRUARY

MARCH

APRIL

MAY

JUNE

JULY

AUGUST

SEPTEMBER

OCTOBER

NOVEMBER

DECEMBER

Acknowledgements

Also by Matt Rudd

Copyright

About the Publisher

JANUARY

‘Somewhere on this globe, every ten seconds, there is a woman giving birth to a child. She must be found and stopped.’

SAM LEVENSON

Tuesday 1 January

I am a father.

I have a son.

My son is alive.

My wife is alive.

My son and my wife are both alive.

I am alive.

We are all alive. Happy new year.

I am a father. Right now. As of forty-three minutes ago. For forty-three minutes, I have been a father.

It must have been the cold air hitting me when I stepped out of the maternity ward. Not just the cold air, of course. I am perfectly capable, under normal circumstances, of not fainting in the face of cold air. There were other contributing factors, too. Lack of food, for instance. I hadn’t eaten for forty-six hours. You lose your appetite when your wife is groaning at you and the midwives are barking at you and no one’s dilating quickly enough and everything’s going wrong. For forty-six hours.

The only sustenance I’d had during the whole debacle was a gulped whisky during the small hours of the first night of the two-night labour when it was only me and Isabel (and the bump). The whisky was purely medicinal. We’d been ‘in labour’ for a good eighteen hours by then and I needed something to stiffen my resolve and prevent me from running, screaming, from the house. What a huge mistake that was. Running, screaming, from the house would have been a far more sensible course of action than staying for the full Reservoir Dogs experience. Isabel and the bump would have managed fine without me.

Lack of sleep: that’s another of the extenuating circumstances leading to my fainting in a bush next to the ambulance bay. I have never stayed up for forty-six hours in my life. Hardened SAS men give up sensitive military secrets if they are kept awake for that long. But I’m not a hardened SAS man, and I wasn’t allowed to sleep. Or I might have been allowed, but I never dared ask: one doesn’t want to appear unsupportive during these (many) hours of need.

As it turns out, the first eighteen of the forty-six hours, the ones in the run-up to the whisky, weren’t actual labour. They were only pre-labour, a sort of softening-up phase God threw in so that everyone would be completely exhausted gibbering wrecks by the time the proper labour began.

I didn’t enjoy the pre-labour. I’m pretty sure Isabel didn’t, either. She was having are-you-sure-this-isn’t-the-actual-labour contractions every fifteen minutes or so. And when I say contractions, I mean proper on-all-fours, groaning and screeching and spitting like the possessed girl in The Exorcist. With me, frantic, helpless, stroking her lower back like they encouraged in the prenatal classes. And her saying, ‘What the fuck are you doing?’ and me saying, ‘It’s okay, darling. Swearing is a good release. They said that in the NCT class.’ And her saying, ‘Okay, well stop fucking tickling my back or I’ll fucking kill you,’ and me saying, ‘Yes, darling’. And then her head spinning around 360 degrees.

That was the pre-labour. Eighteen hours, punctuated only by a midwife coming round and saying, ‘Well done, dear,’ before leaving again. And me, about halfway through, saying, ‘Are you sure you want to stick with the whole home-birth plan, because we could go to hospital like everyone else? They have nice monitors and tubes and drugs there and stuff.’

And then the whisky. Thank God for the whisky. For a minute, a beautifully precious minute, peace and quiet. Nerves settling. The clock saying 1.30 a.m. and me wondering whether I could sneak in forty winks since we all seemed to be relaxing into this whole giving-birth thing.

No. Oh no. The moment of tranquillity evaporated as soon as Isabel gave out a real, proper, blood-curdling scream. It was a new noise altogether, a noise that, if you heard it in the distance while you were sitting in a safari truck halfway through a night drive in the Okavango Delta, would prompt you to immediately ask the ranger to drive you back to the camp. It was a noise that would chill a man to the very core, make him drop to his knees and pray, even though he doesn’t believe in God, to make this all stop happening.

MY PRAYER

Dear Lord,

If you can get us through this thing, this terrifying thing, I promise never, ever to have unprotected sex with my wife or anyone else ever again. I promise to give my life to you and spend my days wandering the world preaching your gospel. Without shoes on and everything. Make the next few hours pass as quickly and painlessly as possible, oh, Mighty One, and I shall never, ever be a twat again, I really, really promise. And I’ll bring up the bump in the Christian faith, rather than encouraging him down a more logical humanist path. I promise.

Amen

…and that was it: the start – only the start – of the ‘real labour’. All systems go. ‘This is Houston, you are cleared for liftoff,’ I said to Isabel in an attempt to sound excited and positive.

‘If you say anything else that makes me feel like a space shuttle, I will kill you,’ she replied. ‘Now call the midwife back and tell her to get round.’

The midwife arrived. Four centimetres dilated, she said. Only four? Six whole centimetres to go. Six! Jesus. I mean, blimey. Sorry, God. I started another prayer, but the midwife interrupted, telling me to make myself useful by pumping up the birthing pool. Yes, of course, the birthing pool. Must pump up the birthing pool.

BIRTHING POOL: INSTRUCTIONS FOR USE

1. Important: make sure you unpack the birthing pool and inflate it prior to use to ensure that you are familiar with the equipment and there are no faults. Aquasqueeze Ltd will not offer a refund if any pool malfunctions are only discovered during the birthing procedure.

(Frankly, it was a miracle I even read the instructions on the day, let alone prior to use. I mean, seriously, as if it’s necessary to have a trial run of a glorified paddling pool.)

2. Plug in pump.

3. Pump.

Why didn’t I do a trial run for the paddling pool? It’s childbirth, for goodness’ sake. You don’t muck about with childbirth. But it was one of several things I hadn’t done. I hadn’t read any of the baby books Isabel had asked me to read. I hadn’t got in an awful lot of lie-ins. I hadn’t painted the bathroom, the horrible old bathroom with its horrible old paint. I had painted the nursery, but badly. The birthing pool was the least of my worries. Except, it wasn’t.

It took forty minutes to inflate the pool, during which time the foot pump and I fell out on several occasions. I twisted one ankle and had room spin twice. Shouldn’t have had the whisky. It took another ninety minutes to fill the pool with water using a complicated, improvised, ever-so-slightly panicky siphoning system I devised with the garden hose, a colander, a plastic bag and the bath. Why hadn’t I worked this all out earlier? Idiot, idiot, idiot.

The leak was discovered at approximately 0400 hours, long after the helpline at Aquasqueeze Ltd had closed. Mind you, they were probably closed for the entirety of the Christmas period, anyway. That’s the trend these days, isn’t it? No one’s going to turn up for work at a birthing pool company on New Year’s Eve, even though it’s a Monday. Even though people still might be giving birth. That would be far too much to expect, now wouldn’t it?

Only once the pool was full did the pressure begin to force water through the until-then-unnoticeable tear right at the base. From then on, it was like a crack in a dam in a 1970s disaster movie. It got bigger and bigger and bigger. I was already too tired and dehydrated to cry proper tears, and Isabel and the midwife were too busy doing grim things in the front room to notice.

I put a finger over the hole and looked around the dining room. Why we had decided that Isabel should give birth in the dining room and not somewhere one might find the necessary equipment to mend a leak, I have no idea. Next time, we’re doing it in the garden shed. Plenty of appropriate mending equipment in there. Back in the dining room, all I could reach was masking tape. Masking tape is porous, but it bought me enough time to find the Sellotape. Which bought me enough time to explain to Isabel, between contractions, that the pool was ready, but that she couldn’t bounce around in it or anything because, well, it was a touch, erm, faulty, darling…

She didn’t like this idea.

‘I told you we should check the effing pool out before I—bbleeeaaaaaaaarrrrrrrrrgggggggggghhhhhhhhh’.

There are at least some advantages to regular strong contractions. You can only get shouted at for the ever-decreasing periods in between.

7 a.m. Six centimetres dilated. Could it go any slower?

10 a.m. Seven centimetres. But maybe still six because things are getting a bit swollen down there.

‘Keep going, darling, you’re doing wonderfully,’ I told her, while reflecting that God really could pick up a bit more support if he answered the odd agnostic’s desperate prayer every now and again.

By midday, we were on to our third midwife and the pool was starting to sag. Sellotape can only go so far.

By 4 p.m., I had given up trying to keep the water in the sagging pool at a comfortable temperature because Isabel was now roaming around the house like an injured animal. Absolutely no point sitting in the dining room with a thermometer and a kettle when your wife is in a dark corner of the bedroom growling at anyone who tries to offer her a biscuit. And then it was 10 p.m., and the two latest midwives had decided that she was eight centimetres, but Isabel had had enough.

‘I’ve had enough,’ she said quietly and I had to look away because I didn’t want her to see how frightened I was.

So we went to the hospital…her in an ambulance with blue flashing lights and everything, me following in the Skoda without blue flashing lights, the baby bag, a change of clothes or anything. Idiot.

Drugs, gas and air, epidurals, something that sounded like Sanatogen, more slow progress, baby in distress, mother in distress, me shaking my fist at bloody non-existent God for the ridiculous, stupid, impossible nature of childbirth. And then, suddenly, at 5 a.m., I hear the phrase ‘fetal distress’. Isabel is barely conscious. The bump is in trouble.

‘We have to get this baby out. You’ve been going long enough, dear,’ said a no-nonsense midwife with arms like beanbags. And Isabel burst into tears of sheer exhaustion and resignation.

I can’t remember much about the Caesarean, except that it was quick and there were slurping noises like when you’re at the dentist and the assistant sticks the vacuum cleaner down the back of your mouth and you try to keep it away from your epiglottis because you were already very close to gagging but she’s not paying attention because it’s almost lunch and she’s bored, and, oops, a little bit of breakfast has come up and now the dentist doesn’t like you, which is annoying because it wasn’t your fault, it was the bored assistant’s.

At the point of incision, Isabel had to tell me to stop squeezing her hand so hard because it was hurting. Then the doctor made a joke and I made a joke and Isabel had to tell us all to stop joking. ‘Gallows humour,’ I said and immediately regretted it. Three or four seconds or minutes or hours later, there was a piercing, gurgly scream from behind the turquoise curtain: our boy, beautiful, grumpy from all his efforts to escape Isabel. My turn to burst into tears.

And that was forty-three minutes ago. Now I am lying in a bush and an old lady is prodding me with her Zimmer frame and I’m laughing and crying at the same time.

I phone the families. They are equally pleased that we are all alive.

Isabel’s dad says, ‘Bloody home births. Bloody ridiculous. This isn’t the Crimean War.’ And I have to explain, not for the first time, that these days women are empowered to make choices and that Isabel didn’t want to give birth in hospital. He points out that she did in the end. I point out that he’s right and I don’t care…the main thing is that everyone’s alive and he is now a grandfather.

‘A grandfather? Yes, I suppose I am,’ he replies more warmly. ‘About time, too. I was beginning to think Isabel was past it. Everyone leaves it so late these days. I mean, in my day, you got married and you got on with it. None of this work–life balance nonsense. As slow as a giant panda, but you got there in the end. Well done, my boy.’

I then have the same conversation with Dad before he puts on Mum, who is immediately hysterical and then tells me her birth story, which I’ve heard a thousand times before and don’t want to hear this morning. Not now that I have my own which is just as gory.

‘I have to go, Mum. I need to check on Isabel and the bump.’

‘You can’t call him “the bump” any more. Doesn’t he have a name? Please tell me you’ve decided on a name. Please tell me it’s not something trendy.’

‘Not quite. But you’ll be the first to know.’

THE HORROR OF NAMING A CHILD

There is much responsibility attached to having a baby. This much we know. But by far the worst aspect of it is giving the child a name, particularly if it’s a girl. Every girl’s name that Isabel thought was sweet was a porn name. Chloe. Jessica. Ella. We may as well just call her Pamela. Or Paris.

‘What about Sarah?’ Isabel had suggested, reasonably.

‘No, I snogged a girl called Sarah. We were only fourteen and she let me touch her breast. Not appropriate.’

‘What about Susannah?’

‘Everyone snogged Susannah.’

‘Maybe you could give me a list of girls’ names that have no sexual connotations for you.’

‘Okay, Beatrice.’ Because Isabel isn’t the only one who can make reasonable suggestions.

‘Beatrice?!’

‘Yes, or Bea for short.’

‘Don’t be ridiculous.’

This went on for months and all we agreed on was that we shouldn’t go for an ‘interesting name’, like Apple, Moon Unit or Prince Michael II. You are not, as the axiom goes, more interesting because your children have interesting names.

‘What about Electra?’ she suggested while we were failing to choose a pram at John Lewis.

‘Are you making these preposterous suggestions simply so I have to say no a lot so that when I make sensible suggestions in return – like Mildred – and you say no, you don’t appear unreasonable?’

‘Electra was my grandmother’s name.’

I only realised she was joking when we got back to the car. You can lose your sense of humour with the whole girls’ names fandango.

On boys’ names, we had narrowed it down to thirty. My favourite was George, but because her favourite was Albert, which is French and makes me think of pierced foreskins, I had to agree that we would cancel out favourites. Next was my Kit (after the car in Knight Rider, thereby guaranteeing my unborn child a life of success and coolness of which I could only ever have dreamed), knocked out by her Finbar. Neo and Ralph went the same way, but for a long time we found common ground on Elijah.

‘Elijah,’ I had announced proudly to Johnson in the pub. ‘Elijah Walker.’

He’d looked at me coldly, looked at his pint forlornly and said, ‘Poor kid. Poor, poor kid, with his poncey parents and his ridiculous name that will follow him through life ruining any chance he ever had of not being judged. Another pint?’

That left us with deadlock, so we decided to put the whole terrible matter on hold until nearer the time. And then we got nearer the time and were no closer to resolution. Then the time came and went. And now we are the proud owners of an unnamed child and the grandparents are appalled.

Back in the ward, Isabel is sleeping. So is Bump. Ahhh, they are so sweet. Look at him with his little head. His tiny little head. Is it too little? It looks very small. So do his arms. His arms are too short. Oh, God, a short-armed son. Didn’t Hitler go off the rails because of his short arms? I can’t remember. I’m so tired.

‘Darling, you’re hurting my stomach.’

‘What? Who? How? Oh, God. I’m sorry.’ I had nodded off on the chair and slumped forward on to the recently dissected stomach of my wife. ‘I’m so, so, so, so, so sorry. Are you okay? Should I get the doctor? Shall I press that emergency button?’

‘It’s fine. I’m fine. Look at your beautiful son’.

And there he is, looking straight at me. Possibly. Hard to tell, though. He has a glazed expression. He looks a bit dopey. Oh, God, is he simple? Will he still be living with us when he is forty, in an anorak, untouched by women, untroubled by a career, enthused by nothing but trains and their sequential numbering system. Oh, God.

He hiccups and there is a flicker of alertness. No, it’s fine. Everything is fine. And we are all alive. ‘I love you, darling. Happy new year.’

‘Darling? Darling? DARLING!’

‘What? What happened?’

‘You fell on my stomach again.’

‘Oh, God. I’m so, so, so, so—’

‘Why don’t you go home, have a rest, get the bag of things I told you not to forget last night and come back? Bump and I will be fine.’

She’s right. I must stop falling on her recently severed stomach. I must go home and hunter-gather. I shall return in no more than two hours with clothes and Innocent smoothies and flowers. A thousand flowers for my amazing wife. Fear not.

And I was gone.

Our front door. I’m standing looking at our front door. Marvelling at it, at its familiarity. It looks the same, but everything is different. This house is now a family house. My family will live here. Nothing will ever be the same again. The thought – combined with a new wave of tiredness and hunger – overwhelms me. I can hardly find the energy to fumble through my coat pocket for the keys.

Inside, it’s Reservoir Dogs, the leftovers. There’s the birthing pool, its water congealing nicely. I take a closer look and remember the moment, the very specific moment, when the pregnancy ceased to be fun.

THE SPECIFIC MOMENT WHEN HAVING A BABY CEASED TO BE FUN

October 27. 10.44 a.m. Second baby-group meeting. Isabel was excited but nervous. I was nervous but excited. We were running through the list of things we’d need for the birth: the nappies, the breast pads, the wet wipes, the snacks for daddy, the sanitary towels, the pumps, the nozzles, the pointless homoeopathic pills and the million other items that were all absolutely essential if things were to go smoothly. The longer the list went on, the less excited and more nervous Isabel looked and the more strongly I felt like hugging her and telling her everything would be all right, list or no list. Hugging didn’t seem appropriate, so I gripped her hand and gave her a reassuring smile. She smiled back and if, at that second, a lion had jumped over the hedge and attacked her, I would have fought it off with my bare hands. Or at least had a jolly good go. I felt like I would do anything to protect her, anything at all.

But then we got to the very last item: an old sieve.

That’s what it said. Not simply, ‘Sieve’, but ‘Old sieve’.

‘Why old?’ asked one of the more inquisitive mothers-to-be.

‘Because you don’t want to use your newest sieve to get all the bits out of the birthing pool, do you?’ came the matter-of-fact reply. And in that instant, I didn’t feel like everything was going to be all right and I didn’t feel like I could protect Isabel from anything at all. I wanted to smile and shrug calmly at my wonderful, brave, nervous, pregnant wife – but I couldn’t. I needed fresh air. It wasn’t so much that I was squeamish about bits in a birthing pool. It was more that it was going to happen to Isabel, and there was nothing we could do about it. In fact, it was normal. Having an old sieve on a list of things you need for a water birth was normal.

‘Are you sure you’re okay?’ she asked during the break. ‘You look a bit pale.’

‘I’m fine. Absolutely fine. Just a bit airless in here.’

That is all over now. Now we are postnatal. We are, as I have mentioned, all alive. And now I am here, looking at the birthing pool that never was, thinking about the old sieve we never needed. I make my way upstairs, finding more detritus of the previous two nights: half-drunk cups of camomile tea (‘It’s making me feel sick’), wet flannels (‘Get that flannel away from me’), massage oil (‘Stop rubbing me’), CDs of whale music (‘William, will you turn that racket off? I already feel bloated enough without having to listen to the mating rituals of a blue whale’). In the bedroom, I find the bed. Which I shall just lie in briefly. Forty winks, as instructed. That is all…

Wednesday 2 January

‘I can’t believe you left us for a whole day. I’m still wearing the same nightdress I came to the hospital in. I’ve had to borrow some sanitary towels from the nurse.’

‘I’m so, so, so, so, so, so, so sorry. I got home. I had a quick lie-down. The phone was still unplugged from when you told me to unplug that (“fucking”) phone. Then it was 11 p.m. I called the hospital. They said you were asleep. I called your mobile. It was off. I’m here now. I’m so sorry. Look, I bought a cranberry, yumberry and blackcurrant smoothie. It’s very high in vitamin C.’

‘Thanks. Now, go and change Jacob’s nappy.’

‘Jacob?’

‘Yes, he’s called Jacob. I had to call him something because the midwives were about to call social services and report us for neglect. You had gone AWOL. So I decided on Jacob. We can always change it later.’

Ahh, the old we-can-always-change-it-later trick. Isabel has been using this all year. We can’t agree on a colour to paint the baby’s room. I want a good, honest, sensible yellow. She wants a pinky-white, which is ridiculous if it’s a boy, but she says, on the contrary, it’s perfect because she intends for our child to have a non-gender-specific upbringing. Halfway through the standoff, she paints it pink while I’m at work. I come home and look angry. She says, ‘We can always change it later.’ Kapow!

Also while I’m at work, she pays a proper handyman to come round and hang pictures where I don’t want them on the grounds that we’ve been in this house for over a year and she’s tired of looking at bare walls. The same happens with the placing of plant pots, the reorganisation of the kitchen and the moving of all my clothes to the bottom drawer of the small cupboard in the spare room (to make room for all the cloth nappies). But it’s okay, we can always change it later…

We will never change it later. We could barely be bothered to change it in the first place.

This is fine when it comes to the feng shui-ing of a living room or the buying of a girly tree for the front garden, but not so fine for the naming of a first-born.

Jacob.

I’m not sure. I knew someone at university called Jacob. Did philosophy. Smoked drugs. Now lives on a beach in Bali. How much of that is because his parents called him Jacob?

It does have a ring to it, though. Jacob Walker. You probably wouldn’t get an astronaut called Jacob Walker, but equally, you wouldn’t get a shoplifter. It didn’t sound prime ministerial, but there was a certain gravitas. Broadsheet newspaper editor, perhaps. Barrister. Surgeon. Discoverer of (a) the cure for old age, (b) life in another solar system or (c) the ark of the covenant. If they haven’t discovered that already. I can’t remem—

‘William! The nappy.’

THE DADDY NAPPY

Well, I missed that one. We had given over ten minutes of the prenatal classes to the treacly first nappy. Turns out I could have skipped that bit on account of having rather tactically skipped the whole of day one. I got day-two nappy instead and, frankly, I don’t see what all the fuss is about. It went absolutely fine until Jacob (see, I’m already calling him that) decided to have a wee the second, the very second, I’d finished cleaning him up. No drama. I changed him again – and that was less fine because he was screaming. And the screaming is very hard to cope with when you’re trying to work out which way around the nappy stickers go and how you wipe the poo off without getting it on the (pink, why is it pink?) babygro. Still, the smell was bearable, the trauma minimal. All trauma will appear minimal now that I have witnessed the miracle of childbirth.

Thursday 3 January

One more night in hospital on account of the whole dissection thing. This has worked out very well. Now that I have slept – and we have put the whole missing-the-first-day-with-Jacob debacle behind us – I am finding the routine of being a new dad quite acceptable. Wake up, drive to hospital, fuss over amazing mother of my child for a few hours, marvel pathetically every time child moves (‘Look, look, look, he moved his hand, ahhhhhh’), go home, watch DVDs, drink beer, watch more DVDs, go to bed.

Today, we introduced Jacob to both sets of grandparents. We had to prise him from the claws of both mums, but other than that – and a slightly disgusting moment when Jacob tried to suckle Isabel’s mum and Isabel’s dad said, ‘Hang on now, old chap, there’s only one of us allowed to sup at that particular cup these days’ – everything went smoothly.

Until the flowers arrived from Alex, Isabel’s best friend.

WHY ALEX IS STILL ISABEL’S BEST FRIEND

Alex very nearly ruined my marriage. He spent the first year of it spying on us and trying to break us up. He gate-crashed our romantic weekend away. He faked photographs of me having sex with my ex-girlfriend, Saskia (the Destroyer of Relationships). Worst of all, he found out I was getting Isabel’s parents some cheese knives for Christmas and he got them better ones. How could anyone be so devious?

I had assumed the answer was simple enough: he loved her, she didn’t love him, he turned into a nutter. But after the dust had settled, after Isabel and I had repaired the damage he had done, after he had cried a lot and begged for forgiveness, it became clear that it wasn’t quite so simple after all.

‘Isabel. William. I have something else to tell you.’

You’re moving to Indonesia? You’re becoming a Trappist monk? You’re—

‘I’m gay and I’m in love with an interior designer called Geoff.’

I don’t know why we were even still talking to him at all, let alone talking to him about this exciting new revelation, a revelation which, frankly, if he’d revealed it to himself a bit earlier, could have saved us all an awful lot of hassle.

‘Wow,’ exclaimed Isabel charitably.

‘Couldn’t you have worked that out a bit earlier?’ I asked as patiently as possible.

‘I know. I’m so sorry. I always knew deep down. You just do, don’t you? But I was too frightened to admit it to myself, let alone to anyone else. I think that’s why I spent all my time chasing a woman I knew I could never be with.’

‘And hiding a camera in her bedside lamp.’

‘Yes, well, I was in denial. And denial led to confusion. And obsession. And…’

‘And psychotic behaviour?’ I was only trying to help him finish his train of thought, but Isabel gave me a look. Despite everything, Alex was still her friend and she would still support him, a fact which I found intensely annoying. Given the lengths to which he had gone to spoil our wedded bliss, announcing he was gay was about the only way he could insinuate himself back into Isabel’s affections. Which is exactly what happened. He went from, ‘Sorry for nearly ruining your lives’ to ‘I can’t wait for you to meet Geoff, you’re going to love him’ in the space of five minutes.

A week after that, contrary to Alex’s prediction, I found that I didn’t love Geoff. Geoff loved the sound of his own voice too much for there to be room for any other love. ‘William. Hi. Heard a lot about—Blimey, I hope that rug was a present, or are you being ironic? Maybe the latter, I’ve heard you’re quite dry and, my God, what a bold statement you’re making putting that picture against that wallpaper. Bravo. Anyway, sorry, where was I? So good to meet you. I was thinking on the way here that—’

The only time anyone else could speak was when he had food in his mouth. The rest of the time, he monopolised the conversation with long, fanciful stories about how brilliant he was and how awful everyone else’s taste in home furnishings was. I don’t know why he thinks he’s so brilliant. He’s only an interior designer who was on daytime television once.

‘You know, he used to be on television?’ whispered Alex when Geoff gave us all a break by going to the toilet. ‘And he wants me to work with him. He loves my style. He thinks I could be an interior designer, too. Isn’t that exciting?’

‘Yes.’

No.

So now Alex is back in our lives. He has chucked in his old pretentious job and got a new pretentious job. He is now an interior designer. And we have to have dinner with them at their annoyingly designed flat. And they have to come to dinner and make annoying comments about our normally designed house.

And, clearly, he still can’t help upstaging me on the present front. First cheese knives. Now flowers. His bunch would embarrass the head gardener at Kew.

‘Isabel, I thought you disapproved of out-of-season flowers. Because of the food miles, or whatever it is.’

‘Yes, but aren’t they beautiful?’

Friday 4 January

The baby seat. My God, the baby seat. Even when I’d read the instructions (birthing pool: lesson learned), in four languages, I still couldn’t work it out. You have to feed the seat belt through several different holes, loops and clips, all at the pace of a snail to prevent the very touchy seat belt from locking up. If there are any slight twists or kinks in the seat belt, YOUR BABY WILL DIE. You have to get a floaty orange thing lined up with another floaty orange thing, or YOUR BABY WILL DIE. Even though the orange thing is a sort of spirit level and it only lines up when our car is on the road, not the drive. You must then clip one clip into another clip, even though the clips don’t reach one another, or YOUR BABY WILL DIE. If the air bags go off, YOUR BABY WILL DIE. If you have the headrest angled wrong, YOUR BABY WILL DIE. If you don’t follow points 1 to 97 of the health and safety section of the policy document of the car seat, you will be a child killer.

Before leaving for the hospital, I managed to get the seat into the car in a relatively non-lethal way. It took twenty-five minutes and an awful lot of swearing, but I did it. As long as I put it in when the car was on the road, not the drive, it was safe. But when I got to the hospital, they wouldn’t let us carry Jacob out in our arms – against health and safety regulations. So I had to unravel the seat, bring it into the hospital, put Jacob in it, take it and him back to the car and then tell the hardcore hospital traffic warden to back off because, even though I was in a ten-minute loading bay, I was dealing with baby seats as well as a baby and would be more than ten minutes. The traffic warden backed off.

Putting a baby-filled baby seat into a car is much harder than putting an empty seat in. Eventually, I gave up. I told Isabel, sitting in considerable pain in the front seat, that all was well, smiled at Jacob, cursed the fact that Alex’s flowers had to be brought down to the car in two separate journeys, then drove all the way home at no more than four miles per hour so that OUR BABY WOULD NOT DIE.

Ahhh, home. Start of the babymoon. We are all alive. We are all at home. None of us appear to have contracted a hospital superbug. Although I can no longer get away with watching DVDs or drinking beer, I am feeling very, very happy – as happy as someone who thought everyone was going to die and then found out they weren’t. As long as I don’t make Isabel laugh at all in the next two weeks (her stitches forbid it) and as long as we never want to drive anywhere ever again with Jacob, we will be fine.

Saturday 5 January

Well, that was interesting. I think I slept about nine minutes in total. In one-minute bursts. Jacob was in a crib next to the bed. He didn’t like that, so Isabel brought him into the bed. Co-sleeping, they call it. By the time I came to bed (very late, after trying to recover from eight hours of constant waitering), Isabel was fast asleep and Jacob was in the middle of the bed stretched out in a star shape.

He looked very, very small. Easily squashable. Isabel says that a parent, so long as he or she is sober, is perfectly in tune with his or her baby and wouldn’t squash it in a million years. She’s read that in a book. But in the small hours, with Jacob snuffling away next to me, a half-remembered horror story about a giant panda squashing its offspring creeps into my head. I think it was a panda, but it could have been a Glaswegian. No, it was definitely a giant panda.

So I lay there trying to work out if giant pandas aren’t comparable because they are animals, not half as intelligent as humans, and they have the sort of fur that would easily suffocate their offspring. Or if they are comparable because even if they aren’t as intelligent, they’re probably more in tune with their instincts than we are. And one of their instincts is bound to be, ‘Don’t crush your offspring.’

Every time I succeeded in rationalising the giant-panda issue and began to nod off, Jacob would emit what sounded an awful lot like a final death rattle. Then he would stop breathing. I would pull up the blind so the streetlight would illuminate his face. I would peer at him closely, listening for signs of life. There would be none. Was he going blue? Were his tiny lungs packing in? Should I not be reacting? React, man, react! This child, this poor helpless child, is dying of some rare and undetected condition and you’re not reacting! And then a millisecond before I started shaking Isabel awake, he would make another gurgling noise, as if back from the brink, and carry on breathing.

An hour of giant-panda analysis would pass before I felt even remotely calm enough to nod off again.

Another death rattle.

And repeat.

Until 6 a.m. when he wakes up and looks at me. Or looks in my general direction. I put my finger into his wrinkly little hand for reassurance and he grips it tightly. I know in that moment that I will do anything for Jacob for ever…sleep permitting.

Sunday 6 January

7 a.m. Breakfast in bed for Isabel, who is in a lot of pain but pretending that she isn’t to make me feel better. I ask her if she can remember anything about the sleeping habits of giant pandas and she starts laughing and then shouts at me for making her laugh, which was the last thing I was trying to do, what with her liable to split open at any second. Which I tell her and that makes her laugh again and so I get shouted at again. As punishment, I spend the day slogging around getting this and that for Isabel. Another night of total sleep deprivation.

Monday 7 January

‘This is why Ali and I never had kids,’ says Johnson, my second-best friend, when he phones to apologise for not sending flowers – even though Ali actually had.

‘I thought it was because you didn’t want to risk having a girl because girls are manipulative and controlling and you have enough of that in your life already?’

‘Yes, that as well. But mainly because you don’t sleep for years and you become a domestic slave. I’m delighted for you, of course. You ignored my advice about marriage and now you’ve ignored my advice about procreation. You have no one to blame but yourself, and I shall enjoy seeing you fall to pieces over the next few months. Pub tonight?’

‘No.’

‘Thought as much.’

The problem now is that I’m so tired, I’m worried that if I do manage to nod off, I’ll sleep so deeply that I wouldn’t have any anti-child-crushing instinct. Isabel says this is nonsense. I point out the case of the panda. She says this is nonsense: I am not a giant panda. On the plus side, she and Jacob are sleeping brilliantly and I only have two more weeks of paternity leave before I, too, can sleep brilliantly, back at my desk.

Tuesday 8 January

I love Jacob. I really do. But he’s so very, very small and fragile. Because of the whole stomach-slicing style of birth, Isabel can’t carry him around easily. So I have to. Every time I take him up or down the stairs, I have resolved in my mind that if I slip, I will cushion him, rather than put my own arms out to break the fall. I may kill myself, but Jacob will survive. This is what I am prepared to do.

At lunch, which I have made because Isabel still can’t do very much in the way of chores and because she seems to spend most of the day breast-feeding, I sit watching my pasta get cold because I am holding Jacob. Every time I put him down, he cries.

‘He needs a feed,’ I say hopefully.

‘I fed him five minutes ago. I’ll take him in a second. And anyway, you can hold him with one hand and eat with the other.’ Isabel is way ahead of the curve on this whole parenting thing. Despite being sore, tired, pale and red-nippled, she is already putting things into perspective, behaving rationally, becoming supermum.

‘No, I can’t. I might drop him.’ I’m not quite there yet.

‘No, you won’t. Just relax.’

So I relax, take a mouthful of pasta and Jacob’s head lolls unexpectedly, striking the edge of the table. It takes ten minutes for him to stop crying. It takes ten hours for me to stop freaking out at my own stupid stupidity. Isabel says it’s only a little bump. I say he could have been killed. And even if it is only a little bump, he still has a bruise.

And the health visitor is coming tomorrow.

Wednesday 9 January

The health visit is compulsory. Society does not allow people to vanish into domestic anonymity without first double-checking that they are not doing horrible things to their newborn children.

This is unfortunate because the bruise looks epic this morning. It looks like I’ve punched him. I look like a heroin addict because I haven’t slept for three nights. We will be flagged as an abusive family. Jacob will be taken away from us and raised by horribly strict foster parents who, at least, will never try to stuff their faces with pasta while holding an eight-day-old infant. Years from now, Jacob and I will be reunited, perhaps on a television show presented by Esther Rantzen. And I will try to explain that I hadn’t meant to bang his head on the table, I just hadn’t realised how floppy a newborn child’s head could be. And the crowd will boo. And Jacob will tell Esther how, despite his strict Christian upbringing, he finds it hard to forgive me.

‘Morning. I’m the health visitor.’

‘Morning. Hi. Come in, come in. How are you? Can I get you a cup of tea? Or something stronger? No. Silly. Of course not. Don’t know what I’m saying. Tea? Yes, right away. Isabel and Jacob are in the front room. Okay. Fine. Right. Okay.’

Brilliant. The same guilty ramblings I spout when I’m going through customs. Which is why I always get searched. And now why this health visitor is going to take Jacob away from us.

‘Here’s your tea. Hahahaha. Can’t remember if you said white. Or black. So I’ve brought both. I mean milk. I’ve brought milk.’

Calm down, you idiot.

The health visitor tells Isabel that she shouldn’t co-sleep. It’s dangerous.

Isabel tells the health visitor that it isn’t and that it’s up to her how she raises her own child.

The health visitor makes a note.

This is going badly. I explain, apropos of nothing, that the bruise was an accident. She makes another note. Isabel rolls her eyes really theatrically at me, as if to say, ‘Why on earth have you mentioned the bruise?’ I throw back a ‘What?!’ face, as if to say, ‘What?!’ The health visitor makes another note, so I pretend I have some e-mails to answer.

Ten minutes later, the coast is clear and Isabel reveals that the woman asked if I was abusing her. Apparently, they have to ask. Apparently, Isabel saw it as a good opportunity to make a joke about our marriage. ‘Only mentally’ she had answered, laughing. And instead of laughing, the health visitor had made another note.

Saturday 12 January

I think we have a routine. Bed at 8 p.m. Awake at 5.30 a.m. Naps at 11 a.m. and 3 p.m. This is fine. This is survival, at least. And Isabel and Jacob seem to be sleeping rather beautifully together. I know this because I still can’t relax. It’s not just the whole panda thing; it’s the responsibility. The sheer mind-blowing responsibility of having a baby totally dependent on you. Well, us. Well, her. But at least we have a routine.

Sunday 13 January

We don’t have a routine.

Monday 14 January

The routine is that I have to get up at 5.30 a.m., even though I haven’t slept, and read Thurber to Jacob while Isabel sleeps. She’s still recovering. He prefers Thurber to Hardy – I can tell by the way he dribbles faster. Isabel reckons I should stick with The Hungry Caterpillar but Jacob finds the inevitability of the caterpillar’s descent into teenage obesity depressing.

Tuesday 15 January

I can’t do it any more. I can’t go shopping, tidy the house, change eight thousand nappies, make tea, make coffee, bounce Jacob to sleep, bounce myself awake, tidy the house again, attempt to write thank-you letters to all the people who have sent us chintzy flowers, lurid babygros and mindless, noisy, cluttery plastic toys. I can’t then tidy the house again, make breakfast, lunch, dinner, a second dinner (because, as I think we’ve established, Isabel is breast-feeding and needs all the energy she can get, even if this means matching the caloric intake of an Olympic decathlete) and a midnight breakfast, and tidy the house again. I can’t do it.

I love being a dad. I’m delighted we’re all alive and that Jacob appears to be not just growing but taking an interest in serious literature. Honestly, though, this is even worse than the third trimester, when Isabel was at her itchiest, her most disconcertingly oversexed, her most bloated and her most intemperate all at the same time.

Thursday 17 January

It’s not worse than the third trimester. I have slept. Hallelujah, I have slept. True, I have been forced from my own bed, but this is understandable. They need each other. I need sleep. The sofa bed: my new salvation.

Friday 18 January

Isabel’s mum has decided that Isabel’s decision not to buy a pram because she wants to carry Jacob everywhere is a silly one. ‘You are not a hunter-gatherer. You are not toiling in the harsh conditions of the African bush. You are in Britain. Your mother didn’t escape from the tyranny of Communist Poland and marry your fine upstanding English father in order to produce offspring that behave like they live in a hut. So, darlink, I have been to John Lewis and have spoken with the lady who is expert in prams, and I have bought you a Bugaboo.’

The Bugaboo is the four-by-four of the pram world: excellent for pushing up a mountain, but something of a handful if you have a small house and you confine most of your pram-pushing to standard-width pavements. Still, it looks cool. And Caroline, the most vocal of the NCT baby-group mums (yes, they have formed a gang and she is the leader), has a sister who claims her children are five centimetres taller than all the other children at her nursery solely because she used a Bugaboo. This, pontificated Caroline, is because it’s the only buggy that allows the child to lie flat. This helps their bones to stretch. When I pointed out that it might be genes, she replied that it might…but was it really worth the risk? Was it really worth having a buggy – or a sling – which could stunt the growth of a baby?

‘I bet the Hunchback of Notre Dame’s parents didn’t use a Bugaboo,’ said her husband, in an attempt to diffuse his wife. And then the conversation moved on to torn perineums.

Saturday 19 January

Only two days until I go back to work. Bravely, I volunteer to take Jacob out for an hour on my own to give Isabel some morning ‘me-time’. I aim for the park, proud new dad pushing quite grumpy baby. Grannies smile as I lift him out of the buggy to show him what our local trees look like. In a few months, he’ll be on those baby swings. In a couple of years, he’ll be on the next swings up. Then he’ll be on the big slide. Then he’ll be snogging another teenager over there. Then he’ll be smoking cigarettes behind the hut over there. Then he’ll be sitting on this bench with his own baby, thinking about the future.

This is it now. This is my life. It is all mapped out. My plans to resign from my boring office job, retrain as a sailor and enter the Vendée round-the-world yacht race have been put on hold indefinitely. Ditto resigning and moving to a yurt on the Mongolian steppe. Or resigning and moving to Buenos Aires to drink heavy red wine and master the tango. Adventure and unpredictability have vanished, or rather, they have been condensed into the child looking up at me right now. I think this is probably fine.

‘Are you looking for salvation?’ A man in an anorak is peering down at me through milk-bottle glasses.

‘Sorry?’

‘You look sad. Are you looking for salvation?’

I notice he is clutching a pile of pamphlets entitled Let Jesus Save You. Right now, this seems unlikely. Can’t a parent sit in peace mulling over lost freedoms without being God-bothered? I tell him I’d love to be saved, but I have a nappy to change and it’s going to be a big one. So he leaves.

Sunday 20 January

Alex, newly gay and newly full of joie de vivre, has popped round with Geoff to give us our baby present.

‘Surely the tropical rainforest you sent over was ample?’ I ask innocently.

‘Don’t be silly, dears. This is the greatest moment in your lives – ever. Flowers alone would not suffice. Geoff and I have been talking and, well, we’ve decided we would like to give you something very special indeed.’

Oh, God.

‘Something to mark this wonderful time in your lives.’

This is going to be bad.

‘Your three lives.’

He grips Geoff’s hand, and then Isabel’s. Like he’s Madonna about to walk on stage.

‘Geoff and I would like to design your bathroom for you.’

‘But—’

‘No buts, babes. You wanted it done before Baby arrived, but Willy was too busy at work to do it. We can do it for you. Geoff and I. This country’s newest and hottest interior design team. And I know you’re going to say it’s a bad time, but I promise you won’t even notice the work going on. You’ll blink and it will all be done.’

‘But—’

‘Didn’t I say no buts, babes? You’ve done the nursery yourselves, and look what a mess that is. I simply can’t let you ruin the bathroom, too. Now, here are the catalogues. I’m thinking this bath. And these taps. And Geoff was thinking an LED mirror with a built-in sensor, weren’t you, Geoff? You twenty-first-century designer, you.’

And that was Geoff’s cue. Until then, he’d been uncharacteristically quiet, but he made up for it now with a twenty-five-minute speech on how our bathroom would be the bathroom to set the new standard for all bathrooms. And then he just started saying random words. Light. Space. Air. Movement. Energy. Calm. Length. Girth. Swirling vortex. Drip. Drop. Drip. Movement.

‘You already said movement,’ I point out.

‘Movement. Movement. Movement,’ he continues.

Nothing good will come of this.

Monday 21 January

Don’t tell Isabel. Nobody tell her, for goodness’ sake. This must be our little secret. But, oh my, the joy! The joy of leaving home, of bidding farewell to my beloved wife and my beloved three-week-old child, of strolling to the station on a crisp winter morning, buying a coffee, boarding a train and sitting unmolested for forty-five whole minutes – no, more than forty-five minutes because the train is delayed due to the late running of an earlier service. No crying. No screaming. No panicking.

Bliss.

Let the train be delayed all day. Let me sit here in this railway siding, staring into space, dribbling a bit like a baby but not with a baby that I have to worry about all the time. Even when the pointy-faced little woman sitting next to me still doesn’t move her bag on to her lap when I ask politely, I refuse to let the bliss dissipate. I simply open my paper as unthoughtfully as possible, allowing its pages to encroach on her personal space. I have had enough practice of commuter one-upmanship to remain unflustered in the face of pointy-faced rudeness.

The bliss lasts until the minute I get to work. Even though he only sits two desks away, Johnson sends me an e-mail: ‘Welcome back. And by the way, I don’t know if you’ve been keeping up to speed with the Media Guardian and I’m sorry I didn’t mention this before, though I was being thoughtful because you were having a baby, but did you know that Anastasia has been made Editor?’

‘Corridor. Now,’ I reply.

He isn’t joking. Anastasia, who was work experience less than eighteen months ago, has been appointed the youngest-ever editor of Life & Times magazine. The teenager over whom I once threw a cup of (cold) tea because she was so irritatingly efficient is now the boss. I start strangling the water cooler.

‘Not having anger-management issues again, are we, Walker?’

It’s her: our four-year-old boss.

‘No, no, he isn’t,’ mumbles Johnson. ‘He was telling me how much fun being a dad is. Turns out not much fun at all. Hahahaha.’

‘Johnson, a baby is a lifestyle choice. We mustn’t feel sorry for people who opt to procreate. Even idiots could grasp the fundamentals of a condom if they wanted to. Now, conference in fifteen minutes. And I want some fresh ideas for front of book. It’s looking tired. Tireder than poor Walker here.’

I go back home that evening wondering how best to break it to Isabel. In the end, I opt for the direct approach.

‘Isabel, I’m afraid I have to resign. Anastasia has become Editor.’

‘Oh no, you don’t. You have a family to support. We can’t live on my maternity leave. Now take Jacob. I’ve had him all day.’

And the matter is closed.

Thursday 24 January

It has occurred to me that now I am a dad with a bitch for a boss, the train is the only place where I can relax. At home, I appear to have developed a sensor on my arse that triggers an order from Isabel. Every time I sit down, no matter how gingerly, I set off the sensor: ‘Darling, I’m breast-feeding. Could you pass a muslin?’

I get up, I get the muslin from all the way upstairs, I come back, I sit down and I trigger the sensor again.

‘Sorry, darling. And a glass of water.’

Repeat. ‘And another cushion.’

Repeat.

‘Could you not group your requests in some way?’ I ask. And this makes her apologise and so I feel terrible. But, really.

At work, Anastasia is on my case. She breaks up a group of people ahhing at the new baby photo on my desk. She barks at me every time I look like I’m about to drop off (which is frequently, because the sofa bed doesn’t provide quite the blissful night’s sleep I had initially hoped for). She criticises my poor grammar, even though it isn’t poor at all. Not really.

The train is all I have left. No one can bark at me on the train. And the sensor on my arse is out of range. And this is the reason why I won’t let the pointy-faced woman who keeps hogging one and a half seats on my carriage annoy me. She is short. She is ginger. Life cannot have been easy for her. This is her way of getting her own back on the world. I won’t rise to it.

Saturday 26 January

Today marked our first social occasion as a mobile family unit. It was only lunch at Isabel’s parents who only live a ten-minute walk away, but it was still something of a milestone. We hoped, I think, that it might have gone better, that it might have been enjoyable, but even with military-style planning, it didn’t and it wasn’t.

We asked Isabel’s mum to have lunch ready at midday because, if we have managed to establish any kind of routine – which we haven’t – it was that Jacob tends to need bouncing to sleep from 2 until 3 p.m., or he screams until 8 p.m.

We arrived at 1.20 p.m. because we were about to set off an hour earlier, but then Jacob needed a feed. And a change. And another feed. And another change. Then it started to rain and I couldn’t remember where I’d put the waterproof buggy cover, even though Isabel had expressly asked me to leave it somewhere handy. By the time I did find it, the rain had passed but Isabel had hunger-anger. It comes on quickly in breast-feeding mums. So she demanded toast even though lunch was but a ten-minute walk away. Until, at last we set off.

Frankly, Sherpas bound for the summit of Everest carry less. I had at least nine bags containing everything from nappies and wet wipes to toys, changing mats, breast pads and nipple cream, arnica, snack bars, babygros, backup babygros, backup-backup babygros and a kitchen sink. I walked ten steps behind Isabel and Jacob all the way to the in-laws.

We had roast chicken accompanied by a relentless monologue about timekeeping from her mum and advice on no-nonsense parenting from her dad. Isabel had no appetite because of the toast. Then we set off back to base camp, me with the nine bags plus four Tupperware containers of some kind of Polish stew and, inexplicably, a very large photo album from when Isabel was a baby. By the time we returned, Isabel needed more toast. I needed a lie-down.

‘You can’t lie down. Jacob needs changing.’

‘Seriously, how many times can one human being need changing in one hour?’

‘Darling, you are at work all week. You can’t complain about a bit of light parenting at the weekend.’

It has begun. The thing I had been warned about. Mothers, completely understandably, complaining about how much easier it is for fathers because at least they can escape to the office.

Which, praise be to the Lord, they can.

Monday 28 January

I escape to the office. On the train, the lovely train. Again, the bliss was not ruined by the pointy-faced woman, even though she was sitting opposite me this morning and had a laptop. Even though she then angled the laptop’s screen well and truly into my airspace. And then typed very loudly, as if her laptop was a percussive instrument, as if by typing very loudly she was demonstrating that the thing she was typing was more important than the things the rest of us would be typing when we got to our offices. Even though it wasn’t because I had a peek on my way off the train and she was only playing Tetris.

So I really wasn’t already in a bad mood when I arrived five minutes late and Anastasia told me not to be late again. I may have to confront her: I think she still holds the throwing (cold) tea incident against me.

Wednesday 30 January

First proper argument of parenthood. Isabel wants me to take another week off and rent us a cottage in Devon. This is madness on two counts.

1 I can’t manage a whole week off again so soon after the previous three.

2 2. How on earth are we going to get all the way to Devon if we almost killed ourselves going to visit her parents who live in the same town?

I only mention point two to Isabel, but she reacts badly. ‘We’ll be fine’ / ‘I need a change of scene’ / ‘It’s all right for you. You get to go to London every day’. I react badly back, even though she’s right. I do get to escape on a daily basis, even though it’s only to a horrible office with a boss half my age who hates me. Now that we have both reacted badly, Jacob bursts into tears. ‘Now look what you’ve done,’ says Isabel, and I suddenly realise how tired she looks. So I apologise, spend the rest of the evening feeling like an arse and worrying that we will be the kind of parents who do lasting damage to their offspring by fighting all the time in front of them. I then agree to a week in Devon in just under three weeks’ time. On a farm. In February. Just what the doctor didn’t order.

Thursday 31 January

Anastasia frowns when I ask for a week’s holiday, makes a barbed comment about lack of dedication and storms off to her lunch interview at the Ivy with the Dalai Lama. I storm off to lunch at the pub with Johnson, but I am momentarily perked up by a text from Andy, best friend but strangely busy for the last six weeks. Can he join us for lunch?

‘Hello, stranger,’ I say when he walks in.

‘Congratulations,’ he replies, but he isn’t looking me in the eye, which is unlike him. People say that on becoming a parent, you lose friends, even best friends, because all you can talk about is nappies, sleep routines and birth stories. Friends without children have very little interest in these things. In fact, some of them would rather not hear anything about it at all. They would prefer to remain in denial about the whole messy topic until as late as possible. I assumed that the reason Andy hasn’t been in touch at all since the birth was because he doesn’t want to know what may await him if he ever goes out with anyone long enough to marry them and have children. And I don’t blame him. If he would rather steer clear of me while all I can talk about is Fallopian tubes and nappy rash, so be it.

But here we are in the pub – him, me, Johnson – like old times. And he isn’t avoiding. He’s just oddly nervous.

‘I have some news of my own,’ he says after I’ve tried hard to have a whole conversion without mentioning tubes or rashes. ‘I have a new girlfriend.’

This is hardly news. I’m convinced Andy, an incurable but dastardly romantic, only forged a career in the diplomatic service so that he could fall in love with as many girls in as many different countries as possible.

‘This time, it’s serious. I think she might be the one.’ He has said this before, many times, which Johnson and I point out in unison.

‘Yes, but this is different.’

‘…because you and she share a bond, even though she speaks only Farsi and you speak only nonsense?’ asks Johnson.

‘…because you and she transcend the boundaries of simple geography, even though you live in Tooting and she lives in Islamabad?’ I add.

‘No, because it’s Saskia,’ he whispers into his pint.

FEBRUARY

‘The biggest thing I remember is that there was justno transition. You hit the ground diapering.’

PAUL REISER

Friday 1 February

Punch, punch, punch, punch, first day of the month.

Of all the women in all the world, Andy had to fall in love with the one who very nearly destroyed my marriage. It’s not like he didn’t have warning. She’s not called Saskia, the Destroyer of Relationships for nothing.

She had been the most exciting girl I had ever met. She had strolled into a party several years ago, informed me that we were leaving and then pretty much forced me to have sex with her on Hyde Park Corner. It was every man’s perfect fantasy but, after a few more casual encounters, it turned to a nightmare. The fling finished because that’s what flings are supposed to do. I fell in love with Isabel and married her and thought nothing more about Saskia or her long legs or her short skirts, until the day she coincidentally moved into the flat below ours in Finsbury Park. Except, it wasn’t coincidental: she had joined forces with Alex, back when he wasn’t gay, to help ruin my marriage. He wanted Isabel. Saskia wanted revenge. Apparently, the fling from years before hadn’t been a fling after all…I was the first person Saskia had ever loved, she said, and I’d discarded her without a moment’s thought.

That was how she put it, anyway. She was Glenn Close; I was Michael Douglas. The pet rabbit was my marriage and it very nearly got boiled to death.

Once Alex and Saskia admitted to their plot – and Isabel and I had managed to start trusting each other again – Saskia vanished. And now she was back.

‘What do you mean, “She’s back”? I thought you killed her,’ joked Isabel.

‘She’s, umm, going out with Andy.’

‘What?!’ stuttered Isabel. Jacob, who until that moment had been happily sucking away on a breast, started to cry. Perhaps the milk had curdled.

‘They met by chance in a bar in Islington. Andy was going to avoid her, but she and her friend were getting hassled by a group of yobs. Andy stepped in. The yobs threatened him and got thrown out by bouncers. Saskia and Andy got chatting and now they’re madly in love. The end.’

‘Blimey.’

‘I know.’

‘Can you make me a camomile tea?’

Saturday 2 February

The weekend. It’s hard to say whether it’s worse than the week. Obviously, it doesn’t contain any work-related horror, but equally, it doesn’t contain any work-related loafing, either. It is much easier to give the impression that you are busy in an office than it is at home. You sit at your desk and you do pretend typing. You dial some non-existent telephone numbers and have some non-existent conversations about non-existent articles you aren’t really writing. A whole afternoon can pass with the minimum of brain activity. Not so at home. Pretending to change a nappy, make tea, cook dinner, unload the dishwasher and make decisions about what type of bathroom suite we want is easily detectable by an overly tired wife.

‘Have you unloaded the dishwasher?’

‘Yes.’

‘Are you lying?’

‘No.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘No.’

I’m wondering if they’ll let me go into the office at the weekend as well.

Andy texted to see if I wanted to go out with him and Saskia for a tension-breaking drink. Tonight. Even if we ignore the fact that I have a new baby and a very tired wife and I’m an hour from London, we can’t ignore the fact that my best mate is going out with my worst ex. So no, I can’t.

He texts back: ‘Saskia wants a chance to talk to you. To explain.’

I don’t reply. Instead, I sing soporific nursery rhymes over and over again, right through the Lottery show (my only chance to get the money I need to hire a full-time nanny) and Casualty. Jacob loves my singing. Point-blank refuses to miss any of it by going to sleep.

Sunday 3 February

My parents come round with lots of blue clothes for Jacob. Isabel explains her desire to give the poor chap a non-gender-specific upbringing. Dad rolls his eyes and bites his tongue. Then they leave.

Alex and Geoff come round minutes later. Isabel has failed to dissuade them about the bathroom. They are still promising it will be done in a jiffy and that we will hardly notice and I only just manage to stop myself pointing out that I have already noticed them because they’re here on a Sunday prattling on about bath shapes. And it’s Jacob’s nap, the only time of the day when I can lie catatonic on the sofa and pretend to read the newspaper.

Geoff likes egg-shaped.

Alex likes roll-top.

Isabel is split between the two.

When they leave, at last, I look stroppy. Isabel asks why I look stroppy. I tell her it’s annoying that our Sundays have to be intruded on by Alex and his very overbearing boyfriend.

‘Darling, I know he’s a bit crazy and I know he did all that horrible stuff last year but, well, he’s still trying to make amends. I thought you liked baths. Aren’t you excited about having an egg-shaped one?’

‘No, it will be too steep at the top. I like the one we’ve got.’

‘It’s yellowing and you complain about it all the time.’

‘I’ll paint it.’

‘You can’t paint a bath.’

‘I’m sick of Alex. Why can’t he leave us alone?’

‘Why can’t Saskia leave us alone? At least Alex is gay. And sorry. Which is more than can be said for that tart.’

I give up. ‘Cup of camomile tea, darling?’

Monday 4 February
CONTENTS OF MONDAY MORNING INBOX

1 Three e-mails from Andy apologising for falling in love with the Destroyer of Relationships, but also saying that Saskia is completely misunderstood and isn’t a Destroyer of Relationships at all.

2 Two e-mails from Isabel, the first delighting in the fact that Jacob is sleeping properly, the second, much shorter, lamenting the fact that he isn’t. And that the house is virtually uninhabitable. And can I please get home early, if possible.

3 One e-mail from my mum asking if I could check if it has a virus atta—oh, bugger.

Thursday 7 February

Jacob smiled. And just when I was beginning to wonder if he had the same syndrome as the boy on the Channel Five documentary – the one who had to have nine operations in order to smile, or was it the boy with the face-eating bug who had the full nine? I can’t remember. But the point is, we hadn’t seen a smile yet, and Isabel’s mum’s greengrocer’s daughter’s baby smiled after the first month. I was beginning to wonder whether I’d passed the stress of an unreasonable boss, a traitorous best friend and a psychotic but newly homosexual bathroom designer on to our precious child. But it was definitely a smile. And it came at 4 a.m.

4 A.M.

This used to be the time when you would be sound asleep or possibly clubbing or hosting a terribly good party or, very occasionally, having sexual intercourse. Used to be. Now, it is the hour of the zombie parent. It is said, although no one has reliable statistical evidence to back this up, that at least 20 per cent of traffic on the M25 at 4 a.m. constitutes exhausted parents trying to drive their insomniac babies to sleep. The figure could be far greater. It is certainly the time I am out pushing the goddam four-by-four Bugaboo round the block under the quite possibly inaccurate assumption that cold air makes our insomniac child sleepy. I loop the block twelve or fourteen times, singing nursery rhymes as boringly as possible. Why won’t he sleep? Doesn’t he know I have to pretend to work in the morning? And finally, he closes his eyes.

And then opens them again.

And this is the point, the horrible dark point, in that horrible dark hour, when you think, is this really worth it? Would adoption be such a bad thing? Maybe I could leave him in a cardboard box outside the gates of the hospital? With a blanket, of course.

Then he smiled – a beautiful smile right at me – and it was all worth it a million times over. I had the energy for another few hundred loops of the block. Or the M25.

And when he finally did nod off, I went back inside to find Isabel, anxious, in the front room. She never sleeps properly now when Jacob isn’t with her.

‘He smiled!’

‘Did he?’

‘Yes. A proper smile. It was beautiful.’ And Isabel didn’t look like a zombie parent any more, either. She looked happy, happy for me and happy for Jacob. We hugged and she took him off to bed while I checked the NHS handbook. Three months, they’re supposed to start smiling. Three months! Not five weeks. We have a genius on our hands. Cancel the Channel Five documentary. Phone Channel 4. We’re making The Child Who Smiled Seven Weeks Early.

Friday 8 February

Isabel, having read an article about the plight of the bumblebee, has signed us up as members of the Bumble Bee Conservation Trust. This despite the cost of nappies (the initial outlay for the cloth ones, plus the recurring outlay for the horrible plastic ones that will sit in a landfill for a thousand millennia because, as I had predicted, we really haven’t managed to keep up with the cloth-nappy washing demands), baby clothes, prenatal wardrobe, postnatal wardrobe and the Barn Owl Conservation Society she made us join last year when she read about barn owls being combine-harvested or something.

As sole breadwinner in this house, excluding paltry maternity leave, I have been forced to put my foot down. From now on, barn owls and bumblebees will receive our support and sympathy. All other endangered animals will have to fend for themselves…

Saturday 9 February

…except, perhaps, for coral and red squirrels. And a certain type of parrot that only eats mangetout. I have conceded additional species on the understanding that I can go to the pub this evening, but only between the hours of 7 and 9 p.m.

It was Andy’s idea that they come all the way down to my local pub because I have a baby. He’s clearly trying to get back in my good books. Johnson isn’t. He arrives grumbling about it being a long way to go for a couple of hours, seeing as they both live in London and I live in the sticks. Despite Andy being a bastard and Johnson being miserable, I am delighted. I am in the pub. I am a free man.

The first pint vanishes in twelve seconds. The next two go almost as quickly. I should probably hold back: I am a dad now. But Johnson explains that it is important to wet the baby’s head, even if the baby isn’t here. And besides, I have to leave in an hour and they’ve come all this way, so we have another two pints in quick succession. We talk about nothing in particular, largely because baby talk is boring and talk about women would involve mentioning Saskia, which none of us feel like doing, given that we only have two hours.

None of us, except Johnson.

‘Andy?’ he asks after a long draw of lager. ‘Do you find it weird sleeping with a girl with whom your mate has already slept? It’s only, I did that once, back when life was fun, and the image of my mate, naked, kept popping into my head every time we shagged. It got to the point where I had to stop mid-coitus every time because it got all strange and homoerotic. I had to dump her because it felt like being in the wrong sort of threesome.’

Andy looks first at Johnson, then at me. He sips his pint thoughtfully and says, ‘Saskia and William. It was almost five years ago. I think we can all assume it’s water under the bridge.’

This is not the case. Saskia is still Saskia. Andy is still Andy. But the pub is still the pub, so after explaining that I’m fine with it as long as I never have to talk to Saskia, I have another quick pint and then another one. Then I suggest they come back because I have beers in the fridge.

‘And a baby in the living room,’ says Johnson. ‘We’ll leave you to it.’

This proves to be a sensible decision. I zigzag home, open the door to the blissful domestic scene of Isabel still trying to make herself dinner, half undressed because she had momentarily given up on dinner and tried to go to bed, Jacob screaming in one arm, a soup spoon in the other, the kitchen looking like it has been ransacked by angry chimps.

‘Forget the coral and the parrots. You’re never going out again,’ she says. And she is only half joking.

Sunday 10 February

Everyone has decided on an egg-shaped bath. Everyone, except me. It will take four weeks to be delivered from Sweden or Denmark or whichever other design-obsessed country it is made in. Alex promises the bathroom will be started mid-March and finished mid-March.

Thursday 14 February

Even though we both disagree with Valentine’s Day, even though it is a stupid American invention designed to keep us as impoverished slaves of the capitalist system, even though I spent eight million quid at Budding Ideas last year (motto still: ‘Flowers for that special occasion or just because you want to say I love you.’ Spew), I have no choice but to return and spend another eight million quid this year on a dozen long-stemmed red roses.

Then we have an argument because twenty minutes after I present them to her, I discover them in a vase in the bedroom…with the long stems cut off.

‘I wanted to use this vase.’

‘The short one?’

‘Yes, the short one.’

‘So you cut off the long stems?’

‘Yes, is that a problem?’

‘Well, I could have saved seven and a half million pounds if I’d known you were going to cut the stems off.’

‘Do you want me to get the stems out of the bin, or can I enjoy the flowers you gave me in the way I want?’

Eight million pounds out of pocket and an argument for my troubles. But I decide to remain circumspect. We are both very tired and very ratty. It is no wonder that little things are triggering arguments more than usual. I must remain calm. I must remain calm because this is the first step on the long Zen Path to the Mastery of Parenting.

THE ZEN PATH TO THE MASTERY OF PARENTING

Step one: you must remain calm in the face of petty marital discord and not let it develop into a proper argument as it may have done in the time before children. Arguments take energy. You do not have energy. Whereas before, you could afford to spend days bickering about Marmite toast, bathroom usage and unappreciated long-stemmed roses, now you must centre yourself and allow these minor annoyances to wash away.

Step two: you must remain calm in the face of stressful situations as well. If you get a parking ticket, you must accept it and move on with your day. If someone, that someone being Isabel, spills red wine on the expensive white rug you bought for Christmas, you must shrug and volunteer to clean it. If you find yourself in Sainsburys still wearing your pyjama bottoms because you were halfway through getting dressed when your child woke up and started screaming (and if there’s one thing you’ve learned, it’s that you can only stop the screaming if you get to the child in the first ten seconds), but in your head, you’ve finished getting dressed and you only remember you haven’t when the checkout girl gives you a funny look, you must simply close your eyes, imagine a calm place, a garden perhaps, full of recently sprayed orchids, then pay the bill and leave quickly before anyone can call the police.

Step three: you must remain calm, even when it makes no sense to do so. Like when you haven’t slept continuously for more than an hour in six weeks, when you get home from work and have four hours of tidying to do before you can have dinner, which you can’t have because it’s then your turn to take the baby because your wife is exhausted and then you find the only way to get your child to sleep is by jogging around with him in a tight anticlockwise circle while reciting ‘The Owl and the Pussycat’ backwards in the voice of Barry White. For an hour.

I am still struggling with step one.

Friday 15 February

I have asked Isabel to start packing now for our incredibly ill-conceived trip to Devon on Saturday. She has agreed to do what she can.

This turns out to be very little because Jacob has a fever. Not a wink of sleep – not a single wink – mainly because I can’t stop myself taking his temperature every hour or so through the night to check it’s still only 99.8°C, not 101°C or 102°C. God forbid it gets to 102°C, even though Isabel phoned her doctor mum, who told her that babies get high temperatures and it doesn’t necessarily mean Jacob is going to die a horrible feverish death. ‘It doesn’t necessarily mean’ is not good enough for me. He is still tiny. His little body shouldn’t have to have a temperature. I’m not taking any chances.

Saturday 16 February

Not going on holiday today on account of Jacob’s temperature, even though it’s gone down and it looks as if he might survive. The snowstorm sweeping across the country isn’t helping, either. I am not saying ‘I told you so’. It is enough that, for once, I am right about something. She knows it. I know it. Jacob knows it.

Sunday 17 February

Still not going on holiday because the snow has turned to black ice and Isabel’s mother and my mother have both phoned and pleaded for us to wait until it is safe to drive. Even the bloody weatherman warns us not to travel anywhere unless it’s absolutely essential. I preferred it in the old days, before the Met Office missed the hurricane. They were more inclined to throw caution to the wind, so to speak. I say, ‘I told you so,’ because I simply can’t hold it in any longer.

Monday 18 February

And so, two days late, the first Walker family holiday begins. It will be the first of many. Over the next two decades at least, we will explore the world together. We will drive across Europe in campervans, we will sail narrow boats across England, we will explore exotic cultures in an educational and adventurous way. And we are starting with Devon. If we get that far. We woke at 6 a.m., a lie-in, and I suggested our ETDIAAHP (estimated time of departure if at all humanly possible) should be a very conservative 10 a.m. We left at 1 p.m., which isn’t bad when you consider that we had to take the entire house, the whole of Waitrose and a large section of Halfords with us, and that we’d only had five days to pack.

Twenty minutes in, against all odds, Jacob fell asleep. For the first time in seven weeks, Isabel and I had a conversation. It was leisurely. It had no sense of urgency about it. It was trivial and no child’s life depended on it.

‘Nice coffee,’ I said.

‘Do I get points for bringing it, dearest?’

‘Yes and no. Which would you like first?’

‘I may have to kill you, but purely out of interest I’ll start with the yes.’

‘Yes, because you’ve used proper milk, not devil’s spawn goat’s milk, and there’s enough sugar for once and we won’t have to spend £972 on crap motorway service station coffee.’

‘Right. And the no?’

‘No, because bringing a flask on a car journey is the beginning of the end. Only middle-aged people do that. Have you got some travel sweets in the glove box, too? Oh my God, you have. I rest my case.’

‘I hate to tell you this, but you’re already middle-aged, sweetheart. You planned the route three days ago.’

‘I didn’t.’

‘You did. You phoned Johnson and had a conversation with him about it. Only middle-aged people can spend more than twenty minutes discussing whether the M4/M5 is quicker than the A303.’

‘Well, Johnson was talking rubbish. Everyone knows the M4/M5 is best if there aren’t roadworks.’

‘I love it.’

‘Love what?’

‘Being middle-aged.’

‘Really?’ For a minute, I’d thought she was having me on, but she wasn’t.

‘Yes. We’re settling. We know what we’re doing. We know where we’re going.’

‘Do we?’

‘Yes. Apart from this whole parenting thing…which I think we’re doing all right at, don’t you?’

‘Well, you are. You’ve been brilliant.’

‘You’re doing all right as well. I think we make quite a good middle-aged couple, all things considered. And here we are, going on a lovely holiday as a family with our beautiful sleeping boy.’

She paused, smiling, and looked out the window. I smiled, too, because perhaps everything was going pretty well. And there was no denying it: we were going on holiday. A family holiday. It might even be fun.

Except then Jacob woke up and needed a feed. The fourteen miles to the next service station were the longest fourteen miles of my life. It’s bad enough listening to babies crying in general, but when it’s your baby, it has an extra piercing quality. It cuts straight into the very centre of your brain. It is almost impossible to do anything but deal with that noise. This is very clever: Mother Nature’s way of ensuring the offspring isn’t left abandoned in its hour of need. Except Mother Nature didn’t take into account the fact that we were going on holiday to Devon in the driving rain of bleak midwinter with a seven-week-old child. And that I might need to be able to concentrate on driving.

…and breathe.

THE ZEN PATH TO THE MASTERY OF PARENTING (CONTINUED)

Step four: you must be able to drive a car at high speed in the rain while a child is screaming and the petrol gauge is on empty and your wife is saying, ‘Hurry, he needs changing and it’s still ten miles to the next service station,’ and you know he needs changing and you know it’s still ten miles to the next service station and, oh Christ, there’s a police car and, oh Christ, he wants me to pull over and, oh Christ, should I keep going because it’s now only five miles to the service station and he can give me the ticket there.

I pull over. Isabel climbs into the back to feed Jacob while I face an interrogation.

‘Good afternoon, officer. Can I start by saying how sor—’

‘Do you know what the national speed limit is, sir?’

‘Seventy miles an hour, officer. But this is our first-ever—’

‘And are you aware of how fast you were travelling?’

‘Too fast, officer. But you see Jacob was—’

‘Ninety-eight miles an hour,’ he interrupts again, peering into the back of the car at Isabel, who is trying to change Jacob.

‘Seriously? Oh God. I’m sorry. We’re new to this whole parenting—’

‘How old is your child?’ he interrupts for a fourth time and I begin to wonder whether the police computer is connected in any way to the health-visitor computer because we’re bound to be flagged on the latter so a flag on the former might constitute two flags on aggregate and I wonder how many flags you’re allowed before they take your child away. Probably no more than three.

‘Seven weeks,’ says Isabel. ‘And I don’t think we’re going to be doing any more long journeys for a while.’

The policeman hesitates and shakes his head. ‘Tell me about it. Mine’s three months old and we still can’t make it beyond the M25.’

‘If you arrested me and carted me off to prison, I would be grateful,’ I say, in an attempt to build on our shared pain. ‘Anything to escape the nappies.’

‘I’d love to, but I can’t,’ he replies. He is no longer a police officer. I am no longer a felon. We are new dads together, trying to make the best of a crazy world, a world of tears and stress and sleep deprivation and a necessity, every now and again, to drive at ninety-eight miles an hour.

‘I can only issue a ticket.’

‘But—’

‘If you pay in the next fourteen days, you won’t need to appear in court, but you will get three points on your licence and this will affect your insurance premiums. Another two miles an hour and you’d have got a ban.’

‘But I thought you were—’

‘There’s no excuse for driving so fast on a motorway. You’ll get yourself killed. And your little kiddie there, too. And perhaps someone else’s kiddie. Like mine.’

Unbelievable. He knows about the piercing scream that cuts straight to the very core of your brain but because he’s a copper with an annoying high-vis jacket and a Taser and a hat, he thinks he’s above the laws of parenting.

‘But he is right, darling. You shouldn’t really be driving so fast,’ says Isabel, astonishingly, as we pull away, but I know better than to try to argue. She’s tired. I’m tired. We must get through it. I shall content myself with muttering all the way to Devon.

Why would anyone pay good money to stay in a house that is more rubbish than their own? Because it looked nice in the picture? Because they automatically but inexplicably drop their standards while they’re on holiday? Because holidays are supposed to be rubbish? And because if they weren’t, it would be unbearable to go home at the end of them?

The cottage is what an estate agent might call rustic but what I might call uninhabitable. The drive and garden are submerged in five centimetres of what an estate agent might call locally sourced, organic yard cover but what I might call mud. The puddle by the front door into which I drop the seventh bag, the one containing all Jacob’s baby clothes, is a metre deep, although no one could have foreseen that until a bag had been dropped in it. An estate agent might call it a well-appointed plunge pool.

The heating system is what an estate agent might call an original fixture, the logs for the fire are what the lying bastard might call slightly damp. The oven has the remains of someone else’s pizza in it. The microwave doesn’t exist. There are many beds scattered around the top floor, but none of them are comfortable. The windows open, but they don’t shut. The bath has a pink and brown shower curtain slouching bacterially over it. The pink is its original colour, the brown a modification over years. Or vice versa.

If we put the quarter-kilowatt electric shower on at the same time as the kettle, the television, the radio or the baby-listening monitor, we have a power cut. To re-trip the switch, I have to walk across the swamp to a shed in which the mains electrics are housed.

The television, in direct contrast to every other television in the land, only gets Channel Five.

Unfortunately, the farmer is very friendly. He describes himself as an artisan. He grows not enough pigs and not enough cows and sells them to people like Isabel at posh farmer’s markets at vastly inflated prices. And people like Isabel can’t help feeling sorry for him, this last protector of the land, even though he’s conned us out of £400 for an outbuilding on a farm he is clearly struggling to keep going.

I refuse to feel sorry for him. He could always stop being a farmer and condemn himself to a life of office radiation and zombie commuting like the rest of us. He could be an accountant. Isabel claims that, without him, a way of life will be lost for ever. And the bumblebees and barn owls would go with it. We must use this week to live the good life…conversation round a candle, reading a book, playing backgammon, listening to the drip-drip-drip of the leaking roof.

There is nothing for it but to go to bed.

So I go to bed.

And Isabel goes to bed.

And Jacob starts coughing.

It is this damp shed’s fault. Pursuing a dream of rural existence that vanished in the nineteenth century, we are dooming our tiny, defenceless baby to a nineteenth-century cough.

Tuesday 19 February

I have caught the cough. The one time I thought I might go on holiday and not immediately get sick (‘It is your body relaxing, darlink,’ says Isabel’s mother every time it happens), I get sick. It is raining so hard that we abandon going outside altogether.

Wednesday 20 February

Isabel has also succumbed to the pleurisy-type disease Jacob and I are struggling with. They don’t mention this in the ‘Welcome to Devon’ pamphlets that lie curled and ageing in the top drawer of the only piece of furniture in our damp and smelly living room, so I burn them. And unless our chipper farmer produces some dry wood in the next hour or so, I’m going to burn the chest of drawers they came in, too.

Thursday 21 February

There is nothing worse than having a sick baby, except when you are sick yourselves, except when, instead of being at home, you are in mid-Devon, about a thousand miles from a chemist, and bloody wildlife is keeping you awake at night. Last night, in the precious minutes when Jacob wasn’t hacking his way through an illness he wouldn’t have if we were in a nice centrally heated house, a barn owl, a bloody barn owl, was hooting away in the adjacent bloody barn. Isabel, the barn owl conservationist, didn’t notice. She had a pillow over her head. This was a shame. Even she, the great farm-loving romantic, is beginning to see that there are advantages to the twenty-first century and that perhaps farm holidays aren’t right for (a) this time of year, (b) a young family and (c) enjoying oneself in the slightest bit, ever, at all. If a bloody barn owl had kept her awake all night, too, she might have also seen that (d) barn owls aren’t worth conserving.

Friday 22 February

I have made an executive decision. We are leaving. We are leaving one day early from the holiday we started two days late. I don’t care about the money. I don’t care about offending the friendly farmer. I am tired. I am damp. Most of Jacob’s clothes, the ones I dropped in a muddy puddle, are still not properly dry. The bloody goddam barn owl was at it again last night with his infernal hooting, so much so that I woke Isabel to complain. She then had the temerity to shout at me because I’d woken her up.

When she had finished shouting at me, she listened to the barn owl and then said, ‘Wow, it is a barn owl. You’re right. How amazing,’ and immediately went back to sleep, content that our annual subscription to the Barn Owl Conservation Society was money well spent.

I went downstairs to make a Lemsip and, because I’d forgotten to turn the bedside clock off first, fused the lights. I then stepped in the three-foot-deep puddle on my way to the shed. I then locked myself out. I then threw stones at the bedroom window, but Isabel didn’t hear me because she presumably had the pillow back on her head and it had begun to rain noisily on the tin roof.

She noticed when the last stone I threw broke the window. And that was when we had the argument that ended in my executive decision. It began like any normal middle-of-the-night, exhausted-parent shouting match, only with one of us standing outside getting wetter and wetter, and the other one shouting through a nice new hole in the window. But like a migraine, it developed into something darker, something more poisonous and unshiftable. It became one of those arguments in which horrible lurking disputes that were supposed to be long ago forgiven and forgotten rise to the surface.

‘You’re always negative.’

‘No, I am bloody not.’

‘You were negative when we lived in Finsbury Park.’

‘That’s because it was dangerous. And our neighbours were crazy. And that man with a knife tried to kill me.’

‘A boy who said he had a knife said he might try to kill you. That’s not the same thing.’

‘It is in this day and age.’

‘You’re negative about living outside London.’

‘That’s not true. I love it. I love our suburban existence with our curtain-twitching neighbours, our soon-to-be-ruined bathroom and the relentless commute.’

‘You see, that’s just it. Relentless commute? You told me the last time we were arguing that the commute was the only time you could sit quietly without being ordered around by me or that work-experience girl who is now your boss. You’re negative about everything, even the things you are positive about.’

‘I am not.’

‘You were even negative about our wedding.’

‘Let’s not go there again. I wasn’t negative. I was emotional. It’s not the same thing. The fact that Alex tutted all the way through it was a bit of a dampener. Especially after he turned up with all those horses. You’d think he wouldn’t have bother—’

‘If we are going to survive this whole parenting thing – and we probably should, don’t you think, for Jacob’s sake at the very least – then you are going to have to get a grip.’

‘I have got a grip. You are the one who thought it was a good idea to go on holiday to a bog in February.’

‘Is everything all right?’ It was the chipper farmer, peering out of his probably properly insulated window across the yard.

‘Yes, everything’s fine. Just another power cut. Sorry to disturb,’ I replied, pausing only for the slightest second to marvel at how, even in this terrible crisis, I am still so English that I will apologise to the person largely responsible for it. Would I apologise to a tailgater if he crashed into the back of our car? Would I apologise if someone spilled my pint? Would I apologise to a hoodie for getting his knife covered in my blood? Probably.

‘Can we continue this discussion inside, dearest? I am now soaking wet and I have bronchitis.’

She let me in. How kind. ‘Where were we?’ One thing you become quite good at as a parent is continuing conversations over many interruptions. It works particularly well with arguments.

‘This bog. February.’

‘Oh, yes. Right. Well, I have two things to say: one, we’re never coming to Devon again; two, we’re going home tomorrow. How’s that for negative?’

In the cold light of day, we packed in silence. I thanked the farmer for a lovely stay, apologised for breaking the window and offered him £20 to cover it, which he accepted. I then spent the whole return journey furious with myself for paying someone £20 because their dodgy electrics trapped me outside in the rain at 4 a.m. when I already had early-stage triple pneumonia. The whole journey, that is, minus the time spent driving at ninety-eight miles an hour to a service station because we mistimed Jacob’s feeds again and even the prospect of another speeding ticket won’t make me put up with that screaming a second longer than I have to. And minus the time spent queuing outside the only baby-changing facility on the whole M4. And minus the time spent queuing outside the same baby-changing facility again because Jacob always likes to poo twice when he knows there’s a queue for the changing facilities.

Saturday 23 February

We are all friends again.

Jacob, who hadn’t smiled for a week – and who could blame him – has been grinning away all morning. So much so that, by midday, I was wondering if he was grinning too much. Have they done a Channel Five documentary called The Boy Who Couldn’t Stop Grinning?

Isabel is as relieved to be home as I am. We apologise to each other, we cuddle, we kiss. I can’t remember the last time we kissed…certainly not last week. But that was probably because of the hacking coughs. Maybe the week before. I think we might have done it then.

We haven’t had sex since Christmas Day when she was forty weeks pregnant, frightened and frightening. I do not intend to have anything approximating sex with Isabel until she is completely and utterly recovered from childbirth. My benchmark for this is a full month after the last time she says ‘Owwwwwch’ and clutches her stomach when trying to pick something up. If it takes six months, that is fine. Or a year. Or ten years, even. (Well, maybe not ten years.) But kissing…we always kiss. Or we always did.

HOW MUCH ARE YOU SUPPOSED TO KISS ONCE YOU BECOME PARENTS?

I always assumed that kissing each other good night was the absolute cornerstone of a healthy marriage. Kissing in the morning went out the window soon after the honeymoon, but if you don’t even bother to kiss each other at bedtime, then you may as well accept that your relationship has become entirely platonic. An affair is more or less inevitable.

I assumed wrong. Since having Jacob, kissing, even at bedtime, has become intermittent at best. It is enough to be alive and/or dressed in the daytime. Other things previously considered essential, such as teeth-brushing, tea-drinking, shaving more than once a week, going to the toilet and not falling asleep while standing up, are now very much optional luxuries. Kissing is going this way, too.

Does it matter? When I ask Isabel, she says it hadn’t occurred to her that we hadn’t been kissing although now that I mention it, I’m right. But then again, we have other priorities, like not killing each other. Ha ha. And anyway, we’ll have plenty of time to kiss when we’re in our rocking chairs. Ewww. ‘Darling,’ she says, reassuringly, ‘right now, going to the shops not wearing my pyjamas is a more important target to aim for.’

All the same, we make a point of kissing each other good night. The kiss is awkward, toothy, self-conscious. We bang our noses together. It’s like we’re teenagers again, except with an unmanageable mortgage, a nearly unmanageable baby and a vague memory that we have sworn we’ll spend the rest of our lives together in sickness and in health.

This is my fault. I have ruined kissing. I don’t even need a barn owl to keep me up worrying about it.

Monday 25 February

Johnson says he still kisses Ali at least twice a day, but (a) they don’t have children and (b) the kissing is now so utterly devoid of emotional meaning that he could be kissing the postman. Like he reckons she does every time he goes to work. Not for the first time, I wonder why on earth Ali puts up with Johnson.

I ask my seventeen Facebook friends how much they kiss. Most of them are people I haven’t seen for years and will probably never see again. They are virtual friends and I can ask them virtually anything I like but I immediately wish I hadn’t. The one I used to play clarinet duets with when I was fourteen, who now has three children, a dog, a goldfish and a husband who is in the army, kisses her husband all the time. Except when he’s on tour (and presumably when she is Face-booking, which also appears to be all the time). I Facebook back asking how long he’s away at a time, which is annoying of me. I am being further assimilated into a system of social networking that will ultimately destroy face-to-face human interaction, leaving us controlled by computers, plugged into a mainframe, devoid of legs and fed through tubes.

‘Nine months,’ she Facebooks and then does some random punctuation :( which I’m given to believe is teenage shorthand for a sad face. This is good news. Not for her but for me. I think Isabel and I would kiss all the time if I had been in Afghanistan for nine months. Maybe I should sign up? The adverts look quite exciting. Building bridges out of oil drums, jumping in and out of helicopters and so forth. Of course there’s the shooting and the bombing, too. That’s a given. But it does have its pluses. No nappies to change, for example. Quite a lot of kissing and so forth when I was back. And no unfeasibly young, over-promoted, man-hating boss who still holds a grudge against me because I once, almost accidentally, threw a cup of tea over her. They wouldn’t allow that sort of nonsense in the army.

‘Shouldn’t you be a bit too busy catching up after yet another week off to have time to muck around on social-networking sites?’ says the unfeasibly young, over-promoted, man-hating boss after a particularly fast pass through the office. ‘Everyone else is striving to make Life & Times a great magazine once again. It would be nice if you could at least pretend to help.’

Right, that’s it. I’m joining the army.

No, I’m not. According to the stupid website, I am too old. Even though the army is desperate for recruits, someone in their very early thirties, someone at the very peak of their physical and mental condition, is too old.

To make matters worse, Andy, my only real friend on Facebook, has posted a picture of him and Saskia tonguing each other in Paris. Underneath, it reads: ‘Paris in the winter: it’s like being in a film, a beautiful film. The romance is illicit. You steal each other’s kisses.’

It has always been important to keep Andy grounded when it comes to women. Johnson and I think of ourselves as his emotional anchor. Every time he starts talking rubbish about romance, we have to take him for a pint and suggest that he calms down, cancels his plans to emigrate to Santiago with the secretary from the Chilean Embassy and maybe first goes for dinner with her a couple of times. After that, things usually sort themselves out. Saskia is a different prospect: emotionally manipulative with very long legs. It may prove harder to keep him on an even keel.

Happily, there is a small text box below the photo inviting comments. I type, ‘Pass le sac de vomit,’ and hastily log off before Anastasia can make any more sarcastic comments.

Tuesday 26 February

Andy’s e-mail: ‘I found your comment on my Facebook page upsetting.’

My e-mail: ‘Lighten up.’

His e-mail: ‘You need to get over your hang-up with Saskia.’

My e-mail: ‘I have, but do you really expect to post a cheesy picture of you and my ex on the internet and not get the slightest reaction?’

His e-mail: ‘You didn’t go out with her. You had a fling with her and you dumped her. Callously. You should move on, man.’

I decided not to dignify that with a response. For about five minutes. Then I e-mail back saying how disappointed I am in Andy, that he was there when we discovered what Saskia had been up to with Alex, that I can’t believe he is being so easily manipulated. No reply. Loser.

Wednesday 27 February
THE THREE TERRIBLE THINGS THAT HAPPENED TODAY

1 Isabel woke up at 5.30 a.m., snuck down to my sofa bed, woke me up and said, ‘Jacob’s asleep,’ before starting naughty kissing. Having been asleep, I was still half asleep when I began naughty kissing back. Then, before I could stop and think what I was doing, Isabel was saying, ‘Gently,’ and we were having post-op sex. Less than two months after the Caesarean. And then Isabel was saying, ‘I think we need to stop. It’s hurting.’ And I suddenly remembered that I wasn’t going to have sex with Isabel until she was a thousand per cent recovered. How had this happened? We stopped and that will be it for a while.

2 Saskia is trying to become my Facebook friend. I can’t say no because she’ll know and Andy will know and that will seem childish. And I can’t say yes because then I’d be Facebook friends with Saskia.

3 When I got home from an entirely miserable train journey during which the ginger woman filed her nails and flossed her teeth right opposite me, I found a large half-egg-shaped package in the midst of our living room.

‘Hi, darling,’ said Isabel, as if there wasn’t a large half-egg-shaped package blocking our view of each other.

‘Hi. How are you?’ Was I the only person who could see it?

‘Oh, fine. Jacob is playing up but nothing out of the ordinary.’ Maybe I was imagining it. Maybe I had suddenly developed a half-egg-shaped cataract.

‘Darling?’

‘Yes.’

‘I think I’ve got cataracts.’

‘What?’

‘Either that or the bath, which was supposed to arrive in two weeks’ time, has arrived already.’

‘I know, it’s exciting, isn’t it?’

‘Does this mean we’re going to have a bath in our living room for the next three weeks? Or is there the slightest chance that Geoff and bloody Alex are starting earlier than expected?’

‘No, they can’t, unfortunately. They’re going to Barbados. And they want to be around when the work begins. Because of the filming.’

‘The filming?’

‘Yes. In order to cover the costs of the whole installation, they’re going to have a small camera crew doing a little television thing. It’s only a daytime thing. Spruce Up Your House or something. Geoff and Alex are the presenters. It’s a big deal for them, but it shouldn’t affect us. Didn’t I mention it?’

‘No.’

‘Oh right, sorry. It’s not going to be a big deal, so don’t worry.’

‘But—’

‘I should also mention that there’s been a slight change of plan re the colour.’

‘Why are you talking like someone at a call centre?’

‘It’s lilac.’

‘What is?’

‘The bath.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘The bath is lilac. Only a bit. You’ll hardly notice. It’s like a lilac-white. They just thought it would match the colour scheme better and be more relaxing.’

‘We have a pink bath?’

‘Lilac. Lilac-white. Do you want to see?’

‘No.’

MARCH

‘I think that I see something deeper, more infinite, moreeternal than the ocean in the expression of the eyes of alittle baby when it wakes in the morning and coos orlaughs because it sees the sun shining on its cradle.’

VINCENT VAN GOGH

Friday 1 March
REASONS TO BE HAPPY

1 I am a father.

2 I am still alive.

3 Isabel is still alive.

4 Jacob is still alive, he is two whole months old already and no longer looks so fragile that he might not make it through the night. According to the health visitor, who appears to have accepted that we are, in spite of everything, not about to end our child’s life at our earliest convenience, he is now above average in height and weight. If we play our cards right, this means he will be a successful rugby player and I will get tickets for Twickenham internationals through his club.

REASONS TO BE UNHAPPY

1 Due to the pressures of modern life as well as the relentless marketing that children are exposed to from a very early age, we won’t have a chance to play our cards right and Jacob will become one of the nine out of ten children who are morbidly obese by their fifth birthday.

2 We have a bath in our living room. This means I can’t open the sofa bed. This means I can either sleep back in the bedroom with a fidgety baby and a fidgety wife or I can sleep in the bath.The bath, due to its annoying egg shape, is uncomfortable to lie in.And it’s pink.The ‘present’ Alex and Geoff have given us comes with a television crew attached, so it wasn’t really a present at all.

3 And I am not talking to my best friend.

4 Every time I think about sex with Isabel, I feel terrible because she’s the mother of our baby. She’s vulnerable. She wants protecting and looking after and help with the whole mother–baby thing. Not sex. She says otherwise, but I’m pretty sure she’s pretending to make me feel better. It’s confusing.

5 This is having an effect on kissing, too. And I was already worried about the kissing.

6 I only have seventeen Facebook friends, only one of whom is a real friend and he’s gone to Sudan for two weeks while we’re in the middle of an argument.

Saturday 2 March

We still have a bath in the living room. It is still pink. I am sleeping in it.

Sunday 3 March

Isabel’s mum has volunteered to baby-sit for a couple of hours to give us a break. This seems very early in Jacob’s life, but frankly, the thought of two whole hours without a child makes it worth the risk. Isabel has borrowed a breast pump from Caroline. I don’t know how I feel about this. Weird, probably. All the same, it is astonishing how long Isabel’s nipple becomes when she uses the pump. I find myself wondering if the same is true of Caroline’s nipple.

‘Couldn’t we buy our own nipple pump?’

‘I want to try it out first. Some people find they can’t use them. And it’s a breast pump, not a nipple pump.’

‘Right. Doesn’t that hurt?’

‘Yes. Now pack the bags. We need to leave at 12.47 p.m.’

We arrive half an hour late, which is some sort of record. We’ve never done it in under an hour before. Isabel then spends another half an hour filling her mother in on every last detail of Jacob’s life, before handing over the expressed milk. She then asks me to explain how the Bugaboo works to her dad. This is difficult because I don’t fully understand it myself and her dad is too busy giving me a lecture about how, in his day, a pram was a pram, not a designer accoutrement. We then give them nine different emergency numbers and leave.

We are free. And elated. We are late for our lunchtime reservation at our favourite pre-Jacob café, but they have kept our favourite table for us. We order our favourite wine. We smile. We hold hands. And we talk about Jacob. How amazing he is with his little hands and his little eyes and his little smile. How much more amazing he is than all the other children in our baby group with their horrible little hands and pokey little eyes and crooked little smiles. And how lucky we are that he isn’t one of those children that sleeps all day and all night, that although it is, at times, challenging, we are much better off with a child who is expressive.

We are maybe twelve minutes into lunch before I say, ‘Shall we call to check he’s okay?’ and Isabel says, ‘No, he’ll be fine. Mum would call if they were having a problem.’ And it is maybe another seven minutes before Isabel suggests that perhaps a quick call wouldn’t hurt, and it is my turn to pretend I don’t think it is necessary. By the time our main courses have arrived, we have still spoken about nothing but Jacob and can stand it no longer.

‘Hi, Mum. Sorry to call. Just check—…right…right…right. Okay. Speak to you later. Thank you. Bye.’

‘What happened?’ I ask. ‘That sounded bad. Is he all right? Has something happened?’

‘He’s fine. He’s had the milk. He’s had four stories read to him. They’ve taken him for a walk round the block and now he’s asleep. She says there’s no need to rush.’

‘Was it just once round the block?’

‘Yep. Went straight to sleep, she said.’

‘With singing?’

‘Didn’t mention any singing. Now, eat faster and let’s go home and have a cuddle.’

Two things ruined my enjoyment of the remaining time we had free.

First, I could not believe that Jacob had chosen the one time neither of us was looking after him to behave angelically. All the exhaustion, the shuffling through the first two months of parenthood with that haunted, hunted look in our eyes, the desperation, would now seem to Isabel’s parents like we were simply making a meal of things. I could hear it now: ‘Jacob was a little treasure, my darlinks. He is charming. We will look after him again any time.’ Annoying.

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