Life is Healthy

I pride myself on my powers of observation. For instance, I am very good at noticing when people are left-handed, either in real life, or on-screen. Obviously this is fairly easy if you are consciously trying to spot if someone is a leftie as you can just wait for them to pick up a pen. What I mean is that I notice without consciously looking. As soon as I see someone writing something with their left hand, the thought immediately pops into my head: “That person is left-handed”, but if they are using their right hand then I don’t immediately think anything at all. I have never found a use for this beyond annoying my girlfriend during films, or pointing things out to new acquaintances that they would have been aware for the majority of their lives, but who knows what crime I might witness where the conviction hinges on which hand the accused was using to plunge a bloody knife into someone’s body? Beyond reasonable doubt I would notice if they were using their left hand, but if they were just like 90-93% of the population I would probably not register the scene at all and carry on walking. So beware, all you sinistral stabbers. Though I actually have no statistics as to how many southpaws I am missing – I only have my intuition that I am spotting them all. What I need to do is team up with someone who only consciously notices when people are right-handed, spend a lot of time together, filming everyone we see whether on-screen or in real life, then play the video back and see if there is anyone we have missed. Perhaps those people will turn out to be ambidextrous. Who knows? It’s a crazy life I lead.

Anyway, I was sitting in a cafe in Brighton on Saturday with my girlfriend when I noticed a strange thing. There were two photos of Brighton Pier on the wall behind her, taken from different angles. But something was odd about them. As I looked more closely I realised that the right-hand one was not a different photo taken from the other side of the pier as I first though, but was the first photo, reprinted in reverse. All the detail, down to the last pebble, was just flipped around. It felt like a cheap trick. How much time and money had the photographer tried to save by doing this instead of just walking to the other side of the pier and taking another photo?

After some intense study and internal conjecture whilst my fry-up got cold, I pointed all this fascinating detail out to my girlfriend, who stopped eating, sighed, took one look over her shoulder and said, “There’s a mirror between them”.

Sadly, she was right. The end wall had an alcove entirely filled with a mirror. There was only one photo, and I had been looking at its mirror image. This also explained why for 15 minutes a man had been sitting on a chair looking straight down the stairs to the basement, which I had thought a bit odd, even for Brighton. He was merely a reflection of a man who was sitting perfectly normally on a chair in the cafe eating his lunch, oblivious to the idiot at the next table. I consoled myself with the knowledge that one of these two men would be left-handed.

Yesterday was my LOVELY SON’s first birthday. It was ace – we bought him some Duplo, so I have spent many happy hours building houses with it. Sometimes even when he is with me.

The past year has been a blur. His birth did coincide with a sudden increase in my workload, and it wasn’t until three weeks ago that I finally said to my girlfriend “You know, for the first time in 11 months I actually feel on top of things.”

Since then:

• My PC died necessitating a costly, disruptive and time-consuming repair,
• I had a nasty bout of tonsillitis and lost several more days’ work time, including missing a meeting that would have paid me just for turning up, cracking jokes and eating biscuits,
• The washing machine died, necessitating a costly, disruptive and time-consuming search for a replacement.

I am now back behind schedule, about £800 worse off, and will never again make predictions about anything going well.

It is true that having a baby introduces you to a different circle of people. Including the Man Who Thought It Would Be OK to Take His Dog Into the Children’s Play Area. It wasn’t mauling anybody or anything, but it was running around without a lead worrying some toddlers and causing a great deal of middle-class muttering amongst the parents at the swings. Dark looks were cast around as we tried to work out whose dog it was, then, once identified, to try to get him to leave without having to actually confront him. Because no one wanted to star in the “Playground Stabbing Horror” headline.

It was like the Aesop fable Who Will Bell the Cat, where a cat was terrorising a community of mice, and they all agreed that the solution would be to tie a bell around its neck, so that they could hear it coming. But none of the mice wanted to be the one who had to perform this dangerous task, so although they would all have been better off as a result, it didn’t get done and the cat ended up still eating them.

But I wasn’t going to let that happen here. With the words of Pastor Martin Niemöller ringing in my ears I strode over to where the man was sitting on a bench (sitting on the upright part with his feet on the seat!) and smoking (smoking!), and spoke my piece. The effect that I was going for was Clint Eastwood in Dirty Harry, though on reflection I think I may have come across more as Jeffrey Fairbrother in Hi-De-Hi.

I knew that I was in the right (there was a sign on the gate with a diagram of a dog in a red circle with a red line through it for flip’s sake), but he was determined to play the dog owner’s card of “My dog wouldn’t harm anyone”. It also didn’t help that he had sunglasses on so I couldn’t make eye contact, and that he was on his mobile phone the whole time, giving a running commentary about what the “white guy” was telling him off for.

At one point I tried to up my threat level, but again on reflection I think I was less Terminator and more Rory from series three of The Apprentice shouting “I Am Your Boss!”

The upshot was that he and his dog stayed in the children’s play area and we left, and I just spent the rest of the afternoon wondering whether to phone the police and tell them that he was a paedo.

As I put my son to bed I realised that discipline isn’t going to be my strong point as a parent. But I make great Duplo houses.

We have both been quite tired recently. It isn't anything that any other parent hasn't experienced, and last week I met someone who had triplets which shut me up a bit, but our lovely son is now mobile and intent on vomiting on everything in the flat.

The icing on the cake is when I tip his bubbly bath water from his baby bath away into the big bath only to see a massive turd heading straight for the plughole which then needs extricating from/just pushing down through the complicated plug mechanism.

We finally get him to sleep and open a bottle of wine. I collapse on to the sofa and realise that my trousers are still encrusted with rancid orange juice from when I took the recycling to the supermarket and a not-quite-empty carton leaked all down my leg so I had to go around Tesco looking like I'd wet myself but didn't really care at all. I then realise that this was actually the day before, so these trousers have already been taken off and put back on again in preference to any others, mainly because all my other clothes have been vomited on and all our drying space is full of damp baby-gros.

"Does this wine taste funny to you?" my girlfriend asks.

I sniff it, take a sip, swill it around my mouth and gurgle it across my taste buds like they showed us on the wine tasting day we went to in a previous life. Then I look at the label.

"This is mulled wine."

"Oh."

"Well, we've opened the bottle now. Cheers."

Our son wakes us at 2am; my mouth tastes of Christmas.

EXT. PETROL STATION - DAY.

SALVADORE'S GIRLFRIEND sits in the passenger seat waiting. She drums her fingers and rolls her eyes impatiently.

Finally, SALVADORE comes out of the petrol station. But then he stops to chat to an ATTRACTIVE YOUNG WOMAN who is wearing shorts and a bikini top.

Salvadore's Girlfriend looks annoyed.

Salvadore ostentatiously takes a £50 note out of his pocket and gives it to the Attractive Young Woman, who hugs him - a real tight bear hug.

Salvadore's Girlfriend stares in disbelief.

Salvadore strolls back to the car with a satisfied smile on his face.

Salvadore's Girlfriend looks grim - this is going to take some explaining, and it had better not be another of his ridiculous "And that, darling, is what really happened" stories.

My girlfriend and I have been feeling very smug. Not only is our baby LOVELY, but he is a September baby. September babies, as any parent will tell you, have an advantage throughout school by being the oldest in their year. On average they will always be more advanced than their peers academically and emotionally, and there is a strong correlation between sporting success and birth month (the theory being that the oldest kids in each year will tend to be the biggest and best at sport, so will like it more and be encouraged to play it more). Of course, our baby is already showing great sporting prowess, and with my footballing genes he will be playing at Wembley in no time.

We have just found a slight flaw in this plan though: we’re going to have to pay for an extra twelve months’ childcare than if my girlfriend had managed to pop him out three weeks earlier. OK, he might have had to go into a premature baby unit, but we are talking thousands of pounds here.

From smug to mugs in one fell swoop.

I actually made an Excel spreadsheet of our childcare options – they’re quite complicated and involve a subsidised crèche that only takes kids from the age of two, a childminder, a nursery at three days a week all year, a nursery every day but only in the term time, and emotionally blackmailing our mums into spending more time with their grandson.

We then talked about if and when we might possibly have (if we were able to) another baby. I very nearly cried when I then saw cell E15 – the cost of each year that they would both be in full-time childcare.

“The next one’s going to be an August baby”, I told my girlfriend. “Sod the fact that all his mates will be on holiday when it’s his birthday, and that he’ll be the runty kid in the class who is crap at sport, wears glasses, plays the violin and is only good at maths.”

My girlfriend looked at me a bit funnily.

“I just made that mental image out of nowhere”, I said. “As a hypothetical example of a child born near the end of the academic year. He is nothing like me. I wear contact lenses now for a start.”

Perhaps an adversarial start is character-building in the long run. Do any of those people who bullied me have an internet weblog that is read every week by literally half-dozens of people? No. And I know they don’t because I Google their names every week to see what they are doing. So who is the loser now, eh?

So I went back to my spreadsheet and factored in the maximum lengths of maternity leave and pay, pro-rata part-time salaries, interest rates, housing market predictions, fertility rates and ovulation cycles. Intimate relations are next scheduled for November 14th 2009. Wish us luck. Though if it’s twins we'll need more than just a new spreadsheet.

9:58am The day starts badly. I’ve had a flu-y stomach bug for a few days, been knackered after a run of baby-induced sleep-interrupted nights and I have to pitch three ideas at a meeting tomorrow. So far I have written none. But my girlfriend said that she would take our baby into the living room for a night so that I could get a good night’s sleep and awake refreshed and raring to go. I awake, refreshed and raring to go, but two hours behind schedule as I have managed to sleep through my alarm clock.

10:30am I start work. My girlfriend and baby are at a post-natal group, so the flat is quiet. Having found out the cost of nursery fees I have been taking on any work that I can, but three ideas in a day is a tall order. Particularly as I have to cook the dinner and want to watch the football at 8pm.

10:45am I have an idea!

11:15am Idea 1 finished! This is a great start.

12:10pm Another idea! I am on fire.

1:15pm Idea 2 finished! What a day! I break for lunch and an episode of Heroes.

2:00pm Back to work. No ideas forthcoming.

3:00pm Still no third idea.

4:00pm Aagh! Nothing.

4:15pm My girlfriend and baby come home having also been shopping.

5:00pm No idea.

6:00pm I go through every unsold episode idea for every other show I’ve ever worked on in the hope of being able to cobble something together. But nothing is suitable. My girlfriend starts the baby’s evening routine of bath, feed and bed.

6:35pm I have an idea!

7:00pm Idea 3 finished! Baby bathed, fed and asleep. Girlfriend asleep on sofa. I start manically chopping vegetables.

7:30pm Dinner in oven. Girlfriend asleep. Kick-off and dinner both 30 minutes away. All well with the world.

7:31pm Baby crying! As stated before, MY BABY IS LOVELY, but boy is it difficult to get him to go to sleep. The fact that he’s woken between feeds is not a good omen. I go into our bedroom and start off with some shushing.

7:32 Shushing and rocking the Moses basket. The baby is still crying.

7:34 Some light jiggling on my lap. The baby is still crying.

7:37 Walking around holding him. The baby is still crying.

7:42 Lullaby nightlight on. The baby is still crying.

7:45 Lullaby nightlight off. The baby is still crying.

7:49 Shushing and jiggling, trying to mimic the sound and motion of being in the car. The baby is still crying.

7:56 Shushing, jiggling, rocking, walking around and lullaby nightlight on. The baby is still crying, probably due to overstimulation.

7:59pm The baby is asleep! Gently, gently I lower him into his Moses basket and turn to tiptoe out of the room.

8:00pm My alarm clock goes off, waking the baby. I hadn't slept through it this morning, I'd just mixed up am and pm. The dinner burns. England lose.

My girlfriend looks at me grimly. "We're never going to agree about this, are we?" she says. I fear that she is right. Every time I change the toilet roll, I orientate it so that the paper hangs against the wall. Every time she changes the toilet roll, she orientates it so that the paper hangs away from the wall. Which is annoying as I then have to change it. This has been going on ever since she moved in three years ago. Instead of saying something straight away during her induction period (like with the tea towels), I have just let it slide, resorting to the passive-aggressive method of quietly correcting it every time and hoping that she gets the message. And they say that men aren't good at communicating.

I explain that my method is neater, more aesthetically pleasing and just plain right. She disagrees. I quote from the episode of The Simpsons when Homer and Marge leave the kids in Abe's care. Child protection agents scrutinise the ensuing chaos and amongst their damning indictments is "Toilet paper hung in improper overhand fashion". My girlfriend still disagrees.

I go on and on and on about it, and finally she concedes that it might be OK to do it my way. I am shocked with her for changing her view. Say what you like about the Nazis, but at least they stuck to what they believed in. At no point did Magda Goebbels ever say "Maybe the Allies have a point". No, she killed her six children then committed suicide rather than live in a world without concentration camps.

But in the interests of domestic harmony I am going to listen to the wisdom of crowds and ask you to complete this survey. Then we will know who is right and who will have to crack open the cyanide tablets.

It is still dinner à deux chez Vincent. The baby had better come soon as I am fast running out of ways to describe its non-arrival.

I liked the story of Mackenzie Crook having to have Gareth's hairstyle in all his wedding photos as they were still filming The Office at the time. I went to the barber's this afternoon. Ever the attentive father-to-be I told my girlfriend that I had my mobile with me, and to ring me if anything happened. Though I did then add that I would probably wait until he finished my haircut before running home, as I wouldn't want to be in all the baby's first photos looking like Phil Oakey.

But nothing happened and I am now evenly shorn.

Still no baby.

I am beginning to wonder whether my girlfriend is really pregnant at all, or whether she is faking the symptoms in order to get maternity pay and back rubs.

We went to see Atonement last night, which I thought was very good, despite having already read the book. My two criticisms would be (a) they couldn't spell ukulele in the credits, and (b) it wasn't a ukulele anyway. All the multiple viewpoints, non-linearity and unreliable narrator stuff worked fine.

But neither the film, with its tragic romantic narrative and harrowing scenes of war, nor my expert analysis afterwards, with its focus mainly on spelling mistakes and the works of George Formby, brought on labour.

No baby yet.

I am, however, pleased to have calculated that due to a combination of a surprise win by Aston Villa, the Euro 2008 qualifiers fixtures list, and our local hospital's policy on inducing overdue mothers, our baby will almost certainly be born with Liverpool topping the football tables for the first time in years.

If it is very late and a long labour then I will be looking for a win in the lunchtime game at Portsmouth on the 15th to make sure (should be OK on goal difference). Anything less and I will be telling my girlfriend to push it out before 4:45. I am sure that me switching over from whale music to Sport on 5 will help.

For the past eight months I have been wondering what sort of a father I will be. I was still wondering at our first ante-natal class yesterday. The only other father there was Keen Dad, who was asking more questions than all the mothers put together. I like to think of myself as a New Man - I've certainly flicked through a couple of my girlfriend's magazines about babies and stuff, but this guy sounds like he's been conducting his own medical trials on the long-term effects of different feeding methodologies.

I try to think of a question to ask that will make it clear to everyone present that I too am going to be a great father. I think so hard that I knock a glass of iced water all over the doll that the midwife has been using to demonstrate feeding techniques.

I try to make a joke: "Oops! I think your baby's wet itself."

"I can see we're going to have to tell Social Services about you", jokes the midwife. At least I think she is joking.

Perhaps being a father is like being an actor - bad dress rehearsal, good performance?

I am achier than Billy Ray Cyrus's breaky heart. My back hurts like that of my village's coalman in the 1970s and my knees are sorer than Monica Lewinsky’s (note to self – try to think of some more up-to-date references), but I have laid the kitchen floor.

All the kitchen furniture, including the fridge, is in the living room. There is still tacky glue everywhere so we have to wear plastic bags on our feet when we cook, and I’m fairly sure that the cooker is stuck fast to the floor, which will at least be a good excuse for never cleaning behind it again.

The biggest difficulty was that once I'd opened the adhesive and started spreading I had to finish the whole job there and then, so it wasn’t until 1:30am that I laid the last strip. Aching, I removed my sticky clothes and washed my hands, peeling huge wodges of tacky glue from my fingers and was just about to go to bed when I found a sticky problem. My DIY jeans had their knees ripped years ago, which meant that my bare knees were now completely covered with dried glue.

I’m quite a hairy man, and despite stoically not complaining about the back pain at anything less than three minute intervals all day it just hurt too much to pull the glue off. (Ladies - please don't bother trying to trump me with any “You don't know what pain is till you've had a bikini wax” stories. It is a well known medical fact that men's knees contain more nerve endings than women's loolahs.) I tried opening the freezer door and freezing it solid like chewing gum so I could chip it off, but other body parts were in danger of becoming brittle as well. There was only one more thing I could try...

And that, darling, is why you found me in the shower at 2am this morning shaving my legs.

I have an annoying habit. It is that I can’t help pointing out to people that what they think of as amazing coincidences are usually statistically fairly probable. I am often to be heard using the phrase “What would be really amazing is if there were no coincidences”. By the time I have mentioned self-selecting samples or false causality it is usually agreed that I have won the point, or that it is time to be going home.

As an example, my Dad, who was a primary school teacher, was amazed by the fact that he never once taught a pupil who had the same birthday as him. But I used some simple maths to show that 25 new children each year for 40 years is only 1000 kids – it would be more amazing if all those birthdays were evenly spread throughout the year. It was actually quite likely that there would be some days with no birthdays, and it was only because one of those days was his birthday that he found it significant. This speech perhaps wasn’t the high point of his retirement party.

Anyway, so a stranger from off of the internet wanted to ask me some questions about writing and I agreed to meet him for a drink after work so that I could impart all of my wisdom and experience to him. It turned out that I actually didn’t have all that much wisdom and experience to impart, and there was a good 10 minutes before I needed to leave to meet my girlfriend and some friends of ours for dinner. (NB this is probably the first time in the last decade that I have gone from one social engagement straight to another without an intervening period of two weeks or so watching repeats of Friends.) So, with a bit of time to kill I asked the stranger from off of the internet where he came from originally. Only to find out that we went to the same secondary school!

Isn’t that amazing? Of course, we both thought that the other one was winding us up, or stalking us, or that some kind of ITV Friends Reunited show was underway and that the hidden cameras would come out any moment.

The hidden cameras did not come out. It truly was an amazing coincidence. And luckily I never bullied him and he didn’t have a sister whom I failed to get off with so it wasn’t awkward or anything.

I then went to my dinner engagement. My girlfriend and our friends were already there, so I made a grand entrance and told them all to shut up as I had the greatest story ever told, and I started to relate the events of the evening so far, right up to asking the stranger from off of the internet where he was from. “And guess what?” I said, triumphantly.

“He went to the same school as you?” my girlfriend asked. I made a note not to invite her to any more stand-up gigs I might do.

“Yes! Isn’t it amazing?”

There were some polite nods.

“Was he in your year?”

“No.”

“Was he from your village?”

“No.”

“Did you know him at all?”

“Er, no. He’s five years younger, and because of the schools in that town reorganising we were never actually at the same school at the same time. But we remembered a couple of the same teachers.”

The conversation stopped. I felt a bit like the scientist who announced about 20 years ago that he had perfected cold fusion to give us all limitless free energy. When he had actually just perfected heating up some water in a test tube. Imagine if he had also said that in an amazing coincidence his new lab assistant had turned out to be his cousin’s friend’s neighbour’s ex-husband’s brother-in-law.

“So it’s like when I met your friend Denise you did your MA with, and it turned out I went to the same school as her”, said my girlfriend. “But again we weren’t in the same year and didn’t actually know each other.”

“Not really”, I said. “You both come from London, and you met her in London. That’s not an amazing coincidence. This is – we went to school miles from London. This must be a one in a million chance.”

There was then some discussion about this implying a significant overspend in the government’s education budget, with a secondary school for every 60 people, regardless of whether they were aged 11-16 or not. I shortened the odds somewhat, but still insisted it was amazing.

Then one of our friends asked about all the hundreds of people whom I’ve met in the past couple of decades who didn’t go to my school, and whether I found that remarkable in any way.

I had taught them too well; my own weapons had been turned upon me. I muttered something about wanting to choose a starter, and the conversation moved on. But after that amazing coincidence I'm doing the lottery this weekend. Somebody's got to win it.

Today is my birthday, the day that I stretch the definition of "mid-30s" ever closer to breaking point. I have been wished a happy birthday by my girlfriend and received cards and presents from her, from family and friends. My parents and niece rang me this morning to wish me a happy birthday. People I have never even met in real life have given me virtual presents on Facebook.

So why is it that when I needed to write the date on something I paused, thought about it, then looked at my watch to see what day it was? Whatever this is a sign of, it cannot be good.

(At least my watch is one of those that does actually tell me the date - it is not as though someone asked me the way to the station and I looked at my watch. I will save that particular insanity for my "late-mid-30s".)

On Sunday I went to the park with my girlfriend and her parents and we played with a Frisbee. I thought it might have been a bit boring, or even embarrassing, but this was actually the most fun I have ever had with my clothes on (that involved my girlfriend's parents). Not that I have ever attempted to have any fun with my clothes off that involved my girlfriend's parents. Though her Mum has shown interest.

I am pleased to report that Frisbee technology has improved since I was a kid, and this one had a special rubber edge which meant that it didn't hurt your hand when you tried to catch it. I never liked that and generally went indoors and played with my ZX Spectrum at that point, pretending not to be crying.

But not only did I not want to go indoors this time, I was easily the best at it, which has never happened before in any group of people with whom I have been doing any kind of sporting activity. The fact that I was playing against two pensioners (one of whom is recovering from an operation) and a pregnant woman had no bearing on my victory and will be expunged from the record books.

It has been a long search for the perfect car. I have been reading surveys, browsing magazines and scouring price guides. I have registered with websites, and automated emails have filled my inbox with likely candidates. I have spent days going to look at these, only to find each one fall at hurdles such as not having been serviced at the correct intervals, having a rather worrying sticker on the dashboard warning me that the mileage might not be accurate, or having more scratches than a flea-ridden dog.

Finally, we have found The One. It is the right make, model, age, condition and price. It has the correct stamps in the service history, and my detailed multi-part mechanical inspection has confirmed that it does indeed have four wheels.

My girlfriend goes to find a salesman just as I decide to perform one last check.

She returns, the salesman taking one look at me and instantly upgrading his monthly bonus expectation.

“Actually, I’ve changed my mind”, I say, as I sprawl casually against the side of the car.

“What?” asks my girlfriend.

“Yes. There’s a problem with the...” Damn, the car is perfect. “The colour.”

“But you’re the one who wanted silver.”

“It looks different in this light.”

The salesman looks around, confused, as there has not been an unexpected eclipse in the last two minutes. I lean further back, desperately trying to mime something to my girlfriend.

“We’ll keep looking”, I say, sending the salesman back to mentally cancel his foreign holiday.

“What was wrong this time?” my girlfriend asks with a sigh. It is true that I have been dragging her around lots of garages when, to be honest, we could have already been driving around in something perfectly suitable for the past month.

“I wanted to see if it had a lock on the petrol cap, and this came off in my hand”, I say, showing her part of the fuel filler flap that I had only managed to hold in place by nonchalently leaning against it.

I sort of wedge it back on, and we continue the search.

Yesterday our building work was nearly finished. The bathroom looked lovely, and would look even lovelier when we have painted it. I still need to lay a new kitchen floor and fit a blind (pencil “I have glued myself into a corner!!!” into your blog-reading diaries for about three weeks’ time), and the builders need to come back and fit a waste pipe on the kitchen half-sink, and also replace a bathroom fascia panel that they had cut incorrectly (full marks to Armitage Shanks for simply sending me a new piece for free, when I was preparing myself for being told to buy a whole new unit).

One of the nice new features only just fitted is a soothing nightlight on the bathroom cabinet. Pregnancy has meant that my girlfriend has to get up more in the night now, so it’s good to know that we have made this chore a little bit more pleasant and that she would be able to get back to sleep more quickly.

“Enjoy your visit to the loo”, I said as I kissed her goodnight. (NB I normally say something a bit more romantic, like “Did you remember to turn the hot water off?” or “Can you remind me to tape that programme about steam engines tomorrow?”) The building work has been a bit stressful at times (I often imagine Kevin McCloud saying “Salvadore has bought materials from Homebase and B&Q, he’s using builders one of whom doesn’t speak English, and he’s trying to hold down a full-time job whilst he also occasionally makes them coffee), but it was almost all over. I relaxed and closed my eyes.

It was with some surprise that I was awoken by my girlfriend at 4am to be told that there was water coming through the bathroom ceiling. My sleep-addled brain realised that even Polish plumbers can’t make water defy gravity, so the problem appeared to be coming from upstairs. Which left just one problem: what is the etiquette of waking your neighbours in the middle of the night?

I was in my usual conundrum of having something quite bad be happening to me that is entirely someone else’s fault, but also not really wanting to make too much of a fuss about it all. Perhaps if I took the fuse out of the lighting circuit so we didn’t actually die when we touched things, I could leave it till morning? Or maybe put a note through their door and knock quite softly. Then I could say “I did try to wake you.”

I was once in a fast food outlet in London, at the height of the IRA’s mainland campaign. Bombs had been going off in litter bins – the first sign of which was often smoke coming from the bin. I looked out of the window – smoke was coming from the bin outside. I knew that I had to do something – I couldn’t let innocent people die because of not wanting to make a fuss. So I went up to the counter and queued up to tell somebody. Which is nearly as English as when that person then just said “Oh, is it still doing that?” and threw some water over it. Hah! No wonder they’ve had to end up sharing power with the DUP.

OK, if upstairs’ flat was on fire I would definitely tell them (polite knock, “Sorry to trouble you...”). And if the water’s coming through a concrete floor it must be getting quite bad up there. I’d want to know. They’d surely want to know before their bed floated away.

I was apologetic. He was apologetic. At the end I went even more English and decided to then formally introduce myself to him, which was a bit weird as he was possibly only wearing a T-shirt, pulled down quite low. Having to remove one hand to shake mine didn't help the situation.

After thinking that the building work was nearly all over, we might have to remove loads of tiles and re-lay the sodden floor that was only laid last week. But, whilst we wait for the ceiling electrics to dry out, at least we have a nice soothing nightlight to work by.

I am quite indecisive. Or am I? Haha. No, I am. Definitely. I think. My girlfriend shares this quality, which tends to make for a happy relationship. I would imagine that one decisive person and one indecisive person together would be a nightmare for both. Two decisive people together would be OK, so long as they also agreed on their decisions. But two indecisive people together seems to work. Though for all I know, my girlfriend still might not have made up her mind about me, and 5½ years on with a baby on the way she is perhaps totting up columns of pros and cons somewhere (“Pros: am having baby with him. Cons: can be quite indecisive.”)

So, painting the new bathroom has turned into quite a complicated decision-making process. We have already totally blown our budget just on tester pots. It’s not helped by the fact that the colours in the brochures and the colours when they are actually put on the wall bear as little relation to each other as Prince Harry and Prince Charles. We literally have the entire range of Homebase, Crown and Dulux colours in the neutral/brown palette, from Jasmine White through to Choc Chip on the walls. In fact, the 20+ different samples now cover more wall area than the old paint does. It looks like a patchwork quilt, apart from the Choc Chip bit, which has gone on a bit smearily, and looks like some kind of dirty protest.

We are getting nowhere with just picking which is our favourite, so decide to have an elimination process. We pair samples up randomly, then decide which of the two we like better. The loser is voted off, and after qualifying heats, first round, quarter finals, semi-finals and a grand final, we have a winner. Predictably, it is an inoffensive, neutral hue, almost exactly halfway between Jasmine White and Choc Chip.

“So, which one is that?” My girlfriend asks.

“I have absolutely no idea. I should probably have labelled them all somehow.”

I open all the pots up again and start to paint some more patches, trying to find the chosen colour.

We are in position on the sofas. I have a copy of 7000 Baby Names with Adolf, Gaylord and Iaian already crossed out. My girlfriend has a similar tome lent to us by another well-meaning friend. We have agreed upon a complicated system of vetoes that would make the UN look like a model of concordance and productivity.

It is actually quite fun. We just call names out in no particular order and the other person has to give a gut reaction, generally based on the criterion “Was I ever bullied by a person of this name?” We mix it up a bit, throwing in the odd silly name to get a laugh. This also helps in case my girlfriend laughs at one of my serious suggestions – I can then just pretend that there was no way I was ever really contemplating calling out firstborn Stanley.

Most of my gut reactions are what the kid will get called as a nickname.

“Guy?” suggests my girlfriend.

“Gay.”

“Ben?”

“Bender.”

“Graham?”

“Gay-am.”

There was a lot of homophobia at my school.

We also quickly settle on “pony” as shorthand for any girls’ name like Camilla or Fenella which sounds like it belongs to the sort of person who might have a pony.

“Briony?” asks my girlfriend.

“Pony.”

“I really like it.”

“Nope. Definite pony.”

My girlfriend flicks through some pages and tries again.

“What about Trudi?”

“Trudi?” I laugh. “That’s what you’d call a hamster.”

“My grandmother’s name was Trudi.”

“Er... Obviously a hamster you were very very fond of.”

I quickly try to pass a resolution that comparing a deceased ancestor’s name to that of an imaginary pet rodent does not infringe middle name rights of the other gender, but I think Stanley’s definitely off the table now.

Dear Sir/Madam,

I know that 6997 Baby Names isn’t quite as snappy a title, but please, for the love of God, will you remove the following boys’ names from your book:

– Adolf. The poor kid is going to hear That Question for the rest of his life. Yes, “Do you spell that with an F or a P-H?” Oh, and the Hitler stuff. OK, so Stalin didn’t ruin Joseph for everyone, but then Jesus’ stepfather kind of balanced things out a bit there.

– Gaylord. Hahahaha. Even now I am laughing about how funny it would have been if I had been to school with a kid called Gaylord. It is a million times worse than Adolf. At least if you got a little bit of stick about the whole Third Reich thing you could retort by saying, “Actually, it means “noble wolf”, and what about Adolphe Sax who invented the saxophone, or Adolf Dassler, who founded Adidas? Everyone loves saxophones and trainers, so that is nearly as good as being Jesus’ stepfather.”

– Iaian. What? Seriously, what? Iain condemns you to a lifetime of “That’s I-A-I­-N”. Iaian would leave you with irritable vowel syndrome. What next? Iaiain? Iaiaian? Iaiaiaiaiaiaiaiain? Each time you gave your name over the phone it would sound like you were singing Old MacDonald. At least there is only one way of spelling Gaylord.

Yours faithfully,

Salvadore Vincent