Life is Healthy

Last night I dreamt that my girlfriend and I were going to do a load of washing and were discussing whether to do a light load or a dark load. This is what my dreams have come to. Literally. My life now revolves almost entirely around work, MY LOVELY SON and other family commitments. But the six or seven hours of sleep I get a night are mine and mine alone. In my unconscious mind I can still go anywhere and do anything, with no responsibilities. I could fly, swim underwater, travel to outer space or make love to supermodels with no feelings of guilt. And what am I doing? Laundry.

Maybe tonight I’ll have another dream. A dream that dark-coloured washing and light-coloured washing can one day go in the same laundry cycle.

As you can see, I have bought a graphics tablet. It was an impulse purchase so that I could try to be a bit more creative in different ways and just try out some new ideas. I thought that if it didn't work I could simply return it, or flog it on eBay.

I am not very good at drawing, so perhaps you think I am still using a mouse, with my left hand, which I have injured with a hammer, but I can assure you that I am using a graphics tablet with my uninjured right hand, which is my preferred hand for drawing. It is not my Lovely Son drawing these cartoons, and anyone who says it is is lying.

My Lovely Son does likes sitting on my lap and trying to use the graphics tablet though, doing some excellent scribbling and watching with glee how his actions are translated from the desk up on to the screen. Today he drew some circles and some steps. At this rate he will be complaining about the 50% tax rate before we know it. But soon he realised his artistic limitations and put the stylus in my hand and told me to draw a bus. "What colour is this?" I said, drawing a magnificent blue double-decker.

"Green", my Lovely Son replied.

I was a bit disappointed. We are not trying to get him into Mensa or anything, but I had thought we had got colours cracked several months ago.

"No, it's blue. What colour is it?"

"Green."

"No, it's blue."

"Green!"

I looked down, and sure enough he was drawing directly on the graphics tablet with a green felt tip.

The combination of being freelance (not wanting to spend my fluctuating income on luxuries such as new clothes) working from home (where every day is a dressing-down day and some are even dressing-gown days), and having a small child (often no room to wash and dry my own unfashionable clothes, necessitating wearing even older garments from the back of the wardrobe which then also invariably get smeared with food/snot, sometimes not even mine) means that normal standards of dress have been slipping for a while.

To save time in the morning, this look is often combined with my face being in the follicular hinterland between “hasn’t shaved” and “has grown a beard”. This state isn’t helped by the fact that although I have reasonably hirsute sideburns, moustache and chin area, my cheeks always look like they’ve been defoliated with Agent Orange, sporting as they do more bald patches than a monastery.

It was in this state that I went to the corner shop to buy some bread.

On the way I passed a hunched old man looking even scruffier and more stained than I was, shuffling along in flip-flops despite the cold weather. I asked him if he was OK, and he asked me the way to the corner shop. I told him he was going the wrong way and pointed the way he should be going. He looked confused. I pointed again. He looked more confused. After several more points/confused looks I realised that he was blind.

I offered him my arm as I was going that way, and we shuffled along together. He told me that he needed to pop into the greengrocer’s first as he needed to borrow some money from him, so we manoeuvred our way in through the crates of fruit and veg.

Unfortunately, only the greengrocer’s wife was in and she wasn’t going to be lending money to anyone. The blind man pleaded, but she was adamant. He told her that her husband often lent him a few pounds, but she was having none of it.

As the conversation wore on I looked up at the convex mirror that the greengrocer uses to monitor his shop instead of CCTV. In it I saw, to my horror, exactly what we looked like: two tramps begging for money.

I was in yet another socially awkward situation. I wished to help the man, and I didn’t mind being known as artistically, perhaps even eccentrically dressed by my near neighbours. But there is a fine line between “shabby chic” and “hobo” and I had to concede that this line was so far in the rear-view mirror as to be hidden by the curvature of the earth.

So, as the blind man continued his pleas I started trying to convey to the woman, using only facial expressions and my left hand, that I was in fact a middle-class, well-educated professional who was just having a bit of a bad beard day, and that I was not actually with this man. This was despite the fact that we had come in together and he was still holding on to my arm.

Neither of us were successful and we found ourselves back on the pavement, empty-handed. So I offered to buy the man’s groceries for him, and then we began the slow shuffle back to his house. I resisted the urge to casually mention that I was clean-shaven and wearing a pin-striped suit. Instead I listened to his sad story – about the wife in long-term care, the drug-addict son, the loss of his sight. I promised to phone social services on his behalf and tell them exactly about the help that he needed as soon as I got home.

I did, but first I shaved and went and explained a few things to the greengrocer’s wife.

Re: Patrull drawer/cabinet locks

Congratulations! Not only do these prevent a young child from opening a kitchen cupboard and harming him or herself with a knife or bleach, they also prevent the child's parents from opening the cupboard to cook the child some food, thus stemming the childhood obesity epidemic and, eventually, global overpopulation.

Well done!

My LOVELY SON's intellectual capabilities continue to grow. As well as him recognising pictures of objects in books, we regularly show him photos of relatives he sees less often and explain who they are. He manages to identify them too, pointing to the correct cousin or grandparent when prompted.

So it was with some surprise that he pointed to this picture of England cricket captain Kevin Pietersen in a magazine yesterday and said, unmistakeably, "Dadda".



Putting all obvious paternity jokes aside I was still a bit concerned. What if my LOVELY SON isn't the genius that all other signs of his abilities (stacking five wooden blocks at a time, going headfirst down a slide, growling when he sees a picture of a lion) are pointing to? But, let's just take a closer look at those sculpted cheekbones, smouldering eyes and dimpled chin:



Yes, I can stop worrying because, when you think about it, confusing me with Kevin Pietersen is actually an easy mistake to make, even for the most gifted of the population. One of us is an extremely talented sportsman at the peak of his physical prowess, good enough to not only play internationally but to captain his national side, plus he's handsome and successful enough to be offered even more money to advertise expensive watches ...

... and so is Kevin Pietersen.

I read that supporting and praising your child is very important, so my reply of "Yes, that's me captaining England" isn't really a lie.

I sat down to eat my lunch and turned the television on. But instead of a picture it displayed a screen that was blank except for the ominous message "Enter PIN: ****". I worked out quickly what was going on when I realised that the remote control, instead of being in its usual home high up on the furthest bookshelf, had been on the coffee table. Clearly, my LOVELY SON had got hold of it and somehow set the parental lock. Though, I realised flicking through the channels, apparently only on ITV1. Not that I was going to watch Loose Women, and anyone who says I was is lying.

My son is obviously a child prodigy, as even with the manual I couldn't work out how he'd done it. Perhaps he's doing one channel at a time until all that's left is CBeebies.

At 13 months his understanding is really coming on. He's great on "Where's the car?" and "Where's your nose?", but "What's the Pin number?" was met with a blank shrug. At the very least he could have said, "For goodness' sake, Father, the 'N' in Pin already stands for 'number'. 'Pin number' is a tautology along the lines of 'safe haven' or 'free gift'". But no, his burgeoning genius only goes so far.

It's a bit annoying as I do sometimes watch programmes on ITV1, like, er, um... Well I guess in 2010 they might be showing some of the World Cup matches, so I hope he's learned to talk by then.

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.

Our LOVELY BABY has been eating lots of interesting things recently. Not just coins, batteries and carpet fluff, but stuff recommended in baby books as well. As a result I have been sent to Tesco to buy tofu.

Being a lifelong omnivore (apart from a few weeks in my teens when I was trying to impress a vegetarian girl, but it turned out that there were other, more fundamental things putting her off from going out with me) I had no idea which supermarket aisle I would find tofu in. My local Tesco is one of the largest in the country, so I thought I had better ask for help.

As well as being massive, this branch of Tesco is in the most ethnically diverse part of the most ethnically diverse city in the country. What I am saying is that the staff look like the cast of Mind Your Language. This is absolutely fine with me - if I wanted to live entirely surrounded by white English people I would go back to the village I was brought up in, with its pure Anglo-Saxon language, albino-white skin and particularly choosy females. (Why wouldn't she go out with me? Why?)

So I asked a West Indian shelf-stacker where I might find tofu. He didn't know, but went to ask a Middle Eastern man on the deli counter. He didn't know either, but asked a passing South-East Asian colleague. She didn't know either, and the game of Chinese Whispers continued. Literally in her case. Then it became a game of Indian Whispers, then Hispanic Whispers until that employee asked an Eastern European man with a particularly thick accent who was pushing a large trolley of empty cardboard boxes.

"Tofu?" he replied, like a young spaniel who had just been asked if he'd be at all interested in chasing a stick. "Yes! Aisle seven!" He quickly set off, motioning that I should follow him.

I liked this last man immediately. It is perhaps a patronising cliche to say that all Eastern Europeans are hard-working and polite and respectable, but I knew instinctively that this man had come over with his wife and children to London NW10, where the streets are paved with fried chicken wrappers, but that he loved it here, and that he loved to work and that his heart was overflowing with pride and joy at being able to help someone on what was almost certainly his very first day in the job.

I followed him down an aisle that I had never been down before, full of strange, exotic items.

"There!", he beamed, proudly pointing at a shelf. "Tofu!"

I looked at the bags of Winalot and the tins of Pal and tried to pinpoint the exact link at which communications had broken down. We were looking not at tofu, but at dog food.

I scrutinised the Eastern European man's face. It was full of expectation, desperately hoping that I would validate his reason for emigrating here. Would he be able to go home to his wife and children and proudly say, "Today, I help man"?

"That's great, thank you", I mumbled. "He'll love this." I picked up a couple of tins of Pedigree Chum with the intention of leaving them at the checkout. Though I expect they're tastier than tofu.

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.

I make the two hundred and thirty-seventh trip to load up the car, then take a look around the hotel room that has been home for the last four days and nights and our first family holiday. There is food sprayed on the wall, vomit stains on the bedspread and excrement smeared on the towels. It looks like Mötley Crüe have stayed here circa 1987, only if instead of being addicted to class A drugs they were hooked on Hipp organic baby food.

I realise that I have entered the phase in my life where it is necessary to leave tips everywhere we go.

1. Completely strip covers from all cushions, scatter cushions and main part of sofa and wash them all, because if you just wash the cushion that he was sick on then that cushion will fade slightly and not match the rest of the sofa.

2. Just wash the cushion that he was sick on. You no longer care about the sofa matching.

3. Give the cushion a wipe and turn it over, hoping not to find anything on the other side.

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.

I am pleased to report that my son's gross motor skills are developing well, and that last night he managed to kick a ball for the first time. Unable to even sit up on his own yet, it may be a while before Signor Capello picks him for England (though if he were a few months older I'm sure he could have got a place in one of McClaren's squads). He was a natural though, not needing a Kevin Keegan poster to tell him to keep his eye on the ball, keep his head over the ball and to strike cleanly through the centre of the ball.

Sadly, the ball in question was inside my scrotum at the time. But may no longer be.

I guess he's happy being an only child.

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.

I have had loads of great suggestions as to what to call my baby on this blog. Here are just a few highlights:

Matt - This was actually in the final five on our real life shortlist. It wasn't till it kept turning up here (sometimes with one 't' or preceded by Bart) that I realised the subliminal link that there must have been in my head to everyone's favourite bathroom accessory. But I think that it might be disresepectful to the bath mat and also unfair to my son to try to relive those exciting, emotional days through such an obvious substitute, particularly when the grief is still so raw.

Zeus - This was such a great suggestion that I almost put it on to our real life shortlist. It is a brilliant name - the king of the gods, and it begins with 'Z', which is cool. If my name began with 'Z' I bet that my life would have been much more exciting, like Zorro's, and much less inclined towards a career in IT. I blame my parents.

Gene - This led me to think that if I were a geneticist I could call him XY. I used to work in IT, so I thought about v1.0. Then I thought that as I'm now a writer I could call him Working Title. But that might get confusing if I ever have a script in development with the film company of the same name - I might write something here like "Working Title did a poo on my script", and you wouldn't know whether I was referring to an innocent accident by a toddler, or a meeting with Messrs Bevan and Fellner that probably meant that they weren't going to greenlight anything just yet.

I was even offered sponsorship money if I always referred to him here by a certain brand name. My response to this ugly commercialisation? "Double it and I'll put it on the birth certificate as well."

But I think that for now I will just call him my baby.

The parenting thing is going OK so far. The answer to "Either he has wet himself or I have" turned out to be that he had, which means that I am not yet incontinent, and as a bonus our new sofa's covers are, as advertised, removable and washable. As were my trousers.

But our baby does not yet have a name. Both in real life and also, more importantly, for the purposes of this blog. And this is where you come in, dear readers. For I am running a competition where you have the chance to name my baby (for the purposes of this blog, not in real life - I am not a total idiot). Just leave your suggestions in the comments box. And please note that, unlike Blue Peter, I am not bound by any Ofcom guidelines and can choose any name that I want - we won't be immediately having another baby that we then have to call Cookie.

I am a father!!!! It is a boy!!! He is lovely!!!! All other babies are inferior!!! Mine is best!!!!! I have a million photos of him asleep!!!! He held my finger!!!!! It was amazing!!!!!

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.