a message from the wife

Hester is feeling like she has consumed copious amounts of LSD this morning due to her brother insisting on playing his keyboard right next to her head when I was feeding her, he was alternating between a super fast bossanova beat to a low hip-gyrating salsa as he danced around her in the drug induced style of one of those heady Bacchanalian orgies my mother didn't go to in the 60's. Then she shat up her back, he pissed on the bathroom floor but just in time for me to notice his face get that concentrated poo look and make him sit on the loo which he didn't like so plonked him on the potty with Kipper and he did a huge turd. He was very pleased with himself.

I have a photo.

Got to nursery at 9.55, then H and I walked to Portslade. It's shit there.

How was your morning?

a community support officer comments on my beard

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

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

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

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

"Perhaps," I replied.

He laughed nervously and ambled off.

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

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

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

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

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

It still isn't working.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I boarded the train with a heavy heart.

teaching a two-year-old new words

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

omnibus sloppage

Dear Mr Young,

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

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

Thank you for letting us know……

Yours sincerely

Executive Assistant



To whom it may concern,

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

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

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

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

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

Yours sincerely,

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

Dictated but not read to

His secretary,

Mr Christopher Young

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

Part Four

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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