Kingsley Can't Swim and Other Observations (part 2)

Part Two

i
A new nightmare, or, to be more precise, daymare. I get off my train, usually the one that brings me home from London in the evening, and make my way along the platform; the doors hiss shut and the carriages begin to move. Then I panic: I've left Kingsley inside the train, my god, I've only gone and left the boy in the carriage or the loo or on the drinks and snacks trolley and now he's half way to Southampton.

It takes a few moments, but the realisation does take hold that no, he is not on the train, I did not take him to work with me, and anyway, look on the bright side, being half way to Southampton is better than being all the way to Southampton – trust me, I have been there.

So, the paranoia continued. I texted Helen to tell her not to leave the boy unattended on his changing mat, which we had placed on top of an awful piece of furniture given to us by my parents. It was a polished mahogany cabinet, so polished by my mother over a number of years of obsessive cleaning that it had reached a state of prime slipperiness. It was only 15 years of Mr Sheen that was saving the heirloom from disintegration.

Before now, the boy had laid on his mat peacefully, or if not actually peacefully then at least with arms and legs generally motionless. Now he tended to punch with his arms and kick with his legs, before, during and after his nappy change. Sometimes this evolved into a punting-like movement of the legs. He was like a Venetian gondolier pushing himself closer to a great precipice – that is, the edge of the best-polished piece of furniture in England.

The point is that Helen was equally aware of the boy's development, and I had no reason to text her my warning, other than for the sake of humouring my paranoia.
Anyway, I was determined that we would soon take the cabinet to the municipal tip, it really was ghastly. And very slippery. I would have to emphasise the slipperiness, rather than the ghastliness, when explaining to Mother why the destruction of her cabinet was overseen by men in fluorescent yellow waistcoats.

ii
Kingsley Paddington had, for better or for worse, a distinctive name. At least, it was more distinctive than Dave. In years to come, the boy will no doubt find himself fielding questions about the origins of his name. Obviously, he could make something up: "I was born in Peru and abandoned by my mother, a revolutionary guerrilla who left the country to fight Saddam Hussein in the Bongo Bongos. It was around this time that I was approached by a family of bears. Over the days, weeks and months that followed, we gained each other's mutual trust and respect. In effect they fostered me, yes, I was brought up by the bears and, being cleverer than them outwitted the alpha male to become their king. When Prince Charles heard of my plight while on the Inca trail with his new wife, Brian, he found me and brought me back with him to live in his replica Georgian shed in Poundbury, where the authorities took inspiration from my regal status among the bears and the fact I had been nurtured by them to call me Kingsley Paddington, which is Poundbury Latin for King of the Bears."

Or he could just say, "That's what my parents called me." Yes, his parents: Helen and… Chris. At least Helen could be associated with, say, Helen of Troy. But Chris? Not a name in myth, Greek or otherwise. Not very interesting at all.

I hoped the boy made something up, it would be good for him to have an imagination. Perhaps he could add a 't' to the end of my name and claim I was the son of God. But that would not do, mainly because it would make the boy the grandson of God, and no one has even heard of him.

iii
'Baby on board' signs were starting to annoy me. I had not really noticed them before, but now I had, and they were annoying. What was the point of them? I was going to tailgate your family saloon for the next five miles before ramming you off the road and into a lake, but oh, look, you've got one of those signs in the back window, you must have children in the car, I will remember that only a fool breaks the two second rule and for evermore keep my distance.

Sometimes we saw a variation of the message, such as 'Little person on board' or, even more annoying, 'Cute person on board'. I guessed these more elaborate signs were meant to make me go "Ahh" and vow to adopt a polar bear at the earliest opportunity, instead of retrieving a machine gun from the glove box and opening fire at the car in front until it careered into a tree and exploded.

One weekend, a friend of Helen’s travelled with us to Osama Bin Laden’s hideout in rural Shropshire. Manuela, who doted on the boy in a way unique to Italian women, rather resembled an au pair on this car journey, largely because she was foreign and sitting in the back. I mocked up a sign for the rear window of the car which read, in black on a yellow diamond, 'Manuela on board'. We are certainly sticking it to the hoi polloi with their generic 'baby on board' signs, I thought to myself as we bombed it up the M40. Another advantage of my sign was that it could be tailored for all eventualities. When I was driving alone, it would read 'Man on board'. When I was walking down the street, it would read, simply, 'Man'.

iv
The boy was 14 weeks old when I first noticed it. It had, of course, been building up for some time, but reached a critical mass at 14 weeks. It being all the stuff we, or, more accurately, Helen, had acquired since the birth of our son and left lying about and stacked up willy-nilly in various rooms of the house.

I came downstairs one morning and, while sipping at a mug of coffee, wondered whether one of Helen's friends had left her husband and was storing fifty per cent of the couple's possessions in our kitchen, dining room and sitting room, nursery and spare bedroom, not to mention all the bits of the house in between, such as corridors, steps and our own bedroom. But no, these were not the worldly goods of a friend with a broken heart. The play mat, second push chair, rattles, squeaky balls and books and things that played music when touched (and sometimes, unexpectedly, when merely breathed upon) were patently designated for the boy.

Yes, a second pushchair. What was wrong with the pram we already had, which transformed, through Swedish ingenuity, into a perfectly good pushchair, I asked. "It was in the charity shop," Helen said. "It was only £5, so I bought it." A second pushchair – like we had bypassed the second car on the driveway and instead decided to flaunt our wealth through the medium of multiple pushchairs.

The pushchair was the final straw really, or at least the thing that drew the incessant accumulation of inanimate objects – no, not inanimate, their animation was half the problem – to my attention. There were two doors to our dining room, one from the kitchen, one from the hallway. And, as we have seen, there were two pushchairs, one in the kitchen, one slap bang in the middle of the hallway entrance to the dining room. We had actually lost the use of a doorway.

So we had moved from a shoe box in London, where there was not enough room to swing a foetus, to a family house three times the size, and still we did not have enough space. There is a line in Jaws – "You're gonna need a bigger boat." There is a line in the under-rated Kevin Bacon classic Tremors – "You're gonna need a bigger truck." There is a line in this under-rated Christopher Michael Young classic – "We're gonna need a bigger house."

v
Fortunately, I missed the boy's first three rounds of injections, thanks to not being able to afford taking the time off work. So, his mother accompanied him on every occasion. The first time, Helen reported tears (from the boy); the second time, tears again (from, in order of quantity of tears, the boy and Helen); the third time, tears again (from, in order of quantity of tears, Helen and the boy). I expected to hear that even the doctor had cried, but apparently he maintained his professional detachment throughout.

Watching a man in whom one really has no choice but to trust – he is a qualified doctor, isn't he, those certificates on the wall did come from a university, not the internet? – put a rather long-needled syringe into the foot of one's child – that is the right medicine, isn't it, doctor… Jones, it is the right dose? – is an experience I was grateful to have missed out on. So far. Helen promised me that "Next time, you're bloody doing it!"

vi
We had already encountered dad jokes, and then we encountered mum jokes. During the car journey home from Bin Laden’s training camp near the Welsh border, Helen piped up with a string of puns which I shall not defend but merely paraphrase: the boy's mother, perhaps jealous of my ability to produce owl- and dog-related puns, suggested through the jocular format of question and answer that Sir Patrick Moore buys his electrical goods in Comet, Mahatma Gandhi gets his refrigerators from Currys, Dionysus acquires his household nick-nacks from Argos, Morrissey purchases his books in WH Smith, and the Duke of Wellington sources his medical supplies from Boots.

My only response was to declare, again through the jocular format of question and answer, that Rod Hull's favourite band is My Bloody Valentine, because he is an emu, I mean emo.

As soon as he can comprehend the idea, the boy may well suggest that his mother and father trade in their family saloon for a black cab with thick, soundproofing plastic dividing the front and the back of the car into separate compartments.

My only regret was that the decline of the British high street during the recession would render a number of my best puns obsolete. For instance, I would not be able to announce through the jocular format of question and answer that dogs get their pick 'n' mix from Woolwoofs and their furniture from M.F.I.D.O.

Thank goodness for the continued retail presence of Barks & Spencer.

vii
There was swine flu in the air, if the media were to be believed. Thankfully, the boy had been so well inoculated that he was the least likely member of the family to succumb and, taking all 15 injections to date into account, would probably have survived a nuclear fallout. Him, Bruce Forsythe and the cockroaches.

The same certainty of health could not be attributed to OBL, who informed us on one visit to her cave that she intended to purchase a personalised number plate for her car, one that read OMA 123 or some such variation on the Oma theme. As if knowing what could come to pass, the boy bawled for England when the terrorist, who had him in her arms, waved a photograph of her vehicle before his innocent face.

Luckily, we were spared the prospect of Bin Laden riding around the Midlands with bespoke plates. The price tags associated with OMA 123 et cetera contained too many noughts, and her war chest was wanting.

viii
One of the things dads do, are meant to do, is jobs around the house, involving the banging of nails into bits of wood and the maintenance of white goods such as the washing machine. Oily rags should be at their disposal, probably in the garage or the shed, where one is also likely to find every conceivable tool, from the humble trowel to the mighty lawn mower. More adventurous dads might extend their selection to the chainsaw, and the more timid limit theirs to the trowel, but the point is tools, lots of tools, tools everywhere, knowing how to use the tools, wanting to use the tools, spending every daylight hour using the tools or buying new tools, and telling children not to touch the tools, do not even look at the tools because the tools are dangerous and expensive and the paragon of Man.

Now, I was not the most practical of people, let alone the most practical of dads, but there was an expectation for me to be so, like one expects a good bedside manner from a doctor and a reserved dignity in funeral directors. So it was that since the arrival of the boy, a weight had been lifted from Helen's shoulders, well, womb, and placed onto mine. My shoulders, not my womb. Thus, all of a sudden, I was compelled to perform tasks such as the taking of an antiquated strimmer to OBL's unwanted garden weeds and the borders of her lawn.

After an hour or so of one such strimming session, the petrol-powered machine expired. I went to the garage, retrieved a can of petrol and poured it into the tank of the strimmer – which, I should also add, was unwieldy and heavy; the respect I had gained for it during our recent foray in the nettles was a grudging one. Having completed the refuelling, I had my hand on the starter cord when Helen happened to walk past. She commented, much as Chris Packham might remark to a child that Robin has a red breast, that the strimmer had a two-stroke engine. I tried to contort my face into an expression that suggested I understood the implications of the strimmer having a two-stroke engine. Helen was obviously unconvinced of my engineering qualifications and made off to consult Osama. The information came back that the engine was indeed of the two-stroke variety, which required a different type of petrol to the stuff I had used, and that, Allah willing, the strimmer was not irreparably damaged. I contorted my face into an expression that hid my righteous fury at the fact that Bin Laden had not pointed out the different fuel types to me at the beginning of my adventure with the strimmer. The woman was suggesting that I was a fool for not having inferred the technical information myself, for I was Man and, what's more, Dad.

Allah be praised, the strimmer worked fine once the right fuel was in it. I returned to my chore with a new vigour and the choke turned to ten, imagining that every nettle was another demanding grandmother.

ix
Some ceilings are higher than others. I demonstrated this architectural fact at my parents' house where I lifted the boy high into the air, into the ceiling actually, because my parents' ceilings were lower than those in our house. The boy's head made a solid thud, he thought about the situation for three seconds, decided that some ceilings are lower than others, and demonstrated the architectural fact through the medium of crying.

The boy was OK though really. His head was pulsating beforehand and continued to do so – one could observe a throbbing in the soft spot at the front of his head; normal, apparently.

After this incident I found myself paying a lot of attention to the height of other people's ceilings.

x
Accompanying Helen to the maternity clinic where she would be given her ultrasound scans and other tests was no laughing matter. The first scan, although providing us with the first image of the boy, had its wonder tainted by the lack of reassurance from the midwife. At 14 weeks, and thanks to the machine being unable to produce a clear image, it was too early to tell that everything was alright. He, or she – or, indeed, it – had a head, two arms and two legs, but how many fingers and toes and all the other bits?

In fact, that first scan was so poor that, as well as the feeling of joy I was experiencing at the glimpse of the child, I was reminded of the Saturday afternoons I had spent watching my grandmother's wood-panelled TV set, which emitted the programmes of Channel 4 in ghostly black and white.

We had to wait another eight weeks for the next scan, the last, to find out that the creature who lay inside Helen had a healthy heart, a proper backbone and grey matter between the ears, of which there were two. Now we could relax. We would not be taken into the ominously titled Condolence Room down the corridor, which seemed to exist as a walk-in memorial to the randomness of life and luck.

Later, on a day off work, I went with Helen to one of her routine check-ups at the clinic. The nurse put a microphone to Helen's stomach so we could hear the baby's heartbeat, but all we heard was crackling alternating with silence. It was a tense moment, not least because the nurse was visibly worried. Luck was on our side though, and it was the machine, and not the boy, that was broken. The nurse discarded the microphone, which looked like it should have been plugged into a ZX Spectrum manufactured in 1989, and produced a much more modern-looking one. The heartbeat it detected was powerful, and so was our relief.

It was around this time that I realised I would spend the rest of my life worrying about my children.

xi
Helen using her electric breast pump was a remarkable sight. Her nipple poked in and out of the suction cup's piping like the nose of a mechanical mole, and the effect was more than mere lactation – she verily ejaculated the white stuff in jets, which originated not just from the nipple itself but also imperceptible holes in the areola. In fact, the impression was of a cow being milked industrially, the truth of this being so blatant that my comment to Helen, "You are a cow", was met with utter agreement, if not udder acquiescence.

This, and the noise the pump made as it went about its extraction – it sloshed like a small dishwasher – made an earlier epiphany more pert, I mean pertinent: that Helen's breasts were no longer mine, if they ever were, which of course they weren't, not literally, but erotically I mean – I had lost them to the boy.

I certainly steered well clear of them while they had the potential to spray cow juice across the room like milky sprinklers. Helen is one of the most practical people I have known, and could reverse-park a family saloon more efficiently and accurately than even my father. It should have been no surprise to me when even her breasts became a utility.

xii
During Helen's protracted labour I spent a lot of time rushing in and out of the hospital to move the car, which was parked either in a space near to A&E reserved for ambulances or in a metered space with a time limit of only two hours. So, instead of fulfilling duties such as holding a hand, procuring grapes and liaising with the nursing staff, I was often reverse parking, staring at ticket machines trying to comprehend their rhyme and reason, and abandoning reverse parking manoeuvres having selected a space that turned out to be too small for an Audi A3 Sportsback.

This was largely the fault of the Royal Sussex County Hospital, which had a permanently oversubscribed car park. I say largely the fault of, because for all I know the doctors could have been refused planning permission to build a whacking forty-storey monument to car-parking on top of the maternity wing. But the fact is that there was always a queue as long as one's arm, if one were to have an arm approximately the length of many cars lined up in procession – these cars containing anxious visitors to the hospital and, of course, anxious patients, who probably didn't mind being late for their quintuple heart bypass, gender-realignment or even, maybe, labour.

The road leading to the barriers at the foot of the car park was long and narrow, with one lane for people going in, or waiting to go in, and another for people coming out, which they tended to do smugly. On one occasion as I sat in this queue, having left Helen rolling about in a bed moaning on the twelfth floor of the hospital, a stereotype relating to gender and hair colour was confirmed when a blonde woman drove towards the barriers in the wrong lane, past the 50 or so waiting cars. As the occupants of the waiting cars stared on in disbelief, and as the deep-vein thrombosis gathered in their legs, the miscreant overtook the chap at the front of the queue and plonked her vehicle by the ticket machine in front of the barrier. Fortunately for my blood pressure, a stereotype relating to gender and hair colour was contradicted when a blonde woman left her car in the queue to make a few things clear to the blonde woman at the barrier (Lord knows what she had thought we were all parked up for, tapping our steering wheels while looking longingly at the barrier and urging Chris Moyles to either die or shut up). As the confirmation of the stereotype made an eight-point turn and quit the scene of her folly, I found myself feeling sorry for two people – Helen, who was writhing on a bed, grapeless, and the mystery patient who would not now be visited by the leggy blonde bombshell with the wobbly whoppers.

My absence from Helen's side was also largely, much more largely this time, the fault of Brighton & Hove City Council, which had designated ticketed parking spaces on the streets surrounding the hospital but enforced a time limit of only two hours. It quickly became obvious that two hours would not be sufficient to settle Helen into the maternity ward, listen to Spunk Monkey's tales of gas-and-air-induced debauchery and give birth to, and witness the birth of, the boy. And I was not alone. The streets were full of slow-moving male drivers wearing two-day-old shirts and four-day-old beards, looking for somewhere to park.

I returned to the vehicle at one point in this local-authority-sponsored game of musical cars to find a traffic warden standing by the bonnet and writing in his book. "Look," I told him, striking a pose that I thought accentuated my ruffled, my-girlfriend's-in-labour appearance. "My girlfriend's in labour," I said. He stopped writing and peered up at me, for he was a totalitarian dwarf in both spirit and stature and I was a towering, morally and physically, Man Whose Girlfriend Is In Hospital. "In the hospital!" I bellowed, as if he might have thought she had her legs spread out on the counter of the local chippie. The warden, who continued to look up to me like I was a god and he an oompa-loompa – it helped that I was on the pavement, which was raised by one foot above the road on which he stood – informed me that he had yet to write out my ticket, that if I had been twelve seconds later he would have had to issue me with one, so on your way now sonny jim, and so on.

Later, much later, when the boy had been born and I was leaving him and Helen in the hospital to return home alone, I found the barriers at the exit of the car park – I had finally found a space – in the raised position. And there was a note on the ticket machine basically saying that it was broken so on your way now sonny jim, and so on. I got into the car and sauntered out of the hospital, feeling like that man in that film where all the traffic lights turn to green as he approaches them.

xiii
While returning to the hospital from a car-parking session I passed a woman outside A&E, heavily pregnant and smoking. I could tell she was heavily pregnant because there was a gross swelling of her abdomen, and I could tell she was smoking because there was a cigarette in her hand which she repeatedly lifted to her mouth so that she might suck on it to inhale and then exhale smoke, the smell of which lingered around the ambulances. I was not shocked to see a pregnant woman smoke, but found it remarkable that she would do so right in front of the hospital where she was, by the look of her, soon to give birth – and right next to the ambulances no less.

I suppose I admired her in a way, her defiance in the face of the inevitable wagging fingers, tuts, rolling eyes and admonishing, shaking heads. If I was pregnant, I would probably smoke too, and definitely would smoke if I was heavily pregnant, but I was not sure I could bring myself to engage in the act within spitting distance of the hospital's most ominous portal and its wailing chariots.

I gave up smoking reluctantly and only a few weeks before the boy was born, so I did not have the moral authority to condemn the woman who now stood before me, smoking like a chimney – actually, like Father Christmas in a chimney, because she was big and round and wearing a red dress. But no beard. Imagine if I had come across a pregnant smoking woman with a beard. I might have phoned The Argus, and would certainly have texted Helen, or someone less in labour, with the message that "there is a pregnant smoking bearded woman outside the Royal Sussex County. LOL."

So, this champion of a foetus's right to smoke passively was clean-shaven, or not shaven at all if we assume she did not grow facial hair in the first place. Maybe she wanted a small baby. I heard that certain celebrities puff away during pregnancy, and are even advised to do so by their private doctors, so that the baby will have a lower birth weight and, therefore, cause less unsightly stretching of the abdomen during gestation. I also heard that even NHS doctors had been known to advise a mother to continue smoking if the trial of giving up might cause her, and by proxy her unborn child, an unhealthy amount of stress.

As I walked through the sliding doors and into A&E, I wondered if this woman was a local celebrity hoping for a small baby or a local member of the public pursuing a pregnancy ameliorated by the smooth tobacco delivery of a Marlboro Light. It was likely that she simply did not care what I thought about anything at all, let alone her.

xiv
One day, Helen purchased a sling. To be fair, this cotton contraption looked fine on her, the boy liked being carried about in it, close to a warm body, and he usually fell asleep within moments of being inserted. However, an aesthetical problem presented itself when the role of baby carrier was assigned to me. The sling made me look like I lived in a hessian wigwam, that my favourite film was Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth, and that the magnolia walls of my Clapham flat were smudged with newsprint from The Guardian.

Oddly, given that the proof of my virulent heterosexuality was bound to my chest in the form of the boy, the sling made me feel rather camp. Not quite Freddy Mercury mincing to Morrisons to buy a bag of organic turnips, but camp nonetheless.

After seeing a photograph of myself dressed as Father Earth, I dodged the sling like a dog escaping the noose of its lead.

xv
Now, here was a message to dash one's Friday-night hopes: "Hello, light of my life. I am looking forward to seeing you this evening, but it will only be brief as I think I will end up going out around 8ish. I will pump out some milk for you to give to the boy. Then I will be home later."

xvi
There was no privacy in being the father of a young child. I felt like I was being watched all the time. For instance, one evening I settled into a nice hot bath after a long day at the office. The water was soapy, bubbles were milling about my toes and the boy was absent – in a break from routine, his mother had already bathed him. I reclined into the warmth, let the rising steam obscure my spectacles, and began to ponder how it is the simple pleasures of life, et cetera, when Helen barged in through the bathroom's saloon doors with the boy in her arms. I was startled. What if, instead of my innocent repose, I had instead been engaged in reading the copy of Chat magazine that Helen had left on top of the laundry basket, or, worse, OK!'s special edition on Jade Goody's funeral? Thank goodness, I thought, that I was tired enough to find entertainment in suds and steam, and then I thought, hang on, she's just barged in here like nobody's business, who does she think she is – and why did I not lock the door?

The fact is that before the boy's arrival, a bath could be enjoyed in peace, without fear of interruption or rude awakenings, which are quite rude when one has saloon doors for a bathroom entrance. Now I was fair game, no matter what I was doing or where I was doing it. I would not have been surprised if I were to look up from a reverie on the loo to find Helen ushering in her aunts and uncles to witness me perform my stool. Look, it is the father! See him atop the trumpet box. Plop, plop, plop, plop, plop. Ah! Five chipolatas…

The next time I shaved, would telegrams have been sent to whom it may have concerned, announcing the event beforehand? "We invite you as the mother of Christopher Michael Young to attend his shaving ceremony on Sunday morning at 10am. There will be a champagne reception and canapés in the bathroom from 9.30am."

Gather round everyone, I have an itch gathering intensity on my right buttock and pretty soon I am going to have to… ooh, that's better, ah yes, yes.

xvii
I arrived at work one morning feeling stiff of joint. My knees were aching, my back was nearly killing me, my legs felt like jelly and my feet were sore. All this because, between the third and fourth month of his life, the boy had had his vehicle upgraded from pram to pushchair. The design of the latter was, obviously, different from the former, the upshot being that in pushing the pushchair I had to adopt a walking stance different to that used when pushing the pram. That might sound unremarkable, but over a distance of a number of miles, walking in a new way, with apologies to Monty Python's Ministry of Silly Walks, meant using different muscles and putting new strains on the old ones.

So, the boy's transport had changed, and it meant I had a bad back, knackered knees, et cetera. I explained my pains to a colleague. Ah, he said, rolling up his sleeves to reveal bruises and grazes. He had also endured a weekend which had taken its toll on the body, by playing a full game of competitive rugby. Scrums, line-outs, skidding-through-the-mud tries, bone-cracking tackles. "So," he asked me, "how did you get your injuries?"

"Pushing a pushchair," I told him. He seemed unimpressed.

I was reminded of The Sultans of Ping's homage to life in the middle of the road, Let's Go Shopping: "You can buy crisps and I can buy jam. You push the trolley, I'll push the pram."

xviii
A calamity befell Helen when she was pregnant. She was in a local charity shop searching for tat with which to fill our house when an elderly woman on one of those mobility scooters drove through the entrance. The woman was obviously unimpressed with the bric-a-brac on offer and made a swift retreat, which ended with her scooter becoming wedged in the doorway to the shop. Helen found the turn of events amusing, until she realised that the scooter had blocked the only exit from the shop and she was increasingly in need of the loo.

The daughter of the wedged invalid, who had evidently accompanied her mother into the shop, now began pushing the stricken vehicle from behind, while her mother barked instructions at her. After a minute or two of this, a passer-by tried to become a have-a-go hero by tackling the machine from its front end. Helen watched on, ever conscious of her bladder, as the scooter was pushed and pulled, and pulled and pushed, as if the passer-by had taken it upon himself to re-enact Rudjard Kipling's story of how the elephant got his trunk, with himself in the role of the crocodile and the scooter in the role of the elephant.

Having dismissed the feeble efforts of the crocodile to remove her from the threshold, the beached behemoth moved the scooter forwards and backwards by degrees of centimetres, a protracted manoeuvre which left the vehicle exactly where it had started. Helen, who by now had had enough of all this amateur dramatics, clambered over the mobility scooter, and its gob-smacked passenger, and into the street beyond. Helen and the boy, aged minus three months, were free, and beat a quick retreat home. The moral of the story: do not patronise your local charity shop – everything on sale is rubbish, the volunteers won't let you use their bathroom, and the threshold is not wide enough to accommodate some types of mobility scooter.

xix
The boy preferred his mother to me in more ways than I was probably conscious of. She was, after all, the giver of milk, of life itself in fact and, because she stayed at home while I went to work, the chief guardian of the child, and the main rearer. That might sound like I am saying her rear was bigger than mine, which it was, but that was fine and, anyway, not the point. Among other things, the boy preferred his mother to sleep on, either flat on her chest or propped up on her shoulder. He would not fall asleep in the same positions on me, no matter how I arranged myself and my clothing, sometimes even taking some of it off, sometimes even taking all of it off – remembering, of course, the midwife's words about the importance of skin-to-skin contact, not, of course, pursuing an insatiable appetite for nudity.

The thing is that Helen was, naturally for a new mother, how can I put it delicately, er, er, flabbier than me. Yes, her chest and shoulder had, um, flab, where I had skin and bone. No wonder then that for the boy his mother's torso was a luxurious mattress, and his father's a cold slab of concrete. On a very few occasions he was so tired after waking, from complaint of wind, nightmare or a neighbour's hubbub, that he did, on being picked up and comforted by me, fall asleep upright in my arms, my collar bone acting as his impoverished pillow. But generally the role of midnight comforter could only successfully be performed by the boy's mother, leaving his father free to ponder such conundrums as: I have just used the loo, but flushing it might wake the boy because Fate has placed the noisiest elements of the plumbing in the walls of the nursery. What should I do?

In consultation with Helen, it was decided that while the boy was asleep, the loo should remain unflushed following the evacuation of the bladder but to hell with the consequences if the bowel was involved. While staying with us one weekend, my mother felt the need to commemorate these instructions with a rhyme, for the purpose, apparently, of helping us all to remember them. I cannot now recall this charming ditty, but I think it involved the phrases "number ones" and "number twos", the latter of which was rhymed with "loo". Or was it "yellow" and "brown", rhymed, respectively, with "hello" and "gone down"?

I considered constructing a sign for the bathroom doors: ‘Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.’

xx
Two man-made objects: one is upright, 114cm high, 35.5cm wide and 34cm in depth, has a standard filter, consumes 1400 watts, has a hose length of four metres, a cord length of 9.3 metres, weighs 8.2kg, is bagless and comes with a surface adjuster as standard but no pet-hair tool. It has a large debris channel, a crevice tool and a five-year guarantee; the other is upright, 5 feet 11 inches high, has a waist measurement of 32cm and an unremarkable inside leg, consumes a recommended 2700 calories a day, has a hose length that has not generated any complaints, weighs 11 stone, has a man bag attached and comes with a beard as standard but no pet-hair tool. It has a large debris channel, a crevice tool that has not generated any complaints and no guarantee.
Which one did the boy prefer to talk to – I mean make noises at – when in the mood for banter? The vacuum cleaner, which for him was a strange messenger from another star. I, after all, was just a man.

xxi
Picking up the boy was no longer like lifting a baby, but more like lifting a person. He was no longer supine in body or soul, he did not just lie there staring at the ceiling waiting to be fed or changed or manhandled by relatives; he had, in fact, become a little person, reacting and talking to things and people like a madman. He was aware of his being plucked out of his cot, as one's line manager would be aware of being hoisted by the armpits from his office chair.

This newfound awareness meant more care had to be taken in the picking up, manoeuvring and placing of the boy. For instance, if for reasons of somnolence or haste I accidentally pinched him while raising him from his chair, the boy looked at me in a way that suggested he knew the contact number for social services; only a month or so previously, he would have turned a blind eye. And we now had to be more choosy with our selection of television and radio programmes – we did not want to be reminded by our son one day that he was nurtured within the glow of Ross Kemp On Gangs, or be told by a child psychiatrist that the boy's obsession with cows could be traced to his exposure of The Archers.

But perhaps what I was most concerned about here was the fact that I was definitely not a people person, and here we had a little person, not a baby who merely wanted to mind his own business and consume sleep and milk. There was only one solution – I was going to have to learn to start liking people; at least little people. For he was no longer a being, but a human being. From a distance the world looks blue and green. I believe the children are our future…

But seriously, the boy had crossed a line and was striding towards greatness.

xxii
We know that babies become upset when they are hungry, too hot or too cold, tired and soiled. Apparently, they also cry when they are bored. I was staggered by this information. The boy was not yet five months old and already he suffered from ennui? There are only so many things one can do to entertain a 19-week-old person when the novelty of the vacuum cleaner has worn thin.

If it was a nice day, I might have carried the boy into the garden and pointed out the plants and birds. But the garden was small, there were only so many plants and birds, and I was not Sir David Attenborough. So I found myself talking to him about the items on the washing line – "Those are mummy's pants… oh, look, socks… your bath towel, Kingsley!… socks… what is this, a napkin of some kind… look at the napkin, Kingsley…"
When a man is bored of laundry, he is bored of life, so we went back indoors, where I embarked, for the boy's benefit, on an inventory of the house – "Who is that in the mirror? Yes, it's you… and me… ah! The washing machine! See how it tumbles our linen!… socks… hmm, the bathroom… there's the bath… must give it a scrub… and whose room is this? Yes, it's your room…" – and then he started bawling because he thought I was going to plonk him in his cot and go downstairs to smoke. And he was probably as bored as hell.

xxiii
There were things my mother and father said and did to me as a child that to say and do today would be deemed at best politically incorrect and at worst outright abuse. For example, if I soiled my clothes with the mud pie I had been concocting in the garden, mother would accuse me of being "a dirty little Arab". If I was insolent to my father, he would drag me up the stairs by my shirt, yank down my trousers and underpants and administer a prolonged spanking with his open hand as I cried out for mercy.

Now, I cannot imagine, when the boy is of an age to be consciously naughty, that I will be able to, without shame, inform him that he is, say, a small, filthy Pole, especially not in Tesco. Likewise, I would like to think that his mother and I will be able to persuade him of repenting his sins without recourse to corporal punishment. Perhaps we will issue solemn vows, such as to refer to the boy by his middle name in public at every opportunity unless he stops stamping his feet and comes here at once. The danger here, though, is that the boy's middle name, through frequent use, will become shortened to Paddy because his parents belong to the MTV generation and have short attention spans. This will make him sound Irish, which is fine, of course, but I once heard a girl of easy persuasion say that all Irishmen are players, and we can't have that, not when he is two.

xxiv
As the boy’s arrival became imminent, and in the aftermath of his birth, the gifts showered upon him and his parents were myriad. This did not last long. After a few months, friends and relatives did not exactly lose interest, but they did lose generosity. This was fine by us. Most people don't have much taste anyway and seemed to think, on the evidence of their initial gifts, that we desired to dress the boy as a miniature sailor.

It did occur to me that there was one benefit of this latter sartorial folly – it would allow for a dad joke of dad-sized proportions. Picture the scene: the boy, in his sailor's suit, soils his nappy. The father enters and, referring to the smell, declares there is "a hoy in the air". He turns to the boy and hails him: "Ahoy there, sailor!"

I wonder if this masterpiece will sell as many copies as Angela's Ashes.

xxv
"Massage your breasts for a few minutes. Use flat of fingers, and gently move around the breast, gradually work your way towards the nipple and areola," it says here. "Do not drag your fingers over your skin. Some women spend 5-10 minutes on this. Hair brushing and shoulder massage before and during your expressing will relax you and increase Oxytocin levels. This will help the milk to flow. Some women make a fist and gently knead the breast, not dragging the skin and moving around the breast in circular movements, gradually working down to areola. Rolling your nipple between your finger and thumb stimulates Prolactin output."

The boy's mother had been leaving literature lying around again.

xxvi
We booked the boy onto a course of swimming lessons. It did not really dawn on me until the first session was imminent that this meant we had also booked me onto a course of swimming lessons. The words swimming lessons, though, were disingenuous. Organised by a company called something like Nipper Dippers, the sessions largely involved parents throwing water at their baby's head, dunking the baby in the water and, worst of all for fathers with an acute dislike of singing in public, singing.
In fact, the whole thing might not have been for the boy's benefit at all. I initially suspected we had signed up to the local swingers group, one which catered specifically for new parents – killing two birds with one stone, for what do you get if you combine singers and swimmers but swingers? After all, the sessions involved eight men in shorts wading about in chest-high water while their partners watched on from the side. Take away the babies and what you had was an octet of gents mincing about, or, in the eyes of their audience, strutting their stuff. Even the water was heated to sauna-like temperatures, making for a steamy atmosphere. I would not have been surprised if Tina Turner had strutted onto the poolside, belting out Steamy Windows or What’s Hove Got To Do With It?

Actually, the pool was heated not to make me lose pints of water through pores on every part of my body containing hair (nearly all of it), but to make conditions more comfortable for the babies, who get cold quickly. Fine. I get hot quickly, and irritable quickly.

The first lesson confirmed many of the anxieties I had about taking the boy to an event where I would be compelled to share my nakedness with other, close members of the general public. Having left Helen to loiter in reception among the discarded pushchairs and a couple arguing with a secretary about whether or not Cosmo was on the register, I entered the changing room with the boy in my arms. The first thing I saw was a bare pair of buttocks, which, as I averted my gaze in order to find an appropriate spot to set down our things, began to shudder in the corner of my eye as their owner performed a towel-drying routine that he seemed to have picked up from an Arabian belly-dancer. One part of me was chanting internally, "The floor is wet and slippery, everything is wet and slippery, do not drop the boy, do not drop the boy", while another part was pleading, "Do not look at the bottom, do not look at the bottom." Thankfully, and despite the impression that the steam crawling in from the pool area was the Mist of Time and I had stepped back 15 years and into the changing rooms of my secondary school, I managed to not only take off my own clothes and put on my swimming shorts without flashing anybody, but also put the boy in a water-tight nappy and pair of trunks without dropping him on the floor. I left the changing room and entered the pool area with a triumph only slightly tarnished by the conviction that my mobile phone and wallet were currently being snaffled by the man with the wobbly bottom.

Walking into the pool area was quite like opening an oven door only to be blasted in the face by air measuring 220 degrees Fahrenheit, which is an unsettling experience when one is carrying a small person who responds to fluctuations in temperature as quickly, but more noisily, than mercury. The impression that I had entered the fiery gates of Hell was reinforced as, one by one, the other seven fathers entered the pool area, each new entrant looking more like a former, hated boss than the last. In every sense of the phrase, I stood out like a sore thumb. The other men all had carefully maintained haircuts that belied a career at the hot end of customer relationship management and a weekend life in charge of a small baby at a second home in the country. I, on the other hand, looked like I had attempted to fashion an Elvis Presley quiff only to give up when I realised that the best I could hope for was Elvis Costello. What's more, I was the only one with a beard, if you exclude the man with a sort of manicured stubble-goatee who bore more than a passing resemblance to Billy Joel, aka the Piano Man. And I was the only one with tattoos. None of the other fathers, not even Billy Joel, had ‘Charlie don't surf’ in military font on his upper arm; and none had a cat's face which in Russian prisons denotes a thief. So, there were the Seven Fathers, striding pool-side with chests glistening and haircuts slicing wakes through the steam. They looked like they were auditioning for the role of English Boyfriend in an episode of Sex and the City. And there was me, ruffled, inked up with references to Apocalypse Now and Soviet death camps, in the corner, trying to stop the boy from slipping free of my increasingly sweaty grasp. The temperature was now 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit.

When Helen entered the pool area to take her place on the observation bench beside the Carrie Bradshaws, I would have shot her a glare that told her, "You signed me up to this?", if my full concentration had not been required to keep the boy, exponentially salamander-like, from escaping my embrace. Indeed, I had to spend the next five minutes before the lesson started ignoring the Mr Universe competition taking place around me while grappling with the wriggling, slimy eel. An onlooker might have assumed that a member of Motley Crew had broken into Nipper Dippers and was basting a small child.

Then the lesson started. It consisted of tipping a handful of water over the boy's head while shouting "Ready! Go!"; carrying him through the water on his stomach while shouting "Kick kick kick kick kick kick kick kick"; fully submerging him; trying to reassure his bawling face with an expression that communicated my complete calm at his controlled drowning; and encouraging him to hold on to the side of the pool while shouting "Hold on! Hold on!". So far, so good. The boy was getting used to the water. This is what we had paid for. Then the singing started. As if suddenly noticing that I had not yet been humiliated enough by the presentation of the bottom in the changing room and the parade of life's winners by the poolside, the instructor commanded us to place our babies on a mat floating in the middle of the pool. "Altogether now," she commanded. This was the fathers' cue to walk around the mat in a circle while harmonising to Twinkle Twinkle Little Star. Luckily I did not know the words to the song beyond "twinkle twinkle little star, how I wonder how you are", which enabled me to walk in the circle in silence, while miming badly. The instructor noticed this, and her look of disapproval returned me through the Mist of Time to secondary school, where my P.E. teacher had informed me during a cricket game that I threw the ball "like a girl" (the fucker is dead now). Nonetheless, I reassured myself that there was little point in me contributing to Twinkle Twinkle Little Star when the Piano Man himself was in the pool. And anyway, I was put off by the thought that a rousing chant of "In out, in out, shake it all about" was imminent, what with all those gruesome groins and wobbly bottoms lurking under the surface.

After the lesson I carried the boy back to the changing room. Just as I was beginning to make a success of changing the boy and myself while keeping him from crying and my socks from getting wet, I looked up to see a penis swinging towards me. I looked away for reassurance to find Billy Joel's bare arse bent over his child. The rest of the getting dressed was a blur. I could not locate a fresh nappy in the bag that had been packed by Helen. Perhaps she was testing me. Not only did I have to sing nursery rhymes with He-Man, Lion-O and the rest of the supermen, but I had to devise alternatives to a nappy from the bare ingredients in front of me: a pair of wet socks, my flip-flops and a slippery boy. Thankfully my desperate cry of "There is no nappy" – with the "no" part sounding like Frodo's lament for Gandalf's demise in Lord of the Rings ("There is NOOOOOooooooo nappy!") – was heard by Billy Joel, who, being a Perfect Father, of course, had a spare one to give me. Then, just as I thought it was all over, with man and boy fully dressed, the male model poncing about to my right declared that he had lost his towel. "Where did you see it last?" I ventured, before following his gaze to my bag, the top of which was open and displaying his towel in all its stolen glory. I must have mistaken it for my own in my haste to get away from the stubble, swaying willies and shivering buttocks. "Sorry," I said, handing him his towel. "I'm a bit disoriented." As I made my final preparations to leave, I wished I could whistle like a plumber.

Later, I asked Helen: "Is it your turn next week?"

xxvii
Grandmothers, inexplicably, tend to claim to be able to divine the gender of an unborn child, not necessarily through the laying on of hands or the dangling of a pendant over the belly to see which way it rotates, but often because they "just have a feeling" and "I've never been wrong yet". This talent does not manifest itself in grandfathers, who take a much more hands-off approach to pregnancy. If they did have such otherworldly powers, one assumes they would put them to better use, such as for the placing of large sums of money on the Grand National.

On the Christmas Day before the boy's birth, when he was eight months in utero, a friend of the family revealed he had a party trick. He could divine water, he told us, with the aid of a V-shaped stick or pair of metal rods. What's more, he could use the same tools to map the electric circuits within the walls of a house, and, the cherry on the cake, use the rods to ascertain a person's "aura". Everyone, he told us, gives off a field of energy, and he could analyse this to tell us certain things about the person undergoing trial by rod. Having drunk a few glasses of wine, I was willing to suspend my disbelief and humour this man, who was friendly enough and well-meaning. After all, I thought, if dogs can sniff out cancer in a man, why should not a man measure another man's energy field? It all sounded quite Chinese, and anyway, it was Christmas. The upshot of all this was that he wanted to test his powers on Helen's bump.

As a warm-up, the witchdoctor – I forget his name, let's call him Ken – obtained two L-shaped rods from somewhere and pointed them at a wall. They swivelled outwards within his fingers, then inwards, where they remained. "I'm picking up an electric current," said Ken confidently. He had every reason to be confident, I thought, noting that he was stood opposite the light switch. Then Ken let the rods guide his arms as they traced the wires feeding the switch. "Those are the wires," he said. Perhaps so, Ken, or maybe you are just a little drunk.

Noticing that we were thus far unimpressed as we stared on in silence from the sofa, Ken walked over to Helen and pointed his rods at her. One moved outwards, then the other one moved outwards, then the first one came back in a bit. The last action obviously concerned Ken, and he repeated the manoeuvre from the beginning. Again, one rod moved outwards, then the other one moved outwards, then the first one came back in a bit. We all looked at Ken, who furrowed his brow. "These aren't my usual rods," he said. "Helen's aura is interfering with the baby's… the rods are confused… but I think they're saying it's a boy." Either that, I thought, or Helen’s womb was harbouring a ladyboy.

Actually, it turned out Ken was right. But, like all good grandmothers, he did have a 50:50 chance.

xxviii
Parents are meant to blow raspberries, not smoke, in their child's face, which presents ethical issues for a father who has broken his cigarette fast. In my defence, I did so as a measure of self-prescription – I had picked up a horrible cough after months of not smoking, and decided in lieu of professional medical advice that a dose of the cancer sticks might kill off the lingering germs. And make me look cool.

However, walking behind a pushchair while smoking is not a good image, and the looks one receives from fellow pedestrians and loitering shopkeepers are not good either. The pleasure of smoking was lessened by my suspicion that everyone was watching me, and that all of them worked for social services. The feeling was worse when I had to stop the pushchair in order to drop and extinguish my cigarette: for those moments I was a sitting duck for scornful looks, real or imagined. It was best to keep moving.
Obviously I never knowingly let my smoke waft into the boy's face, but after a few weeks of faithful puffing in the opposite direction the guilt was too much and, once again, I packed it in. It did not help that there was a TV ad running at the time which featured children pleading with their parents to stop smoking so they would stay alive long enough to witness next week's egg and spoon race. Also, my cough was cured. (Please note: this does not constitute professional medical advice. Your doctor may prefer to prescribe Benylin, rather than Benny Hedgehogs.)

I also wanted to stop smoking to avoid the travails endured by my father in his relentless pursuit of Saint Nicotine. When I was small, he smoked in the lounge: there was an ashtray on his armchair, and the curtains and ceiling had a tarry tinge. Then, after new curtains were bought and the ceiling repainted, mother relegated him to the kitchen, where he puffed into the extractor fan above the oven. Then, after the kitchen was refitted, mother exiled him to the garage, where he fumed into the saws and screwdrivers hanging by nail on the chipboard. He was the first member of our household to be relegated to the outdoors since the cat fell out with my mother.

Back in those early days, of course, one could even smoke on airplanes. My mother and brother would sit in the last row of non-smoking, father and I in the first row of smoking, the two sections of the family, the uncool and the cool, divided by a mere curtain. Now Her Majesty's prisoners are the only people allowed to smoke indoors, which could be a sign of how far civilisation has come. This sense of progress, however, was somewhat compromised by the existence of armrest ashtrays on the last flight I took. I decided that I could use this to my advantage. Not wanting to get on a plane with the boy, who would likely scream and soil himself regularly throughout the flight, I could scare his mother into agreeing that a Winnebago in Bournemouth would be preferable to two weeks at an award-winning spa in St Lucia. "Look," I will say, "the planes still have ashtrays in the armrests, they must be older than the hills." "OK," she'll reply, "let's go camping!"

xxix
The security guards at supermarkets know to be on alert for mothers with prams frequenting the wines and spirits aisle – for it is an old trick to place expensive liquor in the luggage tray beneath the baby (if indeed there is one present) and then 'forget' to pay for it at the till. If detected, the guilty parent can act dumb – "My basket was full, so I put the bottle of Pol Roger in the pram." To which the jolly security guard might reply, "Surely you should be drinking Mumm champagne?"; to which the serious security guard might reply, "You're nicked."

The closest we came to grocery theft with the aid of pram as getaway car was less salubrious. The shop was Lidl, and instead of stealing champagne, we nearly forgot to pay for a 79p packet of extra mature cheddar. Luckily, Helen spotted the cheese partly concealed under the boy's feet and presented it to the checkout girl before she had a chance to call in reinforcements.

But security personnel can rest assured that, despite the incident with the cheese, the boy's pushchair, besides being his pushchair, had more innocent alternative uses for his parents. I preferred to see it as a Zimmerframe, and when on long walks with mother and boy, and sometimes on short ones when feeling fuzzy of head, I would ask to push the chair, not out of chivalry, but for want of something to hold on to. Pushing the chair was not only stabilising, it also provided an occupation for one's hands – particularly useful for a recently reformed smoker whose pockets, before now a safe retreat for fidgety hands, were brimming with squeaking and mooing plastic contraptions and an assortment of wiping devices.

More importantly, though, the pushchair gave one power of the pavement. Even whippersnappers in hoods who looked like they had skipped bail for selling their grandmother's dog respectfully stood aside for the chair. The result was that the pusher – that is, me – carved a wake through the busiest of high streets. I did not fidget with my trousers or stumble towards my destination like my legs had evolved into flippers.

The Americans like to call this device a 'stroller', but it would better be termed a Dignity Preserver. One afternoon I was standing with the chair quite happily in the designated section of the bus. Suddenly, a 14-year-old boy with a pathetic attempt at a moustache offered me his seat. I declined – after all, I was still enjoying being propped up by the chair's handle, so had no need to sit down on a seat covered in gum and the detritus of a McDonald's Happy Meal. He even called me "mate".

Helen later opined that my newfound friend offered me his seat out of respect for my moustache-and-beard combination. But I knew better – it was respect for The Chair.
At home, too, the chair had multiple functions. Helen got into the habit of using it as a temporary laundry basket. "Do I have any clean pants?" I would ask, apropos of not being able to find any clean pants to wear to work. "Try the pushchair," would come the reply.
"I need a clean shirt for tomorrow."
"There's one in the pushchair."
"Ironed?"
"Fuck off."

In fact, the only time we seemed to use our wardrobes and chests of drawers was just before taking the boy for a walk, when the necessity of putting him in the chair meant taking our clothes out of it.

xxx
Clothes became an issue after the novelty of the boy had worn off and friends and family were no longer keeping us well stocked through the Royal Mail. The boy’s friends – well, the children of the mothers who were friends with his mother, his chums, his associates, his foetal fraternity – were dressed like people. That is, their parents no longer put them in babygrows, but made them wear miniature versions of the adult clothes they were wearing – jeans, shirts, dresses, et cetera. On our arrival at an aunt's house, the relative took one look at the boy in his romper suit and exclaimed: "Oh my god, he's still in his pyjamas." No, we told her, those are his clothes, he is a baby.

For the boy’s male peers it was all chequered shirts and denim. They looked like very small cowboys, midget John Waynes with muslins instead of cravattes, chewing and spitting Rusks instead of tobacco. For the girls it was all billowing dresses and floral blouses. They looked like dolls that had been dressed by a five-year-old.

We were determined to keep the boy in his 'pyjamas' until at least his first birthday. But even here there were pitfalls. One day his mother dressed the boy in a white vest covered in black patches. He looked like a cow. Still, I would rather my son resembled a farmyard animal than a very small John Wayne – a cow rather than a cowboy – and the noises he was producing were at least appropriate. His gurglings had evolved into all manner of "hmmms" and "ooos" as he attempted, now trying to crawl, to communicate his four-legged view of the world. No doubt Ken would have predicted the weather according to the boy-cow's position on the floor. If he lies flat on his stomach, bring in the washing, it's going to rain. Wiggling his bottom? There's a storm brewing. Rolling onto his back and screeching with delight: the sun has got his hat on. "Ooo" was not quite a moo, but it was close enough.

xxxi
The boy's gravitational pull on old people was, in the main, harmless, but sometimes traumatic. Helen returned from the library one afternoon to report that an elderly, haggard woman had appeared from behind a bookshelf and, without encouragement or permission, began to poke the boy's cheek with a warty finger. When the hag started tugging on the interminable line of questioning that begins with "And how old is he?", Helen manoeuvred the boy from the reach of the finger and declared that it was time for him to feed and they had to leave immediately. But they had escaped one warty woman only for another to appear and make clear her intention to poke the boy while delaying his mother with inane interrogation. Perhaps remembering the scene in Rosemary's Baby in which Mia Farrow is handed a book entitled All Of Them Witches, Helen quit the library before more members of the coven had the chance to corner her.
Later I found myself in Tesco, where I had been sent with the boy to procure our comestibles. On entering the store, the boy began to wail – a performance he maintained for the duration of our adventure. With one eye on the shopping list written by his mother, and one eye on the reddening face of my charge, I first negotiated the fresh produce section. Somewhere between the bananas and broccoli, a contact lense became dislodged to my great discomfort, and I parked the boy beside a bucket of spinach in order to prod my afflicted eye back into vision. Helen chose this moment to phone me on my mobile. Assuming the matter was urgent, and assuming my fellow shoppers did not want to endure the approximation of birdsong emanating from my trouser pocket, I answered the call. The boy was screaming even louder than before, my eye was causing immense pain and Helen was issuing additional shopping instructions down the phone when, from among the throng, a middle-aged woman appeared by my side. Indicating the shawl covering the pushchair, she said, like a contestant on Catchphrase who has been asked to “say what you see”: "Your baby is all covered up."
My irritants were now multifarious, and, indeed, nefarious: the caterwauling boy, the needle in the eye, the barely audible shopping instructions issued by phone and the well-meaning, interfering old bag. I did not have enough control of my senses at that moment to tell the woman that, contrary to her accusation, the boy was not crying because his view of the lemons was compromised, he was simply protesting at being inside Britain's biggest supermarket. "Oh, fine then," she tutted at my silence and twitching eye. Thankfully that was the last I saw of her.

Having regained my composure and completed the shopping, I proceeded with the screaming banshee to the till. By now I had withdrawn the shawl to no remedial effect at all – the action had simply served the purpose of allowing the boy to focus his rage at passing faces, and for passers-by to witness the source of the hubbub which they first caught wind of seven aisles away and were now experiencing first-hand. As I unloaded my items onto the conveyor belt, the elderly woman before me in the queue took one look at the red rager and declared that "It's his lunchtime", before adding (in the general direction of the pushchair), "You're hungry aren't you?", and then, "Yes, you are, yes, you are." If I were not a pillar of society I would have interjected: "He is crying because he hates old people. He can smell death." But I did not say this. The woman, although as unhelpful to my situation as it was possible to be without taking the carrot from my basket and sticking it in my eye, obviously had good intentions. Luckily her interest waned when I vocalised the suggestion that the boy's nappy was fit to burst and that when it did, it was likely "to leak. Everywhere."

She turned her attention to packing her tomatoes.

xxxii
People kept asking us what nicknames we were using for the boy. "The boy," I informed them, and they seemed unimpressed. His babysitter vowed to shorten his name to Lee, which was annoying, as it made him sound like a plumber. Worse though was when we first announced the birth. An uncle posted messages of congratulations on Facebook in which the boy's name was spelt ‘Kingsleigh’, which, frankly, gave the impression that his parents planned to nurture him on KFC buckets and drive him around in a stolen Vauxhall Nova.

The uncle got his comeuppance. When the boy took a liking to him, it was suggested that he was merely responding to the uncle's utter baldness, which made him look like a big baby. The uncle was subsequently referred to as a big baby and, whenever the subject of the boy's hair was introduced, someone would always say, "Well, he has more hair than his uncle." Whenever the subject of the uncle's hair was introduced, someone would always say, "Well, you have less hair than your nephew."

At first I resisted humouring other people's desire for the boy to be given a nickname. After all, that will surely be the job of his school peers, and I did not know anyone with a nickname coined by their parents. The best I could come up with were Laddie and Boyo, but they made him sound like a sheep dog and a Welshman respectively. Then it dawned on me that a nickname would actually be of use. Indeed, there would come a time when I would need to use either the full name or the nickname depending on whether the boy had been naughty or good. So, if he had been bad: "Kingsley! Stop smoking mummy's cigarettes!" And good: "Kingers, these eggs are poached to perfection!"

His mother, though, did not approve of Kingers. Likewise she had never warmed to my pet name for her in the later stages of pregnancy: Fatty Fatty Fat Fat. Similarly, she requested that her mother, the self-crowned Oma, should no longer be referred to as Osama Bin Laden. In pursuit of a more benign sobriquet, the best I could come up with was Omar Sharif, the moustachioed Egyptian actor, and Barack Hussein Obama II, the 44th president of the United States. There was continuity here in the Arabic-sounding names, but clearly the star of Doctor Zhivago and the leader of the free world had more positive connotations than the CIA's most-wanted man. However, Sharif and Obama were both men, and the boy's grandmother was patently a woman. I overcame this problem by applying the fact that the actor was famed for his bridge playing, and the president was not. Bridge is something old women do, too. Which is why Helen's mother was now known as Omar Sharif.

xxxiii
One morning I was getting ready to leave the house for work – a rushed affair that depended on the regimentation of procedures such as brushing one's teeth for no longer than 30 seconds – when Helen hailed me from the nursery. "Come and look at this!" she shouted. "Now!" Only ten seconds into my brushing, I continued at the task for the remaining 20 seconds of my schedule, during which time I heard shouts of "You must come now!" and "Quick, this is important!"

Having satisfied the requirements of my oral hygiene, I glanced at the time and realised I was late. Something must have happened to knock me off course. I lingered in bed too long, perhaps. I fumbled repeatedly with my underpants, maybe. "Why didn't you come and look?" Helen now demanded, visibly furious. I felt guilty, and for a few moments sidelined the morning routine. Had I missed the boy speak his first word? Was he crawling? Walking!?

"He did a massive poo," Helen explained. And then, as I refocused my efforts on getting out of the house on time, she added in a disappointed tone: "I wanted you to see it."

If a thousand babies were given mushed-up sprouts and cabbage to eat for a hundred million years they would eventually fart like trumpets the opening notes of Richard Strauss's Also Sprach Zarathustra: "Ba, ba, baaaa… BA-BAHH!… bum-bum bum-bum bum-bum bum-bum bum-bum bum-bum bum-bum bum-bum. Ba, ba, baaaa… BA-BAHH!… bum-bum bum-bum bum-bum bum-bum bum-bum bum-bum bum-bum bum-bum."

Now that would be worth being late for.

xxxiv
When the boy's mother asked me to write her a poem, she ended up being disappointed. "Roses are red, violets are blue," I said, and then thought about the composition for 20 seconds. "…And so are you."

Despite such blundering in the field of poesy, I felt compelled to write a nursery rhyme for the boy, partly because even Row Row Row Your Boat had left me flummoxed in the pool by the second verse.

The following should be sung to the tune of Michael Jackson's Billy Jean:

Willy Clean

Cots are more like a prison cell, and they make me yell
For my next bath, mum what do you mean I am the one
Who will splash on the floor in the bath?
She said I am the one who will splash on the floor in the bath.

My mummy wanted my willy clean as it has always been,
Then my daddy turned on the taps so bubbles did float in the bath,
Who will splash on the floor in the bath.

Daddy always told me be careful of what you do
And don't go around breaking smelly farts,
And mummy always told me be careful in slip'ry baths
And be careful of what you eat 'cause you do not yet have teeth.

Willy clean I feel much better,
Mummy's a girl who claims that daddy's the one
Because Kingsley is his son,
She says daddy's the one because Kingsley is his son.

xxxv
There will come a time when the boy will approach me for help with his homework. The fact is, I am woefully unprepared. History, for instance, is not my strong point, largely because my long-term memory is nothing to write home about. I think I sustained brain damage in my teens during a deep-sea dive in which a flipper fell off and I swam in descending circles for 30 minutes unable to equalise my pressure. And I find it difficult to remember names and places and times and dates, and when I do remember them, tend to get them in the wrong order. This is something I may have inherited from my father, who still refers to ITV as ATV. More worryingly, he often refers to me, thirty years after naming me Chris, as Stuart.

So, it might interest the boy to learn that Buzz Lightyear was the first man on the Moon, a feat he achieved in the USS Enterprise. His co-pilot on the mission, Mollie Sugden, was the second man to set foot on the lunar surface, on which he erected the Hammer and Sickle.

The boy was born in the reign of Babs Windsor, the Queen of England, who was seated on the throne after winning the TV contest It's A Knockout. Her husband, Richard the Lionheart, lived in London Zoo, from where walkers in Regent's Park could often hear him roar. Known affectionately by the tabloid press as Top Cat, his dung was collected daily by London’s park rangers, who distributed it in public gardens to ward off the Blue Peter badger.

After the Big Bang, television was invented by the Dalai Lama, who, in his autobiography, Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code, declared Noel's House Party to be the best programme ever broadcast. He subsequently changed the name of Tibet to Crinkly Bottom.

Then came the Middle Ages, when Jesus killed Judas after selling his soul to Gandalf the Grey. World peace was eventually restored when Princess Diana married Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in the Bermuda Triangle, a place named after the bride's preferred style of merkin.

xxxvi
I had mixed feelings when a work commitment meant Helen and the boy would be away from the house for three nights. At first, I felt like a bachelor again. How would I occupy my time and take advantage of my newfound, albeit brief, freedom from the chores of childrearing and girlfriending?

On the first evening of my liberation, I spent the train journey home listing all the possibilities: sit in the bath for two hours, not letting the call of nature interrupt me; listen to that Sultans of Ping album I bought a few years back; have a Ginsters ploughman's sausage roll for dinner; eat three Müller Fruit Corner yoghurts for dessert, each of them apricot flavour, which is the tastiest; smoke in the dining room; retrieve that copy of Escort magazine from under the spare bed; retrieve the Lubed Girls 2 and Sweet Black Cherries DVDs from under the spare bed; what is the name of those free porn websites I used to use?; trawl purposely through Facebook for 45 minutes without feeling guilty about not having a real conversation with someone; watch The Good, The Bad and The Ugly – need to get back in touch with my masculine side; find myself flipping through the Sky channels at the saucier end of the spectrum to which I do not subscribe but which show free previews on the hour; write a book, I don't know why, no one will ever read it; devise a sure-fire winning gambling strategy for the upcoming football season; sleep in the middle of the bed, not right at the very edge of it, an area to which I have been shepherded by an L-shaped breastfeeding pillow that occupies twice the volume of physical space than a standard-sized and regular-shaped pillow; sell that Sultans of Ping album on eBay; let nature's gasses flow from me in whatever room I happen to be in; have a Cadbury's Creme Egg for breakfast; retrieve Japanese Teenage Sluts from under the spare bed; meet up for drinks on Tuesday night, Wednesday night and Thursday night; don't go home; try on that green dress in the wardrobe – what would it actually feel like?; do we have a full-length mirror?; phone in sick and sit on the beach all day instead of going to work; retrieve Euro Slit from under the spare bed; sleep in the spare bed just because I can and am not doing so to escape Helen's snoring – are our guests comfortable?; ignore Helen's request to get the landlord to fix the broken fridge; watch that documentary about lumberjacks, instead of Masterchef again – need to get in touch with my masculine side; apricot-flavoured Fruit Corners might go off – tell the landlord about the fridge; watch Ross Kemp in Search of Pirates, could it be as good as Ross Kemp on Gangs?; write intriguing vignettes on my life and post them to my excellent blog, This Quintessence of Dust; accept invites I would normally refuse and which, if I thought about it, I know I should refuse because I won't be able to honour them; agree to go out next Tuesday, a school night, and next weekend, when I know full well we are expecting a visit from Omar Sharif; carry out all the tasks I don't have time for any more, such as cut my toe nails, shave the increasingly thick hair from my shoulders, pluck my nasal hair; defecate without a time limit – and with the door open, so I can hear the radio in the kitchen; Ice Road Truckers – need to keep in touch with my masculine, truck-driving side; idea for a sitcom: within out-of-town shopping plaza Greensleaves, four shopkeepers – Jefferey Liddle Phelps, Max der Azda Price, Rye Sonting Newton Day and Morris Öns – engage in a turf war and vie for the ultimate prize: a personal profile in Mall Teasers magazine; look for that AJP Taylor book, I need to brush up on my history; send my Architects' Biscuits idea to Fox's – a presentation box featuring Bourbon Foster Cremes and Jammy Rogers…

I arrived home. It was empty. It was horrible, I was lonely. So I went to bed.

xxxvii
The appointment of the boy's godparents was necessitated by our decision to have him Christened. We were not religious, we just wanted the boy to receive as many presents at Christmas and on his birthday and on his Christening as possible, preferably in the form of cash, which is why we thought he would need two godfathers and two godmothers. That's a lot of potential presents, or a lot of potential horses’ heads in the beds of the boy's enemies, depending on whether or not one is familiar with the work of Mario Puzo.

The non-religious nature of this future Christening was emphasised by the backgrounds and lifestyles of the godparents-to-be. Of the four, only one had been Christened herself – baptised, actually, for she was a Roman Catholic Neapolitan – which pretty much put paid to any idea that they would be responsible for the boy's spiritual education. What's more, both of the godmothers were mistresses to married man (the godmothers were not married to the godfathers, another ploy to ensure the maximum possible income of gifts – that is, one gift on each occasion from each godparent, rather than one from each couple of godparents). As we were not planning to stage the ceremony in France, we were certain that the vicar would not approve of the godmothers' predilection for sugar daddies. So, one thing was clear: in front of the vicar, there would be no talk about God, no talk about marriage, and no talk about Christening.

But we felt we had chosen the right people for the job – of all our friends and family, they were among the highest wage earners. One of the godfathers asked if he could be in charge of sport, cricket specifically, while the other just seemed embarrassed to have been asked, and responded to the request with a look that seemed to say, "You're asking me? I'm the last person I'd ask to be someone's godfather." I supposed that with sport already taken, this one could be responsible for guilt – compensating the boy for his lack of personal involvement in the role of godfather by showering him with gifts, hopefully cash. I did, though, wonder what the godmothers would be in charge of. Free love?

The boy could have done much worse out of the situation. One man, whom Omar Sharif suggested would be a perfect godfather and was, in her eyes, the very salt of the earth, was revealed to have a dark side. For he had a few years previously daubed a swastika on his bedroom wall in fluorescent paint (apparently it still glows nice and bright with the light off) and more recently voted for the British National Party in a local election.

So I reckoned the boy was better off with the homewreckers and heathens.

xxxviii
"Who is in your book?"
"Osama Bin Laden."
"Who is that meant to be?"
"Your mother."
"You can't call her that."
"Why?"
"She'll read it."
"I use the name affectionately."
"Osama Bin Laden, affectionately…"
"OK, how about Omar Sharif?"
"That's another man."
"Dr Zhivago?"
"You're going to have a lot of explaining to do."
"I know. I'll speak to her, it will be fine."
"Am I in the book?"
"Yes."
"Do I come across as a nagging bitch?"
"No, of course not."
"Oh, I do, don't I? I come across as a nagging bitch."
"No."
"Are you in it?"
"Yes, of course… bugger."
"What?"
"When you told uncle Michael that I was writing a book, I told him that he was in it."
"So?"
"He isn't in it. I'm going to have to write him in."

Uncle Michael
The boy had a great-uncle. His name was Michael.

xl
Women tend to make friends more easily than men. Or, to be more precise, mothers tend to make friends more easily than fathers. Within days of the boy's arrival, Helen had nestled herself within the bosom of a coterie of ladies, whom she met at a mother-and-baby group. Let’s call them Barbara, Sandra and Brian. They did not include Big Fat Wendy, who, apparently, was disgusting and, I was told, "probably has a freezer full of crap from Iceland". This assertion was backed up with the comment: "Even Sandra, who is kind to everyone, said Big Fat Wendy was disgusting." Yet despite this, the mothers made friends more easily than the fathers, who, if they were honest, would rather not have bothered.

When Helen invited her coterie and their boyfriends and husbands (BAHs) to our house for dinner, the contrast in the way the different sexes behaved was marked. Immediately on arrival, the mothers went into the sitting room, for birds of a father flock together, to update each other on the minutiae of their biology – I understand that the subjects discussed required the use of words such as "prolapsed", "painful," "during" and "intercourse", as well as "started", "lactating", "while", "he", "was", "playing", "with", "my" and "tits". The fathers meanwhile removed themselves to the garden, where they engaged in small talk about cars, bikes and the weather.

After ten minutes in the sitting room, Helen knew more about the intimacies of the women's recent existence than even their own mothers and general practitioners. After forty-five minutes in the garden, I had ascertained that the weather was predicted to turn sour on Sunday, that one of the BAHs enjoyed cycling, and that the other drove a jalopy.

I got the feeling, though, that the fathers were united in their sense of having been forced to take part in the social occasion against their will. For while the mothers had sought each other out during Baby Boogie and Sling Group – yes, there was organised support available for mothers who wanted to learn the one hundred and one ways to carry a baby in a sling – the fathers had no intention of ever meeting, let alone stand in a semi-circle in someone's garden to swap tales on the joys and miseries of childrearing.

Perhaps, to even the balance between the maternal and paternal level of disclosure, the BAHs, prompted by their partners' undoing of braziers in anticipation of breastfeeding, should have dropped their trousers and continued their conversation sans pantaloons. It might have broken the ice more easily and given the men an idea of what it feels like for a mother when she has to get them out in public. It might also have enabled, in response to the maternal statement "I've seen such-and-such's tatties", the paternal declaration "Well, I've seen what's-his-name's John Thomas", before the supplementary: "It's much smaller than mine."

One more thing united the BAHs – there was a definite spirit in the garden of 'look at us men, we're young, the kids are asleep, we're drinking beer and the womenfolk are just in there, comparing breasts'. I think we all drank to that, albeit subconsciously.

xli
I could no longer announce my imminent visitation of the loo as "going to the little boy's room" because the little boy's room was now the nursery and I did not want to give the impression that I was off to perform a dirty protest in the chamber in which my son slept and dreamt. This is not to say that I had started referring to the nursery as "the little boy's room", because to do so would be to equate it with the loo, which would also be wrong despite the acts and smells that often occurred within.
One solution would have been to rename the loo the "big boy's room" when in polite society, but this might have given the impression that I had 'come out' and moved in with Billy Joel from swimming.

Perhaps "plop shop" would be better. Plop shop has an onomatopoeic quality that children respond well to when learning new words, so it could come in useful when potty training. Although, to avoid confusion, a distinction might need to be made between the potty itself and the loo, between the plop pot and the plop shop, the first being a little boy's plop pot and the latter a big boy's plop shop. If the boy makes a mess of proceedings, we could say that things have gone to pot; in my own department, during an anus horribilis, I could be all over the shop. When holidaying on the Continent, it will be useful for us to know that the Italians might call the potty a pentola ploppa, the French a pot plop, and the Greeks a δοχείο plopalopalous.

xlii
Some people soothe their screaming babies to sleep by putting them in the car and driving them round the block a few times. Others swear that placing the child in front of an active washing machine will hypnotise it to somnolence. And my mother claims that laying the child on top of the tumble drier is the most effective method, as the vibrations will rock it to sleep. None of these tricks, however, were guaranteed to work on the boy, who, when in full throttle, would only be placated by a rather odd song played through his mother's mobile phone.

As a bachelor, for want of anything better to do, I once engaged myself in the art of the amateur deejay. One resulting creation from many hours of toil at my computer's virtual mixing desk was We Dislike To Party. I conjured up this monster of a tune by, to use the parlance of our youth, mashing up The Vengaboys' We Like To Party with the Manic Street Preachers' version of the theme from MASH, aka Suicide Is Painless. Now, a few years after my magnum opus had been discredited as a folly of misspent youth, we were using it to calm down the wailing boy. Nothing else, whether it was the washing machine thrashing a full load or the family saloon navigating the vicinity, worked to the same effect. And no other tune, be it Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata or the latest offering from The Killers, was good enough.

It was as if the boy's screams to the gods were code for: "Please, father, play We Dislike To Party again, for I am in mean spirits and this song speaks to me like no other. And turn it up to ten, for everyone should hear it and share in my pleasure."

Every girl, and the boy, loves a DJ.