Breaking Fast: Dad’s in the Stress Business

Breakfast is the little chunk of free-time/me-time enjoyed in the gap between stirring from bed and stumbling out the door for another soul-crushing day performing menial tasks for minuscule pay that will barely cover your overheads, but make fat-cats and shareholders significantly richer. How do I like my coffee in the morning? Bitter, thanks. Very bitter.

‘Break fast’ is also a description of what happens to your sanity and self-control when you’re trying to work through the breakfast routine with your children. I’ve always been a morning person, but no longer. I’m now a mourning person – in mourning for the times when I could be a morning person without the happy whistles being ripped from my lips by two children going to war over a fucking waffle or something.

Not all breakfasts, of course. Some of them can be a blessed victory. It’s the law of averages. If you stood forty-feet away from a basketball net with your back to it and lobbed basketballs behind you like a human trebuchet, you’d get the odd three-pointer from time to time. Some mornings we bound down the stairs singing and dancing like the hosts of a 1970s variety show. We have cutesy conversations, play practical jokes and stop just short of shooting rainbows from our eyes. Most mornings, though, breakfast feels like the basketball’s rebounded off the backboard, come bouncing back towards me at great speed, and knocked me unconscious.

My two boys, 3 and 5, are a close-knit team: they cuddle; they play; they laugh; they have each other’s backs. But closeness isn’t all sunshine and lollipops. Sometimes that closeness brings out the worst in them, triggers some genetic or chemical imperative deep inside them to fight to the death over scant resources in the cramped conditions of our cave… I mean house. I swear sometimes those two boys go to bed bickering, proceed to bicker with each other inside their dreams, and then wake up to recommence bickering immediately, a seamless chain of ten-hour-long bickering that surely qualifies for inclusion in the Guinness Book of World Records.

They bicker about everything: who’s first to use the toilet; who’s first to go down the stairs; who gets to be carried down the stairs, or gets to hold my hand; who gets the first cup of juice – ‘I WANT THE GREEN CUP, I SAID I WANTED THE GREEN CUP!’ ‘THEY’RE BOTH GREEN, YOU BASTARDS!’ – who gets a vitamin tablet first… everything. Bicker, bicker, bicker. I sometimes feel like calling in the UN. Or getting the Knesset and the Palestinian Authority to arbitrate.

Here’s a typical scene for you. Let me take you into the dark heart of our kitchen (by this point, the boys have already fought over who gets to squeeze the jelly-meat sachets into the cats’ bowls):

I put two plastic breakfast bowls on the counter-top. Jack walks into the kitchen first. I ask him what he wants. He asks for a type of cereal we don’t have at the moment. I tell him we don’t have it. He takes a strop. I talk him down. He relents. I ask him to choose again. He chooses another brand of breakfast cereal we don’t currently have. I imagine myself drowning in a giant vat of Rice Krispies. Finally, he chooses Cheerios, which I pour into a bowl.

Chris the Younger walks in. What’ll it be, Christopher? Cheerios, he says. Jack loses his shit. ‘I don’t want Cheerios if he’s having Cheerios. I want Chocolate Hoops instead.’

‘Me want Chocolate Hoops!’ shouts Christopher, his face contorting into a half-cry.

I imagine myself being the little boy inside the hooped cereal almost eaten by Rick Moranis in ‘Honey I Shrunk the Kids’, but this time I’m eaten. I can feel Rick Moranis crunching through my bones like candy, and it feels good.

The odds are high that one of the kids will either spill their juice, or spill their milk and cereal all over the living room table and floor. I prepare myself for the possibility, but I’m never really prepared. Whenever it happens I still contemplate trying to choke myself to death with rolls of kitchen-towels.

We watch an episode of classic Doctor Who with breakfast. We do it every morning. It’s nice. Twenty minutes of calm and curiosity, of imagination and inspired questions. Half-way through the episode they finish their food, put down their spoons and canter over to the couch, ready to fight over who gets to sit on the left-hand side of me, and who gets to sit on the right-hand side.

The TV goes off, and I ascend the stairs to complete my morning ritual of shit and shower. Again, flip a coin. Will my peaceful poo-poo be interrupted? Will these little poo-surpers of the throne oust me naked and annoyed into the hallway? Yes. It’s 50/50 to be honest. Last week we formed a vast Mexican Wave of evacuated effluent. I sat first, Jack hammered on the door, I yielded to him (you sacrifice for your children – plus, I didn’t want to have to clean up his shitted pants), then no sooner had Jack plopped the first dollop than his mini-me was throwing open the door and angrily demanding that he, quite literally, move his ass.

It’s chaos.

But I wouldn’t have it any other way.

(Yes I would, but I didn’t want to end this with you thinking I was a bad person)

DISCLAIMER: Some aspects of the breakfast routine may have been exaggerated for comedic effect. Real breakfasts may be 20 to 40 per cent more blissful than listed herein. Any similarity to persons living or dead is wholly intended, as I’m writing about me and my children, you arse.

The Pain (and Joy) of Sending Your Kid to School

Jack’s last day of nursery was melancholic. For me. Not for him. He ran out with a smile on his face and a spring in his step, just like he had every other day. I alone was left to feel the weight of time pressing upon both our shoulders, leaving Jack free to dance between sunbeams in the soft summer breeze. As it should be. That’s part of a your job as a parent: to absorb life’s upsets and irreconcilable truths on behalf of your children so that in later life their existential horrors can be all their own.

When that nursery door slammed shut behind Jack on that last day, he had no idea it would stay shut forever. It sounded like a gun-shot to me, but he didn’t even flinch. Future, past, and present run together in his thoughts like an artist’s palette in the rain. His life – time itself – isn’t portioned or partitioned, and so existence simply is, and things simply are. There’s nothing to fret about; no subtext to analyse. Christ, I envy him. [gulps down another Citalopram]

My wife and I took Jack out of nursery on a Thursday, a week before term officially ended, because we were flying out for a family holiday/honeymoon combo that very afternoon. I collected him at mid-day, a few hours before take-off. As we left the building his classmates were still whooping and dashing and laughing, business as usual, so Jack had no sense of something momentous having happened. There were no cues around him to tell him how to feel. It made me wonder just how much of our sadness is ceremony, a ritual learned like the steps of some lugubrious waltz. It is sad, though. The best, happiest and most innocent days of his life are now behind him, and, in a cruel twist of fate and biology, he probably won’t ever remember them.

Us on Jacks first day of school. His crazy little brother his doing his Gollum thing in the background

The end of nursery and the beginning of primary education can be a tough transition for children and parents alike. Walking through your kid’s nursery class as a parent or guardian is like walking through some wonderful dream. It’s a magical, toy-filled living room you never have to tidy up, with grubby, screaming kids in it that you never have to endure for any longer than you absolutely need to. You can spend as little or as much time in there as you like. When you drop your kid off in the morning you can spend twenty minutes helping them to settle, feigning wonderment at their ten thousand identical pictures of stick men, and variously tripping over other people’s children; when you pick them up at the end of the day you can spend another twenty minutes in hovering about, hoping that the nursery teacher isn’t going to pull you aside to tell you that your little cherub has stabbed a fork into another kid’s eye, or started reciting grandpa’s favourite racist rhyme about Chinese people.

During the day you can pop in to drop off egg cartons, or bits of pasta with googly eyes drawn on them, or a bag of Y-Fronts, or illuminous hymn books, or whatever crazy shit they’ve asked you to donate this month. You can stick around for the bulk of the day helping them to make fairy cakes with bogies baked into them, or build towers out of tea-bags, tea-spoons and tubs of butter. You can turn up in the middle of the day and take your kid out of class to attend a Mongolian throat singing lesson, if that’s what tickles your fancy. Nursery is an amorphous, collective experience.

School isn’t, and by necessity it can’t be, because part of school’s function is to prepare children for the hellish institutions in which they’ll find themselves trapped as adults, and you can’t take your favourite aunty, rolls of sticky-back plastic, coloured paper and a stuffed parrot to work with you as an adult, unless, that is, your favourite aunty has a massive stroke and you’re employed as her carer.

When you drop your child off for their first regular day of school, you’re bundling them into a fortress. This isn’t your world anymore. YOU… SHALL NOT PASS! The military discipline starts aproper. The kids are organised into quiet, at-heel little lines, awaiting the clanging-ding of the school bell and the Pavlovian rigours of the education system… although with rather more of an emphasis on gluing things and drawing pictures of cats than that last sentence implies.

Jack jumped into his first day with happiness and curiosity. As we all sat in the gymnasium receiving our talk from the headmistress, teachers started calling out kids’ names so they could be grouped together for the walk to class. When Jack heard his name, you’d have thought he’d won an Academy Award. ‘That’s me! That’s my name!’ he said, jumping out of his seat.

I have only vague recollections of my early years at primary school, little flutters of memory, like magic cuts of video-reel blown in the wind: pipe cleaners; that glue that sets on your hand like a second gooey skin; the smell of chalk and sadness; little desks arranged like rows of square islands at which our tiny forms were marooned, adrift in a sea of quiet and boredom; dusters the size of 100-year-old tortoises.

Things are different for Jack (and will be for his brother, Chris, who’s still got a few blissful years of googly-eyed pasta in-front of him). They’re better. The powers that be have closed the gulf between nursery and the early years of primary school. They now all bleed into each other, making the transition between the two a lot smoother, and a lot less daunting. We’ve finally cottoned on to the fact that little kids are better taught through play, fun, and tactile learning. There’s plenty of time for them to sit deathly still in a suffocatingly quiet room bored shitless and wishing they could escape once they join the work-force.

I remember my primary one teacher, Miss Donaldson, a thin, teetering waif of a woman whose head looked altogether too delicate to rest upon her stick-like shoulders. She was like Popeye’s Olive Oil but with big 80s glasses, and the personality of an awkward and squirrelly church organist who didn’t really like children. Her skin was a waxy alabaster, her cheeks a bright rosy red, like they’d just been pinched by a crab. She once shouted at me for opening my packed lunch about a minute before the lunch bell, and my mum came to school to shout at her. I had some of my first sexual thoughts about Miss Donaldson. They were wholly PG in flavour, of course, because no 18-rated input had yet reached my eyes (and glands). I had a dream where she gently rebuked me while parading about in white underwear. This tells me that I must’ve studied the lingerie section of the Argos catalogue in some detail at some point in my very formative years.

Luckily – or perhaps unluckily – for Jack, most primary school teachers these days are young, attractive urban professionals in their mid-twenties, so any burgeoning romantic and sexual fantasies he goes on to develop around the authority figures in his life will be a little less Dickensian in character.

It scares and excites me in equal measure that Jack is now a few notches removed from the sphere of our parental influence, and will continue to move further away with each passing year. Our input, once absolute, will now be diluted, and sometimes overwhelmed by the data and cues he receives from other sources: peers, teachers, other authority figures. I’m excited to see him learn new skills and information, uncover hidden talents and barter with exciting ideas and concepts, but I’m terrified of that inevitable day when some wee git in his class tells him what a dildo is.

I was largely a good little guy when I was a nipper, although I was undeniably off-kilter. At home, when I was 4, the local farmer had to chap my mum’s door to tell her I was in his field ‘yaa-ing’ at the half-wild horses like I was a cowboy. When I was 5, at the height of my parents’ divorce, amid the uncertainty and confusion, I blagged my way out of the class at day’s end and walked 2 miles home on my own. A few years later I tried to get our headteacher to sign off on distributing a comic I’d co-produced with a classmate, a request she denied on the grounds that the strip on the front cover showed a man boiling a baby. FASCIST!

I wonder what stories and memories my kids will have to share once they’re looking back on their school days, Wonder Years-style, like I am now.

God bless technology, is all I can say. It’s a modern scourge, certainly, but also an indispensable window on Jack’s learning. We, as parents, may be physically blocked from the classroom (except on play-days and parents’ nights), but social media grants us full access to their daily activities and highlights. We need this, because Jack has already become a teenager.

‘How was school?’

‘Good.’

‘What did you learn about?’

‘Stuff.’

[sigh]

[consults phone]

It’s going to be an interesting twelve years.

The Sex Life of Parents

As a teenager I worked very briefly in the tomato department of a fruit-and-veg packing plant. I had to stand at a conveyor belt for eight hours a day placing tomatoes – eight tomatoes at a time – into an infinity of plastic punnets. Tomato, tomato, tomato. Punnet, punnet, punnet. Before taking this job I’d counted myself among the tomato’s greatest fans. I loved everything about those round, red sods: their soup, which was warm and comforting, like a cuddle at a lower-tier relative’s funeral; how the tangy wetness of a single sliced tomato could bring a whole bag of finger-waggin’ sass to a boring old cheddar sandwich (imagine a tomato saying ‘Hmmm mmmm’, ‘you go girl’ and ‘ah don’t THINK so’); how easily a tomato could be transformed into a portable ballistic weapon with a single bite.

After two-and-a-half days of non-stop tomato-packing it’s fair to say that my love for them was waning. As tomatoes dropped through my fingers by the thousand-load they came to assume the consistency and snack-appeal of cricket balls, possessing the sass not of an enormous black woman in the audience of Ricky Lake, but of a recently-deceased Alan Titchmarsh. Tomato, tomato, tomato. Punnet, punnet, punnet. Tomatoes. I was bloody sick of them. Immune to their charms. They were just things now, lifeless, inanimate things, devoid of all joy and use and substance. I never wanted to sink my teeth into one of those round mother-fuckers ever again.

That’s pretty much how witnessing the births of my children made me feel about vaginas.

At least for a while. The forswearance was temporary, dear reader. Once the stitches had healed, and the missus had reclaimed her inclination, and my NAM-style fanny flashbacks had ceased – ‘The head… the head was sticking out, and, and it was blue, man… it was covered in blood and …bent out of shape and… oh CHRIST… (swigs another quart of bourbon)’ – things went back to normal. Attitudinally at least.

Unfortunately, the temporary reframing of my perspective on vaginas was merely the opening salvo in a much wider war upon my sex life; a war that was being waged against me by – in a weird, round-about-way – my own sex life from the past. My enemy: the physical manifestation of fifty per cent of my own sainted DNA.

Having sex with kids Having sex when you’ve got kids

Your baby’s first words to the world, unspoken and unspeakable, consist of a simple resolution never to let you have sex again. ‘Em, hello – you’ve got me? Why would you want to do this again? PUT THOSE THINGS AWAY!’, their wails seem to say. Babies are nature’s most exquisitely evolved biological padlocks and chastity belts. Your new kid on the block is a cock-block; a hex on your sex. How much wood would a rude dad chuck if a rude dad’s son hucked puke? I’m not even sure what that last sentence actually means, but I do know, with clarity and certainty, that y’all ‘aint getting any sex – at least not until after the divorce.

Until then you’ll roam the earth a foggy-eyed sexless husk, splitting your time between cooing and cursing, pooing and nursing. Inclined to be amorous, but too tired to follow through, or else perfectly well-placed physically but too mentally frazzled to get into the swing of things.

Or, worst of all, the planets of your desire will align, and you’ll be in the midst of blissful sexual abandon when a baby’s cry will cut through the air and wilt your willy away to nothing. They know, they just seem to KNOW when you’re at it, those tiny bastards, wherever you are in the house, and whichever stage of the process you’re at, and they’ll move heaven and earth to put a stop to your shenanigans.

Our kids have always seemed unknowingly to favour their mother on such occasions, and many, many times my chivalry has been punished; having selflessly provided pleasure through non-penetrative means I’ve been denied an orgasm of my own by the sounding of a baby’s cock-blocking klaxon, halting us pre-coital, and sending her to soothe the baby back to sleep, and me into the bathroom for a consolatory wank.

So having sex when you’ve got kids is hard. Unless, of course, you happen to be one of those couples who’re to be found in the pub within seven days of the birth, telling people you’re on a well-deserved break from the stress and exhaustion of parenthood, and noisily proclaiming to all who’ll listen that having a baby needn’t affect your social commitments or change your life. Not change your life? It’s a baby, not a slight fucking limp, you vomit-smeared scrotums. Anyway, if you’re one of those couples then you’re probably free to make the beast with two backs as often as your built-in babysitting network will allow, in which case this article isn’t for you, and you should stop reading it immediately. May I suggest you go fuck yourselves? You’ve clearly got the time.

Aural sex: ‘Come ear!’

Every sexual encounter between you and your partner has as its template the fervent spontaneity of the first eighteen months or so of your relationship; the heady, come-to-beddy days where any time, occasion or flat surface (vertical or horizontal) would do; when your hands felt grafted to the skin of the other. It’s the memory of these days that makes the meticulous scheduling of sexual activity seem so off-puttingly antiseptic, despite the absolute necessity of such planning when you’ve got kids in the house. It makes what’s supposed to be five minutes a good solid hour of passion feel about as sexy as a hospital appointment.

Because of this new reality it pays always to be on the lookout for ways to return a little verve and spontaneity to the process. Just last week my partner used her skills of time and resource management, and sexual intuition to exploit a rare opportunity. Both of our kids were asleep before 8pm, and neither of us appeared to be ill or over-tired, so off she slinked upstairs to the bathroom to slip into something a little more comfortable.

Unfortunately, I had no idea this surprise was in the offing – and she in turn had no idea that I was bursting on a shite. As she stood naked in the bathroom, seconds away from togging herself up in a titillating outfit, the sound of my fist banging on the door relayed this information to her swiftly and efficiently. ‘Get out!’ I implored her. ‘Get out quick, I’m literally about to shite myself!’

The door whooshed open. ‘That’s killed it,’ she said, as she brushed past me to go change into some lounge-pants.

Another hard-core sesh as a parent

Despite the existence of a multitude of niche German movies lurking in deeply unhygienic corners of the internet, there are few greater passion killers than an unexpected jobby. So we decided we’d take a rain-check on the cha-cha-cha and snuggle up on the couch and watch TV instead. But still. The gauntlet had been thrown down, and the promise of sex had set my ridey-sense tingling. I made some overtures, seductively wiggling my eyebrows and shuffling up the couch towards her crotch like some brain-starved zombie.

‘Why don’t I do something for you?’ I asked.

She didn’t say ‘no’. She said something much worse. She said: ‘You burst in on me before I had a proper chance to wash myself, and I’m not going back up to that bathroom to inhale the smell of your boufing shite, so I guess we’ll just have to keep watching TV.’

I’m sure I’ve heard that line in a porno somewhere. Wounded and thwarted, I bided my time. We took stock and tried again. I shuffled closer and we went in for a kiss. Our lips softly butted, but as soon as they’d touched she yanked her face away from mine with a violence normally reserved for cases of whiplash in a car-crash. A grimace of displeasure warped her features. This isn’t a particularly encouraging sexual signal, unless you happen to be some sort of sadistic deviant, or have been married for twenty years (the two are by no means mutually exclusive).

‘What is it now?’ I asked.

‘Your ear,’ she said, shuddering. ‘It stinks.’

She was right. I had an infection in my left ear. But like the smell of a man’s own farts, I’d grown used to it, and had little idea it was so repulsive. So I couldn’t fault her disgust, but even still I sulked, my pride wounded, the thin and tenuous bubble of my sexual confidence well and truly popped.

‘Don’t sulk. I’m not rejecting you, I’m rejecting your ear.’

‘Yeah, whatever,’ I said, even sulkier still.

Don’t listen to what these women’s magazines tell you. Sulking is HOT. It really works up a soak.

She tried to be conciliatory. ‘Maybe… maybe if we have to kiss, you could come at me from one side only, keep the bad ear away.’

I shrugged. She sank deep into thought. Seconds later, there was a light-bulb moment, followed by a big grin. She stroked my shoulder, eager to share her epiphany.

‘Or why not just do me from behind?’

I gave a dismissive wave. ‘Nah, it’s finished. I’m vile. I’m a vile and disgusting creature. I stink and I’m horrible.’ I don’t know why I was so gloomy about it; that realisation had never stopped me before.

We watched TV in silence for a few moments.

‘Maybe…’ she began, the words tip-toeing carefully out of her mouth, ‘Maybe if you put your hearing aid in, it’ll plug the smell!’

I shook my head. ‘Maybe I could just f*** you with a walking stick?! Jesus, now I feel disgusting AND old. Brilliant.’

At this point she laughed. I did, too. How bloody ridiculous.

‘Is this what our sex life is going to be like now?’ she asked.

‘No,’ I said. ‘It’ll probably get much worse.’ A third child is very much in the offing for the not-too-distant future, so our offing days are probably numbered.

‘What do you want to do?’ she asked. I smiled.

In defiance of the Gods of Domesticity and Sexual Scheduling, I did her from behind.

And then I ate a tomato.

Why love is more important than sex

I swaggered around the homestead one weekend morning, naked except for a dressing gown, which billowed around my bare arse like a Roman’s cloak – but a Roman’s cloak that was soft and cosy and really rather effeminate, if I’m being honest. I’m a morning person, much to the consternation and occasional fury of my partner, who either isn’t a morning person or simply isn’t a ‘me’ person. I like to greet the day with a series of nonsense songs, daft-dances and urgent finger-clicks, whilst she likes to greet the day by violently murdering me.

Despite my glee I had woken up with a bit of a jumpy tummy, which probably has nothing whatsoever to do with the fact that I have the same diet as a bin inside a McDonalds’ restaurant. My stomach issued a rumble here, a grumble there, a Mexican wave of nausea there. But no matter. I still had a song in my heart, and a fart in my… Oh, hello. A fart! Where did you come from, you little tyke? Well, the conditions aren’t ideal, but if you really must insist upon making a life for yourself in the world outside my rectum, then who am I to… let me just feel it out here, and give a little squee…

Oh.

Oh my.

You’ve heard of a shart, right? Well this wasn’t a shart. It was pretty much a full-blown shit.

One doesn’t accept a surprise defecation quietly. My loud regrets, interlaced with hissed staccato swearing, stirred my sweet from her slumber, and led her siren-like to the hallway, where I stood temporarily frozen by fear, regret and disgust. I quickly bolted to the bathroom, grabbing up cloths and cleaning products. I didn’t want her to see this, to learn what had happened! To my horror, a few stray droplets of poo peppered the tiled floor of the bathroom in my wake. I sprayed and wiped and rinsed the tiles at lightning speed, and then hurtled into the hallway to mask or remove the worst of my shame. Why had we carpeted the hall and not kept the laminate, I lamented! Her footsteps drew closer still. It was too late, too late! I bombed back to the bathroom to grab more cloths, and to wash down my legs, but in my haste I slipped on a section of tile I’d just cleaned, flew into the air and just about knocked myself unconscious against the wall.

Even though I genuinely thought I’d have to go to hospital to be treated for a concussion, I don’t think I’ve ever heard a human being laugh as much or as hard as ‘the love of my life’ did that day.

Some people say that love is sticking by someone through thick and thin, being willing to go to the ends of the earth for them, risking life and limb in pursuit of their wellbeing and happiness, being willing to lay down and die for them. I’ve no doubt it is. But love is also still having the desire to fuck someone after you’ve witnessed them shitting the floor.

If our sex life can survive that, kids should be a doddle.

Sometimes… Dads Can Be Right?

The other night, sometime around two am, I awoke to find my eldest boy (2) standing at my side of the bed. He was staring at me, his face smeared so liberally in blood that he resembled some half-mad jungle general who’d just taken a bath in the gore of his fallen enemies, or a demon sprung from the Cenobite’s mattress. His hands, too, were as red as pillar boxes, obvious even in the half-light conjured by the street lamps outside our bedroom window.

The uneasy, tentative ‘Jack?’ that escaped my lips belied the frenzied engine of my thoughts, which were screaming ‘AAARRGGHHHHHH! BLOOD! AAARGGHHH! BLOOD!’ inside my head. As he opened his mouth to speak I was sure he was going to say one of three things:

  • ‘Jack no need to have two legs so me took one off.’
  • ‘Which one of you rat bastards is next?’
  • ‘The cat’s sleeping now…Sleeping forever, Daddy…’

What he actually said was: ‘Hi Daddy,’ giving his biggest, goofiest smile in the process.

Mercifully, there was no sinister explanation for his appearance. He’d had a nose bleed. His mother’s prone to them: enjoy that little gift of genetic inheritance, my young friend. Psoriasis and depression runs on my side of the family, so look forward to an adolescence of scratching and crying as the blood streams as if you were some sort of Vatican-sanctioned miraculous statue.

We whisked him through to the bathroom and perched him on his little stool by the sink. His mum had to scrub him really, really hard. What began as an act of cleaning quickly turned into exfoliation, which in turn became a genuine attempt to scour the very skin from his face. It was late, very late, and Jack was tired. He moaned. He cried. He just wanted this brutal ritual to come to an end so that we all could be snuggled up in the cosy darkness of the parental bed like a family of fairy-tale bears. ‘Let the blood stay,’ his eyes seemed to implore, ‘Maybe I like resembling one of Captain America’s oldest and most significant enemies!’ He wailed and whimpered, simpered and sulked, even as I carried him back through to our bedroom and the warm, imminent promise of sweet dreams.

‘Hang on,’ I said to my partner. ‘I’ll need to take him for a piss; you know what he’s like if he doesn’t go for one through the night. Let’s not tempt fate.’

‘No,’ she said, decisively. ‘He’s really upset; you’ll just traumatise him if you cart him back through there, and then he’ll wake his little brother up.’ His little brother, Christopher, a young lad of not-quite-12-weeks old, sleeps in a stilted extension at his mother’s side of the bed, and is forever having his slumber disturbed by his lumbering big brother.

‘He’ll piss the bed.’ I said.

‘No he won’t,’ she asserted.

‘Jack, do you need to pee?’ I asked him.

‘Nope,’ he said.

For some reason I accepted his reply as definitive proof, even though most days if you ask him, ‘Are you a giant tarantula’, he’ll say yes without a second thought.

I awoke a few hours later feeling very lucky indeed, but only in the sense that while Nostradamus died without seeing any of his prophecies come true, I had woken up tinged with the wet and vindicating piss of a little boy.

I slipped Jack out of his sodden clothes, and carried him through to the bathroom. He stood under the shower, harried and half-asleep, his tears attempting to give the whooshing water a run for its money. He wasn’t happy with the situation, but if happiness is lying in a coating of your own warm piss, then happiness be damned. One quick towel down and change of jammies later, and we were in Jack’s room, crammed together in his tiny single-bed. He burrowed into me like a baby bear, while I lay sprawled and contorted like a giraffe in a toy hammock, desperately trying to stave off deep vein thrombosis.

Have you ever looked into the mirror and said ‘Candyman’ five times? Or crank-called 999? Do you ever just feel like playing chicken with fate? I guess I must’ve been feeling particularly brave or stupid that fateful morning, because I made the ill-advised decision (all decisions are ill-advised when I’m acting as my own advisor) to summon my partner: and when I say ‘summoned’, I can assure you that the context is demonic.

What I said to my son, loudly and clearly, to ensure that my voice carried to the next room, was: ‘Oh, son, don’t you worry about having a little accident. It’s easily fixed, Daddy doesn’t mind. It’s not your fault. You couldn’t have done anything about it… (at this point I sucked my teeth) IF ONLY THERE HAD BEEN SOME WAY WE COULD HAVE STOPPED THIS… IF ONLY… IF ONLY SOMEHOW, SOMEONE, SOME FORWARD-THINKING SOUL, HAD BEEN BOLD ENOUGH TO RECOMMEND STEPS THAT COULD’VE PREVENTED THIS; LIKE, I DON’T KNOW, TAKING YOU FOR A PEE WHEN YOU WOKE UP EARLIER, BUT, YOU KNOW, SON, HINDSIGHT’S TWENTY-TWEN…’

At this point a megaton bomb of thunder detonated in the skies above us, and a thousand jagged forks of lightning drove themselves into the ground, scorching and immolating trees, birds and even people, whose screams filled the air like air-raid sirens. Blood seeped through the walls. Ghosts appeared in a flash-flood of light, and swirled around the room like tornadoes. A raven smashed through the window, squawking its message of hell and damnation, each frantic beat of its wings shooting blood-covered shards of glass across the room towards us. I held my son to shield him from the rising chaos, when, before us, she emerged into the doorway through a pillar of foul-scented smoke, the hair dancing on her head like nests of snakes. Her body jerked and spasmed like a stop-motion animation demon jammed on fast-forward; an inhuman blur of boobs, limbs and underwear. We heard the bites and snaps of a mouth that in its fury was more shark, or Beelzebub, than human.

”WE’ DECIDED NOT TO TAKE HIM FOR A PEE BECAUSE IT WOULD HAVE MADE HIM UPSET, WHICH IT WOULD HAVE, SO EVEN THOUGH THIS HAS HAPPENED, WHICH WE COULDN’T HAVE KNOWN WOULD HAPPEN, IT WAS THE RIGHT DECISION AT THE TIME! AND THAT’S THE END OF IT JAMIE! SO ENOUGH OF YOUR BLOODY SARCASM!’

And with that, she was gone.

As I lay stroking Jack’s hair, a large smile barged its way across my face.

‘Totally worth it,’ I said to him, planting a kiss on his forehead.

I slept the sleep of the just. A dad may only get to experience one moment of pure, undiluted rightness like this once in a lifetime. It’s best to savour it.

Baby Talk: Baby’s First Workplace Visit

"Hello Dave? You ma baby naaaow."

“Hello Dave? You ma baby naaaow.”

There’s nothing more terrifying than a cabal of older women suddenly having their maternal instincts re-activated by a baby. You’ll see this happening most often when parents take their newly-spat spawn into their workplaces to show them off.

At first, all is calm. Just another day at the office. Normal. Innocuous. Unremarkable. Near-arthritic fingers rat-a-tap-tap, tatter and clink on keyboards. Phones trill, machines whirr and beep. A discussion about shoes is underway. And then it happens… One of the old women snaps her head back on her neck and takes a long, deep sniff of the air. The other women turn to look at her. The sniffer nods slowly and sagely. There can be no doubt: the seer has saw, preparations must be made. Excitement swells in the air, a Mexican wave of agitation rolls and rushes through the office. The women begin to chitter and hyperventilate like spooked monkeys.

The door to the main entrance, two floors below, creaks open, and they can hear it. They can smell it, taste it, feel it…

“It’s here…” comes a whisper from the old seer, “…it… is… among us.”

A woman starts to beat on the floor with the handle of an umbrella, and all of the others clap in time. The beating and clapping gets louder and louder, angrier and angrier; as it builds to a crescendo the women accompany the percussive rhythm with a malevolent hum, the droning of a thousand wasps, a sound that gets deeper and deeper, louder and louder, before finally exploding into a roar, then a shriek, then a howl. THUD THUD THUD! RAAAR RAAAAR RAAAAR! The oldest woman in the office leaps onto her desk in a single bound, defying both reason and medical science. “Chillldddreeennn,” she moans, her body convulsing violently. “CHILLLLLLLLLDDDRRRRREEEENNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNN!” she screams, throwing her veiny arms into the air and shaking her fists at the heavens.

stamp

“You didn’t tell everyone in the office we were bringing the baby in today, did you?” “Erm… no?”

All of the women lope and scurry away from their chairs like something out of Michael Jackson’s Thriller video. A fist fight breaks out at the head of the line as the women vie for pole position and the first crack at the baby. Three of them are killed, but still the horde advances, fingers outstretched, eyes red, bulging and demonic. The parents reach the top of the stairs and are assailed by a terror that detonates in their stomach and makes mince-meat of their bowels. They see it but can scarcely believe it: the  mass of elder zombies staggering towards them, moaning and gnashing. The parents stand frozen with fright, the car seat clutched tightly in the father’s grip, their poor baby swinging inside it like bait.

“COME TO YER AUNTY JEAN!” shriek twelve of the women, even though none of them are called Jean. Within seconds they’re upon the baby, a hellish scrum of old ladies, hands grabbing and clutching and clenching and tearing, like a grizzly death scene from The Walking Dead.

zomb

The baby is gone, taken, passed among the old ladies like crack. The parents can no longer see their child, just a mess of grey limbs and hair-dos. They only know their child is still alive because they can hear the old ladies talking and cooing away at it.

“OH,YOU LOVE YOUR AUNTY JEAN, DON’T YOU? YES, YES YOU DO, YOU LOVE YOUR AUNTY JEAN! OH, I COULD JUST KEEP YOU. I’M GOING TO KEEP YOU, YES I AM, I’M GOING TO TAKE YOU HOME AND KEEP YOU AND THE POLICE WILL HAVE TO SHOOT ME TO GET YOU BACK! OOOH, HE’S GOT MY EYES, DON’T YOU THINK? WHAT ARE YOU FEEDING HIM? BREAST? OOOH, FORGET THAT, YOU NEED TO LOOK AFTER YOURSELF. GET HIM THE BOTTLE. GET HIM A BOTTLE AND PUT HIM IN HIS OWN ROOM AFTER THE FIRST WEEK, HE’S GOT TO LEARN, HASN’T HE? IT’S NOT FOR ME TO SAY, BUT THAT’S NOT THE WAY I’D DO IT, COURSE IT’S YOUR BABY, SO MANY PEOPLE WILL GIVE YOU ADVICE, BUT DON’T LISTEN TO IT, JUST IGNORE THEM ALL, YOU’VE GOT TO DO YOUR OWN THING, EXCEPT WHEN IT COMES TO MY ADVICE, IN WHICH CASE FOLLOW IT TO THE LETTER. OH, HE’S SMILING AT ME, HE WANTS ME TO TAKE HIM HOME, DON’T YOU WANT ME TO TAKE YOU HOME? COME LIVE WITH YOUR AUNTY JEAN, YOU LOVE ME DON’T YOU, LOVE ME BETTER THAN YOUR OWN MUM, DON’T YOU??!!! YOUR MUM’S GOING TO HAVE TO PRISE YOU OUT OF MY COLD DEAD HANDS, ISN’T SHE, HMMM???!!”

I think we can all agree that taking your infant to work can be a savage and unsettling experience. Old women in offices make David Bowie’s character in Labyrinth look like a registered child minder.

"Gimme the baby and no-one gets hurt."

“Gimme the baby and no-one gets hurt.”

You’ll notice that no men were mentioned in this little office-based reconstruction. That’s because they were all sitting at their desks muttering ‘it’s just a fucking baby’ and ‘you’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all.’ Sure, some  of them looked up from their monitors for three seconds and aimed a half-hearted wave and an awkward ‘hiya’ in the general direction of the baby, but most of them just continued typing, wishing with all their hearts for the baby to fuck off.

Next time on Baby Talk, we deal with the age old question: “Oooh, what weight is he?”

Yer ‘avin a giraffe!

There’s a tribal leader living with his people in some forgotten corner of a rain forest somewhere, and even he’s just changed his profile picture to a fucking giraffe. For those of you blissfully unaware of the ‘phenomenon’, here is the message to which Facebookers the world over have been responding:

gir

 

 

 

 

 

A few things…

1) If my parents decided to pop along for breakfast at 3am, I’d only be opening one thing: ‘FIRE.’ Or Google, so I could find the telephone number for the nearest 24-hour mental home. Seriously, whose parents turn up at their house with a fucking picnic at three in the morning? Hearing from your parents that early in the morning usually means that somebody close to you has died, and in those circumstances jam is rarely necessary.

Imagine if you heard this being hollered up at you from the street below: ‘JAMIE! IT’S YOUR MUM! YOUR AUNTIE MARGARET HAS DIED! DO YOU FANCY A CROISSANT?’

2) The riddle is so easy to solve that having to post a picture of a giraffe as your avatar is far too lenient a punishment. As penance for being a drooling idiot you should have to post a profile picture of yourself naked with dead flies selotaped all over your body, and a wet dollop of your own fetid excrement smeared o’er your smiling face. That’ll teach you for being so stupid, you giraffe arsehole.

3) This whole thing – the popularity and simplicity of this giraffe-based chain-riddle – makes me highly suspicious. I’ll bet some cunning criminal mastermind has uploaded tonnes of virus-infected giraffe JPGs to the internet, and he’s currently using them to steal every password, pin-number and piece of personal information from Portsmouth to Pyongyang. Have a good long look into the eyes of your innocent Facebook giraffe, my friend, because the long-necked cunt is in the process of selling your bank account details to the Chinese mafia.  It’s got to be a scam. It HAS to be, or else there’s no point at all in this orgasm of inanity that’s shuddering its way through the internet. I’ll say this, though: if this is a grand criminal scam then its architect has created nothing less than a giraffesterpiece. And I’ve invented one fucker of a new word.

4) This has been reported in the news. The NEWS? Are you kidding me? Do you know how many rapes, robberies, coups, killings and scientific breakthroughs have gone unreported today? Trevor MacDonald will be spinning in his grave (some feat, considering he’s still alive). If the words ‘giraffe’ and ‘Facebook’ popped up on his auto-cue he’d rip off his shirt and start howling like a wolf. The ‘And finally…’ segment of the ITN News would be Sir Trev being subdued by security as he tried to smash apart the auto-cue machine with his head.

5) Why can’t I just lighten up and let people enjoy some innocent giraffe fun? Because I CAN’T. OK? There is a small silver lining, I suppose. At least people aren’t changing their profile pictures to an incredibly tired Bill Cosby kicking an unemployed Asian man to death.

6) If you really must be a class-A douchebag and change your profile picture to a giraffe, use one of these:

g6

 

g8

g2

 

 

 

 

 

g7

g4g5

g3