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Take Me Out to the Ball Game: My Vasectomy

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It was the day of my vasectomy. Or V-Day, as my darling Kate enjoyed calling it. We were deposited at the hospital by a friend, as both conventional wisdom and medical protocol urged strongly against operating a vehicle immediately after having my knackers carved like a pair of munching pumpkins. Kate was there to lend love and moral support. She also wanted to watch my operation. I’d already consented. She claims she’s possessed of an intense curiosity about the workings of the human body, but there’s at least a small chance she just thought it would be a bit of a laugh to see me receiving the surgical equivalent of CBT. They didn’t let her, even after we protested that men since time immemorial have had the option of watching their partners’ va-jay-jays being destroyed by childbirth, so why shouldn’t women be allowed to watch the crucifixion of their partners’ nut-sacks?

Despite the subject-in-hand being very much on my mind as we approached the front entrance of the hospital, there was very little fear circulating through my system. I’d told so many jokes about what was about to happen to me that the whole thing felt a bit abstract. I didn’t exactly swagger through the front doors like John Wayne bursting into a saloon, but then neither was I dragged into the building kicking and screaming like a toddler.

Emotionally and psychologically, I was somewhere in the middle of those two scenarios. I entered the hospital with the bearing of a man who was heading for something simple and nice and innocuous, like an eye test. That’s how big a deal I’d convinced myself this operation was going to be. I’d had teeth removed, blood taken, toes snapped back into place. I’d never relished any of it, but then neither had I resisted it. I’d just gone with the flow. So I was flowing again. Somewhere cool. Somewhere calm. I was chilled. Serene. Until, that is, precisely seven steps into the hospital, at which point I became Mr Jelly Legs McScaredy Pants.

Into whose hands would I be putting my nuts? Edward Scissorhands? Freddy Krueger? Jack the Ripper? The nightmare scenarios just kept piling up. Would one of my knife-wielding surgeons – still a bit squiffy from a few too many reds the night before – burst one of my bollocks like a soggy grape, and force me to spend the rest of my life limping and hobbling around like the cast of Last of the Summer Wine? Would both of them turn out to be testicle-eating vampire cannibals? I needed to know!

I was so visibly nervous that the surgeon who came into my little cubicle to deliver the pre-procedural pep talk had to lower his clipboard, and start talking me down like I was a guy standing on a high ledge… but actually with a lot less sympathy than that scenario suggests. I can’t remember exactly what he said to me, but the general tone of it was very much: “Would you like me to give you some time so that you can go and find your big boy pants, Mr Andrew?” I couldn’t fault him. His position made sense. A surgeon couldn’t very well take the risk that his patient might start gyrating like James Brown the second some cold steel skiffed against his spunky walnuts. To be honest, though, I don’t think my demeanour was helped by the fact that the surgeon had clearly been mandated to list all of the procedure’s potential problems and side-effects prior to me signing the consent form.

“I can’t tell you there won’t be any pain afterwards,” he said gravely, perched on his tiny stool. “Most people are fine, that’s true, but in some rare cases, and I mean very rare cases, you may find that your testicles start to swell up, and in even rarer cases they might spontaneously combust, firing your penis across the room like a torpedo. And if you’re ever erect when that happens, you’re a bloody dead man.”

OK, I’m paraphrasing a little. My recollection’s fuzzy. In saying that, I’m absolutely positive that he went on to say: “There was this one tragic case, where there was this guy having his left ball incised, and at the exact same moment some wicked old man died on the operating table upstairs, in the stroke ward – a real bastard he was, too – and his soul floated down, and the old man managed to enter this guy’s body through his sliced-open scrotum. Well, the old man possessed this guy’s body any chance he got. The poor fucker would wake up on the ward with accusations flying at him, everything from cheating at Bingo, to chasing nuns around the hospital and biting them on the ass with a set of false teeth he’d found in a bin. In the end they had to – and I mean, this is terrible, but they had to get that ghost – in the end they had to amputate both of the patient’s balls, and at least half the shaft. Course, by then, the old man had escaped into his right tit.”

I managed to remind myself that my decision to nix my cum-flow was in the service of not only saving myself the potential hassle of changing nappies at an age where I’d probably need to start wearing them, but of protecting Kate – her body, life and sanity. After that, it didn’t take long for me to find my big boy pants, and put them on to boot. I wandered through to the operating room, carrying my real pants in some sort of bio-bag (which, admittedly, is exactly where my pants belong). There were four other people in the room with me: two female nurses and two male surgeons. The surgeons stood on opposite sides of the bed, presumably because they’d dibsed a bollock each.

“*I* want the left!!”

“No, *I* get the left! It’s my lucky side!”

I lay on the bed with my gown resting limply against my body, the flap at the bottom drawn back to reveal my junk. It’s a strange experience, getting your balls out in company. It’s a surreal outlier in your day: get up; get dressed; have a coffee; go to work; kiss your girlfriend; walk into a room with four people…erm, get your balls out; and, em… then two guys stab your balls. It’s not an itinerary I ever expected to see outside of seeking election for the Tory Party.

As momentum steadily built towards the main event, the surgical team kept me distracted with a steady release of dark banter. As they chatted, they applied copious amounts of gel to my ball-sack. It was relaxing, ostensibly because I could easily imagine that I was some Roman Emperor receiving his royal ball-massage, instead of some filthy, frightened peasant who was about to get his sack ruptured. Which is precisely what I was. The pleasing illusion lasted for almost exactly as long as it took for a needle to show up on the scene. No amount of funny jokes or enjoyably slimy testicles could detract from the sudden and terrifying stabbiness of the situation. Worse still, I could see that the needle was longer by far than my flaccid penis. Admittedly, that’s not hard.

Don’t misunderstand me, dear reader. I’m not on Team Micro-Member. Once my Clark Kent-ish penis emerges from the cocoon of its Metropolis phone booth it’s a perfectly serviceable piece of equipment. It can even shoot lasers. OK, so it wouldn’t trouble the pages of the Guinness Book of World Records, but then neither would it have women writing in to the problem pages of Bella, their hurtful words printed under the caption: ‘My hapless hubby’s hung like a seahorse’.

I’m a grower, you see, not a show-er. But the medical staff can’t tell that, can they? Not just by looking: I don’t care how many penises they’ve prodded and stabbed over the years. They couldn’t conclusively and scientifically differentiate between a grower on the one hand, and a guy with a wee tiny dwarf dick on the other. Not unless they jerked him off first – and Christ only knows what side-effects they’d have to list before they could do that. For a few shameful seconds, though, lying on that table, it somehow became incredibly important to me that the four other people in that room understood that my penis had a lot more to offer aesthetically than just newly-hatched Witchetty Grub, and cocktail sausage on a beanbag.

Outwith the one-night stands of my younger days, I’ve never really been in a position where I’ve felt the need to explain my penis to a random stranger before. It’s an eerily novel experience. I guess I felt vulnerable. Ridiculous. Like a dog that had just been shaved bald. “Hey, you know those puritanical, Victorian-era sentiments around bodily-shame and conservative social comportment your culture has drilled into you all throughout your life? Yeah? You do? Well, fuck you: get your balls out. GET THEM RIGHT OUT!”

Men: I won’t lie to you. The needle going in was painful. It was like every kick or punch to the sack you’ve ever received squeezed into a syringe and stabbed into your belly in one hit. Shhh. Shhhh. Did you hear that, men? That’s the sound of every woman reading this muttering something about childbirth under their breaths all at once. Don’t worry, though. The operation itself was fine. No pain. It felt like a really weird catch-up with a bunch of friends, all of whom just happened to be looking straight at my bollocks.

Once both balls had been ripped and stitched, everyone left the room to let me get my bearings. After about ten minutes, one of the nurses came back to run through the post-op low-down. She became increasingly agitated by all the questions I kept asking as she tried to read through the after-care blurb. At one point she did a jokey little growl, held up the piece of paper, and pointed to a section half-way down the page, pulling an exasperated little face as she did so. This was in lieu of her grabbing me by the collar and screaming in my face: “MAYBE IF YOU STOPPED TALKING AND STARTED LISTENING, YOU’D REALISE I’VE GOT THE ANSWERS TO ALL OF YOUR QUESTIONS RIGHT HERE, MOTHERFUCKER!” By the time we reached the part where she was ready to ask me if I had any questions, I only had two, and neither of them were related to the procedure. One of them wasn’t even a question.

“I was just wondering,” I said. “Say there’s a real fire, and the alarm goes off, what happens to all the patients in surgery – do they wheel them out into the rain under a big umbrella and keep operating on them, or do the surgeons just make sure they’ve got a few fire extinguishers handy and keep going?”

I had visions of fleeing doctors trying to buy themselves time to escape by hurtling gurneys with unconscious people strapped to them down the corridors like curling pucks towards the flames. And shouting over their shoulder: “I wasn’t very good at that operation. You were probably going to die anyway, Mrs Blompkamp! Thanks for your sacrifice!”

“We’ve…” the nurse said, “Em, I’m not sure, really. That’s never happened to us here. Yet!”

I nodded contentedly. The question hadn’t been answered to my satisfaction, but I’d have to conduct the remainder of the research under my own reconnaissance. On to question 2: the one that wasn’t really a question.

“When you were out of the room,” I began. “I looked down at myself wearing this hospital gown, and then around at the room, and I thought to myself, ‘There’s a strong chance that one day in the future I’m going to die inside a room just like this, wearing a gown just like this, too’.”

She didn’t quite know what to say in response to that, and who can blame her, so I filled the mounting silence between us with a mound of tension-breaking self-effacement. “And, yes,” I said, “I’m tremendous fun at parties.”

She smiled, but I could tell that I’d made her distinctly uncomfortable. She was probably thinking to herself, “Why are all of these small-cock guys such fucking weirdos?” I wasn’t finished there, though. “It’s your own fault for leaving me alone with nothing but my own mind for ten minutes,” I told her.

It was my mum I’d been thinking about. Earlier that year I’d spent her last days with her in a room similar to that one, while she was wearing the same kind of gown. My thoughts were probably the mirror image of the sadness her death inspired in me: the fear that one day it would be me. And now I’d just removed my capacity to create life. There’s a song in there somewhere.

Back at Kate’s, my balls were in danger. No creature on earth can make you feel as welcome as an excited dog. But after an operation like the one I’d just had on my baby-makers, our dog’s friendliness was a threat. Poor, sweet Lola was transformed in my mind’s eye into a furry, four-legged weapon – a propulsive ball-seeking nuclear missile with warheads ready to detonate both testicles: Hiroshima for righty, Nagasaki for lefty. There was no escape. She would appear in door-frames and hallways out of nowhere like the two little girls from The Shining. Every time she walked towards me I could hear the Jaws theme playing in my head. Thanks to Lola’s rambunctiousness, for the first hour I had to hop around the house like a Cherokee priest performing a rain dance (and making very similar noises, too) to dodge her happy-sack attacks.

They say that after an operation like this you probably won’t be able to have sex for a day or so. Dear reader, I was being jerked off at tea-time. Later that night, Kate was subjected to some of the foulest intrusions imaginable, and in their wake I found myself googling ‘Is Being a Fucking Stud a Side-effect of a vasectomy?’. Or was I like a Batman baddie, and this was my origin story?

“Ever since those goons at Gotham hospital snipped the wrong tube, this city can’t catch a break from RELENTLESS SEX MAN.”

There is actually some evidence to suggest that a vasectomy can – in rare cases – boost a man’s libido. Why didn’t you tell me about THAT one, Mr Clipboard-Face McSurgeon? Not that my libido is exactly lacking, the massive filthy bastard that I am, but there was something supercharged about the post-op situation. The volcanic power of it faded, so I can only conclude that this wasn’t a permanent consequence of my vasectomy, but some primal response to either the surgical segregation of my sperm, or the recent thoughts I’d been having about death. Which means… I had really great sex because of my dead mum? Great. Another one for the therapist.

I’ll leave you on a note of optimism, though. Men, I’m talking to you, again. Whatever pain you experience before, during and after your vasectomy, try to keep in focus the absolute best part of the procedure, which is four months later when you have to provide a sample of your gentleman juice to see if your willy’s successfully firing blanks yet. That’s not the great bit, although it’s definitely not a chore. But, come on, think about it. The sample needs to reach a lab in the hospital between 0930 and 1030 on a Monday, and it has to be fresh…which means…

Which means, my friend, you can legitimately phone your work and tell them that you’re going to be in late because you’re having a wank. And there’s not a fucking thing they can do about it. Your doctor will even back you up! (Although it might start a craze of fake Doctor’s wank-notes across the working population. “Dear boss, it was me what told him to crack one off. It was a medicinal emergence. Donut dock his wages, you bitch.”

I think you’ll find though, guys, that the work-wanking thing alone is worth walking like John Wayne for a wee while.

Jamie Does… Love Island

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I’ve never watched Love Island.

Mind you, there are a lot of things I haven’t done: stapled my testicles to my left thigh; performed a bungee jump using a bunch of dead snakes tied together; covered cereal boxes with black masking tape, strapped them to my body and ran through an airport shouting ‘bomb’. I guess what I’m driving at is: not having done something isn’t always a strong argument for doing it. Some things are better left un-done.

Still, my shtick is to see or do something new with a view to writing about it in an excoriating and/or self-deprecating manner, and what better opportunity for malice and mirth than having a crack at what I’m sure is one of the dumbest, most shamelessly hedonistic sex-a-thons the world has seen since Charlie Sheen got his knob stuck in the air vent at his local swimming pool.

So I watched Love Island. Three episodes to be precise.

And I think that was enough.

And by ‘enough’ I mean ‘too much’. And by ‘too much’ I mean I think I’m going to take my eyes out and roll them around in broken glass in case I’m ever tempted to watch Love Island ever again.

Though I’d never watched the show before, I had a pretty good idea of what to expect. And lo and behold, shocking precisely no-one, least of all me, the title sequence was a montage of attractive, deeply conceited people casting off their clothes in slow-motion to the kind of music that suggested a sense of grandeur unlikely to be matched by the reality of a bunch of twenty-somethings sitting around a pool trying to fuck each other.

First up, the girls.

There was Siannise, a Beauty Consultant from Bristol with the intonations and mannerisms of Marjorie Dawes from Little Britain. She said she wanted someone family orientated and respectable, which begged the question: what the fuck was she doing on Love Island?

Then there was Paige from West Lothian, an ex of Lewis Capaldi’s, who described herself as loud and a drama queen, as if those were in any way positive attributes. I wish people would realise that honesty isn’t always the best policy: “I’m horrible, me. I wet myself on purpose every time I’m on the bus. I strangle turkeys for a laugh. My favourite show is Mrs Brown’s Boys.”

Leanne from London promoted herself as the life and soul of the party, a rather trite and vacuous thing to say, but I could tell that beneath her shallow and hedonistic veneer lurked the soul of a true romantic. “Might as well go for a handsome guy, because ugly, handsome, they’re all assholes,” she told us, “But it burns more when you get cheated on by an ugly guy.” Wasn’t it Jane Austen who said that first? Although Jane Austen probably wouldn’t have gone on to say that she loved builders.

Next there was Shaugna, a Democratic Services Officer who didn’t seem to understand exactly what she did for a living. She was a little more certain in her opinion of plumbers: she liked them. Sexually, one would assume, rather than just admiring their work ethic.

KNOCK KNOCK

“Who’s there?”

“It’s a me, it’s a Mario!”

SLIDES KNICKERS OFF.

I’ve got a little tip for you, Shaugna and Leanne. If you’re asked to list three of the most interesting things about yourself, and one of those things is that you like to fuck tradesmen, you could probably do with taking up a few more hobbies. Even try shagging a few scientists and people who work in the customer service industry to even things out a bit.

Sophie from Essex blathered on about the colour of eyes she wanted her babies to have. Yeah, Sophie, I’m sure the pulsing meatheads about to swagger into the pool area can’t wait to have a long chat about your maternity plans.

‘OH MY GOD YOU’RE GORGEOUS!’ the women all shouted at each other, as I smirked and thought to myself, ‘These women will fucking HATE each other in 3 days time.’ Turns out I was wrong.

It only took a day.

I think ‘Love Island’ does a great disservice to the word ‘Love’. I wish they’d just be honest and just call it FUCK ISLAND, and invite contestants of more average body types to participate. “Ah’m big Sharon fae Paisley, and ah fuckin’ love chips and gettin’ ma hole claimed.”

Next came the guys. There was Nas from London, a builder (yeah, I know, seemed like a dead cert with the ladies, being a tradesman and all, but none of them liked him). He kissed his ‘guns’ and stood with his hands on his hips looking all pouty, before revealing that he was after ‘a good set of eyebrows’. If he’d been on Take Me Out, they would have buzzed him into oblivion, jammed the buttons so hard it triggered an earthquake that swallowed the studio down into the hungry jaws of the earth itself. Still, he seemed like a nice guy, which again begs the question: what the fuck was he doing on Love Island?

Callum the scaffolder from Manchester was a little more on-message with his cry of ‘Get me in there. I want to see what the talent’s like!’ He never said as much in his intro-tape, but it goes without saying that he’s probably got Chlamydia. And such a vicious strain that his cock is now possessed by the virus, glows green and calls itself ‘Evil Claude’.

Ollie was next, a young, posh heir to a fortune and a Lordship who looked like Martin Clunes and sounded like George Osborne doing a Mr Bean impression. He announced that he was a cheater, and lived next door to Charles and Camilla, possibly labouring under the misapprehension that the wow factor of the latter cancelled out the disgrace of the former, when in reality the cheating bit was probably more palatable than his being neighbours to that pair of horse-faced weirdos. Ultimately, no-one really liked Ollie, mainly because he was a surly, brooding, conceited ball-bag. In any case, he was swiftly axed from the show when news broke in the real world about him molesting antelopes or shooting tortoises through the brain or something. I’d still maintain that murdering an animal isn’t as bad as inviting a girl over to your house only for her to glance outside and see Camilla putting the washing out.

Then there was Connor from Bolton, a chiselled but goofy-looking young man who looked like Pornstache from Orange Is The New Black mixed with David Walliams, a look that he topped off with the hair-cut of a monk. He very quickly revealed a whole deck of ‘RED FLAG’ playing cards, delighting the young woman who showed an interest in him by getting drunk and starey-eyed, before aggressively brushing her hand away and claiming that she hated him already. To paraphrase Paddy McGuinness: “Let the island… see the love!” Where’s the love?

Mike the police officer was last to arrive. His ‘aw shucks’ smile and gift of the gab did a lot of heavy lifting to off-set the predatory energy bursting out from his steely, tiger’s gaze.

The pairing system and the ‘getting to know you’ games seem to eschew the current trend for open and honest dialogue between the sexes in favour of a Weinstein-esque, Lack-of-Consent-a-thon, which is of course why the infernal shite gets so many viewers. I guess it isn’t called ‘Respect Everyone’s Boundaries Island’ for a good reason. Who would watch that?

When the guys first arrived, the women had to stand behind some love hearts, and step forward if they wanted to be coupled with the man on display. Poor wee Naz the builder struck out, with not a single lady even flexing their toe in his direction (if I was a contestant on that show, the five women would have poured petrol on the love hearts, set them alight and then retreated behind the safety of the flames).

Here’s the kicker, though. Even though Naz was regarded with shrugs of ambivalence from the girls, he still got to choose one with whom to couple up. “Well, Naz, none of them has given consent, so which one would you like to compel to share a bed with you?” Christ.

A later game involved the presenter reading out a fact about one of the contestants, and then asking a member of the opposite sex to passionately kiss the person to whom they thought it referred. It was all getting a bit too rapey for my liking.

I won’t deny that there was some small part of me – some sad, primal part of me – that started to get into the show, fooling myself that I was embarking on a psychological dissection of the mating rituals of the under-30s. When the twins bounded in with their blonde locks and big boobs, I correctly predicted almost instantly that they’d end up with Mike and Callum. I felt like a Club 18-30 Freud.

But by episode three I’d had enough. We all like a good gossip, men as much as women in my experience (although men pretend they aren’t gossiping), but after a while my brain started to rebel against the steady diet of intellectual nothingness I was feeding it. And, sure, there were some beautiful girls there, but if carnality’s your thing it’s best to either find a real woman, or thump yourself half-blind to porn.

I tend to resist the current trend towards inter-generational conflict. ‘OK Boomer’, Millennials, all those assorted generalisations and stereotypes. And I try hard not to sound too curmudgeonly or out of touch. Times are different. We’re reasonably free from strife. That’s great. Past generations suffered to make this world better and easier for the generations to come, not so they could make us feel guilty for being free or prosperous. But even still, I found myself sitting there shouting things at the screen like: ‘A good war, that’s what’ll sort out these preening fucking layabouts.’ And ‘Try doing your eyebrows in a trench, you oily, tattooed numb-nut!’ Conveniently forgetting the fact that my adolescence was spent playing computer games, drinking to excess, spending money on drugs and inflatable furniture, and sabotaging my romantic and sexual couplings at every opportunity, with not a war or a rationing book in sight. I was once just as feckless, fatuous and reckless as these young whippersnappers, it’s just that significantly fewer people wanted to have sex with me, and now that number is somewhere in the low single-digits. One. Me. I still quite like to have sex with me, so at least there’s that.

Anyway, I’m off to watch something a bit more worthy and important, to wash the stink of this fleshy tosh off my soul.

[cycles through Netflix for six hours]

[types FUCK ISLAND into Pornhub search box]

Twelve things I’ve learned being a Dad to two under four (PART 2)

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Thank you for returning to read the rest of my far from comprehensive, barely instructional list of twelve things I’ve learned so far as a parent. May it strike a chord, or make you feel smug and superior, you hubris-filled wanker. Either way, I hope you enjoy it. You can read PART 1 here.

5.) TV is your friend

Don’t listen to the snobs: your TV is as much a part of the family as the grandparents, or that funny uncle with the twitch. My partner and I vowed never to use the TV as a live-in babysitter or a motivational tool, and largely we’ve observed this vow. We’re careful to offset time spent in front of the TV with oodles of outdoor larks, jigsaws, puzzles, pretend play, books and tickle-fights. But sometimes… Just sometimes. Some days. TV may very well rot your children’s brains, but the brain-rotting skills of children themselves are unmatched and exemplary, so in this dirty war no weapon is out of bounds. I’ll be honest, if it wasn’t for the TV I’d probably have immolated myself by now.

6.) Don’t sweat the swearing

I don’t care what the Preachy McTutters of this world say: a swearing kid is a fucking hilarious kid. Naturally we don’t deliberately teach our three-year-old swear words. We don’t create Venn diagrams to show him the full galaxy of obscenities at his disposal, or give formal lessons every weekday morning. ‘Now, Jack, I want you to say it again, but this time I want to hear you enunciate the consonants like we practised. Ki…ki… ki… Ku… ku… ku… kun…kun…kun…. That’s it, you can do it!’

You simply don’t realise how much you profane as a matter of course until you’re sharing your home with a kid or two. Don’t get me wrong, over the years we’ve tried to shrink our pool of bad words (removing an em eff here, a cee there) and reduce the frequency of our swearing, and on the whole we’ve been successful in our efforts, but a one hundred per cent standard is impossible to attain: as long as there are frights, stubbed toes, dropped plates, inconsiderate drivers and sudden swirls of anger there will always be ‘bloody bastards’, ‘shitting buggers’ and ‘Are you fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuckkking kiiiidddddddddding meeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeees’.

A friend of mine recently told me that she and her husband had been aghast to hear their three-year-old daughter saying ‘Oh my God!’ As I listened, I had a flashback to all of the times our Jack has blasphemed, bee’d, essed and effed, all of which were entirely and inescapably my fault. I’ve heard him affectionately refer to a playmate as ‘a wee bugger’; I’ve watched him dancing around the toilet chanting ‘Shit! Shit! Shit! Shit! Shit!’ like some demented shaman; I’ve seen him sneering a swear through one side of his mouth in the same manner and voice as a 1950s Italian-American Godfather, even shaking his little fist: ‘Sunnnnnn of a bitch!’; I’ve watched him lightly slap his own forehead and cry out ‘Oh fuck’. It’s like some horrendous version of Blankety Blank sometimes. “OK, here’s your next one. The guy tailgating me is a blanking blank?” “He’s a f….” “Nooooooooooo!”

In saying that, he’s seldom swore the same swear twice, largely because we react to each utterance with calm neutrality, gently re-directing his words down a different path without giving the no-no words any sense of power by confirming their taboo status.

Some examples:

“Yes, you can say (x), but it would be better to say (y) instead. Yes, maybe next time we’ll just say (y)”

or

“No, I didn’t say that, darling, you must’ve misheard. I said ‘rubber trucking other cuffer‘. What does it mean?… I’ve no fucking idea, son.”

7.) People lie about their kids.

Nobody talks up the beautiful, life-affirming aspects of parenthood. All parents-to-be are given the same bleak and nightmarish pep-talk: “You’re having a baby? Oh, you poor bastard! Forget sleep. Forget sex. You’ll be up to your knees in shit and piss. You’ll be so tired you’ll start hallucinating sentient raisins. You’ll be stressed out. You’ll probably start serial killing frogs, and using your head as a hammer to smash down play-parks. Your left leg will turn into an eighteenth century courtesan and start trying to marry people. Your right leg will fall off. You’ll shrink by five feet. Your eyes will explode. You’ll think you’re an owl. Seriously, I’m not kidding around here, my cousin was a dad for one day and he set fire to himself and tried to ram-raid a church. With a bison. I’m telling you; you might as well just kill yourself now, save the trouble. That’s how awful kids are.”

And then once your kids are a bouncing, bawling reality, and you’re asked the questions: ‘How are things at home?/How’s life as a parent?/how is/are the kid(s)?’ you lie then, too. Maybe you’ve just been sat at home cuddling your kids while watching a movie, or joyously laughing at their inspired silliness, or moved to tears by their innocence and sense of wonder, but you’ll always say something like: “Those bloody kids will be the death of me!”

8.) Bye, bye, sex life

Scheduling amorous activity with your partner when you’ve got children is difficult; scheduling it when you share a bed with your kids (the baby sleeps in an adjoined extension, our toddler usually sneaks in beside us at some point through the night) is nigh on impossible. The very fact that you have to ‘schedule’ at all is a bitter pill to swallow (a pill to swallow? Christ, there’s a Freudian slip). Sex isn’t an activity that lends itself well to scheduling or good time management skills, although as I’m writing this sentence I’m remembering a little something called ‘the entire sex industry’ that rather depends upon both of those things for its growth and survival, so I guess I’ll rephrase and refocus my argument somewhat: good time management and awesome scheduling skills may be useful, but they sure as shit never made anything sexier. Sex in the home between two partners should be sexy, urgent, primal, spontaneous, and not boring and clinical like making an appointment to see your bank manager (if you’re currently banging your bank manager, please feel free to imagine a different analogy).

The ideal scenario is for both kids to be fast asleep, and for us to slink silently from the bed and into the hall downstairs, to commence the world’s quietest bout of passion, like two mime artists make-believing a normal sex-life. If we make it to the living room we’re in for a riot of locked-knees, cold bums, burnt bums and stiff necks. We still have to be savagely quiet, but if there’s an accidental scream at this point it’s usually because we’ve stained the couch we’re still bloody paying for.

Wherever the venue, time is very much of the essence; because we’re both aware that we could be interrupted at any second, our coupling becomes less like a spontaneous act of love and more like two people desperately trying to beat their record on the mechanical bull. Never matter. I’ve always excelled at getting it done quickly.

For a longer consideration of the deleterious effects of children on your sex life, click here.

Click on PART 1 for the first four 12 things.

The Sex Life of Parents

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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.