Feeling a bit linky, am I?

Part of me wonders if some of my recent anonymous, IP-addressless readers are tuning in to see if I’ve failed yet at NaBloPoMo, but then I think: how sad.

Probably it’s just the secret police (look, it was only a chocolate bar; I was fourteen!), so I won’t worry too much.

In any case, I will not fail, because I told my brain at the beginning of the month that I must do this thing, and my brain was all Must we? Fine, but there’s something you need to do for me too. Can you please STOP THAT INCESSANT SINGING OF THEME SONGS TO CHILDREN’S TV PROGRAMMES? And I was all Yeah, sorry. I’m working on that.

So last evening I went to Ignite London, which you can read about elsewhere (back there, for instance), and though I’ll admit I was unduly excited to attend, I was not disappointed. One of the slide show presenters did a slam poem about how he got food poisoning from this one doner kebab, and I have never before heard anyone rhyme ‘attack’ with ‘stomach’ before, which is odd, come to think of it. Why not? Regardless, I am so glad he did, even though I was in the midst of eating a plate of chips.

My friend Amy was one of the event planners, and wrote me a little RESERVED sign for my seat, which I lorded over the 170 attendees before spending the next two hours messing about on my iPhone. Well it was a really visual experience, and there was a lot to Tweet about.

Besides, some of the talks were related to technology, social media and distraction, as well as iPhone photography (I best liked the line about how ‘photography is clip art for the digital age’ or something to that effect, as this is exactly the kind of thing I’d been wanting to write for The Januarist but didn’t have the guts to do [some of my closest friends are iPhone-tographers].) so really, I was only doing what was expected of me.

Don't it just?

But yes - the event was brilliant, and the free drinks not too shabby. I really hope they put on another one soon, because I need to see at least two or three more before deciding whether or not I stand a chance up there. I thought I might do a talk on The Numberjacks, which is a programme Hartley really enjoys, and is a source of much contemplation for me as well.

True Story

Why don't we save ourselves while we have the chance?

We just finished watching The Age of Stupid, which does what few provocative documentaries about climate change have managed (I’m thinking of Al Gore and the slow boiling frog, which is about all I can recall from that film): broadcast from an imagined future earth, the culmination of our (impending) self-lead demise is made plain through a convincing splice of actual archival footage that brings the evidence together in a continuity never before afforded us. The film's tagline cuts right to the chase: "Why didn't we save ourselves when we had the chance?"

Michael Moore has a talent for assessing some of our biggest denials about a controversial issue and then methodically severing our most beloved strongholds on fatal ignorance in short order. Although he is often criticized for taking liberties with the truth in order to better serve his own agenda, this doesn’t make that agenda false, any more than unfulfilled promises make a member of the elected a poor politician (maybe not the best example).

This film, amazingly, is not another Michael Moore initiative as I'd first believed, but one that was written and directed by British born Franny Armstrong. So before the (anti-?)conspiracy theorists get all bent out of shape, they should probably know that there is more than one good storyteller who is fighting for humankind's wellbeing.

I don’t necessarily believe that things are as black and white as Armstrong portrays them, though I have a strong feeling that unless we cut emissions to practically nothing, and quickly, we are pretty well doomed to whatever fate a planet suffers when it runs out of the stuff that makes its inhabitants live (we can see microcosms of this occurring the world over right now – no need to wait for some ambiguous Armageddon).

So tonight I am powering off this computer, the television, and the fan we leave on in the bedroom that drowns out Bruce’s snoring and simultaneously keeps Hartley from waking to every little sound and me from dreaming that I am asleep in a crypt (it is that dark, silent and airless in our bedroom without the fan). I am going to brave the wrath of our neighbours when we invariably get our recycling all backwards (I geddit, no plastic fruit punnets or cereal boxes) and I am going to look into ways of sustainable living that we can achieve now (cutting travel, turning off lights) and ones we will need to work towards in the future (compost toilets, solar panels).

Bruce thinks I’m on another tangent that’s due to fizzle out by morning, but I am deadly serious. The idea of Hartley suffering some future, sickly world that I didn’t lift a finger to try and save, or that his children might not even live to see any world whatsoever, makes my heart shrink into a tiny, wrinkled pea of grief.

I haven’t had a chance to look at the website yet, but apparently www.notstupid.org has some practical tips for turning things around, should enough of us feel moved to rise to the challenge. You can wait for someone else to take initiative and do it for you, but unfortunately there are probably more of you out there than you think.

A crack up at the egg aisle

Some might come across a senseless scene of yolky devastation such as this, shake their heads and think, “Tsk, such a shame.”

Not me though. I think: How touching is that?

That a group of regular eggs, so much like the ones you had for breakfast – these eggs that could have ended up in a happy omelet with some cheese and ham, or flown across an autumn picnic in the trembling mouth of a spoon during the Egg and Spoon race – these fairly healthy looking eggs gave their lives for something larger than themselves. They gave their lives so that we may know that it’s Christmas time.

Obvious Christmas tree formation

Or perhaps they were staging a protest against the ugly holiday spangles that hung like Goth extensions in the windows at Sainsbury’s. It’s still a bit early for tinsel, in my opinion.

I mean, it’s hard to say. Who knows what lies in the hearts of eggs? Besides unfertilized chicken fetuses?

Still wouldst thou sing

I used to be pretty precious about film credits, as in my bum would not leave my seat until the very last name reverse-abseiled over the top of the screen. Nowadays nothing can keep me in the theatre beyond the plot, not even amusing outtakes or charming vignettes of our beloved characters.

Last night I went to see Bright Star at the cinema up the road, and apart from it being a very quiet, somber sort of narrative with few opportunities to unwrap your Oreos or fiddle with your strawberry pencils (not a euphemism, but go ahead and enjoy that), it is the credits that constitute the true test of a film lover’s endurance. After the final scene, the roll call began its dutiful climb skywards and the theatre was just bustling to life when, suddenly, the voice of the actor playing Keats started to read out “Ode to a Nightingale.”

The weary rustle of coat gathering rippled to a halt.

Nobody was going to be the sort who would walk out on a poetry reading just to save themselves an extra five minutes, and so we sat respectfully, silently, as the ghost of Keats read out line after haunting line. The poem lasted the length of the credits, which is a long time for a stuffy theatre full of strangers to sit in mutual reverence of a disembodied voice.

I’m not overly familiar with the poem, but by the time Whishaw read out “Adieu! adieu! thy plaintive anthem fades” most of us felt pretty confident that we’d be queuing for the toilet stalls within moments. The reading did end fairly soon after this, but not for another stanza or so. As the screen blipped into darkness, nobody dared move from their seat – it wasn’t a spell, so much as a reluctance to break the spell, should one be in the midst of occurring for somebody else.

And then I grabbed my stuff and made for the door. It totally wigged me out.

Into the eye

It’s one hour before Hartley goes to bed and then this domestic inmate is going out for an evening, on a date, with herself. Earlier, while Bruce and Hartley were in the West End reading comics, I did a quick blitz of the flat, opening the window for a bit of air. It’s mighty gusty out there but it looks worse than it is. As the boys returned home, I left to grab my first gingerbread latte of the season, and to purchase some reasonably priced junk food for the cinema later. The citizens of Muswell Hill were in a tizz, stockpiling fresh produce like the end of the world was nigh and nobody seemed to have a handle on what they were doing, including the frazzled baristas who made my latte.

On my way home, I shed the gloves and woolen beret (my only extravagance from our trip to Paris, bought in a shop at the train station like a true tourist) as it was windy but not at all cold. Throw a bit of rain or snow into the equation and you’d have something to worry about definitely, but there’s something exciting about venturing out into dramatic weather that’s all bark and no bite. That said, I do plan to steer clear of any dodgy looking fixtures, as on my way to the shops I noticed an entire doorway lying flat across the path amidst portions of the brick wall to which it was once attached. That doorway always did look a little sorry for itself, though, and maybe this is just the kick in the pants that agent or landlord needs to fix it properly for those poor tenants.

Initially I was going to grab some dinner and a drink at the pub around the corner (the restaurant there boasts some of the best Thai Food in North London) and maybe read a bit of my new book, but the film I’m seeing starts earlier than I thought, so it looks like I’ll be having steak or maybe coq au vin at the establishment directly opposite the cinema. You could do worse on a stormy night in London, I guess.

True milk

I’ve had enough online experience to know that in the grand scheme of things, nobody is going to bother reading a post on a Friday. It doesn’t matter if it’s morning, afternoon or evening – people are too busy planning their brief weekly escapes to pay much notice to trifles, especially those of the online persuasion (hopefully, for their sake). But NaBloPoMo waits for no weekend.

We’ve been back a day, and already I feel much better about things here. I guess you don’t have to have a wildly fabulous time on holiday in order to approach your real life with renewed strength. I am definitely much more appreciative of how calmly efficient everyone is here, respectful of boundaries and even appearances. Sometimes looks do matter, and I know I’ve never seen a terrible collage of piss, shit and vomit on a street corner outside Kings Cross, never mind a major disembarking point like Gare Du Nord.

In the spirit of civility, I did not meet the mummy group in the pub this afternoon, and instead spent the day reestablishing order within the flat. Hartley was keen to get started so I let him unpack our suitcase, right after I let him eat the top off an empty raisin packet, because I can’t watch him every second of the day. I usually let a few seconds slip by, and it only takes one to eat something you shouldn’t.

Speaking of, I can hear young sir calling out for his midnight snack as I type this, so I’d better finish up.

You may want to give this one a miss

Maybe it is because I’m tired and have never had a life threatening illness, but I’m going to go ahead and make the comparison between cancer and babies. Yes I am, because I don’t have the wherewithal to come up with a better, more sensitive analogy, and also because I sort of think I’m right in this instance.

We took this trip to Paris thinking that it would be a nice change of scenery for Hartley (which it was) and thus a relaxing time for us (which it was not). And see, I always forget the golden rule of parenting: wherever you go, there they are – screaming to be taken out of their push chairs in rush hour traffic on a rammed bus, or punching you in the tit in the middle of the night, just for fun. Like cancer, right?

Okay, how about this: having a baby means you never get to rest. Let me stress this: HAVE A BABY AND YOU WILL NEVER AGAIN HAVE A MOMENT’S PEACE, NOT UNTIL HE IS EIGHTEEN YEARS OLD, AND EVEN THEN YOU WILL WONDER IF HE IS LIGHTING INCENSE BECAUSE OF SPIRITUALITY OR SOME OTHER REASON.

So you may think that a trip to another country would be just the thing, but you would be wrong. Mightily, stark-raving-madly WRONG. Because having a baby basically takes a stressful situation and ramps it up to DEFCON 1, such as when we decided it might be fun to walk to the Eiffel Tower from where we were staying, which is nowhere near the Eiffel Tower. And on our way back, in our fifth hour, as we hobbled a fair distance further because we couldn’t find the right bus stop, a long, plaintive sound suddenly emanated from Hartley that was the infant equivalent of Oh you’ve GOT to be shitting me, and that is when he had a complete meltdown - one that could not be overturned by raisins or sips from my water bottle - and so we had to carry him for another ten city blocks until our feet turned blue and fell off and we died.

And anyway, even if you’re not into suicidal levels of pedestrian sight-seeing, holidays are not really holidays if you’ve brought along a baby. Babies boil down all experience to the same few elements: feeding, playing, napping, nappy change, bedtime. You could be on a spaceship to Mars, but if that kid has done a number two, you are not going to be counting Saturn’s rings from the observation room at that moment but, rather, hoping like hell that you remembered to pack the powder-scented nappy sacks.

I can only imagine that cancer has the same effect on holiday – if it’s really terribly serious, and you are suffering day and night, it doesn’t make a lick of difference if you’ve got the penthouse suite on Paradise Island, you are still living in your own personal bubble of cancer hell. Though obviously having a baby is nothing like having cancer, and might even be the opposite. Both have their stresses, though, and that is why. That is why I am going to shut up my typing fingers and stop this ridiculous post. We’re back in England, and I’ve never felt more at home.

Hartley: Ten Months

http://m.flickr.com/#/photos/bruceandjackie/4095639061/sizes/m/

Hartley Bear

Right this minute you are sitting up on the bed, fingering and biting your jumper instead of sleeping. I think you must know that you are toeing the line because at least you're not trying to leap off the bed, and actually, you are falling asleep in an upright position, so I guess your batteries have a small amount of juice in them yet.

Which is more than I can say for this phone, which is the only thing I have with me for posting online. We're in Paris on a much needed holiday from England, and somehow we took for granted that they'd have everything we needed for you already at the flat. I mean, it's Paris. It's just a French-speaking London, right? Except no. This apartment, this entire city, couldn't be any less accommodating to babies if tried, and sometimes it seems to give that a go too. If we have to carry you down the several steps leading to the metro and we leave plenty of room for someone else to get past us, that someone else will find a way to get stuck behind us so that they can tutt and sigh and make rude remarks about us under their breath. But they live in the country of good cheese so you have to be lenient.

This hasn't been the easiest month of your life, I have to say. It seems like your cold heads off to the cold library every week where it renews that same book about a runny nose and high temperature, which this last time around you had for four days. FOUR DAYS. That's like six months in baby years! And we took you to the emergency clinic for your tracheotemy or vasectamy or whatever would make that permanent bogey on your top lip disappear long enough for you to eat and breathe properly in your sleep. It seemed you woke with every stiffled breath, which meant bad sleeps for mummy, and also daddy while we've been sharing a bed here.

The only way we could convince you to drink your horrible banana-tasting antibiotics (which I think were given to us to make us go away, though we've started you on them now and have to finish the course) was to pour it into a shot glass and pretend like it was liquid gold. Then, even this stopped working, and currently you're taking it in the lid of a cola bottle. If you insist on a thimble by tomorrow, I'll thank my lucky stars there's only four more days of this.

I don't have much time, as we plan to watch a French film we bought earlier, as well as scarf down a wheel of Brie with the rest of those madeleines, so let me just say that in spite of how hard being sick was for you, you have been lovely and brave, and are growing in ways that take my breath away. You participate in our jokes now, and have begun to imitate small gestures, such as the one we call 'fish' and the one where you tickle your bottom lip and make a burbling sound. Your mamama and dadadas have become more pointed, and it's becoming increasingly evident that you are your own person now - one who likes to stand on the back bumper of your walker or shout at us when we do the hoovering or sit up on your own gumming baguette in a restaurant.

We love you madly, mon cherie. Don't ever change.

Not every fountain is a wishing well

We went to the Louvre and it was . . . closed.

We walked to the Eiffel Tower and it was . . . far.

Hartley will only take his antibiotics in a shot glass. No comment.

I am trying to add an image to this post, though I'm not sure if I'll succeed. It was taken at the Muse de Louvre during those blissful minutes before we discovered our mistake.

It's been a long day, and I just want to drink a glass of wine and think about nothing, so you'll have to imagine a grand day with us in it.

Present and accounted for

In spite of engine failure and a sick infant, the three of us made it to Paris, and as I write this on a notepad with a failing felt-tip pen in the near dark of the television, Bruce is trying to tire out Hartley, who for the last two hours has been proclaiming his enthusiasm for the new surroundings, and for the recent absence of a crippling fever which has plagued him for more than three days. It doesn't help that we're an hour ahead here, but it's approaching ten o'clock at night and he's still sitting up in bed like a cheeky sentinal, blowing raspberries and shouting at me from across the room (it's an open-concept apartment superficially divided by a skeletal wood shelving unit.)

I'm drinking Cotes de Bourg (or perhaps that's just the region - whatever, the stuff is red and dry and lovely) and eating emmental croustilles (they really like their emmental in this country), pre-writing this post so as not to waste a precious drop of my iPhone's dwindling power, as we don't yet have a converter. But we are having a marvelous time. Or at least I think we are. It is the British way to leave on holiday and then spend the entire time pointing out how much better England is and wanting the holiday to be over so that one can return home.

Earlier, Bruce applauded my stellar bilingualism at a cafe in the train station shortly after we disembarked, and seemed really impressed, until I reminded him that the croque Monsieur and pain au chocolat are already in French.

Anyway, I'm still here. Proving I can kick it old skool. I mean, pen and paper - what's that all about, hey? Wish you were here, etc.

C'est la vie en rose

Hartley’s fever broke at around two this morning and Bruce and I did a sleepy high-five in the dark before settling back into a fitful sleep. At about four, Hartley woke again, this time in tears. His little head began another slow burn, and by eight o’clock, his fever was back in full force. We called the NHS help line, and the person on the other end of the phone said some vague things about Swine Flu before referring us to an emergency clinic in Crouch End.

We bundled up our little boo and rushed him down there, only to find that the doctor seemed relatively unconcerned, even after he misunderstood that his fever had only come on in the last few days and not weeks as he’d imagined. We’ve had a trip to Paris planned for ages, and as it’s coming up tomorrow, we were certain we’d have to cancel. But the doctor wrote us up a prescription for antibiotics just in case we needed a Plan B, and told us to have a nice time.

So the rest of the day has passed in a flurry of activity - not only in preparing to leave for Paris, but in getting my application together for my leave to remain, as my visa runs out soon and we have to pop it in the mail the day after we get back. In addition to proof of having passed my Life in the UK test* and upward of eight hundred pounds, we also need to provide several documents demonstrating that we’ve been cohabitating for the last two years. One would think a marriage certificate would suffice, but one would be sorely misguided in that thinking.

If you’re well acquainted with the pair of us in real life, you will know what our organisational skills are like. They are like someone carefully filed every single letter, bill, receipt or notification in a well-ordered cabinet, in a well-ordered study, and then lobbed a Moltov cockatil into the midst of all that order. And then rubbed their hands together and said, Okay, now where did I put that Council Tax bill from 2006? I tell you, trying to gather the supporting documentation whilst force-feeding our screaming, choking infant his thrice-daily antibiotics has been fun. Great fun.

But although we are closer to fleeing the country in distress than setting out on a great adventure at this point, I have high hopes that tomorrow Hartley’s fever will have disappeared, and that we’ll be able to pull off this packing/leaving the house stint within the first few hours of waking. Or at least I’m folding dresses, t-shirts and baby blankets like that’s what I think. Going through the motions of belief is half the battle.

If anyone reading has ever done Paris on a budget and with an infant, your ideas on some baby-friendly sights and activities would be greatly appreciated. We haven’t exactly had time to do our research.

A tout a l’heur!


*I think I could probably wring a whole new post out of that experience, and will probably try at some point this month.

Prisencolinensinainciusol and Paracetamol

I’m leaving in less than an hour to meet my friend Jennifer, for an evening of comedy in a beautiful venue called Union Chapel in Islington. It really is a chapel, and it’s leant itself to a number of fringe activities, such as waiting for Daniel Johnston to lose the plot after Adem played a really tiny keyboard and, I hear, a screening of the original Friday the 13th movie with free whisky (Personally, I can’t think of which is worse, but maybe one makes the other bearable).

Bruce is out supporting his football team in Tottenham but his mother will be over in a little while to take care of Hartley during the overlap. Our poor wee boo has been doped up on Calpol for the past twenty-four hours, and although it hasn’t done anything to assuage his fever, it does make him feel well enough to trawl for exposed wires to chew on (they are well hidden, but not well enough – it’s okay, I’m keeping an eye out). He’s a bit fragile, so his minor entanglements with the legs of chairs are upsetting him more than they usually do. I wish he would rest, but you can’t really reason with a medicated infant with get up and go.

Anyway, I anticipate coming home to a circus of flu, snot and tears, which means I’d better whip up a post for today before I leave.

This is it, folks!

This, and a video I posted on my Facebook last week. Even if you’ve already seen it, it’s worth watching another twenty times, in my humble opinion. If we all learn the dance moves from our respective homes, maybe one day we can get together and, you know, recreate it.

Bubbles: like mother like son

I have slug trails of baby snot on my top, dark circles under my eyes and I’ve lost the will to watch America’s Next Top Model, which frightens me the most.

It’s been one of those weeks, and Hartley’s cold-turned-cough-turned-fever was brought to us by the makers of insomnia and too many nights out with my good friend Beer and his loopy gal Red Wine.

I nearly killed myself by drinking a full bottle of wine over the course of three hours at a cocktail bar last Friday, and ‘never again’ turned into ‘maybe just four’ when I had the good fortune to spend a fabulous night out with the lovely Making Strange this past evening. We ate our weight in ribs caked in Frank’s Red and I doused the fire with two Coronas, a Peroni and a San Miguel.

Sadly, liberal amounts of fizzy pink alcohol circulated at a baby’s first birthday party this afternoon, with most of the mothers justifying a second and third glass by way of the ‘it’s only 4%’ clause. Live and learn, and live and learn again.

Needless to say, I’m in no state to brood over a proper post this evening, so instead I give you a video of my son enjoying bubbles more than anyone with a temperature above 37 degrees has any right to. Please enjoy!

In the morning

In the morning, I make myself three slices of toast and a cup of coffee. I make Hartley one slice of toast with a very thin spread of margarine, cut into small pieces.

I sit at the computer having my breakfast, and I pass Hartley a little piece of toast, repeating the mantra A slice of toast is a good breakfast for a boo. This is something Bruce said once, to make me feel better about the fact that Hartley will only eat toast or fromage frais in the morning. I say the mantra aloud as I hand him each bit of toast, and he looks up at me from his Bumbo and smiles, making clutchy clutchy motions with his hand.

Sometimes he takes the toast and turns back to watch television, which is on to distract him from the fact that his only task right now is to eat his toast. Toast isn’t much of a challenge for a ten-month-old. Having a conversation with him doesn’t work, because eventually it dawns on him that he’s eating toast and then he gets upset.

Sometimes he makes the clutchy clutchy hand motion but then slaps the toast out of my fingers. If I feel he’s going to do this, I lightly hold his wrist and sometimes he will let me place the toast in his palm. If he’s serious about wanting to slap the toast away, he won’t let me hold his wrist, and will flap his entire arm at my fingers until the toast piece falls to the floor. Then I know that breakfast is over.

When his favourite programme came on this morning, he did what he does every time the programme comes on: he swivels his head to locate me in the room and then gives me a cheeky grin as if to say, Look, it’s our favourite programme! Then he turns to watch the intro, which is the best part of any show in his opinion.

We only let him watch baby telly, and only when we’re trying to eat breakfast or accomplish a task he’s not allowed to take part in, like a shower or cooking. The kitchen is very small, and he always wants to play with the rubbish bin.

Mornings with the baby are some of the loveliest mornings I’ve known.

Must...write...post...

Hoof, why did I sign up for this again? Okay, something else. Tonight it’s the Proust Questionnaire.

1.What is your idea of perfect happiness? 
No pain, no yearning, and to exist without the weight or burden of self.

2.What is your greatest fear? 
Dying, and the eternity of nothingness that follows.

3.What is the trait you most deplore in yourself?
Weakness.

4.What is the trait you most deplore in others?
Smugness. Or immodesty. I don’t know, some combination of the two. Smudesty.
 
5.Which living person do you most admire?
My son.

6.What is your greatest extravagance?
The time I spend online.
 
7.What is your current state of mind?
It’s standing on the edge of a high diving board that is suspended above an empty pool.

8.What do you consider the most overrated virtue?
Beauty, obviously. Nobody has to work at beauty, so why do we reward those who have it? Ptooee.
 
9.On what occasion do you lie?
When I want to spare someone’s feelings. I think that’s important to do. There’s nothing virtuous about crushing someone.
 
10.What do you most dislike about your appearance?
My eyes. They look hound-doggish when I catch a glimpse of myself in a mirror.
 
11.Which living person do you most despise?
I’d rather not say.
 
12.What is the quality you most like in a man?
Wit.
 
13.What is the quality you most like in a woman?
Kindness.
 
14.Which words or phrases do you most overuse?
I quite like [insert likeable thing here].
 
15.What or who is the greatest love of your life?
Bruce. Or Hartley. Brucely. Hartluce.
 
16.When and where were you happiest?
I don’t remember.
 
17.Which talent would you most like to have?
Musicality, or paintingness.

 
18.If you could change one thing about yourself, what would it be?
I would feel less awkward about talking to people.
 
19.What do you consider your greatest achievement?
Changing my life from what it used to be.
 
20.If you were to die and come back as a person or a thing, what would it be?
I’d want to come back as myself. I can’t imagine being anyone or anything else. That would be frightening.
 
21.Where would you most like to live?
France, or some non-existent place in Italy.
 
22.What is your most treasured possession?
A small box of memorabilia from childhood.
 
23.What do you regard as the lowest depth of misery? 
Being in a very bad situation you know you're not going to change. That’s different from the lowest depth of grief, obviously.

24.What is your favorite occupation?
I haven’t found it yet, but I imagine it would be writing. It’s the only thing I actually put effort into without feeling like I’ve lost something.
 
25.What is your most marked characteristic?
I wish I knew.
 
26.What do you most value in your friends?
Mutual respect, and the sense that I can speak to them in confidence and vice versa.
 
27.Who are your favorite writers?
This changes with the books I’m reading because I admire a lot of writers. Right now it’s Wells Tower. I used to really like Murakami, but then I realised everyone else in the world does too, which makes me question his value. I know that’s silly, but the best writers make you feel as though they are writing only for you.
 
28.Who is your hero of fiction?
Fictional hero? Or writer of fiction? If it’s the former, then I’m not sure. I don’t think writers are heroic. It’s easy to sit alone in a room and make things up. It’s much more courageous to try and see things the way they really are, and feel helpless in the face of that.
 
29.Which historical figure do you most identify with?
I’m ignorant of most historical figures. I’ve been told that I resemble a Joan of Arc figure, and I remember feeling like a persecuted crusader when I was in a mental institute, so maybe her.
 
30.Who are your heroes in real life?
The professors at the university where I did my film degree. They are some of the most dedicated and interesting people I’ve ever met.
 
31.What are your favorite names?
I admire simple names, like Sam, but I’m always choosing silly names like Jupiter. If I have another son, I think I’d like to name him Casper.
 
32.What is it that you most dislike?
The feeling of impermanence, or that life could end at any moment so you can never really relax.

33.What is your greatest regret?
That I fell out of touch with a wonderful friend who died in an accident a few years later. I wish I’d told her how much she meant to me, but I was young.
 
34.How would you like to die?
I’ve thought about this, and I still don’t know. I think it would be horrific to die before you have the chance to say goodbye to your people and to yourself. But I think it would be horrific to contemplate eternity as imminent also. I think I would like to know that it was going to happen and then drift away surrounded by people I felt good being around.
 
35.What is your motto?
I don’t have a motto. Mottos are for people who think in absolutes. Maybe that’s my motto.

What is more interesting than child abuse? Herein lies the answer, maybe.

Ha ha. It only occurred to me today that I can’t even rest on my laurels of yesterday’s post, as I’m meant to be doing this every day. When did I last have enough time or gumption to write a post about myself every single day? Somewhere in the vicinity of 2004, I suspect. My navel seams to have closed up over the past few years, and I find myself - or even the way my brain works – less and less interesting as time goes on. I don’t even look at daily events as potential story fodder anymore, as I find most things can be adequately summarised in a 140 character tweet, or my Facebook status.

I thought I was going to have to elaborate on how my good feeling about this little play group I attend nearby went rapidly downhill after I watched the leader snatch a toy piano away from a baby not much older than Hartley while she was trying to make an announcement, even though she’d just finished handing out instruments to the children in preparation for our sing-along, and then didn’t even give it back to him once the music had begun (though some kindhearted mother pointed out to her that the reason he was screaming through snot and tears was probably due to this fact). The good feelings dissipated further after I watched her absentmindedly push what I am hoping was her own child into a pretend sleeping position for "Hop Little Bunnies," which resulted in said child hitting her head on the hard vinyl floor.

But then something much more interesting took place after class, on our walk home. It was Morag who noticed that someone had left their laptop case leaning against a tree. I’d registered the laptop but immediately dismissed it as unimportant, I guess because I envisioned someone emerging from one of the nearby houses to collect it. But then I remembered that we live in London, and you can’t drop a wallet with any hope of ever seeing it again if you don’t notice straight away. We deliberated about what to do, and had to concede that its owner wasn’t coming back and so began searching it for contact details.

I found a plastic folder of personal effects, which I felt uncomfortable about going through because at that point I thought there was still a chance the owner would return and find me snooping through their official documents. The documents contained an address, but it wasn’t a UK address. I opened a note that had been handwritten in blue ink on a piece of graph paper, which was tucked away in a pocket. The letter was folded in three, its face addressed to “Mum and Dad” in a childlike script. Inside was an apologetic, self-deprecating missive with a tone of finality so pointed it became immediately apparent that it was a suicide note.

“Um, this is a suicide note!” I said to Morag, who was in the midst of outlining a plan of attack. Her eyes widened as I handed her the piece of paper, and she scanned the letter quickly before noting, with some relief, that it was dated from two years ago. We finally decided to take the laptop to the police station, because whether or not there was any significance in it being left behind, we couldn’t just let some random kid come along and pinch it. We scrawled a quick note to this effect on the blank inside of a prescription packet and tacked it to the tree where we’d found the laptop, reasoning that if they returned to that spot, they’d probably see the note.

The police station isn’t far from where I live, though it’s small and keeps to erratic hours, so it was closed by the time we got there. We stood outside in the dark debating on whether or not one of us should take it home and bring it back in the morning. There really didn’t seem to be any other option, so I hooked the laptop case around the handle of Hartley’s pushchair and we headed off back in the direction of home, and the shops.

Along the way, we ran into two female police officers, who agreed to take the laptop from us with our details. They asked us what was in the bag and we itemised everything whilst they went through it all. Morag mentioned the suicide note, which seemed to baffle them, though they glossed over this bit of information in their report. The officer I spoke to said they would contact me if the bag was retrieved by its owner. Bruce says this is because the owner might want to give me a small reward. I think that’s an odd thing to volunteer, but we’ll see I guess.

Mostly I wonder about the note, and about the person who wrote it. Our search revealed that the owner of the laptop is in his or her seventies, which would put the writer of the note in his or her thirties, at best. If a child writes a suicide note to their parents and that child is very young, there is a chance the note is a cry for help. If the child is more of an adult, on the other hand, there is a very good chance that such a note indicates intent.

It’s difficult to know for certain, and so the question I’m left with is this: would a parent keep their child’s suicide note from two years ago if the note writer hadn't succeeded? Would they keep the note if the note writer had succeeded? I don’t want to put myself in the shoes of whoever lost that laptop, even if it means clearing up a mystery. And who am I to reduce the tragedy - large or small - of a complete stranger to a mere curiosity?

It is rather curious, though.

Much ado about blogging, and pasta

Let me sully this post by first speaking about my writing here, and elsewhere. I think reflexivity is pretty pertinent to a month-long yard sale of musty, randomly priced ideas I’ve had to drag out from storage because I have nothing of real value to say. Everything I write is off-the-cuff, from conception to execution, and I only sit down to write when I feel confident that my mojo (or in this case blomo) is in good working order.

This is why I have a partially written piece that gives me the evils every time I maximize its worthless bulk to see if I can perform some kind of emergency surgery to get it at least looking like something I could post on a collaborative site made up of fearless, prolific bloggers. But that’s the irony of my situation: the words I conjure are either living or dead, and the dead ones are usually too far gone for the defibrillators.

So you may be in for a fairly ghastly house of spooks, gimps and amputees this month, and I can’t even pretend it’s a lead-up to Halloween. What I can do is try to keep this as close to its original intent as possible: an online log of day-to-day events as they occur, at least for the month of November. I might even be able to convince you that I do more here than shovel gruel into the mouth of a nine-month-old boy and then scoop out the results hours later. Slightly more, then.

Today, for instance, I tried to do what I do every day, which is to make a sort of minor celebration of life using whatever positive feelings and tangible materials I have at my disposal and fashioning them into some kind of ticker-tape, bunting-choked fanfare that will propel me out the door and into the world, where we all live and pretend that nobody else lives as well or as colourfully as we do. That last part is something I don’t do anymore, actually. I’ve let too many minor characters act out their stories on my stage over the years, and wouldn’t know how to play the leading lady to a flea at this point.

Regardless, I know that I have to raise a wee one, and wee ones naturally feel they are at the centre of everything, with passersby cheering them on from open windows and city sidewalks. This is why they smile so damn much, and why they have no qualms about screaming at you in public if you’ve deprived them of a teething biscuit for longer than five minutes on a bus journey to the nearest play group. This is a delusion you want to nurture, because it takes a buttload of confidence to make your way in this world without letting some bullish, snub-nosed kid grind your feelings beneath his heel because you wouldn’t let him push you off a swing.

We do not push people off swings, we two, no. We stand idly by and grin madly at the fun those kids are having until someone’s father notices us and sheepishly pries his sprog from the chain-linked ropes so that we can have a turn ourselves. It’s chilly, and his breath is hitching with laughter as I push him gently away from me and he comes drifting back into my hands, and I remember that although this doesn’t come naturally to me, the stuff of memory is born from playground antics with your mother or your sister or whoever is in charge of your experiences, and I want him to have as many happy memories of his childhood as I can reasonably provide.


I remember how some baby book or website or newsletter told me that it was my job to make sure that Hartley transitioned from helpless infant to confident baby - to “turn him on to life,” they said. And I wondered how I could do this after allowing him to lie naked under a florescent lamp for three days, screaming for hours on end, because he had a touch of jaundice and that’s what the hospital wanted. He went from being the only baby on the ward who never cried or complained, to an inconsolable, blubbering mess who hated everything to do with being alive. I really felt like that was my fault.

But I needn’t have worried, as this kid is turned on full bright. I don’t think a day goes by that he doesn’t screech with delight over his evening bath, or his lunch, or some silly expression on my face.

So anyway, we had a bit of a swing, and then I took him down the slide a few times, and we headed back home, where he played happily alone in the living room while I made dinner for myself. Whenever Bruce is out for the evening, I try to take the opportunity to eat something he would never in a million years concede to trying. That’s anything that includes vegetable pieces, by the way. Earlier today I’d picked up fresh ingredients for a vegetarian bolognaise (I use Quorn mince, because it makes an awful lot, and because I’m the only one eating it so I have to consider its longevity in the fridge), and I chopped and seasoned and threw it all together in a pot to simmer for an hour.

My pasta sauce is pretty much like my writing – I mainly rely on common sense to roll it out, and if I throw in a little more cooking wine and a little less oregano than last time, it usually still turns out okay.


I had to let Hartley play with a plate of cold noodles, since he’d already had his dinner and wasn’t in any mood to let me eat mine without his participation. Then I gave him a lovely warm bath and a good feed before putting him down, and now he’s sleeping soundly in the next room, which is how I managed to find the time to bash this out. Usually, I lie with him until he’s fully asleep and then transfer him to the cot before tiptoeing out again. While he drifts, I surf the internet on my iPhone, which is mainly how I get around online these days. I steal a moment here and there when I’m out with the baby, or while he’s napping, or sitting in his Bumbo eating toast.

As the cold weather sets in, I become more interested in stories about recipes and cooking, and Erqsome never lets me down on this front. She remains the biggest culinary/crafting genius I’ve ever met, and she can turn a pretty mean phrase as well, which consequently leaves me feeling hungry and full, all at the same time. I know I don’t usually praise other bloggers here (most of them are pretty good at bigging themselves up on their own blogs), but you’d be surprised by what this girl can do with cabbage. She’s my inspiration in most things, and I still refuse to molest that lovely hank of wool she gave me for my birthday this past year. At least until I can work out what I’m doing.

NaBloBlahBlah

I signed up to write a blog post every day for the whole of November, I guess because I don't have enough on my plate.

Actually, I have about a million things to do, most of which need doing in the next ten minutes. But the online writing thing has fallen to the wayside since motherhood, and this makes me sad in moments when I can actually get a handle on how I'm feeling and why, so I thought: why not? I'll leave National Beat Yourself Up for Not Knowing the First Thing About Writing a Novel Month for those with more ambition and less infant in their lives.

So here's my first post. You can find quality posts such as this one right here, every day for the next thirty days. Or is it thirty-one?

Hartley: Nine Months

Chicken,

Today you turned nine months old, which means you’ve officially spent as long on the outside as you have on the inside. I’m not sure if there’s any significance in that as such, but it’s sort of interesting, no?

I think the last time I wrote you, I said something silly about the fact that babies stop smiling at strangers once they realise the world is Satan’s playground and everyone in it self-serving demons who are only interested in their own survival and would use your head as their personal stepping stone if it meant they could leave their stamp on this whirling, meaningless mass of tarted-up dirt. Those might not have been my exact words, but the sentiment remains.

Your mummy has been going through a bit of a rough patch this past while, as our little family unit was playing tradsies with a variety of illnesses that violated one or more of us nearly every single day for three solid weeks. We were very lucky in the sense that none of these illnesses affected you too badly, and for the most part you were your boisterous, happy self. In another sense, we were unlucky for this same reason, if only because it wasn’t easy to convince you to stand in your walker in front of the telly while we took turns rotating from the bed to the sofa to the toilet until it was time to feed you and put you to bed.

Somewhere in the midst of this, a doctor told mummy she wasn’t allowed to be skinny anymore, because she hadn’t earned the right to wear size 6 jeans (which, in this country, is actually a size 8). No, mummy cheated the system by acquiring a thyroid disorder that turned her closet into a veritable storeroom of unwearable tents and, more significantly, messed around with her mood, which has been up and down and all around, but mainly buried down beneath a heavy duvet, which is where mummy wishes she was most of the time.

Anyway, that’s nothing for you to worry about. I’m working on feeling better, and meanwhile am painting over the big brown scribble I made all over poor, defenseless planet earth and its inhabitants. I’ll let you know how that goes.



And it turns out that your growing wariness of outsiders is a good thing. It makes perfect sense, now I think of it. How else would you know not to go crawling into the lap of a psychotic dictator or a diseased leper or your grandmother after she has said something rude about the way I walk, with my arms held stiffly down by my sides which, I should point out, is the strained and cautious walk of a person who has spent the bulk of her life beneath a cloud of cruel scrutiny, ruthlessly delivered by the woman who raised her? You wouldn’t, and so this is part of what you must teach yourself.

It’s been a little strange, though, to watch you go from open and beaming to guarded and vaguely fearful almost overnight. But both my baby newsletter and the health visitor say that you’ve worked out who the important adults in your life are, and although you might deign to smile at a table of pretty girls if you’re feeling secure in my company, for the most part you will wail like you’ve been stuck with a pin if someone looks at you wrong or, god forbid, tries to pick you up. This makes the baby gym class we signed up to on Wednesdays a little uncomfortable for both of us, but I’m sure you’ll get used to the lovely woman who encourages you to walk on the balancing beam soon enough.

Apart from the onset of shyness around strangers, you are steadily gaining confidence in yourself and in the world around you, conquering whatever obstacles you come up against and gumming happily on the rest. The other day we were deep in conversation when suddenly your father looked over and said “Hey, he’s standing up.” And so you were! You’d been trying to pull yourself up by holding onto the back of your walker since the last time we’d helped you to do that, and lo and behold, it turns out you no longer need a cheering section to get to your feet. I’ve also watched you pull yourself up by holding onto the seat of the sofa, but only because you spotted my iPhone and saw that it needed chewing.



I am no longer under the illusion that I’ve given birth to the only developmentally-challenged infant on earth who is destined to never grow to be any bigger than a bread loaf and will always impart his needs through screaming, but that doesn’t mean that you don’t surprise and delight me on a daily basis. You have to remember that until you came along, your mummy had only ever lived with cats. It takes approximately two weeks before a kitten outgrows that cute tiny kitty phase, after which it spends the next fifteen years knocking your picture frames off the mantelpiece in a misguided effort to get you to feed it. Babies, on the other hand, go from being inconsolable lumps of scream to actual humans with their own mobile phones, and the shift from one stage to the next is palpable.

The other day I was encouraging you to drink from a cup, and after you struggled to allow some water into your mouth before I pulled the glass away, you smacked your lips. Only that: you smacked your lips, except for me, it was the equivalent of a ten-year-old cat clearing its throat and then asking you to please pass the fish snacks, it was just that astounding. I have to keep reminding myself that you are not a one-dimensional animal or even a very clever one-dimensional animal – you’re a tiny person, and with every passing day you are shedding the mystery of mute infancy and becoming ever more sentient. It’s thrilling, and also a little sad, because I want to freeze you like this forever. You’re my little boo, but one day you’ll slam a door in my face because I won’t let you buy a Vespa with your postgraduate savings.



Even though you are still waking up many times in the night because you can’t get back to sleep unless you are pressed against me, your hand curled loosely around the collar of my shirt, your lips pursed and sucking the air, and even though I am exhausted and sometimes desperate for a bit of time alone, I know that I have to try and stay with you in these baby years, because I’m told it’s over far too quickly. I can’t imagine you being anything other than who you are right now – this beautiful, smiling chicken who pumps his little arms excitedly and nearly hyperventilates at the prospect of milk; who screeches with delight as someone chases him down the hall on his belly; who grins and lifts his arms with the anticipation of being picked up.

You were in Camden earlier, suffering your father’s five-comic-a-day habit so that I could get some writing done, and though you weren't gone for more than a few hours, I was already missing the way your eyes burn a hole into the back of my skull if I turn away from you for more than a few moments, and the sound you make when you want my attention, like a little Einstein discovering the theory of relativity over and over again: Ahhhhh!



I guess one day we will only have photos and videos and memories of this time, which we’ll share quietly with one another while you conquer the world in the privacy of your own bedroom. But right at this moment you are kneeling by your walker, cooing and pushing the buttons on your activity tray while daddy prepares a lovely Thanksgiving dinner for your Canadian mummy, and I’m going to file away this letter and come and join you now.

I love you, chicken.

Hartley: Seven and Eight Months

Hello Little You!

Well. It’s been quite some time since I’ve written to you here, and as usual, I’m at a loss as to where to even begin.

Some people might think me crazy for saying I have no time to write anymore, when I’m clearly active on one of the biggest time wasters to hit the internet thus far – Twitter. But one-hundred-and-forty characters is pretty much all the time you’re willing to give me, at least once I’ve done the essentials like bathed, eaten breakfast, had my coffee and maybe read a page or two of a book. I suppose if you tallied up all those one-liners, you’d have a decent block of time wherein one could feasibly write letters of adoration to her firstborn son, but that’s not how life works, at least not for us.

After I last wrote to you, the three of us flew to Canada to visit family, and it was there that you turned seven months old. I think we were all more than a little surprised by how well you adapted to the situation. A long-haul flight across the Atlantic with a seven-month-old baby is a harrowing idea for those of us with children (and those of us who fly with those of us with children), and I wasn’t sure how I was going to help you settle into nine hours of lap time, being that you’re not a lap baby by any stretch of the imagination, and being also that mummy is a very nervous flyer.

No matter how many statistics I hear, or glasses of wine I imbibe in-flight, nothing can convince me that flying is a perfectly safe way to travel. And mothers don’t follow you around with their tops undone, asking if you’re okay and making sure you don’t pull the stereo speakers off the table and onto your head because they have nothing better to do – no, we are programmed, PROGRAMMED to keep our babies out of danger. And so if any part of me, however irrational, believes that by getting on a plane I am somehow putting myself at risk, try and imagine how much bigger that fear becomes when I add you to the mix.

Regardless, we got on the plane, mummy forced herself to chill out, and we steeled ourselves for countless hours of you crying and us pacing the narrow aisles. But you know what? You were fine. No, you were better than fine: you were a brilliant little flyer. From the moment we got into the air, you transformed into a baby I’d never met before. Although you were confined to my lap for 95% of that flight, and even though you missed an entire night of sleep, you didn’t complain once. I spent most of those nine hours shrugging at strangers and saying “He’s not usually like this,” because I wanted them to know how very lucky we all were that you’d left your former shouty self at home.



Even when we disembarked and we buckled you into your car seat and subjected you to the most annoying drive of your life, because your grandparents can’t drive anywhere without getting lost or having an argument but usually both, you still managed a smile. When we got to the condo, I let your cousin Danielle take you upstairs in her arms, because I was practically blind with exhaustion and you seemed fine. And you were fine: all the way upstairs in the lift, all the way down the hall leading to the condo, and all the way into the living room, where Danielle finally lay you gently against a cushion on your grandparents’ sofa, you were fine. And then you completely lost your shit, because you had no idea where you were, hadn’t slept in over fifteen hours and had no clue who any of these people were. Pretty understandable, really.

But then your aunty Gabe offered to help me bathe you, and so you had your first bath outside the little plastic bath we’d been using at home. I dressed you in clean pajamas and your cousin fed you your peaches and banana in the plushest high chair we’d ever seen, while Aunty Gabe unpacked, folded and hung all our clothes for us. Then I did something that daddy still wishes to this very day I hadn’t done: I taught them the song I sing to you when I put you in your boo bag, and so the three of us surrounded you on that giant, marshmallowy bed and sang the boo bag song to you until your father left the room in shame.

I thought there was no way you’d concede to sleeping in a strange room, in a strange cot, which was a travel cot and so nothing like your cot back home, but after a few minutes of crying you settled into a deep sleep, which is something you did every night thereafter.



I don’t want to spend too much time on Canada because so much has happened since, but I will say that we flew back to the place your mummy was born, and it was a trip that made her very happy (she saw one of her dearest friends marry) and a bit sad too (it had been nearly three years since she’d returned, and home had lost its shine, which is something I’ll explain to you one day). At one point on the flight back to Vancouver, you let out a scream that continued to rise in pitch until everyone in the adjoining rows was staring at us. I thought that might have spelled the end of your flight tolerance, but it turned out you were only politely informing us that your foot had become trapped between the arm rest and the seat. Sorry!

In spite of the fact that we suffered two weeks of terrible jet lag, and you wouldn’t sleep in your cot - wouldn’t sleep at all - once we arrived home, I am so happy that we made that trip. It gave daddy and me a chance to catch our breath, but more importantly, the new environment, all those different experiences, and the loving, varied attention you received from family and friends brought you out of yourself, gave you confidence and turned you into the happiest baby you’ve ever been. A few days ago, you turned eight months old, and the three of us celebrated by taking you to an exhibition at The Serpentine before denying you chocolate ice cream at Harrods, though we gave you tastes of vanilla (we’re not that cruel).



The other morning, after very little sleep, I opened my eyes and caught sight of a small, strange face looking back at me. I must have brought you back into bed at some point, because there you were beside me in the push up position, breathing into my face and grinning at me like someone with very good news. It took me a few moments to recognise your sweet face, because I still remember when you were too little to meet me at face level of your own accord, and part of me hasn’t caught up to this other baby who can sit upright without support, handle and chew a variety of finger foods with his bottom two teeth, and laugh at all my jokes because he knows exactly what I mean. You are becoming less like a baby and more like a little boy every day. I remember when I thought that this would make me sad, that I would lose the tiny infant I first fell in love with, but I now realise that I am steadily gaining more and more of you, and that there’s nothing to be sad about at all.



I’m glad that you’re still so good at smiling, and I honestly believe that you could build bridges with those big silly grins of yours. The other day I took you into the dentist’s office, where I barely registered a sulky looking youth with long greasy hair and dark circles under eyes obscured by furrowed, pierced eyebrows. You, on the other hand, gave this boy your whole attention, disarming him with one of your charming grins and eliciting an unguarded smile from him as well. It wasn’t until I noticed this interaction that I realised that I’d made an unfair judgment about someone I didn’t know based on how he looked, which is something that you would never, ever do. I know it’s because you’re a baby, and babies haven’t been shaped by societal stereotyping, but it gives me a glimmer of hope nonetheless, because you continually remind me that nearly every single person on earth has the same good things inside them.

Sometimes when we’re out for a walk together, I look into the faces of people who seem bitter, depressed, lonely and generally unhappy, and I worry that some of them might have started out exactly like you: enthusiastic about what life has to offer, happy to experience this magic among so many others, and secure in the notion that people are inherently good, loving individuals who mean you no harm. I worry that one day you will grow too wise, see things - the world and its billions of inhabitants, some thriving and some always in the grip of terrible things - the way they really are, and that these two elements combined will break your heart. I can’t think of another way to explain so many unhappy faces in such a beautiful, thriving city, Hartley.

And although nothing I say and do could forever shield you from the sadness of being, I hope that you will always find ways to smile at strangers, that you’ll show compassion for people who aren’t as fortunate as you, and that you’ll strive to find the magic in living, even if life gets hard, because it’s there. I promise you, it’s there. You’re living proof of that.



I love you very much, darling.

Away

What makes me think I could do this again? I don't know. Something.

I'm quite behind on the one little online luxury I allow myself, mainly because I feel I'm not being completely selfish with that time, and possibly because I'm arrogant enough to believe that I could be making an investment in his future emotional inheritance.

But actually, it will be a number of years before he'll know how to read these sentimental outpourings of mine and, indeed, a good few more before he'll even want to. I've got at least two decades to complete this series, and that's if we still communicate online, with words, written with our tentacles. Fingers! I mean.

For those of you still with me, though, I can offer you the Cole's Notes version of the last eight weeks:

We took Hartley to Canada for three weeks, so that he could meet the rest of his family and finally pay a visit to his second home. In that time, he turned seven months, but not before growing two teeth and learning to crawl - a skill he uses mostly for good, though sometimes for trying to launch himself off the sheer quiltface of the bed, like a happy wee lemming pursued by the notion that something more exciting exists just three feet lower.

In less than two weeks he'll turn eight months old.

I love him more every day.

Some wise T-shirt once said: "Every Life Should Have a Secret Plan" or something to that effect (I don't actually own the t-shirt). We don't have any top secret plans to sit on yet, but I think we're working on it.

Hair

It’s not true, what they say about the smell of babies, or if it is, it’s a universal illusion perpetuated by a shampoo commercial.

In the dark, I kiss your small, hard, delicate head. I cup it in the palm of my hand and press my lips firmly against your temple, linger longer than is necessary, as though I could sink this message down into the roiling quicksand of your subconscious.

... love ...

I lob these words into your slumber, the sounds reverberating incomprehensibly: I love you, whispered furiously, like force could crack the shell and release their slippery innards, leak them into your dreams.

Your hair does not smell like baked bread, or clean sunshine or talcum powder – it smells of nothing. I inhale the absence of smell, breathing the warmth back into your hair. It contains a slight, melting whiff of the dinner we cooked earlier which, if anything, accentuates the perfect, nothing smell of you.

Love: I’m unlearning the words to every meaning I know.

Hartley: Six Months

Hello little you!

So, how does it feel to have lived half a year already? It must feel pretty good, because these days it’s not difficult to coax a smile out of you, and you’ve already learned to anticipate when something worth smiling for is about to come your way. I have only to touch the top button of my blouse or dress, for instance, before your arms and legs begin their mad cycling and pinwheeling, and you’re curled into position for a feed, slapping your thigh and hyperventilating with wild abandon, your eyes popping out of your head like you’ve just won the boob lottery and – lo and behold! – you have.

You’ve gone through so many changes these past few weeks that it would take me three Saturday mornings of you being out with Daddy in order to record everything, and that’s if I were able to discern some sort of continuity. These letters are some of the hardest things I’ve ever had to write because before you can put something into words, you must first suspend the dizzy, elemental churn of existence in order to peer inside and see what’s there. But every time I hit pause, the organic soup of the experience gains an inaccurate definition that defies description.

What is your mummy banging on about now, hmm? Let’s just start from the beginning, shall we? Any beginning will do.

This month I worked very hard at streamlining our lives in such a way as to eliminate any unnecessary noise that might obscure some of the things you’ve been trying to tell me. A week can seem quite long at the starting point when you’ve got so many hours in a day to fill, and up until recently, I’d been filling them with activities in the hopes that this would provide you with some structure. Rather than let your moods dictate events, as I should have been doing, I went about it the opposite way, sometimes to the detriment of your happiness.

It finally dawned on me that neither of us was benefiting from our strict, weekly lunches with the postnatal group. You’d had your hair pulled, nose tweaked, and head knocked far too often for my liking, and any concern I showed for you was met with derision from certain mummies who believed that I was only inhibiting your learning curve. I came away from these meetings with the impression that not only was I turning you into an oversensitive, socially inept, blubbering mess of a child, but if I didn’t get you to sleep in your cot right now, I’d be sharing a bed with you until you were old enough to grow a full set of sideburns and handlebar mustache. For your part, having to work your feeds and naps into these hours-long sessions made you miserable, and I think you dreaded Friday afternoons nearly as much as me. So one day I told everybody that we were going to stop coming, and that’s just what we did.


Since then, I’ve let you determine the shape of our day. Apart from an hour-long walk, which I’ve instigated for the good of us both, and usually around naptime, you pretty much take the lead from one hour to the next. Your daddy bought himself an iPhone, which gave us enough bargaining power to secure you a walker and a baby gym, both of which have accelerated your development in ways that have surprised all three of us.

One Saturday morning, your daddy took you out so that I could rest and then go out to a class that I take a few times a week. It was a very hot day, and when I got back, daddy was molded to the sofa and you were stripped down to your nappy, standing in your walker and clutching a bottle of water to your chest, watching television and stamping your little feet against the rug like a tiny happy ox. At this moment I had to concede that my helpless, anxious infant had somehow transformed himself into a strong, confident little boy.

We still spend many hours glued together, you and I, and sometimes when you see me leave the room you’ll cry like your heart is breaking because it seems like I might never come back. But there are also times when we’re going about our own business, happily coexisting and unconcerned about what the other is up to. At these times I’m usually eating a meal or tidying the flat while you watch Cbeebies in your walker whilst exercising your legs (stamp three times and then stretch onto your toes, stamp three times and stretch, &etc.) or play in your gym, where you pivot on your belly in order to reach your toys.


Oh yes – the pivoting. You used to hate being on your back, but you were never able to hold yourself up on your front for very long either. The walker provided some relief but this got old very quickly. One day I put you on your back under your gym in order to make the bed, and you started complaining right away so I had to be quick. Before I could make it back to you though, you’d stopped crying. I took that opportunity to hang up some clothes, and when I came back into the room, I saw exactly why you’d stopped crying: you were on your front!

I’d heard about this phenomenon of babies rolling onto their fronts but I never imagined that one day you would do this of your own accord. You hated being on your tummy so much that I always thought you’d be one of those babies that skipped the crawling stage altogether. The next time you rolled onto your front, me and your father were preoccupied with something on the television and so I missed it again. I needn’t have worried though – a few days later I watched you finish a feed, roll onto your front, do two massive farts and then fall asleep with your face buried in the mattress. You woke again a few minutes later, pushed yourself up and grinned at me like you’d just been awarded a gold medal for body surfing.

Now we can’t stop you from rolling over, and we have to be very careful at naptime and bedtime because you don’t always tell us that you’re awake. Instead, we’ll come in and you’ll be in the push-up position in your boo bag (which is what we call your sleeping bag), nodding your head like a sea turtle and stuttering with the effort of it all. The other night you woke up crying, and no wonder – I came in and found you propped up on your hands and thighs, only half awake and facing the opposite direction from where you’d fallen asleep. It seems the impulse to be on your front is beyond even your own control at times.


In terms of your verbal skills, except for when you’re sleepy and patting at my face while droning ‘ahhhhh,’ there is nothing very gentle about your elocutions. One day you stood up straight in your walker, flung your arms over your head and made a strangled roaring noise in your throat like a monster rising from the depths of the sea, or like a zombie getting ready to eat someone’s face off. You did this because something on the television excited you, and when you heard my laughter, you grinned at me and did another massive roar.

Your daddy was away at a conference and I searched fruitlessly for our mini video recorder because I was sure this was something you’d never do again. But a week later, when the three of us had stopped to take a break from some shopping we were doing in town, all of Starbucks turned to see what on earth was going on, as you stood on your daddy’s legs and roared at the posters tacked to the bulletin board above your head.

You’re just as boisterous about your interactions with inanimate objects. There are no half measures with you, and if you can’t fit something into your mouth, you are busy trying to smash it to bits. If there’s nothing to smash to bits, you resort to slapping the floor, the book, the walker tray or whatever is within reach, because the physical world must be subjected to some type of impact by your hand at all times. Nothing and no one is safe, not even your daddy’s prized iPhone.


That’s not to say you’re not incredibly sweet, because you are the sweetest, most engaging little person I have ever met. You match me smile for smile, and that smile still erupts across your whole entire face. Your silly gummy grins are infectious, and you offer them indiscriminately when we’re out together, whether or not mummy wants to have an interaction with a flushed, giggling indie girl on the tube or a hard-bitten clubber shouting into her mobile phone and wearing last night’s dress. You seem to bring out the best in everyone, and I have yet to encounter the face that doesn’t smile back at you and mean it.


I am much more relaxed about things than I used to be, and this has given you a chance to relax and enjoy the process of learning too. We’ve had more fun together since I stopped worrying about doing what’s right for you, and instead just started doing it. It’s a good thing, because today we are heading into the uncharted territory of solid food and I want you to be able to approach this adventure with as much confidence and enthusiasm as it deserves.

A whole lot has happened in six months, though the time has gone by far too quickly, as they said it would. I’m so thankful to have another six months of getting to know you before I go back to work. I wish it were longer.


Happy half-birthday, my stompy little ox. I love you more than you can know.

This imaginary hour

Bruce and I were having one of our many theological conversations (I hesitate to call them debates since neither of us are particularly invested in what we’re saying), and Bruce put to me the idea that since we can’t conceive of infinity, maybe there is a God. A rather A-Z analysis of a more complex idea he had, but this was the general thrust of his argument.

I countered with the theory that Infinity didn’t exist until humans came along and created it – an unfortunate by-product of an artificial notion of time.

This got me thinking, though, about Time. Paul Auster kicked it off really, with his wonderfully clear prose in Man in The Dark, and though he wasn’t writing anywhere in the vicinity of my thoughts (or perhaps my thinking wasn’t anywhere in the vicinity of his writing – that sounds right, actually), it was as though his words had suddenly cleared a path through the unruly jungle of consciousness itself and I realised:

We live every moment of our lives, as it’s happened and as it has yet to occur, simultaneously - all the time. This is to say that we are the clocks, and each event we have lived, and will ever live, has been etched into our faces from very early on, maybe from the moment we became self-aware. Maybe even those who lack self-awareness do this, as it’s not something to realise but is instead a state of being.

I haven’t thought it through any better than that and, in any case, I’m sure it’s a load of bollocks like everything else that shoots into my head. But today it helps me to think this for some reason.

I keep looking at families in the midst of their lives and wondering when we will ever reach this or that stage ourselves, always forgetting to recognise what is happening in the here and now.

It is so important to try and glean as many nutrients from this moment as you can, or you’ll be waiting a good long time for that imaginary hour to arrive.