A journey into hell, with a party bag at the end of it

I am writing this in a state of shock unlikely to be matched unless I witness my own house burn down, or my new car disappear over a cliff without my mother-in-law inside it.

It all started innocently enough at 6.30 last Tuesday morning, when my son Charlie joined me at the breakfast table. I wished him a happy birthday, but he apparently felt no interest in that.

“Daddy,” he announced, “I need to tidy up the conservatory and I need you to help me.”

I was astonished. Hitherto, Charlie’s commitment to doing the reverse of tidying up any room he enters has been pretty much total.

I finally persuaded him to open his cards and presents instead, but then he started banging on about the conservatory again.

So his mother and I naturally asked him the reasons for his sudden conversion. “So it’s tidy for when all my friends come round for my party.”

“But that’s not until Sunday,” we pointed out.

Cue floods of tears. Charlie’s not ours.

The party continued to dominate conversation for the remainder of last week, during which it grew in my mind from a vague and distant warning in the long-range weather forecast to an imminent destructive tornado.

We had decided, foolishly, to operate on the assumption of decent weather and rely on the kids to make their own entertainment running around the garden. To assist, I laid out an old battery-powered ride-on train, kindly donated by a cousin, which proved no longer to work. We also hired a small bouncy castle, delivered by a large man in a Citroen Picasso who insisted on taking his instructions from my wife and referred to me dismissively as “Granddad”.

As if by magic ...

"Charlie, do you want to have first go on the bouncy castle, then?"

Usually this not uncommon faux pas at least secures me an apology and discount from the trader concerned, though on this occasion only the former proved to be forthcoming.

When my contemporaries started breeding 30 or more years ago I often remarked that I had no plans to follow their example as I did not like children. This invariably elicited the shiny-eyed response, “Ah, but your own are different!”

I will now concede that this is true, up to a point. I can just about bear to take my two out in public together, and I do not glare and tut anything like as much as I used to do when I find myself next to other people’s noisy brats on a train or in a pub.

However, I can also report that a room full of four-year-olds is, without doubt, completely unbearable. Give me a chanting mob of bloodthirsty fanatics any day.

After numerous cancellations I think that only about eight of them actually turned up, but it might as well have been 800. And they were in my house for less than three hours, but it seemed more like three months.

I had been enjoined to put Charlie’s Hornby train set into full working order for their entertainment and they descended on it like a plague of locusts, snapping signals, ripping off couplings and testing the track to literal destruction.

Worst of all, their own parents just beamed indulgently throughout. By the time they had sung “Happy birthday”, eaten their cake and sloped off with their party bags, I was a broken man. I slept for a solid 12 hours afterwards.

On the home straight: birthday candle successfully extinguished

I recalled my elderly mother’s reaction when a nephew came round to show off his new son. She seemed distracted throughout, and after my cousin left I asked what had been on her mind. “All I could think,” she replied, “was that if that child broke something, I would scream!”

I found that amusing at the time. Now I know just how she felt.

We are supposed to be looking for a new home nearer Charlie’s first school, but I am beginning to think that we should actually look for two of them, including a nice little flat in sheltered accommodation for me.

Failing that, perhaps we could run to something with a granny annexe. Given stout locks, soundproofing and an ample supply of bookshelves, that might just about do for “Granddad” until the men in white coats come to take me away once and for all.

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.

It's true: your own are different

I have long accepted the platitude that nothing is more tedious than other people banging on about their children, apart from meeting the little darlings in person.

I dreaded the piping of infant voices in trains, pubs and restaurants, and had no idea what to say when I encountered them in my friends’ homes. Almost the only green claim I could make for myself was that I had no offspring, and was most unlikely ever to do so.

Then my fiancée announced that she was pregnant, and exhaustive interrogation failed to identify anyone else who could be to blame. But still I drew firm lines in the sand; I was most certainly not going to be present at the birth, and envisaged the sort of domestic set-up in which the nursery lies behind a thoroughly soundproofed green baize door, and a well-scrubbed child is ushered into father’s study for ten minutes every evening, to be patted on the head and given a few words of warning or encouragement.

It was the birthing aspect of my plan that seemed to excite the most outrage, particularly among feminists of a certain age. I particularly enjoyed their reaction to my wife’s well-rehearsed reply: “To be fair, I wouldn’t be present at the birth either, if I didn’t have to be.” Male reactions were invariably one of two extremes: I would be missing the most wonderful experience of my life, or “You lucky [insert expletive of your own choice]! How on earth have you got away with that?”

So I drove my wife to the maternity unit on Thursday morning with a light heart and a good book to read while she was doing her stuff. Having been assured that an induced delivery tends to be a long process, I even nipped home at lunchtime to take the dog for a walk and have a bite to eat.

I returned in perfect time to witness the first serious contraction, after which my wife turned to her mother, her chosen birthing partner, and advised that she had better make the most of her coming grandchild as there most certainly wasn’t going to be another one. Shortly afterwards all hell broke loose and I made the critical mistake of accompanying the ladies into the delivery room to afford some initial encouragement.

I had not reckoned on my hand being seized in a vice-like grip that left me no hope of extricating myself, and made me wonder whether I would ever be able to type again. There was more than one Hann’s cries of pain echoing down the hospital corridor that afternoon.

Given that Mrs H is not noted either for doing things quickly, or for taking advice, I was amazed by how readily she accepted the midwife’s suggestion that screaming is a waste of good energy that could be applied to pushing. In less than an hour I was looking in amazement at a perfectly formed baby. And yes, reader, I cried, as all the textbooks told me I would.


The placenta looked like something dreamt up by the props department of a particularly low budget 1960s British horror film, and I would not mind at all if I never saw another one, but other than that it was a perfectly civilised and hugely uplifting experience. Though with hindsight, the most remarkable departure from plan was not my presence but Mrs Hann’s failure to consume the shed full of painkilling drugs she had promised herself, since it was all over so quickly that she forgot to ask for them.

Now I am spending a lot of time cradling a tiny son on my knee, something I never expected to write, and can provide authoritative confirmation of another of those sayings directed at sceptics about the joys of parenthood: it really is different with your own.

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.