Hymn

Complimentary

It was the end of the meeting.  We were just getting up to leave, when one girl, admiring another’s file container, said, “You’ve got a lovely flowery box.” 

I was the only one who spat out their coffee.

Avalanche

Baby had been asleep for three blissful hours when I had to go the loo.  I creep out of our room, no lights, no noise.   When I return, she’s sleeping so soundly, I kneel by her crib to listen to her breathing.  First mistake, like having a snowball fight under a heavily laden snow slope.  This innocuous act makes T stir and she calls across the room, “Is she all right?”  She was.  As if in reply, Baby starts gently grizzling.  ‘She’s fine.’  Of course, that’s not good enough: two minutes after I’m back in bed, T gets up to check for herself.  Baby’s murmurs intensify.  Five more minutes of listening for the two of us who are wide awake before the light goes on, “To see if she’s been sick.”  She hasn’t.  But it’s the tipping point and unleashes the ear-splitting cries. 

In an attempt at damage limitation, T removes Baby from the bedroom to feed downstairs.  As I roll over, there’s a terrible series of thudding bumps and T screams.  Fearing a catastrophic fall down the stairs, I fly out bed, crack both shins on the bedstead and race to see what’s happened.  Mother and Baby are fine but shaken.  As T had switched on the lounge light she’d woken a visiting cat who was asleep on the sofa.  The startled moggy jumped a metre into the air and, not calmed by the scream, ran around the room like a daredevil motorcyclist in a Wall of Death.

It’s 4.30am.

Surprisingly, our neighbourhood trumpeter doesn’t take this as a cue to start practising.

Work Plan

I laugh at myself now.  How, having read ‘Contented This’ and ‘Baby That’, we were determined to follow the Experts’ rules.  I spent my train journeys memorising the precise timing of the proposed routines because they were so thorough (and so thoroughly complicated).  It wasn’t long, probably an hour at home, before we discovered that those regimes were more or less entirely incompatible with any form of normal life.

Now we operate a much successful strategy.  We’ve thrown away the books. We’ve developed own procedure; it’s called “Do whatever the hell works.’

Rise and Shine

Why is it that when you’re most tired, most in need of a good night’s sleep, most desperate to rest, your eyes spring open at 4am?  And it wasn’t even Baby.  Me.  In the dark.  Eyes wide open.  Apparently full of life.  But I know, oh, I know, that getting up at this ungodly hour would be fatal; that my energy is just phantom, that within moments life would seep out of my body and trickle away between the floorboards.  So, I close my eyes and wrestle myself back to sleep (always fighting the urge to see just how much time I’d wasted so far). 

Two hours later and at the instant, the very instant, that it was my turn to make a shrieking bird impression in my dream, the alarm wakes me.  Do I feel better for the extra hundred and twenty minutes?  Do I Balls.  Now, I feel like a long dead corpse reluctantly reanimated but mostly decomposed. 

Hair Line

I am, some might say, follicly-challenged. In fact last year when I ‘grew’ my hair for more than two months no one, not a single soul, noticed.  So how is it that today I wake up with a single strand, some two centimetres long, protruding from the middle of my forehead?  Where in God’s name did that come from?  Right in the middle of my forehead.  Half way between my eyebrows and my ‘hairline.’  And how?  Overnight?  Ridiculous. 

Cloud Spotting

I’ve lost track of the number of hours I’ve sat at the airfield waiting for the weather to clear.  This morning I left a sleeping mother and baby and drove down hoping to exploit the recent spell of clear skies.  Except, of course, today the sky was impenetrably grey.  I waited a couple of fruitless hours before going home.  As if I didn’t feel bad enough scurrying away to indulge myself, I waste a whole morning and have the expense of travelling there and back.  Bloody clouds.

Picture Perfect

Baby looks around much more now.  Instead of the blank unfocussed gazes of the first few days, now she’s really looking.  I can’t help wondering what she thinks of these initial visions.  No frame of reference: just loads of new stuff.  No judgement, no prejudice, no prior experience - she’s painting her world on an entirely blank canvas.  I wonder what she makes of it.

Crossing

I saw a girl cross the road as a swan swims a river.  Perfectly motionless above the waist, running like fury below.  I think she was attempting elegance.

Road Works

At midnight I was driving up and down the M6.  On the back seat, a screaming baby.  The drive - my feeble attempt at pacifying her.

Out for the Count

I embarrassed myself today.  I inadvertently recalled how many seconds there are in a solar year.  Just to the nearest hundred, you understand.  I thought it might be important once.  You just never know.  And there are some things that you just shouldn’t know.