Rude Awakenings

I had a horrible dream last night. I dreamt that I went to the dentist and she diagnosed me with leukemia. She did this by taking me into a little office and showing me a big piece of green card with leukemia written on it in red letters. I was wondering what to do about this when I heard the baby squealing and woke up.

I sat straight upright and said, 'Hey!'

The baby looked round and smiled. She was lying on her front busy doing something that required high pitched shrieking with the corner of her blanket in her mouth. I picked her up and dumped her in the bed next to us. She saw my nipple ring and pulled a face, eyes wide and lips pursed. Its the face that usually means she wants to play with the buttons on my shirt. Nooo....

'I think she's hungry,' mumbled Lynne.

'You think I should get up and feed her?' I asked. It was 6.30am.

'I've already been up!' Lynne was as indignant as you can be with your eyes closed.

I hadn't meant it like that. I just wanted to know what to do.

Time's Getting On...

It four weeks until Lynne goes back to work. I am absolutely prepared for looking after the baby single handed, but there is one thing that worries me. Now that I have a wee part-time job the baby will have to go into child care on Monday mornings and Wednesdays. A day and a half a week. We have found a nursery, they are on my way to work so they are really handy, they seem nice, they make positive noises when we ring them up, but they still seem to be building the place.

The work was meant to be done by the end of May, which is now, but the scaffolding is still up. Everything has been so easy so far, I'm just getting nervous that this is where our luck runs out.

The Goodness of Milky Puddings

I took the baby to get weighed at the health centre today. It had only been two weeks since we last had her weighed but she had lost three ounces that time, and Lynne was worried. Not really worried, you know, just a she-needed-to-know kind of worried.

The baby weigh-in takes place in a wee room with the heating turned right up, changing tables in each corner and a collection of chairs where parents sit with their half-dressed kids. At the front is the table with the scales on it and the two smiling health workers who call out our names in turn. I strip the baby down to her nappy and she babbles as we sit looking round at the other babies. I'm trying to work out if there are any as pretty as she is. I'm not sure what she is thinking.

It gets to our turn and I take the baby's nappy off and put her on the scales. This is a race against time because we have to get a reading off the scales before she craps and pisses everywhere. But she manages to preserve her dignity and we find that she has gained 10oz. She is now 17lb 1oz.

The health worker asks me if there is anything we think we are doing different. I tell her we have been giving the baby cheese, yoghurt and milky puddings. She nods approvingly.

I take the baby home and we have scrambled egg on toast for lunch. Lynne feeds the baby her egg with a spoon and then the baby gums each piece of toast into a gooey ball and throws them on the floor. For a finale, she thumps her plate with both fists so that it flips over and falls on the floor. We cheer and the baby laughs. 

Dead Fox Hand

We had vegetable lasagne for dinner, the three of us, the baby's mashed up roughly with a spoon. The move onto solid food has been surprisingly easy and the baby seems willing to eat whatever we put in front of her, which is pretty impressive seeing as how she has no teeth.

When we were finished Lynne glanced out of the window and said, 'Oh, the fox is dead.' Looking out I saw a fox lying on the opposite pavement in broad daylight, it's head at a funny angle.

'What should we do?'
'We can't leave it there.'

I went out with a bin bag. It was odd that the fox was just lying out there on the pavement, foxes usually take themselves away to some little den to die in private, so I think there must have been some violence involved. It was lying among some little broken pieces of polystyrene and in the gutter was a length of metal, like a kick-stand broken off a bike, with a twisted bit of spring round one end and tape round the other. I don't really know how the fox would have been killed used these bits and pieces, maybe it was just hit by a car. This is as far as my forensic investigation took me.

I picked up the dead fox by the tail. It was absolutely rigid, and its fur was unpleasantly wet. Bear in mind that I am a city boy here. Its tail stuck out stiffly so that the corpse wouldn't fit in my fucking bin bag. I shouted up to Lynne, who was looking out the window.

'I need another bin bag!'

She didn't open the window. She waved.

I mimed putting the fox in another bag, double-bagging if you will, and held up two fingers. Lynne disappeared from the window. I stood there, with a dead fox half falling out of it and my hands held out awkwardly to my sides. I felt like they were streaked with vermin and death. It looked like I was surrendering.

A woman walked by. 'What's that?' She winkled her nose.
'It's a dead fox.'
'Did you kill it?'
'No, I'm... I'm waiting for my wife to get me another bin bag.'

I was sad about the fox. I used to see it cutting about in the street at dusk or early in the morning, and I liked that, those times when there was nobody about but me and the fox. It's not all bad though, the other day I saw a fox cub in the window of a derelict flat. There was work being done on it, and some vixen must have made a den in there when work stopped for winter (or the recession) and littered amongst the scaffolding and pulled-up floorboards. So it all goes around, I suppose.

I'm a Bit of a Knob Sometimes...

After my last post I had intended to continue over the weekend by riffing on feeding and sleeping patterns, vis-a-vis the baby, but events conspired to prevent me. So instead I offer this, three instances of petulance on my part that happened this weekend. I tell these stories against myself.

I was eating breakfast on Friday morning when Lynne said,

‘Give the baby some of your scrambled egg.’

‘No,’ I snapped. ‘She’s got porridge and she’s [expletive deleted] eating that.’

Lynne leaned towards the baby as if to share a confidence and cooed, ‘Daddy is angry with us.’

Two points about this. The first is that I am trying not to swear so much in front of the baby, she is still too little to take it in but I need to kick the habit before it’s too late. You have to imagine the [expletive deleted] spoken in a neutral voice an octave lower than the rest of my statement. I’m not saying that is an honest transcript of what I said; just that that is how you should imagine it.

The second point is that I was angry with Lynne and the baby. It went back to the asparagus Lynne gave her. I know it is important for the baby to try new foods, but giving her exciting things like asparagus, or strips of toast spread with Dairylea, with her dinner only serves to highlight the shortcomings of the goo that forms the bulk of the meal. And if the baby does not embark on the voyage of sleep stuffed to the gunwales with grub, she wakes up hungry and I end up getting up at 5am to shovel baby rice down her throat. So, quite neatly, I have shown that the fact that I was tired and grumpy was all Lynne’s fault.

My in-laws came down for the weekend. Yas, ya fucken beauty! There is still a slight frisson of tension between me and my mother-in-law, but the baby is blissfully unaware of this and loves her grandparents unreservedly, giggling and bouncing up and down as they play with her. This is made all the more irritating as the baby howls with displeasure at the sight of my mother’s face. Stupid baby.

That is all background to instance of petulance number two. I came home from work on Saturday to find Lynne and her mother fussing over the baby in her cot.

‘Hey,’ I cried, pointed at Lynne’s mother’s feet. ‘No shoes in the bedroom! We’ve got a cream carpet in here! I’m not allowed shoes in the bedroom!’

‘Oh, sorry,’ she replied in a voice that didn’t sound very sorry at all. That was the only point I scored all weekend. Pretty needless really. Make sure you mark it up there with the rest.

On to number three. On Saturday night I went out to for Tiny Eric’s leaving do. He is leaving for America on Wednesday so he wanted a few drinks in the pub. I was there at 9pm, but he was nowhere to be seen, but I saw another guy I knew so we had a pint. He was only staying for one and then going on to the Halt Bar. Tiny Eric pitched up half an hour later with another one of his mates and said he was going to find a table round the corner, but my Halt Bar mate was in the middle of a story so I told Tiny Eric I would join him in a minute.

When I went in search of Tiny Eric I couldn’t find him. There were bands playing down the stairs, a girl sitting at a table in the doorway taking the money and stamping the hands.

I asked her, ‘Did a little guy with glasses and a tie go in here?’

She shrugged. ‘It’s indie music. They are all little guys with glasses and a tie.’

‘How much is it?’

‘Five pounds.’

‘A fiver?’ I scoffed. ‘I’m not paying a fiver to see shit bands in the pub!’

So I went to the Halt Bar. I probably won’t see Tiny Eric ever again.

I Should Just Be Waking Up About Now

Well, the results of the election seem to have been met with widespread disappointment, as if people expected the ugly ducklings they voted for to turn into beautiful swans by morning. I am watching breakfast news,  breakfast news for God's sake, the morning after the first meeting of the new cabinet and the general mood of the nation seems to be surprise that the government is made up of the same old fuds that were on the telly before. Who would have thought it? There also seems to be rolling footage of a Bee Gee drinking champagne with be-medalled war veterans. I must be delirious. They must be congratulating him on his survival.

I have been awake for hours. At fucken hell o'clock this morning I had to get up and shovel baby rice into the kid, who has been up all night demanding milk. That is because she wouldn't eat her dinner. She had a big lunch, and for her dinner she had some asparagus spears, which she chewed up enthusiastically, and a plate of vegetable mush that she turned her little button nose up at.

Now she is grabbing her foot with both hands, grinning and talking shite to me as if it is all cool. It's not cool at all. I want to be in bed.

Coffee To Go

Lynne went into the coffee shop while I waited outside with the pushchair. An old guy sat outside, a big round bear of a man, looking huge at the tiny aluminium table he was sitting at. He watched me as I crouched in front of the baby, prodding her and pulling faces.

‘Is that your first?’ he asked.

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘Aye, I brought up my daughter by myself,’ he replied. ‘Since she was six weeks old and her mother tried to kill her.’

The old guy then proceeded to tell me his life story. He lived in Canada, had a good job and was married, but when his kid was born his wife went a bit loopy. The doctors wouldn’t talk to him about it; they just gave him the pills and left him to get on with it, he said. He would come home from work and find that his wife had shut the baby in the cupboard under the sink with a three bar fire, that kind of thing. Finally he had enough and decided to take the kid and come back to Glasgow.

He bought a plane ticket, but he didn’t have any papers for the baby and was wondering how he was going to get her through check-in, but somehow everything went his way. A stewardess saw him struggling with his bag and the baby and offered to help, picking up the kid and walking straight through customs. He was able to go through as a single person. Then he was sat on the plane feeling like a criminal, which technically he was, when a man came out of the cockpit, with gold braid on his jacket and a fancy cap.

‘He looked like an admiral!’ the old guy said.

He started to sweat, but the man just asked if he wanted a travel cot for the kid. He could have laughed with relief.

When they landed in Glasgow he had to smuggle his baby through customs again. His luck held; in front of him a customs official had broken an ornament that an old dear in a big hat was carrying in her luggage. She looked like Margaret Rutherford, he said. She was going apeshit, and everyone was fussing round her. He walked straight past it all, and found himself back in Glasgow with nothing but a baby, a bag of clothes and twenty-six Canadian dollars.

He managed to tell me this whole story in the time it took Lynne to buy two coffees.

‘It took me seven years of messing about to get a divorce and custody of the child,’ he said. ‘But she is thirty-three now, she has two degrees and she works down south.’

‘What’s her name?’ I asked.

‘Audrey,’ he smiled.

Just then Lynne came out of the coffee shop and started telling me why it had taken so bloody long to make two fucking coffees. I was hoping the old guy would hang on so I could tell him how much I had appreciated his story, but he must have assumed that I had lost interest in him. He picked up his shopping bags and sloped off down the street by himself. I just let him go.

Election 2010!

So today I voted. It was no hardship; the polling station is right across the street from my flat. I thought about taunting the SNP guy handing out pamphlets outside, I could have opened the window and shouted, 'Do you want a cup of tea?' and when he said yes I could have replied, 'Aye, thought so,' and shut the window.

But that would have been childish.

We took time out from watching people go in and out of the polling station to go to the health centre to have the baby weighed. She hadn't been weighed since before she started on solid food. It turns out that she has lost three ounces. How can this be? She eats an incredible amount of food! Lynne feels guilty. I try to reassure her, three ounces is a very small amount of weight, and the baby is already huge anyway. The woman in the health centre doesn't seem worried, she says that dairy products are the answer. Cheese, yoghurt and milk. When babies start on the solids it happens, because veggies and stuff aren't packed with so many calories as the all milk diet. So we now have eight kinds of cheese in the fridge. I have just give the baby her tea, stuffing her with tuna and pasta, baby rice with a peach mixed through it and two cups of milk. I ate black pudding and mushrooms on toast. Nice.

Then I rocked I baby to sleep. She would fall asleep in my arms then wake up when I tried to put her down and start moaning. I had to deploy a Beatles song, sung by me, with the lyrics changed so that it was about tickly bums. In the end I managed to put her down and her eyes stayed closed, a little whine escaping from her lips like a deflating balloon.

Oh, and, because I know that you are dying to ask, of course I voted for Nelson Mandela Morgan Freeman.

Pre-Election Wobbles

There is an election tomorrow. It's hard to know which way to go without jeopardizing my Family Tax Credits. My local MP, who is standing for re-election, can't even be arsed with his flyer. The section with his fat face on it with a quote from some constituent is entitled 'endorser header', which is surely the title off the template. And the bit where he states his policies, lots of the sentences end with a (?), as if they hadn't decided what they were going to put there. But they printed it anyway. The cock's name is John Robertson and he is standing for Glasgow North West. He doesn't give a fuck.

I'm starting to think that I live in one of those constituencies where my vote won't really count.

I'll be voting tomorrow anyway. I won't say who for, it is meant to be a  secret ballot, but I will refer to the Guardian Weekend magazine, which contained a nice little set of interviews with the prime ministerial candidates and a cluster of other politicians. They were asked what their favourite colour was, what team they supported, things like that. When asked which living person they most admired they all said, every motherfucking one of them, they said Nelson Mandela.

I've nothing against Nelson Mandela, good guy, but get a fucking imagination.

I asked Lynne which living person she most admired. 'Helena Bonham Carter,' she replied. 'How does she get her hair to do that?'

Me, I would say Morgan Freeman. When he played Nelson Mandela in that film. He played God once as well.