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.
