So Spider-boy has some questions. Several questions. He’s been at nursery, he’s had the radio on, he’s overheard us talking to friends and relatives. He’s wise enough to save the first couple of questions until I am trying to shut the front door after our guests have left while gingerly edging his sleeping brother to […]
Life and movies don’t always collide. Although I suspect anyone who claims never to have imagined themselves in a pop video whilst rammed into the back of the family car on some endless sweaty holiday journey is probably lying. We’ve all done it, melted our world into a movie in our head, in my case […]
A lot can happen in a second. So the phone rings, when I am in my office. ‘Is that Spider-boy’s mother?’ says a voice I don’t know. She has used his full name and her tone is neutral. I pause. Just for a second. Catching a bit of breath in the back of my throat. […]
This morning Spider-boy is indignant. Indignant, and confused, and beginning, I think, to get a bit upset. I’ve emerged downstairs after a catch-up lie in at 8.45 am. Both boys are in the playroom immersed in a reacreation of Cars 2 in which the smallest is crawling around, puking in the cracks in the floorboards, […]
Spider-boy has just turned four. FOUR. Well done him – eating all that time, straddling two decades already, forging ahead and becoming him and him and then him again. Squeezing off see-through skins like a never ending edemame bean, perfect moulds of him shedded day by day to reveal brighter, firmer, more solid seed kernels […]
The daze of title, is of course mine. It has been a week for striking out. And now I have to tell you something bad. Something very, very scampy indeed. Did you read the brilliant My Naughty Little Sister books when you were little, secretly worshipping the nameless anti-heroine and her accomplice Bad Harry? Here’s […]
So newborn is on the move. He’s off, crawling like a pro. Properly, on all fours, moving forwards and backwards and to the side. My jersey-clad crab, edging round the lounge. That he’s moving isn’t a surprise. Not because I expect my children to be precocious, but because the blessed scamp has been crawling in […]
Here’s some good news. With background. When I was 7 months pregnant with Spider-boy, a colleague and friend took me to the side. She had her first son in his pram and she wanted to give me a warning. She said that though lots of people would tell me that giving birth was the happiest […]
The end of the world is on its way. Newborn has worked out his favourite thing in all the world. Beating Sophie, his brother and I on the list is standing. Standing and stamping (whilst clinging to a grown up finger) and being able, all of a sudden, to pick things up, stuff them in […]
I give too much away about my Dad-rock tendencies in that post title. It almost prompts me to reveal one of my great regrets: that according to fansite sources, Springsteen had planned to play Glory Days at Hyde Park with Bon Jovi but the council pulled the plug on such a noisy late encore. How […]