Tag: humour

Funny ha-ha and funny weird

Gillan DrewLeave a comment

Thanks to that funny thing called life (along with a chemical imbalance called ‘my brain’), I’ve been rather down of late, so I thought I’d cheer myself up (and others?) by recording those funny and weird things my daughter’s been doing. Because really, when you’re circling the abyss and getting ready to fall, there’s no better lifeline than a child’s laughter to pull you back from the edge (disclaimer: a child’s laughter is no substitute for a lifeline. Always use a rope from an accredited climbing centre when circling abysses.)

I discovered this last night while dancing about to John Denver as I was cooking dinner. It was, apparently, the funniest thing Izzie had ever seen. I’ve never heard her laugh so much. And nice laughter too. I guess in a few years, the laughter will come for a different reason, but for now she thinks I move like Justin freakin’ Timberlake, so that’s a boost to the self-esteem.

Of course, a slight blow comes from the fact I just realised yesterday that instead of singing about his lover, a hillbilly strumpet named Country Rose, John Denver was actually singing about ‘country roads’. So I’ve been singing it wrong for twenty years. Yikes! A bit like Jimi Hendrix’s ‘Scuse me while I kiss this guy…’

Which brings me neatly to sounds. Izzie has learnt two new sounds. The first isn’t so bad. It’s a loud, drawn out roar that combines hello, how are you, I’m Izzie, do you want to be friends and let’s play. A little weird when you’re pushing her round the village and she roars at everyone you walk past, but survivable.

The second sound is drawn from the depths of hell.

She’s discovered she can make a noise on the in-breath as well as the out-breath, but this  in-breath noise is enough to make you shudder. It’s a gasping, choking hiss, like she’s being strangled or some strange demon creature has possessed her and wants to summon serpent warriors from a netherworld. It’s worst when you’re settling down to sleep and this freaky, banshee shriek comes through the monitor, sending a chill down your spine. You leap out of bed because it sounds like she’s having an asthma attack, but no, she smiles up at you, innocent eyes all aglow. And then roars at you in greeting. Creepy.

Actually, night time has become altogether weird. Three a.m. I’ll hear a noise and get up to check on the baby. I stand outside the door to listen, but there’s silence. I gently, oh so gently, push open the door, and then I see…it. This figure, dressed in white, bathed in the white glow of the baby monitor, standing up, motionless, just staring at the wall two inches from her nose. Just standing there. Not moving, not making noise. Staring at the wall. It’s like something out of Poltergeist.

Then she slowly turns her head to look at you. Ye gads, at three in the morning that’s enough to give anyone the heebie-jeebies!

They're Hee-eeere!
They’re Hee-eeere!

Even weirder are the sounds from the monitor. A few weeks back it started playing piano music for a few seconds. There was nothing in her room that plays a tune. I looked at Lizzie, she looked at me. ‘Did you just hear -?’ ‘Yes, that was weird.’ Checked on Izzie and she was fast asleep.

A couple of nights back I jerked awake as I was sure I heard a man’s voice shouting profanities right in my ear, right through the monitor. But the baby was sound asleep.

And speaking of sound asleep, because she’s so active during the day, Izzie has started sleeping like a log. Or perhaps a better way of saying it would be that she sleeps the sleep of the dead. Half a dozen times in the past fortnight I’ve gone to check on her and she’s so still, so quiet, I’ve momentarily thought she’s dead. I watch for the rise and fall of her chest – nothing. I put my hand by her mouth to feel her breath – nothing. It then takes a huge effort of will to reach for her wrist and check her pulse, because I dread feeling cold skin beneath my fingertips. But she’s never been dead so far, so that’s good!

She’s developed a fascination with Grandpa’s cans of cider too. There’s this thing called object permanence – basically, once something’s out of their sight, babies don’t realise it still exists so won’t look for it, whereas later they realise things exist even if they can’t see them. Well, Izzie’s cracked that one – no matter where he puts it, where he hides it, she continues to look for it, crawling all over him like an alcoholic spidermonkey. Gives new meaning to the expression ‘monkey on my back’.

Her level of activity is astonishing. If I need the toilet during the day, I pop her down in her cot and go sit on the loo with the door open as it faces the nursery. Within seconds, a little hand will appear on the top of the headboard, then another, before the top of the head, eyes and nose come straining to get a look. She’s like that graffiti motif Kilroy Was Here. Watching me take a crap. Thanks honey.

It extends to nappy changes. You put her on her back on the changing mat and she immediately rolls onto her front and crawls away because she knows what’s coming. You manage to grab her by the ankles, drag her kicking and screaming back, take off her tights – she crawls away again. You hold her by the ankles, lift them up in the air, but she twists so her upper half is facing the opposite direction to the lower. In that odd, contorted position, you take off her nappy, clean her up. You let go for a split second, look away, look back to see a little naked bottom disappearing behind the sofa. At which point you think, ‘Sod it!’ and let her keep on half-dressed. Although it’s a bit like Russian Roulette – peace right now weighed up against the risk of having to clean poo out of the carpet. Sometimes peace right now is worth any amount of future scrubbing.

 

 

And since she’s just vomited yellow stuff all down my trousers, I’m going to sign off here. Like I’ve said before, you need a sense of humour to be a parent – otherwise, it’s just tragic!

Never Too Young For Mischief

Gillan DrewLeave a comment

Before embarking on this parenting lark, I figured babies were like little balls of dribble and poop. Some were easy on the eyes, others less so. They were slaves to their needs for milk and bowel movements, demanding instant gratification or else letting out an ear-splitting howl. And they were all exactly the same. To talk of ‘personality’ in a baby was laughable.

How wrong I was.

Izzie has buckets of personality, and a talent for mischief that I wouldn’t believe in a seven-month old if I hadn’t seen it myself. Far from being a passive servant to her physiological urges, she’s an active participant in learning, laughing and game-playing – mostly at the expense of daddy.

Take what she did to my phone the other day. Since her favourite game is grabbing those things her parents deem important enough to deny her access to – mobile phones, TV controllers, cameras, tablet devices – Lizzie was using my phone as bait to encourage her to crawl. And of course, it would be unfair to take it off her once she got it.

At least, this was Lizzie’s philosophy. I was blissfully ignorant of it until I walked into the lounge and saw Izzie with one end of my phone in her mouth, her fingers tapping the touch screen like she was playing a flute.

Ah, how cute, I thought – she’s making a phone call.

I was less amused when I took it off her (unleashing a wall of tortured screaming) to see she was in some application on the internet and there were two buttons on the screen, one reading ‘confirm’ and the other ‘cancel’.

Panicked, I quickly cancelled out of whatever it was she’d been about to install, or buy, or delete, thinking I’d dodged a bullet. But that was just the start of it.

She’d turned on the wi-fi, turned on Bluetooth, turned on the GPS tracker, turned on mobile data, put it into flight mode, and changed the network from Vodafone to T-Mobile! God knows what else she might have done that I haven’t found yet – there’s an icon on the top left of the screen that wasn’t there before, and all attempts to remove it have failed. And it seems to think I have headphones plugged in all the time now.

It’s the same story with my Kindle (forgive the pun). I’ll be writing something, little ‘un on my lap seemingly engrossed in her own thing, and suddenly this little hand will swipe across the screen and exit whatever application I’m using, or delete my file, or undo changes. And she smiles and giggles, like she knows exactly what she’s done.

She has an uncanny knack for making mischief. The other day I spent a couple of hours baby-proofing the lounge, putting plastic squares on sharp corners and sticking rubber padding on the edges of furniture with double-sided tape. Then I brought Izzie into her new ‘safe’ playground.

The very first thing she did – the very first! – was to roll her way over to the sideboard, grab the bottom of the rubber padding and – riiiiippp – pull off the whole three-foot strip. Then she eyed-up the padding on the TV table, so I put her to bed.

Not that bed is safe from her shenanigans. She loves throwing her dummy down the back of the cot, perhaps because she knows it’ll force me to pull out the drawer and strain to squeeze underneath to retrieve it. The other night, she was lying peacefully in her cot, ready to sleep, so I stepped out of the room and closed the door. Within twenty seconds, I heard the dummy clatter down behind the cot and she started to make crying sounds, only to laugh the moment I stepped back in.

Having a bit of sense – only a bit – I put the second dummy in her mouth, stepped out, closed the door, and in less than ten seconds – I counted – it followed the first down the back of the cot.

After enduring five minutes of her tearful sniffling I went back in there and – lo and behold – she started laughing!

I’ve developed a new tactic in the Battle of Bedtime – I put Dummy 1 in her mouth, and as soon as she takes it out I pop in Dummy 2, so she ends up with one in each hand and a perplexed expression on her face. It’s not foolproof – she can just throw them both down the back of the cot – but she hasn’t quite figured that out yet. And long may she remain in ignorance, or else Dummy 3 will have to make an appearance on the scene.

Nothing but passive servants to their physiological urges? They’re devious, calculating monsters!

Now I’m dreading the arrival of my phone bill…

 

Christmas Shenanigans

Gillan Drew1 Comment
Christmas in a photo - the world as a blur!
Christmas in a photo – the world as a blur!

What has Izzie learned to do over the Christmas period? A whole heap, it seems.

Raspberries. She was pretty good before, but she’s perfected it now – perhaps because the funniest thing in the world is when daddy blows them on her belly and on her neck.

But I have created a monster.

It’s okay when she’s chomping on a wooden spoon – she blows on the bowl and uses her fingers along the handle like she’s playing a clarinet. And it’s tolerable when she has the dummy in her mouth – it just sounds like a lot of farts. But when she does it with food in her mouth – porridge, mushed-up carrots, rusks – it’s not pretty at all. Especially as I tend to be sitting right in front of her trying to feed her at the time. And she finds that pretty funny too.

She’s also making weird faces recently, like she’s trying to learn how all the muscles work. Mostly, she does duck impressions, sucking in her bottom lip, sticking out her top lip, and burbling. I guess it’s part of the process of learning to speak – after all the vowel sounds, double-ues and gees, she’s starting to make bee noises and something approximating an em, and the other day she randomly blurted out, ‘Hey you!’ which terrified the heck out of me.

Noise is something she’s fallen in love with over Christmas. The aforementioned wooden spoon that used to keep her quiet is now a drumstick for cracking out a rhythm on the tray of her high chair (always with her left hand). And the dummy is no longer a tool to help her sleep – it’s a passive-aggressive torture device she rattles back and forth along the slats of her cot like a prisoner with a mug along the bars of his cage. When she’s not laughing, that is, because bedtime is now an opportunity to chat to her teddy bears, kick the wooden headboard repeatedly, and generally have an amazing time.

Though she really ought to be tired, considering she barely sleeps at all during the day. She gets tired but she fights it, gets stroppy but resists any attempt to quieten her down, spits out her dummy, rubs her eyes, and cries. In fact, the sound she makes reminds me of that scene in Jaws where Quint is being eaten by the shark. She doesn’t want to miss anything, you see, though what she’s afraid of missing, I have no idea. The opportunity to be a nuisance, perhaps.

Because she’s loving being a nuisance too. She throws the dummy down the back of the cot so I have to pull the drawers out and crawl underneath to retrieve it (never fun at three in the morning). When she’s on her play mat she kicks the uprights over so it rolls up and buries her.

Help!
Help!

She constantly tries to turn the spoon round and jam the handle down her throat, and keep your face away from her if you value your ears – her current speciality is scrunching them up in her hands and digging in her fingernails, which is excruciatingly painful. And if she gets your phone, somewhere between chewing on the corner and drooling into the earphone socket, she sets the alarm for four in the morning.

But woe betide if you try to take it off her, because she knows what she wants.

If you think you're taking my spoon, you've got another think coming, mister!
If you think you’re taking my spoon, you’ve got another think coming, mister!

She’s become fixated with the TV controller and screams if you prise her robot-strong fingers off it. She wants to stand up all the time, not sit, not crawl – stand. So this morning when we put her in her chair for breakfast she slammed her little fists into the arms and stamped her feet  like an eight-year-old throwing a tantrum – she’s six months, for crying out loud. And the ball pit we bought her for Christmas isn’t going to get much use because all she does is press her face to the little holes in the side and strain to get out.

Get me the hell out of here!
Get me the hell out of here!

Which goes to show that the old adage is true: kids would rather play with the box than the toy within it. She got approximately a million toys for Christmas, and her favourite toy from the whole period? The bag container from inside the nappy bin. Typical!

Thanks, dad! It's just what I always wanted!
Thanks, dad! It’s just what I always wanted!

But at least she’s not the dog, who followed the gingerbread house with a bag of popping candy chocolate orange segments…

Future Worries

Gillan DrewLeave a comment

I had an argument with my six-year-old niece today.

‘I know more than you,’ she said.

‘No you don’t.’

‘Yes I do. All you know is how to eat chocolate.’

‘Not true,’ I said. ‘I know how to dispose of a body where nobody will ever find it.’

Her jaw dropped open. When she’d recovered, she said, ‘Well, I know how to kill a dinosaur.’

‘That’s nothing,’ I said. ‘I’m the reason there are no dinosaurs.’

And it got worse from there.

I’ve always been a bit of an easy target for kids. No matter how old I get, they treat me like I’m one of them. In fact, they treat me like I’m beneath them. When I was an eighteen-year-old sixth former – tall, bearded, tattooed and pierced, with a leather jacket, a ponytail and chunky army boots – the eleven-year-old Year 7s used to trip me up, call me names, tease me, even spit on me. And it’s always been this way.

No matter how much I threaten, shout, growl, snarl, swear, they still think I’m just a big teddy bear. Maybe it’s my Asperger’s Syndrome, but I have no idea how to get a child to respect me as an adult. And since Izzie turned six months old yesterday, that’s starting to worry me.

I want Izzie to like me, of course. I want to be best friends with her. But I also want her to respect me. To trust me. Not to see me as a figure of fun to be poked and teased, but as a person with a wealth of knowledge and experience and, stemming from this, a certain amount of authority. If today with my niece and nephew is anything to go by, she’ll laugh at me, snap at me, make fun of me, throw things at me, hit me, talk down to me, roll her eyes when I talk, and generally treat me as just another plaything. As kids have always done.

It’s worse for Lizzie. Instead of people just seeing her as a big kid, she is a big kid. Thanks to her autism, learning disability and dyspraxia, she thinks the wind is caused by trees, spends her time doing paint-by-numbers and playing with gadgets, and can’t walk past a ‘keep off the grass’ sign without cartwheeling on the lawn. She gets on great with kids because she’s on their emotional level – space hoppers and trampolines, Kinder Eggs and Happy Meals – and she’s so clumsy, everything she does looks like it’s been made by a five-year-old. This is not to be mean – she would admit as much herself.

And so, as little Izzie grows, Lizzie is daily becoming more nervous about how she’ll cope with a young, precocious child. She’s terrified of Izzie growing up and making fun of her. She’s terrified of Izzie overtaking her very quickly and coming to look down on her. And she’s terrified of Izzie growing up to be embarrassed of her immature, incapable mother.

I don’t think she has much to worry about. I have no doubt she and Izzie will be best friends. They’ll have an innate understanding of one another and while it is likely true that Izzie will overtake her in knowledge, skill and maturity, I don’t think she’ll make fun of Lizzie – she’s more likely to be fiercely protective of her mother, and help her with her deficiencies.

However, I sincerely doubt Lizzie will be much of an authority figure or a disciplinarian, and so this will fall to me. In our relationship, I’m the one who has to say ‘no’ when Lizzie is getting carried away, climbing over safety barriers, trying to dance in the rain without shoes or a coat, or spending a month’s income on frivolities. Even now, she’s the one who buys cute outfits and toys and bouncy chairs; I’m the one who buys nappies, and nappy creams, and baby wipes.

So the question is: how I can be the lawgiver parent when no child has ever respected me?

I mean, I can’t even get the dog to behave anymore. Lizzie spent six hours making a Christmas Gingerbread House. I then spent three hours correcting the mistakes Lizzie had made with the Christmas Gingerbread House. Since it kept collapsing under its own weight, I froze the pieces overnight then as I rebuilt it, I reinforced it with chocolate fingers so there was an internal frame, then glued it all together with icing sugar. It collapsed again, so I persevered, and finally I had something I was proud of. I put it on a plate on the table this evening, left the room for two minutes to change the baby’s nappy. In case you can’t guess the ending to this story, I’ve attached a photo. Now, if I can’t get an eighteen-month-old Cocker Spaniel to behave, what hope do I have with a spirited toddler?

IMG_0016

Random Thoughts

Gillan DrewLeave a comment

It’s my birthday next week. Lizzie keeps asking me what I want. Apparently ‘a day to myself’ isn’t an appropriate gift.

Whenever I sneeze, Izzie bursts into tears in absolute terror. So when she’s in her chair, cot, or with Lizzie, I rush out of the room if I feel the urge. But what do I do when she’s asleep in my lap and I feel a sneeze coming on?

Check out my new i-phone, bitches!
Check out my new i-phone, bitches!

Izzie is fascinated with my face. If she’s not twisting my ears, tugging my awesome beard, or pulling my glasses off and flinging them on the floor, she’s pushing her fingers as far up my nostrils as she can manage. As cute as she is, it’s rather unpleasant.

Izzie is so innocent and uncomplicated, her face is a succession of emoticons. When she finds something funny, she laughs; if she’s happy, she smiles; sad, her bottom lip sticks out and her eyes fill with tears; confused, she frowns and twists her mouth; tired, she yawns and rubs her eyes; surprised, her mouth falls open and her eyes go wide. They could use her on those caricature cards they give to autistic people to explain what different emotional states look like.

Where do all our muslins disappear to?

When I fart these days, it smells exactly like the baby’s poop. I know for a fact we’re not eating the same thing, so what’s that all about?

When babies cry, it’s out of need, frustration and annoyance. They’re not really sad, despite the tears. When they’re genuinely sad – like when they wake from a bad dream or their dad sneezes – their crying looks and sounds completely different.

People keep asking what Izzie’s getting for Christmas. She’ll be six months old – she can have the wrapping paper from whatever I unwrap, and the box it came in if she’s lucky.

The first song she heard after she was born, playing on the radio in the operating theatre, was Phil Collins’ Can’t Hurry Love. If they’d waited a few minutes before yanking her out, it would have been Ellie Goulding’s version of Your Song, which would probably have been more appropriate. But then, they were hurrying, love.

Why do they have radios playing in operating theatres?

Not sure how much actually made it to your stomach there.
Not sure how much actually made it to your stomach there.

All-terrain buggies should be renamed ‘heavy, big-wheeled, wide wheel-base buggies’, because other than being incredibly heavy and too wide to go down shop aisles, that seems to be the only difference. The only genuinely all-terrain buggy is called a sling.

Apparently, the middle knuckle of my right index finger is more appealing than a teething ring.

Whenever I walk down the street these days I pay inordinate amounts of attention to other people’s babies, and conclude that, yes, mine is the best. People say I’m biased, and I am. But that doesn’t mean I’m wrong.

She woke me up the other morning rhythmically banging her feet against the cot’s headboard. The fact she was put to bed facing the other way doesn’t seem to concern her.

Right now, when she burps, we cheer and tell her well done. In a couple of years we’ll tell her off for being so rude!

Izzie is terrified of missing things. She refuses to fall asleep in the afternoon as though worried in case something exciting is just around the corner. You can see her eyes drooping, but she refuses to give in, whereupon she goes past the point of tiredness into frenzy mode. That’s where she’s super tired, hyper alert, and has completely forgotten how to get to sleep. Tip: it’s not by pinwheeling your arms while shouting and going red in the face.

They need to build statues to honour whoever invented the dummy.

Now that Izzie is going to bed around 8pm, Lizzie and I keep sitting on the sofa, staring at each other, and wondering just what the hell we used to do in the evenings.

What is going on with that little cough thing that babies do for attention?

All my clothes seem to be covered in crusty white stains. It looks particularly dodgy on my black dressing gown. At least I know it’s puke, not that that makes it much better.

That stuff about having to be careful when changing a boy because they pee when the nappy comes off is only half right. If my experience with my daughter is anything to go by, all babies pee halfway through the nappy change, soaking themselves, their clothes, the clean nappy, you, and the carpet all at the same time.

Pesky bib!
Pesky bib!

How is it that dribble bibs are terrible at catching milk, milk bibs are terrible at catching dribble, and food bibs seem incapable of catching anything?

In the battle between the cot in the nursery and the Moses Basket on a rocker by the bed, the Moses Basket wins hands down because a) it’s right beside the bed, and b) it rocks. Whenever Izzie used to stir, I could lean over, pop her dummy back in, and rock her to sleep with my foot, all without getting out of bed or even really out from under the covers. Now I have to get up, go next door, put the dummy in, try to soothe her without rocking, and when she’s quiet I retreat to bed only for the monitor to kick in with grizzles around fifteen seconds later, forcing me to repeat the whole thing five or six times. And that’s a problem at three in the morning.

Izzie keeps doing phantom poops. She makes a noise, I feel the guff, the smell is awful, so I wait a couple of minutes, sniff her bottom to confirm that yes, it stinks, and pat the nappy to confirm that yes, there’s something in there, but by the time I open the nappy the poop has mysteriously vanished. Spooky.

Why, when I use the tympanic thermometer, does it always read 35.4 degrees? Am I not using it right?

And lastly, when I was doing night feeds every night around 3am, I could handle it. Now that Izzie sleeps through to around five-thirty or six in the morning two nights out of three, those 3am feeds every third night are absolute killers that I struggle to recover from. How does more sleep make you feel less awake? Or is it because I check her every couple of hours to make sure she’s still alive?

Sense of Humour Bypass

Gillan Drew1 Comment

The hardest thing about looking after a baby is not a single, groundbreaking event like a giant poo or a sudden explosive scream just as you’re settling down to dinner. It’s not a night without once closing your eyes or an entire day of crying. It’s subtler than that, the accumulation of lots of little events, weeks of broken sleep, and the general running down of your energy reserves, but when it comes, it’s no less impactive than a Mike Tyson slap round the face.

One day you wake up and find that things just aren’t funny anymore.

At five this morning I came downstairs with the baby to discover the dog had, in her infinite generosity, left me some chocolatey gifts all over the kitchen. And not crisp, tempered chocolates, but some kind of squidgy, runny mousse that has somehow stained the lino black as though we’ve spilt oil on the floor. Normally I’d think, ‘Wow, what a great anecdote to add to my ever-growing pile of gross-out fun!’ Instead, I cleaned it up with about half a roll of toilet paper, disinfected my hands, and set about feeding Izzie.

How dull.

I think the funk set in yesterday. I’m particularly good at what we in the autism community call ‘masking’. This is using your intellect to compensate for your condition and thereby mask your symptoms. It was the reason it took until I was 28 to receive a diagnosis. It’s not being dishonest, simply that we’ve learnt to hide the more ‘out there’ aspects of our autism in an attempt to fit in.

Unfortunately, the more tired I become, the less capable I am of consciously suppressing my autistic behaviours. Thus, if I’m not paying really close attention, I start taking everything literally; I lose the ability to understand when someone is joking; my social filter stops working; I start being pedantic and pernickety; I become paranoid because I can’t figure out why people are behaving the way they are; my mind starts to trip over the rapid flow of thoughts; and I act out my obsessive tendencies.

Yesterday we went out for coffee with some family and family friends. Because I pay close attention to every little detail in a social interaction to know when to speak, what to talk about, I don’t miss a trick, so I noticed that every time I spoke, two of the people around the table looked at one another, made a face, and laughed. I watched them while other people spoke, and nothing. I spoke, same response – they looked at one another, made a face, and laughed.

Thinking I might be paranoid, I went to the toilet, cleared my head, returned and tried again. Same thing. They were mocking me.

I couldn’t figure out what I was doing wrong. Was I speaking too loud? Off topic? In an odd register? Was I saying things inappropriate to the context? Sure, I was discussing how Izzie seems to have a hard nugget of poo in her rectum which backs up a sausage and a tin of mushy peas, but they had asked how she was doing and nobody was eating at the time. Then I was mentioning my orthodontic treatment as a teenager, how they wanted to break my jaw, bring it forward and insert a false chin to line up my teeth, but instead I opted for an agonising headbrace. I’m not sure what’s so amusing about that. One of them said they kept all of their child’s teeth and had them in a box – I said they should make them into a bracelet, but that was considered horrible. Well, you’re the one collecting teeth like a kleptomaniac tooth fairy!

Later, I had a row with Lizzie. As she is also autistic, she can similarly struggle to see things from another’s perspective i.e. mine. I didn’t feel she was giving me my due for doing the nights and allowing her to get a full night’s sleep, every night. In fact, I turned very much into a woman. ‘You just don’t understand how hard it is,’ I said in my whiniest voice. ‘You go out with your friends and come home and just watch TV. You don’t pay me any attention anymore. I feel like a single father. I just want a little consideration, and wah, wah, self-pitying wah.’

In the ensuing argument she grew defensive and said some things she shouldn’t have, and which I should have known not to take seriously, but I did. And all I could think during the argument was, ‘Why are you saying nothink? There isn’t a k in it, the word is nothing. And stop saying miwk, it’s milk. This Estuary English is entirely inappropriate for someone born and raised in Dorset!’

We made up, but when she went out in the evening with the baby, instead of having a rest I spent three hours obsessively looking up Spanish swear words on the internet. They mostly cast aspersions on the sexual behaviour of one’s mother. But I can think of better things I could have been doing instead.

So here we stand, or rather sit, with Izzie fixing me with her creepy unblinking gaze as she has done the past few hours. If she’d only cry, I’d be able to deal with it: why the hell is she just looking at me?

I need to regain my sense of humour. You lose that, next comes misery, self-harm and suicide. Or, at the very least, socks with sandals and an interest in snooker. And I need to find it fast: nobody can survive a baby without it.