A Wedding

Here are most of us - at Emily's wedding 22 August in Hawes in Wensleydale. I'm the one in the blue tie. I'll leave the rest to your imaginations. The fifth washing machine is hidden on his mother's shoulders. You can see all the others clearly.

Cold Turkey

Something wrong here. Leaving our bed regularly in the middle of the night when 15 month old still waking gorgeous boy comes in. Can't sleep with the snuffles and restlessness. Then Grace comes in an hour later - once or twice a week. Must sort this and soon. Given that he's not ill or hungry we should not let the screaming get to us. Make him aware of our presence close by but don't lift him up, they say. This is a four nighter. How do you even contemplate it when you're nodding off at the wheel and aching in every joint already? Cold Turkey, for all of us.

Where's North?

Walking back the through the village to our house Grace, 4, suddenly asks 'Where's North, Daddy?' I'm usually good at unravelling concepts for children but this one is hard. I wave my arm vaguely across the fields to our right where rain looks to be pressing in to ruin our day. 'Over there, where those clouds are. Do you see?' 'Can I go there?' 'Not really darling. It's a direction.' Hopeless. 'You remember how I told you that we live on a giant ball. Well when we walk up that ball we're going North.' Still no good.

32 Toyota Tankfuls

On most days of the week we both finish work work around five and then switch straight over to childcare, which goes on until at least nine. Or maybe one of us is working later. Either way there's no let up, for either of us. This hefty routine has been going on, on and off, in my life since the early 1970s and the sheer exhaustion you feel on the last leg is the surest way to alcohol dependence. It starts with a single glass of wine, just enough to neutralise the buzz and get you smiling at each other. Quite soon this becomes two and from being an undiscerning quaffer of plonk you begin to know a little about wine. The idea of dependence doesn't occur to you - it's just a way of making a hugely stressful experience manageable, enjoyable even. Supper time is fun. You give yourself to bath time. You are present when you're reading the story and could even recount it if asked. And there's the thought of what's left in the bottle for that quality time together later on.

I stopped drinking completely nearly three years ago - not a drop since apart from a couple of glasses of Prosecco at our wedding and even this made me feel rough the next day. What struck me was how STRONG it was and what shocked me was how much of it I must have drunk in the previous 35 years. When I stopped I was drinking about a bottle of wine a day, not excessive by alcoholic standards, but then what exactly constitutes alcoholic? I had been trying to stop for a while until one day was just the right day to go for it. Why stop? Because something I'd thought was making me more present was doing the opposite, cumulatively, over a long period of time. Not that I was ever drunk. More that I realised that effect of alcohol never really left me. I can't say, at the end of a long day of work work and childcare that not having a drink has made me feel that different. Once past the sense of achievement it's DAY ONE of the rest of your life. But my older children tell me I'm different, less emotionally absent, easier to communicate with and I suppose they'd know. I do miss good red wine though. But a bottle of wine every night for 30 years? At 12% alc that's 12% 0.75 litres x 365 days x 30 years = 985.5 litres of pure alcohol - or put another way - 32 Toyota Avensis Tankfuls. That's a lot.

Hearing the Cry

As my mother grew older she grew steadily more deaf. When it wasn't funny, it was annoying having to shout and repeat what you'd said to her. The TV was always turned up too loud when we visited and she was too vain to use her hearing aid. Do you know what? I'm going the same way and, like her, I've resisted a hearing test. Pathetic, isn't it.

When I found out, aged 63, that I was to be a father yet again the hardest thing to accept was that I was going to be in it to the finish. Oh yeah, of course there was all the pride, the thrill of a boy at last, quiet pleasure in the visible evidence that I could still, you know. But the fact was there would be no Indian Summer to my life, no sitting back to enjoy a fat pension (no chance of that anyway). I had already been looking after my young children since 1972 and this wasn't set to change. Challenge now was to stay alive for long enough - say 90 - when Bobby would be 27 by which time all of them would have got enough FATHER to live reasonably balanced lives and my death would be more relief than tragedy.

What they don't warn you about getting older is how bits fall off. But like an old car, most of us still run OK with a few faults. We keep going through bad teeth, gouty toes, piles (not me), high blood pressure (managed) etc and of course, hearing loss. One of the upsides of mild deafness, I'd thought, was that I wouldn't get woken up so much by the baby crying. Natural earplugs, I joked. After 30 years of broken nights I would at last get some sleep. Not a bit of it. While I often don't hear him when he wakes when I'm downstairs in the evening there's something about the wavelength of his cry later in the night that goes straight through to me, especially when he's in the same room as he has been since a series of weekend of visitors have been sleeping in his room. Encroaching deafness does not shield you from your own baby cries. Nature's made sure of that. Not that this has made much difference in the share of baby care I've been doing through the night this time round. When he wakes I take him groggily from the cot and pass him to Lu, then decamp to the bed in the other room. But more of this bad habit another time.

The 1st Washing Machine

It was a Hoover, bought in Woolworths (RIP) on Holloway Road in North London early in 1973. The money for it (£84) was a present from my Uncle and Aunt to celebrate the birth of Jo. We lived in a collective household at the time, not quite a commune, but shared responsibility for the house and a little bit (very little) for children (Jo was the only one). The washing machine became the house's washing machine. When I thanked my Aunt for it she was horrified to discover that other people's washing - ie not family - went through it. A PURITY AND DANGER issue. The commune contaminates the nuclear family. Repellant. Disgust, almost. The emotional core of ideological conflict.