22/11

You didn’t really think that I was going to post a photograph of… why, give yourself a good hard slap!

On 22^nd November, my best friend gave birth to a child who has been named after me… yes, gentle reader, it’s true! (By coincidence, his dead grandfather also shared my name) I am sure this circumstance will increase my influence over the little boy in years to come.

So I am obliged to make another visit to Ireland: unhappily, I have never managed to persuade my best friend that it is an insufferable country; while one might blame fate for having the misfortune of being born there, there is one to blame but oneself for not getting out. I had hoped that the child’s father might make her come to her senses, but he proves quite willing to exchange the miserable flats of The Netherlands for the miserable winds of the west coast.

There are aspects of the child’s arrival that I am anxious to hear about. Not the child-birthing itself, good heavens, no- I am slightly curious to know if it was traumatic enough to put her off ever doing it again, but no more! I will be oddly disappointed if a seismic post-natal shift doesn’t affect my friend, yet I can’t imagine motherhood will result in the same character-changing hormonal imbalance that transformed other women in our acquaintance, turning their brains to slush. You wouldn’t believe how many hedonistic hippies that used to denounce papistry went scuttling off to get married in a church when they hit thirty; some even wore white. Even worse, all have gone up the aisle again to have their babies baptised… so that they can access better schools, presumably. Secretly I hope that ‘fucking hypocrite’ is the first expression to slip out of their child’s unwashed mouth, and someone must teach children those words, which is where an evil fairy godmother comes in...

Returning to my own little namesake, what do you think? There’s no need to gush: let’s be frank, one infant looks quite like another… ugly, pink, and somehow raw.

Yet I do feel, embarrassing though it may sound, that the world has become a better place because of his arrival.

My best friend and her partner will be a wonderful parents, leaving me great scope to be a negative influence. Already one imagines how in his teenage years, he will approach them both with sensitive questions about sex and drugs, to which they will give mature and considered replies... after which he will need a second opinion, an immature and ill-considered one, and I will be there for him. He may seek advice on what to wear, and lets face it a homosexual male of any age is more likely to be on the cutting edge of fashion than a middle-aged heterosexual couple. That is not all I will offer: won’t he be astonished to discover that Auntie C knows more about how to please and entertain girls than his heterosexual role models… he will be a little Casanova that no one can resist once I’ve finished teaching him what I know.

Speaking of children, a young couple moved into my building this month with a little baby of their own. I realised this when at 2am the little critter started to cry. Needless to say I smiled for the first hour, wondering if my own dear friend might be listening to a similar sound… then I started banging on the floorboards, shrieking at them to make it stop. It cries for an hour every night and the charm has worn off, no doubt because I don’t have the consolation of seeing little baby looking beautiful for the rest of the day. I met the couple in the elevator, looking rather harassed it must be said, with the infant strapped comfortably to daddy’s chest in one of those ‘holding harness’, head dangling limply to one side, I’d go so far as to say unconscious.

Had they slipped something into its food? Should I be reporting them to social services... or should someone be reporting me?