by Matt Rudd
Then we have an argument because twenty minutes after I present them to her, I discover them in a vase in the bedroom…with the long stems cut off.
‘I wanted to use this vase.’
‘The short one?’
‘Yes, the short one.’
‘So you cut off the long stems?’
‘Yes, is that a problem?’
‘Well, I could have saved seven and a half million pounds if I’d known you were going to cut the stems off.’
‘Do you want me to get the stems out of the bin, or can I enjoy the flowers you gave me in the way I want?’
Eight million pounds out of pocket and an argument for my troubles. But I decide to remain circumspect. We are both very tired and very ratty. It is no wonder that little things are triggering arguments more than usual. I must remain calm. I must remain calm because this is the first step on the long Zen Path to the Mastery of Parenting.
THE ZEN PATH TO THE MASTERY OF PARENTING
Step one: you must remain calm in the face of petty marital discord and not let it develop into a proper argument as it may have done in the time before children. Arguments take energy. You do not have energy. Whereas before, you could afford to spend days bickering about Marmite toast, bathroom usage and unappreciated long-stemmed roses, now you must centre yourself and allow these minor annoyances to wash away.
Step two: you must remain calm in the face of stressful situations as well. If you get a parking ticket, you must accept it and move on with your day. If someone, that someone being Isabel, spills red wine on the expensive white rug you bought for Christmas, you must shrug and volunteer to clean it. If you find yourself in Sainsburys still wearing your pyjama bottoms because you were halfway through getting dressed when your child woke up and started screaming (and if there’s one thing you’ve learned, it’s that you can only stop the screaming if you get to the child in the first ten seconds), but in your head, you’ve finished getting dressed and you only remember you haven’t when the checkout girl gives you a funny look, you must simply close your eyes, imagine a calm place, a garden perhaps, full of recently sprayed orchids, then pay the bill and leave quickly before anyone can call the police.
Step three: you must remain calm, even when it makes no sense to do so. Like when you haven’t slept continuously for more than an hour in six weeks, when you get home from work and have four hours of tidying to do before you can have dinner, which you can’t have because it’s then your turn to take the baby because your wife is exhausted and then you find the only way to get your child to sleep is by jogging around with him in a tight anticlockwise circle while reciting ‘The Owl and the Pussycat’ backwards in the voice of Barry White. For an hour.
I am still struggling with step one.
Friday 15 February
I have asked Isabel to start packing now for our incredibly ill-conceived trip to Devon on Saturday. She has agreed to do what she can.
This turns out to be very little because Jacob has a fever. Not a wink of sleep – not a single wink – mainly because I can’t stop myself taking his temperature every hour or so through the night to check it’s still only 99.8°C, not 101°C or 102°C. God forbid it gets to 102°C, even though Isabel phoned her doctor mum, who told her that babies get high temperatures and it doesn’t necessarily mean Jacob is going to die a horrible feverish death. ‘It doesn’t necessarily mean’ is not good enough for me. He is still tiny. His little body shouldn’t have to have a temperature. I’m not taking any chances.
Saturday 16 February
Not going on holiday today on account of Jacob’s temperature, even though it’s gone down and it looks as if he might survive. The snowstorm sweeping across the country isn’t helping, either. I am not saying ‘I told you so’. It is enough that, for once, I am right about something. She knows it. I know it. Jacob knows it.
Sunday 17 February
Still not going on holiday because the snow has turned to black ice and Isabel’s mother and my mother have both phoned and pleaded for us to wait until it is safe to drive. Even the bloody weatherman warns us not to travel anywhere unless it’s absolutely essential. I preferred it in the old days, before the Met Office missed the hurricane. They were more inclined to throw caution to the wind, so to speak. I say, ‘I told you so,’ because I simply can’t hold it in any longer.
Monday 18 February
And so, two days late, the first Walker family holiday begins. It will be the first of many. Over the next two decades at least, we will explore the world together. We will drive across Europe in campervans, we will sail narrow boats across England, we will explore exotic cultures in an educational and adventurous way. And we are starting with Devon. If we get that far. We woke at 6 a.m., a lie-in, and I suggested our ETDIAAHP (estimated time of departure if at all humanly possible) should be a very conservative 10 a.m. We left at 1 p.m., which isn’t bad when you consider that we had to take the entire house, the whole of Waitrose and a large section of Halfords with us, and that we’d only had five days to pack.
Twenty minutes in, against all odds, Jacob fell asleep. For the first time in seven weeks, Isabel and I had a conversation. It was leisurely. It had no sense of urgency about it. It was trivial and no child’s life depended on it.
‘Nice coffee,’ I said.
‘Do I get points for bringing it, dearest?’
‘Yes and no. Which would you like first?’
‘I may have to kill you, but purely out of interest I’ll start with the yes.’
‘Yes, because you’ve used proper milk, not devil’s spawn goat’s milk, and there’s enough sugar for once and we won’t have to spend £972 on crap motorway service station coffee.’
‘Right. And the no?’
‘No, because bringing a flask on a car journey is the beginning of the end. Only middle-aged people do that. Have you got some travel sweets in the glove box, too? Oh my God, you have. I rest my case.’
‘I hate to tell you this, but you’re already middle-aged, sweetheart. You planned the route three days ago.’
‘I didn’t.’
‘You did. You phoned Johnson and had a conversation with him about it. Only middle-aged people can spend more than twenty minutes discussing whether the M4/M5 is quicker than the A303.’
‘Well, Johnson was talking rubbish. Everyone knows the M4/M5 is best if there aren’t roadworks.’
‘I love it.’
‘Love what?’
‘Being middle-aged.’
‘Really?’ For a minute, I’d thought she was having me on, but she wasn’t.
‘Yes. We’re settling. We know what we’re doing. We know where we’re going.’
‘Do we?’
‘Yes. Apart from this whole parenting thing…which I think we’re doing all right at, don’t you?’
‘Well, you are. You’ve been brilliant.’
‘You’re doing all right as well. I think we make quite a good middle-aged couple, all things considered. And here we are, going on a lovely holiday as a family with our beautiful sleeping boy.’
She paused, smiling, and looked out the window. I smiled, too, because perhaps everything was going pretty well. And there was no denying it: we were going on holiday. A family holiday. It might even be fun.
Except then Jacob woke up and needed a feed. The fourteen miles to the next service station were the longest fourteen miles of my life. It’s bad enough listening to babies crying in general, but when it’s your baby, it has an extra piercing quality. It cuts straight into the very centre of your brain. It is almost impossible to do anything but deal with that noise. This is very clever: Mother Nature’s way of ensuring the offspring isn’t left abandoned in its hour of need. Except Mother Nature didn’t take into account the fact that we were going on holiday to Devon in the driving rain of bleak midwinter with a seven-week-old child. And that I might need to be able to concentrate on driving.
…and breathe.
THE ZEN PATH TO THE MASTERY OF PARENTING (CONT
INUED)
Step four: you must be able to drive a car at high speed in the rain while a child is screaming and the petrol gauge is on empty and your wife is saying, ‘Hurry, he needs changing and it’s still ten miles to the next service station,’ and you know he needs changing and you know it’s still ten miles to the next service station and, oh Christ, there’s a police car and, oh Christ, he wants me to pull over and, oh Christ, should I keep going because it’s now only five miles to the service station and he can give me the ticket there.
I pull over. Isabel climbs into the back to feed Jacob while I face an interrogation.
‘Good afternoon, officer. Can I start by saying how sor—’
‘Do you know what the national speed limit is, sir?’
‘Seventy miles an hour, officer. But this is our first-ever—’
‘And are you aware of how fast you were travelling?’
‘Too fast, officer. But you see Jacob was—’
‘Ninety-eight miles an hour,’ he interrupts again, peering into the back of the car at Isabel, who is trying to change Jacob.
‘Seriously? Oh God. I’m sorry. We’re new to this whole parenting—’
‘How old is your child?’ he interrupts for a fourth time and I begin to wonder whether the police computer is connected in any way to the health-visitor computer because we’re bound to be flagged on the latter so a flag on the former might constitute two flags on aggregate and I wonder how many flags you’re allowed before they take your child away. Probably no more than three.
‘Seven weeks,’ says Isabel. ‘And I don’t think we’re going to be doing any more long journeys for a while.’
The policeman hesitates and shakes his head. ‘Tell me about it. Mine’s three months old and we still can’t make it beyond the M25.’
‘If you arrested me and carted me off to prison, I would be grateful,’ I say, in an attempt to build on our shared pain. ‘Anything to escape the nappies.’
‘I’d love to, but I can’t,’ he replies. He is no longer a police officer. I am no longer a felon. We are new dads together, trying to make the best of a crazy world, a world of tears and stress and sleep deprivation and a necessity, every now and again, to drive at ninety-eight miles an hour.
‘I can only issue a ticket.’
‘But—’
‘If you pay in the next fourteen days, you won’t need to appear in court, but you will get three points on your licence and this will affect your insurance premiums. Another two miles an hour and you’d have got a ban.’
‘But I thought you were—’
‘There’s no excuse for driving so fast on a motorway. You’ll get yourself killed. And your little kiddie there, too. And perhaps someone else’s kiddie. Like mine.’
Unbelievable. He knows about the piercing scream that cuts straight to the very core of your brain but because he’s a copper with an annoying high-vis jacket and a Taser and a hat, he thinks he’s above the laws of parenting.
‘But he is right, darling. You shouldn’t really be driving so fast,’ says Isabel, astonishingly, as we pull away, but I know better than to try to argue. She’s tired. I’m tired. We must get through it. I shall content myself with muttering all the way to Devon.
Why would anyone pay good money to stay in a house that is more rubbish than their own? Because it looked nice in the picture? Because they automatically but inexplicably drop their standards while they’re on holiday? Because holidays are supposed to be rubbish? And because if they weren’t, it would be unbearable to go home at the end of them?
The cottage is what an estate agent might call rustic but what I might call uninhabitable. The drive and garden are submerged in five centimetres of what an estate agent might call locally sourced, organic yard cover but what I might call mud. The puddle by the front door into which I drop the seventh bag, the one containing all Jacob’s baby clothes, is a metre deep, although no one could have foreseen that until a bag had been dropped in it. An estate agent might call it a well-appointed plunge pool.
The heating system is what an estate agent might call an original fixture, the logs for the fire are what the lying bastard might call slightly damp. The oven has the remains of someone else’s pizza in it. The microwave doesn’t exist. There are many beds scattered around the top floor, but none of them are comfortable. The windows open, but they don’t shut. The bath has a pink and brown shower curtain slouching bacterially over it. The pink is its original colour, the brown a modification over years. Or vice versa.
If we put the quarter-kilowatt electric shower on at the same time as the kettle, the television, the radio or the baby-listening monitor, we have a power cut. To re-trip the switch, I have to walk across the swamp to a shed in which the mains electrics are housed.
The television, in direct contrast to every other television in the land, only gets Channel Five.
Unfortunately, the farmer is very friendly. He describes himself as an artisan. He grows not enough pigs and not enough cows and sells them to people like Isabel at posh farmer’s markets at vastly inflated prices. And people like Isabel can’t help feeling sorry for him, this last protector of the land, even though he’s conned us out of £400 for an outbuilding on a farm he is clearly struggling to keep going.
I refuse to feel sorry for him. He could always stop being a farmer and condemn himself to a life of office radiation and zombie commuting like the rest of us. He could be an accountant. Isabel claims that, without him, a way of life will be lost for ever. And the bumblebees and barn owls would go with it. We must use this week to live the good life…conversation round a candle, reading a book, playing backgammon, listening to the drip-drip-drip of the leaking roof.
There is nothing for it but to go to bed.
So I go to bed.
And Isabel goes to bed.
And Jacob starts coughing.
It is this damp shed’s fault. Pursuing a dream of rural existence that vanished in the nineteenth century, we are dooming our tiny, defenceless baby to a nineteenth-century cough.
Tuesday 19 February
I have caught the cough. The one time I thought I might go on holiday and not immediately get sick (‘It is your body relaxing, darlink,’ says Isabel’s mother every time it happens), I get sick. It is raining so hard that we abandon going outside altogether.
Wednesday 20 February
Isabel has also succumbed to the pleurisy-type disease Jacob and I are struggling with. They don’t mention this in the ‘Welcome to Devon’ pamphlets that lie curled and ageing in the top drawer of the only piece of furniture in our damp and smelly living room, so I burn them. And unless our chipper farmer produces some dry wood in the next hour or so, I’m going to burn the chest of drawers they came in, too.
Thursday 21 February
There is nothing worse than having a sick baby, except when you are sick yourselves, except when, instead of being at home, you are in mid-Devon, about a thousand miles from a chemist, and bloody wildlife is keeping you awake at night. Last night, in the precious minutes when Jacob wasn’t hacking his way through an illness he wouldn’t have if we were in a nice centrally heated house, a barn owl, a bloody barn owl, was hooting away in the adjacent bloody barn. Isabel, the barn owl conservationist, didn’t notice. She had a pillow over her head. This was a shame. Even she, the great farm-loving romantic, is beginning to see that there are advantages to the twenty-first century and that perhaps farm holidays aren’t right for (a) this time of year, (b) a young family and (c) enjoying oneself in the slightest bit, ever, at all. If a bloody barn owl had kept her awake all night, too, she might have also seen that (d) barn owls aren’t worth conserving.
Friday 22 February
I have made an executive decision. We are leaving. We are leaving one day early from the holiday we started two days late. I don’t care about the money. I don’t care about offending the friendly farmer. I am tired. I am damp. Most of Jacob’s clothes, the ones I dropped in a muddy puddle, are still not properly d
ry. The bloody goddam barn owl was at it again last night with his infernal hooting, so much so that I woke Isabel to complain. She then had the temerity to shout at me because I’d woken her up.
When she had finished shouting at me, she listened to the barn owl and then said, ‘Wow, it is a barn owl. You’re right. How amazing,’ and immediately went back to sleep, content that our annual subscription to the Barn Owl Conservation Society was money well spent.
I went downstairs to make a Lemsip and, because I’d forgotten to turn the bedside clock off first, fused the lights. I then stepped in the three-foot-deep puddle on my way to the shed. I then locked myself out. I then threw stones at the bedroom window, but Isabel didn’t hear me because she presumably had the pillow back on her head and it had begun to rain noisily on the tin roof.
She noticed when the last stone I threw broke the window. And that was when we had the argument that ended in my executive decision. It began like any normal middle-of-the-night, exhausted-parent shouting match, only with one of us standing outside getting wetter and wetter, and the other one shouting through a nice new hole in the window. But like a migraine, it developed into something darker, something more poisonous and unshiftable. It became one of those arguments in which horrible lurking disputes that were supposed to be long ago forgiven and forgotten rise to the surface.
‘You’re always negative.’
‘No, I am bloody not.’
‘You were negative when we lived in Finsbury Park.’