Recent Posts

• December 03, 2021

  Sleep

  I picture myself, two or three years from now. By then he’ll be walking, he’ll be having conversations and making very basic jokes. He’ll be in and around the age to start school, we’ll be in a different country. And I’ll be far enough removed from it that I can casually throw out the story to people who are having babies, or having problems with them, with the wise eyes of experience. He was like that, I’d say. He would go to bed around seven, and by ten or half ten, he would wake, shrieking like he’d seen how the world ends. He would be unconsoleable. He would have to be fed, or held down, and cleaned off as he leaked fluids out of his eyes, nose and mouth while continuing to just shriek. And then he’d go quiet. And I wouldn’t sleep at that point, I would go on standby. Waiting for the next one. Sometimes it was at two, sometimes three. He would wake again and his throat would rattle with the force of his rage, eyes still closed. He would continue for an hour, picked up, put down, cleaned up, cleaned out, changed, soothed, wept over, he would continue and continue and continue and then it would end again and I could go back onto standby. It would happen again. If we were unlucky, the hour would begin with five. If we were lucky, seven. He might go on and off for a while but eventually he would be up and clean and so happy, too happy to be mad at, not even aware of what he’d done, and then it’s the beginning of the day and all the things that have to be done have only started. But at least that was a couple of years ago, I’d conclude. Whoever I’m talking to will nod sagely and hope they have it a little better.

• May 18, 2021

  The Canadianification Continues

  Covid vaccines became available to the over 37s in the UK today. I was booked in by 8:44am, getting jabbed next Thursday, May 27. By the time I go home in July I’ll be something like 70% covered, and my parents will be both fully dosed. It’s very much time that I got out of this living room. That is also my dining room. That is also my office. That is also, currently, my bedroom.

• March 05, 2021

  A Personal History of Bright Eyes

  At some point in or around the year 2001, my friend Liz gave me a burned CD copy of Bright Eyes’ Fevers & Mirrors. I only realise now looking at Wikipedia that it was more or less new at the time (and also that Saddle Creek was founded by Conor Oberst’s brother, huh). It starts with the typical Bright Eyes first track, mostly long meandering bullshit that you listen to once to see if it’s worth coming back to (and it isn’t, with the exception of I’m Wide Awake, but more on that later) and then generally consider the album to start on track 2. I really got into it, listened to it a lot. Something Vague made it into my teenage band’s live set a few times, to some extent because it was the easiest one to play and had a fun shouty bit. What I actually wanted to play was The Calendar Hung Itself but I could never master the strum pattern and singing at the same time, so there we were.

• February 26, 2021

  Sleep Routine

  The baby is now almost five months old. He is still a large boy, surpassing the bigger cat fairly quickly. He still sleeps reasonably well, though of late he’s been waking in the hour or two after being put to bed with this enraged shrieking that vibrates the walls and my skull with the same resonance. It’s loud, is what I’m saying. His being in my bedroom adds a new step to my everyday (everynight) routine. Now, instead of sleeping peacefully through the night in my own bed, I get woken up by an abrupt, upset spluttering noise somewhere in the region of 2am. When this happens, I change a nappy and shuffle out to the living room couch to try and get enough sleep to be a functioning human for work the next day. Once there, I am at the whims of its feline residents: Jones and Ripley. If they are already asleep on the couch, I basically have to accommodate them, fold it out and sleep on the edge. If I try and assert my human superiority by, for example, picking them up and moving them out of the way, they will retaliate by wandering around the room for hours, aggressively licking themselves next to my head, or straight up jumping onto me from the nearest height. Not worth it. If they’re sleeping on some other piece of furniture, I’m generally safe until they decide it’s time for breakfast, usually circa 6:30am. They let me know this by wandering around the room, aggressively licking etc. All the stuff I mentioned before except this time louder and at high speed. If I don’t get up and feed them sharpish, they inevitably wake the three-year-old, who is then terminally up, and haunts the corridors until I concede that my day is no longer upcoming, and in fact started a half hour previously.

• December 31, 2020

  On to 2021

  Alright then, what do I want to do in 2021? Here’s the first batch of things: go to a pub, go to the cinema, eat at a restaurant, play board games with friends. God help me I even want to go into the office once or twice to see what it looks like. Maybe complete a work day without changing a nappy or initiating a nap (for someone other than myself). Let’s do the numbered list though, so I can check it off at the end of ‘21.