Fa latte

Summertime. And as the watery British sun filtered through the clouds, our little family cut its losses and did what was only right and proper: fled the country, weighed down by a plethora of bottles, sterilisers, eco-nappies for the Boy Child’s sensitive little bum, squeaky toys and improving books. Plus assorted robes, headdresses and jewels from the National Theatre’s costume department for our annual costume party at our house in Tuscany. (NB: I am aware that this makes us sound like New Labour politicians - or at the very least, somewhat smug. Although we live in Islington we could never be accused of being champagne socialists. We drink only prosecco, imported directly from the motherland).

I am not going to recount the journey – which happened to be the Boy Child’s first trip on a plane. Having eschewed budget airlines for British Airways it was a slightly better experience than expected, but still painful. Enough said.  Thus followed a short visit to the ancestral home and to Granny, who had spent weeks agonising about bedroom allocation so as not to alert the maid to The Situation, almost resorting to forcing myself and Papà A to share a room until he pointed out that she had in fact never shared a room with her own husband and that it was quite proper for a family of aristocratic standing to – in matters of repose at least – divide and rule. The Boy Child behaved impeccably, taking one for the team as he dipped and bobbed in the pool, which she had had cleaned especially, almost without a murmur.

Duty completed, we drove off down the peninsula to our little Tuscan hideaway. This may conjure up images of rolling hills dotted with cypresses and the odd medieval hilltop town. Wrong. Where we are is cowboy country, swampy marshland once drained by Mussolini and now covered in dense woodland, which houses a menagerie of wild boar, wolves and venomous snakes. Maremma is the Gordon Brown to Chianti’s Tony Blair – darker, brooding, and not remotely concerned with keeping up appearances. The valley in which the house is situated is known - by us at least - as Mordor, due to its tendency towards howling gales and storms whilst the rest of Tuscany basks in golden sunlight.

However, as we inched up the almost vertical hill that leads to the house, pushing our hire car to its limits, I breathed a sigh of relief at being back. This place has many happy memories for us, one being our decision to take the leap of faith into the strange and wonderful world of parenthood. I wondered to myself how the presence of the Boy Child might affect the holiday.

As the house filled up with the usual assortment of misfits, drunks and homosexuals (ie our friends), I began to realise that the answer to my question was at once not much and entirely. On the surface of things little had changed: prosecco was still opened at 11am, a medley of cheesy pop and 70s Afrobeat boomed from the speakers, and dinners stretched on late into the night. But the Boy Child was there, and making his mark. I began to realise that being on holiday with children is not being on holiday. It’s like every other day but without the reassuring routine of home. It means entertaining them without the usual means at your disposal. Children don’t know that lie-ins are the main point of being on holiday. Before the arrival of the Boy Child the only time I experienced morning was if I hadn’t been to bed the night before. Now I was up at 7 every day.

However, luckily, I wasn’t the only mother in the house, which gave me the long awaited opportunity to observe at close quarters an entity of mythical status: the Italian Mamma, revered, reviled, respected and feared by the males in our house in equal proportions. I was eager to find out why.

My sample was:

C: ever-smiling primary teacher from Bologna. Mother to 4 year old twin boys, married to the equally smiley F, who copes with the never-ending energy of their sons by making frequent dips into an jam-jar containing some of the strongest weed ever known to man. Makes excellent ragù.

Parenting style: firm but fair, videos of Toy Story on repeat, food offered at regular intervals, small glasses of red wine imbibed at regular intervals, JM cigarette constantly to hand.

M-C: throatily glamorous divorcee from Sicily. Mother to the 4 year old R, a golden-locked ridiculously beautiful boy, given to fighting with above-mentioned twins and wearing his mother’s jewellery. Makes excellent gin-and-tonics.

Parenting style: damage limitation of son’s violent streak, finger painting to Botticelli standards, food offered at regular intervals, large glasses of white wine imbibed at regular intervals, Marlboro Light constantly to hand.

S: a force of nature, known to dive for octopi clad in nothing but bikini bottoms and a knife between her teeth, ripping them from the rocks with only her bare hands. Mother to the 3 year old F, a light breeze to her mother’s tornado, and the smiliest, roundest little cherub you ever clapped eyes upon, and who will of course be leading the Boy Child up the sentiero di giardino as soon as he’s old enough to follow her. Partnered to The Silver Fox, a genial Sicilian of middle years, of Falstaffian proportions and appetite.  Likes to offer traditional Sicilian remedies for all childhood ailments, which usually begin with the phrase ‘first grind together with salt and garlic the carcasses of 25 slugs.’ Makes excellent everything.

Parenting style: has only to raise an eyebrow to get her point across, screenings of the execrable 70s cartoon Heidi when F will not go to bed, cordon bleu standard food offered at regular intervals, entire bottles of prosecco imbibed without interval, Camel Light constantly to hand.

A sudden gust of fresh air blew away the army of Islington yummy mummies that I’d spent the last 6 months with.  Gone was any pretence at remaining organic; the thought of post-pregnancy Pilates banished. These were women who said that their obstetricians insisted that they didn’t give up smoking whilst pregnant because of the shock it would give their unborn child. Bottles of lunchtime beer were explained away by the handy phrase ‘fa latte’ – or ‘makes milk.’

My downfall was swift.  One night, after an excellent dinner, having given the Boy Child to his father for the night, I sat at the kitchen table with S & M-C. A few bottles in, I gave way to a year and a half’s worth of cravings and demanded cigarettes.

That first inhalation was divine – and all the better for being the epitome of mummy badness.  S and M-C welcomed me into the bosom of bad maternal behaviour and we toasted to the agony of childbirth, telling ourselves we deserved a little bit of fun.

Before I knew it, it was 7 am and I woke, naked and sweating alcohol into one of the bunk beds that we had had made for future use by the children. Cursing lightly, I fumbled for my expressing machine so that I could express the boozy milk, a practice somewhat vulgarly known as pump and dump. Papà A and I had agreed on this strategy the night before – all was well. Apart from the loss of a valve absolutely necessary for the functioning of said pump.

Which is how Papà A found me crouched over the bathroom sink trying to milk my ample bosom, by now bursting with vile and poisoned liquid, weeping lightly at my bad behaviour. Giving a light tut, he sent me to bed and took the Boy Child off for some formula.

I woke, several hours later, to a raging headache and the dulcet tones of C, who not only reassured me that I had done NOTHING wrong and that frankly, ANY mother would feel the same way, but that she had nipped down to the village and hired a breast pump which we could keep for as long as we liked. Bursting into tears of gratitude, I immediately attached it to my enormous tits, and sank into a state of blessed relief.

We found the rogue valve two hours later under the barbecue.

I am still working on the retrieval of my lost dignity.

Après moi, le déluge

[credit: polaris37 @ Flickr]

It has been 6 months since the Boy Child has arrived. Wow. I can hardly believe it. Just a few months ago he was an immobile lump of flesh and bones, occasionally yelling until something (usually Lady V’s breast) filled his mouth. But now, how things have changed! He smiles, giggles, tastes mashed-up food, spits it, smacks his tiny little fists on the ground, slaps me and Shu Shu T when we take him into bed early in the morning - having broken his mum after being up most of the night - happy as a pea in the pod at being allowed to play with his dad and non-Chinese American uncle. Our life is changing, slowly but surely, in ways that we could never imagine.

When people tell you “kids change your life”, they are right. Except, you have no way of understanding the phrase until you become a parent. When you do, you realise how real it is, how the certainties that have dominated your life quickly crumble with a single cry in the middle of the night. How the secure routine of daily activities, governed by a certitude stemming from years of independent adult living, sizzle and burn when faced with the constant demands of a newborn baby. The Boy Child knows no time, no space, no concern for other people's needs. He knows no mercy when you crawl at 3 am to his cot, begging him to go the fuck to sleep. He is like the Biblical Jewish God: capricious, irascible, vindictive, all-powerful. And we are the little humans God likes to play with, to plague with unimaginable tortures, to batter until we are broken, and occasionally to reward with a beaming, glorious smile. But what I really understood about the phrase “kids change your life” when I became a dad was not only that they dislodge you from your previous life’s pace and securities; they also change you as a person. More specifically: they turn you into a horrid human being.

Before the Boy Child arrived, Lady V and I were two very nice people, loved and trusted by our community of friends and by the world at large. We were kind to strangers, holding doors open for people entering a store behind us, giving up our seats on buses to anyone who looked a little older/fatter/more tired than us. Our strong social and environmental principles meant we would only consider working for non-profit organisations, accepting minimal or no-payment for hours of back-breaking servitude. We considered the idea of working for a large corporation and of earning shitloads of money absolutely shameful. We felt sorry about other people’s misfortunes, especially overseas, and donated to NGO appeals every 6 months or so. We often thought about volunteering in our communities, without actually doing anything about it. We were basically quintessential white middle-class Islingtonians. But once the Boy Child had installed himself into our lives and house, these feelings of goodness, generosity and love started slowly disappearing from inside our hearts. After 6 months, I can safely say they are completely dead and will never resurface into our hearts again. In their place, there are now feelings of contempt, greed, rage and schadenfreude towards everyone that surrounds us.

For example, when I first realised people got out of the way when they saw a man carrying a baby (they really do, out of what I think is a mixture of respect and fear), I started using the Boy Child - strapped to my chest - as a tool to get from A to B in less time. I now make it a point to snarl at people who are in my way when I am carrying him, especially those who stand on the left on escalators: “I am a father” - I tell myself  - “I don’t have time to waste. These idiots should know better”, and I push past them violently, telling them to return to the bloody provinces if they are unable to adjust to London’s rules. When before, in an act of exaggerated but well-meant courtesy, I’d wait until everyone got onto a bus before boarding it, now I push to the front to get on first, regardless of whether I am with the Boy Child or not, secure in the conviction that - as a father - I need that last seat far more than that whiney old hag. And work-wise, as my bank account hovers dangerously into the red zone after yet another nappy purchase, I have re-written my CV to make it appealing to Exxon Mobil. If during the interview they want me to club a baby seal to death to prove that I am worthy of their trust and their large paycheque, I’ll do it. No problem at all. Just give me the axe.

At first, I thought it was just me, and I felt a bit ashamed at how horrid I had become, so I decided to share my feelings with Lady V:

- Darling, I think I am turning into a cunt. I stopped caring about ordinary people out there and have become a total selfish bastard. I really only care about you, the Boy Child, our partners and our closest friends. I want to earn lots of money and I really don’t care if climate change drowns half the world population. I just want to make sure we survive and have enough cash to buy a house with really high stilts. Fuck everyone else. Should I be concerned at the fact that I am becoming a horrible person?
- Oh not at all - she replied with a loud sigh of relief, - in fact, I am really glad you shared this with me.
- Why is that? - I enquired.
- Well, I feel exactly the same way and I thought I was the only one turning into a bad person, but now that you told me it’s happening to you too, I am actually relieved!
- You feel the same way? Really? That’s great!!

How silly of me to believe her. As a matter of fact, Lady V had taken this plunge into the dark corners of the human heart far more seriously than I could ever (of course) do. While I confined myself to being a bit more bullish and assertive in public spaces, and definitely more preoccupied with money, she had turned into someone who actually rejoiced at other people’s misfortunes. On one occasion, for example, she set off on one of her weekly running dates with other new mums, who stick their babies in a pram and use it as an exercise tool as they jog around a park, terrifying anyone who stands in their way. When she came home, she had a massive grin on her face:

- Hey darling, looks like Pushy-Mummies was fun today, uh?
- Oh yes it was! - she replied beaming.
- Did you get lots of exercise done then?
- Yes, but that’s not the reason why I am happy. It’s that horrid M., the mother of baby-boy C. She’s always gloating about how her fat, ugly child has been sleeping thorough the night since he was born. And she’s pretty and thin as a broomstick.
- And? - I asked, frightened.
- Well, for the last 10 days, fat little C has stopped sleeping! Apparently he only passes out for 20 minutes at the time, and then scream for 2 hours. She’s a wreck, bags under her eyes, tearful and shaky. You should have seen her! Ah ah ah! The stress even gave her acne all over her face. Brilliant!
- Er... yes... brilliant...!
- Indeed. It made my day!

And with these words she tottered off downstairs with the Boy Child looking puzzled into her arms. I was left speechless, and wondering whether she might, at some point, turn into a mass-murderer. Because, let’s face it, when they set their mind to it, women are far better than men in pretty much any field. If Lady V has decided to become evil, God save us all. Britain won’t have seen the like of it since Maggie beat the shit out of the miners in the 80s.

It’s Grim up North

The Boy Child is half Italian and half British. This makes him a cultural mongrel, and a soon-to-be bullied schoolboy. But before other, more culturally-homogeneous children make his life hell, Lady V and I have decided to embrace this beautiful duality and make sure he spends as much time as possible in his ancestral lands - Italy and the Lake District - and hopefully pick up the deceiving traits of the inhabitants of the former and the bullish traits of those of the latter. This way, he’ll be better equipped to fend off the little pricks who will want to make his life hell. But our objective is not just educational: spending time with his grandparents means he’ll become familiar with them, thus enabling us to dump him onto them as much as possible when we want to go on fun, ‘adult’ escapes. Nothing pornographic, mind you. We would simply like to rediscover the ability to enjoy a dinner (at home or in a restaurant) without having to get up every 3 minutes to go calm down the screaming Boy Child who is meant to be asleep in a different room but has instead chosen to test whether he can be heard from people living in Brixton. It has only been 3 months since the Boy Child has arrived, yet I have had countless disgusting meals because I have been unable to eat them while they were still warm. This is when the Italian in me says: enough is enough. There is only one thing more sacred than a child in Italy, and that is food. Hence, my desire for the Boy Child to spend time with his grandparents, especially his maternal ones who are easier to reach, has increased tenfold in the last 3 weeks.

The opportunity to introduce the Boy Child to his Northern kindred came when Lady V’s sister, Aunty S, decided to christen her third daughter J. In many ways Aunty S is very similar to Lady V, while in others she appears to come from a different planet altogether. They share a strong physical resemblance - both have fair skin, blue-grey eyes and a below-average height - and some character similarities: open-mindedness, trustworthiness, kindness, mischief, tolerance. But while Lady V hated growing up in the Lake District and dreamed of escaping to the buzz of London and to her seedy spiritual home of Paris, something she did as soon as she was 18, Aunty S always wanted to become a mother and raise her children in the muddy fields of the Lake District. It comes as no surprise, then, that her 3 children - which she had in quick succession with her climber-husband (a lean, bespectacled figure who seems content with life insofar as he can regularly wear tight lycra shorts and haul himself up to the top of rocky mountains) - are all covered in a thick layer of mud. The Boy Child’s three little cousins - aged 5, 3 and 2 - are ashen blond, blue-eyed and have the terrifying look of kids who are being raised in the countryside and who are used to entertaining themselves by dismembering small mammals. No doubt, at some point, they will try to dismember the Boy Child too.

We left London by car on a Friday afternoon just in time to hit the interlinked rush-hours of London, Birmingham and Liverpool, which formed a long snake of immobile cars across the entire width of Britain. I was driving, while Lady V sat in the back, shoving her breasts into the Boy Child’s mouth every time he expressed dismay at the state of the country’s traffic. T. was still hiking across the Americas with his brother, but DJ S came with us, using this opportunity to lure us into Blackpool for the night - her birthplace and the mythical stomping ground of her mother’s family. I had never been to Blackpool, and I was somewhat unprepared for it. I had always thought of it as a grim northern town where people from less fortunate backgrounds who could not afford going on holiday to - say - Tuscany, spent their annual leave in pursuit of cheap thrills. As it turns out, I had overestimated Blackpool’s grimness and underestimated its thrills.

After a night spent in a lavish (and, for London’s standards, extraordinarily-cheap) hotel on the ‘sea-front’ - I never really got to see the sea, only miles of wet sand stretching into the horizon, so I am not sure Blackpool is actually built by the sea - DJ S took us to the Pleasure Beach, an amusement park that spreads over the middle of the town. It is an extraordinary sight - as if an alien spaceship had landed onto Blackpool, and had become its living heart, with pulses of blinking lights and arteries of interwoven roller-coaster tracks. It was early on Saturday morning when we got in, so the place was relatively deserted, except for a few young teenagers and eager hen and stag-night groups, who surely by the end of the day would be finding themselves drunkenly in bed with each other. DJ S and I headed for the most scary-looking rides, while Lady V sat herself into a champagne bar with the Boy Child. For her, the idea of diving 400 ft into empty space is equivalent to going to the dentist to have all your teeth pulled out. The roller-coasters did not disappoint. Indeed, they were better than I could ever hope for: shockingly well-designed and exquisitely thrilling. By lunchtime, having pumped litres of adrenaline into my bloodstream, I was primed for the northern relatives.

I had visited the Lakes before, always with Lady V, and had met her parents several times, whom I was introduced to first as a friend, then as a ‘very good friend’, and eventually as the man who was going to become the father of their second grandson. While Lady V’s mum and dad had immediately welcomed me as a long-lost son, the rest of the family, made up of a complex array of aunts, uncles, first- and second-tier cousins, had been decidedly less enthusiastic. Until the arrival of the Boy Child, no matter how polite they had all been to me, I had remained an outsider, especially in the eyes of the clan’s men. When I had turned up at family gatherings in the past, they had looked at me with mild curiosity, wondering why this dark-haired, clearly-foreign and sexually-deviant man was amongst them. Their quintessentially-English reserve had only turned into open hostility once, when one of the younger cousins, under the influence of several shots of whisky, had tried to strangle me, drunkenly accusing me of ‘disrespecting’ Lady V. How very bizarre. This time, things were going to be different. I had fathered one of their own kind, and even more importantly, I had fathered a boy. I expected more than just polite hospitality. I expected to be socially embraced and celebrated by the entire community, and to take my rightful place in the Valhalla of Northern Fathers. The opportunity was symbolically optimal: Lady V’s entire clan was coming together that very Sunday at Aunty S’s farmhouse for J’s christening.

I wore my best Prada suit and Ferragamo shoes, not because I wanted teach a fashion lesson to the northern relatives, but because I knew that would get me out of any of the compulsory outdoor activities that seem to characterise each family gathering. The idea of tossing leeks or running a one-legged race across a muddy field might have been appealing when I was 12 (in fact, it wasn’t: I have always hated competitive outdoor sports). At 35, it felt at odds with Western civilisation. People of all ages or physical conditions where forced to partake in these ‘fun’ activities, no matter how good their reason not to. On one occasion, I had seen an eight and a half-month pregnant woman being dragged - literally - by her father into a field to toss leeks, despite her pleas to be allowed to remain seated and resting. The sick, the elderly, the disabled: all were caught up in this frenzy of mud-saturated excitement. The only way to escape it, it seemed, was to be inappropriately dressed for it. Northern men seem to go to formal events with an extra set of informal clothes, and are all-too-keen to toss their jackets and ties and slip into trainers and hoodies if the word ‘games’ is uttered by someone. For this reason, I always make sure I have no change of clothes and that my attire looks fit for a royal wedding. I am thus guaranteed to be left alone.

Before lunch at Aunty S’s farmhouse, we had to endure a never-ending service in a small church up a nearby fell (the local name for an oversized hill). I am a firm atheist, and although raised a good Catholic boy I stopped going to Church for god-bothering purposes when I was 18. On the rare social occasions when I have to make an appearance, I am always surprised at what little attention people pay to the sermon, for if they did they surely should realise what a load of crap they are being told. On this occasion, the local vicar, a pink-coloured man in his early forties, had launched in a very ill-constructed argument about why free will was a bad thing for good Christians: better to trust the writings of the Bible and do what the Church tells them to do, rather than go around questioning things and thinking for themselves. I looked around expecting people to kick him out of the Church - surely free will is one of the very theological foundations of Christianity, the idea being that you will be rewarded with Heaven if you choose to renounce evil and embrace goodness, not because someone else tells you to do so. But most of those around me were too busy trying to keep their children silent to listen to the vicar’s drivel.

I had forgotten how many children populate the Lake District. Thousands. It’s like being in a developing country, where people have no television (and no sustained source of income) so the only thing left to do is make babies and then find a wealth-generating use for them - in factories, in fisheries, in fields, on the street. There were tens of them in the little church the clan had suddenly invaded, ranging from the Boy Child’s 10 weeks to a distant cousin’s 7 year-old son. Covered in various shades of mud stains - the lighter ones older, the darker ones acquired more recently - they ran up and down the aisle, pulled at the vicar’s robes, dove into the baptismal font, crawled under benches and onto the altar, pulled each other’s hair out, yelled, cried and laughed. It was like a rat infestation. Had Jesus ever spent any real time with kids, or produced any of his own, I very much doubt he would have uttered the famous lines “let the children come to me”. Rather, he would have said “make sure they stay as far as possible until they know the meaning of the words ‘ejaculation’ and ‘drug-addiction'. Only then does it make sense to start talking to them”.

Two of Lady V’s cousins had just produced offspring of their own, so, once at Aunty S’s farmhouse, there was a lot of comparing and contrasting. Lady V was thrilled to find out the Boy Child was by far the cutest of all the present babies (thanks to the aforementioned genetic mix), and I could read the ripples of satisfaction in her mouth-lines as she grinned every few seconds for yet another photograph. Like in all other matters of life, birth too seems to be about winning the race, not taking part in it. In the meantime, I was surrounded by the clan’s men, who all had kids of their own, despite at times being 10 years younger than me, and who congratulated me with firm handshakes like an old friend. They treated me like the straightest of man, even making some little jokes, of the kind that straight men tell each other when women are not there. This led me to wonder whether they had forgotten I was gay, and assumed I had shagged Lady V to produce the Boy Child. I decided to avoid any conversation on how the conception was achieved, and took with a manly grin the slaps that kept descending onto my back, and that - as the alcohol intake increased - were suddenly turning into hugs and even gropes. I was beginning to find it really hard to hide the pleasure I was deriving from all this manly bonding, especially since all of the guys were climbers, and I was being given a free ride at feeling up their muscular arms and thighs.

Then, catastrophe struck. Despite my attire, they asked me to play football with them. In hindsight, I guess this was supposed to be the ultimate male-bonding moment, but to me football is what roller-coasters are to Lady V and holy water to the devil. My first reaction is to recoil in horror, and the second one is to launch into a 10-minute long tirade about why it’s an overrated sport, why it’s socially dangerous, why the values it promotes are bad for our kids, and on and on and on. If I am drunk (like I was then), the tirade can go on until there are people willing to listed to me. At first the blokes laughed, thinking I was joking when I suggested we play volleyball instead, but as my rant continued and I started waving my right-hand index into the air - usually a sign I should be dragged out of the room - their mouths started dropping and their hands moving away from my shoulders and thighs. In just a few seconds, I had gone from total social acceptance to complete ghettoisation. They waved their hands, shrugged and moved away, leaving me standing in the middle of the room.

DJ S approached me.

“Nice one”, she said patting me on the back, “you’ve outdone yourself”.

“Well”, I replied “at least I don’t have to worry about my hardon showing when we shower together after the match”.

Losing it

 

I write this eating a bowl of pasta al ragu, lovingly cooked by Papà A. The best thing about living with Italians is that they can be relied upon at any time to prepare a spectacular dinner. The worst thing about living with Italians is also that they can be relied on at any time to prepare a spectacular dinner. They like refined white flour, biscuits for breakfast and spoonfuls of Nutella from the jar. They start talking about the next meal as soon as they’ve finished the one before. I am used to the classic lesbian fridge containing a half-empty tub of hummus, some sprouting pesto and a can of lager. Our super-sized American family fridge groans with the jars of foie gras and Belgian chocolates that Uncle F brings back from his work trips to Brussels.

This is not the best news for the post-partum physique. Since I moved in with Papà A, I have put on 15 kilos. Granted, this isn’t just due to his prowess in the kitchen. Two pregnancies in one year have taken their toll. An intricate network of stretch marks ranges over my belly like a shoal of silver fish. My bottom has expanded to proportions that can only be described as enormous. My cleavage is a deep chasm into which the Boy Child tucks his hand for comfort when feeding. My hips are ample. My thighs chafe when I walk.  I stopped measuring my waist when it became more than a metre round.

I have to face it - I am fat.

I’d like to blame it on hormones, or my polycystic ovaries, or the hyperstimulation that came with the IVF, but it wouldn’t be true. The simple truth is that during my two pregnancies, I ate. For the first time since puberty, I let off the brakes and allowed myself to go carb crazy. I gobbled down hot buttered toast in my morning breaks in the library, gorged on pasta salad for lunch, and munched sandwiches from Pret a Manger as afternoon snacks. I was pret a manger 24 hours a day, and told myself that it was fine, because the baby needed it.

Now, four months since the birth of the Boy Child, I remain, to my chagrin, Rubenesque. This is not what I expected. For some reason, I thought that as soon as the little chap popped out, I’d miraculously shrink back to a size 10. If Dannii Minogue could do it, so could I. And everyone said that breastfeeding would make the weight drop off. It was a lie. True, I dropped about 8 kilos after the birth but half of that was Boy Child and the rest various bits of bodily bloodiness, and now I seem to be stuck at 70kg.

Papà A likes to console me with promises of trips to Brazilian surgeons. Some months before the birth he hired a personal trainer, with the aim of fulfilling a long-held fantasy of recreating that Athena poster from the 1980s, the one with the half-naked man holding a baby.

 

I, however, am living on statutory maternity pay, which I suspect won’t stretch to surgery. And so, despite my better judgement, I have joined an exercise class called Pushy Mothers. Leaving to one side my memories of Prams in the Park, where I was outraged at being told to ‘clench for your husband’ during the floor exercises and was, in the end busted for attending with a child who was not my own, last week I swallowed my pride and made the call.

And thus it was that I found myself being barked at by a military-style instructor, part of a pack of yummy mummies sweating under the midday sun. This being Islington, the competition was, of course, intense. Everyone’s baby sleeps through the night. They are all enrolled on a tight schedule of Baby-Montessori, Baby-Sensory, Baby-Massage, Baby-Yoga and Baby-Splash. They are all expected to be bi-lingual. And the Mummies themselves are terrifyingly taut, clad in tight lycra from the Sweaty Betty shop on Upper Street. I sidled up to the only other fat one in the group and parked my buggy next to hers.

We swept through the park like the Ride of the Valkyries, speedwalking our buggies before being forced to perform gymnastics in the children’s playground with stretchy pieces of elastic. As I ran up and down the slide, sweat pouring down my face, I asked myself if it was more painful than childbirth. At least I had drugs to get through that particular physical challenge.

That evening at home, I told the boys what I’d been doing. Uncle F cackled and gave my bottom a resounding slap.

‘Mmmm, but we like you chubby, Mummy!’

I wriggled away. ‘You are not my target audience.’

I have unearthed the scales from the attic and put them in the middle of the bathroom. The diet starts tomorrow.