On adopted families

We have an old saying in Italy: “When your daughter marries you gain a son, but when your son marries you lose one”. I didn’t really marry Lady V, but this Italian saying is still applicable to us. Since our adventure began, Lady V’s family has wholeheartedly adopted me - and what a family to be adopted into! – while I have seen much less of my own family, mainly due to the fact that they live 2000 miles away and travelling with a small kid is much harder than without it.

At first, I wasn’t sure about the idea of becoming part of someone else’s family. I was particularly concerned about the moment when my ‘new’ family would find out about my God-given one, with its scores of decaying aristocrats, random convicted murderers, occasional B-list TV celebrities and clergymen of sorts. Not the kind of family one would talk about with ‘normal’ people without feeling a little queasy. But as soon as I met Lady V’s family - which sports a 1970s hippy commune, Oxford-educated mathematicians-cum-farmers, French-born aunts who speak in tongues and suicide brides – I realised her family was as bizarre and interesting as my own. And now these two families are one, united in the flesh and blood (and other bodily secretions) of the Boychild. Bloodlines, I realised, only mix when they have something in common, otherwise they would repel each other like oil and water.

The uniqueness of Lady V’s family came to the fore this Christmas, when we visited her native Lake District to celebrate her mum and dad’s 40^th wedding anniversary. The whole event took place at Lady V’s sister’s huge Georgian farmhouse, where she lives with her climber husband and scores of children, which she seems to produce at the rate of one a year while simultaneously running a hugely successful business. And when I say ‘simultaneously’, I mean it literally: the last time she gave birth, she was still sending emails while contractions were less than a minute apart. She only stopped when a midwife grabbed her Blackberry out of her hands and forced her to concentrate on the pushing.

The 5 of us - Lady V, DJ S, T, the Boychild and myself - set off from London on St Stephen’s Day, after a wonderful Christmas at home. I drove the first half of the journey, following detailed instructions from Lady V (“Go North!”), who spent most of the journey passed out in the back seat next to the also-sleeping Boychild and DJ S. Three hours later we switched, and as T and I dozed off in the backseats, the girls proceeded to get completely lost and leave the motorway in favour of narrow country lanes winding down the Peak District. I have no idea what rationale they were following, but the result was that we added two hours to a journey that was already pretty long. By the time we got to the Lake District, it was dark, raining and while the Boychild was in dire need of a nappy change, we were desperate for a J.H. (A J.H. is a very stiff drink, named after Lady V’s mum, who has the wonderful habit of pouring some of the strongest G&Ts known to mankind).

A J.H. is exactly what we got served as soon as we arrived. Getting hammered seems to be the default coping mechanism of Lady V’s family when it comes together. Before I knew it, and soon after putting the Boychild to bed, we were all highly intoxicated, sitting in the living room and watching a DVD entitled “Memories”. It was a collection of Super 8 reels taken in the summer of 1976, the year Lady V’s parents moved into a dilapidated farmhouse with another couple – generally known as “the cousins” (more on them later). They were real hippies, and these were the ‘70s, a time when growing your own food was considered an act of rebellion. I don’t know who the ringleader was, but I suspect it was Lady V’s dad. He was the above-mentioned Oxford-educated mathematician-cum-farmer, but he was also the village vicar, and a theology expert with a weakness for atheism. A mathematician, a farmer and a vicar all wrapped into one rather fine specimen of young lad, lean and muscular, as the movie made clear every time he appeared shirtless and performing one of many acts of torture onto the farm’s animals. These acts ranged from castrating little lambs to pulling teeth out of newborn piglets (“they bite their mummy, you see”, commented Lady V approvingly, making me wonder whether the reason why the Boychild only has 2 teeth so far is that he had the temerity to bite her once, and is now being punished with regular teeth extractions). Sometimes, it was Lady V’s mum J.H. on the tractor, usually in a bikini, smiling and looking glamorous in the sepia-toned colours of the movie. God, I love the 70s.

Lady V’s parents had embarked on this adventure with another couple, composed by J.H.’s cousin G. and by his French wife A.M., a slender and dark-haired woman prone to attacks of religious fervour, who had converted from Catholicism to Evangelism when moving from Bretagne to the Lakes District and was clearly another powerful force to reckon with on the farm. The two couples produced 5 kids in total – 4 girls and 1 unfortunate boy. I say unfortunate because I saw the effects of what growing up with 4 dominant sisters had on this particular young man: he’s got the look of a Holocaust survivor.

Legend goes that on one occasion the 4 girls – led of course by Lady V – whipped him with stinging nettles until his skin broke and eventually tied him to the rail-track that ran behind the farm and on which a train passed at least twice daily. They left him there for hours, until he managed to free himself and crawl back to his mum, crying. The boy was 7, maybe 8. If that isn’t enough to break a man, I don’t know what is. Unbelievably, the boy – now a fully-grown man in his late twenties – didn’t turn out gay, but still likes women. He is, in fact, marrying one this summer, a half-Dutch virago with the attitude of a prison guard. I think his condition is called Stockholm Syndrome.

The video also contained a number of images of Lady V aged 2 or 3. She looked, back in the ‘70s, very much like today: small and mischievous. She was often naked running through fields, occasionally dragging a terrified-looking smaller little girl with her (one of her sisters). And most of the times she was simply the portrait of joy, bouncing like a little blond ball down haystacks and chairs.  I saw a lot of the Boychild in her, and this made me happy, although I also wondered whether he might have inherited not only Lady V’s bouncy personality, but also her penchant for torturing siblings. We stopped watching the movie and started chatting late into the night with J.H. and Lady V’s dad, as they recalled old memories of Lady V’s youth on the farm. She denied everything, growing purple at every turn of the story, until she eventually sniggered and admitted it all. It was, once again, a remarkable reminder of what an amazing family I have mixed my blood with, and how wonderfully odd they are. Compared to them, I almost feel like a bastion of bourgeois conventionalism.

The following day, we headed to Lady V’s sister’s farmhouse well ahead of the event. When I accepted the invitation, I thought I’d simply turn up at the Lakes for a couple of days, chitchat my way through the anniversary soiree, and go back to London happy and restored. In fact, the event was far from restful, since T and I were asked to cook for the 50 guests that were going to turn up that night. I have cooked for large numbers before, but 50 meals beats my respectable CV, which peaked at 30 at my friend PDF’s 40^th birthday weekend. T and I assessed the potential damage, then decided to go for it. We equipped ourselves with all the baking trays with could find in London, several kilos of vegetables, mincemeat and Parmesan cheese, and proceeded to cook 7 trays of lasagne for everyone.

Just as T and I were placing the last tray into the oven, and were beginning to get the kitchen back to its original state, the first guests started to trickle in, at least 30 minutes before the official invitation time. This would be seen as heresy in London (or in any city, really), but in the Lake District it is apparently the rule. For a brief moment, as the aroma of the roasting lasagne filled the air, T and I were left alone in the kitchen surrounded by a menacing group of Cumbrian spectators, watching every one of our movements as if we were aliens with giant almond-shaped eyes and infinitely-long limbs.

I tried to break the silence with some inane chitchat, but they were having none of it. They just stared ominously at us – I could tell – with the look of people who can’t help thinking: “They are the gays!” Soon, I started wondering whether we had made a fatal mistake, and weather a bad supper would trigger a manhunt and ensuing burning at stake. We were, after all, in the middle the countryside, miles from any form of civilisation, and even if we had tried an escape from a crowd of angry Cumbrians, the cold rain and sticky mud all around us would have certainly killed us. Feeling increasingly nervous, I made my excuses and went upstairs to get changed.

Once upstairs, I found Lady V and her siblings all gathered in a room, signing a book of family portraits for the celebrating couple, which had not arrived yet. The younger brother was sitting on the bed, occasionally humiliated by one of his sisters or by his fiancée, whom I hadn’t at first recognised until she barked in my direction something about being rude, which I took as an invite to kiss her on the cheek three times, the French way. Babies had all been dispatched to bed in various rooms, and the oldest cousins were warned that if the Boychild woke up they would be held personally accountable. Clearly, torturing children was still en vogue up North. I sat on the floor, observing the scene. The 4 sisters looked radiant. All were in their prime, having given birth to a child in the last year or so, and were busy comparing notes, telling stories about their children’s achievement (or lack of), despite the fact that most of them could barely crawl, let alone talk.

After we had all signed the book, we made our way downstairs, just as Lady V’s parents walked through the door. They had dressed for the occasion in ruby-toned Edwardian costumes, J.H. in a long gown with a tight blouse and straw hat, her husband the mathematician/farmer/vicar in dark red tails. The sight was extraordinary, the crowd ecstatic, everyone kissed and hugged them with genuine affection. They hadn’t seen some of their guests in 10 over years. But I was distracted, because finally, the moment of truth had come, and the 7 lasagne were making their appearance on the large kitchen table. People looked suspiciously but gratefully (everyone had had a few drinks by now and hunger was beginning to bite) at the foreign dishes being displayed. As the Cumbrian mouths and stomachs came into contact with my Bolognese family’s centuries-old recipe, sudden eruptions of delight filled the room. Old ladies, barely able to walk, pushed their way to the kitchen table, no longer needing their niece’s help, demanding a second helping. Wives who had been dieting for months trying to lose their 5^th child’s baby weight ignored their husbands’ surprised looks and gorged themselves with yet another layer of pasta. It was, in other words, a culinary triumph. They turned to Lady V with looks of approval that said: “They might not be real men, these gays, but damn, they can cook! You are a lucky woman!”. And Lady V returned their looks with grace, promising lasagna recipes all round, and ignoring my pleas that it was a family secret and I could be killed for passing it around carelessly.

As we drove back the following day, tired but happy and with a trunk full of new noisy toys for the Boychild, I thought how lucky I was to be part of this new family, and how much I looked forward to my son growing up amongst it. 

The female of the species is more deadly than the male

‘The thing about gay men, I believe, is that they are not that different from us’, I explained to three 40-something women, who were sharing a taxi ride with me during a recent work trip to Malta. As I was uttering this banality during a bigoted discussion the women had started about homosexuals, my heart was sinking. How had I come to this? How was I betraying my own people and pretending  - years after my coming out - that I was one of THEM? It’s all, of course, the Boychild’s fault.

In our world, most people understand the following equation:

MAN + WOMAN + BABY = STRAIGHT MUM AND DAD

and some have come to understand the following equations:

MAN + MAN + BABY = GAY DADS

and

WOMAN + WOMAN + BABY = LESBIAN MUMS

No one, however, is really ready to face the complexity of:

MAN + WOMAN + BABY = LESBIAN MUM AND GAY DAD

Everyone who knows me, of course, knows what ‘the Situation’ is. But when I come across complete strangers, and for some reason the topic of babies comes up - either because someone else mentions the fact that I am a new dad, or because they spot some compromising evidence (in the shape of the Boy Child’s picture) on my phone’s wallpaper or my laptop’s screensaver - it is impossible to stop them from assuming I am straight. The whole thing starts off quite innocently:

- Ohhhh he’s really cute! How old is he?

- 8 months old.

- You and your wife must be sooooo proud.
- Actually... we are not... er... married, we...
- Oh well... you know... I just used the word ‘married’, the way one uses this word... you know...
- Er... yes, of course... but what I meant was...
- Anyway, you must be soooo happy. First one, isn’t it? When my wife and I had our baby girl, we simply couldn’t stop looking at her, we just sat there for hours adoring this little human being, our hearts filled with joy. Make sure you make the most of these first few months, because, let me tell you...

And the train has gone. By the time - 15 minutes later - the long tirade on the joys of parenting takes a breathing pause, it’s too late for me to finish my opening statement and explain that I am gay, that Lady V is this ‘special’ friend with whom I decided to have a child, that we have our own partners, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

Besides, these days the simple act of explaining ‘the Situation’ fills me with dread. Every time I talk about our special arrangement, a fragment of its magic dies. We are our own thing, our own feelings, our own relationships. It’s nothing to do with labels, sexuality, who is on the birth certificate, who isn’t, what the details of the arrangement are... Like every other human being, I have become quite protective of my family, I don’t like people snooping around it just because it’s a little different. To me, it feels natural and warm like a sunny spring day. For lack of words and for the growing reluctance to disclose to strangers my family ‘situation’, I have now taken to silently acknowledge whatever people assume. People believe I am straight when they hear I am a dad? So be it. What harm can it do? Is it really such a big deal?

Well, it wouldn’t be if it weren’t for the female of the species. Let me explain why.

I am one of those gay men known on the scene as ‘straight-acting’. That means I am not flamboyant, I do not look like an inflated rubber doll, and I do not talk in a high-pitched voice using the expression ‘OH MY GOD’ every 3 sentences. In fact, I don’t even look Italian (an appearance which people often mistake for gay). I don’t have to try hard to look straight. I simply look straight: I wear corduroys, I usually look unshaven, I like videogames and indie rock music. And for a long time, I even behaved like a straight man in the bedroom, sleeping with girls and leading a parallel secret gay life (like many ‘straight’ men do), until I accepted the fact that pussies weren’t really my thing and women were much better as friends than as dates.

Once I realised this, I had to develop a series of sophisticated but effective strategies to make sure women did not consider me potential prey, but understood despite my straight appearance that I was into men, not them. Tricks include: dropping into a conversation how much I hate football; offering spot-on fashion advice; dropping into a conversation what a complex relationship I have with my mother (*this only works outside Italy); revealing how much I love cooking (**this also only works outside Italy - now you understand why it’s so hard to tell Italian and gay men apart). In rare but desperate situations, I resort to uttering a couple of strategically-positioned ‘OH MY GODs’ and revving up my inner campness a little (every man has a little lurking underneath the surface, even the De Niros and the Brandos). These strategies have never failed to switch the ‘husband-hunting’ mode off a woman’s brain and to switch the ‘gay best friend’ mode on. They have worked seamlessly for years, and I have never found myself in awkward situations with women wanting to get more than just smiles and kind words from me.

But as soon as I started walking down the street with the Boy Child strapped to my chest, my entire sexual camouflage was shattered to bits. Suddenly, I became VERY visible to the female of the species, and started attracting the kind of looks a fat gazelle might get from a pride of very hungry lionesses in the savannah. The term ‘predatory’ is an understatement. Women spot me at a distance, notice I am with offspring, as they get closer their eyes lock me like an F14 Tomcat jet (remember Top Gun?). Since my reproductive organs are clearly functioning - the evidence is wriggling in my Baby Bjorn - I am immediately categorised as straight and potential prey. Sometimes they smile coyly as they walk past, but most of the times they don’t even bother. They just cruise me the way sailors cruise each other in the dark recesses of harbours: with a long, hard stare straight into the eyes. I never thought women could be so blunt about their sexual appetite. Sometimes I wonder whether other fathers - the straight ones - ever take advantage of this sudden reversal of roles. Then I remember that the sight of a dad with a baby and without the mother is pretty unique, and I realise why. Women know VERY WELL what lurks out there: thousands of other females ready to pounce on their husbands. As the predator-in-residence, they are not going to run any risks. One careless oversight, and they will be raising their child on their own.

Back to Malta and my work trip. The female of the species - I discovered on that occasion - has little consideration for the one who is left at home with the screaming bundle, as her ‘husband’ goes out in search for food and public contracts. In fact, this is the PERFECT opportunity for an easy hunt. After the taxi dropped us back at the hotel where we were all staying, one of the women who was with me - an attractive 40-something MILF whom I had barely met a few hours before at a workshop - declared that she needed a drink and wanted ‘a young attractive man’ to be her chaperon, as she was not in the habit of drinking in hotel bars on her own. I looked around in search for someone else she might have been talking to, but immediately realised that she had set her eyes on me.

I obliged with a half smile, hoping the other two women might join us too, but these quickly disappeared into the elevator, probably obeying some unspoken hormonal orders of the alpha female in the group. I found myself sitting on a sofa at a disturbingly close distance from the woman, sipping a G&T and using all the lines in my dissuasion repertoire. All of which failed in quick succession. A trickle of sweat suddenly appeared on my forehead. The MILF moved closer, a hand dropping nonchalantly on my knee, fingers wrapping firmly my kneecap like it were a doorknob. I started talking about my child and ‘my lovely life at home with Lady V’. She blanked me, drawing even closer and letting her hand slip up towards my crotch. I watched in horror as years of carefully-constructed protection had been destroyed by the mere existence of the Boy Child. Then, as she finally pounced and reached for my lips, I jumped away from her, yelling - a little too loud for a fairly crowded hotel bar in which we were - that I was gay!

She straightened herself with an incredulous look in her eyes:

- Gay?

- Yes. I’m sorry - I explained hastily - I should have told you from the start, but... well... it’s not easy... the situation... you see...

- I am a very desirable woman - she replied, ignoring my remarks.

- What...? Yes, of course you are... but...

- Shut up. You lead me on until here and then you come up with this preposterous excuse?  Are you not man enough to say you love your wife?

- But she’s NOT my wife! And I am gay!
- No you are not. I know a gay men when I see one. You are not. And that baby of yours is the living proof you aren’t. You are not gay, and you are certainly not a man.

And within seconds she was in the elevator, heading back to her room, and leaving me shaking in the lobby, under the bemused eyes of other hotel guests. That was my first real post-paternal encounter with the female of the species.

And it was scary.

Parental advice

I had never met gay dads before becoming one. Now, they are everywhere. I am not sure how this happened, but I am forced to confront a genre of people that, in all honesty, I detest: militants.

It all started when my friend C found out I’d become a dad. He’s one of those hugely networked and successful gay men, who knows everyone worth knowing within the London Gay Mafia. He is also a banker, which should make me hate him, but he’s too cool and fun, so when I am with him I suspend my well-founded prejudice on the banking profession and enjoy his amazing company. He called me up a few months after the Boy Child was born, and organised in quick succession two dinners with two gay couples, both of whom had fathered a child. At first I wasn’t too enthusiastic, but I accepted trusting C’s judgement and dragged my boyfriend T along for the occasion.

We met the first gay couple in a dimly-lit Turkish restaurant in Islington. They were in their mid-forties, ridiculously handsome and successful - one was a TV actor, the other one a journalist (or was he a lawyer? I cannot remember, I couldn’t get my brain to work as it was constantly distracted by his perfectly-sculpted arms). Before starters were served, the Inquisition kicked off.
 

- ‘So, how old is your son?’ asked the TV guy.


- ‘Three months old, give or take’ - I replied.
 

- ‘Ah, right, let me tell you about the first three months. They are mental!’

And before I could utter a word, he had launched into a long monologue explaining to us everything about nappy changing, sleepless nights, swaddling and whatnot. I tried to interrupt him, explaining that we had already got the hang of all these things, but he didn’t pay any attention to my remarks. So T and I just sat there and listened patiently to all the obvious suggestions they made.

- ‘Anyway’ - the journalist added – ‘you can also read a book or two about parenting.’

- ‘Actually’ - I interrupted, by now slightly exasperated, ‘not only have I read more than a book or two, but we really didn’t find these first two months so awful as you did. It might be because we are raising the Boy Child with his mother, and women tend to understand and cope with the challenges of parenting much better. We simply follow her lead.’

It was as if I had insulted the Prophet in front of a roomful of Muslims. Their eyes bulged at the suggestion that a woman would be better than a gay man at childraising.

- ‘You’re joking, surely! How could you possibly say that, as a gay man? Don’t you think gay men can be good parents too?’
- ‘That’s not what I said.’

- ‘Well that’s what you’re implying. I really don’t think a woman is necessary to raise a kid. We’re good friends with our daughter’s mother, she takes care of her most nights and most days, but we could really do this just as well ourselves.’

- ‘Ah,’ I said, ‘that explains your perfect bodies. I am sure your daughter’s mum has just as much time as you do to keep her body in perfect shape, right? ‘

- ‘Are you a homophobe as well as a bigot?’  the journalist/lawyer asked tonelessly.

I looked over to C, who was sliding quickly under the table. He was mortified at how quickly things had escalated, but this didn’t stop him from inviting us to a second gay dads’ dinner, a few weeks later. This time, it was an American couple who were visiting London for the summer. We met them at C’s private club in Soho. They were less handsome than the first ones, which helped me focus my arguments a little more than the first time, although the gym routine was clearly in full swing, judging by the oversized biceps on both of them. They showed off - in classic American style - a row of perfectly manicured white teeth when they first met me and T, although we didn’t get to see much smiling after that.

- ‘Well, helloooooo!’ said the first one, a tall, blond, pasty guy, who introduced himself as the next Mark Zuckerberg. This made me want to kill him immediately.

- ‘Hello hello!’ said the second one, a short, buffed-up Asian man, who said he was the wannabe kept man of the first one, waiting for him to make millions with his Zuckerberg plan so that he could just lie next to a Beverly Hills pool surrounded by naked Brazilian rent-boys. This made me want to kill him more than his boyfriend.

Over drinks, we started chatting about life, work and interests. The usual gay way of assessing whether you are potentially useful to someone, or should be quickly discarded as a waste of space. Their questions were mainly directed at T, whom they seemed to be far more interested in than in me, probably because he is 8 years younger and has the body of an Adonis. He tried to explain what he did as a Transatlantic PhD researcher in Global Governance issues. The two nodded with enthusiasm, but I could tell they didn’t understand a word of what he was saying. I ordered a second drink for good courage.

- ‘Soooooooo’ the blond guy turned to me, ‘I hear you guys have just become parents!’

- ‘Yes, that’s true, about 4 months ago, although it’s not entirely correct. I have become a dad, not T.’

- ‘Oh dear. What do you mean?’ - they asked with a hurt expression on their faces, turning in condolence to T – ‘you said you’ve been together for 3 years. Won’t he let you be a father too?’

- ‘It’s not that I am not letting him be a father. I am the father. There can only be one biological father, unless you are a duck, whose females, as you know, get gang-raped by several males, who inseminate their eggs collectively. But with humans it’s different. There is one father, and one mother. I am the father, Lady V the mother. We are the parents. Full stop.’
- ‘OH. MY. FUCKING. GOD’ they cried in unison, ‘you’re, like, one of those Christian fundamentalist preachers!’

Remembering how the last dinner had gone, and seeing C’s and T’s faces drop, I decided to take a deep breath and to be courteous. I really didn’t want another sour evening on my conscience.

- ‘Look, I’m sorry, this really didn’t come out properly. What I meant to say is that, although T and I have been indeed together for 3 years, the plan to conceive the Boy Child was developed well before his arrival, between me and Lady V, whom I live with. It’s a different arrangement altogether. We both wanted the child to have a dad and a mum. That’s all. Of course T and DJ S are more than welcome to play a role into the Boy Child’s life, but they are our partners, not the parents. Simple as that.’

- ‘Well, that sounds awfully bigoted,’ replied the Zuckerberg guy, rolling his eyes - looks like you are desperately trying to build a really nice bourgeois family mock-up. You are not really helping the cause.’

- ‘Cause? What cause?’ I asked, confused. 

- ‘The gay parenting cause! What else?!’ replied the Asian queen.

- ‘Well, I think everyone should have the right to have children and raise them in a family, whether they are gay, straight or bisexual. This is our way. I don’t really feel like a Crusader, nor do I feel like I am trying to conform to a bourgeois standard, although I appreciate the work done by those who have fought for gay rights in this country and continue to do so.’ (I was really being as diplomatic as I could).

- ‘You should be grateful. Because people like you would not be able to have a child otherwise,’ said the Zuckerberg guy, turning to T and winking. 

- ‘Well, darling,’ I replied, as my bile started boiling again, ‘maybe you should go back to a biology class. We are A MAN and A WOMAN having A CHILD. That’s how children are born, through a VAGINA. Or did your son come out of your boyfriend’s ass?’

- ‘How crude!’ the Asian commented half-heartedly, as if the thought of a baby emerging from his anus might not, after all, be that unpleasant.

- ‘We paid a lot of money to a surrogate mother,’ replied the Zuckerberg guy, ‘who carried our boy until he was born. We were in the delivery room and took the baby as soon as he was out of her. She didn’t even get to hold it once!’ he added, with pride.
- 
‘Yeah, but she did hold the money for a long time as she was counting it!’ added the boyfriend, with a pained look on his face, as he clearly thought that money could have paid for a lot of coke and sex parties.

I was pondering what tool to use to behead them, when they dropped the final cherry on the cake.

- ‘Anyway,’ he continued, ‘I really don’t understand what all this fuss about women is about. In our experience, they’re not that great at raising children. We did a much better job.’

- ‘Yes,’ added Zuckerberg guy, ‘like, our “friend” Jess’ (he really did use the quotation marks, brushing the air with his fingers) ‘had this baby girl, right, and we went over to her house, she was about the same age as our boy. Like 2 months or something. Anyway, every time she cried, Jess went up to her and picked her up, and we were like ‘Jess, you’re like totally doing this wrong’. We explained to her that when our boy cried, all we would do was to put him in his pram facing the wall in another room, and sure enough after a while he would stop. Problem solved!’

- ‘Yeah, women are, like, totally hormonal about these things, they fuck it up sooooo much!’

T’s jaw dropped. Mine was already on the floor, and couldn’t drop any lower. All I could mutter was:

- ‘Jesus Christ! I am beginning to see why so many people in the US are opposed to gay dads parenting.’

At which point, they both looked at me with horror, turned to C and - informing him that his standards in terms of acquaintances had clearly dropped and that they would see him in the future only on condition of him not dragging bigoted assholes with him - left the club in a huff. Without paying for the dinner, which they had in the meantime consumed.


C was terribly apologetic, and I tried to reassure him that no, it wasn’t his fault, it was an easy mistake to make, etc etc. But in fact, it was entirely his fault. He had mistakenly assumed that all gay dads would probably bond like soldiers in a trench. But the truth is, not all soldiers in trenches bond, because some of them are nice guys, others are cunts and will shoot you in the back to save their bacon. The former avoid the latter, and with good reason.

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”.

Carry on Palazzo!

It was with a certain amount of trepidation that I packed my bags for the Boy Child’s first trip to The Fatherland.  Papà A and I may not be your average couple but there are certain traditions that must nevertheless be upheld, including, of course, meeting the in-laws.

I’ve met Papà A’s mother, F, many times over the years. Luckily, we have a certain amount in common- namely a liking for drowning our sorrows in booze, reminiscing about the good old days and the oeuvre of various 1970s chansonnistes. And because I’m not really her daughter-in-law, there’s none of that inconvenient Freudian jealousy about having sex with her son.

So it wasn’t her that was occupying my mind. It was meeting the rest of the extended family. Papà A’s father had 8 siblings, all of whom still live in the family palazzo, which F refers to as ‘The Concentration Camp.’ Ever since A stood up last December at the end of Christmas dinner to announce the imminent arrival of the Boy Child, the family has been desperate to meet the Englishwoman who has stolen his heart, their appetite whetted by the fact that he has never been known to bring a girl home.

On our arrival at F’s other house, where Papà A was brought up, she immediately whisks us into the bar for a military briefing, this being the room deemed most appropriate as it has high ceilings and is therefore suitable for chain-smoking in the presence of babies.  Over gin and tonics for the boys and for F, a mini-can of Heineken, her beverage of choice, she instructs us on how to behave the next day, when we are expected at Aunt I.’s drawing room for coffee.

Apart from F, Papà A’s sister and a trusted cousin, no-one in the family is aware of The Situation, as F likes to call it. She herself made A agree years ago not to come out in Italy until she is no longer alive.  The strategy she has adopted is not to tell any outright lies, but to let us meet, and for them to draw their own conclusions. I am referred to as The Mother of Papà A.’s Child. There is the added complication of T’s presence but we agree that everyone will be so dazzled by the beauty of the Boy Child that they probably won’t notice that he’s there. F’s only other stipulation is that I shouldn’t be seen to breastfeed in the presence of Aunt I., in order not to offend her delicate sensibilities.

‘Of course, the last time she visited us here, the Princess of xxx saw fit to feed her child, and if it’s good enough for her, it’s good enough for anyone. Still, I think it would be best if you did it elsewhere. We shall have a special sign, so I know when to escort you out.’

I agree, having no desire to whip out my bosoms in front of the whole extended family. It’s bad enough deciding what to wear. My post-partum physique not being quite what I’d like it to be, my wardrobe currently consists of washed out maternity clothes that don’t quite fit, bagging in various places and covered in patches of baby sick. I know this won’t do. I need something demure enough to please the elder aunts but not so much that I look like a frumpy mummy to the younger cousins. And it has to allow me to breastfeed. I bet the Princess of xxx didn’t suffer from this kind of fashion dilemma. She was probably back in her Prada the week after giving birth. Cursing my stumpy peasant ancestors, I decide on a plainish but suitable frock, which is a bit tight, but ok if I cover it with a flowing cardigan.

The next morning the Boy Child, after a strategic feed and change is presented to his grandmother while she has her morning coffee in bed.  After a stern word from Papà A, she has made the concession of not smoking while she holds him. This is a good thing, as the baby, after less than 24 hours in Italy, is beginning to small of fags. Duly presented, he behaves angelically, beaming up at F and thus ensuring that his university education will be paid for.

After lunch in town, during which Papà A, T and I down several glasses of prosecco for Dutch courage, we proceed in stately fashion to Aunt I.’s apartment. This being a special occasion, she has opened the front stairs. As we walk up the enormous stone staircase, looking up at the frescoes on the vaulted ceiling, I experience a moment of mild panic but it’s too late to turn back and so I dutifully follow F to the top where we are met by the lady herself - beautifully coiffed and dressed, jewels discreetly glittering on her elegant fingers.  Aunt I. has the manners and demeanour of another age.  She leads me over polished parquet floors to a salon where, perched on a set of Louis Quinze chairs, is the rest of the family, all agog to meet the latest addition to the family – and of course, me.

I hand over the Boy Child to a posse of aunts and sit straight-backed on a chair next to Aunt I., where we begin to politely converse. She leads the conversation, and I follow, answering questions about whether I come to Italy often, smiling modestly when she compliments me on my Italian, and listening intently to a long, drawn-out story about the Second World War.

‘I’m 86, you know,’ she says, ‘now, do you come to Italy often?’

‘Yes,’ I say, ‘with Papà A, and now with our baby.’

‘Baby?’ she says vaguely.

It is at this point that the extent of her Alzheimers becomes evident. As we sit, having the same conversation over and over again, I feel a growing sense of sadness at the demise of this tiny, beautiful woman who was clearly once a great hostess.

The next time she asks about the baby, her daughters interrupt.

‘You know who this is, Mum, it’s Papà A’s. Now don’t monopolise Lady V. We need to get to know her too.’

There follows a rapid interrogation. I smile nicely and answer, and smile again, while Papà A lurks behind the sofa. I begin to sweat a little under the rapid–fire questions of the aunts, whose curiosity knows no bounds. They look at us expectantly, as if they are waiting for us to verify our union by shagging on the coffee table like performing seals.

To divert attention, I make the special sign to F, who nods to Papà A. We escape, through a series of shadowy, silent rooms, to the sanctuary of the kitchen where I kick off my shoes and feed the Boy Child.

Papà A grins. ‘Top marks, Lady V. You’re doing marvellously.’

Resisting the temptation to stay in the kitchen and agreeing that we need to rescue T, who is also perched on a chair, ignored by everyone, we return to the drawing room, where another discussion is underway about whether or not to invite another aunt, whom no-one likes, because she’s an enormous gossip, but who lives in another wing, and should really, for form’s sake be included. Papà A decides to put his foot down.

‘This is my child, and I’ll decide whom he should meet.’

The aunts tell him not to be ridiculous and telephone her immediately.

‘What’s her name?’  I ask Papà A.

‘We call her Popeye,’ he whispers. ‘Look at her mouth when she gets here.’

Popeye arrives 5 minutes later, eager for the latest information. Her mouth is drawn to the side, in a little pout of suspicion. The name is cruel but hilariously accurate.

More polite conversation ensues, coffee cups are drained, the little lacquer bowl of chocolates passed around again. I look at the walls, from which the faces of ancestors stare down from paintings, as if they, too, are assessing me and the Boy Child. After a while, F stands up and announces that we are leaving. The aunts rise in unison, and we spend the next half an hour saying our goodbyes.

As we descend the staircase, I look back at Aunt I. She waves vaguely, then turns.

‘Who’s that baby?’ I hear her ask again.

Sticking it inside La France Profonde

We carefully timed our return to the UK so as to escape the Royal Wedding, and with it the mayhem in which London was plunged at the beginning of May. We left our house in Maremma on a sunny Monday morning - the first one really since we had arrived - and made our way north towards Genoa. The long journey from Tuscany to Calais, where we would slip our middle-aged looking Volvo into the belly of a train travelling under the Channel, had to be split over two days, so we chose Provence, with its lavender fields and maritime pines, as the site of our mid-journey stop. T - who had accompanied us on the way down - had to catch a flight back to the UK, as he was due to go to the Americas the following day. So it was down to me and to Lady V to get ourselves and the Boy Child back to Blighty. The first time together, travelling like a ‘real’ family. The bare thought of it made us both shiver with horror.

To make things worse, I had chosen an irritatingly quaint, French-looking and absurdly remote B&B near Avignon for our overnight stay. The reason was that it had a highly-recommended restaurant serving local delicacies. As a matter of fact, we never got to taste the restaurant’s delicacies, because, by the time our Volvo had rolled its carcass into Provence, it was dinnertime, and we were still 2 hours drive from our hotel. We were a few miles from Aix-en-Provence, so we decided to stop there for some food, before proceeding into La France Profonde.

Boy Child strapped to my chest, we set forth into the old cobbled streets of Aix. Lady V was in a nostalgic mood (she always is in France, it’s her Pavlovian reaction to years spent in dimly-lit cafes drinking cheap red wine, smoking red Gauloises and listening to croaky records of Edith Piaf). I stopped listening to her when she started muttering about how the last time she was in Aix she had the most exquisite waxing experience of her lower regions, one that had had a marvellous effect on her burgeoning relationship with DJ S. I switched off the sound of her voice (I am getting pretty good at this) and turned my attention towards the bars that littered the grim squares we crossed on our way. Everything was either closed or empty, which, on a Monday night, is unsurprising in a city like London, let alone a shithole like Aix.

Suddenly, a heaving, brightly-lit restaurant appeared at the horizon, and - ignoring Lady V’s protests about French bistros and her need to have the air filled with old chansons - I grinned and parked myself and the Boy Child onto an outdoor table, under one of those environmentally-disastrous heaters. Only then did I turn my attention to the clientele, and I realised we had hit Aix’s equivalent of London’s Chinawhite. The place was covered in gym-buffed men in Versace suits and women who could have easily been either footballers’ wives or whores. They mingled, eating sushi, eyeing each other up like animals do in the savannah, trying to figure out in one sweeping glance how much muscle/money/silicone the person in front of them hid underneath their clothes.

The waitress welcomed us with a shocked look in her face. At first I thought she was merely displaying French coqueterie, or some other French cultural whim that generally leads them to contract their facial muscles in an attempt to look more interesting than they actually are (look at Sarkosy, for example, and how he always looks like he’s sucking on a lemon). Then I glanced around us and realised people were throwing terrified glances in our direction, the way you would look at a man waving a hand bomb while your plane is 12,000 ft up in the air. And then I realised what they were so afraid of: the Boy Child.

Indeed, just as this realisation sunk into my brain, the Boy Child stiffened his back and let out the loudest, most horrific shriek I have ever heard in a human, and proceeded to scream and shout until Lady V hastily uncovered her large bosom and stuffed his mouth with it. If you think the French are indifferent to female breasts, you’ve never been to Aix-en-Provence. Women’s eyeballs popped out of their sockets, men’s tongues rolled onto the tables, and just about everyone in the restaurant stopped breathing for a few seconds in pure shock at the sight of Lady V’s mammary glands. We had become the restaurant’s freaks. Clearly, couples with babies were not the customary clients of Aix’s wannabe Chinawhite.

We pretended not to notice, chatting amiably while the Boy Child screamed, puked, poo-ed, giggled, yelled and passed out in quick succession. But we knew, for the first time, that the line had been crossed. A few weeks ago, we might have been sitting amongst those hideous looking men and women without any of them ever taking notice of our presence. We could have been one of them, as far as they were concerned. But that little parcel we were carrying with us made all the difference. We were a couple. We were parents. We represented everything that is boring and conventional about life. We were the enemy. We quickly finished our dinner, pretending that nothing had happened, and swiftly asked for l’addition.

And as we rapidly walked away from the restaurant, feeling the still-bulging eyes of the waitresses and customers fixed to the back of our necks, we passed a young couple walking towards it. I eyed him up - a handsome, slender, dark-haired Frenchman with a Jean-Paul Belmondo air about him. Lady V glanced sideways at the girl (I don’t really know what she looked like, but I assume she was pretty and French-looking given the loud swooning sounds Lady V emitted when she was at a safe distance). We turned to each other, Boy Child finally quiet in his Baby Bjorn, and gave each other a grin of sexual complicity. Just your average, boring couple? Mon cul, my dear footballers and footballers’ wives, mon cul...!

Happy now?

Ever since the Boy Child has arrived, it is almost as if everyone I know - alongside a good deal of people I don’t know - has been given a secret instruction to do one of two peculiar things. They either reveal their true identity of worldwide child-raising experts, an identity so far concealed to me, and give me military, punctilious and contradictory instructions on how to narrowly prevent the Boy Child from dying and/or turning into the next Adolf Hitler (due to my obviously bad parenting skills). Or they start mumbling confusedly, clutching at my hands, sometimes even touching my face like I was some sort of thaumaturgic saint, and insist on me conjuring up my full emotional spectrum to explain in excruciating detail why becoming a dad was the HAPPIEST EXPERIENCE in my life. It is easy to deal with the former, all they want is undivided attention and a generous ‘thank you, I’ll bear that in mind next time I change his nappy’. But it is impossible to handle the latter, because they are seeking some form of confirmation, without which it seems their life will become meaningless. Their quest will not stop until I give them what they need to make sense of this bizarre thing we call existence.

The other night, for example, I found myself - in a fairly drunken state - sitting on the pavement with an equally-inebriated pretty young woman whom I barely knew through work, and who insisted on me telling her what exactly had gone through my head the first time I held the Boy Child in my hands. Until then, I had always played by the rules, replying conventionally that I had felt, of course, utter happiness. But since I had had no dinner, and my head was light due to a mixture of bad wine, an unseasonable heatwave and an emotional surge in the wake of my first trip back to Italy since fatherhood, I decided I would tell her the truth: that I did not rank that moment as the happiest in my life. She took it with a mixture of revulsion and pity, like I was suffering from some deadly and contagious disease.

    “But how, frankly, can you say that? Surely this MUST have been the greatest joy of your life!” she insisted.
    “Not really.”
    “But... but... fine, if not the greatest, AT LEAST the second greatest!”

No one in my life had ever asked me “when were you most happy?”, and if they had, I - like most people - would have had no idea what to answer. The first time I had sex? It was pretty boring for all involved. The first time I fell in love? I thought I had indigestion. The day I graduated? I was too hangover to feel anything but a throbbing buzz in my head. Happy? What the hell does happy mean, anyway?

The assumption that the arrival in my lap of the Boy Child should automatically be ranked first amongst the numerous happiness-depicting paintings lined up in some corridor-shaped recess of my brain strikes me as both phenomenally odd and somewhat delusional. If I had a ranking of happy moments, I would probably be a psychopath. Only a psychopath could adopt such a surgical approach to life and emotions. Therefore, I can only conclude that anyone asking me if the Boy Child’s birth was the greatest moment of happiness in my life can only be, by deduction, a psychopath. This realisation about many of my friends has made my social life slightly awkward.

So, what did I really feel when the Boy Child was plonked into my hands? The first thing I felt was a slight weight. 3.2 kg to be precise, with a few extra grams for the nappy and towel he was wrapped in. This was of course the most striking element: he was there, weighing, existing. The physicality of his body brought a sense of reality to what was an experience probably far closer to those I have had under the influence of potent psychedelic drugs. Think about it. My brain had been building up to this moment for months, so when it actually came it was almost like seeing the Eiffel Tower for the first time, a weird mixture of extremely familiar and totally foreign. My brain had also been awake (cannot say “active”, but for the most part it was active too) since 7 am the previous day. It was now 12:14 pm, so some 29 hours later. No sleep, hardly any food, 1 G&T. Over the course of 29 hours I had:

- found out the waters had broken and giggled profusely about it with Lady V in a supermarket,
- set up the garden room to be as romantic and welcoming as possible (the birthing pool was in there and for some reason I was sure it would be a water-birth),
- accompanied step by step the accelerating contractions, amazed each time not only at Lady V’s capacity to endure them, but at my own capacity not to faint,
- seen Lady V descend from a state of pained elation to one of agonising terror,
- ridden in the back of a midwife’s dusty Chevrolet to a dawn-wrapped hospital,
- seen Lady V be poked, injected, inspected, interrogated and probed some 245 times
- seen Lady V’s pussy in its full glory, which itself would have been shocking enough, but in these circumstances was utterly terrifying.

This is the factual backdrop of the hours preceding the Boy Child’s birth. What is one supposed to FEEL at this point? There is only one answer to this question, and that is: exhaustion. Complete and utter exhaustion. Were WW1 soldiers scared when they went into battle (not that I am comparing)? Of course not. They were exhausted. That’s it. Exhaustion is an all-consuming feeling, it’s a void, it sucks up every other emotion in its proximity. And that is, in all sincerity, the main memory I have of those first moments.

Then, of course, elation. But it was more about the whole ordeal ending, than about the Boy Child’s arrival. Well, of course, I was elated and in wonder for that too, it goes without saying, but having seen Lady V carved up like a turkey, I was simply overjoyed that she could still talk and somewhat smile (mainly inanely at the Boy Child, who in return gazed at me with the expression of someone wondering if he’s met you before).

And then there was that other, strange feeling, a mixture of the other two, which usually happens after 3 days at Glastonbury under the influence of a lot of different drugs that at this point have created a potent cocktail in your blood stream and sets you a few feet apart from everything that’s happening, like an invisible observer of the world that unfolds beneath your gaze. I felt - pretty much like Lady V had a few hours earlier - like I was high. And yet, I had taken nothing at all. It was a strange, stoned feeling of being elsewhere and seeing things unfold on a screen in front of me. A feeling of detachment and yet engagement.

Yes. It was totally weird. And frankly, do you think the word ‘happy’ could summarise all this? ‘Happy’ like in ‘Happy-meal’? Oh please. The next time someone comes up to me and asks if the Boy Child’s birth was the happiest moment of my life, I think I’ll simply answer ‘no’, and walk away leaving them shacking and wondering whether they should step in front of a bus and put an end to it all.

Scenes from family life

Ten days after The Boy Child’s birth, when the visitors have finally left, A and I have dinner at home: a large steak and roast potatoes washed down with red wine. My vegetarianism has relaxed somewhat since I had the excuse of needing iron during pregnancy.

A: You know, this is the first time we’ve ever had dinner in the house together alone.

V: Wow.

Brief pause while we digest this fact.

V (weepily): You know, I feel very attached to you and The Boy Child these days.

A: (dreamily): I keep having fantasies that you both die in a terrible accident. And then I’m free.

V: ?!?!

A: It's ok, my book on fatherhood said I’d feel like this.

V: Oh, well, that’s alright then.

Silence.

---------------------------------------------------

Dirty Uncle F comes back from a conference in Brussels. No-one really knows what he does for a living, but it seems to involve lots of first class travel to various parts of Europe wearing brightly coloured ties.

He is in an excellent mood, laden with chocolates and little jars of foie gras, his favourite food, especially in front of vegetarians.

F (smirking): I was talking to the ex-president of the Basque region at a function. I told him about our situation. Our family. I was asked if I was in a relationship with A. And you, Mummy. A ménage a trois.

V: And what did you say?

F (through a mouthful of foie gras): I told him everyone should live with lesbians! They are wonderful! The highest form of evolution!

DJ S: ?!?!

F (swilling down a glass of wine): They are excellent! They do womanly things like you, Mummy, like reproduce, and fixing things around the house, like you, Boyfriend. They are like normal women but much better. They are self-sufficient! Everyone should adopt one!

V: Normal women?

F (ignoring her): And gay men are the least evolved. They combine the worst of straight men with the homosexual bits. They are predatory and, they are vain. Quite useless.

A: Even you, Uncle F?

F: Especially me.

He pulls out a sheaf of magazines from his briefcase.

F: These are for you Mummy. I got them on the train.

I look at the selection.

V: Brides Magazine? The Lady?

F (shrugging): What? You need to prepare. You should be married. Either to Boyfriend or to Papà A. You are a mother now, after all. You should be respectable.

V (sternly): And The Lady?

F: What is it? I just picked up magazines for females. I don’t know what they mean.

V: The Lady is for upper class women from the Home Counties. It has articles on the best gardening gloves to buy and what to bake for village fetes.  It’s where you advertise for nannies and maids.

F: Perfect! We need staff!  And you should be like this, looking after all of us.

V: I will never become that sort of woman. Never.

Two days later, while feeding The Boy Child, I pick up the copy of The Lady. By the time he’s finished eating, I realise that I am engrossed in an article on herbaceous borders…

---------------------------------------------------

Sunday morning. A and I are trying to fill in the Census.

A: Oh god, we have to explain everyone’s relationship to each other.

V: Let’s start with the The Boy Child. He’s easiest.

We fill in his section, marking me as mother and A as father.

A: And we can do you and DJ S.  Partners.

V: And Uncle F?

A: Mark him as other. Oh, and when you’re filling in nationality, don’t put him as Italian. He’ll want to be European.

V: OK.

Pause.

V: So what about us?

We go through the options.

A: Well we’re not married, so not that one.

V: And not civil partners.

A: We’re sort of partners where The Boy Child’s concerned. But you’re already down as DJ S’s partner, so we can’t put that.

V: Hmm. And ‘no relation’ doesn’t quite work either.

We stare at the form. There is no box that describes what we are. In the end we just put Other. We post off the form, wondering what the statisticians will make of it.