on fatherhood, or why I haven’t been around
April 4, 2008
It is almost exactly a year since I wrote anything here – or indeed anywhere else. Between tending my wonderful if demanding baby daughter, and tending the charming if demanding Victorian semi in which we’re attempting to raise her, there hasn’t been a lot of time for anything surplus to the curriculum.
Music has continued to play a part, though in new and different ways. I never thought I’d spend so much time singing show tunes in the middle of the night; I also didn’t know how many songs I didn’t know past the first two lines. S has spent a lot of time being soothed (more or less successfully) by Rodgers and Hammerstein – not wholly through choice, it just turns out that’s what comes up when I’m half asleep and need something to sing. And S does enjoy playing the piano with mummy and daddy (sounds uncannily like high serialism!) But no concerts (save for the KCL Symphony Orchestra bringing the Sibelius to St John’s).
So, my cultural activities have consisted of: obsessing over the writing of John Lanchester, grinning like a loon while listening to the new Trevor Pinnock Brandenburg recordings, admiring the quality of arrangements on 70s Playschool records, and compiling a giant and ongoing wish-list of films that I will see when I have time to see films again, in about twenty years.
