Author: damienowens

We went to visit my wife’s grand-mother at the weekend (103, age fans) and found a real treat on her bookshelves – Feeding and Care of Baby by Sir Frederic Truby King. It was first published in 1913 but my Grandmother-in-law’s edition was printed in 1942. I would imagine that it has survived the intervening decades in her house not as a source of timeless wisdom and advice but as an object of pure ridicule. If I’d had time, I would have photographed every single page. I just managed to nab some highlights. Apologies for the crappy picture quality.

The author. We can see at once that we’re dealing with a man who’s high on life and keen to pass on the deep sense of wonder he feels every day as he beholds creation. Look at him! Look at his sense of wonder! He looks like he’s just been told that his cancer has got cancer.

Many new parents find it difficult to establish a routine with their infants but Sir Frederic has them covered. This simple guide divides baby’s day up into handy segments labelled ‘Sleep’, ‘Sleep and Exercise’, and ‘Sleep, Exercise and Bath’, with regular breaks for ‘Food’, ‘Wash’ and ‘Bath’. Now you may think that a) there’s some repetition here and b) this scheme takes no account of reality here on planet Earth, but that’s because you’re an idiot. You probably didn’t have enough sleep, exercise and baths as a child.

It quickly becomes apparent, as you turn the pages, that Sir Frederic is great believer in three things: discipline, routine and the balancing of infants in precarious positions. This happy little chappie is being weighed like a sack of grain, blissfully unaware that one over-zealous giggle will send him flailing to his death on the cold stone floor. Note the several feet of thin air available for him to fall into. Note also that there are no adults within grabbing distance. If you tried to film this for a movie, you wouldn’t be able to get insurance.

More balancing here, this time on ‘the chamber’. This baby has an advantage over his colleague on the weighing scales inasmuch as he has the assistance of a nurse to keep him more or less upright. On the other hand, given the weighing scales farrago, it’s easy to imagine that she herself is perched on a lofty bar-stool that sits in turn atop a piano or perhaps a billiard table. And she is awfully close to the action. One sudden explosion from Junior could loosen her grip and/or equilibrium, leading to tragedy for all concerned. Still, she looks fairly relaxed – more relaxed than the baby, at any rate, who seems close to madness.

Modern parents labour under the misapprehension that sun-bathing should be conducted outdoors. ‘Nonsense!’ cries Sir Frederic. A child can sun-bathe perfectly well in a vast, empty sitting-room, provided they have taken the precaution of wearing a suitable hat.

Way back when, a friend of a friend of mine bedded a guy who proved to be a little … pedestrian in his approach to all things sex. In an attempt to spice things up, the friend of a friend asked him to reveal his number one secret fantasy. He thought about it for a while, apparently, before announcing that he ‘would quite like to be the editor of The Guardian.’

Pyjamas. Despite its close association with the bedroom, it’s possibly the least sexy word we have, holding off stiff competition from the likes of ‘varicose’, ‘bowel’ and the evergreen ‘mucus’. Pyjamas. Say it a few times and it starts to irritate, like verbal itching powder. ‘Pyjamas’ are what old men wear in hospital. They may be something more comfortable, but they’re hardly something you’d want to slip into, at least not within eyeshot of a woman. ‘Keep her lit, I’ll be back in a minute – wait’ll you see my pyjamas!’  It just doesn’t work. The faceless barons of the pyjama industry recognised all this some years back and, like all good faceless barons, set about the process of modernisation. Deciding that it was too late to do anything about the word, they concentrated on the product itself. After considering a variety of alternatives (‘How about if we add a hat?’), they settled on what has come to be known, by me at least, as the kung-fu option. Gone are the days of the stripy flannel suit. Modern male nightwear is a pair of spacious, whisper-light bottoms (or whatever they’re called) and a t-shirt. The t-shirt part is unremarkable enough, but the bottoms are straight out of Enter the Dragon. How you’re supposed to sleep in them, I don’t know. The temptation is just too strong. If I had five cents for every time I’ve climbed into mine and ended up pulling a muscle while trying to kick an overhead light, I would have fifteen cents. But that’s beside the point. They’re still called pyjamas and it’s still all wrong. Pyjamas. Pyjamas. Pyjamas. Great. Now I’ve given myself a headache.

Thank God for asterisks, that’s what I say. Not the French fella with the ‘tache, now, I’m talking about the little snowflake yokes. Where would we be without them? In serious poop, that’s where. We’d be living in a world gone mad, a world without rules or structure, where anyone can just pick a word off the top of their head and go around, you know, using it to make themselves understood. It doesn’t bear thinking about. Asterisks are the elite troops of language, always ready to parachute in and throw themselves on the live grenade that is an inappropriate series of letters. Here, I’ll show you how it works. ‘We had a great day, even though it was f**king freezing.’ Did you see that?! Wow. I’d barely made it to the next word before they descended. No hesitation, no hand-wringing. They don’t think, asterisks, they just act. Never a thought for themselves. All they care about is making sure that you, gentle reader, are safe at all times. It’s amazing, really. I mean, you might think that putting asterisks into a dangerous word would make no difference. That your brain would have no say in the matter, that it would have to take note of the decommissioned letters regardless of how well they’d been concealed. That you’d still end up reading ‘f**king’ and being warped forever. Just shows you how wrong you can be, doesn’t it? I repeat: thank G*d for asterisks. And yes, I am aware that it’s the lowest form of wit.

Next thing you know, it’ll be Wimbledon (and then Christmas). Ah, memories. Remember when the merest sight of Bjorn Borg would send you scurrying to a parent’s side demanding a new tennis racket because the one they bought you during Wimbledon the previous year somehow got repeatedly smashed against the ground and then thrown into a skip about fifteen minutes after the tournament ended and everyone started playing football again? And they’d take you to the cheapest supermarket in town and buy you a £1.99 plastic racket with the strings just drawn on, because they weren’t stupid you know, and you’d lose your temper and burn your sister’s doll’s house to the ground? Remember? That was one of the great things about childhood – you could become fanatical about something just because you once happened to see someone else doing it. Fishing, kite-flying, skate-boarding, Egyptology, it didn’t matter. You merely had to announce that you were now ‘into it’ and that was that. As an adult, you have to be more circumspect. If you suddenly decide to take up windsurfing, say, you’ll need to have done some research. It’s no good just saying you saw it on TV one night and liked the look of it. People will want spiritual reasons, cost projections, health benefit analyses. And worse, you’ll have to fork out your own windsurf boat or whatever they call them. I for one plan to buck this trend. Come Wimbledon, I’ll be out there in me gutties with an old baldy ball, knocking it against the side of the house and pretending I’ve got a beard. And you know what? If every jaded adult in the whole country did likewise, maybe this rough old world would lose some of its edges. All right, maybe not. But it would be bloody funny.