Tag Archives: parenthood

Tiggy

I’ve never regretted not having kids. It strikes me as a tad perverse to claim you’re doing your bit for the future of the species when that future involves the next generation waking up with their hair on fire in the 50 degree heat of Christmas 2050 knowing that it’s just hit £50 a pint.

Rx Tramadol Online When it comes up in conversation, and it does, I just say I can’t see why I’d give up a life of little responsibility, frolics unencumbered and full nights of unconsciousness in favour of ‘kids eat free’ Saturdays in the local and grimly suggesting you move nearer the in-laws just for the cheap babysitting.

But don’t worry, you parents out there, because I’m now one of you. Now, I have a cat.

Continue reading Tiggy

Fireworks night

https://giannifava.org/f92w4vtwh1 There are a few nights of the year sent to test you as a parent, and fireworks night is definitely one of them.

As a kid in the ’80s it was great – big blazing bonfires to which you could get close enough to need a completely new set of eyebrows in the morning, sparklers tracing out your name in the darkness and plenty of whizz-pops and bang-clatters to make a great evening out. Not to mention plenty of hot food and hand-warming drinks.

5th November 2019 on the other hand – not so great.

https://worthcompare.com/t61qulow Continue reading Fireworks night

The old-fashioned way to get knocked up

My husband and I have been trying to start a family. I suppose that’s the ‘delicate’ way to say we are trying to get pregnant. Or maybe its that I am trying to get pregnant and he is just being…ahem…supportive.

Online Tramadol Cod The old-fashioned way to get knocked up is, theoretically,  the easiest way to go about it. And things are not going as planned in that department. Not at all. I can’t believe how much time I spent trying not to get pregnant and now I am faced with the Murphy’s Law of pregnancy.

https://asperformance.com/uncategorized/uu1xpzzl0 Teenagers are getting pregnant all over the place, to look at the statistics. Every seven seconds a 16-year-old, low-income minority teen conceives a child just by talking to a man, if the conservative media is to be believed. The developing world is turning them out assembly-line style.

Order Cheap Tramadol Online In the midst of wars, natural disasters, genocide, political upheaval, terrorism, and incredible poverty with a lack of basic care and sanitation, women are banging these kids out right and left. There are even shows that showcase women who have an awfully hard time not staying pregnant constantly, or who get pregnant on a ridiculously grand scale with multiple embryos. Even our friends who also waited to settle down and begin families are just popping them out like a row of champagne bottles. Our Facebook explodes with daily and monthly reports of their current and impending offspring.

https://www.goedkoopvliegen.nl/uncategorized/31zol8t9a0p My husband and I are not included in this explosion of obstetrics. I am not getting pregnant. No-one knows why and so no-one knows how to fix it in a way that does not involve medical/surgical intervention or the taking of large amounts of hormones, none of which we’re keen on. We will give this the old college try, we decided. But so far, nada.

http://countocram.com/2024/03/07/wbp9yt4 I have read articles with titles like ‘The 10 best ways to get pregnant after 30’ and visited websites showing happy, fecund women in the sidebar proclaiming: “I gave up ___ and conceived after 10 years of infertility!” They are more depressing than helpful. I’ve read books with titles like ‘Pregnancy and the Older Mother’. They mostly leave me with visions of me finally conceiving but needing an ambulance during delivery that can accommodate my walker and that has a holder for my false teeth.

https://www.lcclub.co.uk/wa184epro Most people’s advice is shit. Telling us to relax, not think about it, to let nature take its course. Bullshit. Nature and I are at odds 90 percent of the time. I think it’s trying to kill me which is why I stay out of the rural areas and stick to the city where the human animal is the one thing I am sure of.

Tramadol Online Order They recommend cutting out cigarettes (no problem) and alcohol (problem). Try acupuncture, some Reiki, perhaps? Being stuck with needles and having hot oil poured on me from an angle is just not my thing, so I’ll pass. Apparently, I should keep an ovulation chart (the romance of statistics), take my temperature regularly and check my…um…discharge, to monitor whether “conditions are optimal”, as though conceiving a child is akin to deciding whether or not to take a long journey by sea on a small raft.

My poor husband has been ridden enough (literally) without the medical community’s infantilization of his genetic material by referring to his sperm as ‘swimmers’. He is supposed to wear loose underwear, not take hot baths or showers, not smoke pot, and not drink refined or processed foods with their insidious anti-sperm ‘toxins’. My husband and I both now share the indignity of examinations full of plastic cups and “wands”, medieval looking tools put in uncomfortable places, and tables covered in paper roll.

See, we thought this whole ‘buns in ovens’ process would be a lark. We thought it would take six months tops and we’d be on our way to weekends full of puke and dirty diapers. So we stupidly told our families we were trying and for the first year we’d get excited talking about the prospect of parenthood with them. Well, maybe we shouldn’t have done that. It’s backfired and taken a lot longer than we imagined it would.

Things are also getting weird, more for me than for my husband. I feel alienated from my body these days. As if it has disappointed me, gone off to do its own thing and left no forwarding address. My body has always done what I’ve needed it to do, except for cartwheels . Never was able to do one of those. Now, I feel let down. I am making a ‘hospitable environment’ for baby and baby doesn’t want to live there.

Even though I’m happy for them, I have begun to get sad when people I know let us in on their ‘joyous news’. I have a bit of a sinking feeling when I experience a ‘moment’ in my job (I work with children) and wonder what it would feel like to be a mother. My husband is sad too but he keeps it to himself. Truth be told, we are both in disbelief at this whole mess – there’s even an undercurrent of slight shock. We never imagined anything like this would be an issue. We are both physically fit, happy with ourselves and each other. So: what the fuck?

We’ll keep trying, for now, and then evaluate our options. But if nothing happens and I find out it’s the water supply or the bisphenol A in my fucking plastic kettle, I’m burning this motherfucker to the ground.

Disney meets Stephen King

Ever since I was 7, I’ve been wondering if there was something wrong with me. I woke up every morning for almost 20 years with the question floating through my mind, between thoughts of food and coffee. The inside of my head sounded something like “I’m hungry, what should I have for breakfast? I wonder if there’s something wrong with me. I know: coffee.” The answer is always coffee.

Now I know for sure. There is definitely something wrong with me, because it’s Saturday evening and I’m going to my friend’s house to babysit for her. As I pass hoards of party people, some of them already in a joyful state of inebriation, the certainty that something is wrong with me grows stronger. I try to focus on the music that’s now blaring in my headphones. At some point, I swear I can hear Strummer screaming “There’s something wrong with you” between the lyrics of Cheapskates. Surely, missing out on the parties I was supposed to attend in order to spend the night with the spoiled brats my friend birthed is a sign of something being completely messed up in my head.

Maybe my brain’s been bleeding somewhere in the frontal lobe, thus changing my personality. This may sound extreme, but my friend has three girls, which is reason enough to say no to babysitting. They always look like they came out of a Disney book and that creeps me out. What’s up with those Elsa dresses they keep wearing? This Frozen shit is like crystal meth for little girls.

I look around at girls aged 2 to 7 and all I can see is a future generation of Taylor Swift-loving idiots waiting for some dumbass Prince Charming to kiss their loneliness away. Yesterday I saw a toddler wearing a pink onesie that said “future trophy wife” in capital dark pink letters. Her mum was pushing the buggy around with a smug look on her face, as if already envisioning the life of her offspring in the shadow of some poor fucker who’d have to work 80 hours a week to support the fifties cliche he chose as a wife.

Isn’t society supposed to evolve? Why the fuck are we heading back to the last century? What’s with all these gender stereotypes? Women get pregnant and they can’t wait to find out the sex of the baby, just to know if they should decorate the nursery in tones of pink or blue, although I imagine it won’t be long until some nutjob will have their house covered in shades of grey – about fifty of them. Poor foetuses haven’t even developed fingerprints at the time their fate is decided and colour-coded.

“Oh, baby, Mummy loves you so much. Now, because you have a vagina, you will have to wear headache-inducing colours, play with dolls and survive on lettuce for the vast majority of your life. Please don’t step out of this tiny pink glittery box or you’ll have a very hard time. Other than that, welcome to the world, it’s lovely having someone I can dump all my unaccomplished hopes and dreams on.” Does that sound messed up to you? That’s because it is.

And don’t get me wrong, it’s much the same with boys. The only reason I’m focusing on girls is the fact that I’m surrounded by them and it’s obnoxious seeing this happening every single day. My friend is a nice woman, but she’s making the same mistake as most mothers nowadays. I stopped visiting her by the time her second daughter turned 2. The last time I went to see them, her lounge was something out of a horror story. A pink, glittery horror story. It was Disney meets Stephen King. Carrie at the prom covered in glittery blood. I don’t know if ‘glitter allergy’ is a thing, but it should be and I should try and get it. It would be the perfect excuse to stay away from the three future housewives with sticky hands and weird white wigs that she’s raising.

We think we’re the lucky ones, the ones free and educate their children in that spirit of freedom and accomplishment. Yet there’s a girl across the world who faced bullets in order to protect her right to go to school, at an age when girls in Western countries post pouting selfies on Instagram because they don’t have a boyfriend to validate their worth. We think they’re savage because they force their daughters into marriage, yet we’re so quick to judge a woman who gets to a certain age and is still single and childless.

We jump on our high horses and descend onto ‘poor, uneducated’ peoples to serve them a nice warm slice of our wisdom, not realizing it smells oddly like shit. You’ll read a magazine article praising some Hollywood star’s feminist campaign, then turn the page and find ‘beauty tips’ and ‘diet advice’, because surely, as a woman, you can’t be interested in much else.

And all this shit starts with the Disney movies that seem so perfectly innocent. We take our little girls and spoon feed them all the stereotypes you can think of: girls always have teeny tiny waists, princes are handsome and if you see someone physically ugly in the movie you can bet they’re the bad guy. That’s why they grow up to quickly help that young man in an expensive suit who suddenly got sick in the middle of the street, while ignoring the homeless who’s probably dying under their eyes. And if they somehow grow up without having the perfect princess body, that’s fine, they have the women magazines to teach them all about lemon detox and how to hide their pimples.

People often ask me why I hate children. They assume I do, because I quit teaching for no apparent reason and I say I don’t want to have children of my own. I don’t hate children, though. I hate their parents and their ignorance. I hate how I saw a woman say ‘no’ when her daughter wanted a green tee with a dinosaur on it and buy a pink one instead; when people say to me “you’re too smart for your own good”, but never say it to my brother or my male friends; when they assume a woman is single because she can’t “keep a man around” and not because she actually chooses to be single; when a boy is “gay” because he likes to knit rather than watch football; when “real men have muscles” and “real women have curves” because if you’re too skinny you’re less of a man or a woman.

It’s a two-edged sword, though, because the victims of the issue are also the enforcers of it. Growing up with this bullshit makes children see the world in a very twisted way. They’re not only the ones trying hard to fit in, but also the ones who judge others for not succeeding.

And yes, I still stand by my opinion – it all starts with the fuckin’ Disney movies. I’d like to see Disney make a movie about an average sized girl who likes chocolate a bit too much, binge-watches Netflix at weekends and works a shitty job to pay her way through her neuroscience degree, all the while being single and far from frustrated by it. Or maybe a musical about a princess falling in love with another princess and flipping those who stand against it. But god forbid we teach our children something about real life, right?

A bloody great vase of flowers

First there are the camera angles. Everything is taken from the neck up, limiting any possible interesting dialogue pieces with other characters. Suddenly our heroine will be sitting down a lot, behind a desk, or holding large folders for no reason at all. Sometimes they’ll put a bloody great vase of flowers in the way. Clothing will become oversized, which never hides the bump just merely shouts “Look, the actress, the real person, is up the duff! Fuck trophy alert!”

Is she or isn’t she? This has become an all-consuming pastime for me that ruins many a good film or TV series. Believe me, I am not a rabid consumer of Heat magazine, desperate for information on celebrity breeders. It’s that when a director attempts to hide that an actress is clearly pregnant, the subterfuge is so obvious it ruins every single thing I watch. It’s so fucking obvious!

The fourth wall is broken and I sit on my hands, desperate not to bow to the inevitable and search Google to see if I have correctly spotted the pregnancy. The satisfaction that I’ve spotted the truth is nothing compared to the complete ruination of the story I am watching. Every shot, I sit there pointing out when I see it – there. There. Can’t everyone see it? It’s there, look. So what if someone just died horribly, I can see that woman is clearly pregnant.

The point of an actor is to dispel belief. Once my eyes alight on a possible bump, everything is ruined. I stomp about like a disgruntled Kevin, lamenting the blatant destruction of any dramatic tension. Clearly that isn’t Johanssen kicking ass, it’s a stunt double. How can Nikki Alexander carry on her will they-wont they with Harry if she is hiding the fact she is ferrying an embryo that isn’t his? It just isn’t right. I don’t want to see your real life. I want immersion! Pop the brat out between series, don’t flaunt it at me during the limited opportunities I have to watch good drama.

I ponder whether they should write it in, just to stop my own anger. Sadly this leads to the jumping the shark moment that killed The X-Files. Anyone remember how terrible it was to discover Scully’s baby was Mulder’s? Just me? It might work for soaps, but I hate any baby storylines. It kills anything of interest happening in the future, as you are always left (literally) with the baby. Think about Ian Beale, just think. My point is made.

This obsession with directors’ attempts to hide reality has recently reached new territory with the Expendables trilogy. Every scene where Arnie or Sly jump off a building, or roll away from an explosion, I wonder how they manage it. Of course, they don’t. Younger stunt doubles come in, concrete floors are made of soft eiderdown, beer guts are hidden by lofty camera angles and giant clothes. Argh! Why? They are old, that is the entire concept of the film. Sure they have egos, but let it all hang out. You’re too old for this shit!

I have no issues with people getting older. I myself cannot hold back the tide of aches and pains; my ability to bounce after falling over has all but disappeared. I don’t expect anyone to pay to see an old me defuse a bomb whilst jumping through the air but if it was my career I’d at least show that it bloody well hurt at my age.

But if you decide to drop another unfortunate child into this world of war, then don’t bring it into my living room. Wait until the series is cancelled, plan it so it isn’t noticeable, don’t cry feminism at work and demand it is ignored. I can see it. There. Look, it’s a bump. Have some pride in your art and the deception you weave for us. I have no interest in you, or the baby – I want my stories!

We can pencil moustaches on

A few days ago I had cause to email the following sentence to an acquaintance:

“I would rather be bent over by Rolf while burning myself alive than ever get involved in any kind of fancy dress.“

I’ve managed to reach 37 years old without ever having to wear fancy dress. As far as I know I never wore fancy dress as a child – not so much as a spaceman costume to Richard Knightley’s ill-fated 7th birthday party or a white sheet on Halloween.

It staggers me that grown adults feel the urge to dress up like patients on day release from the local IQ-deficiency ward. If someone could explain to me the fascination with making oneself out to be a cowboy or a centurion or fucking Cleopatra, or some similarly tragic character from times we’ve long moved on from for the good of the race, I could perhaps understand why I’m now being asked to dress like a fucking Frenchman for the stag weekend of a 38-year-old man.

On a Friday night, in fucking Newcastle no less. I’ll just start punching myself now, save the locals the bother.

Clearly there’s something in the make-up of specific cretins that demands people pay them attention. Personally, my imagination works perfectly well without me having to actually become Batman or a Power Ranger. I can well imagine what it’s like to be shot by a Canadian hunter without having to dress up like a grizzly bear. No, I will not wear that Hawaiian skirt and do a little twirl for you just because GO ON IT’S A LAUGH.

It’s parenthood, mostly, I know that – parents who get little or no attention from anyone because their children have become everyone’s entire life consider one day a year dressing up like a fucking vicar to be their quite literally God-given right.

But those of us without the need to be pointed and stared at, then laughed at and kicked shitless in turn, shouldn’t have to be roped into such an appalling parade of childishness when trying to celebrate the end of a man’s freedom in Newcastle on a fucking Friday night. Some of us want to dress normally and get alcoholically strengthened so there’s at least a slim chance of surviving the first round with the half-naked nutter who spills our pint and then demands we buy him one for unwittingly dripping it down his effortlessly sweating beer-gut.

The groom in question is half French, which is what makes the whole thing so thoroughly hilarious. Not for the groom, obviously, who has already threatened to leave the moment anyone produces tying-up material to go with their dressing-up material. Last year on a stag weekend in Dublin, another poor bastard spent the entire day dressed as a leprechaun, only to be told his evening’s endurance involved dressing up like a female leprechaun. With two simple words – ‘Fuck that’ – he sat and remained implacable. He will forever be my hero, perhaps more than the best man, who decided to wear the outfit in the groom’s place to the bewilderment of many a congratulatory Dubliner. “Someone’s got to wear it”, he said. Do they though?

This debacle has so far cost me £20 as I’ve had to change my train to Newcastle to a later one, to avoid three hours of ‘oh go on you have to join in go on’ from friends of friends I see once every six months. I’ll likely have to find a way to fuck off somewhere that night with whoever else refuses at the first, and if it ends up just me so be it. It might sound out of order but it’s not as out of order as making me dress like a comedy Gaul in fucking Newcastle on a fucking Friday night. I already have to wear your stupid ‘shirt and shoes’ combination on the Saturday, that special outfit that gets people into places in the extremities of the UK where they’ve yet to establish that what you wear doesn’t relate to how likely you are to smash the place up come 3am.

There’s an episode of Seinfeld where he winds up having to wear a puffy, piratical shirt on live TV, and he’d really rather not. His “But I don’t wanna be a pirate” is one of the funniest lines of the entire show. I feel his pain like a blade to the calcaneal.

And whatever happened to the word ‘fancy’? Didn’t that used to mean posh, or refined in some way, as opposed to ‘like a cunt’?

I received a reply to the email.

“Right chaps, we’re gonna go with the French man theme for the Friday night. If we all get navy or black stripey tops and beret, we can pencil moustaches on (or you can grow your own Dan!) Apologies to Chris who would rather have intimate relations with Rolf than dress up, but we’ve got to do it.”

But I don’t wanna be a pirate.

I don’t own an axe

What sort of cunt writes a blog anyway? I’d always wondered this before feeling the itch myself. Because let’s face it, who gives a fuck what you think? What I think? Or what anybody fucking thinks? It’s surely one of the most self-gratifying things you can do in this ever increasingly anonymous age. But I decided to give this a go to try and disprove my own theory. Maybe it isn’t self-gratifying at all and it can just be used as I intend it to be. as a method of self-help, therapy if you will.

I suppose it’d be courteous to introduce myself, but I’m not gonna do that. What I can tell you is that I’m a guy very much struggling with everyday life at the moment. I’m unhappy. I have no particular reason to be unhappy, which makes me more unhappy. I hate where I live, I hate my flatmates, I hate my job, I hate my boss and I hate the fact that I hate at all. Boo hoo hey! Don’t get me wrong though, this isn’t some note I’m leaving before going on a killing spree, this isn’t American Psycho, I’m not listening to Phil Collins or Huey Lewis and I don’t own an axe. Shouldn’t I be grateful that I have a house and a job? Yeah sure. But we want more don’t we?

I’m currently sitting at my desk at work wondering how I’m going to waste the rest of the day rather than face the monotonous tasks that await my attention. My boss (who recently had his head shaved so he now bears a striking resemblance to Lex Luthor) sits opposite me reading the Financial Times and drinking ginger tea. What a premium bellend he is.

“Check your Norton subscription now.”

Even my trusty laptop is on my case today.

The truth is, it’s easy for me to blame my boss for my unhappiness in the workplace but the buck has to stop with me. If I hate it as much as I say I do then I can quit and find something I actually enjoy rather than just spending the rest of my mortality as another office-bot, another statistic.

It’s not that easy though is it? I’ve gone past that age where I can go through life on a wing and a prayer. Social stigma and financial commitments mean you must remain in employment, keep on towing the line. I had a chat with a bloke in his fifties the other night who had to stop working a few years ago because of a head injury and he seemed genuinely happier than me. How is that fucking possible? How can his life which consisted of lackadaisical masturbation and drinking himself into a daily stupor provide more fulfilment than mine? In fact, scratch that, silly question.

Fear not though, as there is light at the end of my gloomy tunnel. My girlfriend (who is one of the things I do love dearly) is due to give birth to our first child later this year and I shall be moving in with her soon, which eradicates the need for me to further tolerate the bullshit of my flatmates. Yet despite being overwhelmingly excited about the birth of my child, it also fills me with dread. What sort of father can I be when I allow myself to be so consumed by hate? My father was a fuck up of epic proportions so what’s to say I won’t be the same? I’m sure there are those of you reading this who have children and have maybe had the same worries but that doesn’t make it any easier for me to wrap my head around. Do I raise my offspring to be like Lex, with the ginger tea, Financial Times and undoubted coffee enema or like the serial masturbator? Can I even guide somebody in their life when at this stage I have no idea who the fuck I am and what I want? Time will tell, I guess.

I wish there was more point to this virginal blog of mine but I’m afraid there isn’t. I just wanted to introduce myself to begin with and thereafter start writing with more purpose. If you give a shit though you might be pleased to know that hastily typing this up this morning under the ever judgemental glare of Lex has provided me with some enjoyment so there will certainly be more to come.

Not that you give a fuck of course. Why would you? I’m the sort of cunt that writes a blog.

A thong and a ski mask

‘Look at what my partner heaved out of her vagina. I put all the photos up. LOOK. This one it kinda looks like its flipping you the bird hahaha. And in this one you can see he has Daphne’s nose. LOOK. Isn’t he cute! Let me upload MORE pictures of…’

Fuck off, and fuck your fucking children.

Oh, Facebook. I suppose it was the progression we should’ve expected. When Zuckerberg penned the idea for an online directory of local college flange he couldn’t have imagined it would turn into the whole world’s psychologist. I can just about stomach some of the Cantona-esque cryptic cries for attention, the conspiracy theorists who call for bans on anything edible that contains vitamins L through to Z, the brainlessly named ‘facerape’ about some hopelessly unoriginal homoerotic activity somebody has been dying to get of their chest and the weekly photos of some oik having his latest ‘best time ever’.

But babies? No.

As the actual age of the Facebook narcissist slowly rises, it appears the mental age slowly melts out of their ears as they discover what happens when ‘man put pee pee in woo woo’. And seeing as their entire life up to his point has been telling people (who don’t give a fuck about anyone) about themselves (who don’t give a fuck about anyone) the natural progression is to have a child and then tell all of those people who don’t give a fuck about anyone that you have spawned another little shit that no one can give a fuck about. And when they grow up, won’t give a fuck about you.

But that’s not good enough.

Because once someone becomes a parent they become very protective of their child. They wouldn’t want any harm to come to them, and they say it proudly. With all these paedos around you can’t be too careful. So let me just upload this little human being’s life from the age of ‘cunt-warm’ to ‘staggering like a drunk’ and hope no twisted uncle is beating himself off to it wearing a thong and a ski mask.

Hopefully as a parent you can recognise that he/she is a proper child that requires attention as opposed to an artfully tinted Instagram photo, and refrain from putting more images online for the Nonceville wank bank.

Maybe because I haven’t experienced the joys of being a father that makes me sound bitter. Perhaps. But much like childrearing, I have also never taken a selfie and god knows that would be a fucking treat compared to some of the hideous duck faces pouting about online like the race of the constantly constipated. I still, however, won’t be doing that.

Over the last few years I have slowly slimmed my online ‘friends’ collection down to under 100. These at present contain no baby peddlers, no UKIP chimps, no fuckwits ‘jus chillaxing’ or ‘rolling with my bitches’ in club toilets (because that’s where the party starts).

And how much better my ‘online’ life seems for it. Once in a while a scan photo might slip through, in which case you have a nine-month probation period to prove you are not so excited by your offspring that you feel the need to show everyone, like a child who has shit in his own hand and is so amazed and delighted he offers it to mummy.

Having said all this, I have been left with a barren wasteland of a news feed, consisting mainly of factual statements, the occupy movement, NFL news and betting adverts. It’s all very boring. I need to get out and play a bit of football maybe.

Has anyone got a kid I can borrow?

Now the nuts don’t work

I decided a long time ago that I wouldn’t allow any person to stick their fist into my anus. I’m sure there are people who love it, and I’m sure evidence of that is a brief tap of the keyboard away, but I’m afraid it’s not for me.

I wonder, do the people who enjoy this activity look at me with pity, as though if I would only arch my back I would understand the ecstasy it can bring? Do they share stories of their own gaping arseholes with similarly bucket-reared friends, just loudly enough for the closed-minded likes of me to hear? Do they talk about me when I’m not there, perhaps even run through pro-fisting arguments they can try on me to show me the error of my ways?

Entirely unrelated, I also don’t want to have children. At this point anyone reading this who has children will have their ears pricked up like a dog in a pitch-black room sensing another animal sniffing its ringpiece.

I’ve just seen something that I now have to quote as read, to share the unmistakable taste of stomach acid tickling the back of my tongue.

“I am a father. I have one child – a little girl who is almost 2. She is absolutely amazing and means everything to me. Being a father is very special. However, being a father to a little girl is such a unique and amazing relationship.”

It’s the word ‘special’ I object to (most), much the same way as I object to ‘awesome’. If everything is ‘awesome’ where do we have left to go? I like things that inspire awe, but like kebabs and wanking I don’t want one every few minutes.

And if being a parent is so ‘special’, how come there have been so fucking many of them? I know science has moved on apace lately but the number of people who have had a father is still exactly equal to the number of people there have been, as I understand it.

I’m at the age when not having kids is seen as weird so I’ve decided now I’m going to explain to everyone who starts on this fucking never-ending subject that I have a double varicocele, a swelling of the veins that has drained both my testicles of the all-important juice that only lucky men can use to create a civilisation with one single shot. There’s no known cure, though it’s possible to squeeze a tiny amount of ejaculte out past my throbbing capilliaries if I make sure I fill my life with enough drink, drugs, gigs, holidays, unwanted electronic devices, trips to the cinema and people to do the cleaning for me. Exactly the kinds of thing parents can’t afford, but we all have our crosses to bear.

I will go into as much intentionally gruesome detail as you need about the massive red disease that has snuffed out my only chance at life’s main pleasure and ultimate goal, right up until the point you shut the fuck up about your children and how I really should help cure the world’s human shortage. I’ll stop explaining how I have to milk and milk and milk myself in ever more mind-bending positions the moment you admit that your obsession with children is a pathetic attempt to obtain the immortality you feel you, yes you rather than just your genes, deserve.

Either that or I’ll agree to have kids immediately if you lube yourself up and bend the fuck over. Your choice, daddy.