It's all in the genes

15st 13lb, 1.8 units. I cannot swim a stroke. I always argue that this will prove very advantageous if I ever fall into the freezing North Sea, as it will ensure that I do not suffer for any length of time before perishing from hypothermia. The fishermen of the Northumberland coast traditionally did not learn to swim for this very reason.

Lucker churchyard contains the gravestone of my great uncle James, who drowned off Bamburgh beach in 1891 at the age of 26, not long after safely completing an expedition to the furthest reaches of Dutch Guiana. The lesson we clearly absorbed was that swimming was a dangerous business. Neither of my parents could swim at all. Nor can my elder brother. But I had the advantage of a private education (albeit mostly kindly paid for by the ratepayers of Northumberland through the old direct grant school system) which included compulsory weekly swimming lessons. I kept those up for at least six years, until I became totally proficient at forging my mother’s signature on the letters excusing me from the classes. And, as I said, I still can’t swim a stroke.

The Sutherland Swimming Baths. I gave £1,000 to the fund to knock them down, not realising that they meant to build a replacement.

But I concede that I might have had more fun in life if I could. In particular, it has been one of the four serious impediments that have always cropped up at social events whenever anyone has suggested that it would be fun if we all stripped off and leapt into a swimming pool.

The first and most critical of the aforementioned impediments is usually the absence of a swimming pool. Though there have been occasions when there were ladies present that I was so keen to see naked that I would happily have gone out and started digging one there and then. But for impediments two and three: my complete inability to swim and the fact that I possess a body best appreciated when it is completely clothed, and ideally (a) from a considerable distance or (b) through a stained glass window.

The fourth impediment is that I am profoundly antisocial, and so have very rarely attended the sort of social event that tends towards skinny-dipping in its latter stages.

However, I am keen for my young sons to learn from my mistakes, and am accordingly determined that they should be (a) comfortable in water, and (b) not excessively overweight. The Boy, now two and three quarter years old, has been going to weekly swimming lessons for as long as I can remember. As a non-swimmer myself, and a horrible sight in trunks, I naturally refuse to accompany him into the water, but I have twice gone along as an observer. When I could wrench my eyes away from the yummy mummies with their darling offspring, he seemed to me to be enjoying himself. (I also noticed that his mother’s feet never seemed to leave the bottom of the pool, so I probably needed to major on the “horrible sight” excuse if ever invited to stand in for her.)

Yesterday Mrs H took him to his swimming class and asked him at the end whether he had enjoyed it.

“Yes,” he replied.

“And what was your favourite bit?”

“Getting out,” he replied, after careful thought.

That’s my boy. As they say, it’s clearly all in the genes.

As for his weight, there is no sign as yet of him carrying a surplus ounce. And, with nearly every meal seeming to consist of a long battle to persuade him to eat anything at all, I cannot envisage it becoming a problem in the near term. But at least we have clear evidence of normal bodily functions in his twice daily calls: “Mummy! Close your eyes, I’ve got a surprise for you! TA-DAAAA!”

This is potty training as a form of variety show, with the emphasis on magic. I wonder whether I could fund a comfortable retirement by selling the TV rights to Simon Cowell?

A fox not holding its Mummy's hand

16st 2lb, 3.9 units. I started writing this blog again in February, with the aim of providing a vivid “real time” account of the scheduled arrival of my second son. But then said arrival, combined with my principal client signing a £1.5 billion management buyout deal the day after he was born, meant that I did not have time to write a single word.

Though I did, at least, manage to scribble a newspaper column setting out the essential facts of his arrival. On Valentine’s Day. As planned. A choice which I can recommend to any lady who hopes for the undivided attention of her hospital’s obstetrics team, because it is certainly not a date on which she is likely to face a lot of competition for an elective Caesarean slot. Given that it opens up a vista of many years in which 14 February will be associated with kiddies’ birthday parties and unseemly rows over the contents of party bags, rather than romantic candlelit dinners à deux. I must say that getting out of ever buying another Valentine’s Day dinner struck me as one of the major advantages of the arrangement. People kept telling me that there was no reason why I shouldn’t still go out for that after the birthday party was over but trust me: at my age I won’t have the energy.

Anyway, Jamie (a.k.a. The Baby) arrived at 10.44 a.m. on 14 February, and I am happy to report that it was an entirely painless experience. Well, apart from the humiliation of having to get togged up in ludicrous surgical “scrubs”.

Though given a straight choice, I would definitely go for that over Mrs H’s role of having her stomach doused in idione and then cut open by a group of bantering medics in what looked like the store room of a DIY shop, only with rather better lighting. I realised that the bloke in charge was a man after my own heart when he cheerily asked her “Any last requests?” when completing the paperwork before the surgery. Though being the bloke in charge he naturally wasn’t actually present during the operation, leaving that to his subordinates. Who, it is only fair to say, made a perfectly decent fist of it apart from the moment when a trainee made such a hash of putting a line into Mrs H’s arm that blood spurted all over the floor, prompting the anaesthetist to suggest that the lad might like to think about heading back home to New Zealand.

My initial reaction to The Baby was that he looked much more like his mother than The Boy does. She thought he looked exactly like me. I only worked out who he really looks like when I got home and started flicking through my iPhoto folder, and spotted that it is almost impossible to tell the difference between The Baby and his elder brother at that stage of his life.

Peas, pod. Son Number One ...

... Son Number Two

Given that The Boy seems to be universally regarded as a very handsome little chap, this can only be regarded as a promising outcome.

Mrs H was back at home in time for her own birthday three days after The Baby’s (what with that, Valentine’s Day and our wedding anniversary, February, despite its relative brevity, is sure to prove disproportionately expensive for the rest of my life). And then settled into a routine of breastfeeding that seems to occupy the bulk of her time. Much to the occasional annoyance of The Boy, who alternates between affectionately cuddling his younger brother and attempting to “squish” him, or “accidentally” knocking over the Moses basket with the baby inside.

A perfect mix of affection and utter terror

A fortnight’s “holiday” in Northumberland over Easter provided an opportunity to bond with my second son, as well as a further excuse for not blogging. The weather was epically awful, as one might expect of Easter in England, but we still managed to get out for a number of walks, with The Baby in a sling. Number One Son demonstrated his impressive development as a barrack room lawyer by repeatedly refusing to hold hands with an adult while walking down the road, stating pedantically “I’m not walking on the road, I’m walking on the grass.”

The Boy hides his face to avoid the paparazzi

Months ago, Mrs H managed to whip him into line by drawing his attention to the crushed remains of a fox by the side of the road, and pointing out that this had happened because the fox hadn’t been holding its Mummy’s hand, and had got squished as a result.

This lesson seemed to be well absorbed at the time. Then the other night a little voice piped up from the back of the car, “Mummy, let’s find a fox that isn’t holding its Mummy’s hand, and then squish it.”

Mrs H pointed out that that wouldn’t be a very nice thing to do, and received the rejoinder, “No, Mummy. It will be fun.”

We are consoling ourselves with the thought that he does not understand the concept of death, yet. Given that he is obsessed with tractors, agricultural machinery and animals, some sort of career in farming seemed to beckon, but now perhaps we should add Master of Foxhounds to the list of possibilities. It does not look exactly like a growth industry, but at his age I wanted to be the driver of a main line steam locomotive or a trolleybus, and I am prepared to bet that MFHs will be around for rather longer than either of those proved to be.

Painful injections, hurtful comments

15st 12lb, 4.7 units. This morning I delivered Mrs H to hospital for her Date with Destiny on Valentine’s Day. Apparently she needs to be injected with steroids to give The Baby’s lungs a sporting chance once he is out and about. This is because they are not expected to have the benefit of being squeeze-dried by their passage through the birth canal, if that’s what it’s called in polite society these days. The steroids are delivered by injection in the buttocks and I can exclusively report Mrs H’s e-mailed verdict that “it f***ing hurts”, which is actually considerably stronger language than she ever used during the birth of The Boy two and a half years ago. So I think we may deduce that it cannot be an entirely pleasant experience.

It's being so cheerful as keeps her going

It is fair to say that the maternity ward we are honouring with our patronage does not inspire great confidence. As in every NHS hospital I have ever had the misfortune to visit, whether as a visitor or a patient, everyone appears to be frantically busy to the point of overstretch, yet it is never at all clear what they are actually doing. Rare instances of baby-snatching elsewhere have inspired them to lock the door to the ward, and make it accessible only by ringing a bell. The snag, as I remembered from Mrs H’s incarceration there following the birth of The Boy, is that there is never anyone around to hear said bell and respond to it. So you stand there, peering through the glass panel in the door, and every so often a uniformed member of staff wanders past and stares back, but makes no attempt to admit you. The saving grace is the high proportion of patients defiantly addicted to nicotine, so that eventually we were able to sneak in as one let herself out to add to the huge mountain of fag ends outside the building, directly beneath the notice prohibiting smoking anywhere on the hospital site.

We had been told to arrive around 11. Through our own disorganization, we were around 45 minutes late. Which was lucky, because we then had to wait for an hour while they “cleaned” a room in order to admit Mrs H. I have applied inverted commas to “cleaned” because I noted that there was still dried blood on the underside of the lavatory seat, which made me wonder whether anything else had received closer attention. Though, of course, there was a big notice on the door of the bathroom advising that it was STRICTLY FOR PATIENT’S USE ONLY and that ALL visitors must use the facilities elsewhere, so I suppose the cleaner would have been working on the safe assumption that a lady would never need to raise the seat and inspect the underside.

The light in the bathroom did not work, and the cord that was supposed to operate it had been ripped from the ceiling. I pointed this out to a member of staff, who regretted that nothing could be done about it as there were no maintenance staff on site on a Sunday. Nor many doctors, it would seem, to judge by the hours it took to find one to sign the correct prescription for Mrs H’s steroids. To look on the positive side, at least someone did spot that the original prescription supplied for her was completely wrong before the drugs were injected into her.

I read recently that being admitted to hospital on a Sunday increased a patient’s chances of death by 16 per cent. This is beginning to seem like a suspiciously low number.

The Boy accompanied us to hospital and thoughtfully munched a cheese sandwich in the day room while we waited for his mother’s room to become available. Then his grandparents arrived and whisked him away. I had asked him over breakfast whether he would prefer to be looked after by Daddy or Grandma while Mummy was away, trying to sell the Daddy idea by claiming that we could eat nothing but chocolate for four days.

He gave me a withering, sensible look and said, “No, Daddy, I have to eat my dinner first.”

He did not supply the rest of the sentence: “… and I don’t feel that I can really trust you to supply that.”

But then, to be honest, he did not really need to.

Out and about with a loony dwarf

15st 10lb, zero units. Sometimes my son is the sweetest little boy that anyone could possibly imagine; at other times life with him resembles nothing so much as being in the company of a loony dwarf cloned from Mao Tse-tung or Adolf Hitler.

I am currently beginning to worry that our failure to pay for a Sky TV subscription, partly out of meanness but mainly because of my long-standing dislike of all that Rupert Murdoch stands for, has left him overexposed to the inevitably left-wing hippy standards of the BBC’s CBBC channel. I mean, Waybuloo: what the hell is that all about?

And if we continue to be able to afford to live in middle class rural England, it surely won’t be long before he starts questioning why there is such a marked shortage of the black, disabled and screamingly gay role models of which he sees so much on the telly.

His indoctrination with political correctness struck me forcibly in Sainsbury’s this morning. There was a buy-one-get-one-free offer on Cathedral City Cheddar, so Mrs H naturally tried to stick two of the things in our trolley. But The Boy hurled himself in front of her and announced sternly, “We only need one, Mummy.”

“Yes, but they’re on a special offer and we don’t have to pay for the other one, so it would be silly not to take it.”

“But we only need one, Mummy.”

So you end up in the middle of a busy supermarket trying to explain that we are, in fact, responsible shoppers who would never dream of taking up those pernicious BOGOF offers on fresh food that stands no chance of being consumed before it goes off and ends up being transferred directly from fridge to bin. But on stuff with a reasonably long life like cheese, which we were going to buy anyway, it is actually mad not to take advantage of the offer.

And then Mrs H did her, “Look, what’s that?” trick, pointing down the aisle, and sneaked the second packet into the trolley while he wasn’t looking.

I quite expected to be having this sort of conversation with my child at some point. Just not when he is two and a half. I dread to think what is going to happen when he finally discovers what goes into the sausages that have been his favourite food since he moved onto solids.

I tried to take his photograph eating some in the pub where we went for lunch after Sainsbury’s, but he threw a tantrum, putting his hands in front of his face and weeping “No, no photos now, Daddy!”

I had to sneak this one by pulling the “What’s that?” trick yet again. I wonder how much longer that will work?

As you can see, to say that he wasn't happy about it is something of an understatement.

On second thoughts, maybe he’s a loony dwarf cloned from Hugh Grant rather than Adolf Hitler.

I didn't do anything in my pants

15st 10lb, zero units. Back in 2008 I used to count down the remaining days of my life at the start of each entry in this blog. There were more than 1,200 of them left, then. It was hardly a worry. But if deathclock.com had got it right, I should have died last Saturday.

I thought it was in with a late chance when I developed a mysterious lump on my jaw in early January, which my GP considered worth referring to a consultant who in turn felt that it merited a scan and a biopsy, though clearly it would have needed to be a particularly vicious form of cancer to polish me off in just four weeks. As it was, the lump vanished completely before anyone could even take a sample of it, and I have decided to give up trying to predict when I am going to die. There is enough going on in life at present to keep me occupied.

Cue asteroid falling unexpectedly on head.

The main lesson I need to learn (and I have been working on this for decades, without success) is the importance of constantly reminding myself that we only live once, and not for long, and that it is therefore important to GET ON WITH IT. Like many, I have a nasty tendency to approach life as a whole as I do most individual days: with a stack of things to do, but plenty of time to get through them, so why not have a nice cup of tea and a look at the papers before I get started, then perhaps a glance at Twitter and Facebook and a check on one or two other websites? After which it is always good to go through my various inboxes and send what are supposed to be hilarious replies to my personal correspondents. Then it’s almost time for lunch, so it’s clearly not worth starting work until after that. And in the afternoon – well, I’m a bit tired now and I would undoubtedly get the work done in half the time if I started it when I was nice and fresh in the morning, so why not do a little more of that morning stuff? And maybe write an entry for a long neglected blog?

The net effect of which is that it is time for home and Coronation Street before I know it, with nothing particularly useful accomplished. Which is not how I want to feel when the tap on the window proves to be caused by a bloke in a black hood clumsily wielding a scythe.

But now let us turn to the current mood in the Bloke in the North household, which can best be described as “apprehensive”. Thanks to the entirely characteristic Hann stubbornness displayed by my forthcoming second son, who remains resolutely stuck in the breech position, Mrs H is scheduled to go into hospital on Sunday in preparation for a Caesarean section on Tuesday. Valentine’s Day. The reasons for this slightly bizarre choice of date were covered in my newspaper column on Tuesday, so I shall not repeat them here.

It would be fair to say that Mrs H is not looking forward to this procedure one little bit. But then she listened carefully as the professionals outlined all the various options for separating her and The Baby, and it would be fair to say that she did not fancy any of them in the slightest.

I was fully with her on that.

She asked me whether I would like to be with her in the operating theatre, so that I could hold her hand during the Caesarean. I enquired, in response, whether she would like to be in an operating theatre with me if I were having my appendix out, and we swiftly established that she would not. That summed up pretty much how I felt about being around for her. I have had a horror of operating theatres ever since I had my tonsils clumsily removed in one at the old Throat, Nose and Ear Hospital in Newcastle’s Rye Hill 50-odd years ago. The only half-persuasive counter-argument I have heard is the one advanced by male friends who have sat through both natural childbirth and Caesareans, and confirm that the latter is considerably less likely to put a chap off his breakfast. We shall see.

Meanwhile, The Boy is also showing clear signs of nervousness, despite our best efforts to get him feeling involved and enthused.

“What shall we call the baby, Charlie?”

“De brudder.”

“We think Jamie’s quite a nice name. Shall we call him Jamie?”

“No, I think we call him de brudder.”

Every now and then he picks up a clearly knackered toy car that is fit only for the bin, and generously announces that de brudder can have it.

On Tuesday I drove him into his nursery on my own for the first time, to get him used to the idea since I will inevitably be doing this rather a lot during the weeks that Mrs H is unable to drive as she recuperates from surgery.

When there are three of us in the car he usually keeps up a more or less constant flow of banter, commenting on passing vehicles (with special emphasis on trucks, tractors and Land Rovers) and the animals in the fields, and offering invaluable snippets of driving advice, such as:

“Go very slowly, Daddy. It icy.” (Tick.)

or: “Come on, Mummy. Catch the truck and go past it.” (No tick, as usually uttered on a blind bend, or when there is row of monster lorries approaching in the opposite direction.)

But when there were just the two of us, I was treated to 45 minutes of more or less complete silence, apart from one “Where Mummy?” and a couple of “Not that one”s to less favoured tracks on his Poppy and Sam story CD, which I now know more or less off by heart. (I reckon that Mrs Boot the farmer is having a torrid affair with Ted the halfwitted tractor driver, but have not shared that insight with The Boy. Yet.)

When we finally pulled into the car park he removed his seatbelt, looked me in the face with a very serious expression and announced “I didn’t do anything in my pants.” This is not something he has ever said before. It took me until lunch, which I shared with a couple of colleagues, for its true import to be revealed to me by the man who, before he discovered chartered surveying, was a professional racing driver.

It was, he pointed out, the finest testimonial to my driving skills that I was ever likely to hear, and one that he had himself been longing to hear for more than a decade, but for which he was still waiting.

I suppose I should have expected some such sign of intelligent appreciation from The Boy, whose growing vocabulary remains a daily source of fascination. A few months ago we acquired a cat (hereinafter called The Cat), as an inevitably inadequate replacement for Mrs H’s sadly deceased pair of moggies. She (The Cat, not Mrs H) had been languishing in our usual cattery / kennels for months, while a not very old lady with Alzheimer’s agonised over what to do with her. Or, more likely, kept forgetting that she (the cat, not the old lady, though in this case I suppose it could well be both) existed. She had certainly not been able to remember whether she had fed the bloody thing for quite some time, as a result of which it had ballooned to literally double the weight it ought to be. We have been systematically starving her ever since, under veterinary supervision. Meanwhile, to add to the joy of her life, she is barked at and chased by a Border terrier on a daily basis, and has a small boy periodically hurling himself on top of her and subjecting her to a bear hug. She has not scratched him yet, from which we may conclude that, whatever else one might say against her, and “fat” springs ineluctably to mind, she has at least got a sweetly forgiving nature.

The Boy holds her in high regard. “Melody, you’re amazing,” he announced the other morning, which will make more sense when I tell you that the not-so-old lady with Alzheimer’s named her cat Melody.

He clearly liked the sound of it, for he said it more than once.

Mrs H, in training for having two sons, looked to introduce a bit of balance, and asked him whether Craster (The Dog) was amazing, too.

He thought about it and declared, “Craster amazing – but in a different way.”

Such profundity at a mere two and a half. I do believe we have a genius in the making, or at any rate one whose gnomic pronouncements on the great issues of the day can be published to the delight of the gullible, ideally in return for ready money.

And so this is Christmas

15st 13lb, 4.5 units (reels back in amazement at own self-restraint in Christmas Day alcohol consumption, though sadly not in calorie intake and resultant avoirdupois).

An almost total stranger e-mailed me the other day with a simple question: “Whither Bloke in the North?”

Yes, I checked. There was a question mark at the end, and a second “h” in “wither”.

It seemed a reasonable enquiry, given the comparative lack of activity on this blog in 2011. Though curiously it still seems to receive more visitors than my other blog, keithhann-whyohwhy.com, which I faithfully update every week. And to which I devote far more care and attention than I ever did to this, because each entry is also a newspaper column published in that great daily paper of the North East, The Journal.

Perhaps I inadvertently created a memorable brand in Bloke in the North. Or maybe “bloke” is just one of those words, like “porn”, that people simply cannot resist typing into search engines.

Dear faithful reader, I apologize for the lack of attention to your needs.

The facts are that I started this blog a little over four years ago when I was a confirmed bachelor (though not in the usual sense of “screaming queen”) of 53, largely unemployed, and contemplating a solitary decline towards an early grave. Starting it was a way of whistling to keep my spirits up, while in the back of my mind was the completely insane idea that it might catch the eye of a publisher who would commission me to write something more profitable.

I know. Ridiculous, isn’t it?

I also used it for a time as a surprisingly effective way to discipline myself into losing weight. By the time I gave up I was two stone lighter, though still about 21 pounds above my theoretically ideal weight. I felt much better about myself, though kind friends later told me that I looked bloody awful. There is nothing like a bit of fat for filling out wrinkles. So at least I must look terrific now that I have put every ounce back on, as fat bastards always do.

But before I did that, something completely unpredictable happened. My low profile presence on the internet caught the eye of a young woman, who got in touch to introduce me to a less particular friend who was in the habit of going out with older men. My correspondent had an unusual name, which looked like two spectacularly bad hands in a game of Scrabble. Only the fact that she gave the name of her employer, and that her chief executive happened to be an old friend of mine, prevented me from immediately consigning her message to the trash.

I never did meet her friend, but the young woman and I are now married with a two-and-a-half-year-old son and another boy due to be born in February, though the groans from Mrs H on the sofa last night did make me wonder whether we were going to have to revise our plans and call him Noel rather than Jamie.

So never believe those wiseacres who assert that blogging is a sad waste of time. This one literally transformed my life.

In so doing, it made me immeasurably busier. Not just because of the presence in my life of the aforementioned wife and children (almost) but because of the additional work I have felt obliged to undertake. This being my admittedly not particularly successful way of trying to support them in the style to which they would like to become accustomed.

Not only do I have less free time in which to write, but my natural subject matter has changed, too. From what were supposed to be hilarious tales of my pretty consistent failure to get my leg over with attractive young women who subsequently turned out to be clinically insane, to heartwarming “kids say the funniest things!” anecdotes of the kind so effectively parodied in Viz, and which were once (and, for all I know, may still be) the staples of the letters pages in the Sunday Sun, Sunday Post and People’s Friend.

I would be happy enough to post these on a much more regular basis, but I worry that doing so under the heading of “Bloke in the North” would be so far removed from its original prospectus as to put me at risk of prosecution under the 1968 Trade Descriptions Act.

On the other hand, perhaps it is the reader’s responsibility to keep up? Is Martin Sorrell regularly upbraided, at the head office of WPP, because he cannot supply callers with wire shopping baskets?

***

As an indication of what I am up against, the narrative was interrupted at that point so that I could answer two-year-old Charlie’s first question of the morning: “Where my Advent calendar gone?” (The answer produced tears, as he had got used to a fix of chocolate before his morning milk.) Then my laptop was commandeered so that he could watch three episodes of Chuggington while Mummy prepared breakfast.

Christmas Eve morning, and The Boy knows he has an important date with a chocolate Santa

“Would you like some eggs, Charlie?”

“Yes.”

So Mrs H cooked delicious scrambled eggs while I carved some wonderful smoked salmon from Swallow Fish in Seahouses, and toasted and buttered a couple of slices of bread.

“There you are, Charlie. Eggs with pink fish. Your favourite.”

“No, no, no! I don’t want it!” The bowl was flung across the table, though we did not get more tears until he applied his full weight to disentangling the cat’s Christmas present from some obstruction or other, and it snapped and catapulted him across the kitchen.

All in all, a pretty typical morning with a toddler. Or at any rate our toddler.

On Christmas Eve Mrs H took him out to see a local hunt meet, because there is nothing he likes more than horses, dogs, 4x4s and horseboxes. He snored through the whole thing. Then she took her eye off him for a minute or two after lunch and returned to find him holding a strip of tablets that she had carefully hidden on a high work surface in a remote corner of the kitchen. He proudly announced that he had taken one. But had he? Mrs H could not remember whether there had been six or seven tablets left in the strip when she took her last one. Now there were definitely only six. So it was possible, though unlikely as the tablets seemed rather too large for a two-year-old to swallow. And given that it is hellishly difficult to get him to eat anything at all apart from fish fingers and sausages, what were the chances that he would he chew his way through a very unpalatable pill?

“Did you take one of Mummy’s pills?”

“Yes, I did.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes.”

On the one hand, it is said that small children never lie because they have not yet learned how to do so. On the other hand we know that he is immensely suggestible and will agree to almost anything.

So Mrs H consulted the internet on what damage taking one of her pills for gestational diabetes might do to a two-year-old. Then she rang NHS Direct, who did clearly did precisely the same thing. They advised that it would probably be all right, but there were some exceptionally rare potential complications, so the best thing to do would be to take him to hospital and have him checked out. The last thing any parent wants to hear on Christmas Eve.

By the time they rang back with this advice we had arrived at church for the Christmas Eve crib service. Since no urgency was suggested, and a spot of prayer seemed appropriate, we went in and joined the packed congregation. Everyone else sang three of my favourite carols: Away in a manger, Once in Royal David’s City and Oh little town of Bethlehem. Charlie sang Jingle Bells and somehow his one small voice seemed to carry through the church more powerfully than the several hundred others competing with it.

Then we drove to hospital and joined the queue in A&E, after asking Charlie yet again whether he had taken one of Mummy’s pills as it was very important and we were all going to have to go to hospital if he had.

“Yes, I did,” he insisted.

We were pleasantly surprised that the reception staff at A&E did not greet us by our first names as we walked in, since we see them so often these days. First there was a consultation with a nurse, who did not think there was anything to worry about. Then I stupidly raised the very rare complications that NHS Direct had mentioned, which sent her off to look them up on the internet. She returned with a doctor, who looked about 13, and that was after he had been prematurely aged by exhaustion. And we had a remarkably similar conversation with him. Then he went off to consult a paediatric specialist and came back with his advice: “Admit for observation.”

“You see, Charlie, you’re going to miss Santa now because you took one of Mummy’s pills. You’re going to have to stay in hospital.”

“No, no! I want to go home!”

“But you took one of Mummy’s pills.”

“No, I didn’t! I didn’t!”

“Then why did you say you did?”

“I don’t know.”

Did you take one of Mummy's pills?

“Of course,” the young doctor said, “If you want to ignore medical advice and take him home, that’s up to you.”

Mrs H asked exactly what their “observation” would consist of, and it proved to comprise waking him up in the middle of the night, checking that he wasn’t in a diabetic coma and measuring his blood sugar. All of which, she pointed out, as a (hopefully temporary) diabetic equipped with a blood testing kit, she was fully equipped to do at home, and bring him back to hospital if the results were unsatisfactory.

The doctor seemed satisfied with this compromise, so we left. As we drove out of the hospital, a little voice piped up from the back of the car: “I did take one of Mummy’s pills. I did.”

Back home, The Boy prepared a spread for Santa. I drew the line at eating Rudolph's carrot.

I don’t suppose we will ever know the truth, but he survived to see Christmas and to open his presents, which afforded him some pleasure. Though I relearned the lesson of last Christmas that one gift brings great joy to a small child, and more than one is really just a distraction. I assumed that he would be most pleased with the ride-on John Deere tractor that I had spent a hellish evening assembling from a kit of parts with the aid of instructions that came in a wide range of languages, apparently including ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics, yet strangely excluding English. However, this proved to be a disappointment on two grounds: (a) because he resolutely refused to pedal it, as seeming far too much like hard work, and (b) because I vetoed the use of the front loader attachment to bulldoze a large stretch of the lawn.

Would-be farmer with major capex in equipment

On the plus side, he was delighted with the modestly priced model Land Rover that I had bought him from the Rothbury toyshop that is such a great resource for those with small children obsessed with agricultural machinery.

After we came in from the garden, he became obsessed with (a) getting hold of my box of matches, (b) turning on the cooker and (c) placing his hand on the red hot hob. Perhaps it was these distractions that caused his mother to turn on the wrong hotplate and melt the plastic base of the smart new electric coffee grinder I had unpacked only that morning.

Then we had lunch, where the Boy carried his obsession with gravy to previously unseen heights, demanding that he be allowed to spoon more and more of it onto his already overflowing plate. He wouldn’t actually eat any of his Christmas dinner apart from a couple of chipolatas, once they had been carefully denuded of their bacon wrapping. Then he had a meltdown over the Great Gravy Shortage and fell off his chair. I ate my Auntie’s fantastic Christmas pudding and brandy butter, after which we all had a well-earned nap that was pretty much the highlight of the day.

Merry Christmas, everyone.