A to do list

Some things just look wrong, and that wee redirecting post sitting up here was one of them.

We've been to New Zealand and returned and all was fantastic and someday I'll finish updating the trip story which might well be during our next holiday when I have the time, which itself might well be in 10 or 15 years when we've finished paying for this one, but I will, at some stage.

I would say it seemed somewhat cruel to bring the child back to the more confined and restricted spaces of Holland, when she had the run of some of the most wonderful open spaces you could imagine, but considering that she also spent many hours strapped into a car seat, confined to a campervan, or in a flying germ capsule that would be a tad rich.

Christmas and New Year has come and gone in just the manner the doctor ordered - delightfully quiet, although we have realised that the wonder that is Santa Claus won't play half the role in the child's life that Sinterklaas does. The blackface slave owning, naughty child kidnapping, boat faring poet Spaniard, 3 week early Dutch version of Father Christmas is obviously what all her little friends get excited about, and in order to be fair, we'll have to play along.

It's all food for thought now that she is a far more independent madam than just a few months ago, her surroundings, how she speaks, and the traditions she will want to respect will be significantly different to if we lived back 'home' or somewhere else.  Her emergence from babyhood has unwittingly brought up questions to be asked and decisions to be made that require great thought and have wide impact.

Great thought indeed, just not today.

Regardless, that redirection post has now been shunted down the page and I can consider my day one high in achievement, if somewhat low in standards.

God only knows why

But if the universe allows, by conspiring to have time, inclination, and technology collide I may just keep this http://theoctoberkiwis.blogspot.com/ updated with 'whatever' over the coming month.

Maybe. Perhaps. Probably.

They're coming to take me away - ha ha!

I'm not quite right in the head.

Well, I can't be really, can I?

I mean, the cracks must have already been showing in my mental well-being if I thought it was a good idea to fly to - quite literally - the other side of the planet with a toddler, just so we can all eat, sleep, and travel around the countryside in a camper van. But I do think I've stretched the bands of sanity by disrupting the week and half before our departure, that any normal person would spend preparing for said trip, by having some builders come in and basically wreck our house.

As I type this my darling daughter is snoring her little head off while power cables and water connections are flapping wildly in the late September breeze around me. Stepping outside our back door would result in the lesser agile among us plummeting to their certain death into a hole that I can only hope serves some greater purpose than being the cause of my premature demise.

But hey, kids run around construction sites all the time. Breeze blocks and gas mains make great toys, and don't let anyone tell you that sawdust is bad for a child's digestion.

If I'm to take any consolation from the current state of my home, other than being able to pull off great 1980s Beirut theme parties, it's that the guy running the show seems to know what he's doing. Not that either of us understand a word of what the other is saying, pigeons would be insulted at being associated with our language skills. Nevertheless, he seems entirely confident that we need that trench right there, and that securing that power cable would be an act of folly.

So, with our minds firmly at rest, euthanised most likely, we are going to leave our crumbling home in his capable hands, and head to the wilds of New Zealand for a month. My original worry about being burgled in our absence has been replaced by fretting about the far more likely possibility of being sued by the family of whatever poor misfortunate thief ends up starving to death at the bottom of one of the canyons our trusty builder has provided for us.

If you'll excuse me, I must go lie down.

Double Dutch, a little English, some baby, and a dose of repetition

‘In auto?’

‘In auto?’ she asks again, dragging her raincoat and a bunch of keys to the living room door.

She wants to go for a drive in the car (auto).

-‘Maybe later’.

‘Uit!’ (out!) she says with more urgency, clawing at the door trying to prize it open. ‘Deur stuk!’ she announces for a finish, before pottering off back into her own world, distracted by God only knows what.

-‘Yes, the deur is stuk’ (Door is broken)

Off she trots, busying herself with her ‘brush’, her ‘ball’, her ‘bug-eeee’ and all manner of other things, sometimes English, sometimes Dutch, peculiarly mostly beginning with B. All the usual one and two syllable words that any one and a half year old would use. Then out of nowhere she starts to sing. ‘Applebee, Applebee, Applebee’ repeating one of the many irritating tunes that regularly emanate from any one of numerous bits of bright coloured plastic dotted around the house these days.

With bedtime approaching she demands that she gets to brush her ‘deeesh’, before being put into her (sleeping) ‘bag!’. With a little coercion you might get a ‘night night’ out of her, or if you’re extra lucky, a ‘good night’.

Her ‘ted-dees’ need their ritual arranging before she finally gives in, rubbing her eyes and announcing it’s time for ‘slaapen’ (sleep).

A few mumbles escape as she works herself into her favourite position, before drifting off to have what I can only presume are truly multilingual dreams.

Trying to make my way down the hall while avoiding the creaky bits, I’m sure I hear her ask ‘In auto?’

The leper's anus, & other stories

Nappies, nipples, nose wipes. Bottles, bibs, buggies.

Changes of clothes, snacks, toys, and books. All part of the preparation involved in taking a toddler to the shops just 45 minutes away.

It’s overly complicated and clumsy, and while it gets easier the more often you do it, it doesn’t encourage you to take longer trips with anyone who regularly leaves snot on the knees of your pants.

Never being ones to do things easily, we’ve decided to take our offspring on a trip somewhat further afield, all in the name of 'a holiday'.

We’ve decided it would be a fabulous idea to spend 12 hours inside a germ filled metal tube, eat from tinfoil containers, not actually sleep, and share a bathroom with 300 others. With a toddler.

This joyful experience will sadly be disrupted by a 5 hour stopover in a city that may or may not be on the brink of hosting an overthrowing of its government. Once that potentially anarchical interlude is done with, we get to climb back into the germ rocket and repeat that 12 hour adventure all over again, this time with added sleep deprivation, body odour, and crankiness. With a toddler.

A full 32 hours and 18 thousand kilometers after we leave our home and worldly goods for all manner of burglars and thieves to scavenge through, we should arrive at our destination on the other side of the globe. There we will spend 4 days recovering from the inevitable jet-lag, attempted murder, and whatever bug or virus that will have been generously passed onto us by our passenger companions. With a toddler.

Once we have regained the use of our legs, realised that day is night and night is day, and established that the locals can’t pronounce the letter ‘e’, what else would we do other than pile everything and everyone back into a plane, which in my humble opinion is as healthy a thing to do as lick the anus of a leper, and fly to another city. Not just any city, but a city recently flattened by a massive earthquake. Where we will spend 3 days presumably sightseeing sights that no longer exist. With a toddler.

When we are done with our stint standing & pointing at empty spaces where cathedrals used to be, we up the tempo. We take the holiday to another level. We all pile into a camper van with all the speed and mobility of a fridge tethered to a lame hamster, and spend the next 2 and a half weeks driving three thousand kilometers through drunken rugby fan, sheep, and fault lines all the way back to where we started. With a toddler.

We can then reflect on the glory that was our Antipodean adventure on another 24 hour flight in leper’s undergarments. We will have another 18 thousand kilometers at our disposal to remember the laughs we had cleaning up vomit for the first 4 days, the piles of rubble from the 3 thereafter, and the road rage and loss of our deposit from the last 2 weeks.

Upon our arrival home at some unseemly hour, we can all pass out on the bare floor before calling the police and house insurance to report the theft of everything we hadn’t managed to drag to the other side of the planet and back.

What a great idea this was. I’m already getting excited at the mere idea of it.

His cat's black & white you know...

Fantasy worlds are a wondrous thing.

Some of you are currently living in the dying world of Harry Potter, entranced by spells and wands and magic. Others are loitering about impatiently waiting for a similar journey into the world of the Hobbit, holding Lord of the Rings marathons just to get you through the days before you venture once more towards Mordor.

Many of you live in the past, or future, depending on the depth of your scorn upon those who live in the world of Star Wars, dreaming dreams full of lightsabers, planet Kashyyk, and characters with names that double as slang for self abuse.

In our house we live in yet another world. A simpler world, with simpler heroes, simpler adventures. A certain little girl has developed a fascination with all the goings on in the animated world of Greendale.

Greendale is home to its local hero Pat Clifden. Pat is a postman, a role that has earned him the witty title of ‘Postman Pat’. Pat enthralls us with daily adventures in his wee red van, always accompanied by his sidekick Jess. A bloody cat.

Now, if we put aside the madness of a feline assistant, even in an unofficial capacity, Pat just doesn’t cut it as a postman.

In fact, Pat is without doubt the most useless postman on the planet. Considering I’ve discovered that in real life we never get any post delivered when it rains, to bestow such a title on Greendale’s fictional Postman Pat is no throwaway gift. While I’m sure the intention of his creators was to provide fodder for his daily adventures, I’m yet to see Pat successfully deliver a parcel in one piece. If Scottish terriers aren’t running off with Indian charms destined for a school show n’tell, or the bats (yes, bats) he has to deliver haven’t flown off somewhere, then he is too busy stopping Vicar-driven runaway trains to actually deliver any bloody post.

Even with this incompetence on display, I can’t tear the child’s eyes away from this televisual massacre. Or Pat’s incessant humming.

The theme song insists that ‘Pat feels he’s a really happy man’, well yes, so would you be if you were so thick as to make your cat seem the brightest intellect on your postal round, and yet you manage to retain your position with the national postal service. Either the creators have missed a beat with that one, or I’ve just missed the episode where it’s revealed Pat has photographic evidence of his CEO in a compromising position with a penguin. And several cabinet backbenchers.

My torment doesn’t stop with the star of the show, Greendale’s other residents have to be seen to believed. There is the Indian family with the surname ‘Baines’. Of the New Delhi Baines no doubt. I really hope that bizarre choice of surname to be a nod towards the fact that whenever I attempt a Welsh accent it ends up sounding Indian.

The town’s carless, not careless, doctor is Welsh, the decrepit Post Mistress is Scottish, and the rest of Greendale’s inhabitants all have accents from every corner of Britain and beyond, making it undoubtedly the most diverse town on the planet with a population of 14, every one of which my daughter simply adores.

Without Postman Pat humming like a simpleton in the background morning, noon, and night it’s quite the challenge to stop our beloved offspring going ballistic.

All of this I can cope with, just. It might very well be eroding the part of my brain that keeps me from attempting to climb up a tree in a sleeping bag but all these irritations I can live with.

All except for one.

The doorbells. Being a series based around the concept of delivering post, ‘Postman Pat’ sees a lot of doorbells being rung. This in itself would be fine, if it weren’t for the fact every doorbell in Greendale sounds exactly the same, and more importantly, exactly the same as ours. As a result, since my dear daughter’s obsession with this animated atrocity has started, I’ve spent about 30% of my days running to the front door or peering out windows for no good reason.

Screw you Postman Pat, you incompetent humming bastard, screw you.

Hands in pockets

There are dozens.

Aged probably from 7 to 11 or so, all seemingly darting here and there like a snow flurry of prepubescents. Only when you focus can you see that there are little pockets of them not rushing about.

Little groups of 4 to 8 kids standing around the school yard. Boys and girls listening to, and telling exaggerated yarns, giving and receiving game instructions, hearing the latest updates of whatever it is that is important in that world.

Most are wrapped up well against the sharpness in the bright mid-morning March sunshine. The leaders, the cooler kids sacrificing body heat to stand scarfless, dictating to their subjects in unzipped jackets. The groups centre around these leaders, closely circled by others hanging on every word and gesture.

At the edge of one group there is a stray. An extra. A leftover. A boy or a girl standing three or four feet away from the rest. My bus moves on leaving them behind, and it unclear, whether the child was trying to work up the courage to join the group, or showing reluctance to leave it.

Just standing there with hands dug deep into his or her coat pockets watching the others.

7, maybe 8 years of age and already experiencing a nasty reality they can’t possibly yet comprehend. People are often mean for no reason, they exclude, they judge, they persecute. They do it at 8 years of age, they do it at 80.

A reality I know. A lesson I don’t welcome. A mental note of a school I won’t be sending my daughter to.

March 2011.

When by 6

By 6, she is spent.

Her long day will be coming to an end. A day of crawling into every corner, edging along every piece of furniture, and intensely examining every object she can get her hands on. She will have wobbled over with laughter, animatedly preached to anyone who will listen to her untranslatable sermons, and danced the dance of a dozen demented head bangers.

She will reach up to me, and when accommodated, wrap her legs tightly around as much of my belly as she can span, and jig the jig of an over excited miniature jockey.

I recline in the chair, and on my thigh, she reclines into me. Together we will flick through her favourite songs, or watch video clips that make her laugh, or simply sit and babble back and forth.

Each equally, and irrelevantly, undecipherable to the other.

As another wave of fatigue swirls around her, she will raise her hand to my chin, and as if it were an apple on the branch, cup it, drawing it towards her. Once there she smiles sleep laden smiles as I place kiss after kiss after kiss on her cheek, her temple, her forehead.

Repeating it over and over, she drinks comfort from this exchange. Not knowing that it charges me infinitely more than it does her.

Lulled deep, the penultimate tide washes over her and without a thought she corkscrews, coming to kneel on my lap. With arms raised in surrender, she rests her face against my chest. Her final battle against sleep is played out in the form of her flopping from left cheek to right cheek and back again, before succumbing to her dreams and the warmth beneath.

The formalities of bedtime that follow seem almost unnecessary, and certainly unfair. On us both.

When by 6, she is spent.

February, 2011.

Spaniels arses

She is quite eye catching.

Now, I’m fully aware that to the outside world she might just as easily have a face like a hole dug in a muddy field, but taking the unshakable prerogative that exists for fathers of daughters I’m forging forward with my declaration of beauty.

It should be noted that I place little or no importance on the physical appearance or ability of babies. I already hear too many creepy comments alluding to the later life prospects of humans who are barely a few months old, it’s unnerving, unsettling, and utterly pointless.
Unless of course you find one in nappies with a killer backhand, a 400 yard drive, or the ability to trap dead a 50 yard pass with their left foot, then all bets are off and you should rush to fill their heads with all sorts of praise and nonsense in order to cement and secure your own future fortunes.

Digressions and caveats appropriately dealt with, what inspires my opening proclamation?

First and foremost it’s hair. The child was born with a considerable mop of the stuff. Now, almost a year on, her face is framed by the most remarkable flowing locks. Black, brown, golden, and even red waves of thick hair down to her shoulders that would strike jealously even into the heart of a Mother Theresa and Gandhi lovechild who’d been given up for adoption and raised by Nelson Mandela.

So yes, in my opinion, kind of cute.

Regardless, all this posturing and tangent surfing is quite irrelevant when my aim is to highlight the downside to all this. When you toss the coin of beauty and cuteness, it will inevitably, on occasion, land the side up that you hadn’t called.

There is always a price to pay.

A price to pay for a pretty animated creature with flowing locks. There is no free lunch, or rather, no lunch free from what has become the bedevilment of my days; spoon feeding a shaky-headed, long haired baby.

The elation of having your offspring eagerly gobble up a few spoonfuls of liquidised kidney beans becomes somewhat muted when, with a swish of her head, the dish of the day attaches itself to her flowing mane. 6 spoons later and baby is sporting carrot moistened ringlets making her look like a demented cross between Shirley Temple and an Hasidic Jew.

Quick action is of the utmost importance, failing to wet wipe dinner from your child’s follicles before the main course hardens will leave you facing a baby with hair as matted and tangled as a Cocker Spaniel’s arse after a morning in the woods.

So you see, baby beauty isn’t all it’s hyped up to be. There are pitfalls, slippery slopes, and bangs welded to cheeks with green beans to contend with.

Beauty is very much in the eye of the knot-comb holder.

7th February, 2011.

D day day

Some things in life are inevitable, like Morgan Freeman playing Mandela, or Tiger Woods getting herpes, and with 400 entries behind me, this is one of them.

It’s time to put this blog to bed.

There is a little girl who joyfully consumes more time and energy than I need to maintain this place to the standard it deserves; I believe it’s been a good blog and to continue it half heartedly would be doing it a disservice. I’m not entirely at ease with leaving it behind, but watching it go to ruin with poorer and more infrequent entries would be far worse.

It has evolved naturally, along with the story it’s been telling, from one of just another idiot trying to knock up his wife, to one of grim and dark places with sadness, anxiety and uncertainty lurking in the shadows, and on to one of happiness that no words or silly phrases can convey.

You’ve giggled about the early days of trying to conceive, offered advice when things started to look off colour, and consoled us when they repeatedly went wrong.

You’ve read entries every month with the same trepidation with which I’ve read ET’s face at the same intervals. You’ve cursed when we’ve cursed, and you’ve celebrated with us from every farfetched outpost of this planet that you could imagine.

You chuckle when I admit we are paying funny money to a day care centre and all we get in return are germs. You nod your heads when I try, and fail, to articulate how staring perfection in the face every single day can be as equally unnerving and unsettling as it is calming and gratifying.

For all this, and the genuine friendships forged, I can only say thank you.

My biggest debt has to be to the poor woman who has had her intimates on display for everyone to see, both literally, and well, literally. We did it, let’s enjoy it.

As for writing, I can’t stop now. I’ll continue somewhere soon, in my own time, perhaps with another focus. When the touch paper gets lit again there’ll be no stopping me, and you’ll know where to find me. Until then, all ideas, or job offers, are welcome.

For those reading who are still on their own journey, I know how dark it can be, I can only hope along with you, wish you well, and tell you that someday it could all be very different for you. The breathing sounds from the baby monitor here on my desk tell me so.

So, for the last time I want you to get your arse off my couch and give me that mug so I can put it in the sink. I’ll ignore the mess you’ve left with those biscuit crumbs and we’ll walk you to the door. Just don’t expect Sanne to wave because she only does that cute stuff when no one is looking, you do get a huge smile though.

Thank you for calling, safe home.

Toothy opera & the novelty brunette

There she is, sitting in her chair, feet flat on the fl0or beneath her.

Her cheek and arm meet at a 45 degree angled chubby flesh sandwich. I can't tell which is resting on which.

She hums open mouthed songs to herself. The only interruption to her mini operatics comes as she stops to run her tongue forwards and backwards over the two teeth starting to jut out from the centre of her bottom gum.

Teeth!

I wonder what's going through her mind as she fingers the curls behind her ear with her free hand. Maybe she's thinking about all the little boys and girls at her new day care who stroke her arm, fascinated by her mop of dark hair, here in this land of the blonde follicles.

Day care!

Maybe she's contemplating the fact that this is our first official 'Papa dag', where my mobile can ring and ring but I don't have to pick it up.

Maybe, just maybe, this little girl, who I struggle to call a baby now, is filling her nappy.

Jaws

We hadn’t gone a mile when an unidentified individual asked me a question, ‘So, will ye have any more?’

‘Dan’ I replied to the unidentified individual, ‘that’s a tricky question’.

And it is.

From day one the plan was to have more than one, we both had different numbers in mind but one wasn’t one of them.

The thing is now, we know what can be involved, we know how hard it could be, and we know how miserable you can become when it doesn’t happen.

Those twenty-whatever months hosted some of the darkest days in our lives, and even today I still wonder how we came out of them without one of us throwing in the towel.

You can just about carry yourselves through those times, the problems and needs of anyone else come a distant second.

So how do you go back?

What makes you say ‘I know how bad it can be, but let’s try anyway’? How do you do that when today, here and now, you are more content than you ever could have imagined?

Most importantly there is the matter of what we do have, a wonderful daughter. A wonderful, healthy, happiness-exuding little girl who deserves only smiles of an unforced kind. How would the negative effects of another repeatedly failing conception attempt affect her?

When failure is entrenched in their past, how do people decide when to try again?

What do you do when the desire and appreciation for the potential reward is there, but the risks are greater than ever?

When do you go back into the water?

Changes

The UK tourist board don’t mention it much, probably through fear of bigger crowds coming and spoiling it, but along the Hadrian’s Wall path there is a magic door that hurtles you many months into the future.

I came home after just one week to find the baby gone and her much older self sitting upright in her place.

The changes are remarkable.

She waits open mouthed for every spoonful of rice of carrot, and will eat it until she bursts. She will enthusiastically lick or gum attack any kind of fruit you care to present.

She sits in her activity chair, head resting on her fat old woman’s arms, jabbering doe eyed, pausing occasionally to give herself a forearm love bite.

She spots something she wants and goes into a zombie-monkey-like trance, chanting an oddly deep ‘Oooooooh, oooooooh, oooooh’, with stiffened arms outstretched, and eyes quadrupling in circumference.

She talks consistently in some undecipherable bah bah nang nang tongue, decorated with intermittent screeches and throwing back of her head.

She cackles, she covers her mouth and nose with the palms of her hands and breathes a Darth Vader line or two, she pulls her own hair, and she grins.

She grins so wide it looks like it hurts. She smiles so broadly her whole appearance is altered.

She laughs so hard it makes me jealous.

Ouch ouch ouch

Time flies when you’re having trouble standing upright.

That’s what they say, ‘they’ being me.

The last seven days seem like 100 and have me coming over quite Rip van Winkel with the realisation that only one week has gone by.

To recap the Hadrian’s walk in as much detail as anyone is really interested in, but would be afraid to admit, could be done as follows; there was walking, a lot of it, and there was pain, a lot of it.

Day 1 passed with a bit of a blur and a haze of false security, leaving me to set out on day 2 thinking this was a piece of piss. 10 and a half hours walking in the sweltering heat, 2 naps, and one serious hallucination about a talking bottle of cider later, I arrived last back at the bunk barn to find the reward for my stupidity, lack of a sense of direction, and general shocking state of fitness, was a place to sleep on the floor.

Day 3 arrived with me cursing the fact I hadn’t been killed in my sleep by a sweat-craving poisonous rat, crushed by a falling beam, or radiated to death by one of the 215 iPhones that were recharging by my head. As if to yank me back from the depths of despair, the Gods of walking took us through some of the most stunning countryside you could ever see. It was worth the risk to lift my head from watching each footfall every now and again to take in a 360 view of, well, everything. Should someone pass that Robin Hood tree in the coming weeks and find a lung, that's mine, I'd like it back. By day 4 I was a man on a mission, striding over fields, leaving everyone in my stubby-legged-oversized-backpack wake, except for those faster than me, which to be fair, was everyone. The lanky fuckers.

That afternoon things went back down the toilet once again and my knee decided to go on strike. It turned its back on its normal duties of simple things like supporting half my body, and meant that day 5 was a wash out. Disappointingly, I spent the afternoon on my bed rubbing myself and moaning, and not out walking rubbing myself and moaning. Some good did come of it though; I discovered ibuprofen gel and the magic that it weaves on human lower extremities. Thanks to this wonderful invention, I set off on day 6 as stoned as an Iranian adulteress, happy to let my new best friend in a tube lead my way on the last day. Wind and rain fought against me for every one of those last 16 miles but Mother Nature is no match for copious amounts of drugs, and sometime mid afternoon I strolled over the West end point of Hadrian’s wall path.

Like most of Angelina Jolie’s conquests might reflect after their first and final night together, I might not have finished it off, but I survived.

Despite his bewildering lack of understanding what a mile is, Dan is owed a huge thanks for putting this together over the course of the last year or more. It’s hard to source a bottle of water on parts of that path, never mind accommodation and food for 35 whingers. A big thanks to his whole family, and his old walking mates who kept wasters like me going when throwing yourself sobbing into a ditch was an attractive option. Same goes to all the other walkers too, every one of whom made me chuckle just enough to make it bearable.

I look like parts of my body were dipped alternately in whitewash and purple paint, my flaking sunburn has left enough of my DNA behind to convict me of every crime from Bowness to Wallsend, I ache from the waist down, and the dried and dying blisters leave the smell of rotting flesh hang in the air, but it is all worth it to see that you lot have raised £700 plus, of the almost certainly reached £20,000 target.

Now the real world is demanding my attention again in the form of a little girl who found a new voice in my absence. She is constantly grinning like a demented monkey, has put on some good weight, likes to high five at every opportunity, and regularly throws her legs back up over her head.

I love seeing her progress but that last bit she can stop immediately.

Oh well, one step at a time.

Stupid tortoises

By the time you read this, I will be dead.

Well, I won’t, but I always wanted to say that. Then again, if you are reading this for the first time sometime around 2060 I very well could be. Anyway, by the time you read this I will be on my knees under a back pack as heavy as myself and twice as big.

Today starts Hadrian’s Walk, where I will join the rest of the Dan Hughes cult in an attempt to walk across England.

It hit me yesterday how utterly stupid a man I am. I’m not fit, I’m not sporty, and I’m not entirely sure I’m in full possession of all my senses. Everything I am going to need for the next week is on my back. Unless you are a camel or a tortoise, that cannot be a good thing.

I don’t want to go, so why the idiocy? Why the happy-ending-less self abuse? Why leave my two ladies behind for a week?

It makes a difference, that’s why. Everyone that is going is each making a small difference, and as any good mathematician or corrupt banker will tell you, lots of small differences make a big difference.

It makes a big difference to families who have lost children. It helps them in a practical way when their worlds are at their lowest point. Every one of you who have donated, every one of you who has promoted the walk and the trust on blogs, twitter and facebook, every one of you who has encouraged the walkers as they prepare and fundraise, every one of you have helped us make those small differences.

Through this site you’ve raised just over £600, this is more than I expected, and I am grateful and delighted. Overall, the fundraising is currently at over £17,000 of the £20,000 target.

So this is, in effect, the last call to arms before I lose my legs, £600 is brilliant, but wouldn’t £650 be even better? If you find that you can help, please do so here.

It’s help we all hope we will never need, but some do.

Neil and Rachael's story.

The official Joseph Salmon trust site.

The Hadrian’s Walk blog.

The Hadrian’s walkers donation site.

My personal donation site for the trust.

Day One

She’s not broken.

I didn’t need the sellotape, the baby is unscarred, and the house is still standing strong. Ok, maybe the house is creaking a little but that has nothing to do with yesterday.

Yesterday, Thursday the first day of July in the two thousand and tenth year of the Gregorian calendar, we packed ET off to work and I began my first weighty and stressful day as a temporary stay-at-home father.

5 episodes of Dexter later all was still well with the world and the child. Granted her first word may turn out to be ‘disembowel’, but nobody’s perfect.

She laughed, screeched, drank, ate, and shitted with all the vigour of a drunk being beaten with a baseball bat.

Today, an action packed day lies ahead for us, oh the plans we have would make Barney’s place seem Guantanamo for infants. There’s lying in and napping, followed by world cup quarter finals, and then annual dramatic and entertaining elimination from Wimbledon of the only British man who knows what a tennis racket is.

Oh, and I think there’s some vaccination appointment or other thrown in there too. We might squeeze that in.

Jiggety jig

Home again, home again.

The silence has been thankfully shattered, and the blue-grey hue of an empty house has been replaced with a noisy technicolour racket.

My long standing belief that airplanes are several notches higher on the ‘germ spreading’ scale than say, being licked by an arse-picking tramp on the floor of a public toilet, has again been proven true. Mango’s snuffling, spluttering and coughing is evidence enough.

So while we hope it passes fast I’m just glad she came home.

Sometimes they don’t. Sometimes that blue-grey hue remains. Sometimes children leave their homes and never come back.

I was unsettled enough over three days to get an inkling of how shattering and traumatic it would be to be facing never seeing or hearing your child at home ever again.

That’s just one of the reasons why, in just over a week, I will join dozens of others in England to walk the width of the country along the Hadrian’s walk trail in support of the Joseph Salmon trust.
The trust offers financial support to families who have lost children, giving them a little breathing space during the lowest point imaginable.

I’m delighted with what has been raised so far, both through here, and in total. An overall target of 20,000 pounds is very achievable if people continue to give whatever they can, or spread the word in whatever way they can. A sugar daddy, or mammy, who craves a warm fuzzy feeling can get a quick fix by dropping a couple of (or twenty) grand into the pot.

It’s been nearly two weeks since I’ve raised a single penny, fancy being my hero and helping out here?

Solstice solace

June 21st was the longest day of the year, in every sense imaginable.

Yesterday was the first day that I hadn’t seen Mango from dawn till dusk. In what’s sounding a little like Alanis’ long lost verse, I left her and ET behind in Ireland the day before, father’s day.

The house is far too quiet, eerily echoing the way it was not even two years ago.

Our neighbour has been and come back from the shops, his two wee girls skipping ahead of him both ways, you notice these things when you sit on the coffee table for half an hour.

Mango’s welcome home present is lying in her playpen watching the television that’s turned on just to break the silence and I move about the house starting ten different things and completing none of them.

My little girl is back home, meeting and greeting, being passed from pillar to post, being poked and prodded with the best intentions. That’s an exhausting few days for someone so small and I want nothing more than to bring her to my shoulder so she can rest her head. Then maybe I can rest mine.

Just one more big sleep.

Squeezing

90 minutes a day, normally, 2 hours if we get lucky.

That’s less than I spend driving.

Life and work and being responsible-ish squeeze most of the life out of us before I get to see Mango.

First thing in the morning, I peek into her cot and she is stretching from head to toe with excitement, grinning so wide you can’t tell if her ears are outside or inside her mouth.

For the next 10 or 11 hours she lives out her days, her walks, her snoozes, and her finger chewing - all while I’m elsewhere behind a laptop, speaking pigeon Dutch and all too often counting to ten.

At the end of the day she is just as pleasant as she was when it started, coyer perhaps, but full of smiles and dribbles saved up for me.

With four months having already flown by, should things have to remain on the same schedule it would be a true shame. Thankfully, and luckily, they don’t. Dutch law entitles both parents to 26 weeks parental leave, to be used, within reason, in any form they wish.

Because of this, I get to spend July getting it all back. Aside from the wee bit where I abandon my family, I have the entire month free when ET goes back to work. That leaves 22 of those 26 weeks, which I get to use 1 day at a time, once a week, for the next 2 years or more.

Thanks to some sensible parental leave legislation, from August onwards I’m cutting to 4 days a week.

From then on, Donderdag is ‘Papa dag’.

From then on, I get to do some serious squeezing back.

No kissing on the lips

There’s always someone shaking their box in your face, looking for cash.

With so much good shaking action it’s terribly hard to decide when you should slip a few quid into a thong, and when you should wave her on in the hope that the next one along will be curvier with awful English, and a poor grasp of exchange rates.

I’ve shaken my box at you lot a few times now in the name of raising funds for the Joseph Salmon trust, and many of you have been wonderful and slipped crispy bills inside my g-string.

As with all whores, I’m hungry for more. I want more of your sweat stained bills grazing my thigh, I want to have more of your coppers lodge themselves in uncomfortable places.

The problem is though, why should you bother? How can I make my collection tin a more attractive place for your hard earned, pilfered, outright stolen, or alimonied cash?

I can’t really, other than give you a list of reasons.

The man who has organised the fundraising walk also arranged this:


That has got to be worth a few cents or pence surely.

I’m five and a half feet tall, if I walk 84 miles there is a good chance I will lose 15% of my pathetic height, my stubby legs will be worn and eroded to just above the ankles. My last miles will be mapped out with a bloody wet trail of oozing slime. Like a snail. Or a 55 year old midget prostitute.

It’s costing more to go on the walk than I’ve raised. That’s depressing. I could have stayed at home and donated the airfare instead and everyone would be happier. I could have continued to live out my life until I have that inevitable heart attack instead of probably reaching my demise at the bottom of some ravine in the North of England. But that would make the world a dreadfully sad place and you don’t want that to happen, do you?

You should be convinced by now as to the merits of throwing a few quid our way, but if you’re still not ready to dig behind the sofa cushions for the walk then I’ve only one reason left.

You can make a difference to a stranger who needs help. Someone like you, a family like yours, or your friends, or your neighbours. An everyday someone who has had their world turned upside down by the loss of a child. Someone who will be at their lowest, needing all their energy to look after themselves and other family members, and who can simply do without worrying about the electricity being cut off, or not being able to afford basic funeral costs, or having to go back to work too soon when they are needed at home.

Your fifty pence, or 1, 2, or 50 pounds donation helps that person.

If you would like to donate, you can do so here. If you would like to know more about why I think you should, you can do so here.



Neil and Rachael's story.
The official Joseph Salmon trust site.
The Hadrian’s Walk blog.
The Hadrian’s walkers donation site.
My personal donation site for the trust.