A Headful of Stars.

I was just lying on the balcony with my daughter after breakfast (cereal for her, toast for me). She looked up at the high-rise opposite, at the crowded nest of aerials on the roof. Space rocket, she said. Then she looked at the next block over, another mighty omphalos crowded with aerials. Look, she said, another space rocket. It was a lovely bit of magical thinking, I thought, which time-machined me right back to when I was a kid, when I thought anyone who did repair work on a TV aerial was inherently mysterious, quasi-magical. These people climbed up to the highest points in my infant world and communed with the magical forces that brought me the Daleks and Doctor Who. They were practically spacemen themselves, up there, sifting through the ether, talking to stars. 

The Rubicons of Parenthood.

No one tells you this, but you don't become a parent overnight. It happens in stages. Terrible incremental stages, rubicons you cross and across which you can never return. These stages are marked by the things you say – things that once said cannot be unsaid, the selfsame things you used to hate your parents for saying.

These phrases include:

You can't have any dessert until you finish your vegetables.

Well, where did you last see [insert name of lost object]?

Pick it up yourself. We’re not your servants. (This will subsequently evolve into ‘This house is not a hotel.')

I’m sure there are a lot more, but I haven’t said them yet. Make no mistake, however: I will. It’s inevitable.

Perhaps the worst part of all this is that it’s only when you become a parent that you realise, with a sinking awareness of what an awful brat you were, that there is a mutuality to saying this stuff; you only talk this way because you’re trying to find the most effective way of communicating with something which is basically an idiot. Don’t take this the wrong way, I love my kids, but seriously, right now: idiots. I don’t know, perhaps the real problem is that parents keep using these dumbed-down phrases long after their usefulness has expired. Along with forgetting how to dance and telling crap jokes, this is how you become the quintessence of future embarrassment that will your force your children to pretend they don’t know you in public and, ultimately, leave home and forget your birthday. And quite right, too.

Parenthood Is

...the last-remaining flesh of your ego being scooped out and replaced with a tsunami of fear, love, sleep deprivation, money worries, education worries, health worries, environmental worries, zombie apocalypse worries and shopping lists.

Just saying.

REMOTE FUTURES.

Living in Brazil, it never sits easy knowing that you're in a country where people are poorer than their first world counterparts, yet they invariably pay more for worse. But when, as happened today, someone who doesn't have much money gives you a remote-controlled car for your little boy that she could ill afford, and it's totally dead from the get-go, plus there's no way of taking it back because you know she will have bought it from the kind of shop where they don't do receipts, it's more than just difficult, it's heartbreaking. Heartbreaking and then, after a while, maddening. I've always been a bit of a bleeding heart liberal, but it's only since coming to Brazil that I've really come to despise global capitalism for the way it's designed to petrify the structures of inequality and foreclose the futures of those huddled masses made invisible by poverty or distance.

Is it a legitimate excuse to say you've not written anything on your blog for the past two months because a deliberate silence feels more profound than anything you might say and you're also feeling a bit exhausted by the internet's insatiable appetite for narcissistic noise?

No, I didn't think so.