If you buy it in the shops for £2.70, you get a free disposable nappy (newborn size) and a chewy oat biscuit. Salut! doesn't run to such gifts, or very often to great cartoons like James Benn's. But this, more or less, is what appears under my name in this month's edition of the magazine Mother & Baby ...
For years, I feared grandfatherhood. Not in the sense of finding it scary, more for what its arrival would tell the world - and me - about my age.
Like many men of advancing years, I keep up the pretence that I am still young or, at any rate, young at heart.
At the leisure centre, I still run around after a shuttlecock as if life depended on reaching it before feathers or cork hit the ground. At football, I leap from my seat when my team scores. I even try to give modern music a listen before exclaiming: “Not like it was in my day …”
Grandfather, however, was different. That, I convinced myself, was for old men, or men old before their time. I remembered the strange way my thoughts towards a colleague changed when he became one in his 40s, and I wanted none of it.
The feeling lasted all of a few minutes into Maya‘s life, no longer in reality than it took the nurse to come and tell us Nathalie had safely given birth.
There had been plenty of time to prepare. Labour was long, induction had failed and poor Nathalie had to undergo a Caesarean section before Maya could be persuaded to enter the world.
Despite having flown halfway across the world to be there – we were then living in Abu Dhabi - we were stuck in the waiting room during these latter stages. But the nurse’s words made it all worthwhile.
My wife, sensibly, never shared the mixed emotions with which I approached the state of being a grandparent. And when we were finally guided towards Nathalie’s bed, my own paternal instincts instantly became grandfatherly ones, too.
It was a wrench having to fly back to the Middle East soon afterwards; our permanent return couldn’t come a moment too soon. In the event, it was only six months and there had been Maya’s first Christmas, in between, to come home for.
Maya is now two, nearly three. These days, even living a short flight away in France creates a separation too far. We have the webcam to show us how almost by the day, Maya has left babyhood behind and turned into a little girl. But nothing compensates properly for the absences.
During the winter months, which we spent mostly in the UK, it was a delight to look after her as often as we did.
And what pleasure we took, when she was with us in France last summer, in promenading quite late into the evening, taking full advantage of open-minded French attitudes on what constitutes a baby’s bedtime and what are appropriate places to take her. We could never forget the west London bar manager who, when asked if the pushchair could be brought into his near-deserted pub, replied: “Yes, as long as there’s no baby in it.”
Naturally I have strong views on important aspects of Maya’s upbringing.
Having failed to make boys myself, I have tried to insist that my granddaughter should at least inherit my love of Sunderland football club. Unfortunately, her father supports Sunderland’s bitter rivals Newcastle United and I must resign myself to the likelihood that a grandfather’s rights, already notoriously inadequate, will not extend to overruling his wishes in this respect.
Maya should without question be taught to play badminton rather than netball or hockey, and listen to my folk music instead of hiphop, but I expect defeat there, too. All in all, I suspect I’ll have precious little say in anything from how she dresses to what sort of education she should have.
But none of this matters too much. I would not have appreciated interference from any of the three grandparents who were alive when Nathalie and her elder sister were small.
For now, I find ample reward in the affection Maya shows, the way she uses the French form and calls me Papy, and her developing senses of mischief and worldly curiosity. I love the fact that her ethnic makeup is quarter English, quarter French, quarter Trinidadian, quarter Seychellois. I am deeply grateful to be there for her in a way my own father, who died at 64, could not be for my daughters.
And what is more, I haven’t felt a day older at any time since Maya was born.
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