My memoirs are just too precious to plump for a Partridge style pulping

My publisher gets in touch to tell me that since it is now out of print, my book is about to be pulped. To be honest, I’d kind of forgotten that I had a publisher – let alone a book – but here I am, on the cusp of my very own Alan Partridge moment. That esteemed writer and broadcaster invited himself along to the pulping of the unsold copies of his tome, Bouncing Back, but I’m not sure I could face seeing all those sweet covers of Misadventures in Motherhood disintegrating into wordy porridge. In any event, the publisher is offering a reprieve of sorts: he wants to know if, instead of the porridge, I want to have all those unsold copies for myself. There follows a slightly awkward (and quite Partridge-esque) email exchange about whether or not I will have to pay for them, before the matter is happily resolved (I won’t) and the publisher promises to dispatch my unwanted opuses to me post haste. It doesn’t occur to me to ask how many books to expect, but the publisher tells me anyway: there will have to be somebody at home to take delivery of the unsold books, he says, because, not to put too fine a point on it, there are loads of them.

Obviously, I already have a copy. From time to time, I even take my Misadventures in Motherhood off the bookshelf and read a bit of it – and when I do, I usually end up spending way more time than I intended wallowing once again in the delicious chaos of my children’s early childhood. I sometimes catch The Youngest reading it as well – maybe because she’s the one who, although featured in its pages, has no real memory of the events within it. In case you’re one of the thousands of undiscerning readers who missed it, Misadventures In

Motherhood was a collection of columns like this one that mapped out my first seven years as a parent as they unfolded. It started in 1997, with the birth of the erstwhile Small Girl and ended, two babies later, with her First Communion in 2005. And even if nobody had ever read it, it’s a precious document for me because it served as a sort of enforced diary at the very time in my life when I was too busy to write a diary. Sometimes I read bits and realise that, only for their being put down in print, I would have forgotten them completely. The time the three of them and the Small Girl’s diminutive sidekick Rachel set up a small business in her bedroom called “Can We Help?” that offered “mortgages, jobs and help with your kids.” The Youngest – then about two – was in charge of the mortgage department. When I went to her small desk and asked if I could get a mortgage, she thought very seriously for about 30 seconds, consulted a blank sheet of paper and then said, “yes!” The bureau closed after just a day because some better adventure beckoned, so now I wonder if, had I not written it down, I would remember it at all.

I would probably remember the three year old Boy’s ridiculous Beatles phase – because it lasted for the best part of a year – but would I recall the time, in one of those paint-your-own-ceramics places in Salthill, when he kept addressing me as Ringo and refused to talk to me unless I called him John? Would I remember his short-lived first goldfish, also called John?

John is buried under our compost bin and Rachel lives in Berlin now. Somewhere in the attic, I have a ceramic mug with a small yellow submarine painted on it by my own unsteady hand – though the musician in our home has yet to emulate the success of The Beatles and none of my three adult children entered the mortgage brokering business.

But now I have a hundred or so reminders of those happy days, saved from pulpy porridge, stacked on my bookshelf, mocking me. If you have small children and are looking for advice on how to manage and survive them, then I recommend you look somewhere else. But if you want a snapshot of the wonderful, exhausting reality of dragging up three children under the age of five, then you’re welcome to one. I’ll save you the awkward email about cost, and promise that for as long as the pile lasts, if you contact me on Twitter or Instagram, I’ll send you a free copy. It’s no Bouncing

Back, but it still makes me laugh – and some memories are just too precious for porridge.