PAST-IT PAPA

Lane with Jeremiah (‘Jay’, they call him) on the back of his fixie to pick up bagels. He’s a great believer in self-reliance, is Giles. Make do and mend. Jeremiah’s first night on Earth was spent in a Moses basket that Giles made in a basketweaving class, and he now sleeps in a cot from the vintage shop that Giles repaired with reclaimed wood and funked up with a couple of antique bicycle bells. Above it is a modern child’s alphabet — A is for Android, B is for Board shorts, C is for Caffeine — collaged together from found objects. The nursery gates in this part of town are a riot of waxed moustaches, skinny jeans and tweed waistcoats. Especially at the Montessori school where Jay learns to express himself. Giles has already met three other subscribers to The Chap among the other dads, and one guy who used to do Parkour in the same patch of Hoxton as Giles did. And what of his wife? Chloe is a junior partner at PricewaterhouseCoopers. ‘No,’ 63-year-old Frank explains wearily for the umpteenth time at the children’s hair salon on Newington Green. ‘I’m his dad, not his grandfather.’ The fruit of a May-December marriage, four-year-old Alfie was a project semi-reluctantly undertaken. Frank already has three grown-up children from his first marriage, and his youngest grandchild is two months older than his new son. But then again, Frank loves 28-year-old Jane fervently and he couldn’t deny her the chance to have children of her own. Still, he doesn’t remember it being quite so tiring the first few times around when he wasn’t expected to change the nappies, help with laundering babygros or take the kids to soft play. Soft play, bedad! Sounds like some sort of sexual perversion, if you ask Frank. He emerges after an hour of clambering through Talacre Treetops with his tinnitus howling and his bones feeling as if he’s been put in a sack and pummelled by a Gitmo interrogation team. Nevertheless, he feels a certain pride in his role. He looks with pity on his contemporaries — lost in old-geezerhood. And he shakes his head inwardly at the clueless first-time dads fretting away with their tubs of home-whizzed organic lentil gunge and their bags of unsalted rice cakes. All that bollocks. He makes a point of feeding Alfie crisps and Chocolate Buttons in public, just to see them gasp and tut. And it’s worth it — even when he’s been crucified by carrying his son on his shoulders every step of a three-mile walk — when Jane goes: ‘CUUUUTE! It’s AMAAAAZING to see you being such a hands-on dad. It makes you look so young — and so sexy!’