A week when the little things suddenly feel so important
After my son was born, a friend of my father-in-law gave me a piece of advice. Do it, he said. It may seem a nuisance at the time, but you’ll be grateful later on. It was this. Write everything down. Everything. The funny little things your son says. The cute little things he does. Write down where you go together, who you see, what you do. Write everything down. Because one day, you’ll want to remember. Even the most banal details will make you glad.
I did start to do it. But then I let it slip. Now, though, I want to start again. After Manchester, I feel a need to. A need to hold on to it all. Everything, no matter how small.
I do at least have the notebook I kept when my son was learning to speak. So I’ll always be able to remember the first time he said “Catch!” and “I made it!” and “I eat Daddy toast!” I’ll be able to remember the time a bee flew in the window, and he looked at it sternly and squeaked, “Go and make honey!” I’ll be able to remember how he dragged his fingers across the strings of my guitar, propped against the study wall, and said, “Look, Daddy, I play it!” And how I picked it up to show him how it was really done, and within two bars he frowned and said, “That’s enough.”
I need to start that notebook again. I need to write down how he always pronounces footprint as “foomf-print” (a handprint, meanwhile, is a “hand foomf-print”). I need to write down how, instead of “yesterday”, he always says “last day” (makes sense, to be fair. After all, we say “last night”). And I need to write down how, whenever Mummy or I have displeased him, he tells us off in exactly the same manner the nursery staff use with him: “Don’t do that again, or I put you on a ‘time-out’!”
I need to record his obsession with trains, and how, after we get off at a station, he waves excitedly from the platform and chirps “Goodbye, train!” (he never says goodbye to people). I need to record his love of snails (“I stroke him, Daddy? I pick him up? I put him in a nice place?”), and his inexplicable habit of going to bed clutching Daddy’s tape measure, or, as he pronounces it, “the temperature”. And I need to record his routine for breakfast, or “breffus”: Mummy leaves for work early, so it’s just me and him, but while I’m heating the porridge he always fetches three spoons: one for him, one for Daddy, and one for Mummy, in case she comes home again while we’re eating. She never does, but he remains ever hopeful.
Oh, and the dream. I really want to remember the day he told me a dream he’d had, about a snake catching fish with a fishing rod. The rod, he explained, was held “in his mouf ”. After all, “Snakes don’t have harms.”
Most of all, though, I want to remember the mornings. The summer mornings, when he’s woken by the sun at some enragingly early hour, and comes stumping into our bedroom like a little Ewok, his arms laden with cuddly toys (“I brought lots of friends”). Then, clambering clumsily over us, jabbing a foot into Daddy’s bladder en route, he wriggles into bed between us, and lies there, noisily sucking his thumb, and poking us if we try to go back to sleep.
How small he feels. How small and warm.
The metropolitan liberal elite, it seems, owe Ukip an apology. As soon as they heard Ukip wanted to ban the burka, PC do-gooders hysterically accused the party of Islamophobia. But they were wrong. There was, we now know, an innocent explanation.
The real reason Ukip wants to ban the burka, explains the party’s manifesto, is that it “prevents intake of essential vitamin D from sunlight”.
So there we have it. Far from hating Muslims, Ukip policy-makers are motivated by simple concern for their health. When Paul Nuttall, the party leader, sees a Muslim woman in traditional dress, he is not consumed with prejudice or hostility. He is merely thinking, “Poor woman. That outfit is grievously impairing her body’s absorption of dietary calcium and phosphorus. This could lead to osteomalacia, or even osteoporosis.”
It should come as no surprise to find Mr Nuttall highlighting vitamin D deficiency as an issue of political urgency. As his website makes clear, before entering politics he was the leading orthopaedic surgeon of his generation, and at the age of 26 won the Nobel Prize in Medicine for his pioneering work on neuromuscular function.
Opposition, however, has not come from the PC brigade alone. Ukip libertarians maintain that the party must respect religious freedoms. Surely, they protest, there must be another way to boost vitamin D intake among Muslim communities.
To head off a revolt, I understand that the Ukip leader is weighing up an alternative policy. Any time he sees a woman in a burka, he intends to present her with a mackerel. We’re destroying our planet. Our beautiful planet. And you know how we’re doing it?
By buying salad.
Or, strictly speaking, by buying salad and not eating it. New research shows that shoppers throw away two out of every five bags of salad they buy. This isn’t simply a waste of money and food. It’s also bad for the environment, because decomposing food releases harmful methane.
It’s particularly bad if you’re throwing away lettuce. Separate research has suggested that, per calorie, growing lettuce produces more greenhouse gases than rearing pigs.
The solution is straightforward. Abandon these doomed attempts to eat healthily. Don’t even buy salad in the first place. Instead, eat as many pork chops as you can. The unhealthier your heart, the healthier the planet.
If I were a Green Party activist, I’d stop pushing wasteful election leaflets through people’s letterboxes, and push a rasher of bacon through instead.