Parenting is suffering from the sad demise of the lullaby

Having confidently volunteered to babysit my partner’s year-old granddaughter the other evening, I realised that I had no idea what to do in the event of inconsolable night-time crying. It is a quarter of a century since I was left in sole charge of a baby – and he was mine, so if I got it wrong, no one would know but him and me.

Back in the 1990s, my son had no sleep technology more sophisticated than a cot-mounted carousel of stuffed animals that played a tinkly version of Pachelbel’s Canon. The granddaughter has a white-noise machine that emits a sound of sloshing waves, which is apparently as soporific as lettuce, or the finer details of Brexit.

“But what if she wakes up?” I asked. “She won’t,” said her mother. “But if she does, you put a hand on her back and sing Frére Jacques.”

Here I am on firmer ground. My baby son used to wake at 2am sharp, and I would pace the floor with him, singing every song I knew, from Frère Jacques Me and Bobby Mcgee. Not that it did me any good in later life: these days I get the side eye if I so much as warble Hark the Herald à mi-voix.

It turns out that I had the right idea: according to research published in the journal Psychology of Music, singing to very young patients at Great Ormond Street Hospital significantly reduced their heart rate, anxiety and pain perception. So it is a shame that lullabies have fallen out of favour with new parents, only a third of whom apparently sing to their babies.

One of the joys of Advent is the centuries-old collection of carols framed as lullabies, sung by the Virgin to the Christ child: simple, tender songs to lull him to sleep amid the cacophony of oxen, to shepherds’ pipes, angelic choirs and the flurry of magi and their retinues.

And if, as I often found, the child wakes as soon as the singing stops, the immortal Sellar & Yeatman, of 1066 and All That fame, composed a helpful Psycho-lullabye, designed to soothe the infant and vent the parent’s feelings at the same time: “Hush-a-bye baby/ (Hush quite a lot)/ Bad babies get rabies/ (And have to be shot) …”

It is an arresting image: the Prime Minister, teaspoon in hand, eating peanut butter from the jar. Which is, according to an interview yesterday, how she recovers from a hard day’s Brexitwrangling. As indulgences go, it is mildly less transgressive than her previous admission to capering through a cereal crop in her reckless youth. And for a woman for whom cuddly has never quite seemed the mot juste, it evokes endearing ursine echoes of Paddington and Winnie the Pooh’s sticky fondness for marmalade and honey consumed straight from the paw.

Still, when it comes to relatable comfort eating, there is some way to go before Mrs May matches Bridget Jones’s lachrymose devouring of an entire tub of ice cream (behaviour that exists, I am fairly sure, nowhere outside chickflicks).

As you might expect, there is an undercurrent of good sense even in the Prime Minister’s minor comestible venalities. Not only is peanut butter high in trace minerals and virtuous fats, it is for her, as a diabetic, a blissfully basic alternative to her other current culinary passion: Yotam Ottolenghi’s perversely titled cookbook, Simple.