A sin to swallow for the rest of your life.

Recently I had to endure one the most torrid and fear inducing endeavours known to all of mankind (not human kind, for this dread is of a specific nature targeted at males). Escorting my better half clothes shopping. Please allow yourself a moment to let the terror seep into your pores.
Before you leap up, cry havoc and loose the dogs of war and misogyny upon me. Just stop, remain seated and allow me to continue for just a moment.bthe opening salvo was, of course, simply hyperbole. I have no issue going shopping, even for women's clothing. Of course boredom does at times begin to slowly tug at my soul, but nonetheless I don't give a jot.
My father always drilled into me the fact that chivalry was not dead, and that courtesy and manners are paramount, politeness and a smile don't cost anything. As such I have always tried to treat people with the respect I would like to be treated with, be they woman, man or Martian. So I don't mind at all, in fact I enjoy doing things that will make her happy and I always will do.
If love is the cornerstone of a relationship, then surely the mortar is made from mutual respect and support. This network of support that we provide for each other has taken on new significance since the birth of our son, who is now 5 weeks and one day old.

During pregnancy there is an awful amount kerfuffle revolving around preparing yourself for the birth; How will you cope? Have you got everything? Will you find out the gender? Are you sure you can cope?

I will say now, no matter what you do, no matter how prepared you are. You are really are not. Not fully.

I approached it with a certain amount of hubris, of course I'll be a little more tired, but it won't be that bad. It is that bad, prepare to be more tired than you ever thought possible, unless you're one of those lucky people who's baby sleeps straight away, those people who's total number is about 0.00001% of the population. However, despite all this nothing prepares you for how much you will love your child, unequivocally, without logic or reason, it just happens instantly, a frightening and amazing explosion of utter adoration. 

I have drifted off course a little. The point is we have a son, who is another variable to add to the shopping equation, and we we were out buying clothes for the better half. 

After a rather lengthy browse in new look, followed by a rather lengthy spell in the changing rooms, I found myself perambulating the shop, pushing sprog in a desperate race through the aisles, being chased by imaginary racers in a sprint to the finish. As we coursed through the panoply of garments, we caught kind smiles from elderly women and sympathetic shrugs from the legion of pushchair wielding blokes in our same predicament.
Invariably we (more specifically I, as Oscar was asleep) turned to people watching. New look seemed to hold a population of beleaguered men trudging after their partners in a listless fashion. Hordes of young couples had descended into the town and I imagine only the female part of them truly wanted to be pried away from the football or whatever other distraction usually fills their day.
So there I was, a proud parent, examining other people and I couldn't help but wonder what exactly some of them saw in each other, as surely they have nothing in common. A remarkably shallow thought yes, but valid nonetheless. It is an unfortunate truth that attraction is very often skin deep. People look at other people and find them attractive or they don't, sad but true. Any one who claims not to make a snap judgement is proficient at bending the truth. I'm not perfect and I've made initial impressions based on looks, but it's how you see past this that counts.
My partner, the mother of our wonderful son is an amazing women. I love her with every part of me, I know I do because every time I think of the future, she is it. However this feeling took time to grow, a very short time, but time nonetheless. When I knew her my initial thought was 'cor blimey she's fit' followed by an incoming that there was something much more special at play. Spending time with her only confirmed this. I get the impression that when people see us together thsey share my view stats earlier and wonder what it is we have in common. To be honest, our shared interests are little. I love comics, she loves musicals (yuck), I like football, she really doesn't. I'm sure you can see the emerging pattern here but the fact is, it doesn't matter. Each of us is prepared to take part in and talk about our interests, willing to try and see through the others eyes. Despite this though, if you scratch the surface a little more, we go deeper than common hobbies. She knows when I am sad, when I need a kiss, what I like, what I don't, when I need a cup of tea, when I'm happy and just about every emotion I go through; it works both ways.
So really, if people are capable of this sort of love in a relationship. It really doesn't matter about a fleeting glance in new look.

Word of the week.

As a child I used to pore over the dictionary and seek out words that, when used, would make me sound more adult and intelligent. I developed a penchant for grandiloquence.  Thankfully I have grown out of the pompous habit of using these words merely for the sake of it, in vain effort to appear more cognisant. A happy side effect of this endeavouring that it has improved my vocabulary to some degree, though only on paper, conversationally I still sound like a type writer chewing tin foil.
So, from time to time, I appear perhaps slightly more intelligent than I actually am, without sounding too egotistical or vain, a large vocabulary isn't at all a hallmark of I.Q just as a small vocabulary doesn't show the absence of one.
So the point of this dip into the pools of memory is to re establish my word of the week. This flight of fancy started at university, when a fellow student commented on the language I used in an assignment, which at the time was maybe a little too flowery and unnecessary. She asked if every week I would give her a new word to use, in an effort to increase her own arsenal of literary cannons and so, word of the week was born.
So my aim is to, weekly as the name suggests, share a word that I like, to hopefully spread the joy that can be found in the fickle mistress that is the English language.

This week: Coruscant, adj, sparkling or gleaming; scintillating.

Example: When polished correctly, with scalp oils and hard work. The bald man's head was positively coruscant.

Nocturnal Sea Pinapples

It is currently 05:11 in the morning and I am watching spongebob squarepants. Over the last five or so hours I have had approximately ten, maybe twenty, minutes sleep. My son is now for weeks old, having hit the magic number at 01:58 earlier tonight, and he is a spectacular fidget. He likes nothing more than to thrash about his Moses basket like a floundering fish writhing desperately for air. When he isn't doing his horizontal line dance to keep me from slumber he decides he will not sleep unless he is being cuddled tightly in my arms.  This isn't a most frequent occurrence, to be fair he sleeps relatively well for a four week old baby, but when he doesn't he makes sure he makes a proper job out of it.

He has never settled in our bedroom, he loathed it. This is one thing that is taken for granted in parent hood, it seems such an archetype that your baby will sleep in their Moses basket next to your bed and everything will be serene, but this is not the case. So this has meant that he has been sleeping in his nursery from almost zero hour, which as an unforeseen circumstance left us temporarily bereft of things that we didn't have, assuming that we wouldn't need them for a few months, like a blind or curtains. My partner and I take it in turns to sleep on an air matress in his room, until he is at least sleeping a lot longer between feeds and we're happy that he is truly settled. So, as I'm back at work on night shifts later this evening I bravely volunteered to have a little nap early last night before spending the rest of the night with my boy. This only seemed fair as my girlfriend, who is now sleeping soundly next door, will be spending the entirety of the next three nights tending to his every need. This still seems fair on paper, but now at the outer limits of tiredness, I do feel a slight twinge of regret and am missing bed slightly. No matter how tired I get though, I only have to look down at my son and some how everything shifts and it's all worthwhile.
So that's how I have found myself watching this sentinel of children's cartoons, that I can't quite believe first showed in 2001. Oscar likes watching the colours and the sounds and it somehow manages to send him to sleep, at least temporarily. That yellow sponge of innocence also manages to tickle my funny bone with a humorous feather, there is some clever insightful writing to be found laced inside the episodic stories.
It is now 16:46 of the same dreary Monday, which is testament to how time is an elusive mistress when one has a new baby. I say new as if he is fresh out of the wrapper, but he is in fact four weeks old already. Which again is further proof that time moves quicker when dealing with children. I am currently trapped in that dark penumbra, that hour or so before I have to leave to work for the night. It is in this time that I essentially go through the five stages of grief and search for jobs on the Internet in the hope that some miracle will occur and I don't have to leave. This was a normal routine before Oscar was born and now the knowledge that I have to leave my son increases the desperation exponentially. I don want to sound like an utter fool and don't get me wrong, I'm grateful to have a job that pays my bills and provide for my family, with a little left over to fuel my comic book habit, but it is not the job that I truly want to do.
I am a writer. There is the minute detail that I am as of yet unpublished, but nonetheless I am a writer. I always have been and I always will be. The process of creating and moulding ideas into stories is what I truly enjoy doing, it makes me happy (not to say other things don't make me happy, but you know what I mean).  Most of my spare time (which is limited at the moment) is spent working on my stories, novels and scripts, attempting to make worlds and adventures to entertain, to make people think, cry and laugh. I write about what I enjoy and the capacity of what humans can enjoy is limitless. Writing isn't just a process to me, it's freedom.
It is now 16:33 the following Tuesday. Time has jumped forward once more and I am trapped in that same penumbra. In that time I have done a twelve and a half hour night shift, done the housework, fed and changed my son, played with my son and even managed to fit in a couple of hours sleep ready for tonight. I even managed to write a paragraph or two of a short story I've had floating around my head for the last week.
It is my aim to share one of my short stories with your good selves in the near future. Hopefully suing this blog as a platform, not only to vent, but to share and entertain with the world, so all that's left to say is, thank you SpongeBob.

New Tricks

Today my fourteen year old sister in law took fifteen minutes to teach me about the same amount of knowledge surrounding computers, as it had previously taken me my twenty seven years on earth to acquire.

Needless to say I was humbled. Not to say I don't have a working knowledge of computers, I can use them to the extent which I have always required. Which is pretty much using them to write and format my work as an aspiring writer. Though if I were to be honest, this is a recent addition to my literary arsenal and I still have piles of notepads and pens concealed about my person as testament to my fondness for the classics. So, naturally, I thought the use of technology in such a way to spread my work around the globe made me a technological genius, on a par with one of the new gods from Neil Gaiman's American Gods. In the wake of the day's events and with the added benefit hindsight I can say that maybe I displayed a spot of hubris. I now feel as though I was a sabre tooth tiger skin clad Neanderthal, blissfully bashing away at my computer and iPad (other tablets are available) with my wooden club. Fifteen minutes with my little sister in law and I have become a graceful keyboard extraordinaire, deftly slapping at the keys with experienced fingers. Though you only have to look at the rudimentary template that adorns my blog to see that previous sentence is an overstatement.

This situation came about because of blogging. I have previously forayed into this exciting and exotic Internet domain and have a previous blog with Wordpress (feel free to google my name and Wordpress and peruse the musings you find) but I found its functionally limited. If I were to add veracity to my words here, I used to find blogging pointless and limited. I failed to see it's point, it was a distraction from 'real' writing, the long slog at the computer creating worlds and stories. Though an epiphany involving my 25 day old son and his vomit led me to see that, like many fantastic things, it doesn't have to have a point. It can be whatever you want it to be, a pointless ramble like this, a review of a book, film or comic I enjoy, a cross examination of things that confuse me (Taylor Swift, what is the point of her? What's her problem?). I can even use it to showcase short stories, poetry or novel excerpts. The world has become my hard shelled sea creature.I will verbally take you to one side here, just for a moment, and tell you about my recent introduction to fatherhood. My son, is just amazing. Everything I see him my heart swells with such immense pride and love that I feel I'm using up the worlds supply and there will be none left for anyone else. When I see him and his mother, my partner, together well I'm surprised that I don't become a blubbering mess. I never thought I could love two people as truly as I do. Expect a tale or two on fatherhood and parenting in the future.

Back to the story at hand though. As mentioned previously I had issues with Wordpress functionality, so I mentioned this to my sister in law who looked at me with such disdain I felt I had been cremated. She is one of the youthful Internet generation, whereas I can remember the time of the vhs, the lack mobile phones, the lack of interest and then the dreaded dial up Internet, these things are but ancient history to her. So it felt almost natural to seek her advice on what platforms were out there, and she directed me here. Not that this was a simple task for her as with every detail I was required to enter meant a salvo of questions for her, this isn't a reflection of blogger itself, but of my own I.T incompetence at this point. I now see that blogger is easy to pick up and use immediately, but offers much more scope for in depth modification, so really it's as complicated as you make it. So after ten minutes or so I had a fully operational, though simple, blog. There is nothing wrong with simple, unless you're Oscar Wilde "any man who would call a spade a spade should be compelled to use one, for it is all he is fit for". Well I agree with Oscar to a certain degree and I too have a penchant for the grandiloquent, there is something mysteriously elegant about simplicity. So my simple blog has begun, though with scope for improvements and Internet saturation through google plus, but I have a platform for my voice that's easy enough for a computerised cave man to use. So the aims of this blog are similar to the aims of my old one, no matter what I'm writing about, I want to entertain, to take people to places in their imagination by sharing mine. To inform, to vent (seriously, Taylor Swift?) and to share opinions. So that's what I will endeavour to do, no matter how inane my thoughts may seem.
So here's to Daisy, who proved that while you still can't teach an old dog new tricks, you can teach a moderately computer literate cave man a thing or two about blogging. Follow her at daisies2001.blogspot.co.uk when you get the chance.
Much love.