I WAS on holiday last week and I’m still recovering. Stayed in London. Just the two of us. Had a terrific time. Played at being a tourist a bit. Caught up with family and friends. Pottered about. But I can’t pretend it was easy. In truth, it was exhausting. Let us just say that one of us (and it’s not me) is quite demanding and temperamental. Likes things to be done their way and gets bored easily. Won’t settle for a lazy afternoon with a book. Demands constant activity and attention. There were some great moments, but a fair few tears and tantrums as well. Still, it was great to spend some quality time together and I think we learnt some new things about each other. I’d even go so far as to say I would spend another week in sole charge of my son.
My wife, who normally works part-time from home and is the main carer for our two-year-old, was working in an office and I decided to take annual leave for a week. I’ve spent plenty of single days in charge, but this would be by far the longest stint I had been solely responsible for our son.
I haven’t been following The Week the Women Went on BBC Three. I caught a few minutes, then I remembered that I had a life to lead. You know, I had to wash my hair, try to memorise pi to 50 decimal places, anything really other than watch a dreary reality TV programme in which men in a Nottinghamshire village bored their poor children to death.
But the main reason I didn't watch was that I was shattered. For the week that the woman in our house went (or, at least, was absent between 8.30am and 6.30pm) presented a surprisingly steep learning curve. Even as my eyes were drooping shut at 9.30pm, they were being metaphorically opened to a few home truths.
The first of these was that I am a shirker when it comes to domestic duties. In this I am like most men. No great shocking revelation there. The point is that I know I am quite a good dad. I rush home for bath time. I spend a lot of time with my son at weekends. I know, from the complaints I hear from other women, that I do more than a lot of fathers. Some people might even call me a “new dad”, but if they did I would have to show my “old dad” side and tell them to get stuffed, as that is a truly toecurling phrase.
Nevertheless, I still do much less on the domestic front than my wife. Even at weekends, when we are both looking after our son, I find little ways of carving out time for myself. Most fathers are the same. Let’s face it: how much of the Ashes series has been watched while on dad duty during family holidays? How many football matches are viewed on Sunday afternoons while children are behaving like cooped-up dobermans desperate for an airing? How often does a Balamory tape get slipped into the video player on a Saturday morning as an alternative to actually entertaining the kids while their mother has a lie-in? For how many hours do we linger rather longer than is strictly necessary in the bathroom in order to read the sports pages in peace?
I am generalising here, I know. A couple of my male friends are the main carers in their families and I am sure they are rather more conscientious about it because they are used to being in charge and don’t rely on a maternal backstop being around.
Which brings us to the second home truth: when that backstop is not there it is a hell of a job trying to stay on top of the game as your infant hits you all over the park. My five days in charge of my son felt a little like bowling to Freddie Flintoff for an entire Test match while also trying to cover the ten other fielding positions.
A week is a very long time in toddlerdom and I made the stunning discovery that it is, er, rather hard work. Things that previously had seemed to happen by themselves, like the making of packed lunches, the packing of a bag for a day out, the location of armbands and several dozen other things that enable you to leave the house in under two hours, now had to be done by me. One day it did take two hours to leave the house.
There was no chance of locking myself in the bathroom with the paper for ten minutes because within 15 seconds there was someone rattling the handle and shouting: “Daddy! Poo poo! My turn!” When my wife came home the house was trashed, the washing had not been done, there certainly wasn’t a meal on the table and I was reaching, trembling, into the fridge for a bottle of wine.
Of course, there is a third home truth: for all the graft, it’s wonderful to spend extended time with your child. We had fun. We bonded. By the end of the week he was a real little daddy’s boy. “Go to work!” he admonished his mother one day. I can’t pretend that a bit of me didn’t enjoy that.
As I sit in the office writing this I’m torn. I wouldn’t want to be a full time stay-at-home parent. But I’d like to see more of my child. If you are a father — or mother — who feels the same and have enough annual leave that you can go away en famille and still spare a few days to try being a lone stay-at-home, I’d recommend it. You’ll emerge with a new respect for whoever looks after your kids for the rest of the year.
Footie is just not cricket
I HAVE always preferred football to cricket and have supported Manchester United for 30 years, but as the Test match edged towards its nerve-wracking conclusion at the same time that United’s game against Newcastle United was being televised, I stuck with the cricket. I realise that this Ashes series is special. But the cricketing spectacle this summer has highlighted that too often the hype about football is in inverse proportion to the quality of the entertainment.
What is more, the spirit in which the cricket has been played, give or take the odd whinger of Oz, has been an extraordinary display of good sportsmanship. The players can share a joke even when the rest of us are so tense we are cowering behind the sofa. It seemed archaic that the players swigged beers as they gave post-match interviews, but at least you felt they would be able to handle it. If you gave a crate of ale to many of our preening, over-paid footballers you would fear that they would soon be smashing bottles over each others’ heads.
Candid Cameron
LAST YEAR I interviewed a young Tory MP and asked him if he looked in the mirror and saw a future prime minister staring back. He said: “It takes a very special sort of person to want that sort of responsibility . . . I don’t think I’m one of those people. I look at Blair and Thatcher and Major . . . It’s a different game . . .”
Who was this honest fellow? Why, it was David Cameron, now touted as one of the leading candidates to succeed Michael Howard. Well, I suppose an ability to imagine yourself as prime minister is not a prerequisite for the job of Tory leader these days.
Party pooper
WE celebrated my son’s second birthday with a small family party. He and two of his cousins seemed to be enjoying themselves, assiduously removing every last grain of sand from the sandpit and distributing it evenly across the garden. But then the eldest cousin, a sweet and polite four-year-old, hit me with the brutal truth. “This is a rubbish party,” he said. Why so? “There’s no pass the parcel, no entertainer, no bouncy castle and,” he added, his lip curling in disgust, “no party bags.”
damian.whitworth@thetimes.co.uk
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