Baby love

My first grandson, Oscar, born just before Christmas, has an elder brother and two elder sisters, all aged under six. Including his mum, whom I’ve only recently met, this meant five extra presents to be chosen, wrapped and delivered on Christmas Day. As I’m still a stranger to the majority of this family, I wanted to make a good impression by handing out good-quality, competently wrapped presents. On Christmas morning I went round to their house bearing a gold paper sack containing the results of considerable thought and effort.

The sitting room was ankle-deep in wrapping paper. Oscar’s brother and sisters were out of control with excitement. The boy was doing short sprints from a standing start, halting abruptly and, by going flaccid at the neck, trying to get his head to flop off.

Before I’d taken off my coat my boy had presented me with the baby. I like holding the baby, and my boy and his partner like me to hold it. Oscar is the first baby I’ve been besotted by, and they are encouraging me in my folly. Before Oscar was born, I couldn’t stand babies. The old British aristocracy had it about right, if you ask me: keep them upstairs until they can walk and talk, then send them away to school. As for men carrying babies around in papooses dangling from their necks, it was the most contemptible thing I’d ever seen, surely the result of too much oestrogen in the water supply. I shan’t be going about in public with Oscar dangling from my neck on the end of a sling, facing inwards. I shan’t be going that far. But I admit it: I am smitten.

Now that I can see the big attraction, there is nothing I enjoy more than sitting down with him cradled in my arm and studying his face as it registers his first discomfort, his first hunger, his first grief.