Published The Advocate, January 14, 2006


HERE I was, anticipating another year of friends’ funerals, and my daughter Melissa announces she is giving me a first grandchild. I immediately demanded to know why, why, why, and if she really thought I was old enough to be a grandfather? "You’re old enough but probably lacking in maturity," she said. Daughters can be such a challenge. The thought of grandfatherhood will take some getting used to. Eliza of Lindisfarne wrote me an email: "Congratulations on becoming a grandfather – you will have to invest in some Grosby slippers!!!" Barleys. It’s not like I work in IT. I attended Melissa’s birth, which occurred as Princess Anne and Captain Mark Phillips were being married in London in 1973. In between contractions the nurses kept ducking out to check the progress of the royal wedding on TV. A great occasion – the birth, not the wedding – and I was still yelling "Encore! Encore!" while being escorted from the delivery suite. Jo and Cath – the wives of colleagues – recently gave birth to daughters. Jo has the good sense to avoid my radar but I met Cath the other day in the street struggling under the weight of disposable nappies. The last time I saw Cath she was heavily pregnant and had a healthy, happy glow. Now she looked frazzled. Pregnancy really suits some women. Jenny, an old friend who also happens to be a midwife, is best kept barefoot and pregnant. Late in one of her many pregnancies, I went around to her house one morning and she was in the backyard weeding the veggie patch. I popped around again after lunch and there was the newborn in her husband’s arms. And Jenny was back weeding the garden, as if nothing unusual had occurred in the meantime. Which brings me to Aaron and Janice. I have known Aaron for 18 months and in that time he has produced an assembly line of kids. The fourth was born late last year. And now Janice is expecting the fifth. It seems every time Aaron hangs his trousers over the end of the bed Janice falls pregnant. She is obviously fecund – prolifically fertile – although Aaron obviously must shoulder some of the blame. He told me they had not planned to have a large family but what could you do? I waved a Stanley knife in his direction and offered to do a cut-rate vasectomy on the spot. He looked sheepish. As a matter of fact, Aaron said, he had been waiting in line for an appointment at the family planning clinic when the news of Janice’s latest pregnancy came through. It’s all a matter of time and place. At dinner recently I sat next to a woman who said she was the youngest of 16 children, the eldest of whom was 73. Family gatherings must be quite a memory test, I said. Not really, she said. She remembered her brothers and sisters by where they were born: Fred in Smithton, Alice in Stanley, and so on. Their father was a railway fettler.