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Goodbye Twenties, Hello Fatherhood – Week Two

Another week goes by and yet again I’ve noticed my life changing in weird and wonderful ways. Firstly, after surprising myself with my papoose knowledge last week, my wife and I have taken the plunge and bought one. I’m still not 100% sure I know what one is and how you operate it. A quick google search told me Papoose is a Brooklyn based rapper, but when I look at my papoose, there is nothing ‘cool’ or ‘street’ about it, it’s just a baby sling. Unless a papoose means something different in Brooklyn, Mr. Papoose might want to rethink his stage name.

The papoose is very papoose-y. It looks like a baby can be easily harnessed into it, so we bought it at a very reasonable price. This was the first time we had specifically decided to go shopping for baby paraphernalia. I have to admit I was excited, it was certainly going to be a unique shopping experience. It was everything I expected. The trip consisted of picking up little tiny human clothes and making an ‘ahhhh’ sound, walking past little boots and saying ‘oohhh, aren’t they cute’. In fact, we ended up buying the least cute item possible, which currently looks like a rucksack, but without the sack (or the ‘ruck’, whatever that is.) Anyway, I digress, the main thing is that it has no baby in it, so it’s pretty useless at the moment, unless I wanted to take it shopping and carry an extra carrier bag around my chest in my papoose pouch.

The second tell tale sign that I am accepting parenthood became apparent whilst I was searching the internet. I wanted to look at a web page I had been looking at the previous day. Before some clever clogs questions what I was desperately searching for, it wasn’t prawn without the ‘r’, it was in fact an item I had been looking at on Amazon. As I clicked to see my history over the last few days, I noticed I had visited websites I had never had the inclination to visit before. News, blogs and various football websites had been replaced by mamas and papas, mothercare and random baby name generators. What had happened to me?

Baby names have been a topic of conversation in the Carlton household over the past week and as we are not going to find out which flavour baby we are having until the day, we have started the search to find two suitable names to cover all eventualities. Our conversations varied from the serious to the ridiculous. After much searching on the internet and browsing baby name books, we were more perplexed than when we began our search. Much of the confusion occurred because I became distracted by the crazy names that parents have called their children. I have to assume that some poor child had been given these names for them to appear in a baby name list. So to throw you off the scent and keep you guessing till March, I’ve compiled two lists of my 10 favourite baby names for boys and girls that I couldn’t possibly use. So here is my Top 10 baby boy names if I was a crazy.

Cue Top of the Pops style countdown music

10 – Beige

It’s true that colours can make wonderful names, but baby Beige doesn’t really work. If you were asked how did you come up with the name Beige, your response is unlikley to be ‘…well, we took one look at him and he just looked….dull.’ Or ‘Out of all the colours, Beige is my favourite.’ If you want your kid to be an accountant, call him Beige.

9 – Bonanza

Unless your a fan of the US Western TV series, a boy should not be called Bonanza. However, the dictionary definition offers a positive slant on the name. It’s meaning roughly translates to ‘a sudden opportunity to make money.’ So if he is a talented footballer at an early age, it might be worth changing his name by deed poll, but it’s probably not fair to lumber your kid with the burden of making your future fortune from day one.

8 – Grover

If the muppets were a big influence on your life as a child and Kermit and Gonzo’s names are already used for children of your close friends and family, Grover is an ideal choice. But I must reiterate, only if Kermit and Gonzo are already taken.

7 –  Navigator

I kid you not, Navigator is a boy’s name and it’s one tipped to be more prolific in years to come. It’s seen as a trendy celebrity name, maybe someone like Bob Geldof would use it if he had a boy. I don’t see future Carlton being an intrepid explorer as his parents have lived in the same town all their lives, so if I was to choose a name, he would be more Hermit than Navigator.

6 –  Hannibal

Might as well throw in a couple of middle names just to make sure baby Carlton gets off to the right start in life, ‘I christen/name you Hannibal Fava Beans Chianti Carlton.’

5 –  Favourite

A great name until you decide to have another child. Why not marginalise the 2nd child further by calling it Black Sheep?

4 – Essex

Even if your boy was conceived in this county, giving him that name is half way to breeding a jack the lad of the largest proportions. Without doubt his first words will be ‘Alwight sweetcheeks’, not mummy or dadda.

3 – Dingo

I use Dingo as an example of the paucity of Australian names. Everyone’s heard of Bruce and Sheila, but once you’ve scratched the surface, Australia offers very little unless you want to call your child Galah or Tucker.

2 – Hooker

mmm…..if your a fan of the 80’s TV show TJ……you know what I’m not even going to bother to explain this one. Simply wrong. Don’t do it.

1 – Gaylord

No word of lie, this has cropped up on numerous searches. Maybe it was popular before the connotation changed, but if you’re really thinking about using this as a name for your future offspring, why not stick to something simpler like Neville, Egbert or Malcolm. Come to think of it, name your kid anything else but Gaylord.

That concludes my list, look out for my countdown of top 10 girls names in the following weeks. Until next week, Ta Ta.

 

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A Novel Way to Write a Novel

As you may gather from the category this post has been allocated, a large proportion of my time is currently occupied attempting to write a novel. It is my first attempt at a colossal piece of work. Short stories are normally my forte and hopefully one day, I’ll be lucky enough to gather them altogether and publish them as part of a book. Until then, my focus is fully on finishing this novel.

I’m learning all the time. It’s a complex process that shouldn’t be undertaken lightly. I realised this early on in the project and have made my fair share of mistakes.

When I started the project, I wanted to go at it from a certain angle. Rock bands tend to do this sort of thing and it has turned into a bit of cliche now. After they make their initial breakthrough album and they’re lauded for their originality and freshness, the second and third albums never quite live up to critics expectations. By the time the forth album is released the lead singer normally trots out the same guff from the ‘Rockers that have lost their way’ handbook.’For this album, we decided to go back to our roots…’, in the vain attempt to allay any fears that they might be perceived as too commercial, too mainstream and keep the hardcore fan base happy.

So they make the next album with an assortment of cobbled together instruments or whatever they can get their hands on and start to make the next album using coconut shells, spoons and pubic hair for strings. All in the hope that their rustic instruments might transport them back to the so called glory days. For the band, the whole point of this exercise is to get back to basics, it worked in the past so why can’t it happen again and good luck to them.

I decided to try and buck that trend. Why wait to get published a few times, then realise after my third or fourth book that I needed to go back to my roots, back to basics? If I do it now, hopefully I won’t fall into the trap that many rock bands do and it will save the embarrassment of a reviewer questioning the merits of my third book and suggesting that I should revert to my initial winning formula. I don’t want to be a pretentious, adored author who went too hippy for the readers of the day.

So after I went shopping for coconut shells, spoons and fished out a handful of pubic hair from the bath plug hole, I was ready to write my masterpiece.

On reflection, my metaphor is not totally accurate. In fact, no exotic food, cutlery or discarded hair have been used during my initial effort to construct this novel. However, the humble pen and paper combination has. Initially, it seemed like a good idea, carrying a laptop and using it efficiently wasn’t always possible, but it was simple enough to whip out a crisp piece of paper and a pen and jot down my moments of inspiration.

Before I knew it, I’d completed the first few chapters and felt that handwriting my novel was really helping my creativity. I got deeper and deeper into the story, but then hit a massive road block. I had an idea that absolutely needed to get out of my head and and on to paper. I was a victim of my organised mind, I couldn’t face putting it down on any old bit of paper, through fear of losing it. I wanted to weave it into the story constructed so far. I didn’t want an addendum.

This particular idea needed to fit in the first few chapters, which meant major revisions to some of the work I’d slaved over for a few weeks, but I had to integrate it somehow. The only way I could make it work would be to bring my old pal, technology, to the party and start to type up the work I had already handwritten. Although I found repeating the work a mind-numbing exercise, it allowed me to craft and mould those early chapters whilst incorporating the new idea. After a few weeks of changing tact and letting technology take the strain, the story had taken shape and had not made me any less creative as the ideas were still flowing at a great pace. My advice would be to make use of auto-tune, synthesizers and any other widgets that will make your work sound great, its working for me.

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Goodbye Twenties, Hello Fatherhood – Week One

It would be an understatement to say that my normally placid life is going to change vastly in the next 6 months. Firstly, in less than three weeks, this cruel world will take away my twenties forever and replace me with a slightly creakier, less mobile version of my former self and bring me closer to that inevitable bus pass.

Over the period of my thirtieth year, I have come to accept the fact that I would be entering my third decade and there was nothing I could do about it apart from the obvious drastic measures such as running in front of various modes of transport,an overdose, enforced starvation or watching the omnibus editions of Eastenders and Coronation Street back to back. These all seemed a little extreme, so I had no choice but to ‘man up’ and accept the fact that in the future when I complete application forms online and I am asked to state my age, I may have to schedule a few extra minutes to scroll further down the list.

Once I fully came to terms with the fact I was getting older, I was happy again, the world was a wonderful place. The incessant reminders of my impending doom from friends and family no longer hurt me. I had encased my slightly older body in a younger man’s forcefield and brushed them off with a wide smile upon my face.

However, a night of passion later and a few weeks of wondering whether’things worked’, my forcefield malfunctioned and I was yet again hurtling towards my thirties, but this time with extra baggage. It was likely that I would soon be wearing a papoose or pushing a pram, rather than wearing a cool pair of new trainers or the latest trouser trends, modelled by all the contestants on The X Factor. (I’ve even surprised myself with my papoose and trouser trends knowledge there.)

Please don’t misread my sentiments here, especially if my wife is reading this. I was overjoyed, ecstatic that we would be adding to our family for the first time. I couldn’t wait to welcome our ginger son or daughter into the world. At the same time, I realised that many of the activities and past times that I had learnt to enjoy over the course of my adult existence were soon to be a figment of my imagination. I would look back at them with misty, nostalgic eyes as Master or Miss Carlton scream and wail from the bottom of their tiny lungs. Have they no respect for the past!

Let me give you an example. As I write this, it is currently 13.39 on a wet, dull Saturday afternoon. This time last week, I wouldn’t have been able to impart this information upon you as I was safely tucked up in bed, blissfully unaware of any of the kerfuffle going on outside my four walls. Before you get the impression that my weekends are exclusively for sleeping off a hangover, this was the first time I hadn’t arisen from my pit at a respectable time since my teens. I don’t make a habit of it. There was something particularly nice about sitting in my own filth, and when I use the word ‘filth’, I don’t mean I couldn’t even be bothered to venture to the bathroom, I just mean the general funk of an unwashed body.

I felt bad about my lack of adventure for 4 or 5 minutes, but then it soon dawned on me that it shouldn’t. The lay-in will be one of those soft-focus, ‘do you remember when we used to…?’ moments that will be brought up in conversation between my wife and I for the foreseeable future. It may even bring a tear to my eye when little nipper is waking me up before the birds have surveyed the days landscape. After a few more sleepless nights, a small tear will be replaced by uncontrollable sobbing until my wife wonders what is going on in the nursery and comes to console both of us.

The countdown has begun, my thirtieth birthday is only 16 days away, fatherhood is just 5 short months down the line. Better not waste my time writing this blog and get myself back to bed and make the most of sitting in my own filth.