Actually, it’s okay to listen to advice from other fathers, as long as you remember that:

• 75% of it won’t be relevant to your situation.
• 20% of it they will have made up just to frighten you.
• 5% of it will be true, and relevant, but so scary you’re better off not knowing until it happens.

Definitely, whatever you do, don’t buy a book on fatherhood. They’re just not worth the stress.

My wife went through a spate of buying books about pregnancy and motherhood. She found them reassuring, because she’s one of these people who takes comfort in knowing as much as possible about what to expect and what can go wrong. I’m of the opposite camp. The Ignorance is Bliss camp.

(Actually we don’t really have a camp, it’s more of a muddy hole in the ground covered in a tarp. None of us fancied going to the lecture about making proper camps.)

The trouble with books about parenthood is the information they impart basically falls into two categories: Things That Should Happen, and Things That Shouldn’t Happen. The first category is stuff like “crawling, talking, breathing”, the latter stuff like “turning green, smoking, head revolving Exorcist stylee.”

“By month eight,” a parenting book cheerfully announces, “your child should be reading small books of French poetry, occasionally looking up to exclaim sagely ‘ah! so true!’and gaze wistfully out of a window”.

I look over at my son (who’s engaged with opening and closing the wardrobe door, each time with a yelp of surprise that, even after the 500th repetition, it still contains The Inside of a Wardrobe) and feel more than a little like a failed parent.

They do say in the book that these developmental milestones are just for the “average” baby. But I don’t want to be told that my son is below average in anything! It just makes me feel bad.

The other problem with reading the milestones is that, for me, they totally ruin all the surprises. I want to be totally amazed every time my son does some little new thing, I don’t want spoilers.

Then under the “Things Your Child Shouldn’t Be Doing”, the books delight in doing stuff like listing the symptoms of all the myriad rare genetic diseases you should be looking out for. This merely induces in me a state of hypochondria by proxy… what if that mark above his eye isn’t a scratch, but the first signs of the onset of a horrible skin wasting syndrome named after the only two people who ever had it?!

It’s all rather upsetting, and I’d much rather be safe back in my muddy hole under the tarp.

Actually, I’d much rather be totally clueless, but handily have a wife who’s read all the books and knows pretty much exactly what to do. Which luckily is what I have. Ignorance with instant knowledge on tap, that’s true bliss.

There’s a covert propaganda campaign being fought. A campaign which, despite all its subtlety, has a very clear message: go to sleep, sleep is good, bedtime is the best time ever.

Now, like most parents of small children I guess, I value the times my son is asleep. It’s nice to have relaxed periods when your little bundle of joy is inert and not careering headlong from one deadly hazard to the next. So I’m all for gently persuading children that sleep is a good thing. I just think that maybe the publishers have gone way overboard in pushing the bedtime agenda.

Tom has several books explicitly about the bedtime ritual. Maisy’s Bedtime and How do Dinosaurs Say Goodnight? are two examples, and they’re great books too. But then bedtime seems to crop up at the end of nearly all his other books too.

I think it’s partly because the books are designed to be read at bedtime, and the authors think perhaps if they put in lots of stuff about yawning and brushing teeth and kissing goodnight before drifting quietly into slumber, the child being read the story will take the hint and obediently nod off too.

But partly, I think, the reason why so many picture books end with the main character going to sleep is that the authors couldn’t be bothered to think of a proper ending.

They tend to go into so much detail, too. Just to fill space. Nitty gritty about brushing teeth, and picking favorite teddies, and being read bedtime stories. I mean what’s the point of reading a bedtime story about reading a bedtime story?

It’s something you never see in books for grown ups. Sure, characters go to sleep, but I can’t think of any novel where the last chapter has been all about the protagonist getting ready for bed.

I mean, it would really bugger up the end of Jane Eyre…

Reader, I married him. A quiet wedding we had. That very evening we returned to the manor house, and having carefully brushed our teeth, washed our faces, each chosen our favorite teddy bears and changed into our night attire, retired to our beds and fell blissfully asleep.

F I N I S

See? Rubbish. And yet we expect our children to put up with it.

Anyway, rant over. It’s time I went to bed.

If you’ve ever perused the kiddywink section of a bookshop, you’ve almost certainly come across the “That’s Not My…” series of books. If not, let me explain to you the basic plot of every one.

A mouse (the unnamed protagonist of the series) sets out to find a thing. On the way he find several things of the same class as the thing he wants to find, but each featuring some flaw which immediately identifies to the painstakingly exacting mouse that this thing isn’t the thing that he wanted. Usually the flaw is texture based, and the picture accompanying the text ingeniously incorporates a patch which exhibits the properties which the mouse finds so abhorrent. The patch is very tactile, and teaches small children valuable lessons about poking and prodding their grubby fingers at everything valuable you own.

Eventually the nameless, obsessive mouse finds the thing he was looking for, and lives happily ever after. Presumably until the next time he mislays one of his many possessions.

The original That’s Not My book was about puppies. People obviously suspended disbelief about a mouse owning a puppy, and it sold so well it spawned a never ending series. There’s now an entire floor of my local Waterstones dedicated to just That’s Not My books.

The authors obviously started running out of ideas – faced with increasing demands from the publishers – as the subjects have started getting increasingly far-fetched. My son has, I kid you not, a “That’s Not My Pirate” book. I mean, how could anybody, let alone a small mouse own a bloody pirate?

(By the way, if you own That’s Not My Pirate, the pirate with the too-glittery cutlass, he’s supposed to be gay, right?)

I can’t see them stopping producing ever more That’s Not My books. And eventually, of course, there’ll be the inevitable movie adaptation.

I can see it now. Tom Hanks as The Mouse, searching for his mysteriously vanished wife. He’s called to the morgue to identify a body. The coroner pulls back the sheet. Tom looks down. Touches the face of the cold dead mouse lying before him. Suddenly gasps with relief…

“That’s not my wife! Her nose is too bobbly!”

I think you’ll agree, it’s a perfect introduction for any father new to baby ownership.

Front page

Title page

Page 4

Page 12