Isobella: Thoughts on Bob Dylan

Isobella peruses the sleeve note of her favourite Bob Dylan L.P. 1965's Bringing it All Back Home:

Pregnancy, Baby & You Magazine

The new issue of Pregnancy, Baby & You mag is out now (their website is at www.thinkbaby.co.uk). My next column appears in the April issue, but for those of you who missed the mag last month (shame on you!), here's my January 2008 column:


Are you sitting comfortably reading this at home? Yes? Then stop. Stop immediately. Fold up this mag, tuck it into your coat pocket and head for your local.

Done that? What do you mean you’re embarrassed reading PB&Y in the pub? Okay, tuck it inside a copy of Nuts, then. Got a pint? Best get a shot, too. You’re going to need it. Because, my friend, your pub days are over.

Pub culture is dying. We’re getting healthier, snuffing out fags, cutting out booze. But you are playing a part too. Yes, dear reader, you.

“Not me,” I hear you mutter, “I’d never help the patron saint of coffee – St Arbucks – convert my beloved local.” I said that, too. Once. But like some St Peter of Booze, by your partner’s third cry of “Epidural!” you will have denied the pub at least three times.

Naturally, you will have celebrated the news of your imminent arrival in the pub. Most important events of your life have probably been celebrated in the pub – if they haven’t actually occurred there in the first place. Excluding, I’m hoping, conception.

Your first denial, however, is already in the post in the shape of Provider Panic. It arrives at the moment when you find your Lotto fantasy no longer features a new Maserati but a Bugaboo with on-board i-Pod and climate control. That’s the moment when you suddenly realise that baby stuff costs money. And if babies love anything, boy do they love stuff. Prams, cots, sterilisers. All this and stuff you’ve never even heard of before: topping and tailing bowl (£39.99) anyone?

Thanks to PP you will cancel all mag subscriptions (apart from PB&Y, natch), start taking sandwiches to work and – shock horror – ditch the pub. You are now an embryonic Responsible Parent, my son. And this will delight your partner. Until, having cleaned up your own act, you start lecturing her on the dangers of half-a-glass of red wine with Christmas dinner. Then she will just wish you’d piss off back to the pub where you belong. She may even tell you this. (A word of advice, here: Don’t put it down to hormones. You really are being a sanctimonious pain in the arse.)

In the meantime Champions’ League nights in the pub will slip by, all denied with increasingly flimsy mendacity (“Sorry, bad night: I’m bare-knuckle cage fighting with Jeremy Clarkson.”). And on it will go until the major pub-based event of your life hoves into view. The Wetting of the Baby’s Head.

Why on earth, you might ask, would I miss out on a legitimised, tradition-sanctioned, recrimination-free night on the lash? Am I mad? Well, it’s a kind of madness, I suppose. It involves gazing at your firstborn for hours on end, marvelling at her unique ability to utter the word “Ak” and make green pooh. She is clearly a child prodigy.

This might not sound like good news. But just think of it like this: which event would you rather relive? Your stag night or your wedding night? It’s a no-brainer, really. Unless, of course, you married Tracy Barlow out of Corrie.

Expectant Dad: The Movie

So how are you finding it all, this dad-to-be malarky? A bit like it’s all happening to someone else, is it? Does it all feel like you’re a character in some movie? Well, that’s not too bad an analogy, as it goes. In fact, a trilogy would be more accurate. And just like a real movie trilogy, the same rules of diminishing returns will apply.

Just as the original is inevitably better than the sequel, and the sequel in turn is superior to the third part – or “threequel” in movie geek-speak – so too will your own personal trilogy, your Action-Dadventure epic, deteriorate in quality as it progresses. For example, in the original, you would be played by Al Pacino. In the second, not-so-good instalment, you will be played by Jean Claude Van Damme. In part three, Tyrone out of Coronation Street will be offered the part. And he will probably turn it down.

Part one is set in the pub. Most important events of your life hitherto have probably been spent in the pub. Why change the habit of a lifetime? Most stages apart from conception, I hasten to add, although maybe that’s just me. Perhaps you have another story. If so, please don’t share it. Some things are better kept to yourself. (Although I suppose our conception could have taken place in a bar as Isobella is an IVF baby and one of the top drawer mixologists at Claridge’s or the Savoy’s American Bar could have made jiggly with the petrie dish.)

The pub is also where you will pick up the first flotsam and jetsam from the ocean known as the Sea of Wisdom. Nuggets will include: “You don’t want a girl, mate: boys’re less bovver as teenagers”. Luckily, like most pub pronouncements, you will have forgotten it all by the morning.

Part Two moves location away from the pub, and is subtitled The Provider Panic Months. This shift of location will make for a pretty dismal movie for the viewer, being set largely in the marital home. And it will start out as a love story in which the leading lady (your partner/wife) will be all moon-faced at the fact that you have at last grown up and are ready to shoulder your responsibilities. This will only last, however, for the first reel. After this she will grow increasingly annoyed at your fretting and paranoia and lectures on the dangers of half-a-glass of wine with Christmas dinner. Long before the credits have rolled she will be wishing you’d just piss off back to the pub where you belong.

Reviews for the sequel will be bad. So bad that moviegoers will stay away from the third instalment in their droves. This movie will be subtitled “Whatever Happened to Old Whatsisface?” due to the fact that you will be seen so seldom down the pub that sightings of Glenn Miller’s plane will be more commonplace. But you are the star of this movie. And it is the best part you will ever have. It will be a very long movie, too long to hold anyone’s interest other than your own. But this is a real case of art for art’s sake. You will be listed in the cast list at Happy/Confused/Tired Dad. And it will win you no Oscars. Your new co-star will steal every scene. And none of those scenes will be set in the pub. But you won’t care. In fact, you won’t care if you never see the inside of a pub again as long as you live. And then you will be a true star.

Movie Dads

A selection of role models – and otherwise – from the movies.

HARRY DEAN STANTON in PRETTY IN PINK: A broken man, tries his damnedest, but just can’t do, just can’t say the right thing. But, man alive does he try. Fail again. Fail better. The absolute role model in the business of being Not Too Bad a Dad.

GREGORY PECK in TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD: Here’s the only guide to dadding that you’ll ever need: Watch the movie To Kill a Mockingbird. Observe Gregory Peck as the loving, principled, sensitive, morally upright and generally legendary Atticus Finch. If you try to be a tenth of a hundredth of a thousandth as good a dad as him, then you’ll leave all the Not Too Bad Dads in the shade. An unreasonable goal. But worth shooting for.

MARLON BRANDO in THE GODFATHER: Great scene where, in his dotage, Vito Corleone rues his life of crime in almost confessional tones, while handing the mantle to his son Michael. “There just wasn’t enough time, Michael. There just wasn’t enough time.” Poetic, moving, intensely dramatic, tragic on an ancient Greek scale, this is movieland’s finest equivalent of the Empty Nester’s battle cry “Make the most of it: they grow up SO fast!”

ROBERT DE NIRO in GODFATHER PART II: “I have,” says Brando in The Godfather, “a sentimental weakness for my children.” De Niro takes this line and weaves it into the young Vito Corleone’s makeup beautifully. Standing in their coldwater apartment in Little Italy, De Niro’s young Don watches, biting his fist, wracked with anguish, as the womenfolk apply a hot poultice to the infant Fredo. Tears to a glass eye.

AL PACINO in THE GODFATHER PART III: Touching moment when he produces a drawing made by his son Anthony on the day of the boy’s confirmation. He’s kept it for all these years. Awwwww, how surweeet is that? Okay, so he’s killed anyone and everyone who ever got in his way – including his own brother, Fredo – but he still loves his little boy. If that’s not being Not Too Bad a Dad, then I don’t know what is.

JOE PESCI in CASINO: Robs houses. Shoots people. Beats people to death. Has an affair with his best friend’s wife. Swears like a docker with Tourette’s. Puts a guy’s head in a vice and pops his eye out. But always gets home in time to make his son’s breakfast. Not Too Bad a Dad? Who’s gonna argue?

DARTH VADER in STAR WARS: Who knew? Darth Vader is Luke Skywalker’s dad? V. bad dad role model in the worst movie (and movie franchise) ever made. Once described by Isobella’s Godfather John as “the death of culture”. Indeed this insight was what led us to appoint John as a Godfather in the first place.

What Kind of Question is THAT?

I have been asked some extraordinary questions over the past six months, but this one surely takes the biscuit. Consider that it fell from the mouth of a new father and it seems even more outrageous.

“Were you disappointed?” he enquired.

“Disappointed in what?” I asked

“That you had a girl and not a boy?”

Looking at his little boy bouncing on his knee, I could only hope that he would grow to take after his mother and not his vile father.