Syndicate this site's blogThat was the week that was
Making sense of seven days unlike any other
After the excitement and uniqueness of Fionnuala’s arrival - exactly a month ago today - last week was perhaps the first in which it was possible to see some pattern emerging: a sense of how weeks will be going forwards.
And how strange and new the pattern is. The biggest shift was the huge contrast between the life inside the house, and world outside.
Our focus inside the house is small scale, short-term and intensely personal. The rhythm is set by Finn as we change her, feed her, do the laundry, cobble together some food, grab some sleep. There are pauses of quiet and rest, as now, with Finn asleep, bundled up like a burrito - I grab ten minutes with the paper, and sit down to blog.
People warned me about the lack of sleep, but with both us spending almost all our time at home, we’ve been able to cope pretty well. Friends blanched yesterday when we told them that the previous night had been a good one:
‘So how much sleep did you get?’
‘Five hours, maybe.’
‘At a stretch?’
‘No, in total.’
But the bleary-eyed rolling out of bed with the clock radio counting the small hours has just become what we do. Haven’t we always done this?
The world outside
But how we make sense of the world outside has also changed. With time between feedings so limited, and seemingly always something else to do in the house, there’s got to be a good reason to head out, and it has to be planned way in advance.
Once you’re outside, things seem to be continuing as they were before, but your interpretation of them is different. The chance to grab a latte (to go, of course) is like a gift from heaven, and you marvel at all the folks with time to sit around in the cafe.
And somehow work gets done. I was in a couple of meetings last week, feeling like I was just pretending, in my sensible trousers and shirt. The real work was burping and diaper changing, but I’ll talk about content management systems and web strategy if you want.
News from home
And then came the news of the London bombings. The streetscapes, the double-decker, the accents of the police and fire service spokesmen at the press conference, even watching Huw Edwards and Jon Sopel anchor the BBC1 coverage mirrored on BBC America - all so familiar, and yet all so bizarrre.
I was focusing one tiny baby, creating a good space for her in one house - trying to do something little, solid and meaningful. And my home capital, the city I can’t remember seeing for the first time is being turned upside down. We were just talking about taking Fionnuala to the Olympics there in 2012 - she’ll be seven.
When not if, said all the analysts, and it was great to see the determined stoicism of Londoners heading to work the next day, but watching from the couch in New Mexico with a baby in your arms gives an Englishman a new perspective on these things.
Of course, this whole week has been about new perspectives. The novel becomes normal, the familiar strange.
