CONFESSIONS OF A GRANDPARENT

This will be, unashamedly, a piece about my new grandchild, so those of you who are inclined to see such young beings as merely ‘a hole at both ends,’ can look away now and find something better to do: Sky has some excellent football coverage, I believe, and there are pressing things to fuss with in the garden.

It is all of 36 years since I last held an equally small scrap of humanity - at least one that preserved a good part of my own genome. How I managed then, I don’t know. Grandparents were noticeable by their absence, while the books seemed just too theoretical. In any case, I had quite forgotten it all. But I do remember that somehow there was nothing to learn, nature, by some miraculous process, just took over. Instinct, I suppose.

In any case, as quickly as I became expert with the new born, we were off on the helter-skelter trip down, or rather up, the ages of life: toddlerhood and talking, reading and nurseries, school and so on.This time I expect this progression will seem even faster. Young Topi is a week old already. In a few short months - by the end of the summer holidays - he will be crawling and already taking his first steps by Christmas.

I call him Topi, as no-one else seems inclined to call him anything. With great earnestness do his parents produce constant streams of names, which fade from consciousness like mayflies. We are no further forward.

Topaz was his womb nickname. Topaz was inside the ‘bump.’ At the time we did not know his gender, of course, though we might have learned from the scans. We preferred not to know. Younger Daughter, his mother, has always been endeared to having a couple of (presumably female) offspring called Topaz and Ameythyst - names which even Mrs Worthington would have been pleased to put straight on stage.

I have shortened and masculinized Topaz to Topi - or Toppy, if you prefer - but Topi sounds both more exotic and has a handsome ruggedness that comes with a gentle and caring interior. No-one, anyway, has objected and his parents seem grateful that someone is calling him something in the six week interregnum before they need to pay a visit to the registrar.

I have to confess to being reluctant to hold Topi when I first saw him. An alien, delicate and soggy piece of flesh wrapped in swaddling layers of blanket and what I regarded as a completely unecessary hat, given that the fellow already has a lot more hair of his own that many of the medical men who flitted in from time to time.

But once placed in my arms it is remarkable how quickly the parental instinct usurps such feelings. One ‘knows’ without thinking how to hold a baby, how to position his head close to your own heart and how to move with gentle rocking motions that soothe and comfort.

You forget just how easy the bonding process is and indeed the degree of interaction develops unbidden. Babies are not inert pieces of tissue, they react vigorously to this and that and even when they are content to snuggle asleep against your chest, that itself is a reaction to feeling safe and secure.

It’s been a week now and already we have our little routines. I sing or hum to little Topi while walking up and down. He seems to like the Souza march, which Monty Python took as their theme tune, but Leonard Cohen also seems to go down well. Now and then we do Mozart - at least we try. This, too is lapped up with the rest.

All of this makes me fancy that Topi will be musical - or rather is musical. I can’t remember singing in the same way to my own newborns. But there is something in this baby that demands it. The big eyes, fringed at this stage of development with blue, open and rock from side to side as they try to focus. ‘It will come, Topi,’ I say, ‘it will come, your focus.’ At the moment, trying to focus just makes the little fellow screw up his face and shake his head.

His little fingers, long and narrow, with perfectly formed (and clean) fingernails, clutch mine, with a grip that is surprisingly light, while he forgets about music and remembers the only thing that babies are really interested in when they are not asleep - food.

I give him my knuckle to suck and am initially surprised not just by the force but by the efficiency of the action. Whereas all else about baby is loose and unco-ordinated, half-formed and helpless, the sucking reflex is well-honed.

And once lips touch knuckle he draws his head back, waggles it from side to side and then lurches forward in a species of head butt. The suction starts and we have ‘lock-on.’

Disappointment clearly follows as the knuckle fails to provide anything sweet, warm and nutritious. Topi then boasts a ferocious frown. But, persistent chap that he is he tries again, jerking his head back, doing the little wiggle, and then throwing himself again forward. Thus we continue until he tires and falls asleep, still ‘locked-on’ to my finger.

Yes, all this really is a miracle. And, for it, ordinary life seems to stop, everyday priorities melting away like snow before a warm wind.

So, I am back to re-learning nursery rhymes and finger games and how to make the legs of Pipany’s wonderful Babbit go pitter-patter, pitter-patter. I am back to looking at baby books and wondering (at times) whether the babies that they know are anything like the babies I have known. But most of all I am back to feeling that fierce, defensive pride that wants to love and protect one’s offspring; to draw out and reinforce its aptitudes, to help to link all those myriads of unformed connections in his brain that provide the basis of intelligence and to help him to grow into a sound and happy little soul.

Which is all most wonderful and perfect.