WELCOME, BUTTERBEAN

Mother Clazza and Butterbean

My granddaughter arrived in the late afternoon of the 2nd May,  a grey day on which it didn't rain.  Mother and baby are fine.   The birth happened in the Heath hospital, a vast institution on whose site there has been some sort of establishment since Neolithic times.  It may well have been a hospital then.  Once something becomes a hospital the tendency is to continue, for why would you do otherwise? Each generation adds a bit or knocks down a bit until six thousand years later you arrive at what you have now. Anyway it was not to talk about hospitals that I began this piece.

Lacking a formal name - the naming pot is full of potential names but none has yet been extracted - she is called Butterbean since she was the size, well, of a butterbean, when first we learned of her existence.  (The Butterbean is a species of Lima bean apparently, whatever that is, or so I learned when I looked the name up).  When I did this I saw also that the name had been adopted by an American heavyweight boxer, otherwise called Eric Esch.  He wasn't born on 2nd May but on August 3rd and in addition to being a heavyweight boxer he is also a mixed martial artist.  He is probably a nice friendly chap in reality but his photographs show someone that you might not want to cross in a hurry.  If ever there was someone of whom it might be said 'he will grind your bones to make his bread' then Eric Esch looks to be he.

Which seemed to me to be the very antithesis of our Butterbean who is a mere scrap of a thing weighing in at just 5lbs and 10 ounces and very cuddly to boot.  She now begins the long road - actually a surprisingly short road if you are a grandparent - of putting on weight and filling out and learning to sit up and then to crawl and then to toddle and then to talk and then finding out how the world works and that water is wet and fire burns and it hurts when you fall over and the thousand and one other things that have to be learned before you can even set one foot in front of the other on your way to school.

As an aside, you'd think, wouldn't you, that by now we would have evolved some way of simply plugging the brain with 'applications' - maybe delivered by headphones during sleep?  Could you download how to walk, for instance, or to make apple pie, or a history of all the kings and queens of Britain?  After all, birds seem to inherit complex nest building patterns in their DNA.  They don't spend time learning under the mother's wing - the weaver bird just goes out and weaves, termites build vast citadels, bees talk, bats can use sonic radar, all manner of species navigate across the oceans while the human infant is still learning which end of the spoon goes where.

Still maybe she will do all these things too. For the moment Butterbean is just a gorgeous little thing with blue eyes and dark hair and a contented expression when her head is next to your heart.  You can practically feel some mysterious bonding process at work.  And though babies are common enough each baby is special and reminds us that we were all once in this small and vulnerable state with minds empty and vacant, waiting to be filled with all the wonderful world has to offer.

And she is fortunate to be born on 2nd May - the same day, incidentally, as Catherine the Great, Empress of Russia and James Dyson, the inventor and vacuum cleaner man. The same day as Engelbert Humperdinck, the singer, and David Suchet, the actor; as Manfred von Richtofen - the Red Baron - fighter pilot, and Jerome K Jerome who wrote the funniest book in the English language (Three Men in a Boat).  And should Butterbean ever find herself in Poland then her birthday will fall on the Polish National Flag Day and she will find that everyone is saluting her.  Na zdrowie!

So you see it is quite true what the horoscopes say about people born on the 2nd May being full of artistic and intellectual creativity.  They make extraordinarily good writers of novels, apparently, and good artists, too, if given pencil and paintbrushes.  On the other hand they have little interest in making money; they would far rather do something that they love doing, preferably in one of those professions in which the flow of income can best be characterised as being in a state of flux.

I have discovered my mistake.  I should have been born a week earlier - on the 2nd - instead of, as I was, on 9th May, for which the omens are not nearly so good. Alan Bennett (who was also born on 9th May) is perhaps the exception and he has clearly exhausted all the artistic talent available to Taureans born on this date.  Instead, all the boundless stock of Taurean talent is invested in those arriving on 2nd May and so, dear Butterbean, we shall expect of you (naturally in an entirely unpressurising sort of a way) great things.