Concrete Pencil: Pop goes the weasel

By John Hill on July 8, 2009 2:57 PM |

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Dan Bourke is embracing old-fashioned fatherly uselessness, but he also has some new-fangled guilt to be getting on with

How's it going there, up there in the towers?

I'm not there, I'm in the strange exile of paternity leave. Any minute now I've got to go to Boots and buy an unspeakable object that has something to do with nipples.

Are you all working hard? Has anybody found a new sandwich? How's Davy's been? Of course, in the old days I'd be in Davy's now.

I'd have toddled along to the labour ward a good few hours after waters broke to sit in the waiting room, and I'd have lit my cigar at the bedside while making an inappropriate joke about the baby's genitals.

Tonight I'd roll home hammered again, lift the infant at arm's length for a couple of seconds, decide it'd done its drawers and hastily hand it back to its mother. Then I'd simply light another fag, switch on the telly and wonder loudly at the whereabouts of my dinner.

And as soon as I could in the morning, I'd get back to the office where I belonged.
But that doesn't happen any more. We're not made like that any more.

Now, even in the workaholics-anonymous paradise we toil in, dads take daddying seriously. I can't think of a time when I thought I belonged in an office - but now the thought of being in one all week horrifies me.

And companies give you, to a greater or lesser extent, paternity leave. Even they take it seriously.

But how are we new dads to know what to do? It's never been like this before. What are we to become? Soft-voiced and hesitant, proudly applying oil to the perineum before staying awake all night in case mum wakes up and needs a hopi ear candle?

There's middle ground, is there? But when does tolerating endless use of words like "sanitary" and "canal" turn into actual interest or even enjoyment?

We have no role models. We are from a generation fathered by useless bastards, unhelpful and unsympathetic dolts, whose ill-thought-out and offensive opinions set in the concrete of their brains in about 1975.

Not all of them, obviously. But a working majority.

But what better use are we? Maybe in trying to be different, the best we can hope for is a better kind of uselessness.

Now I've been burbling away at this nonsense for so much of today that the job of getting the unspeakable nipple object has been taken away from me. And I feel really guilty.

Still a useless bastard, then. But at least I feel bad about it.

Dan Bourke also prattles on at blogs.mirror.co.uk/opposite-of-work.