As the little kiddo is currently still in the hypothetical phase and thus unnamed and un-gendered it shall be officially known as ‘The Sprog’ or TS for short.

Little TS has been the subject of much thought over the last few days. Names, times, house stuff, whether TS=1 is better or worse than than TS=<1 and all the other jazz that I am sure will get more complicated as we go along.

And I have been thinking about family. Watched a woman knitting on the bus this morning and it sparked a whole bunch of thoughts about my grandmother and how she would have loved great-grandchildren and opportunity to go into a total knitting frenzy – we’d have had sixteen pairs of booties and enough jumpsuits to wallpaper the house with. I think her grandchildren got too old too fast for her and she would have loved a second chance to play grandmother.

I sat with her in the Oncology ward the evening before she died. She had a brain tumour and her periods of lucidity had been reducing for weeks. But that evening she was completely there – the same bright and biting woman she had always been. It was as if she knew that this was the last chance to talk to her family. She told me she wanted me to finish school and go to university, that she was proud of me and that she wanted me to do well for her. It was grandmotherly emotional blackmail to the last I guess but it was an art my grandmother had mastered brilliantly and we all lined up like ducks when it was used. That night was New Year’s Eve and I went to a party I didn’t much enjoy. By the time I got home in the early hours of the morning she was dead. I’d have liked her to have met Lu, to see me graduate from University, to get married and to have kids.