The problem with how I go about assembling some of my blog posts is that I’ll jot down a few random thoughts or updates on AJ’s well-being or, and I know everyone loves these, some political invectives and then leave it for a few days and so when I pick it up again a few days later it’s often out of date. I think I am up to date with my defections of politicians from the Conservatives to Reform but I am very much not so with Ava-Jane’s health.
It was all looking quite sunny until about three days ago, when she suddenly dipped down again. She’s very twitchy and has had a few severe seizures and her breathing is laboured again. The photos of her are from when she was feeling better over the holidays.
I will add some signposts to the bits below to try to help readers make some sense of where we are.
Ava-Jane’s Health as of mid-January 2026
So the run up to Christmas was not ideal, as you will well know if you have read the quick-fire posts preceding this one. And friends have asked about how she is getting on. Well, and here is the thing about Ava-Jane, just because she was gasping for air and with perilously low oxygen levels one day, that doesn’t mean that she will not be fully back on form the very next day. And so it turned out to be – I left hospital after a three-day stint, handing over to Fo.
And while, I feel more reassured in hospital with all the monitors, machines, nurses and so on round us, Fo is of the firm belief that if AJ can be at home, she should be at home. So, I had only just made it back from hospital when Fo called to say that they were on their way back too.
And she bounced back and has been on better form than ever throughout the festive period. She came to our neighbour’s New Year’s Eve party, which we thought would be very easy as she could come for an hour and then we could pop her back to ours and to bed while the party continued. But she was having none of it. She very clearly told us that, no, she wasn’t going to bed, she was staying at the party, and, what’s more, she would like to dance the night away. And dance she did, she saw it through until past midnight to see in the new year and then, and only, then, would she deign to go to bed.
She’s had a lot of fun hanging out with her big brother, I might even try to sneak a pic of him in.
She’s enjoyed all the socialising that goes on at this time of the year. She’s been bowling twice. This pic os from her friend Connie’s birthday party.
Being a man / being a dad
(Jan 24th: This bit is a bit random! I had a nice chunk of time off for Christmas and had time to fill, what can I say?)
In a previous blog post, and it has been quite the flurry of blog posts this month – for which I can only apologise, I rather pompously announced that I was going to write some ruminations on Daddy Pig vs Bluey’s Dad and what their differences say about the state of fatherhood today. And more than one person expressed an interest in hearing more on this – it was precisely two people but one of them called it an essay, which sounded rather grand. So here we go:
If I were to summarise this “essay” it would be – Bluey’s Dad is cool and Daddy Pig is a dork, a wally, a numpty, a nicompoop, or in Spanish a gillipollas, or any one of those slurs that imply incompetence of an unthinking, harmless idiocy. And my contention is this essay will be that we should dial down on the gilipollas and promote more of the best qualities of dads as exemplified by Bluey’s Dad – we should have more Bluey’s Dads!
Bluey’s Dad is totally invested in his two daughters. He meets them at their level and joins in with their flights of imagination.
But the trouble is that Daddy Pig is far more representative of the generic dad in fiction – a bit of a dork, a wally, a numpty, etc, et al, and so on, and so forth. He’s a figure of fun, living a life somewhat separated from the rest of the family. He’s the father in Mary Poppins before he has his epiphany (sorry for the spoiler!)
My mother was a children’s book writer and she was very sensitive to this depiction of dad’s as dorks, though she would probably not have used the word dork.
The dad in the Biff, Chip, and Kipper books is another example. And he comes from an Oxford University Press-endorsed reading programme. He’s a complete dork. Mum hated those books because of this.
Now, I am not going to argue that not all dads are dorks, nor that all dads are not, at some time, dorkish. And we play up to it. All too often, we see men floundering with childcare pleading for their wives to step in and help (I am consciously using “we” here, btw!)
Women are great at rallying round the sisterhood and being supportive of their fellow women as women and as mothers in a way that I think men are not. I love seeing my mates being good and competent dads and husbands. And I do think we need to recognise this when it happens. We need to signal goodness in men because there is an awful lot of badness on men out there.
The #notallmen hashtag that some men feel the need to add to comments below a post by a woman describing despicable male behaviour is not only trite but also unthinking – men do behave despicably and we should own it, as men. Men do behave despicably and pretending otherwise does no-one any favours.
There is a crisis of despicable male behaviour and where we might have hoped for progress through the generations, there’s a worrying trend, amongst young men, in favour of despicable behaviour. When you have role models such as Andrew Tate, and a man like Donald Trump in the White House, it is hardly surprising that many young men are expressing misogynist opinions and are behaving despicably towards women when men like these model it so loudly.
So, I will be fixing this situation through a comparative study of two cartoon, anthropomorphic dads.
We need better dads – that’s not all we need, of course, we need young men to be able to have viable prospects to look forward to, we need them to have a clear vision of who they are and where in society they fit in, and what they are worth.
But I do think that if dad’s played more meaningful roles in the lives of their children, particularly their sons, it would go some way towards alleviating some of the points above.
When Otto was born, which had been a rather long drawn out affair, and to this day, Otto never does anything in a hurry. We had started off wanting to have a water birth at home and had a very large pool set up in our rather small living room.
After 24-hours of Fo straining it was decided that not only would we not be having the water birth, we would not be having a home birth at all, and we were all to decamp to the hospital. A very decisive midwife told us that “this baby is coming out now”, and sure enough he did.
But then, once it was all done, I found myself being, very gently, ushered out. I didn’t have a very clear idea of what was to come next, but I think I imagined that we’d all be hanging out together for the night. But no, dad’s don’t hang out, they leave.
And so from that very first moment in your child’s life, as a dad, you are considered extraneous. You can now go to the pub and wet the baby’s head with all your other bloke mates, or you could go home and watch Star Wars. FWIW, I don’t think I did either – I can’t remember what I did. But I can’t help but think that it helps no one for dads to be shooed away right at the moment when they become dads.
We need dads to be involved with their children’s upbringing from the get-go and that brings me to the whole Bluey’s Dad vs Daddy Pig thing that this whole bit is supposed to be predicated on! We need to encourage dads to be good dads. So we should avoid depicting them as dorks in stories that will be influential on young minds.
Bluey’s dad is fun, he’s involved. He plays with his girls, but also cooks for them, works, and gives them sage life advice. Daddy Pig, on the other hand, never gets anything right. And he is mocked by his family. In one episode, Peppa and George (her younger brother) build a tree house. They let Mummy Pig in and they are all having a jolly old time. Then Daddy Pig wants to get in too. Peppa demands a password, this turns out to be “Daddy’s big tummy”, and they all think this is very jolly, including Mummy Pig. And funnier still, Mummy Pig stops Daddy Pig from getting back into their house until he gives the password, which, of course is again “Daddy’s big tummy”. Even Daddy Pig’s in-laws ridicule him.
Daddy Pig goes through many pratfalls of this nature – punching holes in walls when he tries to make repairs, falling off ladders, and of course, getting lost and refusing to ask for directions, because of course why not? He would, wouldn’t he? He’s a bloke! Chortle, guffaw, snort and chuckle.
But I don’t think that this infantilisation of dads serves anyone. If you are told from a very early age indeed that dad’s are dorks, that’s the message you will internalise, that’s what you will, as a man, grow into. And men do grow into it. Obviously, we know that if you tell someone that’s what they are like, that’s what they will be like. If you tell dads that they are incompetent dorks, removed from their roles as fathers, that’s what they (we), will become.
And sorry if this all sounds like a sorry apologia for men, I know we have been historically crap, but we all need to pull on the handbrake together.
The Government is proposing to bring in classes for boys teaching them to be aware of inappropriate behaviour. This initiative is partly inspired by the excellent Netflix show Adolescence that shone a focus on how young boys are being influenced in some very disturbing ways by some very disturbing people. I think this can only be a good thing, we need to consistently point out that the likes of Andrew Tate and those manosphere knob-ends are precisely the knob-ends that they appear to be. They are not the men anyone should aspire to be. But the Government can only go so far, at home, we need to be modelling the men that we want our sons to be.
We don’t want our boys to be some sort of Andrew Tate derivatives, nor for them to become Daddy Pig dads. So, we shouldn’t model that, either as knuckle-heads, nor dorks. We should all be more Bluey’s Dad.
Check out the episode where Bluey’s Dad gets pregnant: https://youtu.be/e8ULi9CC6os?si=7oHxdJCy4GOGYfgA
Compare that with this: https://youtu.be/oSEFegIcB-g?si=kqvfpd3-nw5U2Ta5
Just by the by, is there a better song than Tracey Chapman’s “Talking about a Revolution”? It’s what I am listening to right now, and it is just such a fine song, so I thought I would mention it.
I am warming up for a bit of politics further on, so as a starter related to the above:
Kemi Badenoch commented on the Labour plans to educate young boys that I have mentioned. She claimed that these classes were not necessary as the real problem with gender-based violence is people from other cultures. Even if you agree with her racist argument that it’s “other cultures” who perpetrate all violence towards women (and it really isn’t – 87% of sexual violence is perpetrated by white men – people who of course were once young white boys) wouldn’t you want to educate young boys about “our culture”? If “our culture” really is as great as she claims, shouldn’t we do our best to educate our young people about its virtues? Presumably school would be the best place for this education if they aren’t getting it at home.
(Jan 24th: There were some very random notes that went nowhere, even one about Trump. Any note about Trump goes out of date very rapidly! I’ll keep the note about the book as it vaguely relates to the bit about dads.)
Maybe I’m Amazed – John Harris
This is a great book about how a father connects with his autistic son through music. John Harris and his wife go through a lot as parents but their experience is different to ours, well of course it is. James develops, he develops differently but he develops. In one chapter, John realises that James has absolute pitch, something only 1 in 10,000 people have. A truly remarkable ability. When Ava-Jane gets a stat like that it is not generally for being unusually able, it’s more likely to be unusually unlucky.
This quote, however, did chime with me:
“I sometimes go down grim rabbit-holes full of other people’s cruelty and judgement, and nightmarish accounts of people with autism and learning disabilities being locked away. Too many of my thoughts about James are laced with fear: parenthood is always coloured by anxiety, but I envy the easy optimism many parents feel about their kids’ futures, which James’s autism seems to put beyond reach.”
Reform UK
(Jan 24th: sorry… I didn’t delete the Reform bit… in fact, I have been adding to it! I am afraid that I will be banging on about Reform. I know full well that the reach of this blog is minimal and there won’t be many potential Reform voters among the readership. But I do think we all need to put our shoulders to the wheel and call Reform out whenever we can. Many of us find it truly astonishing that the US voted for Trump again, after seeing what he was like the first time around. But I do think that making Farage PM would be very similar to voting Trump back in.)
Reform UK, who we should always refer to as Refuk, which is so appropriate given that Nigel Farage has fucked us once with Brexit and he’ll fuck us again if he ever gets in. It’s quite bold to call themselves Reform UK – because in what way do they really propose to reform the UK? They are going to be beastly to immigrants in many and various ways, we know that. Is that really a reformation in any conceivable sense? Both the Conservatives and Labour have been beastly to immigrants – it’s even working for Labour, see below.
And what have they got beyond that? Privatise the NHS? That’d be big and terrible. Lower a few taxes here and there – whoopdidoop! Wage a war on woke – purlease!
Their candidate roster for the next election will largely be made up of the dregs of the Conservative Party. The ones who lost elections, lost the whip, or jumped before they were pushed.
The latest of these is Robert Jenrick, MP for Newark – I saw someone say that it’s unusual for an MP’s constituency to be an anagram that perfectly describes them.
Two days later:
“On Sunday, another sitting MP, Andrew Rosindell, quit for Reform, citing worries about the deal to hand sovereignty of the Chagos Islands to Mauritius as his main reason.” (The Guardian)
It’s worth mentioning that this Rosindell, an absolute nobody, was a member of a group called “Conservative Friends of Russia” who were disgraced by their close association to Russia and Vladimir Putin.
Reform are stupid and wrong
#1
Immigration is falling and this is bad for the economy
#2
London isn’t a crime infested hellhole – it’s one of the safest cities in the UK and safer than most large cities in the world including pretty much all US cities.
This photo is all you need to see to know that Farage is not fit to be PM of this country.
Weird History
(Jan 24th: This bit really is out of date – it’s Trump, so of course it is. He doesn’t let us breather for one second. As of tonight, I read that his ICE goons have just shot someone else in Minnesota.)
Here’s a weird one. The island of Little Saint James was sold by Denmark to the U.S.A in 1916 as part of the sale of the Virgin Islands (yes Denmark had a colony in the Caribbean – sounds odd but no odder than the UK having colonies there and pretty well everywhere else for that matter). I think this agreement also included an understanding that the US would give up its pretensions on Greenland.
The small island of Little Saint James has much been in the news of late under its nickname of Epstein Island – yup that one. The one that, as one of the few Epstein documents that has been released reveals, Donald Trump visited far more times than he claims or official flight records show. He was secretly visiting the private island in the private jet of a paedophile… make of that what you will.
FWIW, my take on the Greenland thing is that 1) he has a a warped and titanic ego that likes the idea of grabbing a huge chunk of land. 2) His political philosophy is not advanced enough to truly have a position on NATO, he doesn’t give a damn about NATO either way, but he is surrounded by people who do have thoughts about NATO and they hate it. For likes of JD Vance and Stephen Miller hate anything that smacks of internationalism and treaties that limit the uncontrolled might of the US of A. They couldn’t leave NATO without Congress giving it the go-ahead and even the supine Republican Congress people would stop at voting to leave NATO. So the other option, is just to blow up NATO by invading the territory of a fellow NATO member. And 3) he is desperate to do anything to deflect from the Epstein Files.
From the blog that brought you such arcane and mystic predictions including Brexit will be a disaster and Boris Johnson will be an appalling PM, I am betting that there is some truly dreadful stuff about Trump in them there Files.
For ref:
Little Saint James – Wikipedia
This is more random than many of my more random thoughts, but I do sometime wonder how Donald Trump and Ava-Jane can be of the same species. She is so pure, and good, and true, and well, he just isn’t.
Misliterature 