The Sophist: Sometimes I feel like everybody is a sexy baby

But I am the sexiest baby of all

False promises may have been made in this title, as it is alleged to contain no bearing on what I am about to say. Even though I am a sexy baby. Let me tell you five things I learned this week:

ONE

About a million years ago I spent a few months living in a shared house on Albert Street, off Parkway in Camden, North London. My London years had mainly been spent in the East until this point, but I was intrigued by this uphill part of town, with interestingly crumbling people in interestingly crumbly houses that seemed to tilt towards the light. The guys I lived with would walk into Soho. Walking to Soho! And I didn’t have a dog or a child back then so I didn’t really appreciate quite how dazzling it was to have Regents Park and Primrose Hill right on our doorstep, but dazzling it was.

It was an in-between place in my life, and I went straight back East, but I spent about the next 20 years thinking that one day, when I was old and grown-up, I would get to live at the top of London again. I will retire a rich lady with a big house on Hampstead Heath, I have often muttered, in one of those fantasies where it is has to be huge and absolute and a different life altogether for it to happen, ie never. The absolutism of our dreams can sometimes blind us to the compromise that is the possible. I am learning the art of the possible now.

And, to cut short a story so long that I have spent so long trying to explain it and just deleted the whole thing, a long story about five attempts to buy a new place to live in East London and five separate disasters that felled each attempt - we have rented a flat that’s a 15 minute walk from the Heath’s grotty bottom. Not in Hampstead but nearer Camden, like ye olde days. But near enough to my posh old lady future dreams!

It’s half the size of where we lived before and we’ve had to get rid of a lot of stuff, and we’re stumbling over each other, especially if all three of us are foolish enough to try to be in the kitchen at the same time, which is unfortunate as that’s the only place you can eat really, and the pets are also driving us mad and my god, this is it, this is home. I never want to leave.

Liz Truss said something the other day about people in their North London townhouses, trying to suggest that the intelligentsia, the Radio 4 chattering classes, the well meaning liberal-minded-opinionated-but-too-comfortably-off-to-actually-live-in-the-real-world, are here. Something that only furthered my resolve to join them. I always wanted to go where the literati went. I wanted to take my writerly inspiration from the shaggy green hills and the glimpse of Booker prize nominees getting a latte. We’ve even mistakenly been sent some of Charlotte Raven’s post. All my chattering class dreams are here.

Because we now occupy perhaps 26% of one such townhouse (as it’s divided into four flats) with condensation dripping down our windows and happy cheers from the neighbouring pub every time the sport is on. I love the lugubrious moans from the chanting in the Greek orthodox church opposite - I am listening to them as I type this - and the tired and the broken and the lost who walk past our front window to the jumbo-sized doctor’s surgery. Because everyone is not comfortable here - Kentish Town seems to be home to more of the wandering lost than Hackney ever was, and Hackney was a contender.

It’s like the start of any relationship isn’t it - all the things that you initially love about the person who has made your heart flutter are the exact same things that eventually will cause you to leave him. For now, this flat, this place, this street, this land, is everything to me. And when I said I would retire a rich lady who owned a massive house on Hampstead Heath, what I should have said was I will downsize my needs and make a compromise and rent somewhere small but lovely a brisk walk away from the much cheaper side of the Heath, and do it now, in this life, as me.

TWO

When someone says to you, the flatpack instructions are wrong, I’m going to have to bash it round, or drill a couple of holes on the other side, or find some other screws because they sent the wrong kind - beware, you are now exiting the terrain of the humble and enthusiastic engineer and entering the land of the man whose dopamine has all run out and who now just wants to smash his way to the finishing line. I have made one hundred flatpacks in my life and I am sorry to report, they are never wrong. But you are!

And the reason men should not build flatpacks is that - no this is not gross sexism, this is a lifetime of both observation and data crunching - is that they are statistically more likely to be the one with the confidence training to say that the kit is wrong and that they choose to override it. Whereas women, statistically likely to have been socialised with far less confidence in their own capabilities in such matters, will say well the instructions must be right and I must be wrong, it must be me - and they will look and look and look until they figure out what is actually supposed to be happening here. They will stare and stare at the little Morph pictures on the impenetrable drawings until the truth reveals itself like a Magic Eye on a stoner’s bedroom wall in 1994. Something women also have a lot of experience in staring at, as it was the boys who dominated the talking in those rooms. God I was bored. 

Anyway long story short, my daughter now has a cabin bed and I still have a boyfriend. And we are very grateful to him. If he’s reading this. We are very grateful indeed!

THREE 

If your kid has a new friend round for a sleepover and you give them plain pasta for lunch, Wotsits for their afternoon snack and plan to buy Dominos for their dinner, you should probably check what their parents do for a living. And that their dad isn’t a Michelin starred chef who trained at Nobu, who you will then find yourself googling, after this comes up in some humdrum kid chat. You should definitely not end up reading a very interesting interview in which the dad and his co-restauranteur discuss how they learned everything about food from growing up in families who cooked amazing feasts, different every time, and how disappointing it was to go to visit friends whose parents only gave them really unimaginative bland food, how sorry they felt for those poor kids. 

You should definitely not end up reading this interview on your phone while your kid and her mate are eating the Wotsits you gave them, and definitely not directly after the ten year old guest has told you that the colouring in Wotsits is called annatto and is the same thing that is used to colour Red Leicester cheese, something that, you have to admit, you had not actually realised had colouring in it before. Because you think everything is just like that. Because you don’t really think at all. 

Because all this will lead you into your shame space, the one you thought you had got over when you had resigned yourself, really some years ago now, to the fact you have a

child who is a picky eater. And no it didn’t end when she went to school, like people said it would, and no it didn’t end when she turned 8, or 9, or double figures, and your longer term hope that it will absolutely definitely change at secondary school is looking distinctly unlikely too. Still, she’s the tallest child in her class so she’s not exactly starving and, God, just let me do what I can to enjoy our days. 

“What is your least favourite food?” My daughter’s friend asks her as they eat their pizza. A perfectly normal question to which my daughter looks completely blank. This isn’t one she can answer. Her friend is confused. How long have you got, I mutter, it would be easier to ask her to list the 12 things she does eat, and then I feel bad because she doesn’t need any more angst around food and there I go, transferring my shame to her, deepening it like a coastal shelf! 

FOUR

In my better moments of parenting, something the child psychologist Dr Becky Kennedy said on Instagram keeps coming back to me. It isn’t limited to children, either. She spoke about the times a child notices something about themself, like the fact that they’re the only kid in their class who can’t read. Someone who loves them will be tempted to say “You’re doing great with reading,” or “I’m sure you’re not the only one really.”

But, as Dr Becky says:

“When our kids share that other kids can read before they can… or that other kids are faster runners… they actually aren’t looking for a parent to say “No that’s not true!” or “Well, you’re great at something else!” What are our kids looking for? They’re looking for us to be less afraid of this reality than they are.

Our kids are not looking for us to avoid their painful truths. 

Our kids are looking to feel less alone in their painful truths.” 

FIVE  

Now this product I bought is simply a really long hot water bottle with a fleece cover. It’s hilariously long. I actually found out about it while reading a thread about ways to save on your heating bill - someone said she wrapped this around her midriff in the evenings and didn’t need to heat her whole flat, only herself, which was a brilliant idea. It’s marketed for period pains and I imagine it could be good for aching muscles too. But I bought it for our cold new bedroom, so last night I filled it up from the kettle and tried it out. 

My boyfriend said it was disconcerting, like going to bed with another man’s cock, the largest cock in the world, in fact, but he probably doesn’t even remember saying that now, not now that I’ve written it in this newsletter for the world to see. Reader, I don’t care, I hugged the other man’s cock all night schlong, wrapping it all around myself, and it was heavenly. It was still warm this morning. I will share my winter bed with two different cocks forever more. 

Anyway I’ll send some Rightmove links soon. For now, here’s an arty flat in Paris that the brilliant Jessica Stanley linked to in her ace Substack of juicy links, READ.LOOK.THINK. Bye!