If you’re skimming this post only for the baby news, the big update in the last few weeks is that we’ve started weaning! (If you’re bored of all the baby news, I can only apologise.) So far, the good news is that he’s been more than happy to experiment with food. Sometimes, when we’re feeling chill and modern, this has included strips of carrot, sweet potato, avocado, and so on. Also pancakes and latkes! At other times, after we’ve talked ourselves into paranoid around choking, we’ve retreated to the mashed baby food of yore like porridge, mashed potato and yoghurt.
Either way, he’s definitely into it, and is also methodically working his way through the allergens. (Obviously, you should introduce allergens in priority order based on how sad you would personally feel if your baby couldn’t eat them. Dairy would be tragic. Shellfish less so. I am not a doctor.)
Mainstream clinical advice is that babies should not consume ice cream or beer, but this doesn’t extend to parents. So on a sunny Saturday in March, we celebrated his very first high-chair meal on with a trip to the Crystal Palace Food Market. We’d never visited before, but the ice cream flavours included rhubarb, so we will be going back. From there, we moved on to the Gipsy Hill Brewery Taproom. Originally, this was driven a birthday voucher for a brewery tour from Tash and Cormac, but over email the company had patiently explained that it would be hard for them to deliver a brewery tour now that production has moved to Kent, and perhaps I’d be happy if it was converted into a voucher for drinks at the taproom instead? More than happy, guys!
Another big family outing in March was Randi’s citizenship ceremony at Lewisham Town Hall in Catford! In the interest of protecting his privacy I won’t post the (mandatory) photo of Randi posing with a portrait of the King, but while anything involving the monarchy is always going to feel very odd – especially with an American – my overwhelming feeling was how warm and Londony the ceremony was. Most of the time, you likely just take for granted quite how wide the range of backgrounds in the city is. But having everyone’s home country* announced one-by-one as they collect their naturalisation certificates felt like a peek into the superdiversity engine which, I increasingly suspect, is an essential foundation to sustain liberalism today.
I also found it very funny that the newly-minted citizens were divided into two sections of the chamber based on whether they had chosen to say the religious ‘oath’ or non-religious ‘affirmation’ of allegiance. I understand this was for boring practical reasons of making sure everyone said the right magic words at the same time, but it felt like they were setting things up for a controversial revival of CBBC’s excellent gameshow 50/50 (ask your parents).
I will also note, with my historian hat on, that we were promised a “history of the borough” in the email and very much did not receive one, even though Jay Foreman has produced some great videos on the London Government Act 1963.
But still, I’d taken the day off work for the occasion, so after we finished up at the Civic Suite (which charmingly includes the fancy old Mayor’s chair from the council chamber as a novelty seat in the foyer) we headed over to the Perry Hill pub for an authentically British celebration. It’s taken a while, but at least everybody in his household now shares at least one common passport!
Recently we also had Reema and Esther over for dinner, during which I hope we successfully encouraged Esther to reconnect with her old school pal David Broadband. A few nights later, Randi and I were invited over to kick off the long Easter weekend with NCT friends Jordan and Miska. And speaking of NCT: a week later, we caught up with the rest of the gang at Horniman Market, and it is true that knowing just a few parents with kids the same age and within walking distance (even if those kids are still amusingly different sizes!) is a really nice thing to have.
But getting back to Easter itself: our biggest family adventure in recent weeks was to Bury St Edmunds, which was an exceptionally lovely trip. The sun was shining, our Airbnb came with its virtually its own secret entrance to the Abbey Gardens, and both Bubbe and baby got to experience Suffolk for the first time. Shout-out to Randi for remembering to take us all to Nowton Park after she discovered it on a run last time, and to the cheesemonger back in Bury who sold us a wide variety of very tasty cheeses for our Saturday night feast! Then, on Sunday, we took the train to Diss for a very special Sunday roast at Ampersand Brew Tap with my uncle Derek and aunt Ginny and cousins Julie and Daisy.
I don’t get to see this side of the family very often, but we had such a great afternoon catching-up on everything from baby news (massive congratulations to my cousin Kieron!) to the Artemis II space mission, which Derek was following with the same baseline interest and enthusiasm which my dad would have had. I am also grateful to Daisy for agreeing to split a chocolate brownie with me, as otherwise the prospect of dessert would have been dashed. Afterwards we all went for a walk on the fens nearby, before returning to the brewery where Randi – clearly envious of my earlier haul at Gipsy Hill – picked up some craft beers of her own. The perfect Easter outing.
We very much intend to keep returning to East Anglia as a family, even though we’re now another generation removed, so I hope we did a reasonable job with our first indoctrination attempt. But we also have brainwashing goals back in London too, and perhaps none more important than Hampstead Heath.
Josh and I have been promising each other for literally decades now that we would slowly mind-trick our future children into enjoying long walks by meeting up on the Heath, and last weekend we finally accomplished this for the first time! I mean, sure, not everyone was walking yet. And at one point we actually had to exit the Heath to save the buggy from a dust storm. But we got there, so onwards and upwards.
(Pro-tip: we were looking for a semi-affordable lunch in Belsize Park beforehand and came across Brad & Dills, which is tucked implausibly around what feels like a hospital service road but I promise is real and does excellent bagels. I also accidentally ordered more doughnuts here than I meant to by saying “we’ll take one of each!” and not realising there were more than two kinds, but I regret nothing.)
Finally, we’ve also managed to watch a couple of long-form things recently! The first was Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery, i.e. the third installment of the wonderful Benoit Blanc murder mysteries, and honestly I could enjoy these forever. Ideally I’d enjoy them in an actual cinema, but Netflix’s release window is a crime all of its own, so we tried to watch it on Beth’s account as, no, we still don’t have Netflix. This was our intention, at least, but actually we ended up adding a “Beth” to Sam Pow’s Netflix account (look, if you sign into Netflix on our TV, it’s gonna stay there for a while) and triggering a wave of confusion on her side about what on earth was going on. Sorry, Sam!
The other thing we saw – yesterday, in fact! – was Heart Wall at the Bush theatre. This was the other voucher from my birthday last year which was rapidly reaching its expiration date (thanks, Katie and James!) so Randi and I were doubly excited to find one of the Bush’s “relaxed performances” on a weekend matinee. Essentially, this just means there’s an expectation that some members of the audience, for a variety of reasons, may need to make some noise or leave and re-enter the show. It’s a brilliant idea, especially if – like us – you have a baby who is largely willing to sleep through the performance. (He woke up at the end to the sound of clapping all around him, which must have been a little weird.)
Anyway: the play itself was also brilliant! Don’t fool yourself into thinking that we picked something child-friendly for his first theatre outing. This is an emotional family drama about buried grief, set somewhere in the North West of England, and staged mostly in the local pub. (It’s the kind of pub where everybody knows each other and the karaoke machine is always available, I’d like to voice my respect here for the audience members who volunteered to have a go at some karaoke beforehand.)
In the play proper, we start with 23 year old Franky’s surprise visit home from her detached London life. But despite what you might guess, it’s not really a play about class or place. Instead, we see the unravelling of the tragic events which clouded Franky’s childhood, building to an emotional confrontation with dad Dez. Honestly, Heart Wall is just one of those plays where everything just kinda works. Every individual performance is very strong, there’s a good balance of light and dark, and the pace moves well through a single act. Highly recommended.
Finally, and apropos nothing, please enjoy my sad face when I realise I’ve taken the wrong branch of the Windrush line home after a day in the office:
(*P.S. If you’re thinking that ‘home country’ is a confusing term for me to choose here, because of course Britain is now also a home country, the truth is that I originally wrote ‘country-of-origin’ before deciding it sounded too much like a food label.)
