There are very few ways in which my first son is like Princess Diana. At the time of writing, and unless he’s recently become the patron of a landmine charity without my knowledge or more importantly consent, I make it two.
David Whitehouse
1) He is like a candle in the wind.
In that he needs shielding. And he’s unpredictable. The other day he lost his mind because I showed him a glove.
2) He has been photographed a lot.
Not only does this not differentiate him from Princess Diana, but it doesn’t differentiate him from any toddler born post the advent of the camera phone. Except for one. My second son.
I don’t have the time to continually photograph my second son. I am too busy preventing my first son from removing my second son’s scalp with the television remote control.
But equally, I don’t have the inclination to continually photograph my second son. I know from the experience of continually photographing my first son that, of the ten thousand photographs I might take, I’ll perhaps refer again and again to no more than six of them. Like the one in which, from a certain angle with a certain light, he looks a little like the actor Will Ferrell. The rest become a kind of digital landfill, existing in the ether as a permanent unchecked record of a solitary human life.
This is just one of the many ways I pay my second son much less attention than my first son. On the countless nights I spent gently rocking my first son to sleep, his mother and I developed a system for turning off the lights we’d need to walk beneath before we put him in bed, for fear of waking him up. On some days, we debate whether it’s even worth putting my second son to bed at all.
My first son had the diet of a lactose-intolerant Royal, as tailored with great expertise and care by their personal chef (which, now I come to think of it, is another way in which he’s like Princess Diana). My second is more of a leftover disposal unit, his meals dictated by variable factors ranging from tiredness to our new and less stringent attitudes to use by dates.
My first son had a wardrobe of clothes never less than clean, stylish and pressed. My second son doesn’t even have a wardrobe. It’s more like a couple of shoeboxes. In one is a flannel and a hat.
None of this means I love my second son any less than I love my first son. It just stands as firm evidence of how I’ve become lazier as a parent, through necessity, tiredness and a waning sense of wonder for the miracle of life caused by over-exposure. That’s all. It’s about my failings, but it is also proof I’ve not failed at all. Because I can say with hand on heart that I’d feel equally sad about either of them coming to tragic early deaths in a Paris underpass. Or marrying Prince Charles.
The Long Forgotten by David Whitehouse is published by Picador on March 22nd.