On a cold, damp and wet Sunday in south London, I took myself off to the back-up café with my short film notes to try and bring myself up to speed on the project following its 12-month postponement.
If my café, THE café, closed down tomorrow, I’d be devastated. I’ve spent half of my life in there but having the back-up café now, I could survive, live even, with this calibre of latte. And the space itself. I like it. A little less today after owing to a busy morning in there full of young families who couldn’t wait to get on what my great friend ‘The Space Daddy’ calls ‘the programme’, they made me give up the spare chair upon which my bag rested. I really can’t have my bag on the floor.
There were toddlers everywhere and chairs were very much in demand. Obviously, though my circle includes a number of close friends who were never interested in becoming dads and are now making their peace with knowing we’ve effectively killed off our bloodlines, I know that while it’s normal for me to be around people with the same mindset, most people wouldn’t understand anyone not being interested in being a parent.
For me, what I’ve never quite understood is people becoming young parents. To be only a few years into adulthood, and one of the first things you do is become a parent, that still makes no sense to me. Sure, it means that by the time your kids are adults, you’re still a fairly young parent. It’s the limited time they’ve given themselves as child-free adults that I can’t grasp. We know so little about life, we have so many mistakes ahead of us, surely it’s better to enjoy those early adult years free of the responsibility of being young parents.
My parents, for the time, were relatively old. Not having me until their late twenties/thirty mark. That was unusual to have your first child ‘back in the day’. Looking back now, that’s the ideal time to become a parent. You’ve served your adult apprenticeship. You’re ready.
That I never became a parent, it really doesn’t bother me. I was too driven I think, obsessed, with my writing, to want that. Some of that I know was down to grasping how difficult it is for a working class creator to succeed in an industry where the odds are stacked against someone coming from the wrong kind of background succeeding. I felt I needed everything I had to overcome those odds. I was never going to settle for the nine to five life. Money didn’t motivate me enough. It was all about creating work, art, people would remember. Bringing up kids who would’ve probably inherited my crippling OCDs would have got in the way of that.
Even if I’d not had that creative fire in me, I don’t think I’m the kind of person that would’ve welcomed fatherhood. Of course, following this unusual childless route means I am aware that all the things I do for my elderly aunt and uncle for instance, or my elderly neighbour before she finally went into a home, I’m not going to have that help if I surprise myself and make it to their age. That is going to be a problem.
There was a nice moment in a local shop across the road from the back-up café where I ran into Double Denim. He was in a smart green hoodie and his usual moody demeanour was transformed by a brief smile as we saw one another. I think yesterday’s football-related SMALL talk when I exited the café has advanced the slow-moving rapport we’re building.
Getting home, I wiped clean my bag and for a moment, allow myself to ponder how my OCDs would’ve been even worse if I’d had a kid that was doing all the things kids do, that I did, rolling about on the floors of cafés, GP surgeries, touching handrails on buses. Not even an eight-armed God could’ve cleaned a child as fast and thoroughly as I would’ve, armed with wet wipes.
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