Richard Hearn takes stock

It is now four years since I started writing this weekly column. The then editor of Latest Homes contacted me after I’d sent her a speculative article involving trying to explain to our (then only) son which Star Wars was the ‘first’. We met in a coffee shop and she asked me to write a regular column. In the same week, my wife had found out she was pregnant. I didn’t actually tell the editor at the meeting, although I felt it might provide me with at least another 450 words.

“It’s become a record of all the different stages. The big ones, like when they start walking, talking or able to name dinosaurs”

Four years on, and Youngest™ is now only a year younger from being the age The Boy was when I started the column. I’m very glad to have been given the opportunity. On a personal note, it’s become a record, perhaps purely for myself, of my feelings and thoughts of all the different stages. The big ones, like when they start walking, talking, or able to name dinosaurs. The tiny stuff too, the eccentricities that all children exhibit, like the way The Boy always wanted to open the microwave, or when Youngest™ had to wear a striped hat the whole time.

Has the writing of my column changed events? Does observing – and then writing about it – somehow change it? Possibly. There have certainly been moments that happened where either I’ll think, or someone else will say, “that’s going in the column.” A parent turning up at a party with a Lego bag full of wine. The Boy in the park being chased by a dog with the same name as him, the owner shouting it out. (First name only. Otherwise it would be ridiculous.)

I also get to see Paul Lewis’s excellent illustrations for this column reflecting my own life back to me in crisp Technicolor (check out his website, by the way). They’re definitely bespoke illustrations, unless he really did have an illustration of an owl sitting on a fridge freezer or a whale full of hazelnuts, and then receives my emailed column, saying: “At last! I get to use that one!”

My kids take it for granted seeing my glum face in a magazine. As The Boy can now read my column, and Youngest™ will too, I hope they’ll look on it kindly in the future. I’d better choose a good time to stop too. I don’t want my last column to be about them choosing me the worst nursing home they can find as revenge.

Illustration: Jake McDonald www.shakeyillustrations.blogspot.com