I almost don’t know where the time has gone.

It’s coming up to eight months since I last posted anything on here.

Eight months.

About the usual span between the discovery of a pregnancy and the delivery of a child…

When last I wrote, my wife was six months pregnant and we were in the latter stages of sorting out our house in preparation for the new arrival. There were upgrades to necessary domestic devices, there was repair work, and there were small-scale construction projects (a cot, a changing table and so on)…

The birth of our first child was medically predicted to occur one week before Christmas. We’d even begun to ‘place bets’ on exactly which date we thought it would happen. Initially, my money was on it being a bit earlier in December. Perhaps even as early as the 2nd or 3rd.

I myself like to try and be a touch ahead of things, or at the very least on the dot. However, my wife is chronically disinclined to be punctual. She is never knowingly on time or early for anything. She cannot help but be late – even if only marginally. This relationship with the clock seems imprinted deep in her DNA.

Any friend who attended our wedding might be able to describe the expression on my face when she arrived down the aisle at exactly the appointed moment. But it was not, as they might think, just admiration for her generous beauty and an overwhelming sense of love. It was also relief and astonishment at her timekeeping. It can only have been accidental.

And so perhaps whichever gene it is that causes vague tardiness was momentarily dominant in our child over the festive season?

Christmas came and went.

Our fingers drummed on sofa arms in anticipation.

We finished binge-watching all seven series of The West Wing, which we’d begun the night after the US election result in early November. Throughout, we’d joked that by carefully calculating our viewing rate our baby’s appearance would be somewhere in the middle of season six!

Then the year turned.

And then. And then. And then.

And then it is now.

Mid-May.

Over the coming months I intend to get my groove on again.

To write several posts here to ‘catch up’ on it all, or some of it.

To relay my experience of fatherhood so far. The ups and the downs. The middle and the edges. I also think it would be quite valuable and healthy to purge thoughts and feelings. The good and the bad. The hollow and the whole.

But for now?

On Saturday 2nd January, at thirty six minutes past four in the morning, our son was born.