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It’s tricky working nights when you have a baby. Phoebe doesn’t seem to respect the fact that I don’t get to sleep until 1 and keeps waking up at 5.30 (though I appreciate we are lucky that she sleeps pretty solidly through the night). I haven’t slept well this week, even on the night that she was in another room with my wife, but this morning I took the early shift, though managed to grab another half an hours sleep when Phoebe had a nap at about 8.
But I was pretty wiped out and making silly errors and I wondered what proportion of parents manage to kill or incapacitate themselves in these early months of their baby’s life, just due to being too knackered to concentrate properly.
Catie and Phoebe went out to the shops in the late morning and I started preparing lunch. I was hungry, having already been up for seven hours and snacked on an apricot. I had bought these last night from Tesco on the way home from a gig, impressed that you can buy fresh apricots in tiny supermarkets these days, though acknowledging that the fact we can do this and the air miles involved in getting these tiny fruits to us is probably going to destroy the world for my daughter. Still, nice though.
I ate one apricot and threw the pit away in the bin, then I ate another, whilst doing some mundane task. I looked down at the half eaten apricot, ready to extract the stone, but there was no stone. I had either eaten it with the bite I had taken, or possibly absent mindedly popped it into my mouth rather than the bin. I slightly panicked. And became convinced that the apricot pit was lodged in my throat. It certainly felt like it. And for a few seconds I wondered if this was the end. Was I going to choke to death whilst eating fruit? I couldn’t slap myself on the back and there was no one else in the house. I coughed and wretched but the stone was not dislodged. Were my wife and baby going to come home to find me blue and lifeless on the kitchen floor. I wasn’t really scared, just annoyed that I had managed to take my own life in such a needless and embarrassing way. Not sure how Steve Bennett from Chortle would report this one, “Choked Herring” perhaps, though he might need to put “Smoked Herring” in brackets to clarify the pun he was attempting.
I still seemed able to breathe and I drank some water and it went down. Was it possible that the sharp stone had stuck into my delicate throat lining and might shift at any moment. Or if I had swallowed it could it rip open my digestive tract? I was annoyed as I was going to see a play this afternoon and thought I might have to go to A and E (or the morgue).
I googled “I swallowed an apricot pit” to see if I was about to die and although it didn’t seem that I was, I did find out the apricot stones contain cyanide. But only in small quantities. I’d only be in trouble if I absent-mindedly ate all the apricots with their stones in them and then popped to Tescos and absent-mindedly bought about 80 more and then absent-mindedly ate all them and their stones as well.
But it definitely felt like my throat was a little blocked and I was still worried. I asked Twitter if there was any animal that ate apricot stones that I could swallow to save me (you’d be amazed about how many people tweeted me to say, “watch out an old lady did that with a spider once”, as if that hadn’t been my fucking joke). Someone said that dodos did. But whilst it might be possible to take dodo DNA from a dodo in a museum and splice that together with pigeon DNA and then hatch a dodo and raise it to maturing before swallowing it whole, I thought the stone might have passed or killed me by then.
Oh my God. If I had swallowed it, then I was going to have to get it out that way. I was not looking forward to that. And anyone who says I was and that I like to insert rough and sharp fruit seeds and stones up my anus so I can have the pleasure of expelling them again is lying.
After downing two pints of water I thought it was unlikely the pit was still in my throat and it was suggested that it had just scratched my uvula on the way down. I realised I was going to be OK, or at least not die, but it had been a weird few moments, contemplating my mortality. I hadn’t been scared of the void, just embarrassed that this was the way I was going to go and that everyone would be saying, “Oooh, look at him, eating apricots. Vain man". And annoyed that I wouldn’t see my daughter grow up. She will learn that her father is a useless idiot, but it would be a shame for her to have to suffer the shame throughout her life, having to tell people she had no father. And then tell them why.
I am going to live every second from now on to the fullest in gratitude for this second chance I have been given. Especially the second when the apricot reemerges. That second is going to be amazing.
