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Non-parents, all those parents have been lying to you. Being a parent is a piece of piss. Phoebe is no trouble at all, sleeps most of the time and has hardly even been to the toilet yet. Plus all her food is free and comes out of my wife. In fact this might be the time to put my 1999 plan to milk women into practice and start to turn this thing into a profitable business. But let's not get ahead of ourselves.
Parents say you get no sleep - rubbish. I am getting extra sleep, because I don't have to go anywhere to do any work, so even though I had to get up a couple of times in the night (which I have to anyway thanks to having a 47 year old bladder) and waking up at 5am, I then went back to sleep for a couple of hours later in the day. I don't want to tempt fate, but I am 10,000% certain that it will be like this forever and this isn't just a result of my baby being knackered from the stress of being squeezed down a birth canal.
My wife and baby fell asleep beside me at 6am and I wrote some blogs and replied to some emails and did three hours of largely uninterrupted writing. I facebooked a friend of mine who is a writer and a mother and told her I thought that this baby might increase my productivity (I really waste a lot of my working day pissing around on the internet or staring into space or writing blogs or recording podcasts that make me look crazy). She seemed wryly amused, as if I was being naive and suggested that I might not feel the same in three days. But she failed to realise that Phoebe is the best baby ever and is determined not to follow the stereotype and act like a selfish, crying, shitting dickwad.
I however, am acting like a stereotype, feeling terrified about my responsibilities towards this fragile, tiny child (who despite her elfin like size almost has longer fingers than me - which at least proves that the rumours that Hermione from Harry Potter is the real mother are fallacious). And like all parents in the world, when Phoebe becomes especially still and quiet I have to poke her a bit to make sure she's still alive. It's unnerving how still and angelic she can get. That first night back from the hospital is a properly terrifying twelve hours
I had to go and pick up some groceries and nappies and brave the Shepherd's Bush Green Post Office. I was only out of the house for about an hour and a half (and the half hour was spent queuing and live tweeting my post office experience), but I still missed my family. Touring might be a little tougher than usual for me from now on. Even though there are easier ways of posting parcels I wanted to carry on going to Shepherd's Bush Green post office so I could live tweet again, either to show that I had just been unlucky the last time I was in (and to be honest all but about on one other occasion that I've been there) or that service was indeed always that bad. I feel there may be some comedy to have out of the situation, but maybe having the deficiencies shown up in public might help improve things for the beleaguered people of the Bush. You will have to follow me on Twitter if you want to see the full details of the #postofficequeue, but I was not the only one frustrated by there being only 2 staff for the queue of up to twenty people. I thought that I must be the crazy one in the queue, because the first rule of postofficequeue is that if you can't spot the crazy person in the queue then you are the crazy person in the queue. Plus I was tweeting everything that happened, which was another good clue. But then another man complained loudly that there weren't enough staff and it was always like this and that this was the worst Post Office in the world. He had spoken out which is unBritish and crazy, yet once again it was those of us not speaking out who were the mad ones. He was maybe the sanest man of all.
As it turned out he was a bit crazy, but evenso. Why is Shepherd's Bush Post Office so understaffed? Why are the good people of this horrible borough being treated with so little respect? Could a one man Twitter campaign from an almost completely faded 1990s TV star (no scratch that, person who was on TV in the 1990s who no one really noticed even at the time) bring about change? Would I be seen as a kind of God to the denizens of the Bush, who lets face it, wouldn't be allowed into the Hunger Games for being too scummy and rubbish?
Maybe no one cares at the post office, though I was @ing them in. And as I finally approached the front of the queue another counter quickly opened up. Was this just a coincidence? I went to that counter and the woman, who like all the staff here was polite and helpful in spite of working in the worst place in the world. She told me that if I bought slightly different sized padded envelopes I could save money in the future. She then also told me about their drop and deliver scheme where you can avoid the queues by using a slightly complex card based scheme where you drop your parcels off with a pre-paid card. I was being offered a way out. Was this just to keep me quiet? Could I join the scheme and leave my fellow citizens behind, queuing like dolts? Or was that exactly what Ian Post Office and his paid minion Robert Webb wanted. They wanted to shut me up.
To be honest if I wanted to make my life easier I would use one of the other postal companies, like myhermes who will pick up your parcels from your house. But I want to keep speaking up for the oppressed. Ironically by having such a shit service, Shepherd's Bush Post Office are keeping my custom.
You wouldn't be able to treat livestock the way that the Bush folk are being treated. Something must be done. I will not stop tweeting my queue position and waiting time until something is done. You can't pay me off Ian Post Office. Apart from with actual money. If you give me £25,000 I will say no more about it (and get my parcels delivered by my own personal livery coach).
Anyway if you won one of last week's eBay auctions, your parcels are on the way. Delayed slightly by the inconsiderate arrival of my daughter. Who I will be putting up on eBay next week.
