Baby Vaizey
Our first child was born yesterday morning, and as you can probably guess he is wonderful - extremely good looking and obviously highly-intelligent.
Iain Dale suggested I blog live from the birth - but he is a man obsessed (thanks for the plug in the Guardian for the blog, by the way, Iain) - so this will have to do.
I hadn’t realsied that children sit their first test the minute they are born. Joseph (our baby’s name) got 9/10 on his Apgar score, and 10/10 on the resit, taken at 5 minutes. It covers important things like breathing as well as a wonderful category - “irritability” - forwhich he got full marks from the start.
Joseph is already taking after me - he screams if no one is paying attention or food is removed while he is still hungry.
One of the side-effects of having a child is that you can start to appreciate other people’s baby stories. My mum has been regaling us with stories of my late father’s completely unreconstructed approach to childbirth. He was determined that my brother was born before 5th April, so that he could get a full year’s child allowance from the college where he taught (£50 at a time when he earned £2000 a year). So he drove my mother up and down the cobbles of Merton Street in Oxford in their Morris Minor, to the amazement of passing tourists. When my mother duly went into labour the next day, he told her she had a stomachache. When she was about to deliver, the midwife called him, and he replied “I can’t come - I’ve just got to a good bit in the James Bond novel I’m reading”. A different age.