February 2007
Dear Dave,
You’re right – I have been getting a little ahead of myself
in my correspondence so far. I should probably tell you some more about myself
and my family.
My name is Ed, I’m thirty-three, I live in Edinburgh and I’m
a housedad. I used to be a computer programmer in a Large Banking Organisation.
I met my wife, Sarah, at LBO. She works in marketing. At the point our eldest
son, Fraser, was born, I gave up lounging around surfing the internet and
drinking coffee all day in order to put in some hard graft looking after him.
He’s now six. We also have Lewis who’s four and Marie who’s not long turned
two. Most mornings these days, I’m lucky to have an opportunity to check my
email, let alone stir up a flame war on a Star
Trek fansite just for fun. As for coffee, the house is littered with dozens
of half-full mugs of tepid Cafédirect I’ve hurriedly put down for a minute and
never had a chance to return to. (Worryingly, last Tuesday, I found one in my
sock drawer.)
We get by, though. Sarah is happy with her job most of the
time and does well for us. Her boss at LBO is a bit of an idiot who tends to
favour those members of the team who go golfing with him (i.e. the men) but,
hopefully, he’ll do something really stupid soon and get banished to the
Swedish office. Fraser’s enjoying school, Lewis starts in August and Marie
might get a place at nursery in the autumn. (Six months to go!)
People have already begun asking me what I plan to do in my
spare time once I’ve got all three children out of the house. The obvious
answer is that I’m going to eat my breakfast in peace while catching up on the
headlines on BBC Red Button and then follow that with a spot of cleaning, a
chocolate biscuit and an actually hot cup of coffee. Unfortunately, most of my
interrogators find it mildly disappointing that I don’t have a scheme for world
domination ready to put into action during my two hours a day... on weekdays...
during term-time... when all the kids are well.
Perhaps they’re right. Am I setting my aim too low? Maybe I can achieve more than sorting out the
wilderness beyond the backdoor or filing the bank statements from the year
before last. After all, I no longer have cleaning the windows left to look
forward to. (Sarah found stuff growing on the inside of one of them the other
day so I had to bring the maintenance schedule forward. They’re good until the
end of the decade now.) Let’s see... What are the possibilities?
I could put more work into the script of Housedad! – The Musical. It’s a classic
tale of one man’s struggle to be accepted into the local Women’s Institute,
featuring nuns on roller skates, performing dolphins, a dream sequence
involving Princess Leia in a gold bikini and the music of S Club 7. I see it as
a semi-autobiographical work with myself played by H from Steps.
Maybe I could learn a new skill. From taxidermy to Kung Fu,
there are a wealth of options out there. I’m sure every single one of them has
some kind of practical application for childcare as well. If not, I suppose I
could get a job. There must be something available that runs for a couple of
hours on a weekday morning. It probably involves being underpaid, overworked
and getting filthy, though. I’ve had enough of that already.
Crime is another alternative, complete with flexible hours,
performance related bonuses and low entry requirements. My preference would be
for some form of pyramid selling fraud or chain-letter scam. I could send out
letters with six names on (mine and five aliases). The recipients would have to
send everyone on the list three shares in Nintendo, take the top name off, add
their name at the bottom and pass it on. If I ever needed to hide evidence, I’d
quickly give it to one of the kids, tell them it was really important and wait
approximately a minute for it to mysteriously vanish. I’d have little chance of
being caught and I’d own Mario. Excellent.
Or maybe I’ll just have a rest. I’ll be owed seven and a
half years of lunch hours by then – that’s an awful lot of Bargain Hunt...
Yours in a woman’s world,
Ed.
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