The eldest’s 21st party promises to be as wild as his fifth

Many years ago, I was woken in the middle of the night, in the pitch black, by the sensation of my own bedside clock being pressed hard against my left eyeball.

“Look at all the numbers,” a voice said.

At the time, the oldest one was two, and he had just graduated from a cot to a bed without bars. Once he realised that he was no longer imprisoned, he took to roaming around the house in the night like some paranormal presence, knocking over books and dialling Russian phone numbers. I recall the incident with the alarm clock chiefly because I wrote about it, a fragile impression reinforced by a skeleton of prose.

Because I wrote about it, I also vividly remember teaching him to ride a bicycle, when I failed to realise that he was probably still a bit young to learn, mistaking his grim determination for readiness. I grew impatient on the second day and let go of the seat, right after promising him I would never let go, and he fell off and called me a willy-man in front of everyone in the park. We had to take a few weeks off after that.

Later on, I pressed him into service more directly, whenever I needed to know what made the young people of today tick. I once persuaded him to eat lunch three times in the same day for an article about children’s restaurants. Because I took notes, I remember that, at the middle restaurant, he ordered something called Jurassic chicken, which turned out to be breaded chicken pieces moulded in the shape of various dinosaurs. He looked at his plate first in disappointment, then dismay.

Youthful specialists

“None of these dinosaurs,” he said, “are from the Jurassic period.” It was the first time I thought it best to defer to his specialist knowledge on a given subject, but not the last. He was six.

Last week he turned 21. I hadn’t been sent a party invitation, but I managed to procure one — my wife has spies among his contacts. From what I had gathered, it promised to be a wild evening that, if he wasn’t careful, could end up with him slumped in a corner covered in sick, like his fifth birthday party all over again.

I attended the rather more staid lunch celebration later, by which time he was feeling much better. I did not have particularly useful or portentous advice to offer him.

I simply wanted to wish a happy birthday to the person who taught me how to be a father, more or less from scratch. Before he came along, I knew nothing; by the time he was two, I could cut a baby’s fingernails without feeling faint. By the time the next child came along, I could do it with kitchen scissors, in the dark.

I never did write about the day he demanded to know what sex was, and for that reason my memory of the occasion is hazy.

The moment is robbed of place — it could have happened in the kitchen, or in his bedroom, or on holiday — but he could not have been more than five or six.

I only remember that, because of his insistence, his mother ended up giving him a full and frank explanation while I stood by in silence.

“No, sir,” I said.

I suppose I never wrote about it back then, because I imagined that one day in the future he might be old enough to be embarrassed by it. That day, my young friend, was his birthday.

— Guardian News & Media Ltd