If I’d been a parent in the 80s, I realise I would have been that strange, sad man at the corner shop; my wallet bulging not with cash, but a folded concertina of baby pictures
My son is beautiful. I don’t mean as a perfect little iteration of life’s grand design; I mean merely, aesthetically, he is pleasing to look at. I was not a particularly beautiful child. Or, if I was, the fact went consistently unrecorded by the camera technology of 1980s Ireland. Perhaps they’d not yet discovered glass and contrived lenses from potato skin and gravel. This could explain why the few pictures that survive of me as a baby – I can only presume the rest were so hideous they are now buried in a tar pit – show me looking like a blurry photocopy of Ken Dodd’s kneecap.
Of course, every parent believes their child is beautiful, even those couples whose babies look like they’ve recently retired from long and harrowing careers as oil rig workers. They say this evolutionary urge to find babies cute is to preserve the child from predation by jealous parents, before which, I presume, our mammalian ancestors routinely got sick of all the crying and threw their furry little parasites into nearby lakes.
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