Have to catch an early train

I had a day trip over to Stockholm last week, to meet a company who do audio book versions of medical textbooks. Yes! Nine years of education pay off with the perfect job combination! Finally! I knew I'd done all those extra exams for a reason.

Or, well, finally pending a test recording of me reading out ten solid pages of anatomy. You have to add your own little descriptive notes to figure captions, saying what you can see and dropping in helpful explanations. This is quite hard. Reading out two-paragraph-long sentences containing nothing but eight-syllable words is bad enough, but improvising helpful notes on pictures of naked anatomy models really stymied me. "She looks kind of bored? And her haircut is from the seventies." I think that's a vital part of the learning medicine experience.

It's very odd, turning up in another city for a few hours for an audition. Or interview, this was both, really. I get the two terms very confused these days, in the same way that my brain confuses exam and performance stress. Before a show, I dream of sitting naked in an exam hall, unable to read the paper. I don't have so many exams these days, but before other life stresses, like moving house, I dream of being naked on stage, unable to produce any lines. I clearly have some nudity issues to address.

Swedish trains are fantastic. It's fairly surreal to wake up on a train, watching the eerily blue and white snowclad forests rushing by like something from a Russian classic. It's even more surreal when the carriage is mostly decked out in polished wood and has actual compartments. There was an honest-to-god restaurant car. The couple opposite me spent the whole journey in there, doubtless sipping Gibsons with Eva Marie Saint and making smart alec remarks about their lives in marketing.

I was almost overcome with surreality when I went to the toilet. The window was open a crack, and the room was chilly, unlike the rest of the toasty carriage. Someone had filled the bin with beer, left it there to chill. But that wasn't the weird thing. The weird thing was that the entire toilet was spotless, everything worked and it didn't stink of unflushed poo and urinal cakes. And there was no graffiti.

What kind of a crazy world is this? I'm putting it down to the continued sleep deprivation. I read that article in the Guardian yesterday, the one that tells us lack of sleep turns all our genes off. No wonder I feel like I've devolved recently.

Freja sleeps fairly well when she wants to. Sadly, what she'd rather have is devoted attention. She's gone off the pacifier, she insists on having a little finger to suck on instead. And it only counts if you also hold her ten centimetres away from your face and talk to her whilst maintaining unblinking eye contact. Anything less than that and she starts filling out adoption papers.

It's not in any way that we aren't dedicated to her whims. Far from it; I'm also thankful for the unique historical viewpoint it gives me into the lives of Louis XV's courtiers. But come 0400, when your arms are cramping from holding her and you're terrified you might fall asleep standing up and drop her as your grip relaxes and she is still shouting at you because your finger is two degrees off the perfect suction angle, then it's easy to see why the waking world seems to be viewed through a glass of cloudy cider and my eyes and spine have fused into a single hotrod of tired pain. These are indeed the days when you wish your bed was already made.

F is protected from all this by some kind of genetic barrier. Sleep deprivation may have shut down our  pancreases (pancreai?), but it has activated a bunch of hard-coded parental behaviours that divert all our frustration and anxiety on to each other instead. It's the same gene that convinces me I'm not in pain when F swings on my armpit hair, or prevents V from running shrieking into the next country after a particularly bulldog-like breastfeeding session.

She's still totally worth it, of course. I had a lovely conversation with her, during one of the finger-sucking staring matches last night. She has a grunting language that she speaks round the edges of my fingernails. It sounds a bit like a recitation of all the Inuit words for snow. No idea where she picked it up, but she's clearly a towering genius.

Back to School

Tough week, this one.

I've been helping out as a teaching assistant this week. It's the first week I've been working full time since F was born. To celebrate this, she decided to have the worst weekend's sleep she's ever had.

My wife very nobly said that I should get a good night's sleep on Sunday, ready for a pre-dawn start. The plan was that I'd sleep on the sofa bed, she'd take F and deal with any baby-related duties overnight. It wasn't, with hindsight, what you might call a sensible plan, really. Having the meagre thickness of a single door between me and the ever-increasing lung power of my daughter was never going to work.

I should never have agreed to the plan in the first place. The idea of snoozing peacefully next door as my wife coped with everything, scant metres away, gave me a twinge of guilt. Just not enough to stop me going ahead with it.

Come four o' clock, when F had been screaming for five hours straight, it was time to give in. Twice, I'd poked my head round the door only to be shooed away by my wife. She was determined to see the plan through, and if F wasn't going to stick to it, at least I bloody well should. I can't imagine it was a plan that the most competent mother could ever have seen through. Five hours of screaming, stubborn refusal to settle while your husband slumbers next door would dent even the most adamantine will to succeed. But neither of us could quite see things that coherently at 0500 with 4 kilos of shrieking daughter in full effect. I managed to take over for a while, then I had to go, leaving her with our daughter/foghorn.

After eight hours of looking after other people's children, I returned home to find a sort of fraught peace had established itself. My wife was staring into the middle distance with an ashen face and the kind of facial expression that puts you in mind of typhoon victims. F was blissfully asleep and remained so for many hours, as though sweetly incapable of noise above 200 decibels. It has stuck in my mind as a wonderful picture of new parenthood.

Teaching drama is always a lark. You're actively encouraging kids to step outside the boundaries of normal social convention. It's a bit like throwing dynamite at a volcano to teach it to respect your property. The lessons I'm helping with are drama in English; the kids are between ten and fourteen. It's just the perfect age for getting them to do embarrassing mime games in front of potential future dates.

One exercise is a game called 'What Are You Doing?'. The kids are all remarkably fluent in English, even able to improvise to a certain extent. The game involves them suggesting an action to mime to each other. We thought this afternoon's group were doing well, so we advanced to the expert stage. Rather than just miming 'I'm doing X', they had to mime 'I'm doing X with a Y'.

We were hoping for silly and challenging suggestions, like 'I'm dancing with a frog' or 'I'm brushing my teeth with a fish'. That's the fun of the game, to mime something ridiculous, regardless of how bizarre the suggestion is. And the secret of improvisation, of course, is to never say no to anything. So it was with a dutiful sense of artistic integrity that we watched a chubby thirteen-year-old mime out 'I'm raping someone with a pen.'

A few years ago, I remember reading an interview with Michael Gove in which he mentioned wanting the UK's schools to be modelled on the Swedish system (presumably not the part in which the state pays for it all). Now, I'm sure the kid was an outlier. So I hope, at least. All the same, I'm not sure that particular lesson would make it into the new curriculum.

Peace in our Time

Pacifiers are a mixed blessing, I think.

Baby has only just taken to them. Previously, she's spit them out with a look of sheer disgust, one that said 'what do you take me for, that's clearly not a nipple you morons.' Over the last week, she's decided that there is one in her collection that is acceptable. It's a small white half-moon one, with a hippy peace sign on the back. And then from acceptable, it's quickly become a favourite friend.

This is partly great, because it means she'll happily lie on her back for hours, gazing idyllically at the ceiling and munching away on nothing. We can sleep during this time, and it's also helping space out her meals a bit. Instead of immediately resorting to bottles whenever she makes the combination of pouting and grunting that indicates food, we can fob her off with the dummy for a bit.

There it is, though, that 'fob her off'. That's what sticks in my craw a bit. I'm lying to my daughter! Fooling her into chewing on petrochemical rubber. It's going to deform her palate and give her crooked hillbilly teeth and anxiety disorders when she's older and aaaa I'm a bad dad again, aren't I?

That's just paranoia, though, I'm getting used to ignoring that voice in my head. Or entire side of my brain, as the case may be. Harder to get round is the other downside to the pacifier.

It's this - when she loses it or spits it out, she now throws an instant yelling fit. Now, okay, we're gaining sleep overnight by using it. Previously, a yelling fit meant one of us getting up and walking her around or sitting with her on the sofa for a bit until she settled. Now it means staggering to the cot, replacing the lost precious and then collapsing back. Easier, right?

Not when you do it every ten minutes for two hours, I would say. The classic game of Daddy Pick It Up has already begun in earnest.

I was so tired this morning that I couldn't remember the Swedish word for pacifier. I had to go and get my dictionary, my little blue and black Norstedts Fickordbok, to look it up. I leafed through, going from 'do' and overshooting into 'dur' words, running my finger down the page until I found the entry.

But the weird thing was, there was no Swedish definition of the word. There was just a word that looked a bit like 'dnning', but wasn't even clearly in English letters. Phonetics, maybe? Scanning the page, I discovered that all the other words there had the same incomprehensible definitions. This was quite disturbing. I couldn't read any more. My brain was fractured, I'd sprained it by not sleeping enough.

Then I worked out that I was still in bed, too tired to actually fetch the dictionary and just dreaming that I'd done so. And then Freja dislodged her pacifier and started yelling again, and I had to get up.

Fatties' Day

Fettisdagen is the Swedish for Shrove Tuesday, Fat Day in literal translation. They don't do pancakes.

They do better than pancakes.

Let me say that again, as I wouldn't lightly deploy that sentence. They. Do. Better. Than. Pancakes. Pancakes are a Swedish staple, in fact. Traditionally you have them on a Thursday, along with a bowl of thick yellow pea and ham soup, and delicious they are too.

But they pale in comparison to the Semla.

Semla are how you start your Lent off over here. They've been selling them in the shops for over a month, rather in the same vein as the way that Creme Eggs turn up in the shops round about last November these days. Apparently Sweden gets through 50 million Semlor a year. That means about 5 per capita. I know for a fact many Swedes don't eat them, so somebody must be knocking the numbers up somehow. Quite how, I couldn't say. I certainly don't know anyone who's eating them all the time, whenever he gets a chance.

One of their kings died of a surfeit of semlor, apparently. Smart fella, I like the cut of his gib.

Semlor are cardamon buns scopped hollow, filled up with almond paste and whipped cream, then dusted with icing sugar. Sometimes they're called a hetvägg, a hot wall, because you serve them in a bowl of hot milk. That doesn't appeal to me, I can't think that turning it into a platchy mess of warm dough would improve on the lush crispness of the original.

They are nothing to do with babies, but they are to do with me adjusting to life in Sweden, hence a blog post about them. There's no amount of culture shock you can't get round with enough whipped cream, apparently.

We're a multicultural family, of course, so we're also having pancakes tonight. Life is good.

Dinner Time

I made Toad in the Hole for dinner tonight. The Guardian had an article on how to make a good one earlier in the week, and I got hit with a wave of nostalgia. We used to eat it fairly regularly at home when we were kids, but I haven't had it in years. Funny what you miss, moving away. So far, the things I miss most are good thick rashers of smoky bacon and Colgate Total toothpaste. Ah, the taste of home.

Toad in the Hole isn't eaten in Sweden, although there's equivalents like tjock pan kaka (fat pancake). People give you funny looks if you ask for Paddan i Hålet. Something about the idiom of referring to your sausages as amphibians, I suppose. We're not so particular back home, where I hear everyone eats horse now. Deliberately or otherwise.

My wife gave me one of her askance looks when I offered to have a go at cooking it. Fair point - I have never cooked it before, and worse, she has never eaten it before. She's... I guess 'extremely cautious' is a good way of describing her attitude to new foods. I can't entirely blame her, some of my more experimental cooking (mulled spice brownies, economy banger stew) can be pretty unpalatable. But it was okay - rather than refusing to countenance this offering, she only waited a couple of days before giving the project a green light.

People keep asking if we're eating properly. The baby certainly is, and actually, we're doing pretty well too. I've adapted my wife's long habit of eating two meals a day, a good Swedish breakfast of crackers and cheese, then whatever we end up cooking at night. It can be frustrating, cooking something, plating it up and then eating in hurried shifts as we tend to the baby. It's not stopping us, though, even if the meals are a little more irregular and improvised than usual.

The same goes for baby. It's cold over here at the moment (I almost said 'very cold', but cold that would probably spark terrified headlines predicting the eating of the sun by a wolf in the UK is pretty ho hum over here). My wife has to make sure she offloads milk regularly, either into the baby or bottles, otherwise it backs up and can be painful. She's had a couple of alarming shivering fits if she's skipped a session, for frivolous things like doctor's appointments or being utterly exhausted at 0415. I was making glib remarks about ice cream. They were ill-received. Mastitis is no laughing matter.

As I know - I had mastitis as a teenager. No, don't laugh, I just explained it isn't funny. I discovered a painful swelling in my right breast when I was about 19. The wonderful thing about a small amount of medical knowledge is that it allows you to assume you have cancer on a moment's notice. I dutifully alerted my parents to the fact that they might be about to lose a family member and mournfully made my way to the GP, who booked me an appointment with a specialist.

The specialist in question turned out to be the surgeon I'd done my work experience with the summer before. He was exactly the sort of surgeon I love best - the first time I ever saw him, he was sitting in his convertible, smoking a cigar and talking on his (giant early '90s) mobile about golf. After making a couple of remarks about how fit his nurses were looking that morning, he told me I was having a hormonal over-reaction. Not over the presumed cancer, my breast cells were overreacting to the small amounts of teenage oestrogen in my system, and were apparently contemplating growing into an actual boob. This did nothing to reassure me at all.

Once he'd talked me off the roof, he explained it was almost certainly temporary mastitis and nothing to worry about. If it didn't go away, he would happily cut it out. That got me to leave, at any rate, and I went home to bring the diagnosis to my worried parents.

"I've got mastitis," I said, with a look of extreme martyrdom.

"Oh, that's what John Barton's goat had," Dad said cheerfully. Much ribald mockery ensued, as having an elder brother who was doing an impression of a hermaphrodite barnyard was a goldmine to my younger siblings.

It's good to be able to understand your wife's pain.

First Words

I was up early today, off to do some pickups on a voice job from a couple of months ago. Göteborg's usual weather is in effect. It's cold, grey and rainy. The canal is still frozen from last week, but the ice is now rotten and lurking under a thin film of collected drizzle. It looks like the water has fractures running through it.

My wife very kindly offered to do all the baby-related stuff through the night, on account of how I had to get up early. This didn't work out, not because baby was being boisterous or noisy, far from it. Instead, after an early night, I lay awake for about three hours in the small hours, desperately hoping she would wake up so I could leap out of bed and pick her up.

Several times, when she made tiny and slightly restless squeaks, I'd leap up, rubbing my hands together with glee, only to discover she'd disappointingly gone back to sleep. My wife kept having to talk me down. This is clearly ridiculous behaviour, but I really can't help it. God help me, I'm already addicted to nappy changing.

The voice work I do is all in English. I've found a handy niche doing corporate work, stuff for training programs and sales pitches. Things like 'Here's what our CEO has to say about environmental challenges facing the hotel business.' Not high art, exactly. Except that I'm doing it, which of course makes it so. Three years of classical training, darling. Everything I say is art.

Obviously, the people I'm working for are Swedish. We have little chats before and after a job, usually in my erratic Swinglish. A typical conversation might go something like this.

Studio Person - Hej! Hi!
Me - Hej, hur må du? Hi. How's it going?
SP - Bra, sjelv? Great! You?
Me - Bara bra, tack. All good, thanks. 
SP - Pratar du Svenska? You speak Swedish? (this usually in the pleasantly surprised tone that foreigners all round the world adopt when they discover an English person speaks something other than English. We have a well-deserved poor reputation)
Me - Jag förstår lite, men jag pratar inte så mycket. I understand a bit, but I don't speak as much. 
SP - Bra! Tja, jag får manuskriptet för denna morgon, kan vi ha en snabb titt på den och sedan kommer vi spela in en första tagningen. Var du i den här studion förra gången, eller den andra?
Well, I'll get the manuscript for this morning, we can have a quick look through and then we'll get on with it. Were you in this studio last time, or the other one?
Me - Förlåt, jag förstå inte. I'm sorry, I don't understand. 
SP "Oh, sorry. We can speak English, if that's easier?"
Me - Det är bättre för mig att repetera min svenska, tack! It's better for me to rehearse my Swedish, thank you! 
SP - Åh, just, ja. Jobbade du här förra gången? Oh, right, well. Did you work in here last time?
Me - Varsågod. Erm, ja, tack. You're welcome. Erm, yes, thanks. 
SP "English really would be no problem."
Me - Jag måste försöka prata mer svenska. Jag är väl. Tack. I must try to speak more Swedish. I am well. Thanks. 
SP - Okej... Tja, här manuset, du kan läsa. Okay... Well, here's the script, have a read through.
Me - Förlåt, jag förstår inte. Sorry, I don't understand. 

And then we go round in circles until they just herd me into the studio and get on with it.

I find it fascinating to think that our daughter will be bilingual. We sat next to an English dad in the hospital a few weeks ago. His daughter spoke Swedish to him, he spoke English back, and there was clearly no problem at all. That's pretty cool.

Right now, language isn't really our daughter's thing, it's much less interesting than food or sleep. We communicate by trying things out and seeing how much disapproval she gives them. Warmth and milk = good, cold, being woken up or ignored = bad.

I spend a lot of time gabbling a narrative over the top of her confused and disbelieving looks, to establish what we're doing and why. She spends a lot of time furrowing her brow and rolling her eyes. Who's a cute little poop? Is it you? Is it? Is Daddy being silly? Yes, Daddy's being silly. Daddy does that a lot. You'll come to realise and appreciate this over the years.

I hope.

There's Gold in Them Thar Hills

I tell you what, poo isn't a subject that's going to be easily exhausted.

It's hard to be exact. Is poo inherently fascinating? Or am I so inundated with it that I perforce find it fascinating, in the way that an old lag spending too much time in solitary might find the cracks in the walls intricately beautiful? Or is it just my baby's poo?

I had a great chat with my brother a few weeks ago. No! That can't be right, a few weeks ago the baby was still a bump. I mean a few days ago. Probably. Time is a little slippery at the moment. I'm as likely to be asleep as awake at any given moment of the day.

Anyway, chat with my brother. He has a baby daughter who's one and a half, and we were exchanging anecdotes about nappies, as one does with other fathers. "Quite cute, though, the wee poos, aren't they?" he said.

I am lost in wonder every time I look at my daughter. Both my wife and I are very much in the throes of the creepy staring stage, where we spend hours on end gazing raptly at her from about six inches away. Luckily she'll have virtually no memory of this later, as we get in early on proving Philip Larkin right about parents and their proclivities. If the first thing you saw every time you woke up was my owl-eyed, bearded face cooing at you from its perch on the end of your nose, I'd give you a month before you could do nothing more than issue chilling howls and rock back and forth.

With that in mind, however, I do not think I could consider the wee poos 'cute', exactly. Inoffensive and reassuring at best. Seeing a healthy poop in the nappy soothes my frantic worries for a moment or two, at least until she does something else terrifying. Like breath. Or move. But not cute. I want to cuddle cute things. I do not want to cuddle poo.

They were abruptly green last night, altering from the saffron cottage cheese look they're supposed to have to something like jellied pea soup. Sorry if you're eating either of those right now, I didn't mean to spoil them for you. Although I doubt I could, where are you buying these bizarre luxuries? M&S doing another new range for jaded sybarites?

Much consulting of Dr Google later, this turns out to probably be a side effect of inefficient eating. Apparently breast milk is a three-course meal, with a thin gruel to start and a rich cream to finish. Without the rich cream, your baby cannot make enough of the right enzyme to break down the milk, and the mint sauce poop arrives. No wonder kids love desert so much, it's actually good for them.

As with every other alarming revelation, the ones that every fresh second bring us, this has cost us another night's sleep. Must. Feed. Better. was the order of last night, both of us fretting over head position, amount of time spent suckling, pressure to surface area ratios of burpy back pats, all that kind of technical panic. I'm peering into the nappies like a scatological David Bellamy, rooting about in search of that precious golden poo that tells us all is well again.

It was all pointless, Baby is fine and eats what she wants when she wants and is loving all the attention. Net result - more poop.

Sleepless in Sweattle

Life is about normalising just now.

Not so much about getting back to normal - the old normal is dead and gone, never to return - but about adjusting to a new normal, trying to get your head around it.

In Sweden, everyone gets birth leave, mothers and fathers both. My wife keeps referring to her time off as paternity leave, which makes me wonder if there's something I should know. Ordinarily, you'd have a few months off as a father, to be taken immediately or spread out over the first few years of baby's life.

Of course, as freelance, self-employed types, it's all so much dust in the breeze to us. I'm doing odds and ends of voice work, she's been on sick leave due to the pregnancy. This is great, in some senses, as we aren't struggling to fit the new arrival in around jobs or work routines. There's a fairly obvious downside to that, of course.

I had to cancel a teaching gig due to the labour, at short notice. My wife is currently locking horns with the redoubtable Swedish Försäkringskassan, the national insurance office, who will in due course be paying us a monthly allowance that's given to all families with a new baby, regardless of employment, a little child support thing. But first, there's the paperwork.

You are very well looked after by the state here, but you need to convince them you're not just some luckless chancer fleeing the economic ruins of the UK (even if you are). Currently, my wife is filling out a form where she has to estimate how much money they're going to give her in advance. That's a bit mean, surely? How are we supposed to know? It reminds me of Play Your Cards Right, where to win a prize, you had to predict if Brucy's next card would be higher or lower.

We'd like, I don't know, 3 000 SEK a month, please. Oh, I'm sorry! The official results form we've just flipped over says you're not eligible for that much, which means you're not going through to the next round. But nobody gets deported from Sweden empty handed, here's your Hurdity Gurd checkbook and pen.

I'm off to get advice from the special artistic job seekers board, Arbetsformedlingen, on whether I need to set up my own company or not for tax reasons. Probably not, but then a lot of actors do that over here, you can't just say 'I'm self employed' and get on with it. Technically, I get paid salaries for my voice work, which is nice as the tax side is sorted out for me, and not so nice because the tax is quite a lot.

And we're both wrestling with this complex bereaucracy on extremely limited sleep. During the night, anyway. The sleep during the three hours of Swedish winter daylight is great. I remember the sun. It's big and red and pulled through the sky by a chariot. It chars my skin.

Our baby is thriving, luckily, more than her grey-faced parents look like they're doing right now. She's already past her birthweight and now into a new size of nappies. And quite recovered from her jaundice, which means she's now got the full use of her voice and the strength in her arms. Which is obviously splendid in many many ways; as with our employment, there's something of a downside to it as well.

It's hard to think that two weeks ago, I had never changed a nappy. Or that Freja wasn't part of our family, she was the bump we called Flipper. Right now, she's lying on the floor hiccupping, blissfully unaware that  in all likelihood, she'll outlive us both. Outsleep us, definitely.

I'm led to believe that this exhausted state of semi-disbelief is normal for first time parents. Good. All normal here, then, nothing to report.