Bring Your Daughter To Work Day

I often get work at very short notice. Acting is great this way, because you might be having a quiet month and feeling as though that's it, your career is over. Then pow! Out of nowhere you get something and it's all hoots and gravy again.

Equally, acting is crap this way, because out of nowhere you get a miniscule opportunity, you work like stink for it and then have nothing to show when the audition turns out to be for someone else entirely and they just didn't explain it properly.

Not that this was one of those times. This was a voice job, one where I'm expected to liase with the client via Skype during the recording. Said client kept changing their mind about what dates and times would actually work. When it came to it, V was tied up with a follow-up x-ray, and it turned out that none of the rest of the family were available to babysit. So F came to the studio with me.

The studio head was entirely welcoming about this. He has younglings himself, he knows how it goes, and he said actors often bring their kids in with them. After all, you get hermetically sealed into a sound-proof booth so that your 'creativity' can't leak out and disrupt the delicate equipment. No matter how loud your child, the end recording isn't going to be affected.

All well and good, but when it comes down to it, no amount of explaining to F that daddy was going to bugger off and leave her alone for a while was really going to help.

We had a decent length walk out in the sun beforehand. I even got to the studio a little early so I could feed her and tuck her up. "Make yourself at home," the guy who let me in said rather snidely, as I whipped out a bottle and a baby and set to.

I left her snuggled under a blanket in her pram, safe in the dim recesses of the staff kitchen, then left to do the recording, hoping that she'd be okay. Optimism is a fine thing, if rarely rewarded in life.

The recording went fine, two sides of A4 about some deathly dull corporate website tool in eight minutes flat.  Coming out of the seclusion of the booth, I found everyone in the office had donned earphones and was huddled in front of their computer monitors with studious looks, the kind that tell the world they are working on something really important and cannot possibly come away from the terminal just now.

F was howling and weeping in the kitchen, kicking the sides of her pram in a panic, unable to work out why she'd been abandoned. She was fine once she'd been picked up and reassured that this wasn't an orphanage. It took me a bit longer to calm myself down, not that my own fears were any less unreasoning.

Still, good to know it can be done. I don't think I want her to get used to being dumped in kitchens, exactly, but despite our mutual terror nothing bad actually happened. Both of us will have to get used to this in due course for our lives to run normally.