It's That Mumps Again

Baby Mumps has got his mates round, some lads called Trev off the estate. The air is fizzy with shell-suit static and the smell of teen semen. They’re off out later on so they’re getting loaded on cherry 20/20 and Broon. Mumps has his mixed in his Thomas sippy cup.

He holds court on a Trev’s knee, tapping fags and taking the piss, showing off his beatbox skills. Women are the night’s priority. Mumps cracks mucky jokes about wet nurses and fingers his ‘tache. God help them down the roller disco.

They get a Chinese for their tea and Mumps sucks the batter off a bag of pork balls. He fists the insides into the Trevs’ hair and chortles ‘til he tumbles over. When the taxi comes he hops into his car seat and buckles himself in, kicking his little DMs in glee.

That Mumps is no son of mine. The little shit gets through five pounds of mince a week and downs more Calpol than Soft Mick. He mixes it with the gin he nicks from my knicker drawer.

When they’ve gone I crawl out of the cupboard and start to clear up. The house is a wreck - bottles everywhere, tab ends in the cheese plant, 70s porn splayed open on the rug. In the kitchen the fridge hangs open, everything edible gone. Milk pools on the lino. A tiny bootprint mars the butter.

Squeeze Me Slow

I am not a traveller. I'm not a taker of trips. I'll make an exception for Blackpool, of course, my deep-fried neon holyland. Last time I went to Blackpool, the first thing I saw when I got off the train was a pregnant woman dragging on a Lambert while her shaven-headed toddlers gobbed at the gulls. When I die I will go back to Blackpool and suck suggestive confectionary with the one-armed angels in an infinite Penny Arcade.

But sometimes you just need to get away from it all, so the other day I packed some sandwiches and a salacious paperback and wriggled off on holiday underneath my bed. It was the holiday of a lifetime - no sun, so sand and no sea, although after one too many pina coladas I had an uncomfortable encounter with an imaginary cocktail waiter and before I knew it, I was up the duff.

After a brief gestation period, during which I almost did a wordsearch in Chat, my jaw sagged and my gall rose and I hawked up an infant all over the clues. We regarded each other with some mistrust until he slid down the magazine in a log-flume of afterbirth and swaggered off downstairs with my fags under his arm.

And that's how Baby Mumps came to live in the cupboard under the kitchen sink. Baby Mumps with his bumfluff 'tache and Color Me Badd on his boombox, a flick-knife down his Chelsea boot and a stash of Razzles behind the bleach. I've decided to adopt a rather laissez-faire approach to parenting.