With child

Ok here is the short and short of why I shut down the blog.... beloved is 9 weeks pregnant, I wanted to blog about it, in fact I thought I'd do so every day though I quickly realised there wouldn't be much to say on a day-by-day basis, we wanted to keep it a secret until 12 weeks because, well, you are running on the smell of an oily shred of hope until at least then, and friends read this blog, and there was the career thing I mentioned earlier and, well, I stopped here and started here.

But that was all a bit mad, I'm sure for those of you who've known me a while I'm like that neurotic friend who wastes too much of your time with their crazy schemes and weekly crises. So I restarted, and now I'm consolidating.

The cat stories, the politics, the moments with beloved and the story of an unfolding journey towards fatherhood will all be written up in this little corner, by an open fire, with a snifter of Armagnac, Mahler's 5th winding back the mood, all kept alive by the hope that something I can do in this pathetic life will make the world just a tiny bit better for my beautiful, unborn child.

I am only about 8 weeks from unemployment. My decision to leave the private sector, indeed to say no to a job offer about the time an incredible chain of events was beginning that would change our lives together, has never seemed more desperately foolish. I have almost thrived on uncertainty in my life, going from contract to contract, always certain something would pop up, confident I could sell door-to-door if I had to. Or something.

But it's not just about me anymore. I've been a contractor for over 3 years, never more than an unsigned extension from penury, at the complete beck and crushing call of my public sector, touchy-feely, say-no-wrong employer.

Every day I feel sick thinking about it. Right now I would go back to checking people's contracts in an instant. At least they said thank you. At least the Sales Manager of the IT company in London bought be a bottle of Bollinger when we finished fighting over the company's damages cap policy. Well ok, I've had a couple of bottles here too, but unfortunately my tenure is beyond the immediate say so of my superiors, part of a complex thread of caps and policies and divisional funding grants that render my existence precarious. Every day ever more.

I now know vividly the instinct that made our forefathers steal bread when their baby cried and their wife looked up in anguish.

There isn't a lot of space between having options, and having nothing. It's about 5 minutes on the tram from my office near Spring Street to the dole queue on Johnson. A signed acceptance letter between scanning the daily casual boards and scanning the bungalows in the Melba Times.

Nothing like a dependent life to put things in perspective. As if the cats weren't enough responsibility!