The morning after the night before

Well, I survived - and even enjoyed - last night's reading. And here's a photo, taken by my friend Alexandra, to prove it:

Tonight

Tonight I am reading at the Komedia in Brighton. I still haven't produced any new poems. I have a cold (which I fondly imagine might make me sound gruff and sexy but in reality probably juthd bake be sound like dith). And my snotty, stuffed up head is full of boring house moving stuff. So it doesn't bode well.

Eight months and twenty days

It's been three weeks since Alice's palate repair operation, which overall was a less traumatic experience than the previous surgery. Although she had an eight hour wait with nothing to eat before going into theatre, she's at a much more distractable age than she was last time. Similarly, although she was screaming her head off when she came out of the anaesthetic, we did induce her to smile within a few minutes (whereas before she was inconsolably miserable until the next day).

However, we still had a difficult time once we took her home. For a week she wouldn't drink any liquid, either from a bottle or from a cup, so any milk she had was mixed up with baby rice etc and taken off a spoon. She also stopped sleeping straight through for 11 hours at night (yes, I know how lucky we were) and instead refused to settle in her cot at all. We could only get her to sleep by taking her out in the buggy first, and she regularly woke in the night and wouldn't go back to sleep.

When you consider what she went through, two unsettled weeks isn't much to put up with... but my god it felt like a lifetime at the time. It can be quite difficult to see the wood for the trees at the best of times when you're looking after a small baby, but when even the tenuous routine you've established is disrupted you feel like you're never going to feel in control again.

However, here I am. And gradually I am remembering what it's like not to be exhausted.