my status gets updated

At work Jo went to a ‘Penguin launch’. Well, I thought, that makes sense. How can you really be sure that penguins can’t fly unless you put them on the spot? But it turned out to be something to do with books.

I made arrangements to meet up with Richard, who I once attempted to write a sitcom with. In the interim, however, I passed someone who looked exactly like him in the street. I smiled at him but he ignored me. Something about his clouded gaze and the loose way his mouth worked suggested a mental problem. Perhaps, I thought, he’s had a lobotomy; and he was wearing a woolly hat. But the truth was even more horrific. He texted me to say he’d been at work at the time: I’d smiled at a stranger.

The news that eclipses everything, however, is that I have been made an uncle. Bobs released the baby, not without a struggle, on the expected, the magical, date: 7/07/07. ‘Maybe she’ll be Jesus’, I said; and they are at least toying with the name Jessica. I was expecting not to schedule a meeting with my niece until she could form a coherent sentence, in 2012 say. But in practice I saw her today. What does one say to babies? They always look as if they know everything already. She was asleep, luckily, so no need for awkward small talk ( ‘So, how did birth go?’ ‘...’)