The gates of hell

Finally, it comes - bloodshot eyes, apocalyptic rage over trivial matters, crying that pierces the cavities of our brains, 15-minute stretches of screaming that feel like hours and carry us to the brink of insanity.

Come in sleepless nights, we've been expecting you.

I've had 12 hours sleep in the past week and I have literally felt the flames of hell on my toes. Fuck off sub editors, I DO mean literally.

Luca has cried his way through the nights and made us question everything we thought we were doing right. The bath-massage-feed-bed routine is laughing at us. The other night he screamed through every step of it. Then screamed at what seemed like three-minute intervals for the entire night.

What's worst, impossibly, is when he IS sleeping. When he's calm for half a priceless hour, and my mind is telling me, pleading with me, that now is the time to sleep.

In case you've never heard it, it's almost impossible to sleep to the din of your own mind's impassioned reasoning. 'Sleep now man, sleep while you have the chance. Sleep now or never again!'

Then, before I know it, it's 5.34am, Luca's at it again, and the prospect of getting up for work in two hours looms like a slow dance with Satan himself.

Yes, I was warned. Yes, we've had it pretty easy up till now. And if you want to say you told me so, then I'll agree and shake you by the hand. Except my hand will be like Freddy Krueger's, and I'll shake you by the neck instead. Sorry, I'm just having nightmares. Or am I? I don't even know any more. Night night.

PS. Parents, psychics and anyone at all with an opinion, if you want to offer any life-saving advice on how to make the boy sleep, please use the comments box, we need you!

Fun in the sun

Some might call my son a show-off. I say if you've got it, flaunt it.

Like so much, holidays with the little one take some getting used to; different, but brilliant. Gone are the marathon drinking sessions and forging of deep, meaningful, one-night friendships on the miraculous premise of meeting someone else from London. Gone are the lie-ins and five-hour reading/napping/tanning sessions on the beach.

In come early starts, wide-eyed wonder, meticulous planning and religious application of baby suncream.

Luca was a joy, smiling, squealing, into everything, and taking the odd siesta.

The evenings were mixed. One was spent eating dinner on the floor of our en-suite bathroom, trying to keep the room quiet and dark enough for him to sleep in. It didn't work. So the next night we put him in his pram and painted the town red with him in tow. And by painting the town red, I mean gulped down pasta and downed wine before traipsing gratefully back to the hotel. He slept right through.

So, to summarise, babies will not sleep in a peaceful darkened room, but they will sleep in a noisy sea-front restaurant with the buzz of Vespa motors drilling into their tiny dreams. You've got to admire nature's fine-tuned sense of irony.

Life's a lido

Tucked into a quiet corner of Tooting Common is a beautiful, sprawling mass of life and Britishness; dads reading sports pages, mums reading fashion pages, babies sleeeping, kids screaming, teenagers checking each other out, grown-ups checking out teenagers they probably shouldn't be, dropped ice creams melting into cartons of chips, cans of Stella snuck past lackadaisical security guards. It's all there.

A family flies past, leaping one by one off the side of the pool, each striking a diffferent pose in mid-air before crashing into the water; slim kids diving, fat kids bellyflopping, Luca taking in the scene with cool indifference.

On the way there I explained to Mum why the country was so gripped by a fear of England not winning the Ashes, despite being in a position where it is almost impossible to lose. I know precious little about cricket, but I don't want to miss anything, so I kept checking the score on my phone. Mum was unmoved.

We found a spot next to another young family. They looked cool. We remembered when we might have conceivably looked cool, then we noticed a pram behind them, from which they eventually pulled a screaming one-year-old. Excellent.

In between increasingly frantic attempts to calm the angry baby, he was explaining to his wife that Australia needed to score more runs than any team ever has in a second innings.

"So how can England lose?" she asks tiredly.

"It's England. They always find a way to lose."

A few hours later another dad, flanked by rampaging toddler and weirdly thoughtful eight-year-old, is staring dreamily at his phone and explaining to his family that England really have won the Ashes. They don't care.

On the way home I go to the shop to get the Guardian and milk. There's two people ahead of me in the queue, and they are both buying the Guardian and milk.

When I was younger, I fancied I was bit different from the rest, a bit special, that life should and could have more glory in store for me than most. Years later, with my new family in a sun-soaked lido, I realise that we're essentially all the same.

Leaving Luca

I'm back! You didn't notice I was gone? Fine, whatever.

Lots going on recently. Luca had his first babysitters while me and mum went for dinner and a film. Or, more accurately, we talked about him, worried about him and constantly texted the babysitters, while dinner and a film went on in the background.

I had butterflies in my stomach from the moment we left the house. It was pathetic. Poor little thing, we thought, he's going to be lost without us. Not so. Apparently chilling at home with two young ladies isn't so bad after all. Vic and Sonia, respec'.

There's been all kinds of unfatherly things going on recently: a beautifully drunken and silly stag trip and a full week away from the boy while him and Mum were visiting Auntie in Edinburgh.

I'm not going to say a week of having no responsibilities wasn't fun. It was brilliant. But I am going to swallow my macho pride and say I missed my little clan something horrible.

If you're a new dad, and worried about what you're missing out on, have a week off. Drink, have poker nights, watch endless football, whatever does it for you.

After a week of this, you will be sick of drinking, sick of yourself, and have a whole new perspective on just how good family life really is. It's the old "So you wanna smoke boy? Well you're not coming out of that closet till you've chuffed all 200 of those dried out Lambert & Butlers, then see how you like smoking."

Well I'm out of the closet, so to speak. Bye bye bachelor week, hello family, I could get used to this.

The baby dropping festival

And you thought Michael Jackson was bad.

On the surface, flinging your terrified toddler from a great height is pretty weird. In fact, it's fu**ed up on lots of different levels.

But this ritual at the Baba Umer Durga in India has been going strong for 700 years. Apparently it brings a lifetime of health and luck to the babies. And with parents like that, those kids need some luck.

I'd like to reassure all my friends and family that Luca will be doing no flying or falling any time soon, he'll be lounging on the sofa, which happens to be one of his dad's favourite activities. That's my boy.

Stop being evil!

So you're a new parent. Life is a potent cocktail of joy, mayhem and incessant, niggling questions about what is best for baby. Adverts like this beam out at you, beacons to the insecure.

'Don't worry,' they coo, 'everything's going to be fine. Just give us some money and we'll boost your child's immune system.'

Or, to take it to its logical conclusion: 'If you don't buy this, your child will almost definitely die of swine flu, you scumbag.'

We know adverts can be misleading. As a bumbling youngster I learnt the hard way that wearing several gallons of Lynx deodourant will not, it turns out, lead to sex with a bevy of untamed beauties on a Pacific island. Shaving with Gillette razors did not make me a hero, and my last Rolo meant fuck all, no matter who I gave it to.

Adverts twist, lie and exaggerate. It's the nature of things. This one says it will make Luca healthier. Surely they wouldn't lie about that? But Cow & Gate's claim is unsubstantiated. Their poxy follow-on milk does not support the immune system. Despite a frantic effort to prove otherwise to the Advertising Standards Authority, they were forced to pull this ad.

This is a depressingly familiar story. Nestlé still agressively markets it's formula milk around the world, despite its campaign directly contravening World Health Organization guidelines and provoking a 30-year boycott of the company. They stand accused of not only failing to help babies, but actually damaging their health on a global scale by undermining breastfeeding.

Nestlé, Cow & Gate, if you are reading this: Stop. Being. Evil. That is all.

This book will save your life

Luca has been going to sleep on his own, and staying there, for a couple of weeks now. We have a 'routine' that seems to work: bath, play, baby lotion, big bottle of expressed milk, quick burp, bed.

If I knew how smooth this could be three weeks ago, I wouldn't have believed it. So if you have a baby, and he's being a nightmare, things will improve. Believe.

When he drifts off he takes most of our troubles with him. He sleeps, so he's happy, so we're happy, so we're relaxed, so he relaxes, and so on. The cycle continues; life broken down into the essential elements, everyone getting what they need.

And the mornings are glorious.

Me and Mum are getting time alone together, wine, beer, uninterrupted dinners, wine, telly, online poker, beer and wine. It's my perfect family scenario, like the opposite of Eastenders, with more wine.

The truth is that he's just a really good, easy baby. But my policy has always been to credit our brilliant parenting for the triumphs, and blame nature when things aren't going so well.

We also owe a small debt to Sleep: The Secret of Problem-free Nights. I had my reservations. It looks like it's from 1962, and tends to dictate rather than suggest: "From the first time he sleeps a core night, never feed your baby again during those hours."

Not even if it's 2.3oam, he's screaming like a Banshee on fire, you're too tired to know who or where you are, and he's giving a look that clearly says "Mummy, daddy, what have I done to deserve this? Why are you starving me?".

Because life's tough, son. It says so right here in this book. Bollocks. Obviously when this happened Mum just fed him.

But the book's mantra is right, and I recommend it to all new parents: babies want to sleep, and you just need to find a way to let them do it.

This means putting him down while he's still awake, and letting him go to sleep on his own. Then when he wakes up he isn't surprised by where he is, and can see himself back to sleep.

It is also about not 'rewarding' him for waking too soon. In practice, this means letting him cry and feeling like an evil bastard. But it works.