Excerpt: Handsome Red Hobgoblins: The photographs on the internet.

There was a picture of a baby on the internet. Nothing unusual there, because the internet is awash with pictures of babies. But this picture was of a premature baby with its father.  The father was a jolly chap, very robust-looking and his smile suggested a person who rarely baulked at anything. In fact he looked like the kind of person who didn’t even know the meaning of the word baulked. He definitely looked like the kind of person who had never used the word baulked, in any context. He appeared to be a man living in a baulk-free universe.

This baulkless chap was looming over his premature baby in its incubator; the shiny red hobgoblin fast away in its usual morphine dream-world, with splayed limbs and a face full of ventilation tubes. The father was grinning as he held a credit card next to the baby’s head. To give it some scale. He held the credit card inside the incubator, as if it were the most normal thing to do in the world.

The photograph was probably taken to give the people in his local pub some kind of reference point in terms of size. What I found unnerving was that the photograph had the same triumphal quality of a fishing photograph. If this father had had a hook-slung set of scales on him, that baby would have been on them. It was a photograph of stunningly inappropriate pride and achievement in the face of prematurity’s huge trauma.

Part of me wanted to say “ Hurrah for you and your amazingly small baby!”. But that’s the side of me that makes people feel uneasy. But this guy wasn’t alone. In another photograph a similarly gurning father, who this time looked like he had baulked at something, namely ironing his shirt before going to the hospital, was holding up a fifty pence piece next to his premature baby’s head. Talk about a cheapskate. He couldn’t even muster up a credit card. Or a tenner. It was loose change for this proud father. He’ll need that silver for the car park machine. If he has a car, that is.

Honesty time out. I was tempted many times to find some way of showing people just how utterly miniscule our boys were. How their shiny red fingers were the thickness of a liquorice bootlace, or how indescribably shocking it was to see their legs emerging from the postage stamp nappies, legs that seemed more suited to a frog than a human baby. I did manage to refrain from filling their incubators with everyday objects like oranges, bunches of keys or kitchen roll. Apart from the lack of taste, there’s also the matter of hygiene too.