I’m wondering if people can tell that I have no idea how to hold my newborn. It’s warm and it smells like slightly off milk and sick. It has weird, dark, alien eyes that follow the fluorescent lights along the hospital corridor. Sometimes they seem to focus on me when I sing softly.

I have my earphones on. I have made myself a hospital playlist. Somehow a Queen track has sneaked onto it from my childhood.

“Don’t stop me now, I’m having such a good time…” I find myself singing, and I look into his wobbly eyes, and something weird happens. I start crying. It’s happiness, but I’m also emotionally flattened by a big lump of time and memory all landing on me at once. Yesterday I was twelve doing Brian May air-guitar. Today I’m making embarrassing electric guitar noises at my first-born son.

What feels like the next day I’m sitting in a school hall listening to twenty kids singing, together physically, but all choosing their own tune and tempo. “Don’t stop me know, I’m having such a good time…”. My first born son looks like a rock star, long hair and confidence, beaming after a transformative week at summer holiday stage school. They are performing a thinly concealed version of School of Rock. I sing along, crying a little, grinning like I’m insane.

Afterwards, my first born son is thrilled and energised. The show has awakened his inner rebel and he is, to say the least, a bit sassy. I have to tell him to do something he doesn’t want two do. He gives me a look. His weird, wobbly, newborn eyes seem to focus on me.

“No I won’t, you… fat idiot.” He says.

He seems confused when I laugh crazily and my eyes moisten with emotion.