About Once Every Twenty Years

It was a Hollywood moment. The one where you're in a cafe on a summer evening with a girl in your arms. You look into her eyes and the sounds around you fade away into a soft murmur. She looks into your eyes with complete, unquestioning trust.

And then, softly fluttering her tiny eyelids, she falls asleep cradled against your chest.

I looked up from little Sofi to her parents and said defensively "This never happens to me!"

You see, I don't like other people's children. I avoid their babies. They're ugly. Last week a colleague offered to show me a picture of her baby. I looked at her (I have a special look for moments like these). "There's no good way to say this", I explained, "so I'll just say it. I don't like to look at baby pictures. They're all the same to me." She tried to explain that was impossible, that everyone loves babies and thinks they're cute. Finally, in desperation, she said it must be because I'm a man. And I thought to myself No, it's because that's a baby and one day she may be gorgeous but right now she's mostly fat with limbs attached. I didn't say it, but I thought it.

I did once meet a child who was irresistibly charming. I think she was around 5 years old and her name was Kati. She lived in a tribal village in central India where I spent a summer. She had a smile that would very slowly spread across her face until it was brighter than the sun. That was the summer of 1991; I still remember her vividly.

But she was the one enchanting exception to prove the rule that if you're too young to drive, your parents should keep you away from me.

I don't make funny faces at babies. I don't lisp at toddlers. I don't ask 6-year-olds what they're doing at school because I don't give a damn. And if you've just delivered a baby I'm really happy for you but I will not visit you in hospital. I actually like hospitals, I've had some incongruously funny experiences in them! But newborns give me the creeps.

And no, I don't want to hold your baby. You made it, you keep it! That's what I should have said in response to the question "Sofi seems to like you; do you want to hold her?"

But Spain had just won their quarter-final in the World Cup, I was drinking Sangria, it was a lovely sunny day, and I wanted to be nice.

And that's how Sofi ended up with her head against my chest and my arms around her. That's how she fell asleep with her fingers loosely curled around my thumb. That's how... Gah! Never mind. It's no use trying to deny it. I like Sofi.

This could be the beginning of the end of me as I know him.