This weekend with George was great. On Saturday we took him swimming for the first time at the Peckham hydrotherapy pool. They have baby swimmimg sessions in which they raise the floor of the pool (I didn’t know they could do that) to about half a meter and let babies and parents splash around.

We thought he’d like it, but we assumend he’d only be able to cope with about 10 minutes before he needed to come out. He absolutedly loved it - smiling, giggling and playing for about 40 minutes before we decided to take him out.

He didn’t even mind going underwater when we dunked him… apparently it’s fine to do that and the sooner babies get used to being underwater the better. (We decided to restrict it to five or ten minutes underwater at a time though…)

He was happy for the rest of the day while but by the time we’d pottered around Peckham, come home, taken him on the trampoline for a while and put him to bed, we were exhausted.

We did, however, watch the Eurovision song contest selection programme (for some reason).
I’d had a dream the previous night that I’d somehow agreed to sing in front of a concert hall full of people – it was the morning of the performance and I was worried sick – realising that I couldn’t sing, had no experience and didn’t want to do it anyway. I only perked up when I discovered that I wouldn’t have to do it anyway because it was just a dream.

It struck me that these days it must be like that for most new pop stars. Gone are the days when bands used to “audition” for years, going from one club to the next, playing for small groups of friends and building up their audiences until they could play in front of anyone. Now bands are catapulted from nowhere to the top of the charts in a second (and back again just as quickly)….

They must always feel like complete amateurs – which of course most of them are. The guy who won the Eurovision thingy said in an interview that he didn’t feel like he’d been thrust into the limelight – he’d been working at it for 40 years – and it showed. He was more polished and more relaxed and professional than any of the others….

I most of the entertainment industry has become this instant hit thing now - the only exception being comedy – where the names you see on hit shows are generally people you’ve seen over the years in small comedy clubs (if you go to small comedy clubs).

Sunday was another packed day.

It started early with a visit to the photographer’s in Dulwich (a husband and wife team, mr. and mrs. Sherrif whose advertising bears the phrase “shot by the sherrif” of course).

They did a great job and hopefully photos will be available soon. They seemed very surprised when George started smiling and relaxing immediately for the camera and they got the shot they wanted within 2 clicks of the camera.

Apparently it normally takes a couple of hours to get a baby to smile for the camera. George continued to smile for the entire session.

This pleased Mrs. Sherrif very much and she kept dropping very unsubtle hints to her husband that she wanted a baby by Christmas. I think he was beginning to soften to the idea by the end of the session….

Once that was done, we went to Whitstable – Sam and Nick had wanted to go because someone at her college was having a party. We went to the beach, ate cockles and oysters and then we went to a fish restaurant (fish restaurants in fishing towns are so great! – especially when oysters are in season and really cheap)

We discovered that pilchards and sardines are in fact the same fish and we had yet more oysters (cooked this time).

We then went to the party – which turned out to be a home made cream tea party – featuring an infinite number of scones and lots of cava. We dumped George in the living room for a group of strangers to look after, and went to the kitchen to eat scones….

By the time we got home we didn’t fancy any tea.