Stay-at-home grandpa

Richard Oldfield went from looking after a bank to looking after two toddlers – and he’s shattered

My wife used to persuade me, when I was applying for a passport, to put ‘Fruit farmer’ rather than ‘Investment manager’ in the space for ‘Occupation’, though I was nothing of the sort. She didn’t like the flavour of ‘Investment manager’.

Next time I renew, I can with a clear conscience put ‘Working grandfather’ in there. And golly, it sure is work. I am delighted to see that Liz Truss is thinking of shelling out a modest fee to childcaring grandparents.

Young mothers who look after children are far too busy to write articles about what hard work it is, and when they get older, they forget. So the subject doesn’t get as much airing as it deserves.

But circumstances have plunged me into the job. It’s only part-time, because there is a partnership between me and the other grandparents – who do more than I do.

The other grandfather and I did think of formalising the partnership, advertising our services as Granddads Inc, until we fell out in the kitchen at about two o’clock one morning, scrabbling around urgently for a clean nappy and a bottle for milk to deal with the current emergency.

He accused me of wearing ‘green prep-school pyjamas’ – what are ‘prepschool pyjamas’, for heaven’s sake? How do they differ from pyjamas? And I was perhaps too loquacious about the hideousness of his early-hours appearance in boxer shorts. Prep-school boxer shorts, I might have called them.

Part-time it may be but, with two children under three, it is intense.

First thing in the morning, there are the bottles of milk to produce (not too hot, not too cold, exactly the right number of spoonfuls of that rather delicious powder); the nappies to change; the lost unicorn dress to find because only the unicorn dress will do with the pink sparkling shoes; breakfast; the bundling into a pushchair and wheeling through Streatham to the nursery with the mad mongrel dog.

There is usually a drama because even if ballerina bunny can be found, pink bunny or little white bunny or tiger has usually gone AWOL and they are essential to the journey.

In the afternoon, the routine is reversed: collect from the nursery; push back home with chat about the leaves and the trees and the pink house (pink is a big theme) and the cats and dogs and birdies en route; and check that ballerina bunny and little white bunny and tiger and pink bunny all are present and correct. If not, bunnies are a subject better avoided.

I have become an expert on the amount of sugar in cereals. Weetabix has by far the lowest sugar count. But the 1½-year-old behaves like an out-ofcontrol cement-mixer, hurling the stuff round the kitchen with shouts of ‘Oh no! Oh no!’

When I get back from nursery and clear up, the little splodges of Weetabix have hardened so much that they have to be chiselled off the floor and high-chair. I wonder if there is some chemical reaction once Weetabix is air bound.

So we avoid Weetabix, and sugar up. We go as far up the scale as Cheerios, which have nearly ten times as much sugar in them as Weetabix. Scattered Cheerios are a doddle to retrieve.

Then there all the ancillary details of childcare. In my day, pushchairs were quite straightforward. Now there are triggers, buttons and levers all over the place, which have to be activated to operate the thing successfully.

Folding or unfolding reminds me of W1A and Hugh Bonneville’s fingerslicing adventures every morning when he arrived on his Brompton at the BBC.

The seat belts are of bewildering complexity – straps everywhere like an octopus’s tentacles – and bits that have to be fitted to one another like a Jenga puzzle. Slings – the things you have on your back with a child inside – are worse.

Why aren’t there courses in pushchair and sling management so that the hapless (grand)parent can discover more easily which is the right way up and the right way round, and which cavity the child should be slotted into?

The mad mongrel provides her own challenges. The dog-poo bags are helpfully marked ‘Open here’ but are just as intractably unopenable here as there, like black binbags. It’s ‘intuitive’ but I know what intuitive means: it means impossible for the over-50s.

There are advantages in grandpa status. There are opportunities for conspiracy.

‘I want chocolate,’ the infants say.

‘What about this delicious apple?’ I answer.

‘I want chocolate.’

‘Well, I suppose a little bit of chocolate if you say, “Please, grandpa,” but better not tell Mummy.’

‘Please, Grandpa.’

A done deal.

The Favourite by Georgios Jakobides, 1890

Richard Oldfield was an investment manager at Oldfield Partners