Another grandson has arrived. The pesky thing at my age, fifty-something, is you just lose track.
How many are there now? Goodness me, I have this written down somewhere, let me check. Two.
And the one that arrived the other day, in Chicago, is, by my count, the second.
The first one is now three. Rowan.
My wife reports Rowan is wearing a Big Brother T-shirt with pride and sharing eyes.
I like Rowan for a name.
Ra for short, or Ra Ra.
I like all of these.
You can be defined by your name, and Rowan and all the Ras mean grandson one is winning already.
The naming of grandson two was, however, a trial, almost tougher than the 20-hour labour.
I know only a man would come up with such a teeth-grinding simile, but I have been using childbirth as a simile for toothache, hangovers and Otago's last-second loss to Canterbury in the 1994 Ranfurly Shield game all my life, so it would be silly to stop now.
Over the closing weeks, Miles, Julian and Felix cleared out from the pack.
Felix came under that unique/amusing/eccentric umbrella which also shelters the likes of Rufus and Oscar, the sort of name which demands the child grow up to be unique, amusing and eccentric also.
Miles and Julian, call me old-fashioned, seemed heavy on ponce.
My preferences were for Kip, Hugo, Sebastian and Kilometre.
Eyebrows went up when I flung Kilometre into the ring, but I saw it becoming Kilo for short, and I thought Kilo sounded Greek and strong and astonishingly romantic.
A man called Kilometre would never be short of a word at a prestigious dinner party, and let's nail this one down right now, survival at prestigious dinner parties is the one life-defining skill man has to acquire when the adult post office sends its courier to the door.
Felix hit the front just before birth, and then a dark family secret emerged about a Felix.
The information was whispered into my wife's ear, tears forming in the eye, with the plea not to tell the pregnant mother.
My wife rang the pregnant mother immediately, and Felix sank guiltily to the bottom the barrel.
Felix is a catfood name anyway.
In desperation I put out a call on Facebook, which brought in a dragoon of thoughtfulness.
But you get this when your friends are exceptionally smart and well-read.
Prospero, Zenith, Magnus, Pedro, Wilder, Thunders, Hamlet, Lysander, Heathcliff and Gaudentius.
What a nomenclatural dekafeast this was! You could sell names like these.
They chose Julian.
Julian Roi Metreyeon.
It looks nice on paper.
I think they found Roi in Wikipedia.
They are hoping everyone calls him Jude, which begs the question why they didn't call him Jude.
I do like Jude very much.
While it glues my craw to have a grandson named after a Paul McCartney song, I could argue the Jude in Hey Jude was written for John Lennon's son Julian.
And while McCartney may always be the boy with a comb in his back pocket, he did get it right with Hey Jude.
Nine hundred digital photos arrived within seconds.
I was instructed to send them out to three thousand people.
I ran my eye over the nine hundred.
They had come with the information that Julian Roi Metreyeon was the most gorgeous baby in the whole widening world.
How could they tell? All I could see was a tiny pair of eyes peeping out from under a thick woollen shawl.
On Sunday, I saw Jude on the webcam, fast asleep.
He sleeps with his little left fist under his chin like Rodin's thinker, so we know he is ridiculously deep.
And then, just when neither wife nor daughter were looking, and I swear this is true, he woke up and gave me his very first smile.
Me! I smiled back and said, hey Jude.
