What my new grandchild has taught me about love – and parenting trends

I can hear him shrieking upstairs as I write. It’s his new thing – a sort of shouting. Every day there is a new thing. Every day he changes. Lights and the colour red seem to excite him beyond all else. They make his legs go berserk, like a tiny Irish dancer. It’s such a long time since I lived with a baby, so I am learning all over again. My daughter and her boyfriend didn’t plan on living with me but they have been. No one needs a lecture on the housing situation in London. It’s tough. It’s even tougher with a kid.

So here we all are under one roof, but at entirely different stages of our lives. The labour happened here and they didn’t even wake me up. When they went off to the hospital, I texted to see if they had managed to park OK. Parking I hear is an issue. A picture of a tiny creature was texted back; he was nearly born in the car park.

“You will love it” – so many people told me this beforehand that I felt suspicious. It’s weird being told that you will love someone you have never met. Then I encountered something I never knew existed: elderly broodiness. “I am so jealous,” many friends said when I told them of my impending nandom, whereas all I could say was: “I am not ready.” An ex-colleague emailed recently, speaking of his own “faint wistfulness for a grandchild”.

It’s the best relationship, everyone jokes, because you can hand them back. This is true. You get the edited highlights. I am not up all night deranged with tiredness and sore nipples. I don’t change nappies. Mainly in the first weeks, I cooked, as I know how to do that.

For there are lots of things I don’t know how to do, even though I have brought up three babies myself. Partly I have forgotten and partly fashions change. I slept with mine or, more accurately, passed out with them in the bed. This is now frowned on a bit in case you squash them in the night. You have to have a cot sort of attached to the bed.

My friend, Philippa Perry, said: “For the first six months there is no difference between want and need.” I know a lot of grownups like that, too. Babies want to be held all the time, and indeed why shouldn’t they be?

We used to believe in some old hippy thing called the Continuum Concept, where we were to behave as tribeswomen with our babies strapped to us all the time. The backlash then came with the Gina Ford regimes of sleep training, a particularly cruel form of herding cats if you ask me. But for my generation, rushing back to work, expressing milk in office toilets, it was deemed necessary. Blackout blinds. One mate of mine was taping them up and I saw the insanity of behaving like you were in the Blitz in order to get the baby in tune with the work ethic.

So I am not entirely to be trusted, and the first time I babysat I was made to watch some YouTube videos so that the anxious parents would know I knew what to do. There are still things I can’t work out, such as the enormous amount of kit. But there is one thing I can: with all the awful things in the world there is little more joyful than a tiny human, and this special time when one enters a universe in which they are the centre. This universe is both smaller than everything else but somehow larger, too.

As they prepare to move to their own place, I realise, for I am indeed slow on the uptake, that at my age and in my house I have been living in a love story. It’s happened. I have fallen for someone entirely new.