My baby done gone last month but it came back for a little while for some last improvements. We’ve improved the squalling little thing within an inch of its life, and now we’re through. Finished. Done. That baby is so over. That baby is history. That baby has to go out and make its own way now. We’ve got better things to do. At this point, having nails driven through our eyes would seem like better things to do.

And yet, oddly, however sick of it all I am, I still find it funny. There I am proofreading away, with my eyes glazing and the lower half of my body getting ever more paralyzed – and I still find myself snorting with laughter. It’s also interesting that on more and more entries I can’t remember which of us wrote them. There are a good few now that I stare stupidly at thinking ‘Did I write that? I think I did…but…no I didn’t…or did I…no…’

So that’s that. There is champagne dripping down the walls and pooling on the floor. The baby’s clothes and toys and boxes of zwieback are in bundles at the curb waiting for the Salvation Army truck to collect them. The baby’s room has been converted into a stall for a musk-ox. And I’m going on the streets.