mostly david ephgrave

Terrifyingly, we live in a world where someone wanted this. It’s the composition of the thing that gets me; there’s a whole mismatch of scales. It's also designed with little thought to the backstory; why put the prenatal scan in-between the most heavily pregnant picture and the strangely cropped baby shot? Wouldn’t it make sense to put it further away from that? Also, what’s with the wicker screen to the left? Maybe they're implying the baby was conceived behind it, but let’s not delve into that too much; whatever the case, it’s the epitome of bad taste. No wonder it’s still in the shop as no-one in their right mind would buy it. I can understand wanting to chart the stages of your pregnancy in principle, but they didn't need to get so trigger-happy with Photoshop; it must have been hard for the family to envisage the final outcome of what they'd ordered, but let’s hope for their sake that they had no inkling it would turn out ...

Today I met Glyn’s new son properly for the first time. We popped over to their house this afternoon to say hello - not unexpected of course - and to hand over a couple of presents, along with a card for Glyn’s birthday last week. Not only did this give us the chance to meet the new arrival, it was also an opportunity to play with Glyn’s other son Max, who - a month into having a younger brother - was more excited about showing us his new heavy-duty bubble machine than introducing us to his sibling. I feel we've started to bond properly in the last few months. I felt the change kick in when we went to visit the Broadway Theatre in Letchworth a couple of months ago, with Max in tow. It was nice to chat with him, to be able to ask him what he liked and to hold his hand. What was lovely - as was the case today - was how he kept comfortably referring to my wife and I by name, like he sees us all the time, despite us maybe not having met that often. There’ll be plenty of op...

Minutes later, the baby crawled into the dog’s gullet, never to be seen again. It seems a strange scene to immortalize on a commemorative plate. Who'd want it on their wall? Not many, judging from the fact I found it in a charity shop. I bet the original owner couldn’t wait to get rid of it. How did the artist manage to convince his subjects to sit still for long enough to paint them? It’s a nightmare scenario. No sooner would the baby settle than the dog would move and vice versa. They must have got through a lot of plates. Imagine the length of the walk the dog went on to provoke an extended yawn. Think of the lockjaw. Did he have tetanus? Maybe the kid was a canine dentist. Perhaps the dog crawled down the baby’s gullet. I could be over-thinking it.