I was going to talk about holidays today: about the excellent John Lubbock, who, in 1871, introduced the Bank Holidays Act to fix national holidays in the working calendar and about how the Sabbath, one day’s rest in seven, shows that even God recognizes we all need a break sometimes.
Instead, my producer wrote to remind me that a certain baby had been born – you may have heard – suggesting I might like to say something about that instead. ‘What’s your advice,’ he asked, ‘to new parents of girls?’
I wrote back. ‘Start worrying. Never stop’. I was nearly joking.
I have two daughters. They are magnificent. My first, Miriam, is at University. She’s the most stylish person I know and is smarter than me. My second, Esther, turns eighteen on Thursday and will vote for the first time. She’s stylish too, and smarter than her sister.
But I remember smart, magnificent Esther slipping on the steps of a slide and me cycling her to hospital bleeding from a cut beside her eye. I remember smart, magnificent Miriam getting her hand caught between two flip-up seats at Lord’s and me taking her sprained wrist to hospital for an x-ray.
I remember ear infections, split eyebrows, and broken teeth. I remember rolled eyes, slammed doors and ‘I hate yous’. And that’s before any of the more traditional concerns of parents with girls.
What we long for, for sons as well as daughters, is not to worry and instead to be able to give them everything they need so that those events will be memories, and eventually funny memories, and won’t define them, or our relationships with them.
In the Bible, St James writes that, ‘Every good and perfect gift comes from the Father of Lights, who does not change like shifting shadows.’ So my real advice, after ’Start worrying and never stop’, would be to remember that the best gifts you can give a child, the good and perfect gifts, are not the ones you can buy, but the ones accessible to every parent, that come from being constant, not shifting like shadows. Be there. Be the static point and let your children find in your constancy the good and perfect gifts Christians believe we find in our heavenly Father of Lights: kindness, faithfulness, peace, forgiveness and, above all, love.
This was broadcast two days after the birth of Princess Charlotte.