Nappy Rash - Friday Flash

They say every body has at least one book inside them.

Or maybe I just read that somewhere. Not in a book mind, more likely in my baby daughter’s entrails, or rather what issues from them. I snappily browse the latest output from her digestive tract and pronounce myself satisfied with this particular edition; as well as being reapprised with what I had for dinner, now since plagiarised and offered back as part of her own developing opus.     

Unfunnily enough, none of the literature on parenting delves much into the subject of the chromatics of your offspring’s off-loadings. Whether, their off colouring, denotes that she may be off key. The topic crops out barely a pothole, in what is otherwise a mountain of exalted agglomerations of evolutionary know-how. A repository teeming with the species’ collected works on rearing. A clearing house of formative sagacity. With its ante-room periodicals and primers of anticipation; its delivery suite of digests and catalogued consultation; its study of referenced providence. All in all, an abundant library to lend us the abstruse familiarity of our foundlings. But as you pile-drive through the textbooks, the guidebooks, the TV-advertised partworks with free-ring binder, the cribs, monographs and how-to handbooks, clambering towards the pinnacle of human apprehension, the view emerges of the speciousness of this species wisdom. For, despite all the incunabula, you are simply left holding the baby, probably at half-arm length out in front of you, much like you might hold a book. 

So much for the manual. There isn’t a solitary one worthy of the misnomer, throughout the entire damn voluminous paper trail. Me, I’m shivering up to my elbows in droppings back in the pothole. A single little kick amidst the full-of-the-joys-of-being-alive salvo, and my daughter’s nappy pregnant with discharge has slithered across the changing mat and positioned itself perfectly, to catch the down thrust of my elbow as I swipe her legs up in the air to dab at her bottom. Baby shit on my fingers, baby shit on my ulna. Forewarned is not forearmed. 

Once we’ve unerringly pulped all the trees, which might you consider be worse; to have toilet paper but sacrifice books; or to retain the publication of books at the cost of wiping your arse without any intercessional medium? That’s assuming the whole world hasn’t infarcted and collapsed in on itself, under the weight of impermeable, non-degradable, disposable nappies plugging all our landfill refuse sites.