I haven’t written for a while. I have been on holiday. I am in the fortunate position to be able to down tools and spend carefree summer holidays with my son, running on the beach, rolling on the lawn, eating ice-creams in the sun, building Lego and playing miniature golf. I love every moment of it, relishing his bouts of energy and ecstasy and indulging his every whim as the days of summer tick slowly by.

I noticed, however, as the holidays began to draw to a close, that my focus on him has had both positive and negative effects and it’s the negative that I have been fretting over and obsessing about in the last week. It’s about pressure.

With a type of obsessive-compulsive disorder, I tend to have to do everything as perfectly as possible … but if I fail, the world has a tendency to fall apart beneath my feet. That is what it has felt like recently when my son’s usually exemplary behaviour and good manners have been replaced with a disarming overuse of expressions such as farty face, poopoo bum, old bugger, kick you in the pants etc., etc. … in response to simple questions such as: what is your name?

It didn’t take much analysis of the situation … nor much self-analysis to figure out that I am almost entirely to blame.

My personality was formed on the premise that I was a bad person with the odd virtue. To compensate, I have been, for the last four and a quarter years, telling my child how perfect he is in every way and I have been doing this every night as I hold him in my arms at his bedtime.

Hindsight is a wonderful thing, if only it had a way of undoing all the things we so obviously do wrong when shown up in its light. The thing is, it seemed to work so well until it reached a threshold – the pressure began to outweigh the benefit and … I turned him into a monster.