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One year ago today, I had bought my wife and daughter home from hospital. My daughter, at her birth weight of 3220 grams, could fit laid out along my forearm, cradled in the palm of my hand. I could walk around the house with her slung there, talking away to her while I went about my business. She cried, and ate, and cuddled, and slept.

The first really useful thing I learned about her was that when whatever upset her wasn’t hunger, chances are I could fix it by laying her face down on my chest while I lay down myself. I felt so perfectly contented and useful.

Today my daughter has perhaps a dozen words. She crawls around at a great rate of knots. She happily flicks through her books herself, sometimes demanding I read to her, but she’s even been known to suggest she’s too busy to be bothered by parents wanting to play.

Today my daughter made her first preparatory visit to the creche she’ll be spending a couple of days a week at so Maire can spend full days at work. She toddled happily off to play with the other children with scarcely a backward glance.

Today my daughter woke up after being put down for the night, screaming for someone to come comfort her—a bad dream, perhaps. I lay on the bed, and lay her on my chest, and sung to her. She snuggled down, and slept, happy and safe and comfortable.

I felt so perfectly contented and useful.

When people—particularly snotty Eurosnobs—complain that sport exerts too much of a hold on the New Zealand psyche, that we invest too much in it, that we can’t handle our sports teams losing with any grace or perspective, I look to the old countries, those bastions of civilisations going back into antiquity and… giggle.

Today I bought a new, and very handy, garden tool: a four and a half metre pole with a battery on one end and a small chainsaw on the other.

A pole with a chainsaw. I swear, the kids that grew up on Warhammer 40K are designing garden implements now.