How Kids Change Your Taste in Everything

 

"You can almost hear it. My eardrums twitch in expectation of it. It rarely comes."

Seventies shopping centres, Beethoven’s later works, aircraft carriers, well designed litter bins, the Fens. 

I could continue to list my latest interests and passions but you might fall asleep reading. Did I mention my search for a good wooden-handled broom?

As having kids has turned me from an outward-looking bundle of ambition and energy into a desperate, creaky-limbed neurotic, I’ve noticed how my tastes have changed.

You might argue that everyone becomes a bit elasticated-waist and orthopaedic slippersy as they age (and there’s nothing wrong with that) but the last few years have transformed my tastes and interests.

Now, the more clean, practical and untroubled by frivolity a thing or idea is, the more I’m in love with it.

Where once I was all Moroccan lamps, frilly drapes and mini-breaks I now yearn for the life of a Buddhist monk.

There’s a mad craving for simplicity, to pare things back to before my life piled up around me in so many (often glorious) ways.

I’m not sure how much of this is to do with changing fashions, age or kids, but it's undeniable.

Anyway, here’s a list of things I love these days that pre-kids wouldn’t have meant the slightest thing to me:

1. Silence, the sweet absence of sound. You can almost hear it. My eardrums twitch in expectation of it. It rarely comes.

2. Fine examples of civil engineering, i.e: suspension bridges, viaducts, the Cross Rail (website).

3. Anything Polish.

4. Exhibitions about furniture design. Life threw me a curveball there. There’s not much I don’t know about plywood.

5. Sitting in the pews in churches even though I’m not really religious. I never really understood why my atheist parents used to do this. I do now.

6. Losing. I really don’t mind losing anymore.

7. Birds. I used to think birds were cold, unfriendly, arrogant little wannabe mammals. Anyone who warmed to them must be very strange indeed. How very wrong I was. I’m with Chris Packham now on this.

8. Bleak communist buildings. Perhaps more palatable now because there aren’t any communist dictators in them. Or are they just trendy?

9. Sports pitches in the driving rain. I can’t wait to get out there and feel the elements bringing me back to life.