Pregnant pause? Hopefully not

Rather than continuing to make vague comments about being unable to go to certain promising-sounding festivals next year, I ought to come clean and say that, happily, the reason is impending fatherhood. The new arrival is due on 8th April, though if he or she* has either of her parents' sense of timing, you can expect an announcement some time in May...

With the due date still some way off, preparations are yet to get into full swing - that's for after Christmas - but there has been serious talk of clearouts, waving goodbye to the budgies Rita and Sue (though the chickens will definitely be staying) and procuring the essential My First Toon Kit, as well as protracted wrangling over potential names. Mutually agreeable girls' names seem to be plentiful, but boys' names are another matter - my first choice appears to have been permanently vetoed.

So what does this mean for my existing child, the now ten-year-old Silent Words Speak Loudest? In the short term, not a great deal, aside perhaps from the odd post pondering why it seems to be a legal requirement that the size of the developing foetus is measured in terms of vegetables (a medium carrot one week, a large grapefruit the next).

In the longer term, too, there shouldn't be much change. Postage might be slightly less frequent, but I don't anticipate the site mutating and moving into predominantly personal territory - other blogs do that much better than I could ever hope to. You might perhaps notice an increase in the number of album, film and book reviews prompted by more time spent in the house, and a corresponding decrease in the number of gig reviews - not that they're exactly free-flowing at the moment anyway...

So, anyway, as you were - for the time being, at least.

* We're not going to find out before birth - so we won't be offended by references to "it"...