A side-effect of having babies and reading them the same five books on endless repeat is that you start to see subtext where possibly there is none. Take the picture book Click, Clack, Moo: Cows That Type. Clearly, Doreen Cronin’s story of Farmer Brown’s woes isn’t just a charming tale about a man and his cows. (Briefly: after the cows find a typewriter in the barn they start sending Farmer Brown notes, via the ducks, demanding fringe benefits and threatening to go on strike if he doesn’t comply.) Around the 100th reading, it becomes an allegory of the decentralising influence of communications technology and the enduring power of the unions. Fifty reads later, and it’s a critique of American decadence. (The cows aren’t demanding shorter working hours, but electric blankets.)

The better the book, the more inaccessible the meaning. So The Pigeon Finds a Hot Dog! is about sharing, yawn. The Very Hungry Caterpillar reminds us of renewal, a self-help book for six-month-olds. And then there is Judith Kerr’s The Tiger Who Came to Tea, that 1968 classic in which a tiger drops in unexpectedly on Sophie and her mother, eats all the cakes and buns, drinks everything in sight, and leaves, never to return. When Sophie’s dad comes home, there’s nothing to eat and they have to go “down the road to a cafe” for dinner.

“I think it’s about stay-at-home mums,” said the friend who gave me the book. “About how much harder it is than it looks.”

“I think it’s like An Inspector Calls,” I said; the tiger is the idea that jolts us into self-awareness. “Unless he’s Christ, like Aslan.”

“Why would Christ ‘drink all the water in the tap’?” asked my friend.

“I see what you mean.”

After a further 20 readings I think: wait, what if the tiger is actually Sophie’s dad? Who wanted to eat dinner at the cafe all along and who, when he gets home, is weirdly uncurious about their afternoon visitor? Or what if the cat on the penultimate page is actually the tiger, and the whole thing is a piece of undeclared make-believe?

My dad visited recently and while he was reading the book, suddenly it came to me.

“I think the tiger is Death,” I said. Like Memento Mori or the Seventh Seal, the tiger is a long-range reminder that one of these days there will be no more cakes and tea.

My dad looked alarmed. “I think you’re over-thinking it,” he said.

Rain mum

Before the babies, I thought mainly about lunch. At any given point in the day, the thing I was most likely to be saying was “Do you want lunch?”, or “What did you have for lunch?”, or “I had tuna salad for lunch”. It was like the shipping forecast, a ritual only loosely connected to external reality.

Lunch, now, is whatever I can scavenge in three minutes from the fridge, and I realise that the thing I’m most likely to be caught saying – with the reflexive, unvarying cadence of Rain Man’s “Who’s on first base?” – is “Are you pooping?”. I have only to catch sight of a baby, red-faced and straining or placid and sweet, and there it is, soothing as the sea.

Long Island Les Dawsons

Driving in Long Island at the weekend, someone had put out tomatoes from their garden: misshapen and huge, with rubbery faces, like Les Dawson. A sign said, “Ugly tomatoes, please take”. The term “ugly tomatoes” is a valid description in agrarian circles, but I felt such a stab of pity for them. What a terrible thing to say, I thought. I’m sure their mother thinks they’re beautiful.