Great news Rocko, delighted for youse.
Good man. Some baby maths for you: Two are four times the work of one. Enjoy!
Congrats mate.
My 4 year old girl just marched into the room and sang Irelandās Call.
Iām seething.
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Thought for a minute that a second tooth you were posting about and I wondered why lads were congratulating you.
Anyway congrats on the second child.
Congrats @Rocko
Sort it out @KinvarasPassion
Is gripe water available any more via the north? I used love that stuff, gave some to.the kids as well when they needed it. Great for sorting out wind
Hahaha love it kpā¦ You need to teach her the national anthem!!
Yea
Just like the lads in Rome know the best way to handle sex
Yep it is. Youāll find the odd place down here selling it. Chemists in UK airports will usually have it too and are well used to Irish people buying batches of it.
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glasgusban cleaning house here, the girly new age fathers dont like it up them
Very sexist post, just because he has a vagina doesnāt mean heās good at housework. The fanny.
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I just broke down crying reading this
*Itās mid-afternoon on a busy April day at Gatwick. Passengers with suitcases and bundles are coming and going, jetting in from one part of the world, heading off to another. And on a chilly floor in a ladiesā toilet, a tiny baby waits for his life to begin. It was 10 April 1986 ā 25 years ago tomorrow. The baby was about 10 days old, according to a doctor who examined him later. He was wearing a striped vest and two babygrows ā one blue, one yellow ā and wrapped in a blue-and-white checked blanket.
He had been well fed and well cared for. In fact, he was sleeping so soundly that when Beryl Wright, a duty-free sales assistant, spotted him as she was washing her hands, she thought he was a bundle of rags. Only when she moved the outer blanket to one side did she realise it contained a baby.
At first, Beryl thought the babyās mother was in a cubicle; then, she thought maybe heād been accidentally forgotten. But as she cuddled him outside the ladies, and no one appeared to claim him, the terrible truth began to dawn. The mother wasnāt coming back. The baby had been abandoned.
Fast forward 25 years, to earlier this week. We are still in Sussex, but in the seaside town of Littlehampton, 30 miles south of Gatwick, at the home of a likeable, unassuming young landscape gardener, Steve Hydes. Steve is a lovely guy whoās proud as punch of his engaging little daughter Alanna, three, and his partner Sammy, who works in a care home. But Steve is a man without a past, because he was that baby in the ladies at Gatwick. And because heās got Alanna, and because he wants her to know who her paternal blood grandparents are ā and also because, now heās had a child of his own, it has made him realise how powerful genetic connections are, and also how extraordinary it was that his mother could have abandoned him ā he has decided to try to piece together his story. So Steve Hydes ā dubbed āGary Gatwickā by the press after the airportās souvenir teddy bear ā has turned amateur detective. And heās on a quest that may be more urgent and possibly more far-reaching ā certainly more complex ā than most.
Weāre in Steveās sitting room, surrounded by a pile of faded press cuttings and official-looking police letters, examining the paper trail in the hope of finding that one piece of evidence that could change his future. Steve seems almost apologetic about his search. āIāve got a great family,ā he says. āIām luckier than most.ā As well as Sammy and Alanna there are his adoptive parents, Sandra and John, and his three sisters ā Stephanie, Joanne and Natalie. He is also close to Sammyās father, Keith, and her mother, Sandra. The thing is, he explains, he lacks a heritage, a hinterland. Most adopted children know something of where they came from, who their blood family was. Steve knows nothing: his known history began at 2.45pm on 10 April 1986. The 10 days before that; the nine months he spent in someoneās womb; the relationship that gave him life; the family tapestry into which he should have been woven; all the cultural, genealogical and geographical landmarks that make us who we are and give us identity ā all that is missing for Steve.
Everything he knows about himself is what Beryl found that day, on the floor of the ladiesā. And it isnāt enough. Not now that he has Alanna.
So Steve started his search. He went first to the items his parents had kept for him: the clothes he was found in, the press cuttings and the written testimonials of the people he encountered at Gatwick. Their words, preserved under cellophane in a photograph album, bear witness to the extraordinary effect a helpless, motherless baby has on the adults he or she comes into contact with. One of the policemen at the scene describes how āwhen all the fuss had died down, Gary was fed by Sergeant Ahmed Ramiz, who had bought the milk himselfā. Ahmed, the account continues, had three young sons of his own: he asked to be allowed to take the baby home with him that evening, if no foster parents could be found. Janice Stone, the social worker called in, remembers āwrapping the baby in my scarf, because it was so coldā. And Tricia Stamer, the airport public relations staff member, describes how ābecause his romper suit was wet, we dipped into the departmentās tea money to buy him a new oneā.
The testimonials moved Steve so much that he decided ā with the help of the PR team at Gatwick, who traced the people concerned ā to go back to the airport to meet Beryl, Janice, Ahmed and Tricia. When he did, he realised that, in a way, they felt like family. āThey knew more about me in some ways than I knew about myself,ā he says. āWhat amazed me was how much they cared. Beryl told me sheād thought about me every single day, for more than 20 years.ā He swallows. "I hadnāt expected that."
Meeting the people who cared for him that day, Steve felt he was putting some of the jigsaw pieces of his past into place. But he needed more: what about the 10 days before 10 April? Where were his roots?
Because he was found at an airport, Steve always wondered if his background was non-British. Some of his adoptive relatives speculated that he had an Irish, or even a Russian, look. Poignantly, among his treasures, he has the lists of arrivals and departures into Gatwick on the day when he was found. He could have come from almost anywhere on the planet.
Then he heard of a way to check out his background. āI heard there was a DNA test I could have which would give me some idea of my roots, placing me from somewhere geographically, and maybe even linking me to specific family lines,ā he says.
He went to Edinburgh, to meet Dr Jim Wilson, a population geneticist at the university there, who analysed his DNA. He shows me a graph: what it reveals is that ā contrary to his relativesā speculations ā Steveās forebears were probably of English or Scottish descent. Wilson has also done a Y-chromosome check, tracking the male bloodline from that ā and the results show that his fatherās family are more likely to come from the east of Britain than the west.
Finally, and in many ways most fascinating, was that Wilson fed Steveās DNA into a global databank containing the genetic profiles of millions of individuals. These were people hoping to find family matches for either genealogical or medical reasons. From this, he identified a number of individuals who are Steveās seventh or sixth or even, in one case, fifth cousin.
For many people, establishing information so vague and remote wouldnāt mean much. Steve felt as if he had been given pure gold. āYouāve got no idea how it feels to know nothing about what nationality you are, or where you come from,ā he says. "This is worth so much to me. It places me somewhere, it gives me a place to say Iām from. Iām European; Iām maybe from England. I link in somewhere, even if I only have a vague notion of where. There are people somewhere on the planet who are my very, very distant relatives. And all of it matters."
What about the police investigation ā the public appeals, the enquiries, the clues of the early days and weeks? Steve wrote to the police invoking the Freedom of Information Act, asking for access to his files. The reply was an unexpected blow: the notes from the investigation had been destroyed. āAnd why?ā asks Sammy, in a rare flash of anger on her partnerās behalf. āIf it was a murder inquiry and it was unsolved, they would never have destroyed the files. What gave them the right to chuck all that away?ā The police files would have been invaluable to Steve: he can only shake his head in disbelief. In particular, the notes would have illuminated a lead he is keen to follow up ā two days after he was found, a phone call was made to Gatwick police by a girl or young-sounding woman who claimed to be his mother. In the cuttings, the caller is reported as having said she was too young to have a baby, and that if her father found out he would kill her. She said the childās name was Michael, and she gave the name and phone number of a woman in Hounslow who would look after him.
According to the press reports, police traced and interviewed the woman but dismissed her from their inquiries. Steve would like to know more, but all details are destroyed. Perhaps, he muses, this was the person who cared for him for the first 10 days of his life. Someone, somewhere, must know something: even if (as the young caller also said), Steve was born secretly, at home, he must have been seen by someone in his first week and a half of life. āIād like to ask people to think back to early April 1986 ā especially people who lived round Gatwick, and maybe round Hounslow,ā he says. "Do you remember a baby being around and then suddenly disappearing?"
Late last year, Steve wrote an open letter to his mother that was printed in a tabloid newspaper. It attracted messages from hundreds of well-wishers, but little in the way of hard leads. āThe only thing we did get,ā says Keith Collins, Sammyās father, āwas a call from someone who said there were a lot of Travellers around the Crawley area at the time Steve was found.ā Itās not a lot to go on, although it might mean that Steve can go back to Dr Wilson in Edinburgh, and ask him to run his DNA sample through a new database he has of Travellersā gene types.
Other leads are even more hazy, like the grainy CCTV footage of a man and woman seen carrying a bundle that might have been Steve into the airport an hour before he was discovered. The newspaper report describes them as a woman in her 20s, and a man who might have been slightly older, both slim with dark hair, and both wearing blue jeans. Despite several appeals for them to come forward so they could be ruled out of the investigation, they never did ā but as with the paperwork, the images have been destroyed.
What, though, of the simplest way of answering Steveās questions? Is there a way he could persuade his mother to get in touch? āOf course I realise that sheās gone to a lot of trouble to stay hidden, both at the time and over the years,ā he says. "But times change, and circumstances change. It could be that, while she couldnāt acknowledge me in the past, she can now ā or in the future.
"I want her to know that Iām not angry with her and there will be no publicity if she comes forward. But there are so many things Iād like to ask her, and so much Iād like to know about my background, and Alannaās. And itās not just a mother Iām hoping to find ā itās an extended family as well. I might have siblings, cousins, aunts and uncles, even grandparents."
One intriguing possibility is that, with genetic advances all the time, and with the likelihood that more and more people will have their DNA mapped in the decades ahead, Steveās genes will eventually tie up with someoneās, somewhere, on a database, and heāll find someone he is related to. That trail could take him, eventually, to the mother who has hidden her tracks so well and for so long.
Steve acknowledges that even if his search is eventually successful, he knows it wonāt necessarily have a happy ending. But his eyes are bright and hopeful.*
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Thatās it, Iām ringing the CFA. Expect a social worker in 25 minutes
What use is a financial advisor in these circumstances?
I know women are having kids into their mid 40ās now but what age do dudeās here think is too old to become a father? and also what age do you think women should stop having kids? I believe you want to be young and healthy enough to play with your kids without being shattered.mid 30ās for both men and women sounds about right