Night Care Centre

I have always been fond of the idea of a night care centre, a place where you can deposit your offspring like small, sticky parcels and then wander off to rediscover what being a couple even feels like. A sanctuary for parents, a theme park for babysitters, and a temporary ceasefire for bedtime negotiations.

Imagine it. All the babysitters in one place, finally liberated from lonely couches and half‑watched cartoons. The kids forming micro‑societies, trading snacks, settling into sleep with the efficiency of a well‑run airport. Meanwhile the adults are out there doing whatever counts as couple‑ness these days. Maybe once a week, maybe once a month, but it all accumulates like emotional compound interest.

Because the truth is that raising children can distract you from your other half for so long that you forget they have quirks, secrets, and entire personality patches you have not downloaded yet. You miss the nuances, the serendipities, the idiosyncrasies, the bohemian rhapsodies. You also miss the chance to realise you may have chosen poorly, although the pamphlets assure us this is statistically rare.

So if night care centres never become fashionable, find another ritual that gives you the same benefits. Something that lets you step out of the parental fog and remember why you teamed up in the first place. Kiddo.

And for the record, in this context the word couple refers to any union of two or more living humans raising one or more living children. My personal definition also includes starting each other’s sentences rather than finishing them, but that is optional. If any of this offends your sensibilities, please construct a bridge at a safe distance and cross it with dignity.

Harry Handelbar

Harry is a satirist in remission who now moonlights as a metaphysical desk jockey. He specialises in cosmic admin, recursive nonsense, and the occasional algorithmic incident report. One poem he wrote still hasn’t stopped, and several readers claim it whispers back during thunderstorms.