The Potential Platonic co-Parent

  The clinic rang me early the next day. As the phone vibrated my stomach dropped several inches and I felt blood swiftly vacating my head. Up until this moment I had felt perfectly relaxed. After all, I wasn’t even sure if I wanted to have a baby, and this was just a routine test to see if it was even possible, but now, in this moment, it became clear that I’d been suppressing the truth of how significant this was. The course of my life was potentially going to be permanently altered by whatever the person on the other end of the line had to say. “Mr Greenwood? Is this a good time to speak?” “Hi, yes, yes it is”. Over the next 30 seconds he confirmed that my results were perfectly healthy and normal, in fact, I had slightly above average results. At the risk of sounding smug, my sperm count and their performance levels were putting many of my peers to shame. I knew my motivational words to the sample pot would do the trick. The man on the phone rattled through the results so q...

6.8 miles by bike feels like a bit of a chore at the best of times, but when it’s a drizzly January morning, this feeling is only enhanced. Especially when you’re fairly confident that the route through the outer reaches of Bristolian suburbia won’t exactly be a bucolic landscape to ride through. That said, I’d heard rumours that there was a Tesco Extra on-route which I could drop into on the way home, and who isn’t excited by those massive supermarkets, so big they include a mezzanine level for clothing? I had booked a semen test, the cheapest one I could find, a couple of weeks after Christmas. It was my first concrete step towards becoming a co-parent. All of my thoughts of potential fatherhood up to this point had felt somewhat academic until I knew whether I was physically capable of actually producing offspring. I felt relaxed about the concept of the test - ejaculating into a test tube wasn’t going to be an issue - not that it was a sexual fantasy of mine or anything, it just...