Skipping outside into the afternoon sunlight, Big S asked for an ice cream. I told her that she had had enough treats for one afternoon and that it was time to walk home. She pointed out that that was a long walk and inquired with admirable persistence as to the possibility of our taking a cab or the bus. I hatched a plan and offered her a choice: either we could take a cab or I would buy her an ice cream to eat on the walk home. Despite nearly bursting my forehead in an attempt to telepathically influence her to choose the cab she immediately opted for the ice cream.

We stopped at a local park on the way home to allow her to munch lazily at her Cornetto. Once there, she put in a bid for a visit to the playground. I demurred. She looked wistfully at the children playing on the swings and sighed:

“Daddy, those children are having more fun than me”.

“How many of them have ice creams?” I countered.

“None of them.”

“Then you are having fun that they are not having.”

She turned to me with a serious look, the gravity of which was undermined by her chocolate and nut goatee.

“No Daddy. They are having fun; an ice cream is just a treat.”

Well now I know.

One lunchtime the Senior Clerk announced that the HoC had a visitor. Into the room walked David Miliband. I probably knew more about his father than I did about him that point. I was curious though as he had a reputation, even then, as being a possible future leader. He was a Princeling. The HOC was never one for small talk so once I had said hello and my insignificance had been explained, the two politicians headed for the door. There the HoC paused, turned to me and said “I’m off to lunch. You must stay here and await my return. Do NOT go anywhere.” I nodded and waited. Time passed very slowly that afternoon. I shuttled to and from the coffee machine and watched the dusk gather. At 8:00 I risked a call to the Senior Clerk: “Exactly, how long do his lunches last?”. “I think” he replied “it would now be safe for you to assume that his Lordship is done for the day.”

18 years later and Labour is back in opposition. The tragicomic Gordon Brown is no longer leader and we are stirring ourselves to elect a replacement. That was the reason I found myself in a marquee in the playground of a local primary school as a children’s choir sang “You Lift Me Up” and selections from Coldplay. I was there to see the Princeps. He was there to answer questions in a session hosted by David Aaronovitch. The latter is a journalist who writes opinion pieces for the Times. Aaronovitch scares me. My own views so closely match his that I am desperate for him to write something I can disagree with.

David Miliband was also pretty hard to disagree with. He did not duck questions and what he said made sense. There was, however, something missing. He was uninspiring. Like Cameron and Clegg he somehow doesn’t seem quite real. As they jab their crooked fingers, all emphasis and no threat (a gesture known, I gather, as the Clinton Thumb) one finds oneself sceptically scrutinising them for a sign of a soul. It is as if they have been polished somewhere and persuaded to sing moderate words to the tune of a stirring sentiment. The cadences are there but the content isn’t. David Miliband’s words were political neutrinos: only ever weakly interacting with your heart as they washed through.

He talked about “real change for people” , or worse, “real change for real people”. He spoke about “building a new Labour movement in the constituencies” and I found myself reaching for the iPhone. They were attractive words, carefully chosen and delivered with the studied sincerity of an ambassadorial greeting but they just somehow didn’t seem real. That, depressingly, may be for the good, since that seems to be what the electorate wants (although they presently appear to want their vacuity more pronounced and mixed in with a nursery dollop of Bullingdon Club smugness).

When David Miliband spoke about the dangers that the Coalition Government posed, they were the sorts of things that worry professional politicians. He was anxious that boundary changes to constituencies would not be subject to local public enquiries. He was deeply concerned that the referendum on the alternative vote would be held on the same day as elections in Wales and Scotland thereby skewing national turnout. I’m more worried that he Government cuts are forecast to result in an additional 750 000 million unemployed public sector workers and who knows how many more in the private sector. It’s not that the things he mentioned are insignificant, it’s just that given the imminent horrors it is surprising that they are the first things to come to his mind.

The questions, whilst never hostile, were challenging. He was asked to explain why he had not tried to unseat Gordon Brown as leader. He had an answer ready but for all the gloss it had accumulated through its no doubt frequent repetition, I found it made matters worse. He was not, he told us, ready to be Prime Minister at that point. We should not forget, he reminded us, that he had only been Secretary of State for one year. “So what?” I thought “Surely the Leadership has been on your to-do list since the early nineties? And neither Clegg nor Cameron had even a minute’s experience in Government. What critical additional experience have you acquired since?”.

What it seemed to come down to in the end was his exhortation for us not to under-estimate the degree of political determination at the top of the party for Gordon Brown to take us into the election. In other words, he seemed to be saying, the senior members of the party would have hung me out to dry. That is what had happened, he told us, to James Purnell whose departure had “left the Government weaker”. He went on immodestly to say that he felt that if he had resigned that would have left the Government weaker too. This last comment exemplified an infrequent yet somehow encouraging tendency sometimes to say something arresting in its strangeness. At one point, for instance, he implored us not to forget that the “purpose of schools is to turn out British Citizens”. Is it?

At another point he picked a very polite fight with Jonah who was worried about the National Health Service database. Jonah turned out to know a great deal about the subject and promptly wiped the floor with the candidate. In David Miliband’s acknowledgement that he had been well-beaten you glimpsed a humanity that other prepared chunks of rhetoric had disguised.

One questioner referred to him as “Dave”. It was a chance for some humour. “Only two people call me that” he said “My mother and my son, if you are one of those then … er … If you are not … er …”. One felt that at that point he didn’t really know how this particular comedic riff was going to end. He went with ” … then … er .. never do it again”. I laughed; partly, at least, because it had been such an amazingly rude thing to say. Not for Mr Miliband Cameron’s cringe-worthy “common touch” of “call me Dave”. He then said he had forgotten the question. The questioner rose again and said something about the “rift” in the party. “Aha” said DM “I though you said the ‘riff’ in the party”. I am still unsure whether this was a reach for a feeble pun, a genuine insensitivity to the questioner’s accent or just the noise of a mind misfiring.

I’ve been lucky enough in my time to have heard some great speakers. Better still, I have heard speakers who have inspired me. I didn’t feel any inspiration tonight. Perhaps I’m too old for that now. Perhaps others in the room felt their spirits rise and felt that tug of wanting to be engaged – to pour out of the marquee and effect change. If they did, I’d be delighted. Perhaps now all I am good for is writing a cheque to the campaign fund. Where’s my pen?

“Not me” she had replied. I deflated. “Why not?” I asked.

She looked at me tolerantly and explained “Well Daddy, I’m four so I’m your number four girl”.

With her fifth birthday imminent I returned to the subject. “This is your last day as my number four girl”

She squeezed my hand “Why?”

“Because tomorrow you’ll be five”

“But can I still stay here? I don’t have to go do I?”

When I was her age I looked forward to birthdays gripped by an excited greed. It never occurred to me that she might be thinking that her birthday could be the cue for her to be moved on again.

“This your home now. You can stay here forever” She looked at me for a moment and then turned her attention back to Zingzillas.

Yesterday was a rare sunny day. We filled a paddling pool in the garden for the girls and they shuttled in and out of the house as whim took them.

As I sat reading the paper Little S walked past me saying “Hello Daddy”. I glanced up to find her naked save for two disney princess stickers – each one carefully placed on a nipple.

This is what I was gazing up at this evening. Taking the photo involved holding my Canon S90 to the viewing lens on my telescope. I had not thought it would work anything like as well as this.

Hope you were happy in the moonshine wherever you were.

As I tried to lower myself onto a tiny wooden chair, the teacher explained that in honour of Mary’s feast day the assembly would praise mothers. I hoisted Little S onto my knee and, in the hope of keeping her quiet, gave her a bottle of water which she sucked at tenaciously.

The headmistress appeared. She is tiny and pointy and, one suspects, a stickler for good behaviour. She invited us to be quiet, to put our hands together and to pray. Silence grew.

Little S looked up at me bemused. She raised one eyebrow, removed the bottle from her mouth and belched with a gusto that caused the windows to rattle in their frames. Heads swivelled in our direction and the headmistress, enraged, seemed to be on the point of releasing a platoon of winged monkeys. Little S seemed very pleased with herself. I furrowed my brow, held her gaze and whispered “No! Naughty!” at which point she released another blast which misted my glasses and then tore them from my face. The mothers sat around us began to snort and giggle and the prayer was abandoned. I imagine Mary smiling indulgently down from heaven. I certainly hope so as if she had the same look on her face that the headmistress did we are in big trouble.

I am proud to announce that she now has several 3 word sentences in her armoury. Here they are:

“Daddy do it!”

“Daddy hold it!”

“Daddy fick [fix] it!”

“Daddy get it!”

“Daddy find it!”

“No! Naughty Daddy!"

I cannot help but feel that a pattern is emerging and it is not boding particularly well for daddy.

I found them on the sofa, scanning the doorway nervously. P was ahead of me and let out a long “hello” which was part greeting, part sigh and part exultation. “Hi” I said, my tone a rough approximation of that of a Children’s TV presenter. I heard the foster mother ask “Who’s this, girls?”. The younger child who (in the interests of preserving the necessary anonymity) I shall call “Little S” replied “Mummy! Daddy!” She then pointed to the television. Until that moment we had been for her two mugging characters in a DVD, made to introduce ourselves. I stood, stunned, my head ringing as if from a blow. Two months later I am still staggered. Perhaps that is the permanent condition of the parent.

Time, having grown bored of standing still, rushed about like a toddler and we got drawn in to playing games, tickling and hugging; parents and children doing what felt like it needed to be done to draw between us the first fragile strands of a new bond. Very soon it was time to go and we retreated to the farmyard holiday chalet the Social Services had booked for us. It was a place with no landline, no internet and no mobile phone signal. It was as if we had dropped from the face of the Earth.

The next few days involved our taking the girls out -at first for short walks, later for trips to shopping centres and parks. We fed them in McDonalds (as “Big S”, the older girl, demanded) and fended off the grumpy turkey that confronted Little S at the petting zoo. By the middle of the week we had taken on the responsibility of putting the children to bed; bathing them and then reading them a story. Reading stories to the girls was such an immediate and unqualified pleasure that it seemed somehow wrongful – as if every act of parenting had to involve some inconvenience or sacrifice.

When it came time to go on the first night that we saw them to bed, P picked up Little S to put her in her cot. Little S stared at P momentarily and then began to howl. Meanwhile, Big S had thrown her arms around my neck and was shouting “I don’t want you to go. I don’t want you to go! Please don’t go.” I tried to reassure Big S and when that did not help started to prise her arms from round me. I plainly couldn’t stay all night but I was terrified that leaving her so upset would destroy whatever bond we had formed. P, unable to calm Little S, looked at me and said “I don’t know what to do, I am not sure I can cope with this. I am feeling out of control”. The foster mum appeared: “I think you need to leave them now. They will be fine. They often cry when they are put down and they need you to be firm.” We escaped, rattled, from the room and by the time we had reached the foot of the stairs, the girls were quiet.

I reflected overnight and decided to talk to Big S about how she was feeling. As soon as I levered the conversation towards the topic, she disengaged. she did not want to talk about what was scaring her and who could blame her?

P had brought with her a small glass heart that I had given her as a gift. I asked if I could have it. That night I gave it to Big S telling her that if she missed us during the night she should squeeze the heart to let her know we loved her. Foster mum (FM) immediately confiscated it, reasoning, correctly, that allowing a 4 year old to take a glass heart to bed was craziness. Nevertheless, Big S’s positive reaction left me convinced that I was a natural at the parenting game. I had noticed that Big S liked us to read a particular page of a book called “Spot Loves his Mum”. On the page, Spot’s Mum is putting a plaster on his knee. Spot’s Mum, the book says, makes Spot feel “all better”. Big S looked up at me and asked “Will you make me all better when I am upset?” My heart ached.

Spot and his plaster gave me an idea. The next day P took one along, sat Big S down, rolled up her trouser leg and went to put the plaster on her knee. “I promise I’ll make you feel better when you are hurt” said P soulfully. Big S stared at her and said “But my knee ain’t hurt! I don’t think I need a plaster”. My vision of writing my new bestseller: “It’s like a spoon only wider: Using metaphor to become the perfect parent” evaporated away like … like … well I should probably give up the similies as well.

The following day, sat in a cafe trying to persuade Big S to finish her sandwich, she grabbed me by the ears and pressed her face to mine. “You won’t leave me will yer?” she asked. Heart shards scattered across the tiled floor.

Each day we are entangled more closely. Each day my heart softens and dissolves.

I feel strangely about it. Not grief so much as bewilderment. But I also feel it is time for me (finally) to grow up and to be substantially less devoted to self pity.

Many thanks to you all for your thoughts over recent days. I have been astonished by your kindness.