A name and a number

Hurrah – she’s official!

Earlier today we went and registered Hope’s arrival in the world… I wish there was an official way to mark the passing of The Spaniard, I continue to miss the little being inside me but when I look at Hope and realise the little butterfly that the Spanish caterpillar gave itself up for, and then I feel a sense of wonder again.

Anyway, yes, Hope is official … actually she appeared in the Cambridge News last week with an official ‘welcome to the world’ announcement, and I need to get on and fulfil family tradition and put her in The Times (though I have to confess that The Guardian is more me).

Local news announcement

We waited in the shoddy waiting room with an un plastered ceiling at Shire Hall registry office

Fast asleep in the waiting room

… hatch, match and dispatch … very much the case there with people waiting in the same place to register deaths and a merry looking couple waiting to get hitched and outside a demonstration against the dismantling of the local rural bus services in the county.

God's waiting room??!

 

A nice chap called David (in very smart white shirt and high waisted black trousers) came out and called us in and asked us all the same questions that they had asked on the phone, he was the Registrar… he smiled at the number of names and then wished us well before taking money for ‘full’ certificates from us and pressing print on the printer and producing the short birth certificate (used for claiming her family allowance) and the certified copies of the ‘full’ birth certificate. There was one slightly tense moment when he asked who wanted to sign the registration document that will be filed “along with documents from 1830s to present day” that record all the folk hatched in Cambridge … I did say it was OK if her father wanted to sign, but he said I should do it, and so I did. I don’t know why, I guess I’d always presumed that the mother signed it … anyway – I did!!

We then chatted to him about Hope and about his being a member of a society that does battle re-enactments (not sure how we got onto that) and somehow Roy started talking about when he “used to work at Yorkshire Cable” which made me glaze over and clearly had the same effect on Hope (see photo!!)

Oh Daddy not that story again ....

before heading out into the sort of snowy grey morning. We took a few obligatory photos and then climbed The Castle Mount and took some official photos of Hope on her official registration day and headed home. It’s only another piece of the puzzle of formalizing her existence but it meant alot to have finally reached this important milestone. Hope Susannah Clare Elizabeth is now officially registered and along with having her own NHS number and GP is now a part of the ONS statistics data set for 2012.

At the top of the Castle Mound all official

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