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Feeling a bit under the weather today, so it was the perfect time for Catie and Phoebe to head into London for a shopping trip and for me to have to look after Ernie for seven hours straight.
I can't complain too much. I'm about to get at least a fortnight in bed, so it's fair enough that I do my bit now. But it was quite a tough ride keeping up with this ball of energy tiny-clone of me. I adore him obviously and find him very funny either because he is being funny or trying to be funny and failing very badly.
He is the sweetest of little boys, even given that he wants to spend all his money on guns and loves to smash things with hammers and does his best to wind up his sister in all circumstances. Maybe love has blinded me to some of his flaws, but he genuinely has a pure heart, just all the stuff around the heart is infused with energy, self-destruction and madness.
He's the best.
We mooched around town for a bit and then came home and I made him sausages and mash. He went digging in the tiny patch of grass we have at the back of our garden and claimed to have instantly found diamonds (possibly bits of glass, but he wasn't having it), fossils and a stone that he opened with a hammer which apparently included the earliest work of human art.
I was encouraging and not just because I didn't really need to be a big part of this activity.
He wanted to make content for his secret youtube channel (unaware that Kier Starmer is planning to stop kids using that platform) and so then we had to melt some gummy bears on the stove and mix them with coca cola and then put the mixture into the freezer, where apparently it would turn into a sort of coke/Haribo paste.
I mainly ended up pouring boiling hot coke/Haribo mixture over my hand as I tried to get it back in the bottle. We should probably have waited for it to cool.
Then I suggested Ernie practice his piano, but he saw it as a good way of making more content and asked me to film him. He played the Oompah- Loompah song and over the top, with some difficulty when it came to scanning sang
Donald Trump is so dumb
I want to kick him on his bum bum.
Then to the tune of Grieg's "In the Hall of the Mountain King" he sang
Donald Trump is so dumb, is so dumb
Donald Trump is so dumb, dumb, dumb dumb, dumb
Donald Trump is so dumb, idiot, butthead
Donald Trump eats garbage, farts in public, does it for the publicity.
He then suggested Donald Trump doing something that I cannot repeat in a family blog.
It's probably good that Keir Starmer is shutting down social media. I am worried that even by blogging this that Ernie might end up on a no fly list.
He certainly has inherited his father's gift for musical satire.
By now it felt like we'd been together for about 45 hours, but inconceivably there was still at leat three hours before the others would be back.
We played a game of Risk, one of my favourite boardgames that Ernie has recently got into. Just like I used to (when I was 28 years old) he spends a lot of time playing with toy soldiers. I remember my parents being concerned at the time that I was going to be a war mongerer as an adult, but it hasn't happened yet and I don't think playing with toy soldiers equates to wanting to commit actual nationally approved murders.
Risk is quite a complicated game, but Ernie seems to really understand it and the combat bit is a really fun way to play soldiers as well as learn about probability and geography. I couldn't be more delighted to have a new Risk partner. You need three people to play the regular game, but if there is no third person then I bring in Me2 who plays the third army with impeccable honesty (even though each of us know the other's mission).
It was a great game. Which I also won with the easiest mission (18 territories with at least 2 soliders on each), though Ernie had bossed the game and recognised that Me 2 was trying to get South America and Asia and absolutely obliterated him. It had helped that I'd taken a couple of Nurofen beforehand.
Ernie loves this game so much (and came within a whisker of getting the 24 territories that he needed) that he wasn't even upset to lose (I would have thrown the board over) and trusts me so much that he didn't even question whether I might have manipulated the game by controlling two armies (I hadn't. I am very good at playing two opposing competitors and Me2 attacked Me1 with alarming frequency - almost like he wanted me to lose).
I was a terrible loser at his age, and at every age until I was about 58, when I matured on one occasion before reverting to type. I have so much to learn from this child about begin gracious and changing the words to popular songs in order to satirise politicians.
We finally got the coke mix cool enough to go in the freezer, though it never quite turned into the gelatinous substance that Ernie was hoping for.
Finally Catie and Phoebe got home, outrageously claiming that they were tired too! So we got a takeaway pizza and watched a bit of the World Cup. Come on that Curacoa equaliser was a special and joyous moment.
But bring on my debilitating medical treatment so I have an excuse not to have to do this stuff until July at the earliest!
First Edinburgh guest announced. Mike Wozniak will be joining me at Stand 3 on 13th August at 2pm.
BOOK NOW.
