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Having a new born feels a bit like recovering from an accident (it’s sometimes both of course), where you just feel incredible if you manage to go out and do one everyday thing. We managed two trips out in the car today with the whole clan (and the latter one also with the dog) and a pub lunch. We weren’t able to enjoy any of it due to the responsibility and the tiredness, but my, the sense of achievement.
I had half a pint of Abbots Ale to celebrate.
I’d forgotten how terrible it feels to be ripped from sleep to wipe an arse or stuff a cake hole full of milk, all the time feeling that you might fall asleep and then accidentally crush this awful creature that you already love more than life itself. Oh I so want to drift off to sleep, but I mustn’t. But I want to….
To be honest the two and half years with the other child have got me used to operating on minimal sleep and so I am getting through all this and enjoying it. Living in the countryside is good and being a dad is awesome. I’ve only had about five times in the last week where I thought I couldn’t manage.
Tonight they finally showed
the episode of Pointless Celebrities that my wife and I recorded last year. I don’t know why they sat on it so long. It’s a really amazing show. I felt a bit giddy reliving it all. Catie, who is not interested in quizzes and only did this because she knew how much it meant to me, followed my advice to just give any correct answer and let me pick up the slack. Sadly on both of the first two rounds she managed to give the correct answer with the highest possible score, leaving me to have to score well on subjects that I was very unsure of. But both times I pulled it out of the bag, even though I was sure I was going home. Someone on Twitter commented that it was like I was playing Pointless and Catie was playing Family Fortunes. But the tactics worked. Even though we were in the worst possible position of podium number 1. Richard Osman was funny and cruel, calling me out as the worst ever player of the game (something that the Pointless Twitter feed also picked up on) and enjoying me squirming. The Osmond brothers at the end managed to give a ridiculous answer on the first pass of the first two rounds, which made me think we were going to be fine, only to pull something spectacular on the way back, so I was once again seemingly screwed.
And of course we got one up in the Head to Head, even though we were going second, to make it seem like this was finally going to happen, only for Robert Lindsey and his daughter to come back into it with the second question and then win by 2 measly points in the decider.
But it was such an exciting game that even I couldn’t be too disappointed with the outcome. I had nearly cried again when I thought I was going home in the first round. I never get nervous on stage, but in two of the three Pointless shows I’ve done, my voice has cracked and gone all high and weedy like I am about to weep. I suppose if succeeding didn’t mean so much to me that it wouldn’t be so entertaining every time I lose.
Maybe they will invite me back a fourth time. But if it takes you four goes to win Pointless then I am not sure that counts. That’s just the law of averages.
Of course I got a Pointless answer in the final round that I wasn’t doing, though I may have chosen Disney films instead of magic had it been me in the frame. It will never be in the frame.
It was fun to watch it and to see Phoebe taking it in her stride that her mum and dad were in two places at once.
Kazoo Ishiguro is the new Joe Dolce though (which I doubt anyone has said before). Obviously he hadn’t just won the Nobel Prize when we recorded this, but even if he had I am not sure I would have known it was he who wrote that book or been able to call his name to mind. Weirdly a few months after the recording I was in a book shop which had a table with so many books that referenced the answers in this show that I am pretty certain it proves that life is not real and we’re in a computer simulation. Or I am in a coma. Or something.
I was so close to a Pointless trophy that I could smell it and it smelled of victory.
