Warming Up

There is not enough time in the day and we’re always late for everything. Because kids don’t work to a timetable (and neither does my wife if I am honest) and so you can’t always leave the house when you want to, even if you were ready to. Which you never are.

So I careered through the countryside to get to Harpenden, (where we once lived and might have lived in more permanently if we’d had a nicer time there five years ago- I’m glad we didn’t live there, it’s too busy) but were still five minutes late for the gym. At least this time I had had a whore’s bath in the sink before heading out. So I wasn’t quite as stinky as last time (or was it the time before? My life has blurred into one amorphous mass of chaos for me, so I can only imagine how awful this is for you). 

But the first five minutes is boring anyway. 

It’s interesting to watch toddlers interacting with each other, like a live action version of Secret Life of a 2-year-old. Even though there was lots of gym equipment to occupy her, Phoebe spent a good five minutes running round a pillar with another little girl in a game of chase where it was unclear who was chasing who. Her dad and I exchanged glances. It’s lovely to see two children inexplicably decide to be friends and also get such squealing pleasure out of something so simple. The run proved too much for the other girl who sat down in a heap and Phoebe went up to check she was OK and help her up. It was very sweet and then they decided to run round holding hands. Another boy joined in on this action, but he was very much a hanger on, not part of the core group. 

This was much nicer, though less funny, than her taking umbrage with the boy at football. But what marks out a friend from a foe at this stage? It’s very hard to tell.

Although my daughter’s default setting is embarrassment of me already, we are also managing to share some nice moments. In the last few days I’ve been singing the weird and chromatically inaccurate song, “I can sing a rainbow” which not only gets the colours of the rainbow wrong, but encourages children to “listen with their eyes”, which some people might describe as seeing. But it’s a big buzz when embarrassment evaporates and Phoebe joins in. We made a decent stab at most of it today. It’s going to break her heart when she finds out the real colours in a rainbow and that you can only listen through your ears, but let her have this time of blissful ignorance.

Meanwhile I was trying to cram for my first performance of Oh Frig I’m 50 in nearly two months. Obviously I’ve forgotten the whole thing which would be bad enough if I wasn’t being called upon to do a version some 30 minutes longer than what I did at the Fringe.

Luckily I thought to ask for a few shows to be recorded (and if I hadn’t I genuinely don’t know what I would have done as I have forgotten so much of it), but still I found it hard to concentrate for sixty minutes to listen through it all again.

Usually it all comes back enough to be able to do a decent performance, but I hope the people of Halifax won’t be too disappointed. I can always make good on my promise to make the whole show just me watching the Penguin Race game.