Warming Up

"What do you get if you cross a snowman with a vampire?” I asked Phoebe.

“Friends” she suggested.

And I’d like to think she’s right. And I think she might have invented a brand new children’s franchise. But she will be getting none of the money from the rights. 

She’s also struggling with the idea that you have to wait a whole day to open the next door on the advent calendar and collect your chocolate. I told her that when I was a kid you didn’t get chocolate in advent calendars, you’d just open a door and there would be a picture of some shepherds or a teddy bear. “Poor daddy,” was her only response.

And she was right. But we were happy with pictures, until Ian Cadbury came up with the idea of putting Dairy Milk in there instead. And boy, did we feel stupid then? Being excited by a picture of a Christmas tree. We were idiots in the 1970s.

I have been gifted a gin advent calendar, which must make my parents feel even stupider than me. They didn’t have any kind of advent calendar, thinking they were too grand for a picture of some myrrh. But they could have had 24 shots of different types of gin to get them through the month. I mean, they could just have had a bottle of gin (someone did a funny tweet meme of their booze advent calendar being a bottle of gin with 24 black marks down the side indicating how much they could drink). I was trying to stop drinking every single day (and I am sharing the small shot with my wife) but this celebration to the countdown of the pretend birthday of a pretend baby has given me reason to stay constantly pissed. A gin and tonic a night does give you an excellent buzz it has to be said. But it also makes you then drink more booze and thus ruin that.

Both Mark Owen and Charley Boorman were on TV today, which made my Twitter mentions a bit repetitive. But eventually everyone tries to look like me. If it’s good enough for Brad Pitt then it’s good enough for anyone.

Lou Diamond Phillips pops up, without any fanfare as a guest on “Ready Steady Wiggles”. My mind was blown. And you know I wasn’t sure about Simon Wiggle to begin with, but he’s really growing on me. He’s no Emma Wiggle, but then again one of his hands is as big as four of my hands and you know what they say about big hands? You can ignore it. It’s not true. But I am still curious. Sure Lachy is prettier, Emma, but imagine being held in those giant hands - what were you thinking?

My son has bounced back from his bug, but my father-in-law was still poorly, so I waited all day to see if any of the rest of us were marked people. It seemed to be OK, though when you’re worrying about this stuff you do start to feel ill anyway. Especially if you haven’t properly slept since 2015.

I kept eating heartily, under the logic that if I was going to be sick then I would throw up all these calories and have had the pleasure on the lips and nothing on the hips (to be fair, my hips are the slimmest part of me and perfectly capable of telling untruths too, but enough about them). Which would have been fine if I had been sick. But I hadn’t been yet.

Why does my body confound my best efforts to keep it healthy?