Warming Up

Hold on this isn’t a holiday. It’s just parenting in a different location. Which doesn’t have all our stuff in it. What a swizz! Babies don’t even seem to understand the difference. Ernie, we’re meant to be chilled this week. Calm the fuck down, mate. Take a rest from being a baby. We can go back to that next week.

Phoebe gets it a bit better, though she was a bit homesick today. I had fun playing a game where she hid under some towels on a lounger and I pretended not to have seen her and then sat on her saying, “Oh dear, this is a bit lumpy.”

She loved this for some reason and I had to do it over and over again, and so I decided to pretend to be different people sitting on her. To begin with generic types of hoilidaymaker including a polite young woman who kept blowing off, then characters from her TV shows and then at her suggestion objects like another towel or sun lounger. Sometimes, when it was someone she really liked, she peeked out to see if, say, Peter Rabbit had really turned up at the hotel. But mainly she just giggled at the panoply of people and things that she was tricking into thinking she was a towel.

Good for my improv skills. I went with whatever she suggested and just yes anded the shit out if it.

Ernie and me are still struggling slightly from the snotty cold I picked up in Edinburgh (which the other two have somehow avoided) and my back was playing up a bit again and I had tummy ache (must have had a bad pint), but the days are mainly lazy enough for it not to matter too much and I carried on in my quest to make the all inclusive decision economical (even if it kills me). It’s made harder because they provide seemingly unlimited wine with lunch and dinner outside of that offer, so you’re not really in the miid to drink pints of beer and ice cream as well.

But the hotel does provide a morning of free child care for Phoebe - you have to pay for babies and it seems a bit of a waste to pay someone to watch him nap for a lot of that time - and also has a service in the evening where the kids watch a film as you eat and then go to sleep in little beds (until you come and pick them up - though that has to be before 10.30, otherwise I’d leave them there for seven days. Tonight the film was Dumbo, which I’ve never actually seen, but realised as it started that I was somehow very familiar with one of the early and obscure songs, “Casey Junior”. This is because a child I had one LP, which was a collection of Disney Songs from Dumbo, Song of the South and the Aristocrats (again never seen those films either) and this was one of the songs on it, along with the racist ditty “When I See an Elephant Fly” (which I fucking loved as a kid and can still sing, though I don’t because I can only do it in the accents) and the frankly boring “Pink Elephants on Parade”. But the very fifties sounding “Casey Junior” had been forgotten about until I heard it tonight, though I still found I could join in with all the words, “Casey Junior’s coming down the tracks, Casey Junior’s back, Casey Junior’s back.” I assume from the record that the film is mainly about this train and some crows and maybe them getting drunk together, though my daughter would later tell me that it’s about a elephant who sneezes and his ears grow so he can fly. Doesn’t seem likely. I mean, I seen a horse fly, I seen a dragon fly (clearly I haven’t, that’s more impressive than a dragonfly), I seen a butter fly, I seen a house fly, I’ve seen all that too. I seen a rubber band, I seen a hot dog stand, I seen a needle that winked its guys. But I doggone seen bout everytheen if I see an elephant fly.

I'm Abraham de lacey, giuseppe tracey, thomas o malley, o malley, the alley cat.

And everybody wants to be a cat, cos a cat’s the only cat that knows where it’s at, everybody wants to get into that something beat, cos everything else is obsolete. Oh a square with a horn makes you wish you weren’t born every time he plays, but get a square in the act you can set music back to the caveman days…..

Yippity doo dah, yippity a, mah oh man what a wonderful day, plenty of sunshine coming mah way, zippy doo day, zippity a. Oh Mr Bluebird’s on my shoulder, it’s the truth. It’s factual, everything is satisfactual….

Haven’t listened to that album in 40 years and yet there it all is, pretty much still up there. And yet I can’t remember the plots of films I saw two months ago. What the fuck is wrong with you brain, you fucking idiot.

It was this album. Though I think I only had the first LP as I don't remember any of the ones from sides 3 and 4. What a deprived childhood I had.

Anyway as much as I had wanted to see the film, the idea of a couple off hours of being an adult again won me round. So I’ve still never seen Dumbo. 

And we were too tired to make the most of our freedom and picked up our kids with about 90 minutes of freedom remaining and carried the sleeping tots back to our room. I wonder what nonsense they will remember off by heart from these precious times.