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My daughter and I play a car game that we've invented called Rainbow Car. The winner is the person who can see a red car, then an orange car, then a yellow car, then a green car, then a blue car, then a purple car and then a pink car: not officially a colour of the rainbow, but it's difficult enough to correctly identify a purple car (does dark blue count, is red that veers towards blue allowed?) , let alone trying to hit the exact shade of indigo and violet).
It's no CNPS but it's fun and I often play it on my own. The hardest cars to get are usually orange, green (sometimes surprisingly hard) and definitely purple and pink.
Phoebe had the record, getting all 7 cars in order in about 3 minutes as we drove towards the A1.
We've always said that if anyone sees a rainbow car then they win the game automatically. Yesterday whilst out with her nanna, Phoebe got her nanna to send me this photo, claiming a completion time of 3 seconds, because it took her that long to check all the colours were there.
So much of me is in these kids. It's a tragedy. But she was rightly delighted with her unbeatable win.
Looking at that though we should be doing light blue, dark blue, purple to complete the contest. Which will actually make blue a bit harder, but the game a bit easier.
I want to institute a version that includes infrared and ultra-violet and whatever colours/waves lie beyond that. Might be tricky to play with human eyes though.
But it will give me a chance to beat this uber-me.
Today was the last day of the school holidays and I do not understand where that time has gone. It wasn't just a holiday for the kids - my last gig was more or less the day before they broke up and I didn't have to do any work til September (if you don't count writing the world's second longest consecutive daily blog- is the other guy still alive? Can somebody check? I've forgotten his name. Also his blog was shit). I was planning on chilling out, maxing, relaxing all cool and playing some B Ball outside of the kitchen (which I did a few times), but the six week period has disappeared in a puff of smoke. Where did it go? If only there was some way to find out what I did.
It's maybe not surprising that I didn't get much time rilling (as I call chillaxing - you go your way, I'll go mine), but I am in much worse shape at the end of the holidays than I was at the start. And I was fucked at the start.
It's like the left hand side of my body has started to shut down. My left knee hurts, I've strained a muscle in my left arm (don't worry, it's not shooting pains, it's definitely some damage from exercise), my left ear is either itching or hurting and now on top of all this my back teeth/gums on the left are giving me gip, leading to a headache in the left hand side of my skull. My right side is fine. I have the right side of a 35 year old man (though a 35 year old man without a bollock), but everything on my left is falling apart and broken. And yes I dress to the left.
I tried to get a GP appointment about my dizziness a couple of weeks ago, but today was the earliest they could see me and as usual, the dizziness has pretty much gone away, but I went in anyway to see if they can get to the bottom of what's wrong (I hope it's not in my bottom, though if it is, I probably would feel a bit dizzy).
The GP who told me that he was 99% certain I didn't have testicular cancer is long gone (he was actually a terrific GP and it was a shame that the practice couldn't hold on to him) and it's been a different doctor every time I've been over the last few years, but I liked the latest incarnation, a no nonsense female doctor who used her ten minutes with me wisely and decided to set up blood tests, an ECG and get me to take my blood pressure every day until I next see her.
Most of the upcoming blogs are going to be about illness and ageing, partly because that's all that's left me and partly because I am gearing up for my 2027 stand up show "Oh Shit, I'm 60!" No guarantee I make it that far of course, unless the right side of me is able to drag the dead left side of me around like a pair of very melded conjoined twins (and there's no way of knowing that you're not two people who share the same heart and liver and have half a face each).
Phoebe is starting to realise how much older than her mum I am (it's only 13 years, but that's a lot to someone who hasn't even been alive for 10 years) - to be honest I don't think Catie really thought about it when she was 27 and I was 40 and didn't realise that when she was 47 I'd be 60. I am lucky that she had a very poor grasp of mathematics to go along with the low self-esteem that meant she didn't realise how much better she could have done.
I am not very good at realising how old I am. I don't feel like I am a man careering towards his sixties at the breathtaking speed of a second every second. I feel no different inside than I did 35 years ago. I can't even begin to comprehend the awful practical joke that life has played on me by allowing me to get this old. I am absolutely furious about it. Plus with all the time I wasted about being furious about being 40 when I was actually really young.
I will never feel like 57 is young. Nothing can make that happen.
The last six weeks feel like they didn't happen, but so do the last 22 years (basically the time I've been writing this blog - has documenting my life somehow led to me not actually living my life, in some kind of internet version of the Portrait of Dorian Grey crossed with the Time Machine? The online me has the experiences, whilst the real me sits in an attic as the sun arcs through the sky in seconds. I have to say that when I dip back into the vast catalogue of my last two decades, I often have no memory of the events or thoughts that I describe.
