4657/17316
Off to Kew Gardens today for a friend’s birthday. I love going to the park with my little family. I want to spend less days working and more days doing this. Hopefully once I’ve got this stupid show marathon out of the way I can start to get the balance right (though actually doing these weekend shows in London has meant that I have spent a lot of time with Phoebe, just not enough of it rilling [my version of chillaxing that hasn’t caught on with the portmanteau the other way round] on some grass eating picnics). As well as having fun with our baby and our friends we had the added excitement of discovering that Phoebe’s first tooth has just broken through. It’s a tiny bobbly ice berg and most of it remains beneath, but these little milestones are weirdly thrilling (a portmanteau of thrilling and chilling). There were two younger babies at the gathering and it’s weirdly impossible (important and possible) to imagine that Phoebe was ever that tiny. She’s becoming a person. A person who can bite. None of this is good news really.
I want her to be a baby forever.
We mainly sat down and chatted and ate and drank, (though tired from my hard weekend I did have a bit of a snooze too) but then we thought we’d better make the most of our £15 entry fee and went on the Treetop walk. I’ve done this before and don’t remember being such a wuss about it, but having Phoebe in my arms made the height and the swaying and the moving plates of metal beneath our feet strangely terrifying. Partly though because of my compunction to want to throw things of value off of high structures or into rivers or to push those I love into bodies of water. The voice in my head whose job it is to imagine all the horrors that could befall my defenceless baby kept telling me what a bad idea it would be to throw my baby over the barriers, but in a way that made me feel that it was goading me to do exactly that. I discussed my problem with my friends who I don’t think suffer from the same paranoia. I told them I wouldn’t do it. “And what if you just trip and accidentally let her go?†said the voice in my head. “You’d not only kill her, which would be awful, but now after you’ve had that conversation everyone is bound to assume that you did it on purpose. No matter how much you protested your innocence. And you know, looking at it, it would be so difficult to do that accidentally that you’d have to conclude that they were right.â€
I couldn’t let the evil part of my brain win so clung on tight to my baby and got round as quickly as I could and neither tripped or harmed her deliberately, because I love her and want her to live forever and I’d be lost without her. But I don’t appreciate my brain being such a dick about this, even if it thinks that by doing this I will take better care of her. And it was right this time.
I was glad to be on the ground again,even though my brave daughter was neither phased by walking amongst the tree tops or being in the arms of a madman. She knows that however mad I am I will fight to my last breath to save her from any danger, even if I am the danger. But it’s not good that being a dad has made me less cowardly than before. As I didn’t have much lower to slip down the ladder of bravery.
The Kickstarter campaign got over £25,000 in 18 days with another £25,000 to get in the next 12. Basically we require about 900 people to jump in at the same average level, or just 20 rich people to sponsor an entire episode. It’s a tough ask to get £2000 a day, but hopefully the deadline will spur people onwards. Thanks very much to all those of you who have donated already. Any donation, however small (and in an ideal world I would like to fund stuff like this by 50,000 people giving £1 (just 5p per episode). That’s only a third of our listenership. Realistically that’s not going to happen, but what a brave new world it would be if we could fund this stuff via micro-payments. None of the kickstarter money comes to me. I am only interested in making enough to pay everyone else. I think my reward comes later in podcast Heaven.
