5080/18000
A tweet informed me that I am 18000 days old today, which once again means my whole numbering system for these blogs has been exposed for the nonsense that it is. Or I went wrong somewhere along the line. Also it seems that this is the 5080th entry so seems likely that I just fucked up somewhere long the line. You people have to keep me straight on this. I am very old. Is anybody out there? Can someone check my maths? This is really important.
Anyway, pretty certain that I was 18000 earth days old today. I wonder how many I have left. Someone can work that one out for me in hindsight.
Second day off in a row, though I spent most of it driving to and from a one-year old’s birthday party and chasing my daughter around a hall in between. So it was pretty exhausting. But I got to eat cake whilst pretending I was feeding it to my child, so that’s a win/win. It’s hard enough keeping an eye on a child when you are well rested (as if that has ever happened) but when you’re tired it’s a big challenge. They keep running around and bumping into each other and even when you’re close to them it’s easy to lose sight of your one. At one point four of them ran in a circle and I followed the wrong tangle of blonde hair out of the melee, realised that wasn’t my child and for a second panicked that she’d disappeared. But I managed to locate her again in what felt like half a minute but was probably two seconds. Another time Phoebe made for the door at quite a pace and had I not being paying attention might have been halfway down the High Street before I knew she was gone. As it was I was on the case and she was still in the town hall vestibule where some strange looking men were milling around, going to use the other room. It only takes a couple of seconds of inattention or bad luck. The responsibility is unbearable and the way the brain flicks over to let you know what the exact most awful consequences of your inattention might be is horrific as always. We got her through another day without anything too bad happening to her. Though she did fall off a toy car when I was spinning it around a bit too fast. Her head hit the floor with a nasty clunk, but she didn’t seem too bothered and I more or less got away with my awful parenting.
The drive home wasn’t quite as tortuous as the one on the way there, though we did get into a traffic jam for ten minutes on the Westway. As we drove onwards we saw fire engines, one with it’s little rescue box extended up high and a couple of fireman inspecting something. It became clear that a massive pane of glass had fallen out of one of the office buildings opposite Great Portland Street tube and smashed on to the pavement below. I don’t think anyone had been unlucky enough to be underneath it as the broken glass was thankfully clear and not crimson. But if anyone had been under the sheet of falling glass then that would have surely been the end for them. Perhaps it had fallen whilst someone was trying to put it in or remove it and no pedestrians were beneath. But in any case another reminder of the random chance that threatens to change our lives at any moment.
A quick google shows that the glass fell after the area had been cordoned off.
We were all exhausted and I struggled to stay awake as I bathed Phoebe and put her to bed. And as we’d had an early dinner I was able to go to bed straight after her at 7.15pm. I could probably have fallen asleep straight away but we watched a couple of Freaks and Geeks episodes before succumbing to exhaustion. I dreamed that it was AIOTM day and I hadn’t yet written either script and was rushing to do so in the Leicester Square Theatre dressing room. Weirdly I woke up from this dream about three times, but each time I went back to sleep it continued where it had left off. The material I remember, mainly about Dan Tetsell pretending to be from Bulgaria, probably isn’t good enough to go in the actual show. And when you think of the low standards of the podcast that is really saying something.
