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All I want for my birthday is 48 hours of sleep. I won’t get it though. Though I did manage to crash out for about 40 minutes on the sofa in my office this afternoon. I don’t think all these afternoon naps are too much to do with age though, just the sheer pace of life at the moment and my body grabbing some rest when it can get it.
The last day of my forties involved packing up my life into boxes, as if I was about to die, which in a sense (and maybe not just a figurative one) I am. I think about how my wife and I had been planning to have a birthday party on Sunday and I laugh to myself. Thank God we bailed on that. Not least because as it turns out there would have been nowhere to have it. Shepherd’s Bush will have been left behind and the new house isn’t ready. We are nomads til the end of August and will be living in four different homes over the next six weeks. Phoebe is excited about going to live at Nana’s. I am not sure she understands much beyond that.
I am worried that I will put something that I desperately need in the next month and a half into a box that will be going into the attic room of a building site and not realise until too late.
I have given up on the idea of getting any work done this week at least.
I took my daughter to football, probably for the last time in this particular club, unless I choose to drive back into town next week for one last kickaround. Coach Anna has been a patient teacher with a good sense of humour and an ability to usually keep discipline amongst a group of rambunctious toddlers. The other week she got the kids to pretend to be asleep using their footballs as pillows and then said, “Right, we’re going to do this for the next half an hour.” I mean we all wished it was true.
Anna and her team all happen to be Muslim and I wish all the fearful idiots who believe that equates to hatred of the world were forced to come and learn to play football with all the toddlers. London is a great place. I will miss it.
And another promising preview, tonight at Downstairs at the King’s Head, which must be just about the longest running London comedy club on the same premises with the same guy running it (Balham Banana must be in with a shot at that too). I played here back in the early 90s and have returned a couple of times since. But nice to see Pete still smiling in the little booth that serves as a green room and houses the sound desk. And it was the perfect place for a middle of the warm up period preview. More new ideas, which I might well forget and the added tension of the last minutes of my forties evaporating as I spoke. Ten years ago I did a less enjoyable preview, but had a fairly remarkable tube ride home, that for some reason
I failed to detail in my blog, but which you can read about in How Not To Grow Up. Ten years on I sold a few of the last copies of the Emergency Questions book and drove home in the rain to my loving wife. Much has changed for me and I am pleased that it has. I did have a fun fortieth birthday day with friends, but I was very much looking forward to my fiftieth birthday spent with someone I had only met once ten years ago and someone who wouldn’t have existed if I hadn’t met that other person again.
Goodbye forties. You’ve been a good decade. If I am allowed to sleep for most of my fifties, I might be in good shape to enjoy my sixties.
