Warming Up

Happy Birthday to my amazing wife, Catie.

With everything else going on it was hard to give her the day she deserved and aside from buying a small bottle of champagne from the service station on the way to Halifax to enjoy over breakfast I had pretty much dropped the ball. I am hoping I can make it up to her later when we’re a bit less discombobulated by our new baby and our unpacked house.

We did have a massive lunch with Catie’s family in a local pub which was awesome and I attempted to buy her a proper present, heading to John Lewis on a busy Saturday afternoon to look at getting a fitness band/watch. There was a young guy serving us and unusually he didn’t know his stuff at all. He told us that all Fitbits were waterproof, which I knew wasn’t the case and then nearly sold us a bracelet accessory saying it was a Fitbit. Luckily I realised pre-buying it that it wasn’t, but he still insisted that it was, before looking it up and having to back down. It had been quite an effort to get us and our two children into the shop, so it was disappointing to leave empty-handed. My faith has been shaken in John Lewis, which for a middle-class atheist is a bit like discovering that there actually is no God. Obviously I immediately wrote to Ian John Lewis to get the young man sacked. This is Hertfordshire for Waitrose sake.

And by the evening I was falling asleep on the sofa and we just got the kids ready for bed and then tried to sleep ourselves, but Ernie, who had slept through the day, decided that he fancies being nocturnal and we had our most difficult night with him since he was born. Happy 37th birthday, darling. We will get out the other side of this. Maybe by the time you are my age. 

Luckily I still feel like I am in my mid-thirties so I am enjoying the thrill of finally being with an older woman. Age is just a number. Which correctly identifies how many years you have spent on the planet.

I wondered what I had been up to on my 37th birthday and whether I had had a better time than this. I couldn’t remember at all, but thanks to the magic of Warming Up I could find out. My 37th birthday was properly tragic. It was 2004 and I was right in the heat of the Twelve Tasks of Hercules Terrace, desperately trying to complete my pointless tasks in time for my Edinburgh run. I was searching for a 900. The next day I would stand on the central reservation of the A40 for two hours, hoping to see one. Suddenly spending the day changing nappies and placating a crying child seems like the most amazing thing you could do. My wife might not realise it, but she has her life much more sorted out than I did at the same age.

 And back in 2004 then I had a tennis lesson so that I could attempt to beat a 15 year old at the sport. I failed of course and was so into the project that that seemed to genuinely matter. I was pretty depressed with the way things were (or rather weren’t) going. My life couldn’t have been less meaningless, so my wife is way ahead of that disaster. I don’t know what I did in the evening time. I hadn’t even bought an Apple computer by that stage I can’t even check my calendar for clues. Did I celebrate the occasion with one of my 50 dates? I think probably not. It would have seemed like a big commitment to have a birthday date… so most likely I was alone. 

I’d never done a podcast, wasn’t doing stand up, didn’t own any Apple product whatsoever, not even an iPod (I bought one towards the end of the year- I mention it here - but I could probably pinpoint the exact date, because I bought one of the original ones on the day that the newer cooler one was released and I didn’t know anything about that, except that my choice meant I didn’t have to join a massive queue).

Suffice to say I was a huge 37 year old fuck up and I am delighted that 13 years on I have things a bit more in perspective, even if I am still vaguely useless in lots of other ways.