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Maybe four hours sleep last night and podcasts are exhausting enough with twice as much sleep and without the long drive home. I took my daughter to her gym class and managed to snooze on the sofa. One of the teachers came up to me afterwards so say Phoebe had bumped her head on one of the bars, but she had seemed fine so they hadn’t told me at the time. “Thank God,” I replied, “I was asleep. You’d have woken me up.” I am not sure that’s meant to be the reaction when you find out your child has been hurt. But she laughed anyway.
This is a golden period of parenthood, at least with the toilet trained one who sleeps properly. Phoebe is coming up with opinions and attempting problem solving. If we are stuck in a traffic jam she asks why we don’t just drive in the opposite lane as that is clear. It’s a good point, but probably one of the many valid reasons why 4 year olds must not be allowed to drive. But occasionally her solution to an issue is correct, or at least gets to the heart of something that is wrong in society. Hey! I am important. I should be allowed to break the laws of the road if that gets me to where I am going a little bit quicker (or kills me). I remember asking my parents as a child why they couldn’t just print up more money and give it to the poor people. I remember my parents laughing fondly, knowing that that seemed like a good solution, but wouldn’t actually work (though it’s more or less what they did during the economic crisis, except they gave the money to the rich instead of the poor, which is really stupid). But money isn’t real, it’s an artifice that we all go along with for convenience or because we believe it is something real. If something is just made up you can easily just make up more of it. We could all have infinity pounds right now. That would be a kick in the teeth for the Brexit naysayers and I think it’d really get the economy going. If you literally couldn’t run out of money imagine what you’d buy. Imagine how rich the people selling stuff would be. They’d already have infinite money and then we’d give them some of our infinite money. They’d actually have a bit more than infinity.
But sadly we’d have a bit less than infinity now, even though we still had infinity. So you can see how quickly that transforms back into a society of the rich and the poor. At which point you just give everyone infinite money again. It’s fool proof.
I am awaiting my daughter’s solutions to the evils of civilisation. She has a lot to lose if we don’t sort stuff out, so she’d do well to get working on it now, rather than wasting her time colouring in.
Anyway I don’t remember much about the day. The snooze had been enough to keep me operating and able to keep my children safe, but not much more. There was a point in the afternoon when my wife took both kids out to the park and it was the happiest 45 minutes of my life. But I was glad to see the snot-nosed whelps when they returned.
