Warming Up

So here it is. 6000 straight days of blogging. 31.5457% of the days of my life pointlessly documented.  I can’t work out if 6000 days feels like a lot or like hardly anything. It’s sixteen and a half years, which sounds a lot longer. If you have read every one of these, then well done. I guess. It’s an act only slightly more futile than having written every one. 

All I know is that in another 6000 blogs I will be 68 years old. I'm up for it if you and my heart are.

If you’re reading this in the future because I have managed to become a major historical figure in the latter half of my life, then hello, hope I’ve given you an insight into my life and times. I am really going to have to pull my finger out if I am going to achieve that major historical figure tag though. Assassin might be my only chance now.

My daughter so loved April Fool’s Day that she is still doing April Fools gags now in mid-May. “There’s something wrong with your nose?” “What?” “April Fool!” I love the way she trills it and the way she will do five in a row and always think she’s genuinely got me, but there is something slightly genius about doing April Fools on other days. They are at least less expected. 

But it’s my son who made a fool of me today. He’s been a little poorly and waking up in the night and for the last couple of weeks, partly because I generally wake early anyway, I have been dealing with the 4.30am starts and looking after him. This morning I’d left my wife with the monitor and slept in the guest room to get a little extra tie-in. Neither of may children woke up til 7am. How could my wife have lucked out in this way? 

I mean I also got to sleep in (having been awake from 3 to 5am, but just from being old- one of the great things about not drinking is I no longer have those horrific panicky dread-filled early hours of wakefulness any more), but that’s not the point. 

And tonight, when my wife was out doing her podcasting, I had the kids for bed time and my son’s April Fool was to unexpectedly and copiously throw up shortly after I’d put him down and was telling my daughter stories in the other room. Luckily my mother-in-law who’d been babysitting all day hadn’t left and she assisted me with the clean up (Ernie had fallen back asleep after puking and rolled around in his own vomit), but it was still a hectic 20 minutes of juggling spew covered sheets and clothes and trying to get my daughter to sleep. And then half an hour later, when my mother-in-law had left and I was settling down to eat some toast (having somewhat lost my appetite with the stink of baby hurl in my nostrils) and playing a game of online poker, Phoebe (who’d elected to sleep in the same room as her projecting brother) shouted to tell me he was being sick again. I rushed upstairs to see even more sick on the new sheet (how was there so much food inside him?) and picked him up in time for him to throw up over me and the floor. I’d been at a media event in Brighton today and was wearing my nice smart casual clothes and again fate decided to take down my vanity, this time with something more gloopy and hard to clean off than rainwater. 

My wife arrived home about an hour later just after I’d finally got both kids cleaned and down to sleep. The jammy bastard.

The poo and the spew are not so bad though. The hopeless love you have for these pranking idiots and the unbearable burden of seeing them in pain or discomfort or covered in their own sick is what gets to you.

They weren’t here 6000 days ago. And my wife was yet to cross and then join my path (actually I think she crossed mine and I switched to hers in the hope that if I followed her looking forlorn and doe-eyed she might take pity on me and let me walk alongside her). And my life is infinitely better, even if the blogs are slightly duller.

Thanks for reading some or all of these. They’re not really for you though. Or for anyone. I am just shouting into the abyss and hoping that somehow the echo will survive me.

In frame 89 of Me1 vs Me2 Snooker I worried that one of the Mes might say something controversial, but the real controversy came on the old green board. You will not believe the denouement. Make sure you’ve listened to all 88 previous frames first or it won’t make sense. It’s here.