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My car has been warning me that the tyre pressure needed checking for a while, but with lockdown we’ve barely used the car and I didn’t want to take an unnecessary trip to the garage. But I got hold of a compressor and decided to make sure all the tyres were the correct pressure.
I thought the tyres needed to be about 33 psi, but on googling it I found that it was supposed to be 41 for an eGolf, so they’ve always been a bit soft. Two of the tyres were on 33, but the other two were down under 20. They might just have deflated a bit as I fannied around trying to connect the gauge, but that was still a bit of a shock.
But after half an hour of lying in the road and on the pavement trying to get everything connected I finally got all four tyres up to standard, just in the for a proper family outing (only the second time we’d been on one since mid-March). The zoos are open and they’re outdoors and it’s easy to social distance (especially in the massive park that is Whipsnade) and so it felt fun and safe. The sun shone like it should in all childhood memories and we were all set for a great afternoon.
To be fair in all this time at home we’d forgotten how much stress it is going out anywhere with a 5 year old and 2 year old and there were tears and tantrums (and that was just from the parents!!!!!), but it felt good to be doing something normal, even if it just reminded us that normal is full of stress and unhappiness.
I still liked it though.
The kids wanted to play in the trees that lined the road rather than look at animals and after fifteen minutes in one they saw a better one a few yards further on (they are both 28 years old). In hindsight we should just have let them play in it - after all, it’s their special day, if they don’t want to look at flamingos then that’s their business. But we pushed on instead and once we’d made that call and a tantrum followed, we couldn’t go back on it, or it’d look like the tantrum had worked. It would take at least half an hour before we were back to any normality, but at least I’d seen some flamingos and zebras and giraffes, even if my daughter had mainly refused to look for them and the mission had become to find another good tree to climb.
We should have just stayed playing in the trees all day. We wished we had. Being a parent sometimes means making the wrong decision for everyone.
But we were out and about and we did see some great animals. The rhinos were my highlight, looking very much like animatronic versions of some kind of weird dinosaur rather than real animals. Nature is shagging weird. The kids were in a tree so missed them.
Hopefully all this means we’re one step closer to getting to see Mr Tod’s House and for Ernie to cuddle the evil fox, which is all he’s wanted to see and do for months now.
You can buy a signed copy of How Not To Grow Up with a spunking cock lovingly drawn in the front. Just £10 for the cock and the book is free.
Get it here.
