Warming Up

I was expecting more pain from the late night and the (actually reasonably moderate) alcohol intake, but when my son woke me up at 6.20am I didn’t feel terrible.

But we decided to take it relatively easy today and got on to Star Wars episode I this morning and the monstrosity that is Jar Jar Binks (he is shit and the slapstick is lame, but I feel most Star Wars fans don’t like him - or the ewoks- because it reminds them of the truth - this is a film for children). My daughter found him occasionally amusing. The main problem for me was that the flying blob thing that has enslaved baby-Darth Vader uses the word “methinks”. Obviously that is a translation of whatever he’s actually saying. But what does that mean? Is the character speaking in some medieval version of his own language? Is he using an archaic phrase meaning “I think” and that has been faithfully translated into the closest we would have in English? It seems unlikely. It’s hugely problematic and for me brings the whole Star Wars Universe crashing down.

I am glad that baby-Darth Vader gets taken away from his mum though. Anyone who allows her tiny child to take part in a race where a good proportion of the contenders will die a fiery death and where there are people actually fucking shooting at the contestants, let alone any mother who agrees that her son can get in a spaceship with two men she’s really only just met who claim to have “special powers” should not be allowed to care for children.

But maybe a dad who is watching Star Wars on a Sunday morning because he’s too hungover to do anything else is in no position to criticise.

In the afternoon I gave my wife some her-time and took the kids to the woods to climb trees and collect kindling and then killed more time by taking them to the playground, which was surprisingly bereft of all other kids. It’s actually much easier than wrangling them when they’re watching telly, and they played together gleefully rather than throwing lego at each other’s heads in an attempt to start a fist fight.

Some local kids/teenagers (presumably) had raided the next door field over night and thrown/smashed up some of the dreaded crop of beets on the skateboard ramp. And also left about six articles of clothing behind. Phoebe couldn’t understand why they would do something like that and I tried to explain that teenagers could do weird things if they were bored. I could understand the throwing root vegetables at each other, but I didn’t understand how they all managed to shed so much clothing (and it was only hoodies and stuff so I don’t think it had been some kind of orgy, or if it was it was just one where they got excited by seeing each other’s t shirts). Perhaps the children had been disintegrated by exploding beets. 

I pushed the kids on the swings instead and remembered going to the local park in Shepherd’s Bush five years ago and how much my tiny daughter had enjoyed the swings. She still does, but somehow she’s now 5 and two thirds.

I kept us all outside as long as I could, but I had also bought myself two hours of me time, which I wasted by playing games on my phone in the bath, thinking about how I should really be reading more.

But then I just played games more instead. There were some words in the game.