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It's six months since Phoebe's screaming head emerged from my wife (and then the rest of her followed). She still has to wait the entire length of her lifetime for a proper birthday though. I am glad that's not the rule for everyone or it might be a while before I got any presents. The fifth trimester had passed especially quickly. But here we are at half a year of being parents with only one or two bumps and one occasion where I forgot my daughter existed (and somewhat trumped today by the parents in France who left their daughter at a picnic spot and only found out 45 minutes later when they heard about it on the radio. That is pretty impressive parenting right there. Baby kidnap is one of my worst fears, but I realise that very few people would be interested in stealing a child. They're an awful lot of work.
Having lunch with my wife and daughter in a Zizzi's in St Albans (because we know how to live), we had been told to sit wherever we liked as we were early for lunch and the big restaurant was far from busy. We took our pram in with us as Phoebe is still too small for restaurant high chairs and we hoped we might get her to sleep. We didn't, so we ate our pizza with her balanced on one or other of our laps. The pram was tucked in at one side of our table.
Then two mothers turned up with their kids and in spite of having maybe 30 tables to choose from, they started settling down on the table next to ours.This was fine, if a little weird. But our pram was blocking one side of that table which I realised was going to lead to problems. One of the mothers started putting one of her children in a high chair on the other side of the table. She didn't say anything, just looked a bit intently at our pram,which I could see was in the way. But then it was only in the way of one table in the restaurant, so you might argue she had herself to blame.
But given she'd made this choice, she might have just politely asked for us to move the pram. Instead she was waiting for us to do it on our own, as if we had just bowled in and put our pram at her table rather than the other way around. Perhaps she thought we should have left the pram at the door like she had, but we needed the pram, even though we weren't using it at this second. Again perhaps she could have vocalised this if this was indeed the issue. But I would have been tempted to move one table further along and avoid the confrontation all together.
I spotted the issue and Catie, with some difficulty manoeuvred the pram to the other side of the table. The mother did not thank us or even acknowledge our existence. I thought about pointing out to her that she was being a cunt, but I rose above it. Mothers can be dicks.
Or possibly she was just tired and hadn't noticed any of this stuff, but still.
I stumbled through a preview of Someone Likes Yoghurt tonight after having listened to the eponymous routine from that show about seven times today. I needed notes and it was far from perfect, but I got the first half of the show down pretty well and I don't think it will take too long to perfect the second. It's an amazing show in its sheer audacity. In the original version the first half is an astonishing 70 minutes long. I will be cutting that down to 45 largely by not doing most of the Pope John-Paul II stuff. I can't believe people sat through this without rebelling in anger (though a few did). Some of it is great, but most of it seems to have been put in just to test the patience of the people who'd been nice enough to see me. It might be my best ever show in many ways and I think Saturday will be a hoot. But fucking Hell, what was I thinking?
I put together a Twelve Shows of Herring podcast about last Friday's Christ on a Bike show. There will be another one soon about Talking Cock. Out on Thursday.
If you can't make it to London you can still experience most of the 12 Shows of Herring experience (in audio only). We will be releasing the tapes of the first 10 shows (We aren't giving out Lord of the Dance Settee as that's not yet out on DVD or Happy Now? as we don't want to blow the tour. It's just £12 to access the recordings which will be put up a couple of days after we've done the shows. The first two are up already.
