Warming Up

I slept til nearly 8am and felt like a God. If you could travel back in time and tell the me of 10 or more years ago that this would be an achievement then he would doubtless be disbelieving. “What, you mean I am proud of myself for getting up super early?” “No, no super late.” “Say what?” (The me of ten years ago liked to say “Say what?”)

Just as, I suppose, if you went back a decade and told men who see themselves as patriots that they’d be booing their own football team and national anthem they wouldn’t see how that was possible. The future is full of surprises. Sometimes the surprise is that you’ve turned into a cunt. Sometimes it’s that circumstances have shifted in a way you didn’t anticipate. Usually it’s both.

The kids tornadoed back into the house a couple of hours later and it was business as usual, but maybe tinged with a little more appreciation of how lucky/unlucky we are to have them. After my fourth row (£212.50 per session - who’s the idiot now?) we went to Pizza Express for lunch (I had one of those Leggara pizzas with a hole in the middle full of salad, with a bit of a crappy healthy crust, though worked out that splitting a pizza with my wife and having a side salad would be fewer calories - in the olden days I’d have eaten a whole pizza and the half of hers that she never eats)  and then on to the zoo. The sun shone, I occasionally checked my phone to see how England were getting on (the team seem to play well when I am unable to watch, like that time we went to see Bing), we watched elephants showering themselves in water and sand so that they could keep cool, my son boldly went for a mint choc chip ice cream, before declaring that it tasted like medicine and having to have another one instead (we should have seen that coming - my wife also went for mint choc chip and if we’d been thinking she could have had anything else - even had our son liked the green ice cream he would only have eaten half of it. You’d think all our ice cream and pizza experience would stop us making these basic errors). 

Most surprisingly I found that I was able to carry my tall-for-a-six-year-old daughter a fair distance without getting tired or having to put her down. My daughter pointed out that she had never seen me “thin” (not that I am yet, as she is quick to tell me) and I told her that I had got pretty fit before she was born and that she had seen me at a reasonable level of fitness for the first few months of her life, but the exhausting of looking after her had ground me down. 

I am getting strong. Not just compared to when I’d had surgery, but compared to me in my thirties. We were all knackered by the end of this hot sunny day, but I am loving the amount of energy I’ve now got. Having cancer might be the best thing that could have happened to me. I certainly seem determined to show cancer that it should fuck off and stop booing England players.

It was another great family day, where the losses of the last year tugged my heart one way and the joy of being able to do stuff again pulled it the other. The positive side definitely won the tug of war and we’re going to make sure we do as much stuff like this together again, because I guess in ten years (when we will suddenly have two teenagers who sleep in til midday) we may want to travel back in time and let the 2021 us know how blessed we are and how we can’t believe we had such fun. It’s all right 2031 Rich (if applicable), we know. I still envy you your lie ins though.