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I took the kids to their grandparents to meet my wife's cousin's baby and did not attempt to work out what kind of relations this made them. Always lovely to see a tiny baby - this one not even four weeks old - and the kids were fascinated and wanted to hold him. "You can't throw him on the floor like I do with Ziggy (her doll)" said Phoebe and I could see the baby's parents eyes widen as they agreed that she could hold him if she was sitting down.
I can't really imagine that my kids were this small and (since they turned up and I haven't slept properly for nearly seven years) my memory is shot to pieces (thank goodness for Warming Up so I have a chance to relive some of these days - when I have time to reread it all), but they must have been this small and useless and lovely at some point. My daughter has been pretending to be a baby for the last couple of days (on and off) and I think we might be approaching the point where I carry her up the stairs for the last time as she rockets towards her seventh birthday. As we come up to Warming Up’s Nineteenth birthday it is hard to believe that I have been a parent for a third of it.
I've been with these kids pretty much every day of their lives and I can still not make sense of how they have managed to change so much. They had tricked me by doing it very, very slowly, like Harry Hill's mash scoop.
And whilst we played and the kids marvelled over this strange new creature, I wondered what kind of life they were going to have. World leaders seem to have fudged the chance to save the planet, which seems short-sighted, though obviously great for business that profits won’t be impacted too much for them in the short term. Obviously the money they have accrued will become meaningless in a world devastated by climate change, but that’s not our problem. It’s the problem of these little kids. And in a way, it’s their fault for just sitting around doing nothing and playing, rather than trying to come up with a solution.
I hope that science will come up with some kind of solution - though people seem to be turning against science too, so it might not get the chance, but we do seem to be stumbling towards oblivion. Might be the best for the universe in the end. But I will be annoyed that there will be no future readers of my blog as it lies languishing in a crumbling British Library in digital form.
I only did this for posterity. I didn’t realise there’d be no posterity.
Also a bit sad about my kids too, but mainly the blog. It’s almost like I’ve just been wasting my time and yours for the best part of two decades.
