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Catie is now ill with the thing I've been ill with. Which is a relief really because what would it say about the state of our marriage if she was not? So thank goodness .
It's good to tag team it though. I am still snotty and have a cough but am well enough to look after the kids and Catie can rest up. When it really hurts is where both parents are ill (I can't work out if it's worse or better if the kids are ill too, because at least if they are sick they aren't running around as much) and you still have to get on with life.
I got on with life - recording links for the final (for now) Can I Have My Ball Back? podcast (two more eps to come for you and I forgot to mention
that ep 7 was out yesterday) and doing an interview for the Aldershot and Brighton gigs. I am having fun improvising around scripts for the podcast and messing about in interviews (and RHLSTP), things are satisfyingly loose and revelatory at the moment. Maybe I am actually funny. Quite a revelation to me after 30+years of thinking I might not be.
I dashed to the supermarket so I could get more ingredients for my super-healthy cooking - harissa salmon with aubergine and butter beans tonight, which Catie thought was like something from a posh restaurant (but she may be delirious from illness). The weight magically keeps dropping off. I started this diet at an embarrassing 94.4kg and am currently 85.8kg. I wonder when it will plateau. As always still a huge distance from my BMI endorsed ideal weight. Fourteen more kilograms to lose, but the way things are going I wouldn't bet against it. In the last couple of weeks the only exercise I've had is some shortish dog walks, but I am keen to get back out running again as soon as the snot has departed.
I took Phoebe to football and put on my coat, but didn't bother with gloves or a jumper and regretted that stupidity, as finally the evenings are turning bitter as one would expect from mid-October.
I am listening to Adrian Edmondson's fantastic book "Beserker" which is funny as you'd expect, but also quite serious and sad. He talks about his awful school days dispassionately and passionately, filled with hidden and occasionally unhidden rage. It's a weirder experience for me as he talks about the corporal punishment and dodgy physical attention he and his classmates received from the teachers, because Adrian was at Pocklington school in the late 60s and early 70s, exactly the time that I was born and living in the village and my dad was a teacher at that school. I am pretty confident that my dad was a kind teacher, but it adds an extra layer to the tale when you're constantly worried that it might start talking about Whacker Herring (in either sense). Even so it's not nice to have a connection to a dark time in the childhood of someone you admire (or indeed anyone). It's the school system that was at fault of course and hard now to believe that adults beat kids and wouldn't stop until they cried.
Also when I first met Adrian I delightedly told him of our Pocklington connection and that my dad taught at his school and he kindly didn't tell me what a horrible time he'd had there.
It's a brilliant book about comedy, feeling like an outsider, the ups and downs of a double act and mental illness too. A lot of it resonates with me, but if you're interested in what makes comedians tick, as well as a take down of the education system (and family life in the 60s) that so scarred his mind (and bottom) and made him see the funny side of violence,
then you can't do much better than this. (audiobook for full furious impact).
Self playing snooker tonight - a cracking Sliding Doors frame
