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I was pretty convinced that today was Sunday until I looked at the calendar on my phone. They shouldn’t even bother giving the last few days of the year a name. They are just an amorphous blob of nothingness.
I am nearly always the one who gets up with the kids and (where possible) allow my wife a bit extra time to rest up. I don’t like to use the word hero, even though it is accurate in this case, but I am usually awake early, so it’s not a terrible hardship. But today, after an unsettled night I was in no shape to move at 6.30am and though I was woken, I was just an amorphous blob of nothingness and Catie (who was probably equally as tired, but has slept a couple more hours) managed to get the kids downstairs. I got to sleep until 8.30 and felt almost like a human being, at least for the morning.
By lunchtime I was struggling though and the smell of cooked food made me feel nauseous and I had to go and lie down again. Once upon a time I could be a glutton and a drunk and more or less function the next day. I didn’t even really overdo things yesterday (not in comparison to Christmas past) but my sober overindulgence still did me in. I suppose our Christmas has extended over the last five days and been fairly non-stop, so it perhaps isn’t surprising that my body finally said that it had had enough. I think that in the future I might try to treat Boxing Day like a lock-down Christmas Day (without the food). A day to relax with the family, play with the new toys, watch films and try to do as little as humanly possible (though late on Phoebe asked me to help her build some robotic toy and it was all so tiny and the instructions so confusing and my brain so befuddled that I had to ask her if we could leave it til tomorrow).
Will we remember these lessons next year? Catie and I have a resolution to plan ahead a bit more and think things through and not just let life come at us at a million miles an hour. If we’d had a second to think ahead a little bit about this Christmas I think we might have done things differently. It’s been fun still and great to see so much of both our families. But we could maybe have done it in a less concentrated and exhausting way.
It was at least a reasonable start to a diet with just a little fruit for breakfast and nothing for lunch, though my appetite returned a little in the evening. My body pleaded with me not to be punished with delicious food any more and as I did the evening dog walk it thanked me for the vigorous walk up the hill. Am I ready to get back to the healthy regime that I have largely eschewed since the emotional low of the Edinburgh Fringe? I fucking hope so.
Catie was telling the kids that they could be whatever they want and don't have to have the same jobs as their parents. I told them that they had to be comedians. We asked them what they wanted to be and both of them said that they wanted to be comedians. "I want to be a comedian or a teacher or a babysitter" said Phoebe. "I want to be a comedian and a cop," said Ernie. Which could at least be a brilliant TV series.
I couldn't be more proud. The first generation of Herring comedians might have failed, but the second generation is going to take the world by storm. I am not sure if they're nepo babies if their dad has been a relative failure, but I hope to be a nepo-dad and get work off their success.
