7608/20547
Six years since my son shot out of my wife like a bullet, after I'd failed to ensure she got the necessary drugs and I was so shaken up that I couldn't cut the umbilical cord. It was a very stressful day. No one has a tougher life than me.
Happy birthday to Ernie Herring. I can't believe you made it to six in one piece. But I didn't make it to 54 in one piece, so there's still time to get you into two pieces. Hopefully one small and the other large.
We opened presents in bed. He got a lot of stuff. Phoebe had chosen some of them, which meant the biggest (and in her opinion best) gift was some remote control turds. When we came to put them to use later they turned out to need quite weird batteries - incredibly I had some - and then one of the turds would fart when you pressed the button, but not move. Though I am not sure it's anatomically correct for turds to fart. What are remote control turds teaching our kids? In my day remote control turds were much more sophisticated.
It was annoying that only one of the turds could participate in the complex remote control turd game, but I couldn't be bothered to unscrew the battery compartment to rescue the batteries, let alone take the game back to the shop or contact the manufacturer. How many times would the kids play this game even if it was functional? What a damning indictment of our wasteful society. I expect the people of 2045 reading this are pretty pissed off about us having remote control turds that we only planned on using once at most and that didn't even work. What a time to be alive! Now, not 2045 obviously. If only the remote controlled object could be more symbolic of this situation.
We went to see the school harvest festival where the local vicar gave a confusing and possibly racist sermon about bread (he seemed to think that our lovely yeast filled fluffy bread was more delicious than flat bread - and also astonished when many of the kids put their hands up when he asked them if they ate flat bread every day - welcome to the age of the wrap, grandad).
He had a bag of bread with him, which I hope was for the talk and not just something he carried around all the time, proffering slices to strangers. It was odd that he seemed anti flat bread as he was trying to make some point about Moses needing flat bread to get across the desert - the fluffy yeast bread just wouldn't have had the staying power to make it. He claimed flat bread had been around since then, for about 3000 years, as if this proved there was a God. But the dad next to me had taken time out to google the facts and flatbread has been around 14,500 years , long before his precious Bible.
It was a long sermon and I'd preferred to have some more songs from the kids and for my son to pull more faces as he sang them. The vicar asked us all to thank God for bread (or something - I'd lost interest by then). All the kids shouted thank you, but none of the parents.
Happy Birthday Ernest.
