Warming Up

No one is going to shift that skid mark. It’s there forever.

How can I be expected to come up with groundbreaking and hilarious comedy when I have to taxi my kids around all day long? Yesterday I had to break off from my own life in order to drive my daughter to another school to take part in a choir festival and then take her back to school and I wasn’t even allowed to attend the choir festival (to be fair, I sat in a nearby cafe and worked, so it wasn’t all bad) and today it was my turn to take  the kids to their two separate swimming lessons, both in the same place, about 6 miles away. I was back and forth betwixt school and pool all afternoon, only getting a break to record a remote advert for my podcast with Jambo off of Hollyoaks. It was such a tiring day that I suspect that surreal interlude was just in my imagination, but let’s see if it ever turns up.

It was meant to be Jambo and the latest regeneration of the detective from Death in Paradise (the fourth one so making him the Tom Baker detective), but the latter’s internet was down and he couldn’t join us. Jambo and me did a good job though. He’s a nice lad. 

After the glory days of lock down (you know, in some ways) when the kids played pretty nicely together and got on well in the circumstances, they have now become opponents again. It’s all perfectly natural, of course, as they vie for our attention and question whether we love the other one more. The echoes of my own childhood are heard daily from the mouths of these kids and I guess most of these tropes are as old as language and maybe even older. “You love Ernie more than me,” “It’s not fair”. I haven’t yet heard “I didn’t ask to be born,” but it’s got to be a matter of time. It’s annoying to have my own material thrown back at me.

But the fights over nothing are exhausting from the perspective I now hold and almost all entirely pointless. I think my son just really loves his sister and wants attention from her in any form - he seems thrilled by the possibility that he’s about to wind her up to the point that she will definitely hit him, even though he hates being hit. I was the youngest and the irritant in my family group so maybe that’s why I can understand his stupid behaviour. 

I keep telling them that they need to be a team and that they should work together to defeat the real enemy, their parents, but they insist on fighting amongst themselves. Hopefully they will form an uneasy alliance at some point and make our lives more Hellish. And I will have to be pleased that they have learned to unite, even if against a common foe.