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Whatever muscle I pulled in my side is still hurting, but I managed to fight through the pain to play tennis this morning. I had to play with less power and although I went 2-1 down and thought this might be the first time I lost a match in Hitchin, I adapted to a more gentle play which favoured accuracy over power and that worked out OK for me. I won 6-2, 6-0. Battling illness, injury and age and yet still triumphing like a God.
I then recorded a Book Club with Abigoliah Schamaun and Joe Wells about their entertaining book
Neurodivergent Moments and then knocked out a Newsround and it was then pretty much time to pick the kids up from school.
It's half term now. My daughter is just half a term away from going to secondary school. How did this happen?
Ernie has been asking for an ant farm for a few weeks now and we finally relented and the one we bought arrived today. We thought we'd just bought the enclosure and were planning to get some ants once we had it all set up, but the farm came with a test tube of ants.
As we're away this weekend we had to decide if we were going to leave the ants in the tube (they can survive and breed in there for up to a year apparently, though it seems a little cruel) or release them into their new habitat and hope they could survive a few days without human supervision.n Again if they can survive a year in a test tube with a few seeds and a bit of sugar water then we reckoned they'd be ok. And if not then it's only some ants. We have some in the garden and a few that make it into the house.
Though a Queen Ant might be harder to track down. Phoebe wanted to call ours Briant. Though Ernie wasn't so keen.
We decided to let them run free and start digging their tunnels in the sand. It was pretty cool seeing them explore their new environment and see who was brave enough to leave the test tube (not the queen) and then see them get to work moving grains of sand with their fucking ant mouths.
They have three days to work out how to escape and turn the entire house into an ant farm, which will be a farm run by ants, with us humans as their slaves.
Ernie is viewing himself as the king or god of the ants, which is fair enough, but I love how much he loves nature and animals. When I was his age I was more interested in stomping on ants and on one occasion seeing what happened if I got them on to a piece of newspaper and then set fire to it. Did I really do that? What a monster. There's another thing for me to stress out about at 3am. What if the ants we've bought somehow know about my crimes and are planning to get their revenge. It would be entirely fair.
Ernie has not inherited my psychopathic tendencies and somehow is a caring and kind boy, in spite of his terrible father. There's hope for the future.
