Warming Up

It’s been a full on week of work and then rushing home for chid care and perhaps the gig last night was too much on top of all that. This was the first day where I have had to have a nap for quite a good while and I could barely keep my eyes open, which was a problem as I was meant to be looking after the kids for most of it.

I took Phoebe to little gym and it was superhero day, so her Spider-man costume got another outing. At one point the kids had to hold up their big foam batons and Phoebe put her mask on top of it, holding it high above her head. It looked like she was worshipping a weird pair of blue and red pants, but she was making everyone laugh and one of the women taking the class told me that Phoebe was a comedian. I don’t know if she knew that I was a comedian. But perhaps it is inevitable that the child of two comedians will be a crazy show off. I don’t know if it makes me proud or worried, but I like the fact she’s a cheeky little bugger obsessed with poo and making people laugh, so I am not exactly discouraging her. I am sorry for passing on these genes darling. 

On the way back there was a bit of mild excitement, which I hope wasn’t actually my fault. On country lanes, especially at weekends there are lots of people riding horses. I am always respectful of this, knowing it is important to drive past as slowly as possible, giving a wide berth. But today as I passed four horses, pointing them out to Phoebe, one of them did a spectacular back kick which nearly hit the car. I think it was just an especially nervous horse, but the speed and power of it made it apparent why drivers have to be careful (I really hope my tiredness hadn’t caused me to misjudge my speed- I am 95% certain it wasn’t my fault). Luckily Phoebe didn’t really see it and no damage was done to the car, because I think if the hooves had smashed a window or dented a door this would have been a traumatic experience that neither of us ever got over. The rider did a good job of controlling the beast, but as I looked in my rear view mirror, now some distance away, it reared up again and threatened to unseat her. Luckily she kept control, but it was a bit of an unexpected rodeo, with added guilt of worrying I might be culpable.

I had thought about taking the kids out this afternoon, but I didn’t have the energy, so we watched some telly and I tried to strap my escapologist son into various baby traps whenever I needed to cook food.  Phoebe watched a lot of episodes of Beat Bugs and it was fascinating to see how they crow bar in various Beatles songs and make them work for insects - there’s a lot of Beatles songs with people’s names in, so they generally just introduce a character called that. But one of the characters is called Maxwell, which I assumed was so they could use that jaunty song “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer”…. But then I thought about the lyrics and even if they missed out quite a lot of them it was going to be tricky to make this a palatable episode. Much as I’d love to see him cracking all those insect cunts over the head until they were dead.