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After the drive home after RHLSTP I got to bed around 1am and the kids were a bit restless and woke up early so I got at most four hours sleep. Usually Tuesday is out as a writing day and I feared that would be the case today, but we have a script read through tomorrow and necessity is the mother of sitting on your arse and getting work done. And I had a surprisingly productive day. Working my way through the five scripts I have already and tidying them up and filling in the gaps. Episode 4 will still need a bit of work in the morning, but I’m not too far off now. Apart from the non-existent episode 6.
Still completely annoyed with myself for getting into this sick-making situation again, especially when I realise that I can work hard all day, even on minimal sleep, if I really have to,
I broke off for an hour or so to take my four year old son to his first ever soccer training. It took part on the rec under floodlights, as the session ran from 5.30pm to 6.30pm. Ernie took to things OK, but he hasn’t got complete focus yet, often preferring to stare off into the distance and waving his arms around, rather than seeing if the ball was coming to him. He did pretty well for the first half hour and enjoyed a Squid Game style exercise where you could only move when the football was thrown in the air. He cheated like mad, but largely did OK. And he didn’t get gunned down by machine guns, so he’s through to the next round.
It’s a bit of a full day for him as he’d also been swimming in the afternoon and as his bedtime approached he was flagging. Then he accidentally ran into another boy and was knocked over. His shoe came off and he lay on the ground confused, dazed, looking up at the dark sky. He was unharmed, but shaken and a bit teary, so we sloped off just before the end of the session. He’d enjoyed it and done pretty well I thought, but maybe, like his dad is too sensitive for too much rough and tumble and might not be the world’s greatest sportsman. I like the sensitive, distracted Ernie, who is, as yet, not intimidated by the pressures of trying to appear “manly†or too self-conscious to just give stuff like this a go. He’s the sweetest thing and I hate that the world will almost inevitably crush that sweetness out of him. The other boys were friendly and the atmosphere was great. But I am not going to force my kids to do stuff they don’t want to do. That never worked for me. So it’s up to him if he wants to go back. For now his memory of it is the inexplicable moment where he found himself on the floor with a shoe off, rather than all the fun he had earlier.
I came back home and did more writing, working until about 10pm. It’s going OK, but life still leaves me occasionally lying on the floor, not knowing what the Hell is going on, wondering where my shoe is.
