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Making up for all that time away from home by doing as much as possible with the kids. Can I go back on tour now? I am joking. It's been fun.
Phoebe and me had time to finish the lemon meringue pie today and as always I was struck by the magic of cooking. Somehow the spell book worked and combining all the ingredients turned them into something very different than they'd been before. Why did people waste time trying to turn lead into gold when the real alchemy was turning egg yolks, flour, butter and lemon juice into the lemon bit of a lemon meringue pie? Much more miraculous and twice as delicious as gold.
I messed up the meringue by misreading the recipe and adding the sugar and flour too soon. You have to follow the spell exactly or it won't work. My egg whites weren't turning into soft peaks. I rang my mum who is the meringue expert, but I had gone so far wrong she couldn't even imagine the disaster. So I started again and did it properly and BANG, perfick meringue foam.
We stuck it in the oven and it came out looking almost like the picture. I don't even really like lemon meringue pie (I much prefer gold -why did I waste my morning) but I loved ours. It was a total triumph for dad and daughter. If you ignore all the eggs I'd wasted. But some ruined egg whites meant nothing. Our souls had bonded - we'd remember this pie for the rest of our lives or until we were a teenager and other things seemed more important. Still worth it.
We all went out for a Sunday roast and played hangman and Wordle and Ernie insisted on telling the waiting staff a poorly read joke from his new "Jokes for kids of all ages" book. If he does that it's charming, yet if I did it it would look weird and creepy. It's one rule for kids and quite another for old men.
Out of this book we've got a new game where we have to make up Doctor Doctor jokes based on an improvised premise. "Doctor Doctor, I think I'm a table.... Well that's lucky, I needed to put my cup of tea somewhere" and others that didn't work quite as well as even that. It's all part of the training to turn my kids into super comedians so they can win all the big comedy awards and say "That's for my dad. You should have seen his genius. But now it's too late." Though would an hour of Doctor Doctor jokes that don't quite work win the big comedy prize at the Fringe?
Of course they fucking would. It's exactly the kind of shit that awards panels love. I might do it myself.
And then in the afternoon Phoebe had a play date, so I dragged a reluctant Ernie to Luton to
Woodside Animal Farm. As always, he'd said he didn't want to go, but once he got there he had the time of his life. Ernie is obsessed with snakes and after we'd been shown some guinea pigs and chicks and a rabbit, we asked if we could see the snake and Ben, the animal wrangler went to get Tarzan the python (and kudos for not calling him Monty). The kids were only allowed to stroke it, but adults could hold it. I declined. One of the mums was braver than me and Ernie said "You're so lucky being a grown up". Though being allowed to hold snakes is probably one of the only actual benefits and that's a negative for me.
It was a full and exhausting day, but exactly the kind of thing that I felt I was missing when stuck in a hotel in Wolverhampton trying to fight off this stupid bug (which is more or less better now, but still hanging on around the edges like an unwanted party guest).
Family, it turns out, is more important than work. Someone should write a film about that.
