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Friday 26th August 2016

5015/17935

My sleep cycle is way off. I slept in until 11am today, but then didn’t get to sleep until after 3am. I can’t see any way out of this except going back to live in America and live a sad 6am to 10pm existence. Which to be fair is more or less the sad existence I would usually live here, since my wife had the misfortune to squeeze a human being out of her pikachu.

So it was a fairly bamboozled day as both Catie and I are not quite all here. I woke up to a message saying that because it’s a bank holiday I needed to file my Metro copy by lunchtime. But luckily I have enough crazy American adventures to fill three or four columns and I wrote about the lazy cemetery of abortion memorial. It seems odd that commuters up and down the country will be reading about a protest that they probably disagree with in a place they’ve never heard of. But I quite like it that way. Warsaw is, of course, going to fuel much of episode 1 of AIOTM too.

I didn’t really get round to working on anything else though. The time slipped away like ashes through my fingers. But also, I had got up really late (and it’s been a long time since I have stayed in bed until nearly midday). My day had shifted sideways and it meant I got a whole lot of hours at the other end, where my wife was asleep and I wasn’t in the mind to get much done. Phoebe woke up at about 11pm, so I had to deal with her. She’s not only confused about when she is meant to be sleeping but it’s super hot so eventually I decided to relocate with her to the comparatively cooler basement. But that’s full of toys and books and that just woke her up more. I was patient and enjoyed playing with her and then like a super dad managed to somehow transform her from crying idiot upset that I’d put her into her cot to a sleeping child.

And she then slept through to morning time, but I was on the sofa and my brain was whirring and the cat was meowing outside the door and the newspaper arrived with a crash at about 2am and the dishwasher ended its cycle at about 2.30 and the toilet cistern was dripping and I thought I would never get to sleep.

My brain was no whirring, partly with ideas for AIOTM and Relativity, my new Radio 4 sitcom that was announced today - http://www.chortle.co.uk/news/2016/08/26/25650/radio_4_unveils_raft_of_new_comedies I think some of the ideas were good, but I had no pen and paper and so none of them got written down, but nowadays it doesn’t happen much that I am kept awake by the whirr of ideas, so it’s still a good sign. 

And now as a man firmly in middle-age, late nights lying awake of filled with what ifs and wondering how things might have turned out differently. I wondered what would have happened if we’d accepted an offer on our house and bought the house we liked in St Albans last year. We’d be there now. Would it be better or worse for us? How would we be feeling? No way of knowing, but I regretted that things hadn’t quite happened in the right order for us then. People always say that the house you end up in is the one you’re meant to be in. But that’s bullshit clearly. What if we’d given up on our best offer and our best house? 

Then I thought of the girl who used to sit opposite me in English at school and who I think there might have been a bit of a spark with, but for lots of reasons (mainly my own crushing shyness and also the fact that I was in a practically platonic relationship with my first girlfriend). I never addressed the smiles and sly looks. Why had I been so stupid? More importantly why was I thinking about this now? We were so far away from being a thing of any kind - why think of her and not some of my actual ex-girlfriends? I couldn’t even quite for sure remember her name and I hadn’t thought about her much since and I don’t know why she’d sprung to mind. But these are the weird semi-regrets that come to you in the middle of the jet-lagged night. And I didn’t even regret it because had I somehow changed into a different person and acted on my feelings then my whole life would have turned out a lot differently and I wouldn’t be here failing to sleep next to this tiny idiot who I love more than anything in the world. Might be some different tiny idiots. But I wouldn’t want to take that chance. Rueing the poor decisions of the me of 30 years ago was an odd way to be spending the early hours of this late August morning. Especially when I neither rue nor lament it really. Because that’s who I was and it’s got me to where I am. And things have turned out wonderfully well for me. That's why the brain is an odd, odd organ. And no good can come from it.

There's no woman in the world that I would swap for my wife. Apart from Rebecca from Cbeebies and Amy Pond from Doctor Who (character not actor).

I wondered what that girl from school might be up to now, but she had such a 1980s hair style it was impossible to envision what she would look like now. Or rather I could only imagine her with the same hairstyle. It’s not good looking up people from 30 years ago. They are young in your memory and yet look so fucking old and it takes all the self-delusion in the world to not make the inevitable leap from that. But luckily I have more than my fair share of self-delusion and am well aware that I still look like a teenager, so it’s OK.

I fell asleep eventually, assuming I’d get three hours sleep until Phoebe woke up. But she did something she’s never done before and slept in and we weren’t woken up until my wife came downstairs just after 9. Which is techincally tomorrow, so shouldn't belong in this entry. But that's my life now, living my life a few hours shifted from the rest of you.



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