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The most amazing result of our recent holiday is that Phoebe who used to wake up between 6 and 7 (if we were lucky) is now sleeping until 8. And actually having to be woken up by us sometimes as she’s sleeping too long. I never thought I would be so happy to get a lie-in so late. I am still not getting to sleep until 2am, but it’s still amazing to snooze in a bit. Which just shows you doesn’t it? If you give yourself a few months of Hell, then returning to what would previously have been awful seems like Heaven. It’s all about perspective.
I think that has helped me feel a bit more energetic. I managed a 30 minute run this evening, which again would have been nothing in the days before I had as stupid baby to look after, but now feels like I’ve completed a marathon. I’ve been eating healthy food (mainly) and am back to not drinking which helps too, but hopefully I can get back to a pre-Phoebe level of fitness now. We’ll see.
I made some progress on the AIOTM script and also filmed an introduction for the secret channel of extras which should be open soon to kickstarter backers and badge owners (the rest of you will get a chance to buy into this at a later date). It’s quite exciting and extremely terrifying that we’re getting so close. Buy tickets here. The more people who come along, the more fun it will be and the more sketches we’ll be able to film. Plus the shows won’t be out for months so you’ll be the first to see what’s going on and doubtless see lots of exclusive stuff that won’t make it to air. It’s going to be an amazing night out. Maybe not always in a good way.
Reading more of Sapiens by Yuval Harari in the dead of night and considering the pre-agricultural human beings who lived largely by foraging in a nomadic fashion. Apparently though indistinguishable from us genetically, people then would have been super fit athletes, living in groups of a few dozen (and no more than 150) who had to spend a few hours a day looking for grubs and wood and fruit and a couple of days a week hunting, but would have had lots of free time to enjoy themselves. And none of the unnatural isolation and work of today’s world, which we have had no time to evolve into or even adapt (our brains still think we live on the plains of Africa, which is why we gorge on sweet and fatty food, because back then if you were lucky enough to find any, you’d have to scoff it all before some other creature ate it first). I idly wondered if that might have been humanity’s golden age. I usually consider myself to be lucky to be living now in a time (at least initially) of relative peace, with freedoms and technology that some of our ancestors could never have imagined and probably will be denied to our descendants, if we have any. But maybe that time before humans settled down and started farming and living together in massive groups, which ironically tended to cause isolation, loneliness and depression, was indeed the best time to be human. I mean it’d be really cool to be a super-fit human, who had to be capable of understanding how to do everything that was possible to do (Harari points out that now we have elements of expertise, but back then everyone would have had to have been able to work flint, mend clothing, know what food was good and bad, so in a sense humanity never had a more universally knowledgable era) and to live that idyllic life and just enjoying the company of your family and friends (might have been the same people - one theory is that everyone in a tribe had sex together and no one knew who anyone’s dad was, so all the males in a tribe were protective of all the kids because they didn’t know which was theirs- or believed that they had all made the kid through combining their sperm).
You know the cold and dark would probably have sucked a bit, plus the fact that even very minor infections and injuries would kill you and there would be no pain relief and loads of women would die in childbirth. And there’d be no iPhone. And I’d have to do proper hard work, rather than just larking around for the amusement of others (but maybe if you had been really funny back then, everyone else would have kept you on and given you food just for shits and giggles). So maybe there’d be a downside too. But nowadays we live a life that we are not adapted for and we’re clearly heading for disaster as a consequence. Maybe those guys were the lucky ones.
Good book though. It’ll make you think about stuff. Buy it.
