Warming Up

I was eating a stick of liquorice this evening. My daughter saw it and made an interested and impressed “Oooh”. She wanted to eat the liquorice. “You won’t like it,” I told her.

“I will like it,” she replied. Though given she’d never eat liquorice or anything like it, I don’t know how she was sure.

But I admired both her willingness to try something new and her grasp of grammar, so I let her have a try. “Just have a little bite,” I said. But Phoebe is very confident in herself and took a big bite.

She didn’t like it and spat it out.

I knew that would happen and it more or less summed up our relationship. She’s not listening to me now and that will never change. However right I always am! 

Plus she’s an idiot for not liking liquorice. It’s great. What kind of a monster have I created?

It was bin day in Hertfordshire (I imagine one lorry does the whole county) which I find very exciting as rubbish (and the dishwasher) are my territory. And here in our village you get four different bins to use. FOUR. I heard an idiot complaining about there being too many bins and not wanting to wash his rubbish on the Jeremy Vine show last year, but I wish I had more bins. There’s a bin for rubbish (collected fortnightly, but I didn’t know which day was bin day last week so missed it- poo eee), and a bin for all recycling (except paper) and a little crate for paper and then another bin for food and garden waste. I am most excited about that one because I’ve never had that before. I wonder what they are going to do with it all. I like to think that Ian Hertfordshire, the Lord of Hertfordshire eats it all out of a trough. Or maybe they make a big pie pie out of it. Either way, I have been fastidiously collecting my food waste for the bin. And also my human waste in plastic bags and lemonade bottles. I offered it to the bin men and they looked at me like I was mad.

My wife and daughter had a dentist appointment in London this morning, right at the end of the road we used to live on. We haven’t had time to find a new dentist yet and this was a good excuse to come back into town and have lunch with friends. So although we didn’t quite get to the point where we stood outside our old home and looked up at it wistfully, we parked on our road and were right back in the hood that we left in July. It seemed weirdly alien and it was surprising how much had changed. The Mexican restaurant nearby that we’d gone to quite a lot until my wife saw a cockroach scuttle across the floor, has gone and been replaced, the bakers which also shut down a few months ago has boards around it and is about to be transformed into something else. Grenfell Tower still dominated the horizon though.

As with Sunday when I came in for the party I did not enjoy the stress of city driving. Only a few weeks or relatively uncomplicated country roads has spoiled me, but the hustle and also the bustle of the city exhausted me as a pedestrian too. Admittedly I have a dog that shits in my house now, but there aren’t people shitting on my doorstep or the noise and confusion. It’s incredible how quickly the city seems like a terrible place to be. I have escaped the cult and can now see the truth. Or the other way round. Alas it’s always impossible to tell if you were in a cult before or are in a cult now or have just moved from one cult to the next.

We had lunch at the Westfield and then went to do some shopping. Catie is debilitated from having a human in her and I am debilitated from tiredness, but again this seemed like a Hellish experience. To be fair that was also the case when we lived in London. But I already feel like a rube. And one that wants to drive into London as seldom as possible.