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Happy New Year.
Mine started with blood.
We’d gone to bed very early as we’re exhausted after the Christmas week and I was in a deep sleep that even my bladder wasn’t going to dare interrupt.
But my son cried out in the night in some distress, which pulled me from the grip of my dream and I staggered in to his room to see what the problem was, though I was still as much asleep as awake. I did notice that my watch on the nightstand was at 1 something. It was 2022.
Ernie was saying something about weird bogeys, so I grabbed him some tissues in the dark and told him to wipe his nose. He seemed pretty upset for something so trivial, but four year olds are dicks who can’t distinguish between an emergency and some snot, so I indulged him.
I hoped I could let him deal with the blockage and then get back into bed before I’d even actually woken up, because getting properly disturbed during deep sleep is the worst for coping with the following day.
Ernie handed me back the tissue and I was initially confused by what I received. Firstly it looked completely black and had shrunk into a clump and didn’t even resemble a tissue. What had he given me? What was happening in his nose?
I slowly started to grasp reality and when I turned on the light it was confirmed that it was a quite prodigious nose bleed. Blood was everywhere and I probably hadn’t helped matters by encouraging him to blow. Ernie was freaking out and I was concerned that he might be bleeding to death, but we decamped to the bathroom to see if we could staunch the flow.
It seemed bad to begin with, but we quickly got the flow stopped, though the toilet looked like it had been in a New Year’s Eve brawl after spilling someone’s pint.
With the problem stopped I then had to change the bedsheets and tellingly for my parental involvement, the sheets weren’t where I was expecting them to be. But I found them eventually and cleaned up the plastic undersheet (Ernie only ever wet the bed once after we got him out of nappies, but I was glad we’d left the sheet on today) and made the bed.
My wife had finally woken up having slept through most of the drama (luckily for her she wears ear plugs in case I snore, which means I pretty much always am the one to deal with nighttime issues - so what I lose in making beds, I make up for with this), but it was all in hand. She asked Ernie if he’d been picking his nose, which he vehemently denied. What an insulting question.
But when pressed he laughed and admitted that he had been. Which was a relief. Firstly because it’s good to know he’s learned something from his dad, but mainly because it meant it wasn’t some terrible illness as I had felt it almost certainly had to be when I’d seen the bloody mayhem.
It wasn’t an audacious beginning to 2022 and I hoped it wasn’t going to be symbolic of what was to come. If you believed in signals from fate then 2022 is going to be a bloodbath. Or at least a bloodtoilet.
My son’s nose, the oracle of Hertfordshire, has spoken.
We went for a New Year’s Day walk with the dog in the rain and at least discovered what the bureau in the woods is all about. I don’t know how I missed it, but we’ve got a local theatre group who do productions outdoors (this is a pretty cool village) and they’re doing an immersive production based around the Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe this weekend. If I had turned right rather than left yesterday I would have actually had to go through the wardrobe and seen the old-fashioned streetlamp that’s suddenly appeared in the field. Obviously the tickets are sold out, but luckily for us another family has bit hit by Covid (YES!!!) and there were tickets available for tomorrow’s pm performance, so we’re going to get to see the show! And I can let you know what part the bureau plays in the whole thing. I don’t remember it from the original book. But the Lion, the Witch and the small Bureau would have been a great book.
I made good on my New Year's resolution to read more and play mindless games on my phone less. I have been playing Homescapes for many months now and had become a bit addicted and even paying for extra lives and powers and stuff. The game was annoying me quite a lot, but I couldn't stop playing it and had made significant progress and actually getting quite close to the current final levels (they keep adding more though to ensure that the game can never be completed).
This morning I deleted the game and all that progress. It felt like a very good move. I am playing a cricket game instead now, but I kept it to a minimum and did some reading on my phone kindle. Could this be the year I save my brain from atrophying?
I came close to a New Year’s Day death as we tried to get my old desk down the perilous attic stairs so that we could put it in our daughter’s room. I don’t think this was a desk that I’d had to construct, but for some reason (it’s only been sitting in the attic for a couple of years) the top was coming off at one end kept turning at a weird angle. We managed to find a way to bump it down the stairs on its top and I wasn’t crushed beneath it (in this universe, but RIP to the infinity Mes who died in the process in alternate realities). Phoebe was delighted and asked if she could decorate the wood to make it more her.
She spent a good part of the day drawing on it with paint sticks and it’s rather wonderful. Unlike her father she seems to have a pretty good feel for colour and spacing and isn’t a bad artist for a 28-year-old 6-year-old.
The picture only shows the job about halfway through. She is putting stars on the space under where the chair goes so she can sit in there and look up at them when she is feeling sad. I have created an artist and a poet. As well as the oracle with the bloody nose.
