7373/19893
My little girl is a tweenager. She turned eight today and I have also been a parent for 8 years now (weird coincidence). It seems impossible that she’s this age and I don’t know if those two years of Covid are responsible for that disconnect, but suspect that this is the common experience of all parents.
There was a mini melt down as she opened her first present, a watch, that was the wrong colour (she has rebelled against pink in recent months), though she soon calmed down and accepted that the watch was still good. It reminded me of when I wanted a record player for my birthday, (and this was when I was considerably older, probably 15 or 16) and my parents, kindly, some people would argue, bought me a combined record player, tape deck and radio. And I went crazy because I’d just wanted a record player. Even though there was a record player and I could have just ignored the radio and the tape deck and had what I wanted. I imagine that that was a dispiriting day for my parents, after they’d gone the extra mile to give me something special. I am not sure what my issue was - maybe I’d rather they’d spent all the money on a really good record player rather than getting a combined unit that was a bit cheap looking - but it seems unreasonably ungrateful. I mean it’s hard to argue that it’s not a terrible thing to have done. And I used the tape and the radio plenty so they were entirely right. Sorry mum and dad and thanks for being great parents.
Anyway, Phoebe was very happy to be eight (it also means she’s now allowed to stay up until 8pm, though I am not sure that’s a policy that is going to carry on through the years, or she’ll be up til 4am when she’s 16 (to be fair, that’s probably accurate). She snuck downstairs after her mum had gone to the pub and we watched Ghosts US together, even though I insisted she had to go to bed. There were a lot of mentions of sex, but Phoebe knows all about sex apparently - You take off all your clothes and lie next to each other all night and then you have a baby. Though I think she also suggested that the man has to put his balls inside the woman. Anyway good to have these tips, as I’ve never been sure what I’m meant to be doing.
And my chat with the Iceman went off with a hitch. It was always going to be a weird one, but we had an affinity - him working with water and me working with stone (we just need to find someone obsessive about air/gas to complete the elemental art project - the bubble man maybe?). Anthony is batty and brilliant and we discussed the meaning of trying to melt a large block of ice, which would melt in any case and whether that was pointless, or whether everything is pointless and if our attempts to achieve anything in life are ultimately futile, or if it’s more futile not trying to achieve anything. The broadcast truncated at about the 30 minute mark, though we finally managed to reconnect and Anthony thought that maybe the melted water from the block of ice he had with him (of course) had caused the outage. So it was all a huge piece of performance art and it was quite a thrill to virtually meet this legend - so legendary that I don’t even know if I saw his act back in the 90s or whether I’ve just heard so much talk about it that I feel like I did. Anyway this podcast will be out in a fortnight.
