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We were a bit exhausted over the weekend and as a parent it's hard to tell if that's illness or just being a parent. I had managed most of a run yesterday, but conked out at about the point where I crushed the oak sperm beneath my feet. Ernie was saying he felt sick this morning, but he says that every morning, so we got him off to school.
In spite of my brain being fugged (again illness or just the normal state of someone with children) I managed to play and after half an hour of feeling awful (but still winning), I started to feel good (and carried on winning). I wondered if I had Covid and then wondered if tennis might be the cure for Covid. We weren't allowed to play tennis during lockdown so this cure went undiscovered.
It explains why Djokovic didn't want the vaccine.As I progressed towards winning the second set, I got a call from Ernie's school saying he was definitely poorly and needed picking up. So the match was abandoned, luckily for my opponent and I went to get my son.
So it turned into a sick day. I was feeling better than I had over the weekend, but it was probably a good idea to rest up and someone needed to be with the boy. So I had a day of watching Scooby Doo and youtube, whilst playing online poker. I played so much poker that the website actually emailed me to say they were worried about my well-being.
I think they were really worried because I was winning. I maybe made £5 over the course of the day, and that kind of consistency could destroy the company.
Even though actually it doesn't make any difference to them who wins as they take a cut of the money played. But still. I could see them sweating.
We were both in that hinterland between wellness and illness. Sometimes it felt like Ernie might be skiving, but his appetite was gone and he was clearly feeling nauseous, though didn't throw up. Similarly, I was able to play tennis (or yesterday do part of a big run) but had lost my appetite (my favourite kind of illness) and was lethargic. Was I skiving too?
It was a close run thing, but having had to negotiate a big chunk of this year whilst pretty ill and just having to carry on gigging and parenting, it really does take something serious to bring me to a total standstill. Cutting off a bollock serious. Even then I did a podcast the day before and exactly a week afterwards.
We were going to watch one of the Scooby Doo movies but suddenly Ernie got sensitive about it (perhaps offended that the 21st Century take on the source material is rather too tongue in cheek and knowing - though we hadn't even got through the opening credits) and I had to sit with him as he watched loads of nonsense on youtube too. He likes those videos that are groups of men competing against each other, so today it was
two guys trying to dismantle cars to see who could remove the heaviest amount of stuff (they also so one where they try to clean cars coated in mud)- they get random tools to help/hinder.
Do you blame me for playing poker all day? I do that quite a lot when neither of us are ill though.
I guess each generation is not meant to understand what's going on with the one below (and really Ernie is at least two generations below me). It's nice that we both like Scooby Doo though, isn't it? Even in this crazy mixed up world of inappropriate stuff that my 8 year old maybe shouldn't be watching, some things remain constant.
Did our parents worry that Scooby Doo was showing an unrealistic version of the world, encouraging drug taking and befriending animals?
And that didn't have any repercussions on my adult life...
I have to say 2022 was quite a classic period for RHLSTP. Another fantastic retro episode and it's one of the best ever with the wonderful Sally Phillips (where we also have to address our relationship in the 1990s). It's funny, awkward and rather life-affirming and
you can watch it all on video for FREE for the first time.
