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I had big plans for today. To be fair the plans were to maybe do a Craven Newsround and then see if I could somehow cajole myself into writing something that might one day make me money. Oh no, I'd rather do stuff that's too niche to ever get paid for and just hope someone decides to chuck money at me in the street.
Ernie had had to come home early from school yesterday and said he was still poorly this morning, so to avoid driving back and forth to the school all day, we decided to give him the day off. And whilst I might be able to get a little bit done, Catie had plans with a friend who was visiting from Norwich and so I had to do the worst thing for a middle-class person in 21st Century Britain. I had to look after my own child.
I don't know if other newsreaders just have to ring into work and say they can't come in because their kid is ill, or in this case, probably pretending to be ill. In fact I don't understand how any non-self-employed person manages to navigate situations like this. I can pick up my kid at 2pm because I am at best trying to write a stupid blog, but more likely watching an old episode of Only Connect. What if you have an actual job? How do you cope?
And then if your son says his tummy hurts in the morning, do you must take him to work with you and let him throw up under your desk or do you ring up work and say you can't do it today because your son is pretending to be ill?
I had to ring the Newsround team and tell them I just couldn't make it today. Also there wasn't any funny news.
I had fun with Ernie, who rallied pretty quickly from his early morning queasiness, to skipping down the street on our lunchtime dog walk. I told him to at least pretend to look sad and poorly in case someone from the school drove past. He was literally skipping. Amateur.
We played with his plastic soldiers, which I used to love as a kid too. Though Ernie's games are much more imaginative and involve invisible force fields and a soldier who can teleport you over a river and magic gems that can revive dead soldiers. We then read a book about poo together and a book about ghosts. The former was at least kind of work for me as it's by a future Book Club guest, but I've already interviewed Danny Robins about the ghost one.
By the time that I'd picked up Phoebe I was so tired that I almost had to go to bed - though in the end I managed to stay up til 8.30pm. I thought I could maybe do an early evening Newsround, but my heart wasn't in it now.
I think I wrote about this before, but I once skived off of school because we were going to be making cups of tea and coffee in Home Economics and for some reason this scared me so much that I pretended to be ill. My mum and the teacher concluded that the psychological trauma had been so much for me that I'd actually made myself sick. But I was just lying to get out of it.
I don't know what it was that so bothered me about tea and coffee, that even making them in a cup was too much for me. I didn't drink either until I was 18 and still felt the awkwardness of being asked if I wanted a tea or a coffee when I was a teenager. I think they represented being grown up or something. I was a very fussy eater, even rejecting things that I'd never tried. And I had a massive block on hot adult drinks, despite never having tasted them.
I still find it difficult to understand some of my motivations in the moment, but I am constantly bamboozled by the things I did and thought about in the past. I can't fathom why I was so scared of hot drinks. It makes no sense at all. Aside from a refusal to grow up even when I was 9 years old.
Maybe Ernie has some other similarly incomprehensible reason to want to avoid school. His soldier play does suggest he's got a wilder and more fetid imagination than me. He couldn't even sit in the house for a while after seeing bits of Titanic because he was terrified water would burst through the window.
I really should not have been allowed to breed. I blame my wife for not being able to see this.
Children are the punishment for having been a child. And it's a just one. I guess my mum had to take a day off to look after me when I pretended that I was poorly because I was scared of putting hot water on some powder. So I in turn must face a day like this. I only wish I could live to see the nightmare that Ernie's children will be for him. It's enough to know that it's coming.
