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Exhausted and alone, this morning was one of those awesome parental challenges and if I am honest with you I remember very little of the hours between being woken at 5.30 and getting to my in-laws at 10.30. But thank God they had invited us over for lunch, as I don't know how I would have got through to the evening with all three of us still alive otherwise.
Both kids have a bug and I wasn't feeling great after my weekend of driving and poor food choices. Ernie was crying about everything and I felt like doing the same.
They're such fun to be around though. I mean I can't remember any specific examples and it's a shame that the exhaustion means you actually are essentially absent from experiencing this wonderful time and the incredible and amusing things that children say and do, but there's a residual feeling that something special and magical might have happened at some point and that's good enough for me.
Mainly it's good to spend some time with people who are unaffected by self-consciousness or crippled by the fear of what people might think of them and who have little to no notion of the horrors of the world. I have a clear memory of being with my grandma and mum when I was a small child and my grandma saying what a wonderful thing childhood innocence was and how it was a shame that ever had to be lost. It clearly made a big impression on me as it's stuck in my memory banks, so the statement must have troubled or at least fascinated me at the time. In fact I think my grandma saying that it's a shame that children lose their innocence might have been the moment for me where I lost my innocence. This was my apple in the garden of Eden. She didn't think I could understand what she was saying, but I clearly did and she brought home to me in that remark how I must be being shielded from something and what I perceived as reality was just a fantasy. Thanks Grandma, you massive idiot.
I could have still believed that the world was a good place even now, were it not for you blurting out how wonderful the ignorant innocence of a child is.
I am going to try and keep my own children in this Eloi-state for their entire lives. It will be hard, what with the environmental changes that my generation has thoughtlessly but fastidiously wrought, though I suppose in a way my generation has managed to maintain a childlike innocence about those issues and ignore the reality, so maybe it will be possible to carry on when the sun has cracked our skin and the floods have then made our skin all wrinkly and the poison in the air has turned our lungs black.
Fingers crossed.
More great Ed Fringe RHLSTP news - On 4th August one of my guests will be brilliant US comedian Jena Friedman (and the other guest is Phil Wang, so this should be a solid gold classic). Tickets are selling reasonably quickly - the average audience is now up to 85 (though it goes up one every time I sell 21 tickets, so maybe that's not that impressive yet)
So
BOOK NOW in case all the other tickets are caught up in a fire.
And only a couple of hours left in this week's eBay auctions
BID NOW! All funds go into the podcast pot
