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Ooo eee Rick, I had a day off. And it felt good to forget about my scripts and podcast prep for a little while, even though I ended up doing loads of errands instead. School runs, supermarket shops, swimming lessons and picking up a takeaway and I had practically exhausted a three quarter full tank of charge on my electric car (to be fair there was 30 miles worth of charge left, but you get a warning then which makes it feel like you’re in trouble, even though I could probably have made it to central London). And it feels good to know that I have minimised pollution on this run of shortish journeys.
And I have also minimised pollution by not cleaning my filthy car. There’s no point. It just gets dirty again. But it’s only a few splashes away from being a travelling ball of mud.
We live just far enough away from Stevenage to make ordering a takeaway a bit of a risk. There is an excellent Thai in the Old Town called
Sala Thong which we’ve only just discovered. But it’s a good distance to drive and then parking on the high street there is chaotic. I drove up and down three times looking for a space, before vaguely remembering there was a car park behind the high street and then dashing from there to the restaurant.
By the time I was home again the food was certainly not piping hot, but boy it was good. This was our treat for nearly having completed our writing tasks - my wife hadn’t quite managed to hand in the first draft of her latest book and I still have a way to go on my sitcom and one last 2019 RHLSTP to go, but it was close enough. And worth the drive.
Two writing deadlines in the same house with the same basic date is a pretty stressful thing to endure - one is bad enough, so it would maybe have been nice to have accidentally drunk some champagne thinking it was off apple juice, but a massive plate of food was good too.
It’s been a good year and an interesting decade. I have co-created two people in the last ten years and I hope that isn’t a trend that carries on into the next decade, but it will be freaky to reconvene in 2029 and see how things are going for them, when my daughter will be hurtling towards her 15th birthday and my son will be 12. I hope I am still here to be exasperated by them.
And I just looked back to December 2009 to see what was going on a decade ago and discovered that we’ve just passed the ten year anniversary of me and Catie properly living together. So there was something else to celebrate or commiserate depending on which of us you like. She’s the reason that 2010-2020 has been by far the best decade of my life. I might not have made the end of this decade without her (and let’s not get ahead of ourselves - there’s still over three weeks to go). She’s the first woman that I’ve ever properly lived with and I have to say that I aced it first go. I wonder if she’ll have seen through me by 2030. Watch this space.
