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I had Phoebe for the morning and took her to a new activity, Little Kickers, where toddlers get to learn how to play football. It's utter chaos of course, but it's fun to see them try to take part in something so organised when they only have the most basic grasp of the idea of rules. I think professional football could be greatly improved if there were absolutely no rules to it. Phoebe picked up one of the balls as soon as she got there and threw it into the tiny goal. Which may be a misunderstanding of the game, but then a guy managed to invent a whole new sport by doing something similar, supposedly.
I encouraged her to kick the ball instead, but it felt wrong to restrict her creative freedom. Why should she kick the ball if she preferred to carry it and throw it. To be fair it was a much more efficient delivery system. And she did take to kicking the ball in her own good time. When you're taking part in stuff like this there's an element of feeling that you're teaching your child to be one of the sheeple, to follow whistles and instructions, even if they would prefer to be doing something else. But then again an inability to join in with a group activity just creates a dick of a different kind. So what can you do?
Some of the stuff was too advanced for Phoebe, or really any of the other kids, most of whom were still too young to identify colours, which was a big part of the games, but I guess that's how you learn. And I think she had fun whirling around like a whirlwind and doing the wrong thing. She wanted to pile the cones up, rather than try to knock them over with the football and who can blame her? Create don't destroy, Phoebe (though she gleefully does her fair share of the latter). I was tired and it was a long walk home, but I loved spending time with my daughter. On the way there we got into a game of repeating sounds and she managed to do most of the basic sounds of the alphabet in response to me before getting bored at about X. And at the end of the lesson the coach got out a sheet of stickers and Phoebe recognised what they were, jumped to her feet and said “Stdikaâ€. I don't know why kids love stickers so much, but if you were ever to put a load of toddlers in a big toddler jail, then stickers would be the contraband they dealt in.
And as joyous as it is being with her, still, pretty much every second I envisage the worst thing that could happen to her and play the scenario out in my head. A big truck turned a corner in front of us, a safe distance away, but I still spent two minutes imagining it somehow tipping over as it clipped the pavement and falling on to us both. In my imagination I managed to get away and then people crowded round as we tried to free the pram, hoping against hope that somehow the worst hadn't happened, before discovering that it had. Thanks a lot brain for not only making me imagine this, but being forced to rehearse the horror of the loss and then, deciding, in this very unlikely to happen event, that I couldn't go on living and killing myself. What fucking help is that? Why make me spend so much time having to live through a shadowy version of the emotions that such a trauma would make me feel. It wouldn't prepare me in any way for the real thing and in this run through I decided that life wouldn't be worth living. So good work sub-conscious, you fucking evil douche.
I wasn't doing too well with work in the afternoon, but the AIOTM kickstarter DVDs had arrived so I signed the 200 of those that need to go out as rewards and yesterday my “The Best†programmes arrived so I made a bit of headway on signing the limited edition ones of those too.
And I tried to help push the latest kickstarter to its goal with some tweeting. I can appreciate that it gets annoying, but sadly it really does work and over the day the total bumped up £2000 (which to be fair is only slightly more than we need to get per day for the last ten days of this thing). I think we're going to make it, but it's not certain, so if you want to donate and can afford to donate a little then you have til the end of the month.
I continued to explain why we need the money and why it's incredibly good value - none of this kickstarter comes to me (I get a proportion of the ticket money from the recording, but also mainly, I think, am advertising myself which leads to increased tour ticket sales, so it works out OK for us all). Each episode costs a but less than £3000 as we need to pay crew, equipment hire, venue hire, production costs and an editor. And whilst I am happy to work for free I don't think it's fair to ask everyone else to do so, because they don't get the residual benefits that I do. Thankfully everyone works on the shows for low fees or we really couldn't do it. I think anyone who knows about these things would be astonished at the quality we get on this budget. Even more so on AIOTM (I hope).
I know that most people get it and appreciate that crowd sourcing is a great way to get this stuff done - a few people pay a small amount and then everyone who wants to can get the stuff for free, so thanks for being cool about it.
I am, as always flattered and delighted by the level of support I get and write this only to help clarify stuff for people saying, “What's he spending £70,000 on?†Who I know are a tiny minority of entitled fucking idiots!
