Radio 4 Hoodie

Warming Ups

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Ernie and me were walking to pick up Phoebe from football practice tonight. As he pressed the button for the pelican crossing he said "Imagine if Phoebe scores a goal at the exact moment I press this button!" It was 6.19pm and we noted the time, but I told him it would be unlikely that Phoebe would be able to tell us the time of any goal she scored because a) it's not the kind of thing that anyone bothers to note and b) because she didn't have a watch on. Also even if she knew she'd scored a goal at nineteen minutes past six how would we ascertain that it had been at the precise instant of the button push.

However, I think that's a cool and sophisticated thought to have. As long as you don't start believing that you have the power to affect unconnected events by your own actions. There will be no way to ever find out if Ernie was right or wrong, unless Phoebe didn't score at all (unlikely), unless when we get to Heaven God is prepared to rewind the tape to show us this exact moment in both place and see if Ernie's hunch was right. Would God be prepared to do that? If he does it for one person then he has to do it for everyone? And sure maybe he'd be prepared to do it if it was for a really big argument or an important FA Cup goal, but just for the idle speculation of a 7 year-old?

Unlikely. Though there is a lot of time to fill up there in Heaven, what with it being infinite, so maybe he's glad of the distraction. Perhaps he just edits together a highlight reel for every person (and animal and insect and bacterium?) that ever lived so they can get all those questions answered in the afterlife. Is it simpler for God just to do this as it happens, or would he want to put it together later? Then he'd have to remember every single instance of any kind of question or argument and go back and find the tape. But it might save him some time, because then he could probably just do the conflicts and issues that people remember. Will Ernie recall this button pushing/football goal in U10's practice game when he dies at the age of 153? Probably not. He might be confused if God shows him a video of him asking that and then showing him that Phoebe didn't score at the precise second.

I can't imagine we forget about all arguments and queries though and I would want to spend a lot of time discovering it I was right or wrong about stuff - I'd have a lot of scores to settle. Just with my wife for starters - the number of arguments that I'd like to play back to prove I was definitely right. Then she'll have the whole of the afterlife to stew on how right I was and how wrong she was. There's got to be quite the bad atmosphere in Heaven either way, right? You're not telling me we just rise above this stuff just cos we're dead. No way.

We got to football and Phoebe had scored something like a triple hat-trick. So there was a better chance than I'd expected for one of those goals to have gone in when Ernie pressed the button. Can't wait until I'm dead to find out. And until Ernie is dead so I can tell him. Hope it's sooner rather than later. This kind of anticipation could kill you.

I've put up another cool load of stuff on ebay including my exclusive, never-available-in-the-shops Radio 4 hoodie that I got when I did Richard Herring's Objective…

…. a snooker ball signed by sexy Me11, my final copy of the Oh Frig I'm 50! DVD and a complete set of Self-Playing Snooker Punani stickers (not many of these in existence). Bid here. All profits go to making more podcasts!

RHLSTP Book Club with the ingenious George Egg (he said egg) is now up wherever you get your pods.

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We've finally got round to tidying up our new garden and so today went to the garden centre to pick out some plants for the borders. Everyone got to choose something and we got a nice selection of lavender, herbs, vegetables and shrubs which will probably mostly die over the next few days.

There's a little railway at the garden centre that we last went on during one of the lockdowns, so four or five years ago. Some of the photos from that day come up on our kitchen Alexa, so although the train ride hasn't changed much, our kids have. They're still young enough to have enjoyed sitting on a tiny train, but maybe only just for Phoebe.

Later we'd get to put all our plants in the garden. I moved a pot with a slightly brittle bush in it and managed to get a little bit of something in my eye. It felt like some huge thorn had got stuck in the back of my eyeball and it hurt quite a bit. I couldn't open my eye for a while and no amount of rubbing, washing or spraying seemed to make any odds. I just accepted that a stabbing pain in my eye would just be another of the constant maladies that I have to carry with me, but after about three hours the pain just stopped. Either the bit of dry plant had found its way out the front or the back. Maybe it was burrowing into my brain. I found a tiny bit of something brown in the corner of my eye later. Was that it?

I am both surprised that an eye can be so very vulnerable and that it is eventually able to deal with something this abrasive. I refused all efforts to get me to go to an optician or A and E though. I trusted my body to sort this out on its own, just like with the cancer.

The garden looked great though, at least for now and if all goes well we'll have herbs, strawberries, carrots and sweetcorn to enjoy. I think least likely is sweetcorn, but let's see. The important thing is that we've attempting something ambitious as a family. We will either dine together or cry together. It feels like ages since all of us have spent the whole day together. I think this is going to be a fun summer.

Ernie has found the fox puppet I gave him a few years back (I think it was the original Law Fox before I then got one made up with a costume) and wanted it to come up with a bed time story for him. So Mr Brown Fox (as Ernie decided he was called) made up a story about a fox that had always wanted to go scuba diving but didn't get the opportunity as he lived in Berkshire. But one day he got in the back of a lorry and got to the seaside, where he managed to sneak into a divinc centre and borrow the equipment. But then when he tried to dive he realised how wet it was and didn't like it. "And the moral of the story" said Mr Brown Fox, "is to never have any ambitions or to try anything new."

"Is that a good moral?" I asked Ernie. Who didn't think it was.

But Ernie read the fox a book called "Ten Green Bottoms" and was very keen to see if the Fox found it funny. Which the fox largely seemed to, because he is a very childish fox.

Ernie said his story was best. But his came out of a book, whilst the scuba diving one had been improvised so I don't think it was a fair comparison.

The final gig of the Can I Have My Ball Back? tour (and probably last performance ever) is at the Bristol Tobacco Factory on Sunday night! Still some tickets Bristol!