Rainbow Car and New School Tie

Warming Ups 7939/20880 and 7940/20881

My daughter and I play a car game that we've invented called Rainbow Car. The winner is the person who can see a red car, then an orange car, then a yellow car, then a green car, then a blue car, then a purple car and then a pink car: not officially a colour of the rainbow, but it's difficult enough to correctly identify a purple car (does dark blue count, is red that veers towards blue allowed?) , let alone trying to hit the exact shade of indigo and violet).

It's no CNPS (WARNING - DO NOT ATTEMPT TO PLAY THIS NOW OR YOU WILL GO INSANE) but it's fun and I often play it on my own. The hardest cars to get are usually orange, green (sometimes surprisingly hard) and definitely purple and pink.

Phoebe had the record, getting all 7 cars in order in about 3 minutes as we drove towards the A1.

We've always said that if anyone sees a rainbow car then they win the game automatically. Yesterday whilst out with her nanna, Phoebe got her nanna to send me this photo, claiming a completion time of 3 seconds, because it took her that long to check all the colours were there.

So much of me is in these kids. It's a tragedy. But she was rightly delighted with her unbeatable win.

Looking at that though we should be doing light blue, dark blue, purple to complete the contest. Which will actually make blue a bit harder, but the game a bit easier.

I want to institute a version that includes infrared and ultra-violet and whatever colours/waves lie beyond that. Might be tricky to play with human eyes though.

But it will give me a chance to beat this uber-me.

Today was the last day of the school holidays and I do not understand where that time has gone. It wasn't just a holiday for the kids - my last gig was more or less the day before they broke up and I didn't have to do any work til September (if you don't count writing the world's second longest consecutive daily blog- is the other guy still alive? Can somebody check? I've forgotten his name. Also his blog was shit). I was planning on chilling out, maxing, relaxing all cool and playing some B Ball outside of the kitchen (which I did a few times), but the six week period has disappeared in a puff of smoke. Where did it go? If only there was some way to find out what I did.

It's maybe not surprising that I didn't get much time rilling (as I call chillaxing - you go your way, I'll go mine), but I am in much worse shape at the end of the holidays than I was at the start. And I was fucked at the start.

It's like the left hand side of my body has started to shut down. My left knee hurts, I've strained a muscle in my left arm (don't worry, it's not shooting pains, it's definitely some damage from exercise), my left ear is either itching or hurting and now on top of all this my back teeth/gums on the left are giving me gip, leading to a headache in the left hand side of my skull. My right side is fine. I have the right side of a 35 year old man (though a 35 year old man without a bollock), but everything on my left is falling apart and broken. And yes I dress to the left.

I tried to get a GP appointment about my dizziness a couple of weeks ago, but today was the earliest they could see me and as usual, the dizziness has pretty much gone away, but I went in anyway to see if they can get to the bottom of what's wrong (I hope it's not in my bottom, though if it is, I probably would feel a bit dizzy).

The GP who told me that he was 99% certain I didn't have testicular cancer is long gone (he was actually a terrific GP and it was a shame that the practice couldn't hold on to him) and it's been a different doctor every time I've been over the last few years, but I liked the latest incarnation, a no nonsense female doctor who used her ten minutes with me wisely and decided to set up blood tests, an ECG and get me to take my blood pressure every day until I next see her.

Most of the upcoming blogs are going to be about illness and ageing, partly because that's all that's left me and partly because I am gearing up for my 2027 stand up show "Oh Shit, I'm 60!" No guarantee I make it that far of course, unless the right side of me is able to drag the dead left side of me around like a pair of very melded conjoined twins (and there's no way of knowing that you're not two people who share the same heart and liver and have half a face each).

Phoebe is starting to realise how much older than her mum I am (it's only 13 years, but that's a lot to someone who hasn't even been alive for 10 years) - to be honest I don't think Catie really thought about it when she was 27 and I was 40 and didn't realise that when she was 47 I'd be 60. I am lucky that she had a very poor grasp of mathematics to go along with the low self-esteem that meant she didn't realise how much better she could have done.

I am not very good at realising how old I am. I don't feel like I am a man careering towards his sixties at the breathtaking speed of a second every second. I feel no different inside than I did 35 years ago. I can't even begin to comprehend the awful practical joke that life has played on me by allowing me to get this old. I am absolutely furious about it. Plus with all the time I wasted about being furious about being 40 when I was actually really young.

I will never feel like 57 is young. Nothing can make that happen.

The last six weeks feel like they didn't happen, but so do the last 22 years (basically the time I've been writing this blog - has documenting my life somehow led to me not actually living my life, in some kind of internet version of the Portrait of Dorian Grey crossed with the Time Machine? The online me has the experiences, whilst the real me sits in an attic as the sun arcs through the sky in seconds. I have to say that when I dip back into the vast catalogue of my last two decades, I often have no memory of the events or thoughts that I describe.

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The kids started at their new school today. We haven't moved. With some inevitability the work that we're having done to the new place, which was meant to be finished by mid-August is now scheduled to end in October, though we're hoping we can move at the end of September.

But luckily the new school is still within 20 minutes drive from our current house, so they can get to meet their new teachers and class mates.

There is a new uniform that has a tie. I remember absolutely loathing school uniform as a kid, especially the tie - we all wanted to go on strike to make them let us wear our own clothes. Or was that Grange Hill? Why are you dressing kids up as little business people you monsters.

Actually I didn't care about clothes much and was the kind of kid who stayed in my school uniform when I got home, because I didn't have any cool clothes or indeed see the point of changing. Clothes are clothes. But I had hated wearing a tie. I took that off as soon as I could. Yes, I was a rebel.

But boy, these kids looked cute today. Phoebe seemed quite cool and blase about the move (though I know she was putting on a show) but it was tougher for Ernie, who like his dad is an insane mixture of boisterous and shy, outgoing and anxious. He asked us to tell the teacher that he was feeling nervous. Though unsurprisingly the teacher was ready for that! Luckily seven other kids were starting a new school in his class today and one of the other girls had been at his old school til about a year ago and they'd been really good friends. And they picked that up immediately. So I felt less scared for him.

I moved schools when I was 8 (as I think I've mentioned recently) and a few months ago mum recounted watching me in the first week I was thre, walking across the playground alone, playing some solo game - I don't remember it, but the memory still impacts on her half a century later.  I get that. Sending those little cosplay accountants into a new place to fend on their own is quite a tug on the heart.

After school I took the kids for a pizza and then went to a park with Ernie whilst Phoebe went to drama club. Even though I've spent six weeks with these chumps, I really enjoyed another couple of hours of time with them. As usual they didn't divulge much about what had gone at school, but they both seemed to have enjoyed it.

"What was school like Phoebe?"

"School."

Was a typical exchange. Her life is affectation. You wouldn't know it from talking to her, because she makes out she hates school, but when we went into see her end of year work in July it was incredible how much she'd achieved and how great she is at pretty much everything.

It's so fucking trite and obvious to say it, but these are the golden times and yet we miss so much of it due to work. Trite and obvious and the realisation of every 1990s Jim Carrey film, and yet still nothing changes. Plenty of my friendsMy best friend from University, Mike Cosgrave was in our comedy troupe, the Seven Raymonds. I think it's fair to say that he was never going to even try to make a career out of comedy, though he's quietly one of the funniest people I know. He married his first girlfriend, moved to the West Country and had kids. He plays in various folk and world music bands and his wife was the main breadwinner, so Mike largely stayed home and brought up the kids. Today, as I sat in the park I realised he'd probably won life there.  His children are adults now so he can enjoy these later years playing music and being a lovely man.

I think you just measure success differently as you get a bit older. But this morning (Thursday) after I'd got the kids ready for school we all lay on a bean bag together playing on our phones all scrunched up together and I can't remember anything in life that's made me feel as content as that. Who'd want any more than this? And I know it's only a fleeting time, within two to five years they won't want to do this any more.

Anyway I'm giving up comedy to become a full time dad.

What do you mean you thought I had already?

What do you mean, good?

A terrific RHLSTP with Charlotte Church went up today. LISTEN TO IT NOW. I am going to sing a duet of Pie Jesu with every guest from now on.

Here’s a clip!