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Monday, April 20, 2015

It's been so long since I last blogged, my son's turned 16...


Admittedly his growth is a bit stunted, but that's what happens when you live on Barny Bear cakes and ice lollies. Frankly it's a miracle he's still alive. If it wasn't for the peanut butter frosting on his cupcakes, he wouldn't be getting any protein at all.

Anyhoo, the reasons for my prolonged absence are best summed up by this Top Trump, which was kindly created for me by Amelie on an NHS iPad...

Clearly my approach to management is half-arsed, but I'm 100% committed to work. I basically lost the entire month of March to this little endeavour, which I felt was enough of a rollercoaster ride to warrant more than a 10 on my adventure score. Amelie always was a tough marker.

At one point I was asked to write 36,000 words in 3 weeks to win a contract worth ten million. So at £278 a word, I said I'd write a sentence for three grand. It's no wonder we're out of the running.

The lesson I've learned is that when you're leaving for work before your kids get up, and arriving home after their bedtime, you don't want to spend your weekends writing a blog. Admittedly, you don't always want to spend it with them either, but in a lot of ways you feel you ought to. Toby was seeing more of the Yodel delivery man than his own father. He'd started looking at me suspiciously if I walked in without a parcel. So, much like Bloomberg before me, I went offline for a while, in the hope of reminding my kids who I am.

Fortunately I've had enough of that now. I had a week's annual leave booked for March, which had to be cancelled at short notice due to health reasons (the NHS needed me), so I'm taking this week off instead. There's no Cheltenham Festival this week, so it's not quite the same, but at least the weather's slightly better.

We took advantage of it yesterday by heading down to the pier for the afternoon. As the Top Trump above demonstrates, I'm a big fan of Paul Hollywood, so I was particularly pleased to bump into Richard Burr and Chetna Makan from The Great British Bake Off as we strolled past the doughnut kiosk. Needless to say, they weren't buying any. According to Chetna's Twitter, the whole gang were down there yesterday...


... but sadly we didn't see the others. I expect they were busy taking that ice cream out of the freezer.

Anyhoo, the sight of Lisa exercising might be shocking...


But even more jaw-dropping than that is the fact that it's now a quarter of a century since this newspaper article was published...


That was posted on Facebook by an old school friend of mine, possibly in an attempt to make me feel old. And bald. I still remember that free bus to Norwich. I've never known luxury like it.

By coincidence, I made a pilgrimage back to the badlands of Essex last weekend to show Toby and Amelie my old school...


And the house I grew up in...


It hasn't changed a bit. You could still have a Rod Hull incident with that TV aerial, and the walls could do with some render. This hedge is new though...


Well, I say new. They could have grown it from seed in the time since I left.

But despite it being 22 years since I moved out, those bollards have stood the test of time, and immediately proved just as irresistible to Amelie as they did to Big Sis three and a half decades ago...


It was all grazed thighs and bruises back in the 70s. But having seen my old stomping ground, Amelie declared that she loved it so much, she'd like to move there. Which demonstrates what life is like for her now. She sees a Basildon council estate as a step up.