Down the Garden Path

It’s got hot.  Very hot.  So hot that the internal combustion engine that keeps me warm in the coldest temperatures in winter is currently squinting at the thermometer and relishing the fact that it has finally found some serious competition.  It has bought itself some training shoes and recruited a personal trainer and is really getting into shape, I think it’s building itself up for the heating Olympics.  This will likely sound familiar to many of you who also feeling the heat a bit, but I say it to try to explain why I am currently struggling to put one word after another in a way that is anything other than arrant gibberish (it may also go someway to explaining why I find the word arrant quite so bewitching.  It clearly means nothing at all, but has the potential to go with pretty much everything to brighten things up, much like salad cream really.

You Wait Two Weeks for One

On Sunday the London 2012 Olympic Games, otherwise known as the games of the 30th Olympiad if your name is Jacques Rogge and your sole aim in life is to appear at major sporting events and look solemn and sound portentous, came to an end.  This was a sad moment for those of us who had been engrossed (read obsessed) by the sport that had been happening for the last fortnight, and life post Olympics is going to take some getting used to.  It was also a fairly major event.  On the same day Prime Minister David Cameron, otherwise known as the Prime Minister of the 25th Olympiad (if not, why not, someone should really get on to adding that to his job title. I think it could only be surpassed by the woman we were introduced to in the Olympics opening ceremony as Champion of the Earth, whose name is, Maria Osmarina Marina Silva Vaz de Lima. Surely it’s not really fair for one person to have the most awesome title and the coolest name?)  

Sorry, we seem to have lost our way a bit there, back to the point now.  Sunday was also the day when David Cameron announced his government’s extension of funding for elite sports (by which I think he means specifically the ones that the UK is good at) until the Rio Olympics in 2016.  This is also a fairly major piece of news which commits the government to around £40 million a year for the next 4 years. 

A Moment of Praise

You know how people can just get singularly obsessive and boring over holiday photos.  Even if you haven’t experienced it you can imagine it, sitting on a settee whilst photo after photo is passed before your eyes and a story unfolds which, though you may try as hard as you can, you cannot be interested.  Well this post may be a bit like that, I am about to talk about how great my daughter is.  Just thought I should give you all fair warning.

My daughter is amazing.  I know that as her daddy I am not really entitled to pass judgement, after all, if it was up to me she would have been awarded a Nobel prize in some shape or form by now, if Barack Obama can win it after barely enough to draw breath in the Oval Office, why not N?

I’m biased is what I’m saying, and therefore my analysis in this area is not really to be trusted, however, she really is pretty awesome, despite the impression that you may have been given by reading what I have already written.  So let me try to redress the balance just a little with this, very short, but incredibly positive, post about my little girl.  Perhaps I’m going soft?

We read together quite a lot.  We have been incredibly blessed to have received many many children’s books from some very generous people.  I love books (which has led to some quarrels with my wife as I desperately and jealously try to guard the book shelf space that I have against incursions by other things.  I think I must have lost the battle when the exercise bike ended up in the study though.)  I really, really love books, which seems to have rubbed off onto N because she also really loves them.  Her attention span is sometimes not quite as long as mine, although Lord of the Rings was probably the wrong place to start her off, and so we do occasionally find ourselves, despite the one book off one book back rule, surrounded by a pile of discarded books as she tries to work her way through all the books one by one. 

At least I thought it was her attention span.  Until recently when I discovered that she could just be getting bored with the selection.  You see, we have a bit of a game with a particular set of books.  The Usborne Farmyard Tales books, (fabulous, entertaining, colourful, just right for our little girl.  It also turns out, I found out tonight, that you can follow the little yellow duck, who is hidden on every page of the books, on Twitter, brilliant.)  With these books, as we read I will pause as we come up to the people’s names at the beginning of the books, which all start the same, and N will fill in the blanks.  We do this because the first page is always the same and she really enjoys shouting the names, especially Rusty the dog.  It was only these books though, I had never even thought to try it with any of the others we read. 

But then, one evening last week, Nana came round.  Which was great as it took the pressure off me and she got to read N books all evening instead.  And suddenly, N was filling in all sorts of words for her.  Nana would get to the end of a line and leave off the last word which N would dutifully and fairly consistently supply.  Both my wife and I were stunned, which led to a round of testing to find out just how many books N had committed to memory, it turns out a fair chunk of the library is now stored securely in our little girl’s brain.  Incredible.  I’m sure it’s a fairly commonplace sort of a thing which is unlikely to garner international press attention, especially not during the Olympics, but it impressed me.

You see, clearly destined for great things, even if I do say so myself.  Now I will probably go back to writing about the infuriating, maddening, impossibly difficult things that she does to drive both me and my wife mad, but just for a little while it has been nice to be able to bore you all with how great my daughter is, perhaps you’d like to stick around?  I’m sure there are some holiday photos here somewhere I can talk to you about, there was this really great one of a caterpillar I just know you’d love.

Can't Touch This

I like singing.  I tend to sing a lot when I'm at home.  Just bursts of songs as I remember the lyrics, or as the tune pops into my head.  I have listened to a lot of music through doing jobs in various factories, where the radio was constantly on, and somehow most of it seems to have buried itself deep within my brain and will come bursting out, sometimes at very inopportune moments.  Moments of great solemnity can be spoiled by my subconscious suddenly deciding that all I want to do is belt out the chorus to a Beatles track, or something worse.  It hasn't happened yet but my constant fear is that I am going to have a desperate desire to sing 'Barbie Girl' by Aqua whilst in a public place.  If you don't know it you are one of the lucky ones.  A terrible piece of pop featuring the ludicrous line, "Life in Plastic, It's Fantastic."  At least you can't complain about it not rhyming.

This evening my song of choice was 'Can't Touch this' by MC Hammer.  Not a song I like especially, or would recommend to anyone, but the song that bubbled to the top of the pile during tea.  Of course, being at home, with only my wife and N for company, I went for it.  Also of course, it's the sort of tune that demands a dance routine.  So there I was hurling myself around the kitchen whilst the girls sat at the table watching me.  Until the little Buglet decided that she wanted to weigh in on my singing. 

I have already commented on her love of music, and we often have a laugh with me singing and dancing away and her trying to copy my moves.  She's got rhythm, but her balance leaves something to be desired.  She can occasionally resemble Gabrielle Anderson running the last few hundred metres of the frst ever Olympic women's marathon (if you haven't seen it just have a peek at this video.  (Skip through to about the minute mark to get to the actual race footage.)   It would be funny if it wasn't such an epic achievement, I think I would probably look like that roughly a mile into any marathon I tried to run.)

Back to this evening.

Me: Can't touch this *accompanied by some chicken dance which will never be seen in public no matter how much you all ask*
N: Daddy noisy

Only two words, but so crushing.  There goes any dream I may have had to take my talents and go professional.  "Noisy" is not really the critique you are looking for when you showcase your abilities in front of your 20 month old daughter.  At this point my wife burst out laughing and tried to encourage her to say it again while I slunk away into the darker recesses of the kitchen in order to hide the shame. 

Incidentally, this was the same mealtime that had included my wife pouring half a bottle of soy sauce onto her dinner by mistake, and me stuffing a wrap so full that as I took my first bite most of it fell out onto my plate.  A fairly typical mealtime then, except for the part where I learnt that my daughter doesn't like rap, or at least my rendition of it.  Good job I haven't quit my day job then.

Security Issues

Security is an issue.  I’ve recently been tasked, by my wife, with recruiting 10,000 guards to look after our daughter, but it turns out that even though the deadline is coming up very soon, I’ve had to come clean and admit that due to massive administrative complexities I only managed to recruit around 6 thousand and that the rest of the guards have to be conscripted in from the public sector.  I’ve owned up, and I held daily meetings with my wife to keep her fully abreast of the situation, but somehow she doesn’t seem to have read the memo that I put at the bottom of her briefing documents written in size 3 Wingdings which explained the numbers in detail.

Hang on, that’s not actually true, just something that I’ve heard from somewhere.  Anyway, security is an issue in our house as our daughter is at the age where she can put Houdini to shame with her feats of escapology.  Seriously, I have found her in situations that would push Jonathan Creek to drink. I still have no idea how, when she was quite a bit younger, she managed to climb up and out of her cot, and make it to the floor without damaging herself.  Perhaps it has something to do with that radioactive spider she was bitten by?