You
know that feeling?
Yeah,
that one.
The
one where you’ve not been somewhere for a long time and now you’re a bit scared
of going in? Or where you’ve not seen
someone for a while and you’re just a little bit nervous of seeing him, in case
they’re not the same person anymore, or you aren’t?
I
feel a bit like that right now. My blog
is very much foreign territory to me at the moment. I very rarely look at it (N probably wouldn’t
even recognise it if I checked on the stats like she used to) and when I do it
is with one eye closed and my face scrunched up in case I find that it has
actually given up on me and disappeared.
So far I’ve been in luck, but soon it really will just up and find
someone who will look after it better, so I really ought to put something new
there.
Unfortunately
I can confirm that the lack of blogging hasn’t come about because of my vastly
improved fatherhood skills, those are still struggling to get out of first
gear. I haven’t committed any real
howlers recently, like feeding N a meal solely of peas and sweetcorn, or
playing chase with her so excitedly that she got scared of me and I had to
spend twenty minutes cuddling her before she would play again.(1) Nothing like that has happened in the last
couple of days, which means I must be learning, although my general level is
probably still novice.
Lack
of blogging is simply down to lack of opportunity, but today N came out with a
statement which I just had to blog about, and so here we are again, and I really
think that this could be the start of something wonderful.
But
back to N. Now I will readily admit that
I am not a lot of things. I am not an
artist, of any type or description. I am
not good at DIY (see here and here for examples of my particular ineptitude in
this regard). I am not over 30. See?
There are lots of things that I cannot claim to be, some of them I would
like to be, though I don’t ask for much, I would just like to be able to paint
a picture without people having to ask what it is, and if I could just learn to
hang a picture I would be happy for days.
Some things I am not, however, and I haven’t even thought about it,
which is where N comes in.
We
were sat eating our tea and N was entertaining us with little morsels of her
Cowardesque wit when she came out with a pearler of a one-liner. “Daddy is not silly.” This might not seem funny to you, bordering
on downright dishonest as it does, but the best was yet to come. “Daddy is not orange.” This was delivered in the sort of voice one
might associate with announcing that it was raining again, or that Nottingham
Forest had dropped another three points.
A totally reasonable, unsurprising statement. And suddenly I saw myself in a new
light. I had never really thought of
myself that way before but she was absolutely right, she had struck right to
the heart of the matter. I am not, in
fact, orange. It was a revelation.
I
still don’t know where it came from. We
hadn’t been talking about oranges, we have no oranges in the house, our walls
are not orange, and I don’t think N has recently become acquainted with David
Dickinson. It was just a bolt from the
blue, not orange.
(1) Both of which I have, unfortunately,
done in the past.
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