Have yourself a calorific Christmas,
Take another bite
From now on,
Our slippers will be out of sight
Have yourself a lazy little Christmas,
Eat the Yule-tide log,
From now on,
We’ll resolve not to ever jog

Here we gorge on unhealthy food,
Full of sugar we adore
Chocolate boxes so near to us
That we need to have one more.

At New Year we’ll resolve to be better
If our will allows
Hang onto that goal without a plan of how
And don’t regret the bad decisions you make now.

I’m not dreaming of a white Christmas
Just like the ones I’ve never known
With my gas bill rising
There’s no disguising
The last thing that I need is snow.

I’m not dreaming of a white Christmas
The Christmas cards I sent were late
But I’m still quite full of good cheer
Because all my Christmases have beer

Old Christmas tree, Old Christmas tree!
How are thy leaves so plastic!
Old Christmas tree, Old Christmas tree,
I’m not being sarcastic

In the loft in the summertime,
I get thee down at Christmastime
Old Christmas tree, Old Christmas tree,
I think thou art quite broken

Old Christmas tree, Old Christmas tree,
Much pleasure did thou bring me!
Old Christmas tree, Old Christmas tree,
But now thou art quite sad to see

Year on year this Christmas tree,
Becomes less than it used to be
Old Christmas tree, Old Christmas tree,
Quite the plastic tragedy

Old Christmas tree, Old Christmas tree,
Thy lights are always tangled
Old Christmas tree, Old Christmas tree,
Thy branches are now mangled

Each bough hath given up the fight,
The thing won’t last the whole fortnight
Old Christmas tree, Old Christmas tree,
Thou art a tad unsightly

According to my understanding of the Gregorian calendar, today is the last day of the year that I have mainly been referring to as ‘2023’. And if that is the case, then I must abide by my own rules and produce some kind of a review of the year. Because I do it every year. Or I have done it every year since 2015, which is, in truth, not every year at all. Just the years I have been an active blogger.

Whether I deserve to refer to myself as an ‘active blogger’, when I have spent very little of 2023 maintaining this blog is possibly debateable. A quick look back at what I wrote for the 2022 equivalent of this ‘end of year’ effort, would suggest I didn’t do much blogging in 2022 either. I did, as I recall, write a fair bit in the preceding two years, but I think that was mainly as a reaction to a certain pandemic. I’d like to get back to being a proper blogger and updating these little-read pages with my unsolicited observations of the world, but I’m not in a hurry to see another contagious disease sweeping the world, so I’m going to have to find a different kind of motivation in 2024.

That sounds like something I might want to address in my obligatory New Year’s Resolution post and consequently a problem I can defer until tomorrow. Which is the best way to deal with all problems in my experience.

It is, nonetheless, quite hard for me to review 2023, because I’m not sure I really took part in it. I wasn’t just avoiding blogging for most of the past year, I was avoiding any kind of meaningful existence.

That is because my life is now entirely devoted to my two daughters. I’m not sure this is because I’m an especially good parent and more because I’m not really sure how not to devote my entire existence to them. Small children, as it turns out, are quite demanding.

What little I have seen of the news in 2023, suggests that world events have not, on the whole, been especially positive. Perhaps my frequent trips to the play park and/or soft play have been as good as anything anyone else has been up to.

I went on holiday in August. It was a UK-based holiday but I did spend a week in a static caravan somewhere that I don’t live. The children were with me for all of that week though so it was really not that different to not being on holiday. Except I was in a caravan rather than a house. Which isn’t necessarily an improvement. I think I enjoyed the holiday though. I’m certain my children did anyway, which is apparently all that counts.

I’m not sure I’ve evolved all that much as a person in 2023. Possibly I have though. A new Indiana Jones film came out and I haven’t seen it yet. It’s available to stream on a service I subscribe to, I’m a massive fan of Indiana Jones and I haven’t seen it. But I have seen the latest Paw Patrol movie. Twice.

I’ve also started listening to audiobooks. Quite obsessively. I used to read books obsessively once upon a time, but that is something that necessitates ‘finding time to do stuff’ and having two kids means that I’m more likely to find miscellaneous plastic toys in my shoes than ‘time to do stuff’. But audiobooks can be consumed while doing other stuff, like driving, or wandering around the supermarket or picking up miscellaneous plastic toys, so I’m very much a fan of the medium.

My daughters both have evolved. This is to be expected. They are children. Most experiences are new and exciting to small children. Little Proclaims is now in her second year of compulsory education and seems to be fairly enthusiastic about this. She is fairly enthusiastic about a lot things a lot of the time and school, for the most part, seems to suit her. She can now read and write a bit. She is more motivated by the former than the latter and regularly reads even the most mundane of billboards aloud as we navigate through the various commutes life throws our way. Mini Proclaims is still attempting to master speech but has started to develop a few key words to communicate her wants and needs. Her favourite word is ‘chocolate’.

Mrs Proclaims continues to work on a PhD that has seemingly taken up most of her adult life. If all goes well, I might be able to report the successful end of that endeavour this time next year. But she won’t thank me for attempting to count metaphorical chickens on that subject. I’m not sure what she’ll do with herself when she has completed her studies though. Maybe she can start a blog.

In summary then, 2023 was a year in which I was mainly a dad. I like being a dad, but I have no idea what else happened in 2023.

I expect something did though. Maybe other people have written about it.

But I’m not remotely qualified to offer any insight.

Other than to say that 2023 was definitely a year that did happen and in that sense, it achieved its main purpose.

If you are planning to stay up and see the New Year in, then raise a glass for me. I’m pretty sure I’ll have passed out on the sofa several hours beforehand. And I won’t have touched a drop of alcohol.

Like most of its predecessors, 2024 is a year. Whether it is a good year or a bad year (or a blameless measurement of time passing) is yet to be determined but it has now made a start. And when a year starts, it is important that we all take some time to reflect on just how disappointing we are as people and make some kind of pledge to be better in the future. It’s a very narrow window in which to commit to self-improvement. You can’t just wake up on January 2nd and decide to make positive life changes – that would never work. It must be done on the first day of the year, or not at all. I don’t make the rules, but I damn well will abide by them!

In previous years I perhaps haven’t taken the concept of the New Year’s Resolution as seriously as I should, and you could accuse me of having set some rather insincere targets on my New Year’s Day post. Regular readers may recall that one year I became a little fixated with the 1996 film Space Jam despite having never seen it. In 2023 I did manage to right this wrong and watched not only the original Space Jam movie, but the 2021 sequel, Space Jam: A New Legacy. I neither loved nor hated them.

Last year I made the somewhat strange decision to make some real New Year’s Resolutions, which seems very out of character. Having reviewed them prior to writing this post, I can see that I absolutely failed to hit all but one of them. They were as follows:

1. Lose some weight
2. Write more
3. Keep fit
4. Spend less money
5. Enjoy the moment

The only one I did achieve was the goal of ‘keeping fit’. Which was fairly easy seeing as I had already managed to get quite fit during the pandemic. Keeping fit is much more manageable than getting fit in the first place. Plus regular exercise always seems like a legitimate escape from my children a few times a week. I love my children but sometimes I need a break from them. Running around a field might seem like a strange way of getting some ‘me time’ but there’s only so much Paw Patrol anyone can endure.

Unfortunately I also use exercise as a way of legitimising my poor dietary choices so it’s not surprising that I didn’t achieve the ‘losing weight’ goal.

The lack of posts on this blog is a fair indication that I didn’t maintain any kind of writing commitment, and I’m quite certain that I did nothing to reduce my spending, although a hike in the cost of living possibly made that all but impossible anyway.

I did, arguably ‘enjoy some moments’ of 2023, but I don’t think I achieved anything like the sentiment of that resolution and still spent far too much time worrying about stuff outside of my control.

It would be reasonable to just ‘roll over’ last years resolutions to this year, but I’m not going to do that on the basis that:

1. It’s not especially nice to fail at stuff
2. I didn’t actually remember making any of the resolutions until I started writing this post, so any success would have been more down to the fact that I wanted to achieve those things anyway, rather than because I made New Year’s Resolutions.

I think, therefore, an insincere list of stupid goals is probably more ‘me’. So these are my resolutions for 2024:

1. Wear odd shoes to work. Ultimately very similar but slightly different shoes on each foot. Just to see if anyone notices.
2. Start watching a sport I previously had no interest in. And then become boringly knowledgeable about the sport, including historic fixtures which predate my interest in said sport. Then annoy people who really are fans of the sport by constantly sharing my insights with them.
3. Coin a new phrase and then use it relentlessly until it is adopted by at least one other person. I don’t wish to let the sock out of the laundry basket, but I may even attempt that on this blog at some point.
4. Give up a foodstuff which has no negative health implications and then brag about the fact to anyone who will listen, in the hope of influencing other people to make similarly pointless lifestyle changes.
5. Read the chapters of a novel in random order to see if I can still make sense of the plot. And then make the spurious claim that I enjoyed it more than if I’d read the novel in the correct order and see if I can turn ‘reading stuff in the wrong order’ into a social media fad.

There we go. Some pointless resolutions for 2024. I think we all feel better about the future now.

Assuming that I finish writing this post and deem it worthy of publication (and the quality control on my blog is such that if I finish writing something I instantly deem it worthy of publication on these pages, irrespective of whether it’s actually any good), then it will be my 33rd post in as many consecutive days. I’ve achieved longer blogging streaks than this, but I always see a 30+ daily blogging streak as a pretty good indication that I’ve got my blogging mojo back, particularly after a lengthy period of not writing much at all.

It’s slightly disingenuous on this occasion because the first 24 posts of the 33 were my annual advent calendar of Christmas films and I wrote most of those in 2021. But while those posts were appearing on the blog, I was secretly working on watching and writing about other films for future versions of my Christmas countdown. 2024 and 2025 are already in the bag, and 2026 is taking shape too, so the blogosphere can relax in the knowledge that, irrespective of whatever else I might write, the statistically least popular section of my blog will continue for years to come.

The next eight posts all had a Christmas theme too, what with that being the time of year, and traditionally, even during my most fallow blogging periods, I’ve always been quite prolific at Christmas.

But I do feel like I might like to start writing at other times of the year again. This does need to be tempered with the reality that time is rarely a commodity I have much of, even when I seemingly do have quite a lot of it, because my children do occupy a lot of the time I used to regard as mine. They do provide quite a lot of blogworthy material in that time, but I’m generally too exhausted to commit to writing any of it down.

This post, for example, is being produced on New Year’s Day, when Mini Proclaims is taking a nap and Little Proclaims is doing a fairly good impression of a zombie in front of the TV. This window will last a maximum of an hour and is largely only available because it’s cold outside and lots of places we’d normally go are closed for the holiday. Tomorrow, when this post is ‘live’ we’ll be on the motorway en route to visit my parents and the following day has already been mainly put aside for haircuts and shoe purchasing (because hair and feet continue to grow, irrespective of the pressures that such inconsiderate growth places on my wallet). A few more days of soft-play and park visits will ensue, and might yield the odd window of blogging time, before the end of the school holidays will oblige me to try and fit in a full-time job alongside my eldest daughters’ various extra-curricular activities.

Still it does feel like I could do a bit better than I have managed in the last two years and the way to achieve this is to possibly lower my ambitions with regards to quality and quantity. I’ve never strived for both quality and quantity on this blog – generally when I’ve been prolific, it has been at the expense of any kind of quality control, but when I post less regularly, I always think that I should strive to produce something that is quite good. But two years of hardly posting anything is testament to the fact that the threshold has shifted. And so I either need to let this blog die a dignified death, or start consciously producing dross on a semi-regular basis. Even at its worst, I like to think that my blog is far from being the least worthy thing on the internet so I’m loath to make a dignified exit. Instead, I’m going to try and be a more regular blogger from here on in, by adopting a filter-free approach to posting. This may mean several weeks at a time of nothing but bad haikus but I’m not planning on plumbing those depths in the foreseeable future.

I expect there will be quite a lot of poetry though. I’d like to think my poetry will hold a mirror up to society, but some of it will be about such era-defining issues as ‘an old towel’, ‘those biscuits that I quite like’ and ‘that weird mark on the wall’. Perhaps because I have absolutely no understanding of what makes for a good poem, I find poetry quite easy to write. I prefer writing prose but this generally takes more time, even when inspiration is everywhere. There has been a lot of great source material for prose over the past two years, but very little has made it onto the blog. This has to change because if I don’t owe it to myself, then I certainly owe it to my children to ensure that all of their most embarrassing adventures are recorded on here for me to torture them with as they get older.

Both sisters combined on New Year’s Eve, for example, to give me some fantastic material that mainly focuses on their bowel movements. Surely neither of my daughters would forgive me if I don’t manage to record that story for the sake of posterity.

And so this post serves as both an indication that I am now well and truly back in the blogosphere and also as proof that I am quite happy to post any old crap. And that very soon I will be posting a story that is quite literally about crap.

I’m waiting in for a man
Who can fix my roof
Because I can’t fix my roof
I’m rather lacking in that skill
The man is now 45 minutes late
Of his revised ETA
An ETA he only told me about
When he was already 30 minutes late
For the original appointment
Which was at a time he suggested
And which, to accommodate him
I rearranged existing plans

I really need not to have a broken roof
At any time of year
But especially during
What has thus far
Been a fairly wet January
Albeit we’re only five days in

At this point
I might be inclined to suggest
That I’ll take my business elsewhere
But after frantically calling several roofers
All of whom profess to offer
An emergency 24/7 service
He was the only person who returned my call
With any kind of offer to come out

After a similar experience with plumbers
Over the years
I have turned my hand
To amateur plumbing
With varying degrees of success
And not too many spectacular failures
But I don’t think I possess the skills
Nor indeed the ladders
Required to fix a roof

And while one might question
The wisdom
Of my trial and error
Approach to plumbing
The worst that ever happened
Was a wet floor
Which required a lot of subsequent mopping

Were I to attempt to fix my roof
I would be unlikely to need
Any kind of mop
As I would more likely
Be the mess that would need cleaning up

So as annoying as it is
To sit around waiting for a roofer
I think on this occasion
That patience might be more than a virtue

It is Sunday afternoon as I write this. Mini Proclaims is napping, having recently covered herself and much of the dining table in my home-made sweet potato soup. She does enjoy a bowl of soup. Not to eat seemingly, more to ‘accessorise’. ‘Soup’ is a word she does occasionally use in conversation, and her vocabulary is still fairly limited, so I assume she has positive feelings about the stuff. Not all soups presumably – at this point it may be helpful to refer you to a 2015 post I wrote about soup, rather than revisiting the risks of using the word ‘soup’ too generically here.

But she is now asleep, which remains a necessity, both for her and the rest of the Proclaims family. When my youngest daughter finally decides that an afternoon nap is no longer something she is on board with, I fear for the mental health of the rest of the family. Mini Proclaims is not always naughty, but she is a particular kind of naughty.

Little Proclaims, is currently sat opposite me as I write this and busy ‘creating’. Creating largely consists of sticking pieces of paper together with sellotape and then claiming that they are something that they bear no resemblance to. She enjoys creating. Little Proclaims is never ‘knowingly naughty’. This is not to say that she is never badly behaved. Little Proclaims frequently behaves in ways that make her parents lives more difficult, but this behaviour stems from misunderstandings, tiredness, hunger and general frustrations that the world is not exactly as she thinks it should be. She doesn’t ever intend to upset anyone but she sees life through the lens of a five year old and sometimes that causes problems.

Mini Proclaims is four months shy of her second birthday. She is a smiley toddler who likes to cuddle. But sometimes she is naughty because she thinks it’s funny to be naughty. She will literally do things to get a reaction and then laugh when she gets that reaction. Often she will wait until she has managed to attract your attention before she even starts to do the thing that she knows she shouldn’t be doing. Like if we accidently leave the stair gate open, she will literally sit on the bottom step until she sees me looking and then race up the stairs laughing as soon as I make some kind of effort to rectify the situation. Or she will ask for food and then once said food is provided, will tip it on the floor with genuine glee. Or mid change, as you reach for the fresh nappy, you’ll suddenly note the absence of a recipient and a small bare bottom racing away accompanied by giggles.

Little Proclaims enjoys singing. She is too young for us to know whether this is something she is going to be good at, but we have already established that she is enthusiastic. Tuneful or not, nothing warms my heart like hearing her sing. One of her favourite songs to sing is from Matilda the Musical. It’s called ‘Naughty’ and the main recurring line in the song is “sometimes you have to be a little bit naughty’. But even when she is at her most challenging, I don’t think Little Proclaims believes that sentiment.

Recently Mini Proclaims has started joining in with the singing. She doesn’t sing many of the lyrics but the general tune is broadly accurate in the context of her being under-two. When she sings along to ‘Naughty’, I believe her emphatically.

Every Saturday, during term time, I take Little Proclaims to French School. In spite of the fact that I, as a child, hated every second I spent in school, I am nothing if not hypocritical, and I make sure my eldest child not only attends compulsory education, but also has to give up at least some of her evenings and weekends to enjoy (or endure) additional learning opportunities.

Actually it’s Mrs Proclaims who is the driving force behind most of these activities. Except that Mrs Proclaims doesn’t drive. So after Little Proclaims has been signed up for an activity, it sometimes becomes my job to actually get her there. In that sense we are both the driving force, Mrs Proclaims metaphorically and me rather more literally.

As I have revealed on these pages before, Little Proclaims is pretty much bilingual. This is mainly due to the efforts of my wife, who is no slouch at French and is currently working towards a PhD in French Literature. I, too, can speak French, but not as well as my wife and now not as well as my five year old daughter. I still have the edge on Mini Proclaims, but I fear this will not be for too much longer.

Anyway, most Saturday mornings I drive Little Proclaims to French school, which is in a different town to the one we live in. And because my wife is not stupid, I also take Mini Proclaims with me. Mrs Proclaims reasons that if my weekend is going to be curtailed by taking my eldest daughter to an activity then it won’t be made worse by taking the little one along for the ride. That Mrs Proclaims then has the house entirely to herself for three hours every Saturday is just a happy by-product of her organising additional academic input for our child and was never part of some dastardly masterplan.

Or so she claims.

Most of the time it goes fairly smoothly on the way there. Getting two small children into the car with sufficient time to drive the 30 or so minutes it takes to get to the school is not without challenges but we usually manage it. Because the venue is an actual school site, complete with playing fields, various sporting clubs also play their Saturday morning fixtures there so the car park can be a little hit and miss, but for the most part Little Proclaims makes it to the lesson on time and Mini Proclaims and I kill the ensuing 90 minutes either by frequenting a local supermarket for groceries, or going for a walk. Well I walk. Mini Proclaims sits in a pushchair and sings. Before she got as big as she is, I used to walk her around in what might be described as a ‘papoose’. But she’s a bit on the heavy side for that now, so it’s a pushchair all the way.

On occasion Mini Proclaims has thrown a spanner in the works of this mundane but not unpleasant Saturday morning routine. For Mini Proclaims sometimes likes to experiment with being car sick. Not always. Indeed it’s a relatively rare occurrence. Rare enough to catch me unprepared. And therefore disastrous when it happens, because vomit does not, on the whole, smell very nice. And, particularly during the ‘papoose’ days, being stuck with a child who smells of vomit for 90 minutes could be quite challenging on the nostrils.

We hadn’t had an incident for a while, so I should have expected the backseat explosion we had this Saturday.

Fortunately Mini Proclaims had had, amongst other things, strawberries for breakfast. And while, if I’m honest, the carbon footprint of said strawberries was probably shameful, it turns out that strawberry flavoured vomit smells mainly of strawberries.

Which is not at all unpleasant.

I’m not sure if strawberries always offer this level of mitigation when it comes to vomit. I have no idea if other fruit can be substituted to achieve a similar effect. I’m not sure I care to carry out additional research if it can, in any way, be avoided.

Still, I think that Saturday morning strawberries might need to be a staple for my youngest child for the foreseeable future.

I’ve written meta poems before
Though I’ve never met this one I’m sure
For if this poem were a person
Meeting it could only worsen
My antipathy towards this verse
Although I’ve probably written worse
Personification of a rhyme
As bad as this might be a crime
So I’ll never meet my poetry
Why I write it is a mystery

Prior to becoming a parent, I had no idea what ‘soft play’ was. Indeed for quite some time after becoming a parent I was only really notionally aware of ‘soft play’. I knew it was a thing but mainly it was a thing that happened to other parents. Occasionally Mrs Proclaims mentioned taking Little Proclaims to a soft play centre, but my interest was rarely piqued beyond a perfunctory level of curiosity, which was pitched at the level required to fulfil marital obligations but was never at a high enough level for me to glean any meaningful knowledge about the activity itself.

When I was a father of one child, I mainly fulfilled my paternal duties by taking Little Proclaims to activities that Mrs Proclaims had little to no interest in, such as swimming, to the play park or to outdoor spaces where Little Proclaims could run around uninhibited.

Being a parent of two children, with a nearly 4-year age gap, has changed things a little, particularly since Mini Proclaims has become mobile. Keeping one child safe in a large outdoor space is very much within my skillset, but keeping two children safe, particularly when they operate at different speeds is more challenging.

And so in October 2023 I tentatively experimented with soft play. And I haven’t looked back. It’s not especially cheap, but as a way of entertaining and (crucially) exhausting my offspring, it really does provide a one-size-fits-all solution. Over the Christmas holidays, I took my daughters to our local soft-play centre no less than six times in a fortnight. And while I generally found it excruciatingly dull, neither Little nor Mini Proclaims showed any signs that they were becoming bored of the experience.

Post Christmas it has been harder to find the time, because I work during the week and Little Proclaims is not lacking in other activities on the weekends (see last week’s post for example). But this weekend we were away, in Eastbourne, celebrating a milestone birthday with our extended family. It was a fun-filled but fairly intense weekend – when Little Proclaims gets together with her cousins, a very real chaos ensues. Mini Proclaims rather does her own thing, but generally makes the most of being the centre of attention of her adoring relatives. By the time Sunday morning rolled around, a lot of energy had been expended, but it seemed like there was still plenty left in the tank. For the kids. The adults, to a person, while all in agreement that it had been a delightful weekend, were quite ready to return to normality and basque in pleasant memories.

It was felt that the young’uns could do with one last hurrah. A local soft-play centre was mooted. Along with extensive cushioned child-friendly fun it purported to offer a parent friendly cafe. And so to soft play we headed. And as far as that went, it was a success. All children burned off their post-party highs in an hour of brightly coloured foamy fun and accompanying adults enjoyed a much needed caffeine injection. But Eastbourne soft play was different to Reading soft play in that the car park was not free. This is perfectly reasonable. Our local Reading soft play is in a leisure centre with adequate parking and no other nearby attractions. Eastbourne soft play is on the sea front. It’s fairly customary to expect to pay for parking if you park along the sea front in a coastal town. And in fairness, the car park charges were pretty reasonable.

So far so good. I had no complaints.

Until I tried to pay for parking.

Because in 2024 I generally operate in a fairly ‘cashless’ existence. Most things can be paid for by card these days, and it’s generally more convenient to do so. I can even buy a coffee in work on my debit card and I work in a state-maintained secondary school, which are hardly institutions renowned for their cutting edge approach to anything.

Most car parks I use on a regular basis offer the facility to pay via credit or debit card. Indeed many offer a ‘contactless’ approach to such payments. But occasionally one does come across a car park which insists on payment using cash. And not just cash, in fact, but specifically coins. I never have coins on my person so this is always a problem. However, such places do often offer an alternative of sorts.

Which is the ‘parking app’.

I don’t mind an ‘app’. I was not exactly an early adopter of the smart phone but the technology has insinuated its way into my life over the years and now, like many people, I am a slave to my devices. But the parking app seems a fairly unnecessary invention. I wouldn’t object to the concept in itself, but as I am able to use a multitude of parking facilities without ever having to resort to the app, it’s hard to see it as anything other than an inconvenience. And when I do find myself needing to download a parking app, it never seems to be the same app. I’m all for open and fair competition in the market place but there seems to be a veritable plethora of companies operating in this field. Which generally means that when I do need to avail myself of their services, I find myself needing to set up a new account every time. Which makes the whole process rather time-consuming. Assuming I can even get a signal on my phone to download the app in the first place. Which I often can’t as the issue only ever seems to crop up in remote coastal towns where mobile phone signals are often a rare commodity.

Eastbourne, however, though coastal, did offer a fairly robust signal so I was able to download the app. And go through the lengthy process of setting up a new account. Only to find out (once I’d entered the ‘verification’ code that had to be sent to me in order to complete the set-up) that I apparently had used this app at least once in my life before and therefore was directed to log in to my existing account. I attempted to do this, guessing my previously used password far too easily (I am a fraudster’s dream when it comes to account passwords, if only I had an identity worth stealing). Once I’d entered my second verification code of the morning, it transpired that when I had last used the app I had done so with a different car. Which dates my last usage to over two years ago, but it could have been longer. Anyway the app did not like my current car’s registration number and so suggested that I could not proceed further but could, if I wished to pay for parking that day, delete my old account and set up a new one, much as I had attempted to do at the outset. A third attempt (and verification code) later, I finally had paid for parking. It was not, as advertised, a more convenient way of doing things. The whole process took ten minutes, which I think is at least nine minutes longer than it should take to pay for parking. It was cold. I had soft-play bound children with me who were not entirely understanding about why daddy was taking so long to get them inside to the joys of ball pits, slides and squishy things. And for the privilege of using the parking app, I also had to pay 30p more than if I’d had cash on my person.

I think it’s fair to say I was not an ‘appy customer.

This poem
Is not that poem

It’s a different verse
Neither better nor worse
It’s just not the same
And it doesn’t claim
To be that poem

To be exact
It is in fact
This poem

Which is fine
It’s not a sign
Of things amiss
To be this
And not that
Or a cat
Or a hat
Or a bat

It’s this poem
Which is not that poem

In all likelihood this will be the last thing I post in January 2024 because January 2024 is almost over. As Januaries go, this has not been as eternal as some have felt in the past, which is possibly due to the fact that, as a result of some strange quirk in the UK school calendar this academic year, I didn’t return to work from the Christmas break until the 8th, when a sizeable chunk of January was already behind me.

I’m not generally a huge fan of January, which is not really the fault of January itself. It’s unfair to blame an arbitrary measurement of time for anything, but January, as well as having the tough act of following Christmas, is also, in the UK at least, beset by inclement weather and very little in the way of daylight. And lots of fads, which are theoretically designed to make people healthier but, unless healthy and miserable are synonyms, mainly fail on this score.

January 2024 has not been too bad on a personal level. Mini Proclaims has introduced me to several fruit-based flavours of vomit (blueberry being somewhat less pleasant than strawberry). These have increasingly consolidated a vaguely unpleasant aroma in the back seat of my car, which even the most industrious of unicorn-themed air fresheners has struggled to combat (Little Proclaims is quite insistent on the unicorn theme – I once purchased an alpaca-themed air freshener and the resulting outrage was palpable). However, I would not define my initial foray into 2024 as being predominantly centered around vomit.

I’m not sure how I would define it. I’m not certain a definition is even required. It’s been quite tolerable though. Even pleasant in parts. Being a parent of two small children often means that one day seems much like any other, and nothing much that goes on in my life would seem particularly exciting to others. I don’t think the younger incarnations of me would necessarily regard my current existence as something be desired. But I somehow feel that future versions of me might look back on this time as a golden era.

My career is not as successful as I might like it to be, but far more successful than I probably deserve it to be. My eternal struggles to not be overweight are mitigated somewhat by the fact that I am as fit as I have ever been at any time in my life. My house, while in need of much renovation and an industrious spring clean, is full of the kind of clutter that reminds me that it is lived in by people that I love.

It’s early on Sunday morning as I write this, and my wife and children are still sleeping. ‘Me-time’ is hard to come by in a small terraced house full of people. I had a similar moment on Saturday morning, until it was punctuated by the sound of Little Proclaims singing to her giggling sister. I enjoy having time to myself, but there is always a part of me that looks forward to the beginning of the morning song and the resulting chaos that will ensue.

As we said goodbye to January
And associated fads
Such as Veganuary
(In which I did not participate
Out of sympathy to vegetarians
Who surely must feel a level
Of antipathy towards vegans
Who have rather stolen their thunder)
I reflected on whether I might ever
Adopt a specific dietary practice
And adhere to it faithfully

Because I could see the benefits
Of being a little healthier in that regard
But I feel I lack the requisite willpower
To ever truly commit to such a lifestyle

I worry too that a certain tendency
Towards pedantry
Might also hold me back
After all, I am married
To a pescatarian
And I quite like fish
So should not find it too hard
To make the switch
To a sea food diet
And replace my amusingly homophonic
‘See food’ diet

But I would always be concerned
About certain details
Such as whether or not
A pescatarian
Would truly be a pescatarian
If they ever ate a shark

When I was a child, TV in the UK consisted of four channels. In England that would have been BBC1, BBC2, ITV and Channel 4. In Wales, where I grew up, there was no Channel 4. We had S4C. Which was entirely in Welsh. I don’t really speak Welsh, although I did learn a bit in school and somehow managed to get a grade B at GCSE. But S4C was mainly useless to me (apart from as a cunning ruse when I pretended to revise for the aforementioned GCSE), so I grew up with three channels. Channel 5 didn’t really arrive until I was already an adult and, although additional channels might notionally have been available via the installation of a satellite dish, my parents never subscribed to such services because I think they were quite expensive. And they probably felt that three channels was enough.

We also only had one TV to be shared between the whole family and the internet wasn’t really a thing as far as the general public was concerned. We didn’t even have VHS player in the early years. If you wanted to watch TV, you watched what was on the TV. As a child, it meant I knew the schedules pretty well. My time was late afternoons and weekend mornings. Cartoon time. Long time readers may recall my homage to the cartoons of the 80s and 90s but might also note some clear omissions. Like BraveStarr, the animated Space Western that would definitely have been my cup of tea. If I drank tea at that age. Which I didn’t. Although I think I did drink coffee. Which, on reflection, seems wrong for an primary-school-aged child. But I digress. I never watched BraveStarr, because it was on at the same time as something else I liked on a different channel. Possibly He-Man.

Back in the day we had to make some hard choices.

These days there are hundreds of channels available in the UK, many of them accessible without subscribing to any particular service. But if you like having access to the internet, which I do, then in all likelihood you’ll have subscribed to some multimedia provider that throws in a load of extra TV channels as part of your internet/phone package. Most of them are awful, and largely if I watch TV in the traditional sense, then I’d probably watch something on one of BBC1, BBC2, ITV or Channel 4. Not S4C though because I now live in England and have no intention of sitting any more exams in Welsh. Actually sometimes S4C because they occasionally show rugby and football matches involving teams I grew up with and it’s worth putting up with Welsh language commentary to watch those games. But largely it’s the ‘big 4’ if I watch TV. Which I mainly don’t these days.

Because another thing that comes with having the internet is access to subscribable streaming services, and I subscribe to a few. I’m not sure if I can really afford to subscribe to them, but once the direct debit is set up, it’s quite hard to equate those services with the total lack of money in my bank account at the end of every month. And I do use most of them, more so than my gym subscription for example. Which is wrong on multiple levels. I might need to review my priorities a little. Perhaps I’ll do that later with a cold beer and calorific snack.

As a household we still only have one TV. And even that is probably more than we need, because these days you can access moving images via a whole host of devices. But we do have a TV. It’s on as I write this. I’m not watching it. Little Proclaims is notionally watching it. Although being the whirlwind that she is, she’s also multi-tasking and has produced no less than seven drawings of cats in the last 15 minutes. My daughters do enjoy a whole host of cartoons, which are available on demand via the various streaming services. And they do demand to watch them a lot. Of course Mrs Proclaims and I feel a tad guilty about letting them just sit and watch TV, but I could hardly produce exquisite prose like this if I didn’t let the TV do a little of the heavy lifting vis-a-vis childcare. The magic of the modern world is such that we are able to ease our guilt a little by insisting that they watch their cartoons in French. Because that is an option. So it’s sort of educational and not lazy parenting at all.

I do wonder how my children might have coped with the limitations of the 80s and 90s, but I also know that my childhood would have been equally incomprensible to my parents and the stuff of science fiction to the generations that preceded them. Was it better then or is it better now? There’s nothing quite like the good old days of course. Not even, as it turns out, the reality of the good old days.

But at least my parents got to watch what they wanted some of the time, simply due to the lack of cartoons at certain times of day. Mrs Proclaims and I rarely sit down together to watch anything much. Except on Friday evenings.

Friday is pizza night. This mainly entails Little and Mini eating the cheapest supermarket pizza available, as soon as Little returns from school. I would feel guilty about this, but we’ve tried offering them more expensive pizza in the past and Little is very clear that she prefers the cheap ones. Mini Proclaims doesn’t articulate her preferences as such but does like to let you know of her distaste for gourmet pizza through a sound, which might be best described as “bleurgh!”

So they eat their cheap pizza and then Mrs Proclaims gets them ready for bed. I’m usually home a little later on a Friday because I do a thrice weekly martial arts class. It’s pretty much the only thing I do that isn’t work or childcare, and I’m confident that any middleclass person who came at me with a set of pre-choreographed moves would soon find that I could provide some more-than-adequate choregraphed responses. When I return, there is usually time for me to participate in Little Proclaims extensive and elaborate bedtime routine and then Mrs Proclaims and I settle down to enjoy a slightly pricier supermarket pizza and an episode of a show we both like. Or if we’re feeling really extravagant, possibly a whole film. Mini Proclaims will usually join us for this somewhat underwhelming attempt at a ‘date-night’ but only having 50% of our children present is about as close as we ever get to spending quality time with each other.

Until recently Mini Proclaims had not been too vociferous in her objections to us not watching one of her cartoons of preference. Little Proclaims would afford us no such clemency, which is why it is really important that we get her bedtime routine right. Little Proclaims believes the TV was invented solely for her amusement and cannot fathom a world where her parents might also enjoy the moving pictures.

This Friday just gone, I missed my martial arts class, due to the fact that I was recovering from a cold. I didn’t miss a day of work (which on reflection my colleagues may not be thankful for) but I didn’t feel quite well enough to pretend to punch and kick people for an hour. However, I still didn’t get out of work that early, so the children were already munching on their cheap pizza by the time I arrived home. It was considerably earlier than my normal Friday return, so there seemed little point in Mrs Proclaims and I delaying our pizza/TV extravaganza until Little Proclaims went to bed.

Or so we thought.

In fairness Little Proclaims did not object to Mummy and Daddy watching something on TV that wasn’t something she wanted to watch. But she equally saw no need not to talk incessantly throughout the show. She was, however, placated by having the dining table to herself to do an activity that she likes to call ‘creating’. ‘Creating’ mainly seems to consist of sticking stuff (usually stuff found in the recycling bin) to other stuff. Historically her main medium has been sellotape, but recently she’s been experimenting with Pritt stick.

We relaxed. The main source of distraction had been resolved and the issue of attempting to return her creations to the recycling bin without her noticing was a problem for another day. But we’d let our guard down. Mini Proclaims is normally well-marshalled on ‘quasi-date-night’. But with her sister diverting our attention, Mini Proclaims was free to roam. And roam she did. Right up to the TV unit. The first casualty was the DVD player, which she unceremoniously pushed onto the floor. We don’t use it that much, but on balance we’d prefer it not to be treated in quite such an irreverent manner. Still, it survived so no harm done.

Her next trick was to switch off ‘the box’. ‘The box’ is the thing that the internet/telephone company provides customers in order to access all the digital content they offer. This included the show we were attempting to watch, which was instantly cut short without ceremony.

Mini Proclaims looked at us.

And said “oops”.

It was pretty cute.

We all laughed.

I turned the box back on, found the show we had been watching and pressed ‘play’.

Mini Proclaims walked up to the box again.

And switched it off.

And said “oops”.

We didn’t laugh quite as much the second time.

It is February half term in the UK, and being an employee of an institution that allegedly provides education to young people, I have the week off work.

In theory at least.

In actual fact I have a backlog of paperwork that is, in some cases, embarrassingly overdue, and I really should spend this week catching up on it.

I won’t be doing that however, because I am also a father of two young children. The mother of said children is working towards a PhD and generally views school holidays (and weekends) as times when she can offload all parenting responsibility on to me and get on with studying the works of a long dead French writer so that one day she can correct people who greet her as ‘Mrs Proclaims’ by explaining that “it’s doctor actually’.

I’m sure she has other reasons for pursuing her studies but if I ever decide to try my hand at a similar endeavor, it will be solely for the title and associated smugness.

This morning, however, Soon-To-Be-Dr Proclaims did allow herself the luxury of spending a little time with us, and we went on a family trip to Henley-On-Thames. Henley is quite a nice place. It’s the sort of place we could only dream of being able to afford to live, but as we live in the slightly less desirable Reading (also on Thames albeit not in name), which is quite close to Henley, we often enjoy the sights and sounds of our upmarket neighbour without the associated costs of actually living there.

We usually go for breakfast in a pub, which is located in the centre of the town. It is part of a national chain of pubs known for their very reasonable prices. We mainly go there because it opens quite early in the morning, which tends to suit our purposes. We’re quite early risers Chez Proclaims. Not often out of choice, but early mornings have become something of a staple since Little Proclaims arrived in 2018. The appearance of Mini Proclaims in 2022 merely compounded the prompt start to most days.

Reasonable prices are always welcome though. As is the fact that the pub tends to attract the kind of clientele that don’t really mind loud children. Indeed it’s very much the kind of place that Mrs Proclaims and I avoided prior to becoming parents, when we had more disposable cash, and a judgemental attitude towards the kind of beleaguered mothers and fathers who couldn’t control their noisy offspring. The kind of people that we have subsequently become.

These days a trip to an inexpensive hostelry in a pleasant river-themed town is as good as it gets for the Proclaims family. The bottomless coffee, in particular, is very welcome and often quite necessary.

These little outings were quite common ventures when Little Proclaims was…erm…littler. But she is quite busy with activities most weekends nowadays, and I am equally busy as her chauffeur. So Henley tends to be somewhere we only visit during the school holidays. After breakfast has been consumed (or in some cases vociferously rejected by one or both children) we tend to wander along the river and make use of one of the large play parks that sits on the river bank, so that Little and Mini can expend as much energy as possible.

Today was no exception. Both girls ate their affordable breakfasts. Little Proclaims was delightful company. Mini Proclaims was not as enthusiastic about the venture, but a tag team effort between Mrs Proclaims and I sufficed to ensure she did not leave the pub hungry and we were able to contain her well enough to enjoy our own food.

All in all it was a pleasant morning.

It was rendered more so by a timely interjection on my part with Little Proclaims.

My eldest daughter is five and a long time alumna of the toilet training academy. But she can sometimes lack a little awareness that she needs to use the facilities until the situation has become quite desperate. So a little reminder before we head away from nearby water closets is often a good idea.

At the conclusion of breakfast, I asked her if she needed to use the toilet before we headed to the park. Her answer was very much in the negative. But I know my daughter. So I insisted she accompany me to the restroom.

We were gone for some time.

When we returned to find Mrs Proclaims entertaining Mini at our table with some crayons, Little Proclaims felt she should explain our extended absence.

“Mummy, I just did two huge poos,” she announced loudly to the whole establishment.

There was audible laughter from the other customers.

It’s that kind of place and that’s why we like it.

Most weekdays I’m not involved in the process of feeding my children. By the time I get home from work, Mrs Proclaims has taken care of the evening meal for them and herself. She hands over parental responsibility to me at that point and disappears into the world of her doctoral studies and I then attempt to multitask by preparing my own repast while simultaneously (and unsuccessfully) trying to stop my children from destroying my home before I can legitimately pack them off to bed and pretend to have some ‘me time’ as I fall asleep in front of the telly.

Weekends are different. On weekends I take care of everyone’s food. Lunch is generally based around the concept of bread, salad, cheese and/or cold meats. Saturday and Sunday evenings I usually do a cooked meal for everyone, which is generally underpinned by roast potatoes, which I do quite well and which everyone enjoys.

During the school holidays though, I do tend to take responsibility for my daughters’ food intake on a daily basis and evening meals can be tricky. I’ll tend to make something along the lines of pasta or curry for Mrs Proclaims and I on the weeknights of the school hols. I know from the outset that neither of my daughters will entertain the notion of eating my home-made tomato-based sauces. This is not because the sauces are bad – far from it. I am nothing if not a gourmand and because I enjoy eating nice food, I have become quite good at making it.

But children tend to have simpler palates and although my daughters are both fairly adventurous for their age, there are limits to how far I can push them out of their comfort zone. And I reason that as long as what they’ve eaten constitutes a balanced meal, then it doesn’t need to be overly complex.

The trick seems to be to feed them in stages. If all the key components are presented at the same time then both will devour the carbs and be less inclined to consume the protein and the veg. But if the components are presented over three smaller courses, then protein and veg will generally be received without too much resistance. By the time Mrs Proclaims and I sit down to eat our spicy/herby sauce based meal, the girls can join us with a plate each of easily accessible carbs and the whole experience can be fairly pleasant.

The carbs take on different forms depending on what I’ve cooked for us – if we have pasta or rice then the girls will have the same. But sometimes Mrs Proclaims and I might opt for a naan bread as we did one night last week. In this case all bets are off and some kind of processed potato produce from the freezer might be the ‘go-to’ for the children. I generally find such things unappetizing but Little Proclaims quite enjoys them and Mini Proclaims can barely contain her glee when presented with potato waffles, oven chips or, as was the case last week, alpha bites.

Little Proclaims was initially a little nonplussed. Her frozen potato product of choice would be the oven chip. So while Mini Proclaims shoved upper-case spuds into her mouth without so much a pause for breath, Little Proclaims was more circumspect in her approach. But, once she’d overcome her disappointment at receiving the wrong kind of beige food, she did look on the bright side. For Little Proclaims is now at a stage in her education whereby she can read and write. And spell fairly accurately too. And she saw the letters on her plate and realised she could make a word. The letters she had were C,T,N,O, and E.

“I can almost make the word ‘cute’,” she said.

Then she bit of the top of the ‘O’ and effectively turned it into a ‘U’.

The letters on her plate were now C,T,N,U, and E.

She spelled the word ‘cute’.

The she rearranged the letters and incorporated the previously unused ‘N’.

She made a few different words.

Well they were mainly ‘non-words’.

She laughed as she made the various combinations and read them aloud.

Mrs Proclaims looked at me. I looked at Mrs Proclaims. We both looked at the letters.

C,T,N,U, and E.

There was a possible combination that our daughter had not yet hit upon.

Our youngest had already eaten almost all of her potato letters.

I played to Little’s competitive instincts and desire for instant gratification.

“You don’t want your sister to finish before you,” I said, “come on, eat up and then you can have some dessert.”

Little Proclaims took the bait. The ‘N’ disappeared into her mouth.

Crisis averted.

As if oft the case, it is Saturday afternoon as I write this. Little Proclaims and I are sitting at the dining table, while Mrs Proclaims and Mini Proclaims are upstairs. Mrs is writing her thesis and Mini is taking a much needed nap (I’m not sure it was Mini herself who needed the nap so much as the rest of us who needed her to have one).

Little Proclaims is playing with some brightly coloured pipe cleaners, which have never been used for cleaning pipes, and which will, by the end of the day, be different types of ‘ceremonial’ headgear and/or what Little Proclaims likes to refer to as ‘decorations’. They will festoon our living quarters for several days, until sufficient time has passed that they can be discarded or returned to the craft box from whence they came.

Since writing that last paragraph, Little Proclaims has used some of the pipe cleaners to fashion a kind of ‘elephant mask’ and she is now running around the room saying ‘moo’. I don’t believe that elephants are traditionally associated with the sound ‘moo’, but I’m not sure it matters too much. I’m assuming, in the absence of any meaningful reference points, that this constitutes normal behaviour for a five-year-old. In any case, it’s something of a relief to see Little Proclaims with so much energy as she has been somewhat under the weather in recent days. It’s never nice to see your children unwell, albeit the lack of running around could be viewed as a silver lining of that particular cloud.

Because of her illness, Little Proclaims missed out on Friday night pizza and is very keen that we re-arrange pizza night for tonight. As I usually cook a proper meal on a Saturday, which takes a fair amount of time and effort, I’m happy to acquiesce to her demands. I missed out on pizza too, as I had to work late on Friday, which is entirely unacceptable for someone who works in a school. Early finishes on a Friday and lots of holidays are the main benefits of working in a school. Some will have you believe it’s the satisfaction of helping to shape future generations, but take away the early Friday finishes and the holidays and just see how many people stick around in the profession.

This Friday, I was asked by another school to attend a complaints panel as an ‘expert’. I have never thought of myself as an expert in anything, so I was quite surprised that the world might see me as such. I will be remunerated for my time, but there is not normally any fee that would get me to agree to give up my Friday evening. Flattery, as it turns out, will get me to agree to most things though. And it seems, having attended the panel, that I do seem to know my stuff, which rather undermines my daily efforts to seem like an irreverent slacker. It turns out that the only thing I’m slacking at is being a slacker.

I’m not sure how I feel about this. When did I become someone who can meaningfully contribute to my chosen profession? And how did this happen?

I am not, by nature, a hardworking person. Quite the contrary. I’m someone who craves an easy life. I think I accidently became good at my job through the realisation that people would leave me alone if I appeared to be competent and the only way I could achieve the appearance of competence was to actually be, y’know, competent. And this is, apparently, a slippery slope towards becoming a notional ‘expert’.

I’m not sure I am truly an expert, in spite of recent evidence. But I am thinking of buying a t-shirt with the word ‘expert’ emblazoned across it. I may not possess the requisite qualities to be an irreverent slacker, but I certainly intend to be an irreverent expert. I owe that much to myself.

Anyway, thanks to my eldest daughter’s illness and my apparent professional expertise, for one week only Saturday will be pizza night at Proclaims Towers.

Mini Proclaims will be especially pleased about this when she wakes up. Being in fairly robust health, she did get to enjoy Friday night pizza and will now get to do ‘the double’.

And if that wasn’t good enough, Saturday night pizza won’t be your common or garden supermarket pizza. Little Proclaims’ convalescence meant that we cancelled her usual Saturday morning activities, and when she woke this morning, seemingly on the mend, the Proclaims family used the bonus time to pop into town, whereupon I purchased some new trousers for work (to reflect my new status as resident expert) and we all enjoyed a cake in an overpriced cafe. We then popped into Marks and Spencer no less, to purchase the pizzas. That’s correct, at Chez Proclaims tonight, we’ll be enjoying M&S pizza, and we’ll be following that up with M&S profiteroles.

Does life get any better?

Yesterday was Mothering Sunday in the UK (and quite possibly in some other countries too). It was also Mother’s Day, which is, I think, an entirely different thing, albeit one was born of the other.

Mothering Sunday, as I understand it (and I rarely understand very much at all) is less about mothers and more about churches. Mother’s Day is very much about mothers.

At one time, it was, for me, all about my mother. Then, because I got married, it was all about my mother and Mrs Proclaims’ mother. Now, because I have children, Mrs Proclaims gets to enjoy a piece of the action.

And this is, of course, how it should be. I have no objections. All three are more than worthy of the acclaim and recognition for their roles as mothers and in the case of two of them, as grandmothers.

My children have not, in previous years, brought a great deal to the table in terms of celebrating their own mother. It’s not their fault really, they are quite young. Mini Proclaims is still too young to make a special effort on Mother’s Day. But as she makes it clear all year round that Mrs Proclaims is her preferred parent then perhaps she doesn’t need a special day. It is true that my youngest child has warmed to me in recent months and is now, at times, capable of showing me something approximating affection, but I am definitely only her second favourite adult and she’s quick to put me back in my place should I get ideas above my station.

My eldest daughter, Little Proclaims, has always been a fan of my work. She loves Mrs Proclaims, of that there is no doubt, but she is more likely to demonstrate her less admirable qualities on Mrs Proclaims’ watch than on mine. I think it’s because mother and daughter have very similar personalities and this can, at times, lead to clashes. And Little Proclaims has definitely acquired some of her mother’s precociousness too, so they can be quite articulate clashes.

But Little Proclaims does love her mummy and was very excited about this year’s Mother’s Day and an opportunity to make it special. Over the last year or so, she has learned to read and write to an acceptable standard for a five-year-old and was therefore well-equipped to take care of making and writing her own Mother’s Day card.

Which she did.

She was very proud of her efforts, as well she might be.

The card contained a charming message of filial love in beautiful handwriting, with very accurate spelling.

For the most part.

Little Proclaims is only five years old. She knew the day was all about celebrating her mother. But she calls Mrs Proclaims ‘mummy’, not ‘mother’. She never uses the word ‘mother’.

So the card read: 

Happy Muvod’s Day

Which, as far as Little Proclaims was concerned, was the correct spelling.

I’m not sure what year it was that Mrs Proclaims started buying me a giant birthday cookie in lieu of a birthday cake. I’d guess it would’ve been around 2014, which would have been the first birthday I celebrated in my current abode, which is within walking distance of the shop which sells the cookies in question. Certainly it was a birthday tradition for quite a few years and a welcome one at that. I always enjoyed my giant birthday cookie, even on the years when my birthday was slightly ruined by falling on a work day (one of the perks of working in education is that my birthday should always fall during the Easter holidays and, as it turns out, this has not been quite as regular a perk as I would’ve hoped or expected since taking on my chosen profession).

Alas the birthday cookie ceased to be quite as feasible from 2020, first interrupted by the pandemic, which temporarily closed the cookie selling establishment and then by the fact that children made the walk to the cookie shop somewhat less easy for Mrs Proclaims to fit in and she had to settle, instead, for a nearby supermarket to buy me a cake. The cakes were all very nice – the nearest supermarket to our house is a Waitrose, so I have hardly been shortchanged in recent years. But I did really like having the birthday cookie and in comparison even the nicest of cakes would aways be a little bittersweet (in an emotive sense – the cakes themselves were always very sweet in fairness)

This year an early Easter has meant my birthday has fallen very much within the holidays and so I was able to offer sufficient childcare for Mrs Proclaims to take on the cookie shop commute once more. I am, once again, the proud and happy owner of a giant birthday cookie as pictured above. I am a temporary owner of course, because it is not possible to have your birthday cookie and eat it, and I fully intend to eat it. It won’t last as long as in previous years because I now have additional helpers in the form of my two daughters to ensure the thing is polished off fairly quickly. Little Proclaims has already made short work of a very generous slice. Mini Proclaims is a little under the weather but I’m sure she’ll rally in time to ensure she claims her fair share.

Birthdays are strange affairs as you get older. I’m happy to acknowledge the fact I’ve survived another year on the planet, which always seems to be no small achievement, but the older I get, the less getting older seems like a thing I actively want to celebrate. On the other hand, it’s hard to live in the same house as a five-year-old and not consider birthdays to be the greatest thing ever. Little Proclaims is mostly interested in her own birthday, but, given that she can only celebrate that particular event once a year, she’s determined to enjoy everyone else’s birthday too and whether I felt a sense of occasion when I woke up this morning (or rather was woken by my ailing and unhappy toddler), it has been party central since Little Proclaims woke up and not an hour has gone by without my eldest daughter wishing me happy birthday. Mini Proclaims is less aware of what is going on, but as a birthday treat she appears to have rallied against her virus and is more cheerful than she has been for the last 48 hours.

I have received an abundance of presents, most of which will contribute to my waistline in the next few days. I will mainly be spending the day with my wife and children, although I was afforded a little time to myself earlier on (a rare and precious commodity when you are the parent to a five-year-old and an almost-two-year-old) and I went to a morning showing of the new Ghostbusters film in our local multiplex. It has not received especially good reviews but I quite liked it.

I’m back with my loved ones now and sat at the dining table writing this, while my children play with a large carboard box. I have some cold beers in the fridge, which were given to me by Little Proclaims this morning, albeit I think it unlikely that she purchased them herself despite her claims. It’s still a little early to crack them open, but I shall enjoy at least one of them before bedtime.

And of course there will be another helping or three of birthday cookie before the day draws to a close.

Quite a good birthday, all things considered.