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.

I’m sitting in my garden as I write this. Little Proclaims is entertaining herself with a Paw Patrol themed football and a plastic tennis racket. Actually, in the time it took to write that sentence she has switched to riding her bicycle. Our garden isn’t really big enough to ride a bike in but Little Proclaims can’t really ride a bike so it’s a fairly moot point. She still has stabilisers and it’s a slight source of shame for me that I haven’t managed to take her out on more suitable terrain to practice since she acquired her mermaid-themed velocipede. Then again that is partly because I’m too busy ferrying her around to her other commitments or working hard to keep a roof over her head. It is, admittedly, a leaky roof but I’m working on that (which is to say I’m working on getting a roofer to turn up and fix it, which is apparently quite hard to do. It hasn’t actually leaked since January anyway so I’m quietly confident someone will show up before the next ‘event’ but no-one seems to be in a hurry to take my money at present).

Since I started that last sentence, Mini Proclaims has woken from her nap and has been deposited in the garden by her mother who then exited the scene rapidly and left me with oversight of both of my offspring. Little Proclaims has given up on the bike and is now sitting in a small garden chair that I purchased for her a few years back. She’s mainly sitting in it to prevent Mini Proclaims from claiming it as her own after I commented that it seemed to be a more suitable size for my youngest child than her older sister. Mini Proclaims is not especially interested in the seat anyway and has instead appropriated Little Proclaims’ unicorn-themed cycle helmet which she is struggling to put on her head on account of some bunny ears that she’s already wearing. Mini Proclaims is rarely without her bunny ears. We have tried removing them on occasion but Mini Proclaims is fully committed to living up to all the cliches associated with ‘the terrible twos’ and so we mainly let her keep them on.

In order to write this while sitting in the garden I’m using my phone. I was sceptical about attempting this but, while it’s harder to type than if I were using a computer, the predictive text does make it less slow than I had anticipated. The technology appears to have moved on since the last time I attempted to write a blog post on my phone, or perhaps I have become slightly less incompetent at using it.

When I started writing this, I was drinking a beer. I like drinking beer in the garden. It’s more than likely psychosomatic but I genuinely believe beer tastes better when consumed outdoors. If push comes to shove though, I’m not entirely averse to an indoor beer if it’s the only option available. I’ve now finished my beer and I’m debating whether or not to have a second. On the one hand I’m supervising two small children so should probably remain fairly sober. On the other hand, I’m supervising two small children and I need all the help I can get to survive the ordeal.

Mini Proclaims has given up on attempting to don the helmet and has instead insisted that I wear it. I imagine I look ridiculous but I’d rather that than enter into conflict with her. She is genuinely terrifying! I think the beer debate has been settled. I’m going to make a quick pilgrimage to the fridge.

I’m back in the garden, cold beer in hand. I dared to remove the headgear and Mini Proclaims quickly admonished me, so it is perched uncomfortably on my head once more. She was particularly persuasive as she had acquired the plastic tennis racket that Little Proclaims had discarded earlier in this narrative and was wielding it menacingly.

My garden has seen better days in truth. I don’t possess especially green fingers and indeed my lawn is not at all green at present, lacking even its usual covering of weeds. I’ve spread some grass seeds in the hope of a renaissance but I’m not overly optimistic.  It’s been a cruel winter apparently and summer has been a long time coming.

It does seem to be here though and my daughters and I shall hopefully enjoy many more sunny weekends in our little oasis of soil and weeds.

This whole ‘blogging on my phone’ experiment seems to have worked too so hopefully I’ll be a little less absent from the blogosphere in the coming weeks, as I’m rarely able to access my laptop these days but my phone is never too far away. Although my posts are likely to be on the theme of  garden-based parenting for the most part.

And will almost certainly involve beer.

As I continue my attempt to embrace the modern world by writing this on one electronic hand-held device, Little Proclaims is asking another electronic hand-held device to break wind.

I never previously envisaged a world in which writing a sentence like the preceding one would be possible. Nonetheless, that is very much the world I find myself occupying. As I hone my blog writing skills via the medium of smartphone, my eldest child is immersing herself in the world of voice-activated features on a device that she likes to refer to as ‘her tablet’.

It is indeed a tablet computer, though her claims to ownership are more by default than anything else.

The object in question was an impulse purchase by me a couple of years back, when an already fairly ‘budget’ device was made even more affordable by a promotional event held by a well-known virtual retailer. We were, at the time, a ‘tabletless’ household and I felt we should explore the benefits of embracing the zeitgeist. It has proven to be a fairly useless purchase to three quarters of my family. Mini Proclaims is still too young to show any significant interest in screens smaller than the TV (which is a medium she is worryingly devoted to). Mrs Proclaims and I find our information technology needs are generally satisfied by our laptops and phones. Conversely, Little Proclaim has been smitten by the allure of the ten-inch screen since day one, if largely inept at using it. Indeed, any parental guilt I might have experienced about occupying my daughter with excessive table time have been quickly assuaged. I ration her use of the machine with more diligence than I might have thought plausible. This is for less noble reasons than I might like to admit though. The main benefit to me of letting my child spend time using the device would be that she doesn’t need any input from me and I can get on with other things. In reality, Little Proclaims is significantly more demanding when equipped with the tablet than she is without it. She doesn’t so much use the device as commission me to use it on her behalf. She loves the idea of technology but lacks the patience to learn how to use it.

This weekend, though, we visited our extended family, and Little Proclaims discovered the joys of the voice controlled virtual assistant through her technologically more adept cousin.

Who taught her how to make the device ’fart’.

So Little Proclaim has been instructing our cheap (and probably out of date) tablet computer to make flatulent sounds for the last hour or so. It is quite annoying, but she is seemingly capable of carrying out this endeavour independently. I have endured the recurrent raspberries by using my own device to write this post and simultaneously play music through my well-worn blue-tooth headphones (I’m not a total technophobe – wireless headphones have been my salvation on more than one occasion in recent times) to drown out the noise.

Unfortunately, by zoning out the technological (and scatological) machinations of my eldest child, I’ve inadvertently also ignored the lo-tech endeavours of my youngest child. Mini Proclaims has just come to give me an impromptu hug, which would have been entirely welcome had she not been soaking wet, having spent much of the recent interlude emptying her water bottle on herself.

I love my children. Sometimes though, it is hard to articulate why.

It’s Tuesday afternoon as I write this. Which is unusual. I haven’t been the most prolific blogger of late, but when I have managed to get around to writing anything, it has tended to be on a weekend, often with a view to posting on a Monday. Yesterday was Monday and I did post something about Little Proclaims asking her tablet to make fart noises. So this post might not make it onto the site until next Monday, because life with two kids and a wife working towards a PhD means that, without the onset of another pandemic, I’m unlikely to have the time for blogging I once did, and it’s better to have something ‘in the bank’ for next week than to post for two consecutive days and then disappear for several months.

The reason I am able to blog on a Tuesday is that it is half-term and I am blessed with a rare bit of downtime. Mini Proclaims is napping, and Little Proclaims, having tired of asking her tablet to break wind, is now using the device to watch Number Blocks. Which is entertaining and educational, so I can let her enjoy that without needing to curtail her screen time too much. Being an education professional, I do get to enjoy the benefits of the school holidays, but that has rarely translated to a prolific blogging schedule – there’s normally too much else to sort out during the holidays that I never have time to do during term time. And that is no different this half term. There is a lot I should be doing that I’m not at present. But I did take the girls out this morning. I’ve booked Little Proclaims into extra swimming lessons every morning, because she likes swimming and I like that it tires her out. Mini Proclaims always comes to watch. She’s not always the best behaved of toddlers in public, but she seems to find observing swimming lessons quite calming. After swimming, I took them both to soft play, which wore them out. Unfortunately it also wore me out because Mini Proclaims is slightly too small to make her way around the various foam based obstacles without me clambering over them with her.

So while one daughter is napping, and the other is enjoying some maths based cartoon fun, the only activity I felt physically able to do was to blog.

Unlike for my last two posts, I am using my laptop to write this. My most recent efforts have been put together on my phone, and I suspect that will be my method of choice for most posts moving forwards, as the opportunity to sit at my laptop, uninterrupted, is a rare thing these days and my phone lets me write ‘on the move’, which is a state of being I generally find myself in most of the time. Today the weather is not the best though. Today has chosen to embrace the stereotypical notion that it always rains in the UK. It does rain a lot in the UK, but I normally do get to use my garden quite a bit during the summer months and it is from there I suspected I would be writing the majority of my blog posts until September. Au contraire, the last time I was able to enjoy my weed infested grassless lawn was over two weeks ago when I wrote about it in this post.

I am hoping that the rain will at least help the grass seeds I scattered on my lawn recently to turn into, y’know, actual grass. Looking out the window, it all seems to still be quite brown at present, with the only green patches being the aforementioned weeds. It would still be nice to be out there though.

I think the greatest frustration is that, because of the inclement weather, I’ve yet to put up my recently purchased rotary washing line.

I was quite looking forward to putting up my new rotary washing line.

I never cared much about rotary washing lines before I became a dad. If I’d written a post about a rotary washing line before 2018, it would have been a missive steeped in irony.

But there is nothing ironic about my desire to use a rotary washing line in 2024. I even researched consumer websites to find the best rotary washing line to suit my needs.

I’m more interested in my rotary washing line than I am in the fact that the UK is currently in the build-up to a general election.

You could read between the lines and see that last statement as a clever satirical commentary on the current state of British politics. It might well be. On some level I hope it is.

I’d hate to be the kind of person who sees a rotary washing line as the highlight of his month. But I am genuinely worried that I have become that kind of person.

I think it’s time to wake Mini Proclaims from her nap and to remove the tablet from Little Proclaims. Small children don’t always provide the most intellectually stimulating conversation, but even they could produce better topics of conversation than a rotary washing line.

Sadly Mrs Proclaims can’t. She’s just appeared in the room as I’m writing this sentence but all she talks about these days is 19th century French literature. The rotary washing line is definitely more interesting than that.

Last Monday’s post was written on the preceding Tuesday when I was off work and trapped at home on a rainy day, with both of my children temporarily ‘out of action’. One was napping and the other was absorbed by a handheld device in a manner that suggests that I am potentially a much worse parent than I am. Not that I make any claims on being an especially good parent, but if I am a bad parent then getting a tablet to occupy my child so I can ignore her is not something I am often guilty of. I find that the TV does a sufficiently adequate job of occupying both children that I rarely even remember that I have the option of the tablet.

As I write this, both of my children are conscious and are watching the TV. It is, in fact, the same Tuesday as it was when I wrote my last post. Indeed, although a week will have passed between the two posts hitting the blogosphere, barely an hour has happened between me finishing the last one and starting this one. This is all part of my cunning plan to write enough posts in advance that I don’t allow the kind of absences from my blog that have pretty much been the hallmark of my site since the arrival of daughter number two in April 2022. Indeed, were it not for a pandemic-fuelled flurry of activity on these pages between March 2020 and March 2021, it would reasonable to accuse me of maintaining an irregular blogging schedule since the arrival of my first daughter in 2018.

But I am determined to be a better blogger moving forwards and if the only way to achieve that is by writing about the same, fairly boring ,rainy Tuesday afternoon then so be it.

In point of fact I’m not actually ignoring my children while I write this. I’m trying to ignore them, but they won’t let me. I’m wearing my beloved wireless headphones, listening to 90s rock music and staring at a computer screen, but they insist on interacting with me in spite of the antisocial signals I’m putting out there. Little Proclaims is ensconced in imaginary play, in which I think she is playing the part of a midwife to her stuffed toys. One of them (a toy dachshund) appears to have given birth to conjoined twins (two pugs wearing onesies, both of which have a kind of keyring attachment that she has used to link them together). It’s quite an intense game, and I appear to be playing the role of a consultant surgeon who she needs to update on the progress of the twins. The aloof indifference I am bringing to the role rather seems to fit the character I’ve been assigned.

Mini Proclaims is, meanwhile, raiding the art supplies of her older sister. I am aware that if I don’t monitor her that some part of my house will acquire an unexpected mural. I should definitely try and stop that from happening, but in some respects that ship has already sailed so many times that additional wall art is not going to make a huge amount of difference to the existing portfolio.

I am also cooking their evening meal as I write this, but as that meal consists of a baked potato for each of them, I am able to leave most of the heavy lifting to the oven.

In the background the TV is still playing. Occasionally one or both of my daughters will stop to acknowledge the moving images but neither of them are truly watching the show. If I dare to turn it off though, I will be subject to incandescent rage so I don’t dare even consider that move. Thanks to the marvels of the modern age, I am able to ensure that all the cartoons ignored by my children are played through the medium of French. I’ve previously mentioned the impact this has had on the linguistic development of my eldest child (who does seem to be very much bilingual at present) and it’s clear that Mini Proclaims formative language acquisition is more French than English, which should hopefully lead to her mastering both (the English takes care of itself by virtue of the fact we live in the UK). Of course some credit must go to my wife, who does generally converse with the children in French (she is not any more French than I am, but significantly more academically able), but I do think that TV has played a significant part.

And if nothing else, playing the cartoons in French would certainly make me feel less guilty about ignoring them. If only they would let me…

What a difference a day makes. It might well be a week since last I posted anything but it’s merely a day since I wrote last week’s post (and indeed the post of the week before). It is Wednesday 29^th May as I write this and I’m sat on a bench in a park that is but a few minutes walk from Proclaims Towers, enjoying weather that seemed unthinkable yesterday. Little Proclaims is sat next to me happily eating an ice-cream purchased from a conveniently located ice-cream van that is doing a roaring trade. Indeed, it is this very purveyor of frozen treats that has lured my eldest daughter away from her flatulent tablet and into the park for a second helping of outdoor fun today.

Little Proclaims has made short work of the ice-cream in the time it took me to write that first paragraph, and we’re heading into the play park, which is predictably popular considering the sunshine.

Earlier on I was in the same place with both of my children facilitating a morning of feeding ducks, picking daisies (before said daisies were deposited in my pocket, where they continue to reside) and lots of fun aided by swings, slides and roundabouts.

Mini Proclaims gave it her all in the morning session and is now enjoying a well-deserved nap at home while Mrs Proclaims eschews the fine weather and works tirelessly on her PhD.

Little Proclaims also enjoyed her trip out this morning and might well have described the sojourn as perfect but for the slight disappointment that ensued when I refused to buy her an ice-cream on the way home. My refusal was predicated on the fact that we were going home to eat lunch and I felt the best way to ruin lunch would’ve been to feed my children with ice cream prior to attempting to convince them to eat salad. Also, had I bought an ice cream for Little Proclaims, I would have been obliged to buy one for Mini Proclaims and few things distress me more than watching my two year old attempt to eat ice cream.

Little Proclaims took the refusal well and has on the whole been a good girl today, including a very committed effort in her morning swimming lesson so, given the proximity of the park to my house, and the wonderful weather, I felt a second trip out was merited. Particularly as, with only my eldest child to look after, my workload is significantly lower than when I have to supervise both children.

Indeed, Little Proclaims largely looks after herself. When I’m out in public with both children my attention is nearly always exclusively directed towards my younger daughter, while supervision of the older child is generally making sure I can see her with sufficient regularity to be certain she is still roughly in the same proximity as me. When it’s just the two of us, it really is quite an easy gig as parenting goes. So much so that writing a blog post on my phone is entirely possible and arguably easier than when I attempt the same exercise in my garden. In the garden, Little Proclaims is fairly inclined to want my attention. In the park she only wants me as a purchaser of ice cream and a useful repository for any artefacts she doesn’t currently have need of.

Occasionally she likes me to push her on the swings, but I am so well practiced at swing-pushing that I am doing that at present, with my left hand while continuing to write this with my right hand. Multi-tasking at it’s finest.

I don’t think I yet possess the requisite skills to write blog posts while supervising a two-year old in a play park. That might constitute bad parenting. Supervising a near six year old on the other hand seems like a tailor made situation for writing prose. Little Proclaims does not seem to be enjoying the trip out any less than she would with my undivided attention and for my part, it’s made what can be an excruciatingly dull activity far more palatable. As long as the weather holds this could be template for how me and Little Proclaims navigate holiday afternoons for the foreseeable future.

At least until Mini Proclaims gets too old for naps and ruins the accord.

Last week’s post celebrated a glorious sunny day during half-term, which I’d hoped would be the start of summer after an inauspicious few days, in which the main meteorological offer was precipitation. Today’s post, written only a day after its predecessor, finds me once again attempting to entertain my children with a return to the drizzle and therefore little on offer in the way of playparks and ice-cream.

There was a brief attempt at a playpark, this morning after Little Proclaims’ swimming lesson, when the rain was clearly en route but had not yet arrived. It was overcast and slightly chilly but my daughters made the best of what was available and the lack of sunshine appeared to have kept the crowds away, so they pretty much had the run of the place. Which was good, as both my children like to run. And shout. And a play park is a great place for that.

A slightly less ideal place for children to run and shout is IKEA, which was our next stop. Neither of my offspring felt in any way restricted though and viewed IKEA as an ideal sequel to their earlier fun, with display sofas and divans serving as ideal apparatus for bouncy fun. I played the part of a harassed father trying to curtail the delinquency of my daughters, but, truth be told, I had elected on the Swedish furniture store as the ideal location for rainy day fun with my children. They absolutely love it, and, a few irritated flat-pack enthusiasts aside, I can’t see too much harm is done by letting my children run amok in the Scandinavian superstore. I could clearly see other parents doing exactly the same thing, while pretending, like me, to be in the market for bedroom furniture.

Mini Proclaims, in particular, was unhinged. She was literally squealing with delight as she bounced on mattresses, hid in wardrobes and giggled at her own reflection in multiple mirrors. Little Proclaims was a tad more circumspect, and while she too enjoyed some tactile fun with home furnishings, she was wise to the opportunities on offer to acquire more stuff. Little Proclaims very much enjoys acquiring stuff and often puts forward compelling arguments as to why I should part with my wages to provide her with stuff. She caught me on a good day. IKEA is not only the world’s foremost purveyor of ‘build-it-yourself’ furniture. It also boasts a range of other delights, which includes a selection of toys and activities. Activities are, of course, always good, and anything that can keep Little Proclaims occupied on a rainy day is alright by me. And so as I write this, and as Mini Proclaims naps away her morning’s exuberance, Little Proclaims is making ‘art’ out of beads. IKEA calls them Pyssla beads, but they may have another name if purchased elsewhere. All I know is they’re keeping a five-year-old quiet and have done so for more than an hour. Which means that they have already paid for themselves.

I did, at one point, entertain the idea of trying to do some serious shopping in IKEA. There are no shortage of home improvements that could happen at Proclaims Towers, and while the economic conditions are not right for any big jobs (the economic conditions being a distinct lack of disposable cash at present), there is perhaps scope for some minor acquisitions. I was, for a moment, taken with the idea of buying some new net curtains (which was almost as exciting as my recent foray into rotary washing lines), but, though I had taken the appropriate window measurements before setting out, it turns out that net-curtain buying requires more concentration than can reasonably be afforded to someone attempting to supervise a lively five-year-old and a, frankly, feral two-year-old.

So I bought a 600g packet of ginger biscuits instead. Which I didn’t need, but which IKEA do sell. Little Proclaims alerted my attention to them as we were leaving with her other ill-gotten gains and for some reason, perhaps because at that point I had lost all reason, it seemed like the most logical purchase I could make. In fairness they are delicious. Which is just as well, because 600g is a lot of biscuits.

Today I saw a fat rat
Not a fat cat
Or a plump bat
Or a rotund gnat
But a rat
That was fat

Perhaps I lack tact
But I think it is fact
And fairly exact
To call the rat fat
For it was indeed a rat
And it was very fat

Rodent body shame
Is not part of my game
I really don’t judge
For I’m partial to fudge
And other sweet treats
Which are delightful to eat

If you overindulge
You’re likely to bulge
But I can self console
About lack of self-control
For though I am no beanpole
And the rat may be smaller
I’m considerably taller
And can say without caution
If we consider proportion
That I would not self flatter
To claim the rat was much fatter
For the rat was very fat

My success in returning to a weekly blogging schedule, and avoiding my boom and bust (if I’m honest, mainly bust) approach to blogging of recent years has largely been predicated on writing a lot of posts during my week off work at the end of May; a week which was granted to me in honour of my professional status as a qualified teacher who is employed by a school (a period of time otherwise known as ‘half-term’).

School holidays have always been a major factor in my decision to continue in a profession, which yields few other benefits prior to what I’m led to believe is a fairly decent pension (should I survive long enough to enjoy retirement). There are some who believe that working in education is rewarding on a spiritual level, and I suppose it might be at times, but if I had my time again I might well choose a profession that is rewarding on a more financial level. However, irrespective of the other pros and cons of pursuing a career as a teacher, the holidays are definitely a plus.

Or they certainly were when I was a father of none.

These days much of my school holidays are taken up with spending ‘quality time’ with my daughters. Indeed much of my life outside of work, even during term time, is spent with my offspring, given that Mrs Proclaims is in the final stages of completing a PhD that has been going on since before our first child was born. It was originally meant to be completed by 2019, but, thanks to two bouts of maternity leave and a necessity to switch from being a full time student to a part time student in order to accommodate the existence of our children, it is now likely to be completed some time in 2025. When in 2025 we can’t be certain, but Mrs Proclaims assures me that it will be done before 2026 and at that point I might possibly have some time outside of work which is not entirely devoted to my children.

Whether I avail myself of this time, if and when it does become available is another matter entirely. I’m not sure I’ll know what to do with myself. Perhaps it’s because I love my daughters so much that the thought of not spending every second of my ‘leisure time’ with them is abhorrent to such a devoted father as I have become, or perhaps it’s that I’m now experiencing some kind of ‘Stockholm Syndrome’.

I suspect it’s the latter. Not that I don’t love clambering around the foamy apparatus at the soft play centre, but I do sometimes wonder if there might be more to life.

Anyway, the point is that currently I do spend most of the school holidays with two small and fairly demanding people, so my ‘free time’ isn’t quite the blogging nirvana that one might hope it to be. Nonetheless, as I write this it is May 31st and in the past week I have produced enough material to take me, on the basis of a sensible and pragmatic schedule of one post a week, into July. It has been quite an effort, in spite of my notional ‘week off’. Hopefully though, I am so far ahead now that I will be able to maintain a fairly regular output.

One obvious side effect of blogging so far in advance is that I have absolutely no idea what is going on in the world at the time of publication. I am aware that at the time I plan for this post to hit the blogosphere, the UK will have entered the week of the general election. This is notionally quite a big deal and I am usually interested in politics. I have, in the past, even been quite opinionated about the government du jour on these pages. I still am fairly opinionated about them in real life, but it all seems to have descended into farce some time ago and there is little room for satire about an administration that seems to unintentionally self-satirise on a daily basis.

Indeed, although I am writing this some weeks in the past, it would have to take a campaign of significant ineptitude for the Labour party not to sweep into power on July 4th. The most effective election strategy for Sir Keir Starmer would surely be to say and do absolutely nothing and he should be a shoe-in for Prime Minister on the basis that he isn’t a Tory. One imagines that if he makes too much effort in raising his own profile, he might accidently lower his appeal on the basis that, in and of himself, he really isn’t all that interesting.

Rishi Sunak might still be holding out hope that he can remain the incumbent premier on the basis he isn’t Liz Truss or Boris Johnson, but I suspect that will not be enough. It is a contest of two very bland leaders of two political parties that have, at the time of writing, largely failed to capture the public imagination in a positive way. But the party in power have presided over some absolute cock-ups in recent times and it does seem very much like their time is up.

I expect, on the big day I’ll be very interested in the outcome of the election. At the time of writing I’m almost entirely indifferent. But I thought I should at least make an effort to make the post vaguely topical.

For most of the time I have been writing this, the weather has been as inclement as it has been for most of the week (aside from Wednesday 29th May, when it was glorious). However it does look as if the sun has put his hat on briefly, and my children have had slightly too long in front of the TV, so I’ll sign off on this post, which has been mainly written on my laptop and I’ll take the kids out in the garden and write next week’s post on my phone.

In which I will possibly offer some reaction to the outcome of the election or some other future event I can’t possibly know anything about.

My house smells of bin
Much to my chagrin
If my house were an inn
I would not check-in
Because it smells of bin

The unpleasant scent
Now ever-present
Does not make me content
It will not relent
And does not augment
This two-story brick tent
And causes my descent
Into a state of torment

The source of the smell
Is hard to tell
It makes me unwell
It’s a kind of Hell
I want to yell
And yell and yell
And try to expel
Or somehow dispel
This abominable smell

Though I’m not so unhappy
That my home smells so crappy
You may call me sappy
A mawkish chappy
But I am happy
To be a pappy
But being a pappy
Means my house smells like nappy

So, here we are, in the aftermath of one of the most seismic electoral shocks in living memory. Who’d have imagined that outcome, eh?

Of course I have no idea what I’m talking about. It may be the 8^th July where you are but I’m writing this from the vantage point of the 31^st May. Indeed, I only completed last week’s post on my laptop a few minutes ago before heading out into the garden with my children to enjoy the brief cameo of vaguely pleasant weather which has mostly been a stranger this week.

I hope you don’t mind dear reader but I am having to break off from writing occasionally to blow bubbles at the request of my eldest daughter, who is more than capable of blowing her own bubbles. My youngest, who lacks that particular skill is nonetheless keen to take on the baton and as a result one pot of bubble mixture has been lost to the paving slabs already. Fortunately, we are not short of bubble mixture. This is not my first bubble rodeo.

Mini Proclaims is manifestly more independent than her sibling and is just waiting for her developmental stage to catch up with her aspirations. Little Proclaims is further along the developmental journey but lacks any desire to do anything that she can’t get someone else to do for her. In some ways I feel both my children might go far but for very different reasons.

Since writing my last post, although very little time has passed, my life has not been without incident. Prior to making the move from inside to outside, Mini Proclaims thought it would be hilarious to take a gulp of water and then regurgitate it all over my leg. She’s only two, but she knew what she was doing. She’s quite the practical joker l. I’m hoping it’s just a phase. I am fearful it is not.

I have also been mildly frustrated by receiving a message from DPD claiming that they have attempted to deliver a parcel when in fact they have not. The photo they shared with me a proof of the attempt is not of my house. It’s not even of my street and I’m not sure there is conclusive evidence that it’s an image taken in the town I live in. I wasn’t especially waiting in for the delivery, but it is still irritating because I very clearly was in when they purport to have attempted the delivery.

Hopefully in the interim between me writing this post and publishing it, I will finally have received my package. That will give DPD over five weeks to sort it out. Not quite the ‘next day delivery’ I paid for but somewhat on a par with my experience of DPD to date. For the sake of balance, I should point out that other home delivery services are available. And they are all better than DPD.

After a week of largely wet weather, I am pleased to report that some of the grass seeds I spread on my largely weed infested lawn a while back have now turned into grass. It’s still an inconsistent covering. But there is hope that by the time the summer kicks in properly (which I may be naïve in believing will happen) I might have something approaching a lawn. That may well be the case when this post goes live, but alas I will not likely be updating any interested readers until long after the fact. Although if either of my readers is truly interested in the state of my lawn then I suspect they should try and find other interests.

Little Proclaims, for example, is more interested in pizza than the lawn. Specifically, the pizza that is currently in my fridge that she would very much like me to put in the oven. I have already lamented her lack of independence, but I suppose on balance it would be wrong of me to expect a five-year-old to operate an oven.

Although she is going to be six soon so maybe she needs to start stepping up…

Sometimes I don’t pay attention
Which may be a bone of contention
A potential source of tension
Beyond my own comprehension
Irrespective of my intention
But perhaps it is worth a mention
That sometimes I don’t pay attention.

Sometimes DIY can feel a little more like DI Why? I honestly don’t know why I put myself through it.

The general lack of a budget to pay a tradesperson may be part of it. The fact that tradespeople rarely return my calls even when I do have the budget is also a problem. I live in an area where demand for services far outstrips the level of services available. For any jobs that I think there’s an outside chance of me being successful, I often attempt the work myself rather than attempting to arrange for someone to make me wait in on multiple days only for them never to show up.

I’m not naturally a practical person. If you need someone to stoically stand in front of a room full of feral teenagers and not lose his cool, then I’m your man. If you need someone to write passive aggressive emails to uncooperative colleagues, then you could do worse than to employ my services. And if you want overdue paperwork that barely meets the threshold of adequate then I can certainly bring something to the table.

But words like ‘repair’, ‘install’ and ‘renovate’ are alien concepts to me. Nonetheless, out of necessity, since becoming a homeowner I’ve had to affect various repairs in Proclaims Towers in order to maintain the natural flow. Of water. Through taps. And on occasion through toilets.

I’m not a plumber and the carnage caused by by my early home plumbing efforts was very real and caused no small amount of emotional turmoil. But I have got better over time and if not exactly competent, I am able to make almost adequate repairs to plumbing problems when required. I don’t like doing it but when needs must I can step up.

A few weeks ago, for example, I discovered a leak under my kitchen sink. It was quite bad and the sort of thing that I couldn’t really ignore, even for a day. It needed either an expensive emergency plumber or for me to give up my sanity for an evening. I opted for the latter and made a surprisingly effective repair. Of course, paranoia required me to check under the sink for the next few days under the assumption that my efforts would result in a far worse situation than that which I’d fixed. But my repair held firm and several weeks on is still holding on, which means it’s probably fine. My experience of ineffective repairs (and I have plenty of experience) suggests that if a repair is going to fail, it’s going fail pretty quickly.

Today I attempted DIY of a less essential nature. Last year my outside tap started dripping. It was a rusty old tap and not amenable to repair. At the time it didn’t seem worth replacing so I turned off the water via the conveniently fitting isolation valve. But that was at the end of the summer when an outside tap seemed surplus to requirements. Now that summer has once again arrived (as has been the norm of late, I’m writing this a few weeks ago, when summer is more of an imminent possibility than a reality but on the day I’m writing this, the star of our solar system is definitely making use of purchases made from their milliner of choice) and an outside tap seems like a useful proposition indeed. As the father of two small children I can see the value of accessible water in the garden. There are pros and cons. A key pro is that children find water ridiculously entertaining. If my children are entertained then that sometimes means I get to relax for a few minutes in the garden, often with a cold beer. The obvious con is that my children end up soaking wet and often covered in mud. If I don’t also end up soaking wet in the process, then by the time I’ve been through the inevitable bath time routine I certainly will be. On balance, a few minutes of sitting drinking beer in the garden is appealing irrespective of the consequences. So today, I attempted to fix my dripping outside tap.

This first necessitated a trip to a local DIY store. Fortunately, my two-year-old was napping so I only had to take my five-year-old with me. And she was not badly behaved per se. But DIY stores are boring for small children. Unless you let them run around. Then they are ‘small child nirvana’. But it’s not especially safe to let small children run around in a DIY store, so I imposed limitations. Little Proclaims is quite a loquacious child and though she conformed to my rules, she felt it necessary to compensate for her lack of freedom by talking to me.

A lot.

I’m not overly confident when it comes to purchasing plumbing parts, and often my first trip to the store is far from being my last in trying to get the job done. The endless chatter of a five-year-old is not necessarily the most helpful aide in ensuring that the correct components make it into the basket. Nonetheless, I felt I did manage to check out with everything I needed, although I wasn’t 100% sure about the part which connected the new tap to the pipes.

Our next stop was the neighbouring toy store, a visit to which had been part of Little Proclaims ‘compensation package’ for giving up an afternoon in front of the TV and instead accompanying me to B&Q. We spent a good 30 minutes in the toy shop so that Little Proclaims could be sure that I knew exactly what to buy her for her birthday. I agreed to everything on the basis that she asks for so much she tends to forget most of what she’s asked for as soon as she’s asked for it. She never does badly on her birthday – I’m pretty good at present buying, but she does love to browse the aisles of the toy store and as we were in the neighbourhood I felt it only fair to indulge her toy-acquisition daydreams a little.

Once I’d pried her away, we returned home. Mini Proclaims had enough nap-time left for me to feel confident about effecting the renovation of the outside tap. It all went pretty well. I had to replace a lot of the copper pipe because what had been there before had seen better days, but I managed to do that part of the job without any problems or even a hint of flooding. I twisted the isolation valve and water flowed to the new tap.

Which then began to drip.

In much the same way as its predecessor had dripped.

The drip was not specifically coming from the tap itself so much as the tap connector. Which, to my credit, was the part I thought might be wrong. I may not have mastered plumbing but I’m getting so much better at predicting exactly where my efforts will fail.

Fortunately, I have been able to fall back on the isolation valve for the time being and so the new tap is sitting dormant.

Whether my children get to enjoy a summer of water-based garden fun is uncertain. I think it’s a fairly easy fix, but I may have used up all my motivation today.

At the time of writing, it’s the beginning of June and I’m about to return to work after a week off. By the time this is published I’ll be about to finish work for the summer and will have six weeks of holiday/childcare to look forward to. It’ll have taken some very temperate weekends between the two dates for me to have felt that fixing a largely useless tap was a good use of my Saturday afternoon.  But six weeks ahead of me in which entertaining my offspring is my sole raison d’être, a working tap (and its inevitable link to an uninterrupted cold beer in the garden) might well be motivation enough for round two.

As predicted in a recent post, writing this blog on my phone while supervising my children in the garden is becoming the norm.

As I sit here sipping my second beer of the afternoon, Little Proclaims is making some kind of concoction on the patio (or what passes for a patio in my ramshackle abode) which seems to be composed largely of soil but also contains grass and bubble mixture. It looks like mud to me but I’m hardly a connoisseur.

Mini Proclaims has just discarded the second of the bananas that I have given her since she awoke from her nap. The first was accidentally lost to the lawn. The second was lost to her sudden indifference to bananas. I console myself in the knowledge that they were both on the turn and would have been disposed of soon if not eaten. But I know I would happily have eaten both prior to their denouement and so my youngest child’s wasteful nature is a little irritating. But she is only two. So, I shouldn’t take it personally. Nonetheless sometimes it’s hard not to take it a bit personally.

Regular readers will be thrilled to know my rotary washing line is seeing some action. It is actually in the midst of its maiden voyage, because the weather and my laundry schedule have not synced up especially well since I bought the thing. Mainly because the weather has been awful. It seems to be adopting a ‘tower of Pisa’ vibe but it is standing firm so I’m optimistic there will be further opportunities to dry laundry ‘rotary-style’ in the coming weeks.

The ‘coming weeks’ for me will be mainly June-based, as I’m still some weeks ahead in my blogging schedule. In my present the UK general election is still almost a month away and the European football championship (known as the Euros to the aficionados) has yet to kick off. At the time of writing, I’m predicting that the Conservative Party will not win the election and the England football team will not win the Euros.

I would like to be proven wrong on the latter of these predictions.

England is not actually my team as such, having grown up in Wales but I do live in England at present and I was technically born in England, even if I moved to Wales at the tender age of six weeks old. The fact that Wales rarely qualify for major tournaments has meant England has oft been my default team over the years. On paper they should have a decent chance of bringing home the trophy but as I type these words into my handheld device, they have recently lost to relative minnows Iceland in a pre-tournament friendly, which doesn’t bode well. It’s not quite as ignominious as when they lost to the same opponents in the 2016 iteration of the Euros (a tournament that Wales not only managed to turn up for but also made the semi-finals in a run which defied all reasonable expectations) but it does suggest that Gareth Southgate’s team won’t be holding the trophy aloft on July 14^th. Nonetheless, on the day I’m composing this (whatever ‘this’ is), it remains possible that England will be the winners of Euro24.

It is also theoretically possible that Rishi Sunak will still be the UK prime minister. Sitting here on June 8^th , that does seem highly unlikely though. He does, at present, seem to be actively trying to lose the election, so if he is still prime minister when this hits the blogosphere then he probably deserves to be, because he will have run a hell of a campaign to turn around his current position. Obviously, I do hope he has lost. My natural cynicism makes me wary of believing any politician can really make a positive difference to the country and so I’m not overwhelmed with optimism at the prospect of a Keir Starmer government, but my political persuasions have always led me to view the Tories as the bad guys and over the last 14 years they’ve done nothing to dissuade me of this opinion.

I’m not sure what the point of any of what I have written actually is. Other than the realisation that writing blog posts in advance might well be a good way to ensure that the blog keeps ticking along, but it makes any attempt to remain topical with my output almost entirely redundant.

Fortunately, these days my blog mainly seems to be about being the dad of two small children. And whatever the reality is with regards politics or sport on the day this post is published, I am quietly confident that I will still be sitting in the garden fairly regularly, a garden in which my daughters, bubbles, mud and (if I’m lucky) a nice cold beer will all feature.

Rain has stopped play once again at Proclaims Towers. The garden, so oft the location for my blog-writing of late, is off-limits due to inclement weather. This means that I must attempt to occupy my children indoors, while attempting to write. The positives of this are that I can write using my laptop rather than my phone. I’m getting more adept at using a hand-held device to scribe, but a keyboard is still my tool of choice (when indeed I am given a choice). The downside is that my children are more inclined to disturb the creative process (insofar as this can really be described at ‘creative’).

At the moment my daughters are marauding around the room armed with wooden spoons and banging on any available wall or surface that they can find. Not only does this create something of a racket, but several parts of me have been viewed as acceptable surfaces for wooden spoon percussion.

I suppose it is pleasing that my children get on so well. They generally do always seem to be quite pleased to be in each other’s company and can entertain themselves for quite a long time without needing too much direct input from me. It is just a slight shame that indirect input from me seems to be required quite often and normally involves me being hit with a blunt object.

I could silence them quite quickly by turning on the television. I’m not above this tactic, but, in a rare turn of events, neither of my offspring has shown any interest in the TV for the entirety of the afternoon. I possess enough parental guilt to not want to be the person who introduces the concept of extended screen time. I will, of course, acquiesce to the inevitable demand of screen time when it comes but I feel there is a subtle difference between the notion of allowing my children to watch TV and insisting that they do.

I did have a moment of parental guilt when Little Proclaims asked me to read her a story and I refused. Literacy is obviously something I would want to encourage in my children. However, the guilt soon disappeared when I remembered that Little Proclaims can now read quite well, and immediately started doing just that upon my refusal. I think there’s something about giving a fish and teaching to fish which applies here. Although my refusal was more of a timing thing than anything else. I do still like to read to Little Proclaims when I can, because she has always been an appreciative audience.

Mini Proclaims, who can’t yet read, being only two years old, is a less appreciative audience and although she enjoys the concept of ‘being read to’, often insists on turning the pages while I’m mid-sentence, so very little reading occurs. Mrs Proclaims overcomes this by making up her own stories to go with the pictures and I believe she and Mini Proclaims enjoy this act of philistinism. I like to do things properly and therefore derive rather less pleasure from reading to Mini Proclaims than I do from reading to her older sister.

Which is not to say I derive less pleasure overall from Mini Proclaims. She is very much what some might describe as ‘a character’. She has, since late April, been wearing bunny ears during all of her waking hours and has become something of a local celebrity. They were a cheap novelty item purchased at Easter, meant to be enjoyed briefly and then hidden away with all other such novelties, to resurface from time to time until broken or completely forgotten about. They were not designed for the industrial use that Mini Proclaims has put them through and now look worn and threadbare. She will not, however, consent to them being removed. We have tried bribing her with other novelty ears. She was once prone to cat ears. But she will have none of it. The bunny ears are here to stay and now complete strangers walk up to us, laughing and saying things like.

“She’s still wearing them then?”

To be clear, she doesn’t think she’s a bunny. She likes to play games in which she imitates animals and her repertoire includes a range of creatures. She has been a dog, a cat, and a cow in my presence. All the time sporting a pair of bunny ears.

It’s quite hard to explain and in many ways quite perplexing.

But it is also ridiculously cute. She is not always the best behaved of children (as I have mentioned in previous posts), but it is very hard to stay annoyed by a small child wearing bunny ears.

And I think she is well aware of that

As I write this, I am sitting in the car waiting for Little Proclaims to finish her Saturday morning ‘French School’ session. Mini Proclaims is in the back seat, still wearing her bunny ears and maintaining a relatively cheerful demeanour given that she is strapped into a car seat and has nothing much to do.

Little Proclaims has a busy Saturday morning most weeks. We start with a relatively early swimming lesson in a local leisure centre. The centre in question has recently been rebuilt, so although the name has not changed, where once there was a dated and somewhat shabby facility there now stands a state-of-the-art complex. The new centre has been open for a year or so in terms of the gym and various halls for stuff like badminton and my daughters and I have been availing ourselves of the Soft Play there for quite a lot of the past 12 months.

However, the new swimming pool was not completed on time so, until today, the swimming lessons have taken place in the old pool, which was the only part of the former centre that was still standing. It always seemed to be a perfectly adequate facility and neither I, nor my eldest daughter, had any complaints. This week, though, the new pool opened to much fanfare and this morning, we were finally able access the new pool for swimming lessons.

It is quite an improvement. Indeed, it is spectacular. It feels slightly ridiculous that five-year-old children are permitted to learn to swim there. It seems like it should exclusively be in use for the training of future Olympians, 24 hours a day. Of course, Little Proclaims might well be a future Olympian. It’s far too early to rule that out. She’s not a bad swimmer for a nearly-six-year-old. I haven’t yet seen the potential for a gold medal, but what do I know? Perhaps access to this new and improved swimming centre will fast track both my children (for I intend Mini Proclaims to avail herself of lessons as soon as she meets the age requirements. Swimming lessons are available at extortionate rates elsewhere for children of her age, but she’ll have to wait another year before accessing this reasonably-priced aquatic nirvana) to international sporting success. It seems unlikely, if my genes have anything to do with it, but I am not a parent predisposed to installing glass ceilings. I lack the requisite skills if nothing else.

Mini Proclaims joins me for the swimming, which in the old pool necessitated a hazardous poolside experience. Two-year-olds do not like to sit still but should really be made to sit still when there is deep water nearby. This had generally resulted in a 30-minute wrestling match between Mini Proclaims and I, in which, despite my being a fairly large fully grown adult, I did not always emerge victorious. The new pool allows us to escape to a viewing gallery, which means I can let my youngest daughter wander freely without worrying about her safety. Today was, therefore, the first time that she decided to voluntarily sit still.

Well, she mainly sat still.

She did, once or twice, descend from her seat to bang on the glass of the viewing gallery and bellow her sister’s name like some kind of overzealous superfan. Little Proclaims responded with a friendly and dignified wave, which tells me she’ll be able to handle the trappings of fame should the Olympic dream be realised.

This post is turning out to be surprisingly topical. I’m writing it in the middle of June, when the Olympics are still some way off, but having just checked my ‘posting schedule’ I realise that the Paris games will be well under way by the time this post is live.

After swimming, most weeks we then head off to ‘French school’, which is not really a school but is a weekly class in which Little Proclaims gets to practice her French with other children who speak French (we have now admittedly dropped the sporting theme of this post, but Paris is, of course, the capital of France, so we’re still sticking with the Olympic theme in a way). I have no idea if French School has improved Little Proclaims’ French, but it has at least kept it relevant for her since she spends most of her week speaking English in her actual school and there’s possibly only so much our (arguably cruel) regime of only letting her watch cartoons in French will achieve, without a regular opportunity to use her skills. In any case it seems to be working, because she switches between the two languages fairly effortlessly, which is a talent that will come in handy when she is an international sporting superstar.

French school is not in the town we live, so, despite the lesson taking place for 90 minutes, I cannot return home and have to stay in said town with Mini Proclaims. There isn’t a huge amount to do, so we normally head off to a local supermarket and stock up on supplies to get us through the rest of the weekend. Weekend food shopping tends to consist of buying treats rather than the sensible fayre that sees us through the working week. Treats are almost always better from discount supermarkets. I don’t know why this should be, but Lidl and Aldi are really good at the stuff that is bad for you and the prices make it all seem so justifiable. Until later on, when the weighing scale reminds you that there is a different cost associated with high calorie snacks.

Food shopping (even naughty food shopping) can only last so long, so there is an inevitable part of every Saturday morning when I find myself sat in a carpark. Mini Proclaims rarely requires much entertainment by this stage, having generally exhausted herself by being a pain in the neck throughout all of the preceding activities, so this week, (which as previously mentioned is not ‘this week’ at all) I have decided to write a blog post.

It is this blog post.

It may not be a gold standard post, but it is at least a contender for bronze, when one considers the usual output on these pages.

Good morning, for it is morning as I write this. I am at the breakfast table (and indeed the only table) in the ramshackle abode that I like to call Proclaims Towers. My daughters are with me and it is, at present, the 14th August, which coincidently is the day I intend to post this on the acclaimed and beloved online journal that you must be reading if you are reading this.

In recent weeks, while giving the impression that I have been blogging fairly regularly, my posts have mainly been the delayed outpourings of an unusually productive period between late May and early June, when I wrote a lot, but, knowing my ‘boom or bust’ approach to blogging, I decided to stagger the publication of my offerings so it seemed as if I was maintaining a regular schedule, when I had, in fact, not been doing that at all.

Indeed, though it is but a week and two days since my most recent post, it has been many more weeks since I bothered to actually write anything. I had expected a little of this ‘creative lethargy’ to kick in, but assumed that since my last batch of posts should take me comfortably into the school summer holidays, I would naturally have picked up the slack long before now, and would once again have a buffer of several weeks.

However the summer hols have been busier than expected for a few reasons. Should you be interested, the reasons are as follows (should you not be interested you can, of course, skip this bit, but I’m not sure what follows will be significantly better):

1. Despite officially being ‘off work’ for five and a half weeks, I did (and do) still have some work to do for my job so have been (and will be) in and out of my office on a few days.
2. When I am off work, Little Proclaims is also off school (and Mini Proclaims is always off, what with being only 2) so, as Mrs Proclaims is in the final stages of her seemingly never-ending PhD, I have been spending quite a bit of time with the kids, which leaves little time for blogging. I could have adopted my ‘blogging on the phone while supervising them in the garden’ strategy, but that seems to only work when I’m on a bit of a run, and is less conducive an arrangement when trying to write something after several weeks of not writing.
3. Little Proclaims had a birthday. Little Proclaims is quite big on birthdays so much work was needed to plan the day and some recovery was required thereafter.
4. The Proclaims family went on holiday. It was a staycation and we only got as far as Norfolk. Admittedly that last sentence does suggest I had planned for us to be somewhere else. I hadn’t. Norfolk was always the intended destination. It is a lovely part of the UK but in all honesty, when planning a holiday for a two-year-old and newly-turned-six-year-old, the destination is less important than the act of going away and the keeping them entertained. Success was achieved insofar as my children had a lovely holiday. I now need a different kind of holiday to recover.

And so I find myself on the morning of the 14th August, with a pressing need to blog and quite a lot to write about, but very little in the way of the appropriate headspace in which to come up with anything. Other than what I’ve already written. Which I suppose is something.

But I do have a valuable new resource to take advantage of. For Little Proclaims has clearly inherited my love of humour (you may not have noticed but the vast majority of my blog posts are meant to be light-hearted and, dare I say it, witty). Little Proclaims has started making jokes on quite a regular basis and like all good comedians, she writes all of her own material. I don’t think I’m the intended recipient and sometimes the punchlines leave me perplexed, but in the world of six-year-olds, I can assure you that Little Proclaims is producing comedy gold. I’ve witnessed her in action and seen her leaving her peers in hysterics. So, in the absence of anything worthwhile from me, I have asked my eldest daughter to contribute a little material to this post.

When I asked her if she would tell me some jokes and her exact response was, “you came to the right person because I love jokes!”

So without further ado, here are some jokes written by a six-year-old girl (all were produced ‘on the spot’ and written as she was saying them):

What do you call a dog with no tail? A waggly dog!

What do you call an otter with no tail? A crayot!

What do you call a tiger with no mouth? A quiet tiger!

What do you call a butterfly with no wings? A slug with a body!

These were all brand new to me. It was actually a departure from her usual material, which tends to revolve heavily around the words ‘fart’ and ‘poo’.

Perhaps she’s adapting her material to the usual audience of this blog. In which case, I hope you both enjoyed it.

I will back soon with another post. Which might be different is some respects to this post, but almost certainly won’t be any better and may actually be quite a lot worse.

Good afternoon, dear reader. As I write this I am sitting in my garden, but in a break with recent tradition, I am using my laptop rather than my phone. This is a wholly preferable arrangement, but one that is often not possible due to my laptop being a touch unreliable.

It is not a new laptop. I purchased it in the first year of Little Proclaims’ existence, so in light of the fact that she has recently turned six, it is certainly over five years old. Prior to buying this, my main computer of choice was a desktop computer, which sat in, what was then, the spare room, a room that until that point, had acted as my de facto home office. The arrival of our first born meant that I eventually had to give up that room in order to provide a bedroom to Little Proclaims. This was not necessary from the day she was born, as it is customary for newborn babies to sleep in the same room as their parents and thus was the arrangement for our bundle of joy. Indeed, I’m sure I eked out that particular arrangement for quite a while and even when I did give up the room, we operated on a shared custody basis for a while – Little Proclaims sleeping in there and I occasionally still pretending that the room could function as a credible working/writing/messing around on the internet space for me at times. It could not and did not, and so I realised that a more mobile device was needed, particularly as, at that time, I was still in the process of completing my MA (a qualification that has yielded absolutely no career benefits since I completed it, but which does allow me to brag about the fact that I have an MA. Which was possibly why I did it in the first place. If I ever follow my other half into completing a doctorate, I will only do so to be able to use the phrase “it’s doctor actually…”) The desktop computer was relocated to the other room, the one Mrs Proclaims had claimed as her home office back when it was just us, and which remains her office to this day. We notionally do now share ownership of this space, but as she is completing a PhD and I am not, it really has mainly remained her space.

I do still have a desktop computer in that room and bizarrely chose to upgrade that device rather than the laptop a few years ago, when finances permitted such things. The new desktop remains as out of reach to me as the old one, although I think Mrs Proclaims does use it sometimes rather than her own laptop, because the desktop can play DVDs and she sometimes needs to watch adaptations of Balzac novels which are only available on DVD, because Netflix has not yet chosen to capitalise on the huge commercial demand for old adaptations of the more obscure works of 19^th century French novelists.

The laptop is therefore my tool of choice for writing, pretending to work, and wasting time reading lists about pop-culture. Most of the posts that appear on the blog were either composed on this laptop, or at the very least edited (for believe it or not I do attempt some kind of editing before I hit publish). My recent reliance on my phone for composing first drafts stems predominantly from the fact that I tend to always have my phone on me when I’m in the garden with the kids, whereas to bring the laptop out would require some kind of act of intent to write on my part, rather than it being the act of spontaneity that most of my blog posts tend to be.

However, the age of my laptop is also a factor. Five years is quite a good innings for a computer. I did sort of future proof the machine by buying a relatively high spec one in the first place (not very high spec, but mid-range rather than bottom-of-the range) but even so, age catches up on all things and computers more than most. The main issues with this device are minimal but the screen is not really designed with outdoor working in mind, so I am only intermittently able to read what I am writing at present (some people may regard that as a blessing of course). More of an issue though is that the portability is severely compromised by the fact that the battery lasts about ten minutes when the laptop is not plugged into the mains. Less than ideal for garden-based blogging and a problem I’m currently resolving by using the orange extension lead that I normally use for the lawnmower. It’s not the best idea to have a trailing lead in a place where children run around (children running around is not limited to the garden at Proclaims Towers, but it is the only part of our home where it is actively encouraged). Fortunately, this is not currently a problem because Mini Proclaims is napping and Little Proclaims is inside. Little Proclaims was outside when I started writing. Indeed, it was her idea to be outside because she was ‘bored’ inside. Even though I largely trust my eldest child to roam the garden without constant adult supervision, it was at her insistence that I came out to join her, because she was ‘lonely’. Not fifteen minutes after I had arrived, she decided that the garden was ‘boring’ and she went back inside. I expect I’ll find her watching TV when I go back in, despite my insistence that she should definitely not turn on the TV. I probably should have insisted that she remain outside, given that I had just spent ages setting up a load of outdoor stuff for her to play with, not least a tent, which I purchased under the illusion that it was simple to put up, only to discover that it was nothing of the sort. It’s even harder to take down than put up, so when Mini Proclaims wakes from her nap, both girls will be thrust back outside to enjoy some under canvas fun, whether they want to enjoy it or not.

I’ve just checked and Little Proclaims is not watching TV and is actually playing nicely with an educational toy. I feel bad for besmirching her name. But not too bad because she has still been contrary this afternoon and a little besmirching was deserved on some level.

Anyway, at present the trailing leads are not a danger to anyone. Except me. I trip over stuff all the time, even when I know it’s there, so creating a trip hazard for myself is less than optimal, especially when electricity is also a factor.

I’m not sure the poor battery on my laptop is entirely down to age. The computer has not really been the same since Mini Proclaims decided to hurl it on the floor around six months ago. I don’t know why she did this. Little Proclaims never did anything like that at the same age and never showed any signs that she would, so I probably became a little complacent about where I left my stuff, when my youngest child became mobile. Mini Proclaims is a far more destructive force and has taught me some valuable lessons about taking better care of my possessions. The laptop has never fully recovered though. It is, admittedly, in a much better state than I found it on that fateful day, when I truly feared the worst. I was able to get it repaired to a state of some functionality and in truth, when I’m indoors and it is plugged in, it works pretty well. Too well, in some ways, for me to consider replacing it. Particularly as I’m not entirely convinced that my youngest child is truly over her destructive phase. Although her preference these days is to hide things rather than to destroy them, so perhaps I’m being overly cautious.

Anyway, if there is a point to this post, and there very clearly is no point at all, it is perhaps to demonstrate the constraints to my blogging existence. That I post anything at all, under these circumstances, is a minor miracle and to have produced this many words, albeit words that have combined to produce something that is of no value, is perhaps quite laudable.

So, I’m going to give myself a pat on the back and go inside to wake up Mini the Destroyer, and bring her back outside with her sister. I shall remove the trailing wires in the process of course. And I’ll probably get myself a beer.

Good afternoon dear reader, and may I be the first to wish you a Merry Christmas this year?

It is very much the end of August as I write this, and I am eating a mince pie. I like a mince pie and generally avail myself of them from the moment they are on sale in my local supermarket. Indeed it has been something of an ‘almost-Christmas’ tradition for me to gorge on them so much in October and November that I’m a little bit sick of them by the time Christmas proper rolls around. Which is fine, because at that point there are plenty of other treats to overindulge in and the mince pie is largely surplus to requirements.

That Christmas comes to the supermarkets long before December is nothing new. But my understanding was, until recently, that retail outlets normally have the decency to wait until autumn before promoting the winter festival. Last year I noted with some dismay that festive produce was available as early as September. I expect I would have blogged about it, but in I was on something of a blogging hiatus at the time due to reasons I forget, but probably the usual reason that I’m a parent of two small children who take up a lot of what I once considered to be my free time.

It’s perhaps just as well, because had I written that post, it would not have stood the test of time. For less than a year later, it is clear that Christmas has come even earlier to my local supermarket. The last time I checked, August was very much considered a summer month.

I was in said supermarket, with the aforementioned children, trying to con them into believing that going food shopping is the same thing as a fun day out. Weirdly they both seem to buy this fallacy, although in fairness, Mini Proclaims does get to sit in the trolley, which is probably quite fun and Little Proclaims does enjoy visiting the toy aisle. Since she turned six a few weeks ago, she has been in receipt of pocket money, which, according to her understanding of the world, means she can buy whatever she wants. At present the going rate is a poultry £1 a week, but she did have some birthday money to spend as well, so she very much enjoyed her first few days as a person of means. Then she ran out of money and learnt a lesson that we’ve all had to learn at some point.

For Little Proclaims, Christmas (and the related acquisition of stuff she currently can’t afford) can’t come soon enough. But it is still ages away. So we were both by pretty surprised to discover a large display of Christmas fayre available to buy today (‘both’ referring to Little Proclaims and I – Mini Proclaims, being two is simultaneously surprised by everything and nothing). Alongside the mince pies were Christmas puddings, stollen slices and hollow chocolate Santas. And a whole array of other festive-themed goodies.

I was appalled.

Appalled!

So appalled in fact that I put a box of mince pies into my trolley.

It is a farcical situation. The ‘Before’ date on the box is the 4th October, which means they would be almost three months out of date by the time a certain jolly red-suited man tries to squeeze down the chimney. It is traditional to leave a mince pie out for old Père Noël (along with a glass of milk or something more medicinal depending on the values of the individual household he visits). I think Santa deserves an ‘in date’ festive treat when he visits my home, and I can’t run the risk of August mince pies slipping through the net. So I feel it is my public duty to buy and consume all the mince pies I see in the next few months.

You are welcome.