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.

As I sit here writing this, my children are watching Pokemon. I think there are quite a lot of Pokemon cartoons available and I’m not sure which iteration it is they are watching. My six-year-old, aka Little Proclaims, is the driving force in the viewing choice. Her two-year-old sibling, Mini Proclaims, is fairly indifferent most of the time, as long as there are moving images of some description on the communal viewing screen. I have mitigated some of the parental guilt I might feel in letting them watch TV, by insisting that they watch it in French. We’re all happy with this arrangement and it has allowed me a small window of time to write this.

Little Proclaims occasionally breaks off from her viewing to tell me a fact about some Pokemon or other. I try to feign interest, but while I know with absolute certainty that I would have been a Pokemon superfan had it been a thing when I was her age, it wasn’t and so I’m not. My attempts to convince her of the brilliance of Masters of the Universe or Transformers have fallen on deaf ears. Not that Pokemon is anything new, it’s been around since the 90s, a decade in which I was definitely still quite young, but in 1996 I was more interested in bad action movies and Britpop than I was cartoons. Although I’d probably still have happily sat through a few episodes of Masters of the Universe without too much complaint.

Lots from the 90s appears to have endured, as evidenced by the mass hysteria that greeted the recently announced reunion of Britpop royalty, Oasis. I was not successful in obtaining tickets, but I was fairly half-hearted in my efforts – choosing to take Little Proclaims to her Saturday morning swimming lesson at the time anyone serious about the acquisition of tickets would have been logging on to their computers. Post swimming, I then spent several hours driving my daughters down the M4 to visit my parents, so, although my phone was notionally in the virtual queue for tickets, I was unable to give it any serious consideration until it was obviously far too late for me to have any reasonable hope of securing even one of the ‘dynamically’ high-priced tickets.

I am quite a big Oasis fan. Objectively I can see that they are somewhat overrated, but I was smitten with the music of the brothers Gallagher at a young age and, unfortunately, objectivity has no place when assessing who your favourite band is. Nostalgia is far more potent than logic in that arena. I can’t quite understand why so many young people were clamouring for tickets though. I suppose had the Beatles somehow been able to have put on some reunion shows in the 90s (which would have required a supernatural effort from John), I’d have been inclined to try my luck at securing a place in the crowd, but, in spite of recurring lazy journalistic comparisons, Oasis are hardly the Beatles.

Good luck to the kids who did get tickets, I just wish, for their sake, they had musicians from now to get as excited about as bands from the past. I can’t imagine that there aren’t any good new bands out there. Indeed as a regular attendee of the Reading Festival (which is a music festival that takes place in the town of Reading, rather than a literary festival as the name might suggest in print) I’ve seen a few good young bands in recent years. But I’ve also noticed increasingly that the headliners are acts who’ve been around for twenty years plus, which was not the case when I went to the festival as a younger person.

Indeed, I saw Oasis perform there in 2000. I didn’t live in Reading at the time and I camped at the festival, which is what most of the kids still do. I didn’t return to the festival until 2017, when as a resident of Reading, I was able to sleep in my own bed, which is far more sensible. Indeed, I’ve been back most years since (missing a couple due to Covid and one due to the birth of my eldest child). This year, I didn’t even pay for a ticket, as I was able to secure free entry to the festival by volunteering. Apparently my career as a person who works in a school makes me a responsible adult. A lot of the ticket-holders to the festival are very young so having a few responsible adults stationed around the campsite is a way of offering a bit of support to those that weren’t quite expecting the chaos of festival camping. Sometimes the kids find themselves overwhelmed and in need of a consoling chat with someone that has not consumed excessive amounts of alcohol and/or narcotics that day (and who, on the days they do consume alcohol, is far more interested in quality over quantity). I quite enjoyed volunteering. I’d have done it even if I didn’t want to see any of the music. But I did see quite a lot of the music. Including Liam Gallagher. Who was performing songs from Definitely Maybe, which is arguably Oasis’s best album.

I’d still like to have bought tickets to the Oasis reunion shows, but I can console myself in the knowledge that the crowds at those gigs will have paid a lot of money and that the band will not only be playing songs from their best album, but also songs from some of their later albums. Which even the most passionate Oasis fan would have to admit, are not really that good. As well as seeing the younger Gallagher brother for free recently, I’ve also saw him perform at the 2017 iteration of the Reading festival, where I eschewed watching his whole set in favour of leaving halfway through to watch another Britpop alumnus in the form of Ash. In 2017 I also saw Noel and his High Flying Birds play Wembley Arena, which is not quite as big as Wembley Stadium where Oasis will be headlining multiple dates. I have seen Oasis at Wembley stadium though, but it was the old Wembley Stadium that was knocked down in 2003. I saw them there in 2000, a few months before I saw them in Reading. I also saw them in 2009 in the national stadium in Cardiff, another of their 2025 reunion tour venues, on the tour that resulted in them splitting up for 15 years. I have seen a lot of bands over the years. It was a thing I liked to do a lot in my teens and something Mrs Proclaims and I did a lot together in 2017/18 in the year before we became parents. We often refer to that as our last year of fun. It was the last time we did anything socially together that didn’t involve our children. Of course we do occasionally have fun together as a family but it’s not the same. I’d rather be the father of my daughters and not be going to lots of gigs, but occasionally I do miss the days of being able to do that sort of thing regularly and often on a whim. Of the many bands I have seen over the years Oasis are definitely not the worst band I have seen. But, as much as I love them, I can’t honestly say that they are even close to being the best.

At the moment the kids are too young to take to rock concerts. Little Proclaims and I have been to some live shows together, but they have been largely centred around Peppa Pig, Paw Patrol and a Tiger Who Came to Tea. One day my daughters might express an interest in going to see some live music, and there may be a window in that era when they’ll tolerate my company in exchange for me being the person who pays for the tickets. I really hope, when that time comes, that my daughters have something better than the the reunion of a 90s band that their dad liked, to get excited about.

Their current devotion to a 90s cartoon doesn’t bode well though.

Summer now seems to be a distant memory, but, despite claims made by the various retail outlets from which I buy my groceries, we are still some way from Christmas. It’s cold and dark and there doesn’t seem to be very much to be cheerful about. Half the world seems to be at war in a very real sense, while those countries supposedly at peace, seem nonetheless to be consumed by a kind of social-media-fuelled conflict between groups of people with entrenched views who are angry that other people don’t agree with them.

I’m quite happy for people to disagree with me. I often disagree with myself.

These days my life seems to be a kind of ‘Groundhog Day’, although it might better be described as a ‘Groundhog Week’. Monday to Friday is a period of work-based repetition, while on Saturday and Sunday I switch to my role as father/driver to my daughters. If variety is the spice of life then my life is lacking a little in seasoning at present.

Then again, life is very rarely dull. Or if it is, then I rarely have time to notice. I think I might enjoy a little boredom on occasion. I don’t hate my job but it has always been unwieldy in terms of workload and unrewarding in terms of pay. Some call teaching a vocation, and they might be right, but it was never my vocation. I fell into it because I couldn’t think of anything else to do, and I stay in it because I still can’t think of anything else to do. In spite of my best efforts, I seem to have ended up being quite good at it and hold a position which is surprisingly senior. This just adds to my frustration. It seems a tad perverse that I don’t even have the decency to be incompetent at something I’m not especially interested in, yet by every available metric I appear to be offering my employer value. Nonetheless, it has been a stressful time of late, as the demands of the role appear to be increasing at a rate that is disproportionate to the rate at which my salary is increasing.

Light relief comes in the form of my two children. I find being a parent more rewarding than I find my career. But my children are six and two. Looking after them is not exactly ‘down time’. The younger of the two, Mini Proclaims, should be napping as I write this. She was not inclined to support this hypothesis today and remains conscious. Instead of napping she is entranced by the television, which is acting in loco parentis while I write this.

Little Proclaims has just informed me that we have no more A4 paper for her to draw on. She is willing to solve this problem by using A3 paper, which apparently we do have in ample supply. I am quite happy for her to draw on A3 paper, but my assent to her suggestion has been met with far more gratitude than it deserved. I feel a tad guilty about this.

Little Proclaims is quite prolific with her drawing. So much so that there is often a teetering pile of her artwork on a nearby side unit, which I occasionally have to sift through in order to select a few to preserve for posterity. That is the easy part of the operation. The more difficult part is discarding the unselected work. Throwing my eldest child’s drawings in the recycling bin always feels like an act of betrayal, but she is so productive when she picks up her crayons that my small terraced house would be quickly submerged in school-age-sketches, if I didn’t purge the pile regularly. Still I never have the heart to tell her, and instead pretend that I’ve moved everything to the loft. The loft is not a space that Little Proclaims has ever accessed, but if we ever realise our long-term home improvement goal of converting that space into a bedroom for her, I can only hope that having her own room will assuage her disappointment at the lack of her childhood drawings stockpiled in that room.

My lack of ‘me-time’ is partly caused by Mrs Proclaims’ devotion to a PhD that has been her main occupation (notwithstanding giving birth to and being the main weekday parent of the aforementioned daughters) since 2017. Studying part-time and having two bouts of maternity leave, have made her doctoral studies seem a touch eternal. She’s quietly confident she’ll have completed everything in 2025, and hopefully I’ll be in a position to upgrade her blog name from Mrs Proclaims to Dr Proclaims. Also she might look after the kids a bit more on weekends. At which point I’ll be able to switch my focus from childcare to the backlog of DIY jobs that need my attention around our ramshackle abode.

This, on reflection, seems much less fun than looking after the kids.

Mini Proclaims has just come to give me a hug apropos of nothing. Both my daughters do this quite a lot.

Perhaps ‘me time’ is overrated after all.

Recently I decided to up my style game by wearing a suit jacket to work. I generally manage a shirt and tie most days, occasionally supplemented by a v-neck jumper on colder days. I always meet the requirements of the dress-code policy, but my appearance is nonetheless a little scruffier than the ideals stated in that document. The suit jacket is generally held in reserve for job interviews and other occasions when making a good impression seems like a wise move. But from time-to-time I have been known to don the jacket for no other reason than I feel like looking a bit smarter. I find it good for my self-esteem to remind myself that I can, if I choose to, scrub up quite well. Such occasions often draw comments from my colleagues, usually in the form of back-handed compliments. There is generally an acknowledgement from them that I do look quite good in a suit, but an air of suspicion as to why I am wearing the jacket when I normally content myself with a scruffier, less polished, appearance.

So I wasn’t surprised to draw the odd comment or two on this latest foray into sartorial elegance. But I was surprised at how many of my colleagues addressed me as ‘Nick’.

Because my name is not Nick. It is James, as indicated by the title of my blog. Ok, before one or both of my regular readers contradict me in the comments section, James is actually my middle name, but it is the name that everyone calls me. And my first name is not Nick. I have never been known as Nick.

Except on this day, when it seemed like everyone was calling me Nick.

The first time I heard the comment, I wasn’t all that surprised. I work in a school and like many schools in the UK, mine is part of a multi-academy trust (often referred to as a MAT). And like all MATs, ours has a CEO. And his name is Nick.

So I naturally assumed that the first comment was a weak attempt at suggesting that my choice of attire was me having delusions of grandeur and attempting to dress like our, admittedly very dapper, CEO. The second time I was referred to as ‘Nick’, I was slightly thrown, because it wasn’t really a good enough joke for two people to have thought of it. Even in a suit jacket I look nothing like our CEO, and it’s not like I’ve never worn a suit to work before. The third time I was referred to as ‘Nick’ I realised something else was going on.

And indeed it was. For it just so happened that on the day I decided to wear a suit jacket to work, there was an article about me in the local paper. And the local paper had managed to get my name wrong. The local paper had decided to call me ‘Nick’.

To explain why I was featured in the local paper, we have to go back in time a few months. To July in fact, when, a few days into the summer holidays, a time when I was looking forward to largely forgetting about work for the best part of six weeks (or at least the interactions with colleagues and students – I don’t quite get away from the paperwork sadly), my phone started buzzing with messages from colleagues congratulating me on my nomination for the ‘School of the Year’. award. This was a strange accolade, because although I do work in a school, I am not, in and of myself, a school. Or even someone who identifies as a school. So I couldn’t possibly have been nominated for a ‘School of the Year’ award.

Indeed, I had not.

What had happened was that the school I work in had been nominated for the aforementioned award, as part of a local initiative that celebrates lots of achievements of people and institutions that are based in and around the town my school is in. But the reason my school had been nominated was because some very nice parents of students that I work with were very enthusiastic about my ability to do my job. Now I don’t think I’m especially bad at my job. I’d even get on board with the notion that I’m quite good at it. But it’s quite hard to take seriously the idea that I’m the single most important reason that my school might be considered to be better than other local schools. So it was all quite surreal. Particularly the fact that my image appeared to be ‘trending’ on local social media accounts. No-one had asked my permission to use my image incidentally. I suppose the fact that nice things were being written about me made the local press feel that it was ok to just take my picture from the school website without checking how I felt about it. Which I’m not sure is ok really, although I wasn’t all that bothered. I resigned myself to my five minutes of local notoriety with as much grace as I could manage. It was a weird couple of days but it blew over and I pretty much forgot about it.

So, in fact, did everyone else. When I returned to work in September, most of the talk was about who had and who hadn’t managed to secure tickets to see Oasis. A couple of people mentioned the nomination to me, in a semi-mocking way, referring to me as the ‘golden boy’ etc, but it was really not a major talking point.

And then I got an email saying that the school had not just been nominated, we had in fact been shortlisted. As a result we were invited to the upcoming awards ceremony. This is when I got a bit stressed. Because it was all well and good being in the local media for a few minutes and having people say nice things about me, but now there was a chance we might win the award. Which also meant that there was a chance we’d go to the ceremony expecting to win and then ‘not win’. Which would be a bit of a let-down. And I’m nothing if not ‘glass half-empty’. The ceremony wasn’t until the end of October, so I had to endure six weeks of worrying about whether any of this actually meant anything or whether it was going to be the ultimate in anticlimaxes.

At one point the organisers of the awards came out to film me and my colleagues, which seemed like a fairly good portent, but no-one was giving anything away. The invitation to the awards ceremony was for two people. I wouldn’t normally be senior enough to be one of the invitees, but my boss (my boss being the head teacher, rather than Nick the CEO) realised it would be a bit weird to not take me, given that mine had, to date, been the face of it all.

I don’t ‘not get on’ with my boss, but no-one would describe us as friends. We generally tolerate each other pretty well, but I think he has always viewed me as being someone who is quite good at something that he has no particular interest in. He knows that someone has to do my job and it might as well be me, but that’s as far as his curiosity goes. I generally quite like his indifference because I prefer to work autonomously and I’m generally allowed to do that. In spite of this mutual tolerance we would never knowingly seek out each other’s company, and so it was with some trepidation that I attended the ceremony, with a five hour stint of making pleasantries ahead of me, and my continuing uncertainty about whether we would win and by extension whether or not any of this was actually worth it.

The ceremony may have been a local affair, but it was no less ostentatious for that. There was a three-course meal, there were gift bags and there were celebrities (mostly local but at least one person of national fame was present). And there was alcohol. Quite a lot of alcohol. Some of it in the form of free wine on the tables, but my boss and I drank beer from the bar, which he mainly paid for (I did buy him one back at the end, but his salary is quite a lot higher than mine, so I felt no guilt in accepting his generosity). Beer definitely eased the tension. And the meal was really very good.

My worries about whether or not we had won were over more or less as soon as we sat down. Each award (and there were a lot of awards alongside ‘School of the Year’ ) had its own corporate sponsor. And we were sat on the same table as the representatives of the sponsor of our potential award. And we were the only people at the table who worked in a school, so it seemed likely that we probably had won. I wasn’t quite taking it for granted but it seemed a cruel set-up if the award was to go to a different educational establishment.

Some of the local celebrities circled the tables and spoke to us, including one that I had met some twelve years previously at a different event. He actually pretended to remember me, when I told him, which I thought was quite a nice touch.

I checked the programme and ‘School of the Year’ was due to be the third award announced, which meant we weren’t in for too long a wait. I can’t remember what the first two awards were, but then our moment came. The video of the winning school was played and it was the familiar face of my line-manager that loomed large on the screen. Then I appeared, looking significantly less composed than I thought I had been when I was filmed. It wasn’t a particularly flattering clip of me, but it mattered not. We had won. We had actually bloody won. And suddenly all my cynicism disappeared. This suddenly seemed like quite a big deal. My boss was ecstatic. We practically danced to the stage where we accepted a quite impressive looking gong and had our picture taken.

We were then ushered away to speak to the press. It was all very heady stuff. More beer was consumed. I started to enjoy myself. My boss was very good company. I couldn’t honestly tell you what any of the subsequent awards were for, but we cheered them all. And then it was over. My boss and I left together, both eschewing the invitation from our sponsors to the, apparently traditional, after party, on the basis that, despite having consumed a fair few beers, we were clearly a lot more sober than everyone else and going anywhere with these people was unlikely to end well.

We shared a taxi to the train station, where we embraced. We actually embraced. The word bromance was used. He hinted at, but in fairness, never actually promised, a pay rise and promotion. And then we went our separate ways, both feeling pretty good about life.

The following week was half-term so there was something of an interlude before I saw the rest of my colleagues. But a fuss was made this time around, and, in our Monday staff briefing, I had a genuine moment of triumph as I stood in front of my fellow educators and held aloft the trophy as if I were lifting the world cup.

It was a serendipitous coincidence that that same afternoon I was scheduled to lead a training session to all staff. Of course I made reference to the original nomination, which had suggested that I was a ‘real-life superhero’. I reassured everyone that I was not, under any circumstances, going to let this go to my head, and then took off my glasses and unzipped my jacket to reveal that I was wearing a t-shirt with the Superman logo on underneath. This did, fortunately, get a laugh. The rest of my training was a little more sensible, although I like to think I am one of the less dull people who leads training sessions in my workplace.

And then we all moved on. The trophy sits in pride of place in a cabinet in the school reception and people still joke with me from time to time. My boss is back to ignoring me for the most part, but his indifference seems slightly friendlier and he does occasionally refer to our ‘bromance’. There has been no offer of a promotion or a pay rise to date and I’m not holding my breath for one any time soon.

But if I had, in anyway, acquired an inflated sense of self-importance, then that bubble would have been burst the other day I wore my suit jacket to work and everyone called me Nick.

As December 2024 officially begins today, it is time for my annual tribute to films, which may not have been intended as Christmas movies but which nonetheless contain some, admittedly often tenuous, links to the season. This is my eighth consecutive year of doing this and even I stopped seeing the point of this endeavour some years ago.

I concluded last year’s countdown with the rather brilliant Spider-Man: No Way Home. This resulted in me revisiting all of the other Spider-Man movies, and I was delighted to discover that I could, by the flimsiest of rationales, justify including the Web-Slinger’s original 2002 cinematic outing.

Given the plethora of superhero movies already in existence by 2002, it seemed genuinely crazy that Spider-Man had never been on the big screen prior to this point. The technology required to make a credible Spider-Man movie had clearly existed for a while by that point but there was apparently a ‘rights’ issue that kept the movie on ice for years.

Fortunately when the first installment of Sam Raimi’s trilogy did make it onto our screens it was very much worth the wait. Given how many superhero movies now exist, it’s credit to this movie that some 22 years on, it still stands out as one of the very best.

Score for Christmasishness

As mentioned above, my rationale for including this is very tenuous. But there is a scene in which the main characters celebrate (or at least attempt to celebrate) Thanksgiving. And then stuff happens after that scene. It’s not entirely clear how much time transpires between that scene and the end of the movie, but you’d have to imagine that, as Spider-Man and the Green Goblin have their final battle, they’re at least thinking about what their plans for Christmas might be.

2016’s War Dogs is loosely based on real events but, one imagines, so loosely that anything resembling fact has been lost along the way. It is a vaguely entertaining 114 minutes but largely forgettable once the end credits roll.

Jonah Hill stands out for a larger than life performance, playing the less likeable of two fairly unlikeable protagonists but even he can’t make this much more than a run-of-the-mill movie that I wouldn’t particularly go out of my way to watch again.

Score for Christmasishness

Overall the movie isn’t very Christmassy, but Christmas does feature a bit, including a fairly grim Christmas Day for one of the protagonists in Albania, which is followed by an even grimmer New Year’s Day. Christmas does feel relevant to the narrative at that point in the film and there are lots of visual reminders of the season on screen for a good five minutes of the running time. Other movies have made my annual countdown for more spurious reasons so War Dogs deserves to be considered a bit Christmas(ish) according to the tenuous criteria I use to make my yearly list.

2011’s The Big Year boasts an impressive cast but it is still about birdwatching, which is not the most exciting of subject matters on paper. It is more entertaining than the premise might suggest but not as entertaining as you might hope a film starring Jack black, Steve Martin and Owen Wilson would be.

It probably should be funnier, but it’s warm-hearted and likeable enough in the main, if not particularly memorable.

Score for Christmasishness

As the title suggests, the narrative takes place over the course of a calendar year, and is therefore bookended by two Christmases. Both Christmases are afforded a decent amount of screen time so the movie definitely deserves a place in my annual festive countdown. Neither Christmas helps to make the film any more interesting though unfortunately.

Martin Scorsese’s 2019 epic The Irishman is exactly as good as you’d imagine a Scorsese movie starring Robert De Niro, Al Pacino and Joe Pesci would be.

Which is really very good.

Controversial for being a ‘more-or-less’ straight to Netflix release (it did have significantly truncated run in cinemas before landing on the streaming service), any fears that this would be anything other than brilliant were quickly put-to-bed.

If one wanted to be churlish, it might be fair to say The Irishman doesn’t really bring anything new to Scorsese’s oeuvre – epic gangster movies being fairly familiar ground for the acclaimed director – but The Irishman does feel like an evolution of sorts and manages to keep you interested in the characters without encouraging you to necessarily like any of them.

The technology used to de-age the cast might well have been revolutionary, but it’s hard to ever truly be convinced that either De-Niro or Pacino are ever in their thirties, whatever visual effects are in play. It doesn’t matter – the story-telling is so compelling that it’s easy enough to suspend your disbelief and if the 209 minute running time seems like a lot to commit to, by the end you almost find yourself wishing for more.

Score for Christmasishness

The Christmasishness is tenuous for this one but there is a Christmas scene about an hour in, which is fairly relevant to the narrative. It’s not on screen for very long but it is very Christmassy for the duration. It also helps to make the last scene of the movie even more poignant when the titular character finds himself spending his final days alone in a nursing home, forsaken by his family. It doesn’t look or seem very Christmassy, but, to the surprise of the protagonist, we discover that it is Christmas – not that that revelation makes the least bit of difference to him. Not a Christmas movie by any definition, but Christmas certainly plays a small part in the story.

Matthew Vaughn’s 2021 movie The King’s Man is a sort of spinoff/sort of prequel to the British director’s Kingsman film series, the first of which made last year’s iteration of my advent calendar.

Set around a century before the original movies, it depicts a version of the First World War that bears little resemblance to actual historic events and instead relies heavily on suspended disbelief to navigate the plot.

It is by no means a great movie, but like the other installments in the series, it’s fairly enjoyable in the context of a light-hearted mindless action film.

It does have a surprisingly good cast, who all seem to be trying (mainly in vain) to elevate the movie from the run-of-the-mill popcorn flic that it was always intended to be.

Score for Christmasishness

While it is certainly not Christmas throughout the film, about 15-20 minutes of the film do take place over Christmas. It’s an admittedly fairly violent Christmas in Russia but there is a nice Christmas tree. So The King’s Man is more than deserving of it’s place in my annual festive countdown.