• I arrived to after school club and the eldest was toying with the big jenga blocks. She’d used every single one to make a sort of road/land with buildings and tracks. She jumped up when she saw me and I said “are you going to tidy up before you come with me?”. She grumpily agree’d, and I was filled with instant regret when she spent the next 10 minutes ‘tidying up’; Putting the big jenga bits back into the box as a tree, then re-stacking them, then inefficiently stacking the middle ones first, then fitting three in, then taking the three out when they didn’t stack and adding two in, then crossing them, then stroking each block as she set it down as if they were hamsters she was putting back in a cage. I feel it’s sometimes worth watching these little kid inefficiencies and taking the time to laugh about them afterwards rather than jumping in and hurrying her along.
• Performance review season at work. If you didn’t use ChatGPT to write your review then how can you claim to be efficient?
• My classic christmas-dad-ice-skating-knee-injury is almost better. I treated myself to new running shoes but it turned out Nike have made the new version of the shoes I always buy slightly tighter than the last version. So after a swift return-to-the-shop-swap I bought some cool kid running shoes; A collab between Californian hippie-capitalists District Vision x New Balance. I’m 37 and they make me feel like I’m part of the fashionable running elite.
• Took the littlest on a misjudged trip to the mr bingo sale. Passed up the chance to display the c-word in my house but the littlest brought home a lovely nude self-portrait of the artist himself. Afterwards we were talking about our day and she recounted that she didn’t enjoy waiting in a queue to go and buy someone else’s drawings.
• Tidyed the garden. Probably should have done that at the end of summer.