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Friday 15 February 2013

I'm Not a Pear Either

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You know that feeling?

Yeah, that one.

The one where you’ve not been somewhere for a long time and now you’re a bit scared of going in?  Or where you’ve not seen someone for a while and you’re just a little bit nervous of seeing him, in case they’re not the same person anymore, or you aren’t?

I feel a bit like that right now.  My blog is very much foreign territory to me at the moment.  I very rarely look at it (N probably wouldn’t even recognise it if I checked on the stats like she used to) and when I do it is with one eye closed and my face scrunched up in case I find that it has actually given up on me and disappeared.  So far I’ve been in luck, but soon it really will just up and find someone who will look after it better, so I really ought to put something new there.

Unfortunately I can confirm that the lack of blogging hasn’t come about because of my vastly improved fatherhood skills, those are still struggling to get out of first gear.  I haven’t committed any real howlers recently, like feeding N a meal solely of peas and sweetcorn, or playing chase with her so excitedly that she got scared of me and I had to spend twenty minutes cuddling her before she would play again.(1)  Nothing like that has happened in the last couple of days, which means I must be learning, although my general level is probably still novice. 

Lack of blogging is simply down to lack of opportunity, but today N came out with a statement which I just had to blog about, and so here we are again, and I really think that this could be the start of something wonderful.

But back to N.  Now I will readily admit that I am not a lot of things.  I am not an artist, of any type or description.  I am not good at DIY (see here and here for examples of my particular ineptitude in this regard).  I am not over 30.  See?  There are lots of things that I cannot claim to be, some of them I would like to be, though I don’t ask for much, I would just like to be able to paint a picture without people having to ask what it is, and if I could just learn to hang a picture I would be happy for days.  Some things I am not, however, and I haven’t even thought about it, which is where N comes in.

We were sat eating our tea and N was entertaining us with little morsels of her Cowardesque wit when she came out with a pearler of a one-liner.  “Daddy is not silly.”  This might not seem funny to you, bordering on downright dishonest as it does, but the best was yet to come.  “Daddy is not orange.”  This was delivered in the sort of voice one might associate with announcing that it was raining again, or that Nottingham Forest had dropped another three points.  A totally reasonable, unsurprising statement.  And suddenly I saw myself in a new light.  I had never really thought of myself that way before but she was absolutely right, she had struck right to the heart of the matter.  I am not, in fact, orange.  It was a revelation.

I still don’t know where it came from.  We hadn’t been talking about oranges, we have no oranges in the house, our walls are not orange, and I don’t think N has recently become acquainted with David Dickinson.  It was just a bolt from the blue, not orange.

Welcome back everyone.  It’s nice to be back and as with all of these things, there really was no reason for that feeling.  I’ll try to make sure I have no reason for it again.


(1) Both of which I have, unfortunately, done in the past.