Another Saturday Chez Proclaims

When last I troubled the blogoshpere, it was at the end of a horrible weekend which saw Little Proclaims briefly hospitalised and the entire Proclaims family housebound while she recovered from her ailments and I grappled with a deadline for a course that it was in my professional interests to complete but in which I had no actual interest whatsoever.

Since then, I’ve neglected to update the blog, though Little Proclaims quickly returned to her normal healthy (and very very active) self. I’ve mainly not been blogging because September is often one of the busiest months in my role as one of the lower ranked senior leaders (or higher ranked middle leaders depending on one’s perspective – the more accurate perhaps being the one that sounds the less impressive) of a large secondary school in the south-east of England. This September has been no exception – indeed even by the standards of most Septembers, this one was little short of frenetic. Not that any of my travails are really blog-worthy. I’m often surprised at how I can be simultaneously rushed off my feet and bored senseless. The point, though, is I have been busy.

Being busy at work means I have less time during the week to spend with Little Proclaims, and spending time with Little Proclaims is my favourite thing to do in the world, so I’ve neglected the blog in favour of my daughter.

Happily for fans of my blog, if such entities exist, my daughter is once again a bit ill. Not so ill that we need trouble the local infirmary, but ill enough that I have had to trouble my local Covid testing centre and find myself once again housebound until the results are published. In herself, Little Proclaims is in quite high spirts and is currently sitting opposite me, at the dining table I’m using to facilitate the writing of this post, happily munching on a pain au chocolat, colouring in a picture of a turtle carrying a cake (with an interesting choice of palette) and singing (loudly) “baby shark doo doo doo doo doo doo”.

This weekend it is Mrs Proclaims’ turn to grapple with a deadline, though it is one she actually cares about as it represents a milestone in her endeavours to become known as Dr Proclaims as she works towards her PhD in 19th century French literature. I couldn’t comment on the significance of the milestone, but I know, given the part-time nature of her studies, that we are several years off her achieving that sought after title, so I can’t imagine it is an especially important deadline. Unlike me, however, Mrs Proclaims is an accomplished and dedicated academic and thus considers all deadlines important. So I am in charge of the housebound child. Fortunately, Little Proclaims is quite good at entertaining herself and frankly, in doing so, does provide no small amount of entertainment to anyone who happens to be in the room. Although I would quite like her to choose a new song to sing.

I wouldn’t normally mind being stuck at home with my daughter as I rarely have anything resembling plans most weekends, but this weekend I did plan to take Little Proclaims to visit my family in Wales, so I’m a little sad that we can’t do that, although hopefully it’s a postponement rather than a cancellation and we’ll be able to rearrange for next week. I’m not sure we’d have got there anyway as there seems to be something of a fuel crisis at the moment. It does admittedly seem to be a crisis caused by panic-buying as the result of rumours of an impending crisis and so was possibly quite avoidable. Crises these days seem to be rather self-fulfilling in nature. From my perspective, a petrol shortage is nowhere near as alarming as the toilet paper shortage of 2020. Were I reduced to having to walk to work, it would make my commute quite significant, but I would get there and perhaps lose some weight in the process. I don’t know that I could really afford to keep buying the Daily Mail as an Andrex substitute indefinitely though.

Anyway, I’m told by the reliable British media that the government are taking steps to ease the made-up fuel crisis and we’ll all be happily polluting the environment again in the very near future. And to be fair, the government have never let us down before (apart from all the times that they did let us down, but it would be churlish to hold that against them) so I’m quietly confident that Little Proclaims and I will be heading west on the M4 as early as next Saturday.

Until then, I can look forward to a weekend of singing, dancing, colouring and watching cartoons. But I probably should spend some time with my daughter too.