James Proclaims!

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.