James Proclaims!

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.