James Proclaims!

The reproachful look on the face of the Tesco delivery driver made me die a little inside. There he was, punctual, friendly and efficiently providing my weekly grocery shop, without the inconvenience of me having to leave the house and negotiate the local hypermarket, while managing the ‘delightful’ hijinks of Mini Proclaims and the commercial insatiability of Little Proclaims, and the only reward he received for his troubles was the sting of a nettle. Which nettle I couldn’t say, for there are an abundance of them aggressively blocking the footpath of Proclaims Towers.

Indeed my little terraced abode very much has an ‘abandon all hope, ye who enter’ vibe at present. The space laughingly referred to as the front garden/off road parking by the estate agent who sold us this abomination of a property back in 2013 has become overgrown. Which is all the more impressive given that nothing at all is supposed to be growing there.

I’ve been stung a few times while getting out of the car and, bless her, I’ve witnessed Little Proclaims stoically encounter the serrated canopy at least once. I’ve been meaning to do something about it for ages. I’ve been meaning to do something about a lot of things for ages.

The trouble is that there is a lot to do. If the wounded delivery driver (who is, even now, questioning his decision to wear shorts to work, I’d wager) thinks the front of my house is bad, he should take a look at the back garden. I haven’t encountered any velociraptors yet, but there is a distinctly Jurassic vibe about the whole thing. Although the pedant in me would point out that while one might encounter an inaccurate version of the velociraptor in Jurassic Park and its successor Jurassic World, one would not expect to find one in the Jurassic era so much as the Cretaceous era.

But it is overgrown. In June. Which is alarming for a number of reasons. Regular readers of this blog (if a blog which is only updated sporadically and incredibly inconsistently can have regular readers) will know that in the summertime I like to sit out in the back of the garden, drinking a craft beer, pretending to supervise my children while they get increasingly filthy, and writing posts for this blog. Apart from those Christmas movie posts I do every December that no-one reads, it’s one of the few times when I can be depended on to update these pages. So if the garden is out of action, how can I be expected to write exceptional prose such as this? And more importantly, when do I get to drink beer?

But that is only part of the problem, dear reader, for the interior of Proclaims Towers is just as lamentable. If you are that unlikely being that identifies as a regular reader, you might recall me mentioning that I was going to do some DIY courses last year. And do them I did. Quite a lot of them actually. Indeed, I spent so much time doing DIY courses that I ran out of time to do any actual DIY. And now it’s been so long since I did the courses that I think I’ve forgotten everything I learned. If indeed I learned anything.

But life with two children and a full-time job is quite a busy one. Throw in a wife who is attempting to break the world record for just how long one can eke out a PhD, and DIY becomes even more problematic. Because whenever I am home I am tasked with watching the kids, which is hard to reconcile with meaningful DIY, and also DIY would disrupt the studies. And Mrs Proclaims assures me that the studies are now in the final stages and will be complete this calendar year. Or mostly complete. More or less. Not exactly certain, but as close to certain as we’ve ever been. Which is great news. But it does make the DIY a difficulty even if I had the time to do it. Which I don’t.

It probably wasn’t the best time to start a podcast with my friend Ben. A podcast I promised I wouldn’t promote on this blog a couple of posts ago. So don’t consider this a promotion. In fact, ignore this paragraph completely and don’t click on the link below to enjoy a podcast that has been described by critics as… well okay, it hasn’t been described by critics at all, in fairness. But it has some reviews and they are fairly complimentary and they weren’t written by my mum. To the best of my knowledge.

Anyway, the point, if there is a point, is that my home has seen better days. In recent years it has also seen worse days, so I suppose that is a silver lining of sorts. But now I’m being silently judged by delivery drivers and I don’t need that in my life. So I have attacked some of the foliage at the front of the house. So now people won’t abandon hope if they enter here.

Ironically though, they really should.