I had big plans for the day. I was going to teach my 10-year-old daughter to knit, starting with the bit that I learned just as I lost interest, in 1985, which is: wash your dirty hands before you start, otherwise all wool ends up the colour of your dirty hands.
I was going to get my 12-year-old son to sit in on a 90-minute video conference about whether or not this was the right time for the Bank of England to launch a cryptocurrency. I thought that the drier, technical areas – basic citizens’ income, helicopter money – would be made more interesting by the word “crypto”. Kids love that word, it makes them feel like Robocop.
I was going to have rabbit Olympics in the garden (really simple, this: put a rabbit in the garden, watch it hop about, clap), go dog-running (like a regular run, except with a dog). I was going to make an Egyptian vegan dish featuring unexpected macaroni. I was going to have an hour’s session entitled Beach Boys Appreciation, in which everyone would listen to the Beach Boys and appreciate them. And I was only going to drink beer after all those things were done.
I do not have high hopes or unrealistic expectations; I am not asking anyone to lose a stone or learn a new language. I do not have an ancient discipline code, and the limits of my ambition are that something a tiny bit unexpected has happened. Yet I still cannot do any of it. The day doesn’t so much race past as deliquesce; it lands in a melted heap at my feet at about 4pm. That’s the universal time of realisation that nothing has happened, and nothing will. You could remake all those plans for tomorrow, or you could make different ones, or you could make none; the result would be exactly the same.
Fair play, that discussion on cryptocurrency is not going to happen twice. And I did do two rows of a blanket, which started off turquoise and is now the colour of my dirty hands.
