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Our holiday came to an end, but it’s a bit of a long journey home and I have to pick up Ally and Sally from York on the way, so we broke up our journey, staying overnight in the Lake District (at the hotel at Tebay Services which is absolutely excellent and has the jolliest staff and the funnest family rooms).
In the morning we tidied the house and packed our stuff. We left an almost full tub of butter in the fridge, which these days is like giving the owners of the house a 50% tip. I tried to eat the butter, but it’s not as delicious on its own.
The ferry ride was uneventful and as we were inside for almost all the time it didn’t even really feel like we’d been at sea. The drive was mainly uneventful, though there were a couple of accidents to navigate. The first looked like it might be pretty bad, with emergency vehicles zooming past us and some gruesome looking wreckage in the road. But luckily it looked less bad close up - a lorry had maybe jackknifed and hit a car, but all looked well, apart from the bit of lorry that had come off.
The sat nav got us round the second accident, though we could see the traffic jam from the country road that we took. Charmingly a cow and then a sheep wandered on to this road, but only held us up for seconds and we saved ourselves at least half an hour.
The kids have been watching iCarly on Netflix. The show is 15 years old and is about some schoolkids making their own show on the internet. As if that could ever happen. They have to cope with advertisers trying to make them sell out and TV execs changing their vision. It’s actually pretty good largely thanks to some strong performances, especially from Jennette Mccurdy. We got into this show after watching Sam and Cat (which was the follow up series, smashing together Mccurdy and Ariane Grande (who was in yet another series first). It’s great fun to watch, but shortly after we discovered this show news came out that Mccurdy had written an autobiography called “I’m Glad My Mom Died” in which she reveals the tribulations she went through at the time, which takes the shine off things a bit.
I didn’t think Ernie was really enjoying the show but today he started asking about whether he could make an internet show and in the car he was filming himself saying things like “Hello Mr Penis. Subscribe to Ernie.com”, so he’s already got as far as I’ve managed with his online stuff. If anything a bit more sophisticated. The sky potato doesn’t fall far from the tree.
I was knackered from the drive, but although everyone else fell asleep early, I was left awake and unable to nod off. It might have been down to the app that Catie had put on to get them to sleep which told a soporific story about horses and kept repeating a weird song about if you tell stories about ponies, make sure they are ones that can fly. It seemed to knock the kids out, but left me feeling haunted and weird, like it was something from a horror film where dolls come to life.
I went to the loo and saw myself in the mirror. I looked so old and exhausted that I could only say “Fuck”. It was at this point that I realised my youth is gone and won’t be coming back.
