Yesterday? I can no longer recognise the boundaries between night and day, and all I know for sure is that:
# Arrived home Tuesday night after teaching all day expecting a beer and an episode of Shameless to unwind. Instead there was 15 yr old's vomit on the duvet; toddler sick on the settee; red wine on the carpet (knocked over by partner while attempting to deal with the first two). So I started scrubbing, and didn't fully piece together the TV episode with the dogging, nakedness and mad ex-wife. One for the dvd.
* Spent night on sofa as toddler was too ill / upset to cope by himself.
* Wednesday was consequently a bit cack, though I kept the nation's youth entertained and educated in the customary fashion.
* Wednesday night took the (slightly recovered) older youth down to tennis in the other half's courtesy car. She is by instinct terrified of the new (get this - she has never driven a car on a motorway. At 42.)and won't drive it. I think it's a pig-ugly thing. It seems to have been modelled on the face of kiki out of Hector's House, and is a horrible green colour to boot. And to bonnet. Big sticky out wing mirrors, bug eye headlights, stupid interior. So sorry, Mr Ford, but I don't like your new Fiesta. But I do like the fact that it has a passable cd player. New bit.
* Music in cars - great isn't it? My car stereo has been MIA for a month. To take it out you need a ford radio removing tool. Or, according to the internet, a wire coat hanger.
Thing is, there isn't a single wire coat hanger in the house. Where are they in the 21st century? I think I'm more likely to be flogged a shirt wrapped round a ford radio removing tool.
* By coincidence, postie brought me a copy of Tom Robinson's first LP (CD to you). I expected to be shocked, and I was. I bought it first and wore it out when I was fifteen, younger than Theo Walcott or my eldest, so it's thought-provoking to be reminded of how politicised it was. I can't imagine those black goth children who hang round the clock tower buying it these days. That's what I thought, when i drove round the suburbs in a brand new cadd Fiesta roadrunner roadrunner. Good grief.
* If you can't bear nostalgia for 1978, skip this, but I was also intrigued by the absence (on this USA additional tracks thing)of the track by track nuggets that adorned the original. Cus I still remember them: "I have no more illusions about the political left than the political right, just a pretty shrewd idea which side is gonna stomp on us first"; "Freedom is invisible- you can't have liberty at someone else's expense (Eric Idle?!); One of my main ambitions in life is to own a silver grey f registered Ford Cortina. Well, Tom, you'd prefer it to the new Fiesta.
.

* Those of you who sit and whine/
You should have been here back in 79

And if you were born then you'd be 27 now.

See, that was an apocolyptical view of the FUTURE - and when 79 came, it was there in the same spirit. The world we knew busted open wide/ In the winter of '79. They stopped the social in the spring / the Natioanl Front come back in.

All faintly silly after the passing of time, but that's the point. It was another country. Tom Robinson can be currently found in pipe and slippers hosting a mildly alternative Radio show on 6Music.

Did you know that George Orwell wanted to call his dystopian vision 1948 but the publishers wouldn't let him?

* Anyhow, after two nights on the couch I spent last night with the toddler and discovered how much better the couch is. He can only sleep in ten minute bursts, and then he has to be held up vertically so all the catarrh can drain away.

* And today the world and his wife came to watch my lessons. How I smiled!