This is my new profile picture. And yes, it has been photoshopped a bit.
This one makes me look taller – with a better complexion and whiter teeth. But this is me sure enough. As it turns 6am on Easter Sunday I have been out in the back garden depositing chocolate eggs (and rabbits and rolos) for some reason I am not quite sure of.
Which is insane on several levels.
We’ll get the obvious one out of the way first. What the hell is he doing celebrating Easter when he is a stone-cold atheist? And I could yadda, yadda, yadda, pagan ritual really, yadda but the truth of the matter is that sometimes (not all the time) I just like a quiet life and sometimes (most times) there is chocolate left over for me.
But that’s not the biggest piece of insanity in this tableau of madness. The astute reader (if such I have) will have spotted the truly alarming aspect as being the fact that I am awake and alert at 6am on a Sunday.
What the hell is he doing up at that time? I can hear him/her asking.
I was supposed to get up at 6.30am. So I got up at 4.14am. That wasn’t my first wake up. No no no. I had already woken up at … 00.34am having gone to bed at 10.22pm the previous night. All in all this amounts to not very much sleep before doing 5 hours of driving on twisty roads. A crap idea.
And only made possible through worry. If I hadn’t been worried about getting up then I would have slept like a baby. I did not sleep like a baby and the worry achieved what worry generally achieves. Fuck all.
And there seems to be a lot of worry going about at the moment. I was worried about being in Argyll in time to pick up my family but if you don’t have that there is plenty else to be worrying about.
There’s all this for a start. And that’s before you start adding on all the personal stuff that you might have on your plate. The kids, your health, someone else’s health. There’s money and work and the inability of your team’s strikers to score goals. It’s literally endless.
I have now established that there is no point, no point at all, in not worrying. It would not have assisted me in any way to have someone there telling me that I should get some sleep. Actually that would have only caused more problems since my wife was 120 miles away and who would this other person be, exactly?
So, I can toss and turn in bed or I can wander about the back garden placing chocolate confections in unlikely locations just so that my kids can wander about the next day picking them up and shouting ‘Thank you Easter Bunny!’
Dealing with their illogical certainty in a magical bunny delivering chocolate foodstuffs is actually perfect training for dealing with other things in life that I find nonsensical (Trump voters are a fine example here) and I move forward in the hope that this is a temporary state of affairs. I shall be just equally alarmed four years from now should they still be adamant that bunnies lay eggs and Trump is still President. But there is nothing I can do about that.
If you are blessed with a lack of worry then I welcome you. We are in desperate need of optimists right now because (as I have shown) worry can actually cause the very thing you might be worried about. It is actually beneficial for us to have people with a sunny point of view; People who sleep soundly and then get up on time.
In my case that is never going to happen – so, I embrace it. I get up at 4.14am. I put eggs in the garden as the sun rises and I am exhausted by mid day.
But…
Everything was achieved that had to be achieved and if you think you might have cause to worry then you can always ask me. I’m an expert.
