Now that my son is on his summer break from school, my wife and I are having to divide and conquer childcare while juggling with finite annual leave — a familiar challenge facing parents up and down the country at this time of year. It seems cruel to pack him off back to school for summer club when he’s just rejoiced finishing there.
And so I’ve travelled back to work from my parents’ house in Cleethorpes so they can entertain him while I work from their house, which is also the house I grew up in.
Yesterday they took him to a country park not far away, where he fed carp, ducks, peacocks, and had a stand-off with an owl. Today he went to the arcades along the sea front and won an array of sweets and four mini rubber ducks.
Tomorrow they’re planning to take him to the Fishing Heritage Centre.
“The best display of all was one showing what the interior of a ship’s galley was like in rough seas…This was everything a museum should be – fun, imaginative, thoroughly absorbing, wonderfully instructive.”
Not my words, Michael — the words of renowned travel writer Bill Bryson!
My son has seafaring ancestry on both sides of the family, so I’m happy he’ll get to learn about the reality of fishing — even though it’ll likely ruin his idea of it (which is heavily if not entirely based on Animal Crossing).
We got a new prime minister on Monday. I’m not sure what this will mean for UK politics, and I don’t really want to go into it here because I want to keep this light-hearted.
That said, it was sad to hear that Kevin Keegan had died. Maybe he’d seen the future under Andy Burnham and decided that Monday was the day to go — much in the same way the Queen had probably seen the fire and brimstone that awaited under the crack leadership of Liz ‘Pork Markets’ Truss and decided it was under her reign that she must pop.
I must admit, Keegan wasn’t known as a particularly prophetic man and so maybe his death occurring on the same day as Burnham’s appointment will have to go down as purely coincidental.