Nighty night


Our child is sleeping quite reliably now, from eight in the evening till at least two in the morning, a decent stretch of time that lets her parents get a solid block of sleep in. Unfortunately, this is prefaced by half an hour of shrieking complaints, as the child that was so cute and cheerful while it was bathed transmutes into a locus of pure rage. Basically, it’s our fault for putting her into her cot, instead of letting her sleep on the bed, and she does her utmost to make us feel guilt about this.

Perhaps it’s that. Or perhaps she was not best pleased with my reading of The Trumpet Of The Swan, E B White’s tale of Sam Beaver, a Montana kid who finds some swans while on holiday in Canada. I tried to read it with interest and emphasis, but perhaps there hasn’t been enough of an interval between the Charles Stross Laundry novel and this: when I described the frogs, or the foxes, or the titular swans it was less as wonders of nature and more as eldritch horrors from beyond space and time. If this carries on, I’ll be reading Edgar Allan Poe’s The Raven to my child in a highly inappropriate sing-song voice for her second birthday.

No. That would be the mark of a terrible parent. I’ll stick to The Tell-tale Heart instead.

Because of the jet lag, and the colds we are struggling to shake off, I’ve felt dreadful all week, deprived of energy and initiative. It’s only now, as the weekend comes, and I struggle to stay awake to write this, that some hope of being a human being again suggests itself. Tomorrow, needing some rest and recuperation time, I’ll be cycling over to the East Coast for the parkrun, then spending all day running myself ragged, in the hope that this activity provides me with more energy than I started with. By the time we get to Monday I’ll either be fully rejuvenated or I will have destroyed myself utterly. But either way, that’s something.


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