Washing and Half a Tattoo

It is really quite difficult to turn this into an interesting read on a Saturday, mostly because Saturdays are really quite dull events in our household. The most interesting thing that happened today was Number One daughter telephoning to tell me all about her new tattoo, and adding that if I had been a proper parent she wouldn’t have got one because she would have known that she was complete and perfect without.

I had just woken up and was unable to think of a suitable riposte, so I saved myself a lot of squabbling by just agreeing amiably and recommending that she hand herself over to Childline. I don’t know what the tattoo is because she was a bit vague about that, but she did say that it will take ages to finish because despite being a Brave Soldier it hurt too much so she was getting it done a bit at a time. So she has part of a new tattoo.

I am sure that there is an appropriate and supportive thing that parents can say when their children call them to say they have got half a tattoo, and how happy about it they are: but I failed to work it out, answers on a postcard please.

Anyway, as far as noteworthy incidents go, that was the highlight, and now the difficulty I have is that any day which is largely occupied by sleeping and then working, with a bit of faffing about making sandwiches and walking the dog in the middle is never going to make for a captivating read, no matter how enthusiastically and eloquently I describe it.

In any case, regular readers will already have heard far more than they probably wish to about the niceness of the Library Gardens, the pleasingness of our sandwiches and flask of tea, and the happiness of having our house and garden: and might well inwardly groan if I started rhapsodising again about the marvellous way in which we cut the grass and hung the clean sheets on the washing line this morning.

This is all very wholesome and domestic, but still not really fascinating, and sooner or later anybody with any kind of live brain cells will just become bored, and skip over most of it, and then resolve, yet again, to waste less of their precious life dawdling about on social media.

The thing is, if I am going to spend hours and hours composing eight hundred words of masterly prose in my taxi every night, for the small but satisfying reward of the occasional ‘like’ on Facebook, instead of reading my very interesting current library book about gang warfare in Glasgow, I really don’t want the content to be so very dull that you are going to skim over almost all of it.

I did that myself with the book of Fifty Shades of Grey, which at least had the occasional smutty paragraph dotted here and there which should have enlivened it a lot more than it actually did. I thought an awful lot of it was turgid drivel about her bubbling emotions and troubled soul, and so skipped all of that and just read the bits about sex.

Getting people to plough through pages of tedium for the sake of some interesting smut is a time-honoured technique for boosting readership, and obviously it works really well. I am quite sure, for instance, that Christian Grey would never have made it on to the bestseller list had his unquenchable passion been for vegetable gardening. I would certainly have bought it, but then I bought the sex one as well.

I have considered it.

The thing is that some of Oliver’s friends’ parents read this occasionally. I bump into them at civilised functions such as parents’ meetings or school picnics. On the whole it is far better if people can concentrate on the school play instead of being distracted by vivid and inelegant images of how we might have got him.

Anyway, if I was going to do that, the thing to do would be to have an entirely separate website and charge a subscription fee. Liking on Facebook would not be nearly enough recompense for the sort of writing which involves breathless descriptions and liberal usage of adjectives like ‘throbbing’, so I think I had better not bother. I will stick to dull.

I expect you are relieved about that.