Tuesday

There's been a lot going on and I feel like I've been teetering about on a high wire stretched over a burning pit, but here we all are, still going.
Between those last few brief entries I talked one of my daughters out of killing herself, mopped up a lot of blood and packed a car for a festival, all in some kind of auto-pilot trance. I knew she was in a better place than she'd been in for a while and cancelling the festival would have increased the pressure, so off we went.
I had a vision of sitting in a field listening to music, smoking a lot of weed, eating food from the stalls, sleeping in my tent in the fresh air. It would be relaxing, energising, lovely.


 Except it pissed down with rain. Nothing like what others were suffering, I now discover, but enough to wipe out any option of being relaxed and energised by the experience, especially when you factor in the impact of four small boys and one grumpy teenager, also male. We took two 12 year old boys , plus T (16), and gained J (10) and E (8) from morning till night almost everyday.

Man, that was not festival-going as it was intended. I never took my kids to festivals when they were young because I'm too lazy and I thought it would be too much like hard work and I was right. They are all good kids, but Jesus fucking Christ, they're always there, wrestling or chasing or throwing things, constantly moving, making me want to make them sit down and shut the fuck up, just for half an hour, but you can't do that, they're only kids having fun, it's not their fault that I'm so bloody knackered and now I'm even more so. I've been back two days and haven't unpacked the car.

Laters