Funny how you go on holiday and end up with no time whatsoever. Funny. I blame Lila. People generally are demanding in inverse proportion to their size. I worked this out when I met Mel. Very small, very demanding. Lila is a quantum leap in both directions. Really tiny yet can’t even tie her own shoelaces. Not that wears shoes. Obviously. But its not that she wants things all the time, cries out for attention, yells and screams, because she doesn’t. She demands attention by stealth. You know she’s there so you have to watch her. Play with her. Make silly noises, blow raspberries, just watch her sleep. It all falls under that umbrella of ‘amaaaazing’. So that’s where I’ve been. In Malta, with Lila. And a few others. Minor players.

And I’ve come back to a world in turmoil. Ok, not totally dissimilar to the one I left, but really. No, really. No petrol cars to be made after 2040. What will the 84 year-old me do? I want to be tootling round to the shops in a McLaren F1 at 14 mph, wearing a hat (old people always wear hats) and park it really badly, causing more pollution. I don’t want to be hopping in and out of some probably driverless electric ‘thing’. Its embarrassing. But so’s wetting myself and I’ll probably be doing that too.

Donald Trump has banned transgender people from the US military. How is that fair? How does it benefit the American military? Surely nothing fills the enemy with greater fear than a marine in a dress? Yet its almost like Trump just has to be, first and foremost, controversial. Everyone worries about pollution; he pulls out of the Paris accord. Everyone is talking about ‘gender fluidity’ and Trump comes up with the latest ban on ‘trans’ people. And you have to wonder: how big a problem is transgenderism in the US military? Perhaps its a peculiarly American problem: I don’t know whether I want to be a man or a woman but either way I want to shoot people. And I appreciate that this is my own particular problem. I have endless compassion and tolerance for transgender people. But struggle to reconcile my undoubted stereotypical attitudes with a soldier’s life.

There again I’m struggling a bit with the whole ‘gender fluidity’ thing. Not about sexuality, I get being gay, bisexual, whatever. The Romans invented that too. But telling kids not to make up their mind what actual gender they should be is nothing but an unnecessary confusion in a life already pretty overwhelming. My rule is this: if you have a dick, you’re probably a boy. What you choose to do with it is really up to you.

And so to work. Has to happen sometime, I suppose.

Happy Thursday

A xxxx