So the thing about school holidays is that they cause a lot of work, even for grandparents. On a normal Thursday, between school drop off and the afternoon pickup lie hours and hours of peaceful inactivity. Whereas holiday days are full-on. Though realistically, is my life more peaceful with Mel or with Lila and Joey? Who of those can find more things for me to do? Deep philosophical questions. As are questions of ‘love’.

Lila was showing me her newfound ability to write ‘joined up’. Which is brilliant. She’s 7 and can write joined-up, our Prime Minister is 61 and can’t even think ‘joined up’. So I gave her a phrase to write. ‘My name is Lila’, which she dutifully and beautifully calligraphied (new word required: invent one) in lovely script: “My name is Lila”. Ok, now “your name is Andy”, and in lovingly cursived hand appeared “Your name is Andy”. Right, so now write: ‘and I love you’. And on the page appeared: “and I don’t love you”.

And that simply cracked me up. Of course, it may just mean that Lila in fact doesn’t love me, impossible though that would be for you to imagine, but that would be her right. Or it could be that Lila ‘gets it’. That she understands how the truth, integrity, honesty and consistency can only get you so far. Whereas duplicity, misinformation, lying, obfuscating and inconsistency are way more fun. Values I’ve always impressed on her from her first understanding that ‘Old MacDonald has a dog, with a ‘moo-moo’ here and a ‘moo-moo’ there’ is in fact a (rather stupid and exceptionally childish) joke. Why ever state the obvious when stating the opposite gets the laughs?

I know Joey loves me because the level of violence he demonstrates towards me is way in excess of any attack he would launch on someone he didn’t love.

The kids didn’t actually do any, kind of ‘hands on’ welding yesterday, as today’s pic might imply, but their mum did think that might be a good skill for them to learn young. And Thursdays have always been ‘dangerous implement days’, so maybe we’ll give it a go.

And its amazing to think that there are 2 less terrorist leaders in the world than there were on the weekend. Fuad Shukr was a general in Hezbollah and a man wanted for an attack in Beirut in 1993 which killed 241 Americans. He was ‘hit’ by a missile. Shame. And yet, before his body had even fully cooled, the Hamas Leader, Ismail Haniyeh, was hit by a drone, along with a bodyguard in Tehran. Even the Ayatollah had to agree that this was an audacious and brilliantly precise strike. Then, of course he had to add ‘500 women and children were killed in the attack’, so the BBC can spew their favourite line, even though no-one else was actually injured during the strike at all.

The world would sleep easier in its bed tonight for the loss of these two murderers, but for the extreme probability of revenge by Iran. The most humourless nation on Earth. Other than, perhaps, North Korea.

Happy Friday

A xxxx