I admit it – our last few weekends have been a bit hectic and feature packed. It’s mainly to do with my complete lack of leave coupled with a some stressful working weeks – this weekend has been no exception:

Saturday: Lye-in (for me anyway), swimming, neighbourhood café, lady lever art gallery, port sunlight garden centre and some potting up of plants.

Sunday: Church, more plant potting, trip to B&Q even more plant potting and it’s 4:30pm.

I think a reflection on how stressed we are is that Saturday really began with an argument – we don’t really do arguing, I think it’s a sense of perspective thing, so may things aren’t that important in the world to fall our over; only very occasionally does it all go out the window and we will argue about anything today was one of those days.

We did eventually get everyone into the swimming pool,and I’ve already talked about it, Henry thinks its loads of fun, and Daisy is completely traumatised – it was the break in the day we needed though to get over our morning and go for a nice lunch in neighbourhood. a very very nice café on Woolton Road, they took unusually long to serve us but this just helped us unwind into the day, by reading some random books from the side.

By the time we’d finished dinner* (around 3pm) we still weren’t ready to go home so we paid a visit to the lady lever art gallery in port sunlight, it’s one of the very few of the local museum places we haven’t been to / done to death so it was a nice trip: For a quick review; quite a few pieces of art porn, i.e. porn dressed up as art and some really really old things.

Port sunlight as you may or may not know is where Ruth and I got married, something Daisy was trying to get to grips with (the idea of your parents not being together a bit much for a 3 year old we think).

After the art gallery, still not quite ready so we walked up to the port sunlight garden center; just for a wander now; and spent about £60 on plants, hanging baskets and window boxes, which of course meant that when we did get home we had to start planting all this up in the garden.

Ruth got quite a lot of bedding plants, and I bought some herbs, mainly so I can pretend I am like Jamie Oliver.

We did of course by two much, and yet not enough so we’ve had an extra trip to B&Q today, and now we have three window boxes (two on window bottoms, and one on the floor) which are full of flowers; and some quite upset looking herbs. It’s done nothing but Rain since we went all horticultural which has resulted in the rather strange sight of me watering plants in a torrential downpour.

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* you will notice how I interchange lunch and dinner, this is because I am not a ‘proper’ northerner being only from Liverpool and all. while many people will tell you dinner is a northern thing, it’s not it’s a lancastrian thing, and liverpool as we all know is not in Lancashire.

The one sure-fire way to get people to panic buy anything? tell them not to. We saw two petrol stations full of cars today, and we live about 20 miles from a huge petrol depot that’s not on strike.

So..

Don’t panic, there is no need to rush, I haven’t spoken to Waterstones but I am sure they will have enough copies of my new book, “Look Stupid… Just buy it – the idiots guide to buying without thinking” (£25.99)- there will be more than enough copies to go around, I repeat don’t panic!

I think it should be noted just how much Daisy has regressed since the incident in the swimming ‘lesson’.

We’ve taken Daisy to a number of different swimming pools since, and at every one she’s sat on the steps and refused to get wet passed her navel. It’s been hard to judge just how much of that was down to different pools and how much was down to her fear.

Today we took her to Garston pool, which is the one that Daisy and I have been to loads; if you where to ask Daisy this would be ‘our’ swimming baths. Well today Daisy was a complete shadow of herself compared to the last time we went.

The good thing about Garston is that it has a shallow entrance; you can effectively walk in. Last time we went, which is some time ago, Daisy was jumping in of the side, going to the bit where she had to stand of tip toes, and splashing me quite a lot – this time, just about waded in to not much past her knees.

It’s enough to make you quite angry really – we had a good talk afterwards and Daisy told me she was basically scared because of what happened with the man, and she might go under the water again. I told her that she had Mummy and Daddy looking after her, so it wasn’t going to happen again, but she doesn’t really believe me.

We tried all the things we could think of, letting a little girl play with Daisy’s float, taking henry into the Deeper water, talking about how big girls like water, and how Daisy did loads of stuff when she was a little girl. I for one have ran out of ideas – I have no remaining strategies for getting my daughter who is now petrified of water anywhere near a deep bit of a swimming pool.