Yesterday an engineer came to sort out some wires in our house

He adjusted some components then there was a moment when he had to stand around and wait for information from the computer -  we made chit chat

he said, things are pretty quiet workwise this week so I'm taking tomorrow off, it's my kids birthday
Lovely I said how old?

Four-year old twins, twin boys

Crikey I said, were they a surprise or are twins in the family? 

They were a surprise when we saw them on the scan but the funny thing was that my daughter gave birth on the same day

Gosh, did you all go to hospital together?

No my wife was booked to have a cesarean in the afternoon so she was just getting ready for that, my sixteen-year-old daughter was in the next room, she'd been going on about having stomach pains and then they got worse so she came in to our room, I didn't even know she was pregnant. 

????

She was a big ... I thought she'd been comfort eating, her mother had died a few months before.  So my wife was getting her bag packed and my daughter was really shouting about her pain and I was Googling to try and see what she had and the only thing I could find with her symptoms was labour, and I kept saying that and she kept insisting she wasn't pregnant.  And then her waters broke and all I could think was that was a new carpet. When the ambulance arrived my daughter was on the floor on all fours and my wife, who was enormous, she was on the floor behind her, they were both yelling their heads off and the paramedics didn't know which one to help, luckily they had a midwife with them and she got my daughter sitting on the side of the bed and I went out the room for a minute, then I  came back in just in time to see my granddaughter's head coming out of my daughter and they  delivered her right there.

Did you have to get another new carpet?

Immaculate Conception

My posts are getting too angst-ridden, I need to lighten up and share things that I find funny about the universe

Today a young man was doing some building work, he told me a long and involved story about why he was driving a 'poxy car' rather than a van - this was the punchline;

I had to swap it with my brother because his girlfriend went and got herself pregnant

His words inspired me to look for images imagining the annunciation - I found the one above here

Trying Not To Kill People

Once upon a time our business consisted of two Camera Boys, Miss Whiplash and a big pile of kit, our main concern was to insure against bad men running off with a camera or the film stock getting eaten by tigers.

Now that we have a proper grown-up out-of-the-house building and lots of people, the responsibility for not killing people is mine all mine.

Paperwork about Regulations and Compliance rain down on me. I’ll have just filled in a stack of forms for security arrangements or arranged fire warden training, when another hazard looms. I dream that a giant rabbit is living on my lap, every few minutes it burps and gives birth to several kittens and I have to keep them all within my capacious skirts - they keep dropping on the floor and some of them break and I have to scoop them up and hide the bits in my pockets and try and glue them back together when no-one is looking.


I’ve just subjected myself to some intensive coaching about how to be a good employer, my coach is patient. To deal with different situations, he suggests scenarios where I imagine putting on a succession of different coloured hats or confronting a series of doors, there are diagrams too - one looks like a hairdryer.


Yesterday afternoon I had set up a broad range of policies and contracts and insurances, I thought I had it all covered...

I had forgotten the rogue fourteen year old who I rashly said could come and do a week’s work experience with us in the summer. Today I got a phone call from the child labour inspectoriate demanding an interview, they want to come and grill me and my premises and look at my policies ...

Antenatal Nerves

I found the ideal site for our office three months ago - I imagined that the process of moving to new premises would give me material for dozens of hilarious blog posts. All the clichés were there from the start; on-again-off-again deals, scandalous incompetence, rascally landlords, and the sound of heavy machinery gouging money from seams that I had no idea existed.

I had no idea how busy I’d be with emotional turmoil as I ricochetted between hysterical excitement at the thought of having a house that we can live in again ... and friends might want to come and visit ... and there wouldn’t be shit all over the table ... so I might want to cook supper in my own house instead of running away to do it in other people’s kitchens ...

then the paralysis when it occurs to me that it might not be real

We’ve got no budget left for this move so I’ve been scavenging where I can. I went to the local wood recycling yard a month ago, they had just received dozens of hardwood drawers that were being thrown out of a youth hostel, a truck delivered all of them to the back of my house that afternoon. I’ve also been doing quite a lot of ebay trading ... I now have a mountain of furniture and dead animal parts high enough to seriously block our light (that photo’s just the first section), the weather has become truly evil, with some flimsy tarpaulins I am desperately trying to protect my treasures from biblical rains and hurricane-force winds.

Last week when my solicitor had been ignoring my increasingly desperate calls for a full fortnight, I sat in my now dark house and wondered whether the whole move thing was all in my head, like some sort of grotesque phantom pregnancy.