NORTHERN PLANNER

I like new stuff too.

 

I love this. (John Dodds would, no doubt berate me for EMOness) I've only ever met one other person who likes the Blue Nile and I can't get anyone else to listen to them. This song bleeds genius.

 

The soundtrack to the summer of 1988 in Chicago. In the pool for training at 6am watching the sun come up, then frozen yoghurt and the beach.

One of those summers you didn't want to end.

 

To be fair, we all loved this too (we were 14, don't be too hard on me)

 

Incidentally,I now work in Players House. It used to be a bar Def Leppard owned.

Perfect simplicity.

 

It had been quite a week. As I write, my little baby girl is in hospital for the 6th day,with her Mum looking after her (and the NHS' finest). Nothing to worry about, all fine and will be home.

Home is an odd word right now. I'm writing this on a sofa, surrounded by boxes, while Will sleeps in his little bed upstairs in his amidst his own little cardboard city. We're moving tomorrow you see.It also makes you thankful for family who have helped in all sorts of ways,including babysitting, lifting and general support.

But with my family strewn across our home city it reminded me that a house doesn't make a home. People do. You can have the most palatial gaffe, the latest designer furniture and all the mod cons but it's the people that live in the house that matter, not the stuff. I can't wait for us all to be together again.

It's a little daft to think of any house as 'yours' anyway. Before I was born, someone thought the place we're leaving was theirs, just as someone else thought the same of where we're buying. Few people live in the same place all their lives. Like I said, it's the people you live your life with, not where you live it that matter. Or at least that's what I think.

Today, not unusual for the UK, it rained a lot. That meant I couldn't play outside with my little boy. No farm up the road to see the moo moo cows and ba bas, no swings in the park.No going swimming either. We're off for his lesson tomorrow. But we have the garden centre.

That's right. The mecca of having 'given up' for any self respecting grasping at youth GRUP.

Well balls to that. My boy loves it. Running amok amidst the, just in, glittering chistman trees. Pointing in awe at the womderfully kitsch gnomes and outsized frogs. But that's nothing next to the petstore.

He can spend hours gazing into the fishtanks, trying to touch the turtles through the glass, cooing over the 'babbits'. Then there's the parrots and stuff.

He loves tapping the cages of the birds and watching them flutter all over the place. Scratch that. It makes him laugh so hard he'll give himself a hernia.

There's magic in the way a toddler laughs. It's never put on like a grown up. It doesn't require a social setting or the right mood. It's a force of nature. He's happy, it's funny and he laughs. That's it. But Will just doesn't laugh, he explodes, dribbling like a demented idiot, guffawing from deep inside his little belly.

Nothing in this world could make me happier that he does.

Except for having another. Which is lucky because it's coming on Wednesday.

There's so much to look forward to, while at the same time feeling determined my little boy will never feel like he's missing out now there's a new one…and feeling equally resolved to be as close to number two as the chestnut flash we already have.

So that's it for two weeks or so (genuinely this time). While we get used to not sleeping again, move house and get used to being four rather than three.

Bye for now.