Nearly a perfect fantasy day

It isn't often I can do exactly as I like.

Wait. Stop there. I would like to claim 'exactly as I like' means indulging in thrilling conduct. Dangerous, dirty, and unbecoming. If memory serves me right, that behaviour might have implicated silk, heels, and two-seater sports cars.

Regretfully, I think that ended. I didn't give permission. When kids arrived, those days left.

Parental life now diverts me, i.e. I do grocery shopping, laundry, and self-piteous whining, alternating with heavy-duty staggering across deep and sinking badlands of responsibility. I am wearing old shoes and odd socks. I may have grown a beard.

My fantasies out of this mire - into the lightness of leisure and pleasure zones - sadly reveal how limited my expectations and ambitions have become.

Fantasy, to do exactly as I like, is now the impossibility of enjoying a few hours without continuous interruption, in solitary peaceandquiet. Maybe loafing about the house with no imperative to deliver food into anyone's mouth except my own. Better still, no-one to disrupt my cupofcoffee + packetofbiscuits.

Tiptop fantasy number one also adds the indulgence of reading what I'd like, writing when I'd like, listening to music without needing earphones, and being able to stare at pictures going past my eyes on the iplayer without niggle of guilt that I should be doing something with someone else that is educational.

Well, surprisingly, I do enjoy some of my fantasies today. Mostly thanks to a stomach ache and feeling of nausea, but still. Enough to hole me up on the island, provide me with a Get Out of Jail Free card, a perfect excuse not to have to face three million Chinese coming at me with high heels in Wan Chai, and another reason to evade the responsibility of Christmas shopping in the art supplies shop, at least for a while longer.

I spend my feeling-a-bit-off-day loafing about the house, wearing an old tunic with a coffee stain down the front, and ignoring the children in a professional manner by saying I am not feeling well, go and ask your father.

Thus I get to listen to some early music, watch an episode of The Killing, and read from Stephen Clarke's 1000 Years of Annoying the French (funny) to Leslie Chang's Factory Girls (not funny).

Of course I do not manage all my fantasy intact. (It possibly also shows why I never achieve anything of substance and would be foolish to set my ambitions higher than a daily blog post.)

In the writing of these few miserly words, I have been interrupted 17 times; eight of which were demands for food, mugs, laundry, and scraps of paper. Two of the more irritating interruptions included my apparently necessary involvement in a fight over who is the more horrible sister (Shark or Tiger?) and the impact a husband can have, when he comes into the room, announces 'it is too bright in here' and proceeds to switch all the lights off.