Supply and demand are fascinating creatures, aren't they? People love to get indignant about "gouging" in a scarcity, or show off about the amazing discount they got on some random overstocked item in a failing local shop, but even at my grand old age a confluence of unusual circumstances can surprise you with a logically consistent outcome that on the surface of it makes no sense. This week, thanks to the voodoo that is the fuel futures market, the price of crude went below zero as optimistic supply drowned an abject lack of demand in a flammable tsunami of greenhouse gas that might just stay, if not in the ground, then in the pumps, for a time at least.
A little closer to home, last week I was the first person on my team at work to take any holiday since the lockdown began. That most precious of employee commodities is now something that one only uses if absolutely forced by circumstance. Around twenty days were booked off across the ten of us between April and May and it was all cancelled pretty much immediately a month ago. I confess I am among those guilty. Working, to be honest, is the only thing making hanging around the same four walls bearable. What's the point of taking holiday if it's worse than work? Easter stretched before me last Thursday like a long desert road with no service stations, a monotonous trial to be weathered without descending into complete madness if at all possible. As it turned out it wasn't nearly that bad of course, due partly to the fantastic treat of driving 200 odd miles to swap Tiny with her Dad. I knew, objectively, that people were driving less but seeing the notorious M3 and A303 quite so empty, emptier arguably than they would be at 1am on a Tuesday, except at 3pm on a bank holiday Friday, was redolent of the opening scenes of 28 Days Later. (No virus-related parallel intended. Nobody's chewing anyone's face off just yet, except perhaps one's own, from boredom)
In a funny way, seeing even those few other people just going about their day was a calming experience. The temptation, after weeks of housebound lockdown, is to slip into a paranoid state where the outside world seems to surround the house on all sides with vague threat, where outside is a foreign place from which other people are to be avoided, pervaded by a terrifying pathogen cloud of potential doom and in which every gate latch and stile post harbours an invisible film of certain death. When you've worked yourself up into that kind of state, seeing other people tooling down the M3 while texting is reassuringly familiar.
We managed to do an egg hunt. Due to unpredictable shortages in the children's confectionary supply chain we were stuck with unpackaged mini eggs and had to stay up late wrapping them individually with tiny squares of tin foil so they wouldn't directly touch any dog shit in the garden. I snuck out before breakfast and distributed them onto every horizontal surface I could find before returning to the house. "Are both the dogs inside," I asked the youngest housemate. "Because I just saw something brown and furry escaping under the garden gate."
"It was probably next door's cat," she said very calmly. "When do you think the Easter Bunny will come?" I'm wasted on this audience sometimes.
Two four-day weeks back to back obviously not being enough, I had the following Thursday booked off. The consequences of missing Tiny's seventh birthday being too terrible to countenance it was the one day of leave that went un-cancelled among my entire team. "You will have to follow Carl's lead," intoned the Director in our daily stand-up. So now my colleagues think I'm a suck-up. At least I'm not in a position of authority that might be compromised by being seen to try too hard. Well, except that I'm also in charge of approving holiday for everyone. What a balls-up.
So after two (count them) days at work after a four day weekend I found myself once again silencing my 8:15 alarm, only this time instead of hopefully trying to go back to sleep I was swept along by a miniature tornado of birthday excitement. Gifts! Cards! New toys! Chocolate for breakfast! It's a wonderful thing to be seven, it turns out, in fact demonstrably the only thing that's actually better than being "six for ever and ever".
I was hugely pleased by how excited she was by the Big Trak I bought; I figured she was too young for it last year but she grasped the basic concept quite quickly. I'd forgotten that you define the turns in minutes (any integer up to 60 for a complete turn) which is a little fine compared to the chunky 'lengths' unit of forward travel. This means that random button pushing, a state that we slumped into with disappointing speed, gives disappointing results. "Forward 9, left 6, backward 10" means two room-traversing distances punctuated by a mere 36 degree change in direction. And the problem with that is that "room traversing" serves only to describe the distance rather than the actual result, which without careful planning involves simply pushing with futility against the walls or dining table legs. I'm sure the 2020 edition is more resilient than its 1979 original but all the same, two D cells straining a pair of locked electric toy motors doesn't exactly put this amateur engineer's teeth off edge. Still, that's nothing compared to the auditory misery with which I was afflicted when Tiny figured out that "Photon Cannon x 99" would generate a full minute and a half of electronic pow-pow-pow racket with no further effort on her part.
In between fantasising that I've single handedly unlocked a STEM future for her that involves spatial awareness and programming, the main pleasure for me was the speed with which she replied to the assorted video-calling relatives' question, "what did you get for your birthday" with "this amazing tank called Big Trak". However this was somewhat tempered by her subsequent demonstrations, all of which involved between three and none movements followed by, you guessed it, Photon Cannon x99. Did I mention she's seven? She's seven.
We had a big Zoom party booked with her mates. Tiny's favourite topic of conversation for approximately 363 days of the year is "what kind of birthday should I have" (Christmas Day and her actual birthday are the only days when this topic does not, for some reason, occur to her). The frequency of discussion might suggest to one less cynical than I that she cares deeply about the requests she makes regarding Lego cakes, unicorn riding classes, dressing up like the Gruffalo and so on but her inconstancy regarding the obvious choice for a birthday theme is frankly breathtaking. Harry Potter has been the most recurrent option this year, albeit punctuated by Goonies, PlayMobil and others, but by early March we seemed to have settled on a Hogwartsian afternoon of magic and mystery. I was carefully measuring out lengths of bamboo from which kids could make passable wands, and had reasearched eco friendly smoke machines with which I intended to decorate the garage into a kind of wizard's grotto - until lockdown turned up and kicked over the goblet of shite. Luckily, a mere day into the house arrest we watched The Addams Family and Tiny announced, wide eyed and tremulously, that only a fool would ever have suspected her of wanting anything other than an Wednesday Addams party. So no more wands. I was smug that I'd left ordering the more specific wizard-related crap from Amazon until the last minute, although I suppose the cobwebs and bubbling cauldrons for the grotto would still have been relevant.
With a few days to go, and my Dad's premium Zoom account details secured so we could do more than 40 minutes without getting booted off, Tiny breezily announced that her favourite thing would be a "broomstick drawing competition".
"Does Wednesday ride a broomstick," I asked absently, in between mouthsful of Shreddies.
"Don't be silly," said Tiny. "Hermione Grainger does." Of course.
I slunk off to dial in separately from my work laptop. In an attempt to look on-brand but also fun, I slapped on my amazing fluffly owl hat and donned a spotty bow tie before assuming the nom de plume (ha) "Pegwig". I angled the laptop so that the background, normally very obviously my office shelves, was more the Venetian blinds and the angled roof eaves, which I hoped looked a bit like an owl loft. "Hello everyone," I said as the kids joined, wondering how many of them would get on board with my fabulous characterisation.
"Why are you called Pegwig, Carl?" Bastards.
My worry that they wouldn't engage with merely drawing a picture as an activity evaporated almost instantly as they all got busily to work, tongues out of mouths and everything. Adorable questions like "should we draw an animal" and "is it okay if I don't use so much brown, only red is better" were the only interruption. One kid, evidently his own worst critic, seemed to give up after only a minute or two and simply laid his head on the desk, with his hands over his face, and stayed there for literally the rest of the party until his parents logged him out halfway through the bingo.
The pictures were pretty great; I can't show you because even though I asked them specifically they just couldn't organise to hold them all up at the same time and, well, I can't show you the screen grab with half their faces in because of safeguarding and that. I started getting them to describe each others, but sensed I was losing the room so I launched into a bit of an experiment. Cub scouts love a game called "Salute the captain" where you get them to run to the North, South, East or West of the hall and penalise those who hesitate or get it wrong. I figured the same fun would apply to a game of "everyone point at a time on the clock" and would, as a side bonus, look brilliant in grid view with everyone pointing in the same direction. I wasn't wrong exactly, but I was a bit disappointed that so many of the kids seemed to be struggling with pointing to the correct time on the clock I'd printed out specially. Having noticed that video conference images are mirrored (because it's more natural when you watch yourself) I had reversed a stock image of a clock and was so busy earnestly holding it up next to my self-congratulating face that I didn't notice the text message from one of the Mums: "your clock is backwards..." Yeah, only your own face is mirrored. The image you see of others, and hence the way you appear to them, is the correct way around. Sigh.
Bingo went well... ish. Tiny, annoyingly, was one of the last to get a line but, as I'd only fed in 25 names for a set of 5x5 boards, they all completed their boards simultaneously as planned which was perfect. I then made my apologies, whipped off my tie and the stiflingly hot owl hat, and made a reappearance on the laptop downstairs as Carl once more, looming threateningly over Tiny's shoulder with a flaming sponge cake while her friends joined in a cacophonous, audio-delayed nightmare vaguely reminiscent of "Happy Birthday To You" if sung by a particularly tone-deaf collection of characters from a Heironymous Bosch painting. As soon as the candles were out, I suddenly realised we now had 15 kids on a video line, none of whom were about to get any cake. It was time to end that shit before it became a total car crash and we excitedly said goodbye. Given how cynical I had been about managing to fill more than the 40 minute free time limit, I was amazed to see we'd blown through just shy of an hour. Good old Dad and his premium account eh.
Honestly, for all the worrying that her mother and I did about her crappy lockdown birthday I was pleasantly surprised by what a fun day we had. After staying up late to watch Stardust on the projector Tiny announced it had been her "best day ever" and, after a brief discussion about whether to take chocolate or Big Trak to bed (we settled on neither, because I am an expert negotiator, rates on my website) she turned in for a blissful pandemic snooze while her mother and I passed out on the sofa.
Maybe it's not all bad.
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