The shit blog of Paul Chris Jones

I woke up last night because of Youngest Son needed his nappy changing. Then I couldn't get back to sleep for about two hours. Now I'm in my dad's loft looking for an airbed. There are dozens of tiny risk soldiers scattered around on the floor. My dad says there are two Christmas trees up here. Where did the other one come from? We only ever had one. So why were there two? There's an acoustic guitar from the time when my sister Lisa wanted to learn to play guitar. That lasted about two days and then she gave up because it was too hard. There's a big black bag labelled Metropolitan Police in the loft. It's as hot as a foundry in the loft. I feel like a coal miner climbing into a mine. I have to take off my t-shirt. I have rivets of sweat running down my back. I have to crouch because the ceiling is so low. At one point, I stand up and my bare back runs across a wooden beam and I yell out, "Ah!" And all these tiny splinters stab my body. I pick up a box of Playmobil and all of the contents fall out onto the floor: tiny Playmobil frogs and a little monkey. After two hours of sorting out the loft to finally find the air bed, it was right there in the middle of the mess. I could have seen it straight away. I'm swearing and cursing, trying to get the bedroom tidy. No one in my family has tried to prepare for our visit, even though we've announced it months in advance. The bedroom where Oldest Son and I are supposed to be sleeping is covered in army apparatus. There's three bags. I open one to look inside. There's a doll of a baby in there. You're supposed to practise CPR on it. It's creepy. I also find two drawing pins on the floor. Both of them with their sharp point up, ready to pierce my foot. Not so good when you've got an air bed either, which famously deflate when they are pierced by something sharp. In the other room, the one where Girlfriend and Youngest Son are staying, all my dad's clean clothes are in a heap on the floor, as if my dad were a teenage girl instead of a 60-year-old man.