Richard Hearn sum up his 40th year

Every so often, a survey is published saying the average person spends a third of their life asleep. Not true in my case. I wish it was. In the same survey, they might also time-shunt (that’s my phrase; I don’t know what the official term is) other activities together, and claim that you spend two whole weeks of your life picking your nose, or whatever. They think that’s surprising, but I even remember the year. 1986.

“I’m going to set aside the whole of April to being awake but thinking about sleep”

Anyway, I’ve been thinking about 2011 and for the benefit of Latest Homes readers, I thought I’d do some time-shunting with various parenting-related activities, to indicate the make-up of my year.

We may as well put sleeping first, and having downgraded the allocation from a third to a quarter – I surely get less sleep than the average – we land at April Fool’s Day. I’m going to set aside the whole of April to being awake but thinking about sleep. This ranges from mentioning to others that I’m tired to daydreaming about, well, dreaming.

We’re up to the first May Bank Holiday weekend already. For an activity which neatly fills those three days I nominate putting things back on hooks that have just fallen off hooks. The next fortnight would represent all the times when I walked into a room and forgot what I went in for. Yes, I know that makes me sound old. On that topic, at least a week of 2011 – my 40th year – was spent calculating exactly how old I am, and how much time has passed since some previous fixed point.

We’re in June. Coaxing Youngest™ upstairs for his bath, that’s surely seven days (which, for comparison, could have alternatively been spent on a reasonably relaxing package holiday on a Mediterranean island). Other package holiday length activities? Prompting Youngest™ to finish his food using an oh-so-positive tone: “Look! You’ve missed that carrot!”. (I could have been in Kefalonia). Instead of a lounger in Lanzarote, I spent another time-shunted week fielding what-ifs about Star Wars characters.

Pretending that our destination is ‘just around the corner’ probably adds together to equal the same length of time as actually driving from one end of the country to the other. At least two days in 2011 were taken up with answering questions about sharks, and I only know three facts. (They’ve got sharp teeth and dead, black, eyes. I forget what the third is.)

Obviously, some of the year was taken up with non-parenting activities. So we’ll zoom forward to the last fortnight in December which was spent answering The Boy’s quite difficult and detailed questions about Father Christmas. If I didn’t know better, I’d think he was cross-checking facts to write the definitive biography.