Richard Hearn is stringing the week together

There’s a few random moments of interest, but do they make a column? Sometimes, as regular readers may have noticed, I struggle to scrape together my sow’s ear of a week to try and make a publishable silk purse of a column.
Normally, I look for some kind of topic, a couple of moments that together say something incredibly profound and universal about Dad-dom. This week, I’m struggling.

Perhaps I could weave something out of my two shopping trips. Saturday, I bought one pair of trousers, three T.shirts and a shirt. And a hanging basket. They all looked rubbish on me (except the hanging basket), so on Sunday, I took them all back, except the hanging basket. (At least the garden looks better after the weekend.) The fact that I took almost everything back, could become a column about my weekend being neatly balanced., or maybe the devastating realisation that Jamie Redknapp looks better in a shirt than me, not exactly news. I could simply try and say it symbolises the futility of life.

I need more. Maybe my theme could be wasting time, as I blame Youngest™ for having to return the clothes. Probably unfair, but Youngest™ was the reason I didn’t get to try anything on. There’s a lot of time-wasting, interrupted tasks and waiting as a parent. Perhaps I could write about that? I could include The Boy who, whenever we have to do something, always answers “can I just do one more thing?” The ‘thing’ varies, but there‘s always something he needs to do.

Moving sideways, I could devote the whole column to the inexplicable amount of time spent ‘in the search for the owl’. I say inexplicable. Let me explain. Youngest™ currently wants to carry around a tiny plastic owl. If he loses it, all hell breaks loose. One evening, we just couldn’t find it anywhere, and in the middle of the night, he was crying out for it. We found it the next day near the hanging basket.

Aha! A link. If I could just work out how to tie that almost failed shopping trip to an artificial bird of prey, I may be onto something. Hmmm
A side story. In the library the other day Youngest™ was crying out for a book on owls, although his first choice was the inappropriate book War On Terror.

I hope you’ve enjoyed my insight into the writing process and the finding of an idea. As you can see, some weeks, and I’m going to paraphrase Charles Darwin here, both parenthood and writing are like being a blind man looking in a dark room for a black owl that isn’t there.