Oh Dear Loving Blogosphere,

Weekends are simply more exhausting than anything else. The culprit? An expectation of leisure.  A fallacy conjoured up by the bourgeois cauldron of life that suggests one can thread entertainment and relaxation into the daily rigmarole. All I can say is that I am done for, vanquished before the glacial melt of chaos. Who invented the weekend anyway? I think it was probably the Victorians, they are responsible for almost everything. They are the are the culprits of fish knives, doilies, sugar tongs and innumerable other bits of paraphernalia guaranteed to complicate daily life.

 To quote one of my favourite plays by Alan Bennett –  The History Boys (available on Netflix) – “History is just one bloody thing after another” and so is life, just one bloody thing after another, and on and on.

The good news is that even a major celebrity such as Jon Stewart appears to be familiar with this sentiment. Down on the Mall amongst a crowd of some 200,000 he was dimly heard to comment “Most Americans don’t live their lives solely as Democrats, Republicans, liberals or conservatives. Americans live their lives more as people who are just a little bit late for something they have to do, often something they do not want to do. But they do it.” And I might add, they do it again and again and again.

We made our way through the crowds towing three small children. The crowd who were there to address sanity and banish fear were mowing down small children in their wheel chairs. There were people hanging from lamp posts and a guy in canary yellow stockings and a pink tutu wrapped around the traffic lights on 7^th and Constitution.  Feminists (with all the allure of bra burners) were handing out stickers saying “This is what a Feminist looks like.”

The Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Keep Fear Alive would have had many a Tea Partyist smiling wryly, if that is what Tea Partyists do which come to think of it, I somewhat doubt. I imagine an immodest and gleeful jubilation amongst the tea leaves at the heady scent of Amsterdam Coffee Shops wafting up from amongst the liberal crowd. Those tofu-eating monkey huggers.

Ever active on the fringes of politics, we did our part to keep fear well and truly alive by shoving Rosalind 16 ft up into a tree so that she might at least get a view. I felt like saying, hey we’ve done the blitz and our milkmen still delivered milk. Then the IRA proved a little pesky (and we still have no trash cans on the Underground) but what the heck, we can now whack our kid up a tree without fear.  When Emile next lifted Eleanor up, the exclamations became more vocal but the gasps soon subsided into relief when she came to rest atop his shoulders. To give the crowd their credit they did applaud Rosalind once she sat firmly upon her branch and then, inspired by this show of endeavour, other people started to climb the trees around us getting further rounds of applause. More tofu-eating monkey huggers.

We left the rally, ate hotdogs and fries in honour of our American friends and were late for every event for the remains of the day. We even managed to maintain the liberal lack of momentum by setting the clocks back or is it forwards a week too early and finding ourselves 101% undressed just 20 minutes before church.