Sat on the rug, drinking my wine, biding my time

More often than not, it’s halfway down the second bottle of Rioja on a Saturday night when everyone with a drink inside them is suddenly filled with cutting edge philosophical insight.

Regular readers (hello mum) may remember me and the boss had, with reckless abandon, decided not to drink booze for the whole month of September.

Well, we did it.

It wasn’t that hard and the health benefits seemed to level out after a couple of weeks and not drinking became normal.

Weekends lasted about four days and all the money we’d normally spend on wine was spent on something else – so as well as not feeling like a powered up Pac-Man on a Sunday morning we were no richer either.

But Saturday was October 1 which meant September was over and out came the corkscrew, the clinky sound and the glug glug glug noises and even Strictly Come Dancing was made bearable with a few glasses of wine flavoured anaesthetic.

Hell, I even warmed to Ed Balls as he danced like your dad on ecstasy.

Anyway, this moment of clarity.

Our family, the four of us, we are The Beatles.

Solid gold, the real deal, a pristine 1968 copy of The White Album in human form.

A band at its peak with the whole far greater than the sum of its parts.

And just like The Beatles in 1968, we’ve got about two years before the wheels come off and the band splits – when daughter #1 goes off to university.

To be honest, sometimes it feels like she’s moved out already.

I dropped her off at sixth form last Friday morning, she stayed over at her friend’s on Friday night, went to work on Saturday, stayed over at another friend’s on Saturday night and we picked her up from the station at noon on Sunday.

Hello stranger!

We thought you’d gone so we rented your room out.

After that we went on an enforced family walk with our adolescent lurcher where we didn’t get lost in the woods for too long and the dog didn’t disgrace himself too much – put it this way his three out of five stars behaviour was enough to earn himself a little pot of ice cream which he licked clean with his eyes shut.