I really didn't want to help. I just wanted to be left alone with the more important task of checking my phone. But she was insistent. "Daddy: Help me make a dollies' castle. " My daughter wanted me to 'make and do'.

They, including our own two, are probably still the most enthusiastic hand-washers. The most trenchant GIVE THEM SPACE stewards on the footpath. And I may have not realised fully how much this might weigh gradually on them. 

"It takes extreme willpower to transport the chips home without pilferage. You won’t tackle the burger while in the car – it’s too complicated and messy, and anyway"

Children invent their own absurd rules of humour and it will most often surpass anything funny an adult can think up

"Before social media, small villages and townlands weren’t mentioned as much. There were simply not so many places to mention them."

For the first time in decades, I’m back on the loose tea. Teabags have been mainstays since they first crept in years ago. Displacing the loose tea like a grey squirrel chasing away poor Sammy. When they arrived first, the tea bags were cleaner.

Day-time TV has its moments. Most of the moments are less than magic.  On a good day, it might be Columbo and hopefully, you’ll have switched on in time for him to prove the gun couldn’t have been fired the way the sweating witness claimed.

Yes! We celebrated. Or rather we used the announcement of a vaccine as an excuse to get filthy pizza. Pizza with the right amount (a lot) of oil drizzled on it. And the garlic mayonnaise that is only possible to get in takeaways.

Cough, she said. Cough, cough cough, she went on. My wife got a cough. A cough we hoped wasn’t The Cough. She rang the doctor confessing the cough hoping to gain absolution.

Life goals: there are different types.