Opinion: Janet Christie - Spring arrives with a bang to banish blursday

Spring is in the air.

“Happy Blursday,” I say to Youngest when we meet in the kitchen area of the workpod while I wait for the kettle to boil.

“What?”

“Blursday. When you don’t know what day it is. It’s a new term coined during the pandemic. Like covidiot or smize. It’s like Groundhog Day, or Grounddown Day more like.”

“Nah. Never heard of it. No-one I know is saying that,” she says. “It’s not a thing. Anyway, what’s ‘coined’?”

“Coins. We used to use them to buy things. Fifty pences, 20 pences, heptagon-shaped, and pounds, round, gold coloured… you lot used to eat them, shove them up your noses.”

“Aw yeah.”

“So ‘coined’ means created, like…” I give up. She’s already back on her phone.

Snowdrops, a sign that spring is on the way.

I feel nostalgia for the days when coins littered the kids’ bedroom floors because they were too lazy to pick them up and to avoid hoovermageddon I collected them then splurged it all on tobacco. Ah, fags. Sigh.

I’m a bit bored. Yes, if all I have to moan about is monotony I’m lucky, but now it’s year two of cancelling holidays, gigs and nights out it’s disorientating. A feeling of permanent grogginess has me in its grip.

Think I must be tired, I’ll take my own advice and go back to bed.

“You sleep, you must need it,” I’ve always said to teenagers, more out of convenience than anything, aware I’m committing heresy in a wider family of dawn risers where anyone in bed beyond dawn must be ill.

But if the kids were sleeping I knew where they were; they weren’t breaking the house or themselves, and while they were dozing the two sides of the juvenile brain might find each other and they’d eventually wake into adulthood.

The only downside to this parenting style is sleep fuels growth, but this comes in handy later for DIY purposes; they can put up shelves, move pianos, donate hand-me-down hoodies - ideal workingfromhomewear/snoozewear...

“Think I’ll just have a nap, make like a bear...” I say and slip away to my room. Bliss.

“Mother!” Youngest throws back the door with a bang.

“What? Go away. I’m sleeping.”

“No! Wake up! Stay with us!” she shouts.

“I’m hibernating.”

“Get up! Get out!”

“It’s winter. Gaia wants us to sleep.”

“Well you’re too late. You’ve missed it. It’s Spring!!!”

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