Groundhog Day with the Screenager

Monday, 13^th April 2020

WARNING: Almost the entire blog post is devoted to Teen 2. He has, bravely and perhaps foolishly, announced that today things will be different. So, I have today kept this Word doc open to monitor his, ahem, movements and speech, adding to it all day to get an honest account of lockdown with The Screenager!

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The Screenager has promised he will be more active today so let’s see how that goes. He admitted to boring himself stupid in the last few days by accumulating enough virtual money playing Madden 20 to buy some virtual Easter eggs that could be opened on Easter Sunday. Inside the eggs are players he can add to his team. It is almost all he can talk about and none of us can join in, our knowledge of American Football being largely limited to knowing it is played in America and the football isn’t round.

Yesterday, the Screenager waited for the appointed hour by playing Madden 20 and watching the clock for the official egg-opening time. When it was time, he got the dog to press the X button to open one of his eggs and I did one with my nose and the disappointment was palpable. All that work for some guy (or ‘legend’) who played for some team, some decades ago. If I said he had an existential moment of realising that the life he was living was essentially meaningless and he would be better off spending his time reading the Tao Te Ching and developing his inner consciousness, I would be exaggerating. A lot. But he makes a promise to ‘do more tomorrow.’

It would be hard to do less.

1:30pm The born-again, avowed ex-Screenager, has been up for a mere two hours. He is lying across the whole of the sofa in his pyjamas, playing Madden, watching Friends, and growing an unsightly moustache. He is unwashed and unshaved and unchanged from yesterday. He has had breakfast, just after we had lunch. So far, he has ignored several gentle promptings to go and get dressed. Stock response: ‘After this game,’ or ‘After this episode,’ which, as the end of each game and episode never exactly correlate, is like saying, ‘I’m stuck in a time-loop continuum,’ or just, ‘No.’

Yesterday, when in the late afternoon I took to ramping up the gentle requests to something more shaming, ‘Do you know how long you’ve been lying there?’ he turned his ghost-white face towards me and the cracked lips below his straggly moustache shaped me some honest words, ‘I’m happy. Do you want to stop me being happy?’

‘Of course I do. I’m your father,’ was my reply and I faked to steal his phone and the iPad which finally saw him judder into action.

Increasingly, our interactions end up in some kind of playfight, a horribly one-sided playfight, to be honest. Since the chess boxing ended with a black eye and a knockdown and an easy points victory, the Screenager has been eyeing up the fading black eye with interest. He assumes that once it’s gone, we are good to go again. More frighteningly, he has suddenly expressed an interest in chess. I’m not stupid; he doesn’t want to get really good at chess. He just wants to get good enough to avoid being quickly checkmated and prolong the battering I get in the garden where I duck and dive and spin and change from orthodox to southpaw and occasionally turn my back in utter cowardice as he jabs and hooks and cuts with a look in his eye of a cat that has caught a bird, chewed off one wing, and which it now ‘owns’ as its plaything. Until it gets bored and decides to kill it.

1:40, The Screen is finally persuaded to switch off the PS4. He lurches into the conservatory to jumble up all the puzzle pieces that were sorted by shape and colour.

‘Is that annoying?’ he asks.

‘’Just go and get dressed,’ we both tell him.

He starts to lift up some of the pieces from the nearly completed puzzle.

‘Do you find this annoying?’ he asks.

I take the jack end of the headphones by the computer and prod them into the back of his neck.

‘Is this annoying?’ I ask him.

He half-suddenly gets up from the chair as if he is going to attack me but changes his mind, moves back into the lounge, announces he is ‘going back on the PS4’ and slides the door shut on us. My wife follows him in there and somehow persuades him to eat lunch instead. I find him in the kitchen eating another bowl of cereal, ignoring the home-made bread my wife baked earlier, presumably because it lacks the necessary sugar content that keeps him so active. Whilst he eats, he composes a haiku that uses the image of the dead peacock to encapsulate the fragile yet beautiful nature of existence during a global pandemic. Not really. He watches another episode of Friends, so he can delay putting on any clothes for another 24 minutes.

If this is a war of attrition (on our nerves), he is winning.

2:15 He appears in the lounge again, dressed, iPad in hand, another episode of Friends on the go.

‘You’re dressed!’ I exclaim cheerily.

‘Only because I spilt cereal on myself,’ he declares moodily.

‘How about a game of garden cricket?’ I suggest.

‘Maybe,’ he says, eyes fixed on ‘his baby.’

‘Like now?’ I say, hopefully.

‘Twelve minutes,’ he says. ‘I’ve got this to watch.’ He stretches himself out on the other sofa (clearly fancied a change of scene), and adds, ‘I like this more than you.’

Which I understand. It was the iPad, after all, that went to work in a job it hated so you could go on a nice holiday to Morocco, and it was the iPad that spent a whole summer on the tennis courts with you when you were seven, and, if I remember correctly, it is the iPad that stills helps you with your English homework as you sit half-arsed in the background messaging your friends (probably something along the lines of ‘my dad is a complete dick’) watching the iPad, to all intents and purposes, do your homework for you, and it was the iPad that used to impersonate a mad camel and chase you around the house on all fours making weird noises and sniffle-snuffling your neck until you nearly giggled yourself to death. Let’s hear it for the hard-working, parental substitute that is the Apple iPad. A big shout-out to Steve Jobs.

2:45 Screenager sent back upstairs to wash his face. He has his phone with him and so, will, sadly, never be seen again.

3:00 I was wrong; he’s back. And hungry. It’s time for lunch. Phone in hand, he works his way through half a pound of focaccia, feet up on the worktop and long legs blocking access in and out of the kitchen. Somehow, I have upset him and he is not looking at, or talking to me.

3:20 Screenager comes into lounge to lie on the dog. Sent back upstairs to find socks and a hoodie. The monumental decision has been taken to go to the pet shop and buy some things for the old dog and the new puppy.

3:50 We’re in the car.

4:50 We’re home. Dog toys and treats bought. Dog walked in park. Rugby ball lethargically thrown around in the sunshine. On the way back, we ask the Screenager if he wants to do an indoor HIIT class with us. ‘High intensity? No.’ In the end, he agrees to some yoga.

5:30 HIIT class finished, we go into the lounge where the Screenager is cuddling the soft fluffy hippo we bought for the puppy and stretched out on the sofa watching, yes, you guessed it, more episodes of Friends. He agrees to a gentle yoga class which will probably look a lot like his current level of activity but without the iPad.

5:40 Finally, the house goes quiet. I no longer have to listen to Joey Tribbiani being deliberately stupid or Chandler making quips or Phoebe playing her guitar and singing a song about a cat.

6:00 He emerges, eyes roving for the iPad. After that violent burst of yoga, his body demands some relaxation.

6:01 The jangling guitar chords of the opening bars of the Friends theme tune can be heard once more. The Screenager grabs the fluffy hippo off the old dog and sticks it inside his T-shirt. Then he puts his dressing gown over his clothes, pulls the hood up and lies down. He grabs the PS4 controller and starts playing Madden in this most Groundhog of Days.

7:00 We walk past him with bowls of food, saying ‘dinner’ as if he were a hungry dog. He lurches to the table and burps as he sits down. He looks at his bowl of food with an expression hovering between boredom and disgust. He would, given the chance, be eating another bowl of cereal. Eventually, he is persuaded it contains nothing that will kill him outright and he begins picking through it. He finishes and burps to declare the meal finished (he is proud of his burps and refers regularly to the legendary ‘burp that made Tracey cry’).

8:15 Dinner is finished as is a few games of cards.

‘Who’s going to help me clear up?’ Amanda Wife asks.

Both boys push their chairs back and explain that they ‘need a poo.’

‘You can do it after, then,’ I say.

8:20 Teen 1 has shuffled off upstairs to the toilet. The Screenager has resumed his position on the sofa: PS4 – Madden, iPad – Friends. The fluffy hippo dog toy sits on his lap. Amanda can be heard clearing up the kitchen, alone.

8:30 I am ending this here. I can tell you what happens next because it has the inevitability of death. Neither teenager will do any clearing up. Teen 1 will spend the evening in his bedroom Face-Timing his girlfriend and the Screenager will be booted out of the lounge so we can sit down. He will then either go and lie on the bed in the front room or go and lie on his own bed if the stairs don’t look too daunting. At about 10:30 we will start the process of ending his day. He will say, ’12 minutes until the end of my episode.’

We will say okay because we are broken shadows of our former selves and we have lost. Again.

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I’ve done a complete month of what was supposed to be a diary/account of the pandemic but has instead morphed and warped itself into strange shapes. I have spent more and more time each day reading (research), watching videos (masochism), and writing (the fun bit), then finally assembling some photos to break up the text and afterwards trying not to get too drunk to edit and post it at the end of the day.

But now, I am easing back because as lockdown and social distancing continues, and the new abnormal is just our everyday existence, I will struggle to assemble a daily blog post to live up to the very high standards I have for myself and which you, loyal readers, deserve. I will, instead, post whenever I have something worthy or inspiring whilst maintaining my pledge to avoid the overtly political angles which have me frothing at the mouth.

Thank you for reading my babble; thank you for sharing it and passing it on to people you know. As I write this, in the course of the 30 days since I started my blog, I have had 2,171 page views. This has even led to my blog being listed on a website of top 20 satirical blogs (I was number 20) and I have had readers from 16 different countries including the United Arab Emirates, Turkey, Belgium and Australia. I know nobody in those countries so whoever you are, thank you, too. Looking at the blog stats, I can also see that I have had two readers from an ‘Unknown Region’ which is either the government spying on my subversive rants or the Draco reptilian overlords are onto me and I might be spending some time hurtling through the galaxy with an angrily inserted probe erasing my memory.

I will keep posting links to Facebook and Twitter when I have something to say. Please keep reading, keep safe, and for fuck’s sake, stay at home (the neighbours are watching you!).

Latest data for the UK (as of 9pm):

Infected: 88,621

Deaths: 11,329

Celebrity Deaths: 3 

People I know who are infected: 1 (one teaching assistant)

Song of the Day: ‘The End’ – The Doors