The Emperor of Ice Cream

Saturday, 2^nd May 2020

Do you remember the crazy 2019 Christmas of Total Freedom? Utterly fucking amazing wasn’t it? Spending a lot of time with your family, lounging around in your pyjamas, drinking too much, and overeating. Hold on…

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This last week, was the one when we went mad here. It appears there’s only so much time you can pour into a house before the walls start bulging and something has to give. In our case, it was our sanity.

You know when you’re in prison and the conditions are shit but then someone tries to escape and so they ramp things up a notch. Random beatings, strip searches, pissing in your soup. This last week, that was the rain, reminding you that going outside is futile as well as semi-illegal. Even the Americans can’t shoot a cloud to death. It was a visual and sensory reminder of your own mental health: the black cloud that has sat around your head like a halo of your own mortality.

This was the week when my own attempts at working from home began to increasingly resemble the Screenager’s attempts at home learning. I had the attention span of a gnat. I jumped from editing the Chinese romance novels to the geisha puzzle to booping the Angry Moustache to un-hot yoga to eating to lying down with the dog to bouncing back to my laptop to see how many of my class of Year 5s were not engaging with the work I was laying before their feet in an act of pedagogic supplication.

My wife and I kept trying to think of reasons to get the Screenager in an upright position. On Wednesday, I move the car off the drive and stand two pallets upright to make a tennis net. Ever so slightly intrigued, I finally shift the Angry Moustache off the sofa to investigate (just before dusk). Incredibly, he bites and we begin a game. Within five minutes, we have somehow morphed into two characters called Simon and Cecil who both have lisps (Thimon and Thethil) and some serious special needs. The ball is hit everywhere except on the drive-court and the argument rages about who has the ‘thpecial thkills.’ Eventually, to decide an argument between the imaginary lispers, a race is decided and we ‘run’ down the road flailing arms and legs in a wild approximation of actual running. At the bottom of the road, in a sudden desperate lunge for the finish line, I overdo it and slip, falling arse over tit in front of a woman leading a pony down the road with her daughter riding along and literally looking down on us as I lie there laughing in a way that attracts straitjackets.

The next day, this look is repeated by a mother and young son walking past our house who see me and the Screenager going full method acting in the front room as Thimon and Thethil interrupt their game of ‘indoor squash’ to have a dance off: flossing (or ‘flothing’) for our lives.

So embedded are these characters that on Thursday night, during a game of Monopoly, we indulge in a ‘Nipple Rave’ that has the Voodoo Parsnip wondering what kind of family she has been adopted by. We might have got away with this if we hadn’t kept pushing our luck. Thethil would only make a property + cash deal if Thimon danced the money over to him tucked into the crevice of his butt cheeks. Unfortunately for the Voodoo Parsnip, Thimon didn’t hesitate and to one of Fatboy Slim’s Lockdown Mixtapes, he duly twerked his way towards his lisp-y twin with a fan of fake banknotes erupting from his arse-crack. A kind of gay pole-dancing peacock. Another memory (that can never be erased) forged during lockdown.

The game of Monopoly ends with the Screenager slapping the Cine-Teen over some minor verbal infraction and the Cine-Teen slapping the Screenager in reply. Incredibly, the Voodoo Parsnip has never played Monopoly before and naively asked, earlier in the evening, ‘How does this game end?’ It had already gone on for about three days as we sang, drank, waited for the Cine-Teen to go for a ‘drill poo’, argued, twerked, and so on and son on. I should have told her then: it ends like all things end in this patriarchal arse-wipe of a world of ours, with two males butting heads in a futile display of power.

Lidl's Snuggle Booties

It was the week when I began to look forward to going shopping at Lidl as ‘something to do.’ And worse, in the absence of actual shops to waste your money in, I began to spend more time in the Aisle of Dreams – the middle of Lidl – where one can be constantly surprised/intrigued by the array of unnecessary artefacts on display. This week, I came home with two rolls or artificial grass and two solar lights whose lifespan will probably make the poor peacock butterfly look like a Galapagos turtle. If lockdown keeps getting extended, our house could end up being filled with Revolving Garden Gnomes (‘head twists 360 degrees!’) and frying pans that play Yankee Doodle Dandy.

In this inverted world we inhabit, in these elastic times, the only credible response is insanity…

I scream. You scream. We all scream for I scream.

You don’t have to go mad to stay alive during lockdown but it helps.

‘Let the lamp affix its beam.

The only emperor is the emperor of ice cream.’

-         Wallace Stevens

Latest data for the UK (as of 8pm):

Infected: 182,260

Deaths: 28,131

Celebrity Deaths: 3 (This figure is disappointingly low. I have now lowered the bar for what makes a celebrity and enthusiastically invite some 'influencers' to cop it (whilst filming their own demise, of course))

People I know who are infected: 1 (one of my wife’s cousins)

Song of the Day: ‘Crazy’ – Gnarls Barkley