Bedtime Blues and Clerihews

My younger son - to avoid confusion with the elder (Finn Jr), I'll call Ginn Jr (or maybe, Ginger?) - is at an age where he is changing his preferred method of falling asleep.

Until recently, the best way of invoking a nap involved strapping him into either a pushchair or a car seat and expending either leg or diesel power to trundle him into the land of Nod.

However, I'd noticed that my evening walks pushing the buggy around the streets of Mile Cross were getting longer and longer and the end result less certain. Sometimes I would complete the whole extended podcast edition of In Our Time and, whilst my knowledge of the early modern Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth would be satisfyingly increased, the little one would still be pushing the hood of the buggy back to get a better look at the people smoking outside Mecca Bingo.

I don't think we're in Mile Cross anymore...

I downloaded a step counting app to give myself an idea of how punishing these evening walks were becoming. The week when I twice recorded 19,000+ steps, I decided a new approach was needed.

I recalled a method of getting a child to sleep that had briefly worked with Finn Jr at a similar age. This is where I try waiting until he is really tired and lying down in the dark next to him and hoping like hell that he drops off before I do. 80% of the time, this works and I can transfer him to the cot and sneak downstairs for a rewarding glass of Côtes de Gascogne. The other 20%, my wife has to wake me up to tell me I've missed Only Connect.

In an attempt to stave off the inevitable wave of drowsiness that lying down in a darkened room brings on, I like to compose clerihews in my head. (I expect that you'll recall from this 2014 Finnginn blog post that clerihews are four line whimsical biographical poems that don't have to scan and follow an AABB rhyme scheme.)

A new crop of government ministers has revealed a rich harvest of names crying out to be Clerihewed (clerihewn?). Here are three that I have remembered long enough to write down:

Kwasi Kwarteng

Took up a pen

And wrote down a tax-and-spend policy

That wrote off the UK economy.

Suella Braverman

Do me a favour, man?!

What's sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander:

Stick yourself on the next flight to Rwanda.

Goodbye, Liz Truss -

Gone by Christmas.

When Liz Truss sees the Christmas trees

She'll celebrate with a plate of imported cheese.

In the time I've taken to write and edit this, rumours have been circulating that Kwarteng has been sacked as Chancellor. You heard it here first!

In the interests of fairness, feel free to add your own clerihews about members of the shadow cabinet in the comments...

Notes on quitting smoking

Two years ago, perhaps a decade after the above photo was taken by my stepsister, I was convinced to give quitting tobacco a go - and I'm finally ready to talk about the experience.

There are two chief categories of ex-smoker that I encountered while bartending:

1. Those who secretly still love smoking - who will blag rollies off you when they are drunk and without their partner.
2. Those who apparently never really liked smoking in the first place and become vehement campaigners in the anti-tobacco lobby.

I think I am destined to be a category one ex-smoker. But here are my notes on quitting in case they are useful to anyone else thinking of sucking their final menthol tip.

The physical experience of quitting

Overcoming the physical addiction to nicotine has been made much easier by the invention of vaping. In the early days of quitting smoking, I was able to ease my cravings by vaping. Luckily, vaping is a thoroughly unpleasant experience and therefore much easier to stop.

When the battery was fully charged, the experience of vaping was like being at an amateur dramatics production of Macbeth when an over-eager stagehand gives the dry-ice machine full throttle. When the battery was low, the model I adopted was liable to malfunction and deposit a thin dribble of acidic vaping liquid into the mouth. 

I was able to give up vaping within a week (compare that to the smooth taste of delicious Golden Virginia, that had me hooked for a quarter century).

Some people seem to love vaping, so maybe I wasn't doing it right? Perhaps I lack the willpower to experiment with flavours and equipment to make it a proper habit. If so I might be the first person to give up nicotine through a lack of willpower?

The mental experience of quitting

I found it helpful to imagine there is a little compartment somewhere in the mind where you can put thoughts to ignore them. By definition, minds are mental phenomena, where the imaginary is real - so imagining like this is a feature that your mind possesses is sufficient to make it a feature that your mind possesses. Believing in your imaginary ignored memory compartment makes it real enough for our purposes.

Thus equipped, when your mind occasionally nudges: “Time for a lovely cigarette!”, you have a compartment ready to file away the thought. And you don't just have to use it for cigarette cravings - why not store your nagging regrets, resentments and anxieties in it too? Just make sure you seal it up really tight - don't want that lot leaking out on a random rainy Thursday hangover.

As you can see from this before and after, quitting smoking enables you to grow a fulsome moustache as you won't be setting fire to it trying to relight half-inch long rollies that have gone out.