The shit blog of Paul Chris Jones

Dear Diary. It's Monday morning. But there's no school today because today's a bank holiday.

Girlfriend and 1-year-old are in the living room. 5-year-old's in the spare bedroom making things with Lego. I'm in the kitchen and reading a book. It's called Crap Comedy. As far as I know, it's the only copy of this book in existence. The woman who wrote it, Jenny Morrill, only ever published it as a series of blog posts on her blog. She was going to publish it as a book, but one day she tweeted something people didn't like and a Twitter mob attacked her. She was so overwhelmed by the online abuse that she deleted her website and Facebook account and hasn't been online since. But I managed to find her blog and the chapters with the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine. I scraped the chapters from her website and got them printed as a book.

So I'm in the kitchen alone wearing just my boxer shorts while reading this book and bending over to stretch my back. It's bliss.

Then I make the mistake of feeling slightly guilty about spending time alone. And that's the mistake that brings everything toppling down.

First I go to see Girlfriend and 1-year-old. They're in the living room. 1-year-old scoots over and grabs my leg, so I pick him up. Then 5-year-old comes. He sees me and he says, "Let's play, Daddy."

But 1-year-old's done a poo, so I carry him to the changing mat in my bedroom. As I'm walking through the apartment I see how messy it is. There are toys all over the floor. In the spare bedroom, there are bedsheets dumped on the sofa that are clean but were just never put away. They're just dumped on her sofa bed. They've been there for weeks. I blame Girlfriend for this for some reason.

I'm getting angry now. I start swearing: "Fucking hell, fuck sake, fucking piece of fucking shit." I presume Girlfriend and 5-year-old can't hear me. "Your fucking mum is a fucking lazy bitch, 1-year-old. She's a fucking bitch!" But I know it's OK because Girlfriend can't hear me. She's in the living room.

Girlfriend comes.

"How dare you say that!

Oh fuck. She did hear me after all.

She takes 1-year-old and says, "Get out of the house! I don't even want to look at you right now! Get out the house!"

So I grab my book and some swimming stuff and I leave the house. I feel bad. She wasn't supposed to hear me saying those things about it. I didn't really mean them. She wasn't supposed to hear me calling her lazy bitch.

I walk to the local car book sale. There's a broken ukulele for sale. The strings have come off. There are DVDs, one euro each. Most of them are weird ones I've never heard of:

• Judas Kiss starring Alan Rickman and Emma Thompson as FBI agents with insomnia.
• U.S. Marshals, an "explosive thriller filled with adrenaline" starring Tommy Lee Jones and Robert Downey Jr.
• Victims of Love, an erotic thriller starring Pierce Brosnan.
• Basic, an action thriller set on the Panama Canal starring John Travolta and Samuel L Jackson.
• Family Man, a comedy with Nicolas Cage as a Wall Street banker who wakes up one day and finds that he's now a father of two living in a poor neighbourhood. The tagline is, "Would you swap a Ferrari for a mountain of nappies?" I probably would, yeah.

There are also some porn DVDs. There's one called Putas Viciosas ("Vicious Sluts").

Then I go to the swimming pool, swim for half an hour, and then go outside to read the book on a deckchair. To get to the deckchairs you have to walk across the grass, and as I walk across the grass barefoot, all these tiny little sharp bits that have fallen from the trees jab into my foot. "Christ! OW! AH! OW! CHRIST!" No wonder everyone else has sandals.

I go in the sauna for 15 minutes, take a shower and start heading home. I'm feeling good. It's nice to spend time alone. You forget who you're supposed to be. I walk down the street enjoying the sun on my skin. I steal glances at the hot women walking past. There's a smell that reminds me of childhood: a shop that smelled like the Black Country Living Museum. The smell of coal. Very strange. I must have imagined it.

I get home. There's no one there. There's still stuff all over the floor. I sigh. The cushion colours are garish and mismatched. If I tried to change the colours of the cushions, Girlfriend would tell me the cushions are fine and don't need to be changed. We're missing one curtain. The shelves are full of clutter. The floor is covered in toys and books. Maybe it is best to just dump everything on the floor after all. It worked for my sister and brother. As teenagers, their bedrooms were like bomb sites.

I sit on the balcony at home and finish reading the Crap Comedy book. It was a good book except the chapters were out of order, probably because I formatted it wrong. I try to add it to Goodreads as to the list of books I've read but Goodreads won't let me do it because it doesn't exist in their database.

I hear Girlfriend, 5-year-old and 1-year-old come home. They eat lunch in the kitchen without me.

I vaguely wonder what to do next. The phrase "willy snaps" comes into my head for some reason. I don't know what it means but it's quite funny.

I feel like I should tidy the apartment. I google "IKEA living room" to see what a living room should look like. In the pictures that come up, everything is white. White bookshelves, white shelves, white walls. White white white white white.