The shit blog of Paul Chris Jones

Dear Diary. I had a wonderful dream last night: I dreamed my girlfriend was Zooey Deschanel, the kooky lead from The New Girl. Or at least, she looked a bit like Zooey Deschanel. Even my dreaming mind knows Zooey Deschanel is way out of my league, so it created a girl who looked a bit like her to make my dream more believable.

"I love you," I told her. I really did love her, even though it was just a dream.

She didn't say anything back, but this was okay because I loved her and that was enough. Then she said she had to leave me unfortunately. It was at that point that I woke up. I had returned to the real world and my dream girl was gone.

I couldn't get back to sleep after that — I had just lost the love of my life, after all — so I left the bedroom and went to the living room to try to sleep on the sofa. I had no idea what time it was, but I soon found out because a few minutes later, the alarm on my phone went off to tell me it was 7 in the morning and time to get up anyway.

A couple of hours later, I took 5-year-old and 1-year-old swimming. There's a swimming pool at the local gym, and children go free on weekends as long as an adult is a member, which I am.

Taking a baby and a five-year-old to the swimming pool, alone by myself, sounds like a recipe for disaster. Making things worse, neither child can swim.

But it went fine. 5-year-old was wearing a float, and I borrowed some armbands from the lifeguard for 1-year-old. I tried letting 1-year-old float in the water by himself, but he swallowed water, and I had to grab him as he spluttered and coughed. But he was smiling afterwards.

The pool was pretty fun. There are three pools in total: a pool for swimming, a smaller pool for doing exercise, and a spa pool. Kids can play in any of the three pools, and what's more, there's a bunch of floats and floating mats that kids are free to use. 5-year-old was lying on a floating mat and pretending it was a boat, and his mat only crashed a few times into a woman doing exercises with water aerobic dumbbells.

After swimming, we stopped on the way home at the playground. 5-year-old rode his scooter around and around the playground, and then one of 5-year-old's schoolfriends showed up, a 6-year-old boy called Gael. We were all playing in the playhouse when Gael's three-year-old sister, Greta, climbed up on the roof of the playhouse and fell off. She managed to put her hands out, so she fell mostly on her hands and knees. But she must have hit her face too because when she stood up, there was a big red mark down the middle of her face. Instead of crying, she calmly got a bottle of water from her mom's bag and poured water over her face. (Putting water on an injury must be something her mom taught her.) Greta's fucking hardcore. She's going to grow up to be an athlete or a stunt woman.

Later, her mom, Ingrid, was sitting on the bench in the sun. She explained it's for the vitamin D.

"I have a cold," she said.

"It must feel strange, having a cold in the summer," I said.

"Not for me," she said. "I get sick more often than most people. It's because of my allergies. I'm allergic to almost everything."

"Almost everything?" I asked, amazed.

"Well, pollen and dust mites," she clarified.

So not "almost everything" then. Pollen and dust mites are probably 0.00000001% of everything. It's like the time Bill Bryson wrote A Short History of Nearly Everything and didn't include Tamagotchis.

"I get sick more often because my white blood cells are constantly busy fighting the allergens," said Ingrid.

Everybody's got hidden problems, it seems. I assumed everyone was living lives of joy and wonder, like in TV adverts, but instead, it's just misery, misery, misery.

Just then, 3-year-old Greta whizzed past us on her bike.

"She's fast," I said.

"She only learned to ride a bike last week," said her mom, Ingrid.

This only adds to my belief that Greta's fucking hardcore. I just hope she doesn't fall off her bike and break her face.

I took 5-year-old and 1-year-old back home, by carrying 1-year-old in one arm and pushing 5-year-old in the pushchair with my other arm.

Once I got the kids home, I left them with Girlfriend so I could go back to the gym to do some weightlifting. Lifting weights, I've recently realised, isn't just something men on steroids do to get ripped. It's something everyone should do because it reduces aches and pains in your body and makes your body less prone to injury.

On the walk to the gym, I passed the site of a car crash. A black Nissan Note was parked on the side of the road, its front bumper missing and a big hole in the front of the car. Next to the car was an ambulance. Two policemen were directing traffic. I don't know what condition the driver was in but I hoped the gym was still there.

I did some weightlifting and went home.

In the evening, I suddenly realised I had left 5-year-old's scooter in the playground four hours earlier, so I ran back in the vain hope it was still there, but no, the scooter was gone. Someone must have taken it. That scooter cost me 50 euro and now someone else has it.

And finally, 1-year-old's started throwing toys off the balcony. It started this evening when out of the corner of my eye, I saw 1-year-old throwing something off the balcony. I ran to the balcony and looked down and saw a toy lying in the road. I ran downstairs and found 1-year-old's rattle lying in the road. It's a miracle it wasn't broken or run over. What's more, there was a toy block too, lying on the pavement. 5-year-old used to do this too when he was a toddler, but instead of dropping toys, he liked dropping pencil crayons. He would drop pencil crayons off the balcony, and sometimes I'd be fast enough to run down and collect them, but sometimes I wouldn't. There was one time when an old woman bent down and picked up one of our pencil crayons and walked off with it, and there was another time when a man with a broom swept a bunch of my pencil crayons into the path of a street cleaning machine.