Ten years in a sleepdeprived blur. I would not change a thing

Jon Snow must have exceptional reserves of stamina. In an interview with Saga, the 75-year old TV news presenter has been talking about becoming a father again two years ago.

He feels completely at ease with a toddler around the house, he says. Almost as if the whole experience is stress free and that there has been no discernible disruption to his routine.

It’s been more than 30 years since my daughter, Anna, was born – her brother, Robbie, arrived three years later – and I am still carrying the mental scars. Endless interrupted sleep. Lying in bed, listening to one of them crying and wondering if I pretended to be asleep for long enough that my wife might wake up and do the honours. Knowing there was a chance that she too was awake and was hoping I might crack first.

As they got older, there were other challenges. Getting them out of bed and off to school. Trying to remember what they needed to take with them. I would guess that more than 10 years of my life passed in a sleep-deprived blur where I was functioning at about 50% capacity. Don’t get me wrong. I wouldn’t have changed a thing. Well, not much. I love the kids to bits, but it was hard work.

I struggled to survive all this in my late 30s and early 40s. Doing all this again the best part of 40 years later seems unthinkable.

Tuesday

Back in 2002, Stephen Hawking told his researcher Thomas Hertog that he had got his book

A Brief History of Time all wrong. It had been written from the wrong perspective. More than 20 years later, that new theory is to be published next month in Hertog’s On the Origin of Time.

Having been one of the few who actually read Hawking’s Brief History from cover to cover – as opposed to the millions who bought it – I ought to be alive to the differences in the new book. But I almost certainly won’t be.

After 10 pages or so of Brief History, I was hopeless lost. Each sentence would make some kind of sense on its own, but by the time I had reached the end of the paragraph Hawking had lost me.

Here’s Hertog trying to explain his new perspective. “Stephen and I discovered how physics itself can disappear back into the big bang. Not the laws as such but their capacity to change has the final word in our theory.” Mmm. Not a clue.

Wednesday

Lord Pannick first came to my notice back in 2016 when I was sketching the article 50 Brexit case in the supreme court. The KC was acting for Gina Miller and even to an untrained legal eye it was obvious he was a class act.

He operated with a Zen-like calm and astonishing grasp of the detail, and long before the court gave its verdict I felt confident enough to deliver mine. That he had made the barristers acting for the government look like halfwits.

But even the best lawyers can only work with the material they are given. Boris Johnson may have hired Pannick and his team of three legal outriders – at a cost to you and me of an estimated £250,000 – in the hope he could pull off a miracle for his appearance before the privileges committee. But no such luck. Johnson just about held it together for his 15-minute opening statement.

Things really fell apart thereafter when the questioning began. The implausible excuses tumbled out. The ontological contradiction: a habitual liar could never be accused of misleading because everyone knew he was lying.

Long before the end, it all got too much for Pannick. He then leaned back and rolled his eyes. A sure sign that the game was up. When the country’s best £5,000-an-hour lawyer can’t keep a poker face then you’re really screwed. That and when Jacob Rees-Mogg and Michael Fabricant are your sole support. Time to move on.

Thursday

Finland remains the happiest country in the latest World Happiness Report, published this week. Eight of the top 10 are European countries, though not, sadly, the UK.

We have dropped a couple of places to 19th. Just how much work we’ve got to do to climb up the table is illustrated by some of the differences between us and Germany, in 16th, that I found in a Twitter thread.

Average wages in Germany are £43,500. In the UK they are £26,200. In Germany, the state pension is 70% of your final salary; in the UK it’s a flat £9,627. Or 37% of the average salary.

Then there’s the rental market. Rent on the average one-bed flat is 18% of an average salary. In the UK it’s 34%. Universities are free in Germany. A UK degree will cost about £30,000.

Most people have looked at the World Happiness Report and wondered why the UK was not higher. I see it differently. It’s a miracle we’re not even lower. After all, even life expectancy is falling in the UK.

Though not for everyone. Rupert Murdoch has just announced he is getting married again, for the fifth time, at the age of 92. He has rather optimistically said that he is looking forward to them spending the “second halves of their lives together”. Which suggests he is planning on living to 184.

God knows what number wife he will be on to then. Each marriage seems to get shorter than the last one. So by the time Rupey is 150 he will be getting married and divorced on the same day.

Friday

My favourite weekend of the year. Tomorrow the clocks go forward and suddenly the world seems like a slightly less intimidating, less depressing place.

Soon, too, there will be warmth in the sun and we’ll be able to sit outside in the evening. This is the time of year I live for.

Two other things also lift my mood this weekend. The first is that there is no Premier League football. Normally I regard the international break as an irritating interruption to the real action. But right now Spurs are driving me nuts and it is good to have some time off from traipsing up to White Hart Lane to watch negative, clueless football.

The other highlight of the weekend is a new BBC adaptation of Great Expectations. I can’t wait. I’m a sucker for a period drama. Not least when the previews are winding up all the right people.

Various Daily Mail blowhards are outraged that the new series dares to criticise the British empire. Charles Dickens would be horrified, they say. Except he so obviously wouldn’t. If he were writing today, the likes of Sarah Vine and Dan Wootton would be trashing Dickens for being far too woke for endlessly going on about social inequality.

Then on Monday, the return of one of the best series on TV. Succession. Just one slight problem. I can’t remember what happened at the end of the last series. Time to do some homework.