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Perhaps foolishly I decided to accompany my family to a planned two night trip to Norwich. I was better but still a little fragile and tired, but as you may have noticed I don’t really like illness stopping me doing stuff (I recorded my Taskmaster tasks three weeks after surgery). It’s a stupid attitude that will ultimate kill me, but that’s just the way it is.
In hindsight though a couple of days at home would have been a good idea and also set me up for RHLSTP on Sunday, but we hadn’t really thought it through.
We’d booked a family room in a hotel outside of the city. The hotel is in an old Manor House and looked super posh from the outside. As we arrived Ernie started saying how he’d been here before with his father - neither of us had been here before - and then said that his father had built this house and that he used to live here. As it was hundreds of years old this seemed unlikely, but I’d been reading some stories of people’s kids revealing past lives when they are young and it was possible that we’d chanced across somewhere where Ernie had lived in another time. He kept up the story for the next hour, though it didn’t really stand up too well to scrutiny. He said that he had an older brother called Sweetcorn who was waiting in the house for him. His brother used to give him sweetcorn. It’s unlikely that his brother would be called sweetcorn and distribute sweetcorn, but it’s possible it was a nickname. I thought I could debunk this though as the building looked old and sweetcorn can only be a relatively new crop in this country, but it turns out that although we’ve only been growing it in the last 200 years in this country that the Manor House is not as old as it looks and was actually built in 1859. So it’s possible.
And I’ve just looked up the house and found that the man who built his house had three sons and one of them was called Ernest, so now I’m starting to think that maybe these was something in this after all. No mention of sweetcorn when you google any of the brothers, but that’s the kind of thing that google really lets you down on. (I just asked Ernie if he had two brothers and he confirmed he did and the other one was called Fishfinger - though fish fingers did not exist before 1900. I guess it’s possible that his brother got this nickname for another reason).
Ernie maybe overegged the pudding by claiming that every picture he saw in the hotel was of his father, even one with two people on it, but he kept up the monologue for a long time.
Our “Family Room” turned out to be a fairly small room with two double beds and I immediately realised that any hope of me getting any recuperative sleep tonight was basically out of the window. Whatever combination we slept in the adults were going to be awake most of the night dealing with fighting kids or being kicked by a restless child. And we’re here for two nights. When will I ever learn?
We went round to our friends’ house for dinner and the kids were fairly wild and rude to the hosts, mainly in an amusing way - my son called the dad a "fart carpet” which I thought was pretty imaginative. Luckily it was all taken quite well, but the laughter encouraged the kids to be tiny comedians fuelled by reaction and it was maybe a bit much. No one shat on a patio, but it wasn’t far off.
One of the best RHLSTPs ever, with Tourettes Hero, Jess Thom is this week’s Retro podcast.
Listen here. You won’t regret it.
