The rural Herring family made their way bewildered and excited, terrified of encountering the dragons that legend tells dwell if you dare to travel beyond Rodney Stoke, to the big city of London town. The fact that none of them fell off the end of the Earth was a surprise.
They had come to the capital as a special treat to celebrate the birthday of my sister Jill, who most would assume was five years younger than me, but who has now lived for half a century. It makes no sense. It seems like yesterday that she was walking around Cheddar in her Bay City Rollers gear. And it was just yesterday. She still loves them. Les Mckeown would still not be safe from her advances.
She is an amazing woman and genuinely surprised to discover that pretty much the whole family had turned up to celebrate her weekend: which was quite a feat as my dad had apparently been giving the game away on the entire train journey, letting it slip about who was going to be meeting them and managing to give significant clues about the evening surprise entertainment in his haste to not give anything away. Someone should write a sitcom about this family. Oh hold on, someone pretty much did. It just never got made. We could only speculate about what external use only balm or unguent might get consumed by the elderly Cheddar man today.
To add to the sitcom vibe my nephew Andrew (you know the one who broke my favourite mug and who beat me at tennis) had booked my parents' train tickets for them. He's usually quite a reliable young man, when you can stop him drinking and touching himself, but he'd foolishly booked the tickets for the 1st September and not the 8th. Which my dad only noticed on the morning of travel. Other people would have been tempted to risk using the week old tickets and then if challenged by the inspector "pretend" to be senile, perhaps by consuming a vat of lip balm instead of answering any questions, but my parents are painfully honest - they were once burgled and thought that some expensive cufflinks had been taken and were reimbursed. Months later they found the cufflinks and whilst some people might have decided to keep the money having got one up on the insurance company they immediately rang up to offer to pay the money back. When I did an insurance company prize giving I mentioned this story and was told that the people working at the insurance company would have found this a massive ball-ache as it would mean opening up a closed file. But my parents' decency has no regard for the line of least resistance. They made the insurance people suffer for their own mistake.
So of course dad today paid for another set of (expensive) train tickets, even though it would have been a hard-hearted train guard who would have not turned a blind eye to this obvious human error. But you have to respect him for not even considering giving it a go. He is an example I could never live up to, hence my decline into moral laxity.
I should probably have resolved to do nothing but drink during September because the booze binge continues. We met at a posh hotel at St Pancras Station and had brunch, including champagne and Bloody Marys. Our waiter had gone to University with my nephew Andrew, weirdly enough, so probably had a thousand stories of him getting drunk and then touching himself, but he managed to retain his professional decorum.
It was a fun and laugh-filled lunchtime, my sister crying tears of joy at almost everything that happened. Her day was just beginning. Later she would be going to the Last Night at the Proms where, of course something weird had to happen to fulfil the sitcom Gods' whim. The lady sitting next to them collapsed and they had to try and look after her as the concert continued. Nothing can just go ahead without incident for my family.
They are brilliant. And my sister (with the possible exception of my gran - who of course didn't make the trip) is the best one.
Happy Birthday Jill.
