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The Aged Ps arrived this afternoon, ahead of my daughter’s fourth birthday party and had a fun time being hit in the face by their youngest grandson and chatting to their youngest grand daughter. They were brought down by one of their other grandchildren (the four they had before I started putting my gametes to work are now almost all in their thirties) and must be slightly weird to have this extra brace of grandchildren to add to their brood (especially as their one great grandchild is older than their youngest grandchild). But this is the modern way my friends and what is perhaps more surprising is that with four adult grand children they only have one great grandchild. What effect will this social/economic revolution have on the population?
I had planned to have an early night, but the family dinner stretched onwards and some amazing family histories were told that we had never heard before. Of course these juicy secrets will remain so, but it’s interesting to hear the complicated lives of those people who drifted in and out of our childhood, when so much is kept from you and all adults seem boringly conventional. Life is complex and we fall in love and in bed with the wrong people and always have done so, so it’s maybe remarkable that these little secrets are a surprise. There is no shame in anything we heard tonight, though maybe some foolishness around the edges, but society treats indiscretions and alternative life styles as shameful and somehow encourages us to believe we ourselves are the only transgressors and must never let people know, for fear that they will judge us from their squeaky clean moral standpoints.
Still, can’t deny it’s exciting to hear this stuff.
But really I am looking for stories that I can put in my blogs and sitcoms, so what a waste of time it was. Luckily my niece told me of my dad’s struggle to work his new TV box and to get it record anything, but somehow ended up series recording the News at Ten without realising. So that’s a good start for the news series of Relativity. It’s no lip balm, but it’ll be useful for something.
My daughter has been anticipating her fourth birthday for such a long time now that I wasn’t sure she’d be able to sleep tonight, but she settled herself quickly enough maybe knowing that if she could get this one sleep out of the way then she’d have hit her goal. She seems to think that she will gain powers over night, telling us she’d be able to go out on her own (if we open the gate for her) and be able to do much more in general. I remember being four and it might have been the happiest time of my life - possibly the rest of my existence has been dedicated to trying to recapture that time - so I hope that Phoebe will have some memories of tomorrow.
My dad remembers his fourth birthday. His present was a pair of green trousers. And apparently nothing else. Phoebe is going to do a little better than that. My earliest birthday memory is of a birthday cake in the shape of Brian the Snail from the Magic Roundabout. I was 28 years old.
