Family

We were still in bed this morning recovering from Saturday Night At The Taxi Rank when Number One Daughter turned up, accompanied by Number One Son-In-Law and Ritalin Boy and a hangover.

Fortunately we were sitting up in bed wearing dressing gowns and drinking coffee, because they let themselves in at the back door and came and dived in bed with us, in the way families do. Ritalin Boy needed some raspberries blowing on his tummy then, and it took a while to get them all out again.

They had brought their cats with them, as they are both working away over the next couple of weeks, and had decided that our house would be a good place to leave them. To fully appreciate my emotions at this revelation you would have to have already entertained a treasured new carpet and two incontinent cats in the same house. It appeared that they had originally taken them to Ritalin Boy’s Other Grandma: but to their surprise and not at all to mine she had explained that she would prefer it if they went somewhere else.

The dog was fascinated by this development, and very excited in a tail-wagging growly sort of way. The cats responded to this mostly by glaring at him from the top of the sofa, occasionally interrupted with icy and detached outbursts of calculated and malicious violence which seem to have left him with a sore nose and a sharp decline in his self-confidence.

The plan for the day was that we all went together down to the PamperMe Loveliness Beautiful Wellness Health Spa, which was hosting a fitness challenge which Number One Daughter quite fancied, so whilst she and Number One Son-In-Law bounced about the gym we would take Ritalin Boy and Oliver and his friend Harry for a swim.

This took ages of organising and messing about and drinking cups of tea and hunting for swimming things and trying to negotiate peace amongst the animals, and eventually remembering that Oliver and Harry were not actually there anyway but in Harry’s house on the other side of the road where they had stayed the night before, and Mark went across to extricate them which took another half an hour.

All in all it was half past one before we made it down to the Health Spa, where I realised to my relief that all of the accompanying offspring were male and therefore inadmissible to our changing room: so Number One Daughter and I got ourselves changed in relative peace. She was disparaging about my underwear: which was justified but depressing as it may be some time before I can afford to upgrade, especially since I have just spent a small fortune upgrading Lucy’s. She went off to do the Fitness Challenge before her swim, and I dashed into the pool to see if I could manage a few minutes of peace before the others joined us.

We turned out to be exactly the sort of family I would absolutely loathe to find in the swimming pool when I go for my evening swim. Oliver and Harry splashed about yelling, and Ritalin Boy did reckless leaps off the side, and Mark chased them up and down being a shark, and when Number One Daughter and Number One Son-In-Law got in they were hot and sweaty and pleased with themselves for having got the fastest time in the gym despite the hangovers,  and made sure everybody else knew that they were inadequate.

We had saunas and showers and reconvened in the hotel lounge for lunch, which was gorgeous, especially because we had forgotten to have breakfast in all of the excitement. Mark and I had a restorative glass of the hotel’s house red: and the lady at the next table complained that we were too noisy so I suggested that she went somewhere else. We ate lots of everything, and Ritalin Boy charged about being a pest, and Number One Daughter remembered that she had a train to catch and they buzzed off leaving us with Ritalin Boy and the bill.

After that we wandered through Bowness pretending to be tourists, which was splendid fun, and Mark and the boys had ice creams: Ritalin Boy’s was green and Oliver’s was pink and Harry’s was bamboo colour: and we looked at everything and bought some cherries in brandy and chocolate for us and a Singalong Disc with his name in every song for Ritalin Boy to play in the car on car journeys, by way of a small revenge for the cats.

When Number One Son-In-Law came to collect him we made sure they put it on the car CD player before they left. Ritalin Boy will take it from there.

He is of a determined sort of nature.