Noble Diarist

The day started on a most uncomfortable note when on opening a drawer I inadvertently got a splinter jammed down my fingernail.

I can tell you that I was every bit as brave and heroic as you might imagine, and hopped about and squeaked and said bad words. Mark had to take it out with my eyebrow tweezers, which hurt a very great deal, especially because we couldn’t find his glasses first. I shall also tell you a secret, which is that I think there is still a bit of splinter left stuck down my nail, but I am not going to tell Mark, because he will want to look and try and get it out, and I think I would prefer to be hospitalised with a septic fingernail rather than suffer that particular agony again.

I tell you this because it is very fresh in my mind at the moment, being my typing finger, and hence afflicted with every letter, so it is taking a great deal of courage to continue this, and I am considering it a genuine Sacrifice for Art.

Anyway, now that you properly appreciate my nobility I can tell you that the next thing to happen, which is of course the purpose of a diary, not to confide unspeakable medical details in strangers.

When I eventually stopped whimpering, mostly because everybody had stopped listening, the next part of the day was that we had a great deal of running about trying to organise our lives.

This was because we had got visitors coming and I thought we would like to be able to sit down and drink coffee with them, rather than trying to talk whilst washing up and loading laundry into the machine. In fact we were still stacking picnic tubs on the draining board when our visitors arrived, closely followed by Number One Daughter and Ritalin Boy and Identical Cousin, closely followed by Harry’s dad who had brought us some bottles of the wine he had made with the 2014 grapes from our grapevine. I shall let you know in due course if it turns out to have been a good year.

You may have noticed Number One Daughter has been here quite a bit at the moment, today it was because she was collecting Number One Son-In-Law from the station. He has come home in a hurry from his oil rig, because his father died yesterday. Ritalin Boy told me about it this morning, in a stentorian bellow quite unlike the usual gentle whisper associated with bereavement and grieving. “Did you know,” he said, ” that the Grandad wot lives wiv Grandma got died yesterday?”

Of course I did know, and I was sorry about it, because I liked that Grandad. Number One Son-In-Law is one of a family of energetic young chaps whose very name is enough to subdue the most riotous of taxi customers into good behaviour, and their father always struck me as being a man of quiet stoicism, as indeed you would have needed to be. He has been ill for a very long time.

It is a dreadfully sad thing for their little family, although I have not got the least doubt that they will keep coping with it all. Ritalin Boy’s Other Grandma is a lady of more determined energy than I can begin to describe, and if there is a best to be made of anything, I am quite certain that she will make it.

In the end we all had a splendid time. The children charged up and down the stairs and rolled about with the poopies and bounced on the trampoline.

We drank coffee downstairs and talked enthusiastically. Our visitors were an old school friend of Numbers One and Two Daughters, accompanied by a young gentleman friend.

We have all been hugely looking forward to seeing her, and it was an absolute joy.

She lived with us for a while whilst they were all growing up, and I haven’t seen her since. She has grown taller, and sleeker, and has developed the most engaging, gorgeous, sparkling grin, which on reflection she has probably always had but which made an appearance slightly less frequently during her growly teenage years.

She was suitably astonished by the quantity of growing done by Lucy since she was two, which was when they last met, and we remembered rascally teenage adventure after adventure, they were very bad children.

We shared memories all day, until in the end Number Two Daughter and Mark went out to work and Number One Daughter buzzed off to do her hour of self-torture in the gym. I fed all the children on beef burgers and waffles and more ice lollies, my catering abilities appear not to have improved at all since the last time I had a house full of rascally teenagers.

In the end I went to work, where I spent a frustrating evening trying to telephone my father, whose birthday it is, and who had clearly left his mobile phone upside down in a bucket of water or something. When I finally got through I was interrupted after about five minutes by somebody wanting to get in a taxi.

Therefore, in case the message didn’t get through, I shall write it here, sore finger and everything.

Happy birthday, Dad. xxx