Family matters

I regret to inform you that this is the second day in a row in which I have been too intoxicated to write anything sensible.

Of course you will remember that my cousins made the epic journey up most of the country to visit us today, you might remember that we had a tidy up in their honour.

They didn’t arrive until this afternoon, the children spent the morning pretending to make a mess in the tidy house, and then laughing a great deal. Mark weeded the garden and I fiddled about uselessly trying to invent a foam rubber contraption to stop the cups in the camper van from wobbling about: and then suddenly they were here, familiar strangers.

I have not seen my cousin since before Oliver was born, but it didn’t seem to matter, because somehow he is still exactly the same person he was when he was five, except obviously he didn’t have a wife and children then. Also he has grown up in the meantime and become interested in things like politics and refrigeration engineering, but the same soul still looks out of his eyes, which was a huge joy.

Also I was happy to discover that I liked his wife very much, which was a good thing, because of course you never know who people will choose as wives, and my cousin-in-law turns out to be absolutely perfect, sensible and kindly and gentle with the children: and the little girls were absolutely adorable, with huge eyes and creamy complexions and gaps where teeth ought to be.

We drank coffee and looked at poopies and chatted, and Mark and my cousin discovered a mutual interest in boilers: and then we went to the Indian restaurant for dinner, where as well as an especially nice selection of curries, we drank rather a lot of wine.

When we got home we drank some more.

Lucy and Oliver took their cousins upstairs and dutifully entertained them, which was kind of them, although not exactly difficult due to the cousins being considerably less trouble than the poopies, showing no interest whatsoever in biting one another or weeing on the carpet.

The children watched Kung Fu Panda upstairs, and we propped our feet up around a two gallon box of wine and became steadily more and more intoxicated.

The conversation got louder and louder, I am jolly glad I don’t live next door to us.

We talked and laughed until my face hurt.

It was midnight before we all realised guiltily that we had neglected the children completely. They came downstairs and gazed at us with accusing eyes, and Oliver said that a poopy had done a wee on his bed.

After that we had got to bring the party to an end, because of bedtime and the need to do something about Oliver’s sheets.

I can’t even begin to tell you the stories that have been aired today, memories of our own childhood, and stories of my grandmother’s childhood, unimaginably painful little tragedies and kindly souls and scandal and heartbreak and cheerfulness. It is lovely to see my own little life as just one bit in a long onward story, of good times and bad times, and people just quietly getting on with doing the best they could.

We have had the most magnificently, gorgeously happy day, and I am going to bed with a warm contented feeling left over from being reminded that I am not a lone pirate, but part of a large and interesting family.

I promised that I would not tell anybody at all about my aunt’s wine drinking, so I won’t, but I hope she takes a glass of water to bed.

I am sorry that this is short and disjointed, it has taken me absolutely ages even to manage to write this, and it doesn’t at all do justice to the niceness of the day, enough to say that I am going to bed serenely content.

Also I have taken a glass of water with me.