Roller coaster

I'm not sure all this exciting activity is good for an old scrote whose only ambition is to do nothing for a while followed by a nice rest. Having put Jeremy and Sarah on the coach to Heathrow on Wednesday morning (they have both arrived safely back in NZ and USA respectively), I went back later to collect my "adopted granddaughter", Bruna. She is only here for three days before going to visit friends in London and Paris, and then back to Brazil. Three days out of a two-week trip to Europe, her first, just to visit her English avozinho: I am privileged and humbled both. Bruna is great company, bubbly, lively, curious about everything and a very quick learner. We have managed to visit Cambridge, drool over King's College, have lunch in Auntie's Tea Shop, buy a ukulele (for Bruna, not me - I long ago gave up setting conditions for failure), visit Ely and the cathedral, and have coffee with various of my lovely local friends.
We have sung songs, listened to choro, talked in foreign tongues, eaten scrambled eggs, laughed till our jaws ached, and explored a zillion topics. Mes chers potes, there may be luckier men on earth than me, but there can't be many.
Christmas is almost upon us. If I can stir my ageing carcase, I will go to Midnight Mass tonight. When you are as lucky as I am, you need to say thank you to someone.....

Mum's funeral

 [I needed to write this more than you probably need to read it, so I will not be offended if you switch off. Explanatory note: mum's real name was Irene, and that was the name used by everyone yesterday. "Maggie" was my pet name for her, used by friends, but never by the family]
  
The funeral - service, interment and wake - took place yesterday in Liverpool. About forty people attended, mostly mum's relatives. As the wicked lothario who had carried off the favourite niece all those years ago. I felt a little uncomfortable, but in the event everyone was very friendly towards me, thank goodness. I immediately recognised two of mum's aunts (her mother was one of eight sisters), Dorothy and Rosie, and we had some rare old chats after the funeral. Of mum's three siblings, I knew her "little sister", Angela, at once; she's one of those lucky women who doesn't seem to age. I took at little longer to recognise David and Michael, and had long chats with them as well. .But the surprise for me, and even more for Jeremy and Sarah, was the number of offspring. Aunts had had sons and daughters, little known to us, and those sons and daughters had had sons and daughters. Bewildering and beautiful.
Jeremy and Sarah were magnificent. They looked good in their funereal black, they had organised everything to the last detail and played their part in the service with immense dignity and warmth. I defy any one to stay dry-eyed, especially when the eulogies were delivered.
After the service, I had a quick chat with the vicar, the Reverend Alan Kennedy, himself a scouser with all that that implies - nous, sense of humour, feet on the ground, and as affable as they come. He forgave me for having put the standard AV of Psalm 23 in the Order of Service, when I should have used the sung version, and congratulated me on my children: "You must be very proud of them. You and Irene did a wonderful job as parents". That was the moment when I ceased to be dry-eyed.
Jeremy stayed in Liverpool overnight so that today he can spend a quiet time at mum's graveside. saying the private farewells that he couldn't yesterday because he was so "on duty", making sure that everything and everyone was all right. Sarah and I came back to Ely by train, exhausted but tranquil, knowing that mum had had the "good send off" that she and Jeremy (and I) wanted.

The day was full of anecdotes, and I am glad I had one to add to the collection. Irene's grandmother, the formidable Grandma Holmes, had married off seven of her eight daughters, and was ready to turn her attention to the next generation, of whom Irene was the eldest and the favourite. So when she heard that some fellow was courting Irene, she needed to vet him. So Irene and I went to Platt Farm, the clan headquarters, and I stood, apprehensive believe me, before the Imperial Throne, ie, Grandma Holmes's elevated chair (it had a valance to hide, it was said, a crate of Guinness, but that is surely a canard - they would never have told scurrilous stories like that about Queen Victoria). She had piercing black eyes, appraised me silently for a while, and then motioned for me to come a little closer. Then, without warning, she reached out, grabbed my thigh and squeezed it really hard. She then announced to the assembled clan "Well, he's got good legs anyway." And that was it. I was accepted, or at least not rejected, and some while later, Irene Marjorie Pye became Mrs Allsop. And very shortly after that, Jeremy and Sarah Allsop were born.
Time for a cup of tea and another box of tissues.

Rest in peace

There may be silence from me for the next week or so. A sudden family bereavement has thrown us all into chaos. My children Jeremy and Sarah are coming to the UK on Wednesday from New Zealand and California respectively, arriving at Heathrow within ten minutes of each other. I shall be there to meet them, of course, but after that we are likely to be tied up dealing with all the consequences of a death. If it is your wont, please add us to your prayers - we shall need all the strength we can muster to get through the next few weeks. If you are not the praying kind, please think of us on December 15th, when the mortal remains of my wife, mother to my children, are laid to rest.

Jack-the-Lad

This is a photo of the Osborne Hotel in Oswestry. It was taken in the 60's and, as far as I know, the hotel no longer exists. I have never been there, but I have an interest in it. I have a bone-handled table knife inherited, if that is the word, from my mother. It has "Osborne Hotel, Oswestry" stamped on it. I had no idea why this knife had come into the possession of the Allsop family, but now I know. You will notice the sign "Wrekin Ales" at the left-hand end of the fascia board. My father worked for the maintenance department of the Wrekin Brewery, and a large part of his work involved the renovation or refurbishment of properties bought by the brewery over the years. No doubt he was involved in work on the Osborne Hotel and found the knife to be a useful trifle to add to the family goods and chattels.
It wasn't thieving, honest, it was just an early example of recycling, or maybe downsizing. Good old dad, you were a bit of a Jack-the-Lad sometimes. My mother told me the story of the neighbour who came into our house one day, saw the new wallpaper in the living room and commented: "It's much nicer than the wallpaper you buy." Just recycling, making the best use of the leftovers. Good old dad, definitely a bit of a Jack-the-Lad.

Kiki 1, Grandpa 0

I have been silent recently partly because I have only just started to recover from being totally upstaged by my lovely granddaughter, Kiki. Seeing how her mother regularly sets her children little maths problems, I tried one on Kiki at breakfast one morning.
Dialogue:

Grandpa: "Kiki, what's 11 times 12 times 13?"

[pause, followed by the triumphant stare - see pic]

Kiki: "Why do you want to know?"

Pass the Sanatogen....

July visitors

Well, they came, the Californian munchkins (they were good enough to bring their mother with them), and they stayed with me nearly a month, and then they went back (taking their mother back with them).
I really had my grandpa fix, I can tell you.
Highlights were a visit to the Imperial Air Museum at Duxford. If you haven't been, do go, it's awesome, although the price of ice creams is outrageous, even without the chocolate flake; and a visit to the Raptor Foundation to watch the falconry display. All three munchkins had a go at feeding an Eagle Owl, a bird so much bigger than any of them that they couldn't help flinching as it flew up to take the morsel from their gloved hand.

Oh yes, and for Kiki an outing to check some Kestrel and Barn Owl boxes. Despite appearances, the owl that she is holding is not dead, just placid.
After I came back from seeing the family off at Heathrow, I set about cleaning up the house, or at least the living room. Now it is immaculate, nothing out of place, everything polished and sparkly. But it's deafingly silent and spookily empty. Can't wait for the next invasion of the fruit of the fruit of my loins.

Ite, missa est

My feisty granddaughter, Sophie, has elected to do Latin next year, so, when she heard that there is a Mass in Latin at the Catholic church in Cambridge, she asked me if I would take her there. We just got back. I am dazed, but Sophie seemed to take it all in her stride. At least she was relaxed enough after the service to ask me if we could stop at the Spar grocers to buy candy. And there's me thinking that virtue is its own reward.

Cute kids, cute birds

We also took my Kiwi grandsons, Joseph and Matthew, with us on Barn Owl expeditions, and here they are holding owlets and looking slightly bemused, but I think they did enjoy themselves. Matthew above, Joe below.
You will gather from this that I have had visits this summer from both sides of the family. They've all gone back now, leaving me with poignant memories and an incontinent Zebra Finch for company. Ah well, that's the way it crumbles, cookiewise.

Cuddles

What you may not have noticed is that Kiki's Teddy is cuddling a huge red heart. In my family, we believe in cuddles. So there.

Great grandad resurrected

My splendid Kiwi grandson, Joseph, wants to know about his paternal Great Grandfather, ie, my father. Not because it is a school assignment, but because he wants to know. Bless the boy. Knowledge for its own sake! As rare as hen's teeth these days.
I have sent him some information with which I will not bore you. But I will tell you one story that endears me to my difficult parent. He was in charge of the maintenance of the Wrekin Brewery's many pubs, inns and hotels, and a perquisite of this role was that he acquired a lot of materials surplus to requirements. My mother told the story that a neighbour, visiting our house and noticing the new wallpaper on the living room walls, remarked: “It's SO much nicer than the wallpaper you buy.”
Another perquisite of working for a brewery was that my father used to get lorryloads of spent hops delivered to our house. They were tipped over the front garden wall and made a steaming heap with a very distinctive odour that could be smelled through the entire village. The smell is like a sweet version of manure and mildly intoxicating. Apparently an excellent fertiliser, but it was no surprise to me that we were not popular in the village. In an article written in the Wellington Journal many years later about the history of my village, Hadley, was the sentence: At number 51 High Street lived a man called Allsop. We have no other information about him. Well, of course not, because the only information available was wallpaper that had fallen off the back of a lorry, and a mountain of sweet horseshit.

"Sophie, Sophie, Sophie!"

Apparently, that three-time Sophie utterance, accompanied by a deep sigh and a falling cadence, was made by her class teacher. I can guess what she was thinking about my little Princess at the time. Sophie is a one-off, a drama queen, a delightful chatterbox, bright as a button and seriously pretty with it.
Anyway, here is a picture of Sophie deep into reading Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, or something similar. Well, no, but you can bet it wasn't Milly Molly Mandy - she's too far on for that kids' stuff.
I love her to bits and I try hard not to be envious of that amazing hair. All I have left is a fringe round the bald patch, which, according to Sophie, is used by small insects as a skating rink.

At last!

I finally worked out that to take pics with my Nikon Coolpic, the first step was to press the little button on top with ON written on it. So, joy of joys!, I got a real pic of my darlings playing swingball. From left to right: Kiki, Harry, Sophie and Mom (aka Mum aka Mama aka Sarah).
On Friday afternoon, Sarah and I went into Cambridge, leaving the munchkins in the care of Clare, who is a natural when it comes to relating to children, even boisterous ones like my lot. And here she is with Kiki and Sophie:
I took the family to the airport on Tuesday, after a diversion via Grandma's and got back about five in the afternoon. The silence in my house was deafening. It's really all or nothing when your kids live on the other side of the world.
Never mind, it was wonderful having them here.

Putting the 'tent' into good in-'tent'-ions

As you probably know by now, the Califorian munchins are coming to stay with me 12-19 August (That's Sophie 9 and the twins, Kiki and Harry, 8). So, methinks, let's revive my ancient tent so they can sleep out yurt-style in the back garden, maybe live on yak's milk and learn about plov.
The tent is a "Good Companions" tent that I bought in the early seventies when I paid my first visit to the Scottish Highlands, and a bloody good tent it was too. On one campsite, in a storm, all the tents got blown out except for the Good Companions tents.
So, I retrieved the tent and its flysheet from a musty trunk and my god, the canvas smelled musty.
So I pitched the tent in the garden, Moreoroless. Because after so many years, I had forgotten how to erect it (Old Scrotes are liable to this problem), and pitched it wrongly (Photo 1). I finally got it right (Photo 2).
The last time I used this Good Companions tent was with Jeremy when we lived in Switzerland, and we pitched it one summer's evening in the direct line of a Langlauf Piste, ie, zilliions of sweating Swiss in running gear pounding past us getting fit for the winter. I kind of went off camping after that.

Let's be graceful

My three American grandchildren say grace before each meal. And I - an old heathen - totally approve. We lead such rich lives that it is important to say thank you to someone beyond us. So, my munchkins and I say grace before each meal, followed by a grace after the meal is over. The preprandial grace is "Benedicus benedicat" and the postprandial grace is "Benedicus benedixit."
What heartens me is that, despite the disappearance of Latin from our and their education system, they KNOW what the words mean.
Wait till I get there for Thanksgiving: I am going to hit them with the following:
Benedic Domine nos et haec tua Dona quae de Bonitate tua sumpturi sumus.
That should put the stuffing in the turkey.

More Munchkinalia

Mommy, is Grandpa coming for Christmas?
That's right, darlings, isn't that wonderful?!
I hope he doesn't expect a present, Mommy.
Eat your chopped egg and cilantro, darlings.

Mommy, is Grandpa American?
No, dear, he's English.
That's a dumb thing to be.
Well, I am English too, darling.
It's ok, Mommy, we forgive you.

Harry, eat your carrot.
I don't like carrot.
But carrot is good for you, dear.
I guess that's why I don't like it.
Hm, I think you've spent too much time listening to Grandpa.

Dear God,
I hope you don't mind me writing to You like this. Did you really make the WHOLE world in six days On Your Own, or did you have some help?
About Sunday: I don't blame you for taking a day off. It's a good chance to play with Your trainset too. If you got one. Which is what I will do too. If Grandad buys me one.....
Yours sincerely
Joseph Allsop, 7 years and 3 weeks.

Out of the mouths of babes and sucklings.....

Mommy, why does Grandpa grunt so much?
Grunt, dear?
Yes, like when he gets up out of a chair.
I don't know, dear. Ask him.
Grandpa, why do you grunt so much?
It's my way of scaring off lions and tigers, sweetie.
- sigh - I don't know why I bother, really I don't.

Sophie, tell Harry lunch is ready.
Harry, mommy says lunch is ready.
What're we having?
I don't know, for goodness' sake! Snails and worms and cat poo maybe.
Mmmm. Yummy!
- sigh - Boys are just soooooooo disGUSTing!

Dear God
I think it's amazing You made the world in just six days. My dad hasn't finished repairing the Camper yet and he's been at it three weeks already. By the way, did You manage to work on Grandad about the trainset? I'd really like it by Christmas so I can celebrate YOUR birthday too.
Yours sincerely
Joseph Allsop, 7 years and 2 weeks

More munchkin mania

Grandpa, why did God invent wopses?
Invent what, dear?
Wopses.Why do I have to repeat myself all the time?
Oh, wasps!
-sigh- That''s what I said, for goodness' sake!
I don't know, honey. Why don't you ask Him?
Well, I just hope He has better hearing than you, Grandpa.

Mommy, Is Grandpa is going deaf?
I don't know, Sophie dear. Ask him.
Grandpa, are you going deaf?
What?
DEAF!!!! DEAF!!!! DEAF!!!!
There's a jar of it in the cupboard, dear.
-long sigh- Never mind, Grandpa.

Dear God I understand about Noah's Ark, but I wish you hadn't saved the mosquitoes. I just got bitten. By the way, any news about the train set?
Yours sincerely
Joseph Allsop, nearly 7

Mommy, Harry bit me!
Harry! Why did you bite Kiki?
I didn't. She put her finger in my mouth just as I was closing it.

More from the Munchkins

Grandpa, I'm a feminist.
Good for you, Sophie. I'm a masculinist.
What's a masculinist?
What's a feminist?
Shall we go eat icecream, Grandpa?
Good idea.

Grandpa, what's a Muslim?
It's a person who believes in Islam.
What's Islam?
It's what Muslims believe in.
Thanks, Grandpa. You sure know a lot.
That's ok. If you don't ask questions, you don't learn anything.

Dear God
Just to let you know that I am keeping an open mind on the doctrine of Transubstantiation.
PS Any chance I'll get a train set from Grandad for my birthday?
Yours
Joseph Allsop, nearly 7

The terrible twins (Harry and Kiki)

Grandpa, I don't like cabbage.
That's ok, Kiki, you don't have to eat it if you don't want to.
But Harry keeps stealing my cabbage. That's not fair.
You are right, sweetheart. He should steal something you like.
Grandpa, I don't think you are listening to me.

Harry, why are you digging a hole in the lawn?
I am looking for buried treasure, Grandpa.
Have you found any?
I found this beer bottle top.
Keep digging, dear boy. You never know....

Mommy, Harry just ate my carrot!
Harry, why did you eat Kiki's carrot?
Dunno.
Harry, would you like another carrot for your very own?
No, that's ok, Mommy, Kiki needs them more than I do.

Harry, tell Kiki you are sorry you stole her carrot.
But I'm not sorry, Mommy. I don't want to tell a lie.
OK, OK, tell her you're sorry anyway.
What's the big deal? It was only a carrot.
Listen, you monster, don't go all Republican on me!

Let's hear it for Princess Sophie!

Mommy, I think I should go on a diet.
Why is that, dear?
I want to be pretty.
Pretty like mommy, you mean?
Oh no, much prettier than that.
Eat your antioxidant sprout souffle, dear.

Grandpa, why don't you go on a diet?
I AM on a diet, honeybunch.
It isn't working, is it, Grandpa?
Sure it is, it takes a lot of will power to stay this fat.
Grandpa, I think you are truly truly weird.

Look, Mommy, I drawed this picture for you.
Drew, dear. Show me.
Don't call me Dru! My name is Sophie Marie Glazebrook.
Yes, dear. Drink your polyunsaturated sugar-free turnip strainings.

Grandpa, wouldn't it be fun to have a dog!
No.
Why not?
We already have a cat.
A cat's no fun, you can't take a cat for a walk.
Sure you can. Just strap it to Harry's skateboard.
When are you going back to England, Grandpa?