Weekend for the Family
28 August


Lot of travelling this weekend.

The fact that I settled on the price for Kimberley Avenue on Friday meant that I could stick to my original plan and visit Linda and Ian and Gill and Robert.

And there was the big joy of seeing my little niece, Mary who is now eighteen months old. She's a standing, walking, pointing, communicating, realising, thinking, sentient little shrimp. She has words like mummy and daddy to be sure. But there's also door and key and quite a few others. And she has the small person's trick of calling things by what they call themselves. So the cats are yow (as in meiow) and Telletubbies are ayoh.

Linda and Mary and I went for a walk on Epsom Downs and we played for a while on the swings. I hadn't realised that Epsom is quite so high. From the top, by the race course, you can see right over to the bowl where London lies nestled. Presumably it was one of the delights for the East End when it took the charabanc out there on Derby Day - a completely different environment but the safety net of being able to see home from a distance.

Gill is doing well at present though her father, Bob, is getting frail with the Parkinson's he has been living with for the past few years.

Robert was full of the trip he's just taken to go scuba diving in the Red Sea. We watched a video and it looked quite splendid. He's also full of the lads holiday to Kos which he about to go on. He's also full of starting college. Well, he's 19. That's young, dumb and full of himself.

I captured mother and son in a big hug together.

250 miles from Orrell to Epsom. 65 from Epsom to Epping. 210 from Epping to Orrell. I'm glad to be sleeping in my own bed and doing things at my own pace today. *Smiles*

Incidentally, when first writing this piece, I was going to call it Family Weekend. However, I found that there's a piece in the 1998 Journal with the same title. Finding different titles for all of the postings is a point of principle with me. It's the first time in over four and a half years that I've nearly made a mistake.