by I’m back. Long story short, it was great to see my brother and his family, but next time I’ll want another couple of days.
On Thursday the 28th I got up at stupid o’clock – this became a recurring theme – and got a taxi to the airport. The flight to Luton was fine. It got in just after 7am; my brother picked me up at 8:30 or so – he’d driven all the way from St Ives. After last October’s fire in the multi-storey car park which damaged 1500-odd cars, the pick-up and drop-off bit is now acres of tarmac a half-mile or more from the terminal. My nephew was very active in the back of the car; St Ives had sent his sleep patterns way out of whack. The trip down to Poole didn’t take long despite the a woefully wet and windy weather. In the afternoon the four of us went to Wetherspoons in Wimborne. (The Ws kept coming.) They put me up in a room that looked out over the river and a wooded area, with the twittering of birds a pleasant feature. I just wished it wasn’t so bloody freezing (and I’m someone who likes to be a degree or two cooler than the national average).
At around 3:30 that night, my nephew woke up and bawled his eyes out. I was instructed to leave him alone, despite my urge to do something. On the morning of Good Friday the four of us went to Pamphill where they have a popular farmhouse and dairy shop. They hoped the little chappy would wear himself out. We grabbed some coffee and scones, and I think my brother also had an ice cream on a cool March day; eating out for families of young children is now expected, which it certainly wasn’t four decades ago. I think the expected level of consumption (among other factors) would make it very hard for me to bring up a family in 2024. So much of it is a massive WTF to me. Right, so how many bottles of liquid do we need for the bathroom? Shampoo, shower gel (they’re the same thing anyway), deodorant, after shave, and you might like some perfume and some moisturiser. Maybe some mouthwash and some hair stuff, and that should do it. So how many bottles is that? Eight? Ten? Judging by the average modern bathroom, they need at least sixty. My sister-in-law told me the crippling cost of their son’s nursery before moving him into a cheaper one a couple of months ago. It was roughly double what I spend on everything. Just mind-blowing.
Later on Friday, my brother and I went to the nearby pub where we both had cider. Meanwhile, the nearby river had burst its banks and was rising at a near-visible pace, much faster than the Ouse at St Ives did (or does). I saw that Blues lost 2-1 at QPR despite taking the lead in the second half. The decisive goal was another last-minute sucker punch, leaving them deep in the relegation mire. That evening we had curry and I figured I could somehow control their digital radio from my phone. It was called “kitchen control” or something of that sort. At this point I’m no longer a participant in modern tech, or indeed modern life; I’m just a bystander. By this stage my nephew was getting his sleep patterns back on track. He’s a lovely boy (definitely not a baby but a boy) and he makes very little trouble for anyone, beyond the usual peeing and pooing and not sleeping. He’s constantly curious and is expanding his horizons (and his vocabulary) every day. When I was there, he picked up the word “bottle”. He’s lucky to have such good parents who devote a lot of time to him. This was helped somewhat by my brother’s knee operation last year which prevented him from going very far. (He still isn’t 100% recovered, even now.) The knee business didn’t do his degree prospects any harm, either.
We’d planned to go to the car boot sale on Saturday, but the flood put paid to that, so we had coffee in Wimborne instead. It turned into a sunny day, and in the afternoon we met a friend of my brother’s in a pub and had three pints apiece in the beer garden; I can’t remember when I last drank that much. We didn’t realise that the Boat Race, which Cambridge won, was happening at that time. When we got back we saw the final of Gladiators. The original programme in the nineties was Mum’s favourite; exhausted from a week of teaching, she’d blob out on the sofa for two hours and watch Gladiators followed by Blind Date. That night my brother showed me his ultra-precision short-wave military radio. A piece of kit dating from the eighties, it boasts an eight-foot antenna. We played around with it, picking up distant stations including a rather creepy Russian one which was sending out coded signals.
The clocks went forward on Saturday night, and on Easter Sunday morning it was time to say goodbye as I had a long old bus (or, as they say, coach) journey in store.
