this one's about the family

I have had my parents staying for the last few days, so I have had an entertaining old time. The bottle store has also done a roaring trade and that the quality of wine in my house has sky rocketed. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not that I’m such a cheapskate that I’m offering my guests cooking wine, but let’s just say the wine my father buys is of a far superior quality than I buy. And I don’t have a problem with it AT ALL, I encourage it.

Even though technically I’m an adult, I love love love that my mother arrives with small parcels of frozen soup she has made for me. She officially is the best mother in the world. And no, you can’t have her.

My father has just got a blackberry. My mother calls it his raspberry.

My aunt and uncle were visiting and my father was proudly showing them his new toy.

‘So it’s your computer and your telephone?’ Asks my aunt.

‘Yep, everything.’ Says my father.

‘Which means,’ I pipe up, ‘When he drops it down the dunny, he really will be monumentally screwed.’

‘Does it come with extra small fingers so you can use it?’ Muses my uncle.

‘The company has wanted me to get one for years, and I have refused, but finally I gave in and got one.’ (Arms dealers need blackberries, don’t you know?)

‘Oh bollocks Pop, you resisting new technology is about as likely to happen as the Queen deciding she’s going to behead her corgis and swap them for a bison herd.’ But I only thought that as I figured I had pretty much fulfilled my smartarse-remark quota for the weekend.

It was also my niece’s birthday in the weekend. She turned four. She was telling me that she had requested a wombat cake. ‘Are you going to have a chocolate wombat cake?’ I asked her on the phone, ‘NOOOOO!’ she squeal-laughed ‘I’m going to have a GWREY wombat cake!’

Silly me.

Her grandfather is particularly delighted with her most recent choice of career, ‘I’m going to be an airplane driver. A girl one.’

However I have pointed out that I think she may go off that as soon as she realises that airplane drivers aren’t issued with regulation fairy dresses.

Her six-year-old sister has also had a change of heart over her career. After years of me saying, ‘Go tell your father you want to be a pole dancer when you grow up.’ ‘Go ask your father if he knows of a stripper school he can send you to,’ she has picked me for the idiot that I am and has decided she is going to embark on a different career path.

She tells me she wants to be either a mermaid, a fairy or a dolphin.

‘You can’t be dolphin!’ Cries her little sister, ‘Because only sea cwreatures can be dolphins!’

One of the things that warmed the cockles of my heart during the weekend was the look on my father’s face every time his raspberry sprung into life and he saw that he had a text from his ten-year-old granddaughter. He would chuckle away, the seventy-one-year-old deciphering the text language of the ten-year-old.

At one point he proudly boasted to me, ‘I’ve had twenty-three texts from Tenyearold so far this weekend.’

Ah technology, you got to love it.