A very wide awake voice pipes up from the box room. (By that I mean the 'third bedroom', sorry, I'm a 70s child)
"Muuuum....(pause)..... Was I a baby in the olden days?"
Another gem from my five-year-old, I should write them down (!).
It's fifteen minutes past the ten-year-old's bedtime and he's, what's technically know as, 'trying his luck', 'chancing his arm', or if I was a swearing lady, he would quite simply be 'taking the piss'.
With Kevin the Teenager-like tendencies these days, he's barely grunted at me all day.
NOW he wants to talk. Chat, chat, bloody chat. He's had all day to tell me about his Match Attax swapsies, why he was kept in after school for talking (don't know where he gets that from!?), learning the arabesque position in PE (que?) and whether he should, hypothetically, deck someone who teases him about his glasses. NOW, he wants to have a cosy tete-a-tete with his old mum when he's trudged ten paces in front of me all the way to school and home again. NOW, he has time to tell me what he had for dinner at school and what costume he wants to wear on World Book Day.
Well, it's a little too late, sonny Jim (he's not called Jim, or James, really), One Born Every Minute is about to start, off you go to bed!
Some of us girls from tap dancing (I use the term 'girls' in the loosest sense, we range from 41 to 73) went out for a meal on Saturday. I did a straw poll on how many of us had prepared dinner for our families before coming out. There were some thoroughly modern men around I can tell you (except mine!!).
One lady had even had a bath. A BATH!
Complete with bubbles and scented candle.
We were all agog as we leaned in to hear her story like she was recounting an enchanting tale from a bygone era. Cue dry ice machine and soft piano.
She had dimmed the light and sunk, TV commercial-like, into the deep vanilla-perfumed water, closed her eyes and sighed a deep sigh.
The door creaked open (I'm embellishing now, bear with me, pretend it's an old house).
Her 11-year-old daughter sauntered into the bathroom and soundlessly took up position on the closed loo and continue to play on her DS. Mere seconds passed before her nine-year-old brother likewise wandered in, surveyed the scene and finding the bath and toilet already occupied, sat cross-legged on the floor and continued reading Diary of a Wimpy Kid.
My friend once more closed her eyes, sighed, and smiled.
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| A snapshot from 'the olden days', my own episode of One Born Every Minute |
