Lexin

I’m having one of “those” months.

I have had to replace:
My doorbell,
My upstairs toilet, and now
My dishwasher.

Delivery of the dishwasher is Monday, and I’m hoping they don’t have trouble with my stairlift or my curvy stairs.

In other news

I had to go to Ysbyty Gwynedd to have an MRI and it took much longer than my previous experience of one. Still, now done and I may get a result before the symptoms return.

Plus

This morning my sweet Opal was twisting round my ankles, and I nearly trod on her. She’s forgiven me as long as I keep the cuddles and treats coming.

Plus

Mild excitement: my Auntie Peggy has published a slim volume of her poetry, all about her life as a Yorkshire woman. In case you’re interested in reading it, her name is Peggy Mortimer. I do warn you that many of the poems are in Yorkshire dialect. I can just pick my way through some of them.

Thanks to the poems I discovered that I had three Great Uncles, who died in WW1. Their names were Ralph, Fred and John. Why did no-one mention it before?

I’m arranging to go to my Auntie Queenie’s funeral on the 9th of November – what a palaver it all is.

The village she lived in, Thorne (South Yorkshire), has two stations, and it has taken me three days to get my waffly Auntie Peggy to tell me which one is most convenient for them to collect me from and for the church. My brother, who is not nearly as waffly, would have given me a lift at least from Doncaster, but he can’t go as he can’t get the leave from his employer.

That leaves me practically on my own, as the only people I’ll know at this jamboree are my Auntie Peggy, her husband Geoff, and their daughter Margaret. I’ve never met Auntie Queenie’s daughter, my cousin Diane (or not that I remember – I may have been to her wedding when I was a little girl) and only met her brother, my cousin John, once and that a long time ago, again when I was a child. Should be a laugh a minute.

Thinking about it, it will be a laugh in one way or another. Any given family event involving my family, something goes horribly wrong in a weird way, and the only way we can find to cope is to laugh at it because the alternative is to scream and throw things or have a massive row.

The only members of the family alive from my father’s generation are the aforementioned Peggy, Geoff and Uncle Sonnie’s widow, Pat. I don’t know if Pat will be there as I don’t know how well she got on with Queenie, or what her health is like. Auntie Pat must be in her 90s as well. I mean, some of my cousins are pensioners already. Of all the cousins, I’m the second youngest at 53 and my brother is the youngest at 51. It’s a sobering thought.

Still, tickets are booked and will be in the post to me tomorrow. I’ve elected to travel first class there and back as it was only a few quid more and I don’t want to be uncomfortable as well as miserable.

I shall have to look out a black handbag as I don’t feel my normal bright red handbag is suitable for a funeral, and I shall have to decide which of my coats is the best option. I have four coats: light grey, dark grey, bright green and navy blue but with checks. I’m leaning towards the dark grey.

What do people think? Suitable coat to wear to the funeral of an aunt you like but were not particularly close to?

I've asked my colleagues and they've gone 'hmmmmm', so I turn to you as the founts of all knowledge and wisdom.

The reason behind this question is that I'm confused; my aunts and uncles never gave me presents so the question never arose with me. (This was due to a family contretemps involving my parents which I won't go into here but was labyrinthine.)

But it occurred to me that my nephews are 18 this year and should be each their own man soon. So do I carry on giving them presents at Christmas and birthdays or don't I? I don't know what the rules are here, or even if there are any. I have no intention, btw, of stopping without mentioning it to their parents.

See this picture?



The lady in the pink suit is my Aunt Ursula, my mother's sister. The woman behind her in blue is my mother, the Aged P, but before she was aged. The miscreant in the Afghan coat is me. I don't know who the others are. I must be about 15 in this picture, because that's when I owned that coat.

Now, I have a persistent memory that I was a fat child, fat teenager and have always been fat. This turns out, very strangely to me, not to have been the case.

I mean, I'm not skinny by any manner of means, but I'm not fat.

The Aged P. hated that coat with a firey hatred. She made me keep it in a separate cupboard from the rest of the family coats because it smelled really strongly of dead goat.

Note: the picture is back to front. The slides I'm working from aren't marked.

I was walking to work the other morning when this bloke walked past me. He was on his mobile and just as he drew level with me he said, "But what about the woman in the cupboard?"

Er…what?

And the real tragedy is that I'll never now find out what about the woman in the cupboard.

Damned with faint praise

My brother took his kids on holiday to Cornwall. Camping. That was obviously his first mistake. He was round at my mother's with his sons, telling my mother about their holiday when one of his sons said, "It was fun some of the time, Dad."