All that comes with it

This is my Mother, she’s the one on top. On Saturday she returned from a holiday trekking through the deserts of Tunisia, spending her days riding a Camel through the Sahara and her nights sleeping out under the stars. Not bad for an old age pensioner.

What’s more she even visited Matnatot, the location where they filmed Uncle Owen and Aunt Beru’s farm in Star Wars: A New Hope. Unfortunately the significance was a little lost on her.

In the last year my Mum has been to China, Greece, Czechoslovakia, Egypt and Tunisia. This almost beats Kerry’s parents whose recent excursions over the past few years have included the Maldives, Egypt, Hong Kong, Spain and Ireland off the top of my head. My Dad hasn’t been anywhere in a while, but this is more than made up for by the fact that he, my uncle, and their friends circumnavigated the globe in a converted double decker bus during the 60’s – financing the trip by busking (yes, like in Summer Holiday).

My sister lived in Atlanta for five years. Kerry grew up on army bases in Germany and Gibraltar and has been to more different countries than you can shake a stick at. And me? I went to Paris once on a school trip.

My only solace was that my brother was in a similar position, but last night he announced that he was packing in his job next October and flying to Asia with the intention of slowly making his way to Australia to find work. These are no mere pipe dreams either; he’s already bought his ticket.

Ok, so I have travelled the world a bit if I’m honest; especially since I met Kerry (We even got married abroad - in the tropical house of Central Park Zoo in New York). I’ve been to four different continents and even have duel nationality (British and Australian – my mum is from Oz). But somehow I still feel a little left out.

Every now and again I get an urge to pack up and go. I’m lucky in the fact my qualifications and experience mean that I could find employment in most English speaking places without too many worries about work permits. Just after Amy was born Kerry and I were seriously considering emigrating to New Zealand, but we moved back to Huddersfield instead. For a while I was also thinking about going to Sri Lanka in order to use my psychiatric nursing skills in order to help survivors of the 2004 Tsunami, but the organisation I was going to volunteer with didn’t provide support to take your family, so that was out.

In the end I know we’ll always stay put, our families are too important to us, and more significantly to Amy and Evan, for us to ever go anywhere. But you can dream can’t you.

Yesterday evening I gave the kitchen a thorough cleaning. This was a form of groundwork as much as any desire for cleanliness. Amy and I plan on spending tomorrow afternoon baking cakes, buns, and various other party foods in preparation for her birthday tea. This would be quite hard to do when every available work surface is covered in piles of dirty crockery, and so a purge was necessary. The decontamination took me about an hour, but seemed much less due to the delights of The Now Show and I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue.

As a consequence of my efforts Kerry and I had a takeaway for tea tonight; purely in an effort to maintain the kitchens hygienic status. Initially I was quite pleased with our organization skills; we had the money ready and waiting for the delivery man about half an hour before he arrived rather than have to scrabble for the cash at the last minute. My smugness soon wore off fifteen minutes later however when the pizza place rung us to complain that we had paid them in fake money.

Somehow some of the notes from Amy’s fisher price play till had made their way into my wallet. In the dark of the night the delivery man hadn’t noticed as I’d palmed some of them off to him. The first he must have known about it was when he got back to the shop and noticed that the money was issued by the national bank of toytown rather than the royal mint.

The delivery man came back up to collect the real money on his way to another drop off, and was very pleasant about the whole thing. Still, I can’t help thinking that I would have got away with it too if it weren’t for those pesky kids at the pizza shop.

This evening Kerry, Amy, Evan, and I went to the switching on of the Huddersfield Christmas lights. Or rather we didn’t, as we weren’t able to get out of the door in time to catch the ceremony. I’d forgotten just how much having a baby that needs feeding every couple of hours can mess with your scheduling. As soon as that distinctive “give me milk now” cry kicks in you can just about kiss the next half hour or so goodbye. Not even the plant from The Little Shop of Horrors has a more commanding “FEED ME!”

We did manage to see the main event however, a performance by Transe Express – a group of artists who describe their show as follows:

Imagine trestle stages in the middle of a crowd, weak from curiosity. Perched on their stages, embryos of the bell, the Maudits parade, each in his own universe. They tempt, by means of their exploits, to make their obsession tangible: time passes, each interval marked by the toll of the bell… till the moment of happiness when the Maudits come together and lift, slowly into the airs to join eternity, the space of an instant.

Yes. They are French.

It started off rather slowly with a load of mimes hanging off ropes ringing bells and occasionally shouting incoherently. You could almost hear the crowd mentally composing strong letters to the local paper about the waste of taxpayers money. Things got a bit more interesting when they all clambered onto a giant chandelier and were hoisted 200 feet into the air. The whole thing was fairly good, although a little pretentious. It was also rather sinister, which I’m not sure is the most Christmassy of atmospheres to create, but still.

By far the most exciting part of the evening for Amy was the purchase of a very nifty little spinny lighty thing; basically a mini-fan with LED’s attached to its blades. She did manage to get her hair caught in it, needing to be extracted by a subtle combination of a surgeon’s precision and brute force, but even that wasn’t enough to dull the shine of its appeal. At one point she turned round and looked up at us with hope in her eyes; “Can I take this home with me when we’ve finished Mummy and Daddy?” she asked. The look on her face when we told her she could was worth sitting through a hundred French mime artists for.

Andy and Lorna provide a number of nice touches when you rent their cottage. On arrival there is a food pack waiting for you containing a pint of milk, some regional cheeses, locally produced bacon and sausages, freshly laid eggs from their own chickens, and best of all a lovely bottle of Lindisfarne mead (an alcoholic drink made of fermented honey, yeast and water). Did you know that the word honeymoon is traceable to the practice of a bride’s father dowering her with enough mead for a month-long celebration in honour of the marriage? Well it is.

They are thoughtful in other ways too. There is a pretty good collection of books to borrow, and in one of the bedrooms there is a chest packed with toys for kids to play with. One of the toys in particular caught both my and Amy’s imagination. A Playmobil Blackbeard’s Pirate Ship. We spent many a morning playing with it while Kerry and Evan slept upstairs, recovering from a night of interrupted sleep.

The pirates, which Amy christened The Captain and Jolly Jumper, had many adventures. Granted, some of them were a little outside the normal swashbuckling genre – I can’t remember a going to the supermarket to buy some sweets scene in Pirates of the Caribbean; but I still made the effort to throw in a few “arrrr Jim lad that will be £1.50” and “shiver me timbers do you think we need any milk?” in order to maintain at least some continuity.

Amy enjoyed the toy so much that I decided to buy her one of her own. Originally I had planned to save it for her birthday, but I was so excited about putting the whole thing together that I gave it her pretty much immediately. While I was sticking all the stickers on and clipping all the masts into place Amy studiously examined the pictures on the box to make sure I was doing it right. Suddenly she looked up and pointed to the playmobil pirate logo on its side:

“Look Daddy!” she exclaimed triumphantly “It’s a picture of Grandma!”

I said nothing. Nothing at all.