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Arrived at 12.59 to find St Oswald’s House transformed into a cross between Show Home event and a royal tree-planting ceremony. There were red-and-white Thornton Gracious Living flags everywhere, red balloons, glasses of white wine and girls in stiff Employee of the Month-type suits holding clipboards and looking around hopefully for new people who might be fun-loving, yet slightly incontinent.
Ran, as directed, round the side of the house and emerged into the Italianate garden to see that the ceremony was already under way. Nick or Phil, over a PA system, was addressing a gaggle of elderly people wearing novelty hard hats. Handed Mabel the basket of chocolate hearts we’d brought, which she immediately dropped onto the gravel. There was a moment of calm, then a) Billy trod on them, b) Mabel burst into bereft sobs so loud that Nick or Phil stopped his speech and everyone turned to stare, c) Billy burst into his own bereft sobs, d) Mum and Una strode furiously towards us with mad bouffed hair and wearing identical pastel Kate Middleton’s mother coat-dress outfits, and e) Mabel tried to pick up the chocolate hearts but her distress and humiliation were so heart-rending that I gathered her into my arms like the Virgin Mary, realizing, too late, that several of the chocolate globs were now sandwiched between Mabel’s Shirley Temple red-and-white ensemble and my pastel Grace Kelly-style J.Crew coat.
‘It doesn’t matter,’ I whispered as Mabel’s plump little body shook with sobs. ‘The hearts were just for showing off, it’s you that counts,’ just as Mum bustled up saying, ‘Oh, for heaven’s sakes, let ME take her.’
‘But . . .’ I began but it was too late. Mum’s ice-blue Kate Middleton’s mother coat was now smeared with chocolate too.
‘Oh, my godfathers,’ said Mum, putting Mabel down crossly, at which Mabel burst into even louder sobs, wrapping her chocolate-smeared self round my cream trousers as Billy started yelling, ‘I want to go hoooooooooooooooooooome!’
My phone pinged: Roxster!
Startled, I dropped the phone, narrowly missing Mabel’s head. Mum bent to pick it up.
‘What’s this?’ she said. ‘This is a very peculiar message.’
‘Nothing, nothing,’ I gabbled, lunging at the phone. ‘Just . . . the fishmonger!!’
In the background the speech of Nick or Phil was reaching some kind of crescendo, climaxing with a yell of ‘Hard Hats Off!’ echoed by the group of elderly residents, throwing their hard hats into the air, at which Billy burst into more tears, wailing, ‘I wanted to do Hard-Hat-Offing.’ Mabel said, ‘Dammit!’ then Billy, furious with stress in a way I understood only too well, turned to me and said, ‘This is all your fault. I’m going to kill you!’
Before I knew what was happening, I too had erupted with stress like a steam kettle and burst out, ‘I’m going to kill you first!’
‘Bridget!’ said Mum apoplectically.
‘He started it!’ I retorted.
‘No, I didn’t. You started it by being late!’ said Billy.
The whole thing was a total, total fucked-up nightmare. But there was no reprieve. We all retreated into the Ladies’ outside the Function Room to clean ourselves up. Managed to sneak into the cubicle and reply to Roxster about the giant barnacle penis.
Emerged from the Ladies’, chocolate stains smeared and therefore worse, to a stress-free interlude when Mum went off to get changed and the children were briefly entertained by a clown making animals out of balloons. The clown was clearly bored as Mabel and Billy were the only grandchildren under the age of thirty-five, apart from a couple of great-grandchildren, who were babies. Texted Roxster about the clown and balloon animals at which he texted back:
Me:
Tee-hee. The fantastic thing about texting is that it allows you to have an instant, intimate emotional relationship giving each other a running commentary on your lives
, without taking up any time whatsoever or involving meetings or arrangements or any of the complicated things which take place in the boring old non-cyber world. Apart from sex, it would be perfectly possible to have an entire relationship that is much closer and healthier than many traditional marriages without actually meeting in person at all!
Maybe this will be the way forward. Sperm will simply be donated, frozen through the dating website which originally introduced you. But then, hmm, the women will end up doing what I end up doing, trying to run crazily between one child who’s done something messy and complicated in the toilet and the other who’s got sandwiched between the fridge and the fridge door. Maybe the way forward is cyber children, rather like those Japanese Tamagotchi pets, which give you the illusion of parenthood for about two days until you get bored with them, combined with cuddly soft toys. But then the human race would die out and . . . Ooh, another text from Roxster.
Me:
Roxster:
‘Bridget, are you still talking to the fishmonger?’ My mother was now dressed in another Kate Middleton’s mother coat and dress, only this time in Titan-Acorn-Barnacle pink. ‘Why don’t you just go to Sainsbury’s? – they have a smashing fish counter there! Anyway, come on! You know Penny Husbands-Bosworth is married now?’ she gabbled, sweeping me away from the children-and-balloon scenario.
‘Ashley Green! You remember Ashley? Pancreatic cancer! Wyn had hardly made her exit through the crematorium curtains before Penny was ringing Ashley’s doorbell with a sausage casserole.’
‘I don’t think I should leave the—’
‘They’ll be fine, darling, with their balloons. Anyway, Penny was saying we really should get you together with Kenneth Garside! He’s on his own. You’re on your own and—’
‘Mother!’ I hissed, as she dragged me into the alarmingly named Function Room. ‘Is this the man who kept going into everyone’s bedrooms on the cruise?’
‘Well, all right, yes, darling, he is. But the point is he’s clearly got a VERY high sex drive, so he needs a younger woman and . . .’
‘Mother!’ I burst out, just as a Roxster text pinged up on my phone. I opened it. Mum grabbed the phone.
‘It’s the fishmonger again,’ she glowered, showing me the message.
