Today began with blue sky and sunshine, a bit on the chilly side but blue sky and sunshine nonetheless. Some cloud moved in over the morning but my weather app says that no rain is forecast until about 10.00 tonight. I think I can live with that.
Granddaughter Number Two is agitating for us to go and visit her in York, where she is studying. Goodness! I don’t know how I managed without my family going to visit me at university. I did have to write home every week (no telephone, not even a landline) or else they might have come investigating, my mother being a great pessimist who always suspected and feared the worst. But I was too busy to need visits from home. Besides, it wasn’t really the thing back in the day. We just got on with it. Similarly, when I went to spend a year in France as part of my course I went on the train with two heavy suitcases. Nowadays it seems that many parents hire a van to help their offspring transport all the necessary equipment: computer, tv, favourite duvet, large soft toy bear, etc!
Getting back to the idea of our going to visit Granddaughter Number Two, one of the problems for timing is that Grandson Number Two (four years old) has such a busy social life. He seems to be invited to birthday parties almost every weekend. Almost all his cohort must have birthdays this term. His seven year old sister has her share of invitations but hers are spread more evenly through the school year. Part of the reason for this plethora of parties is the modern trend for inviting the whole class to your offspring’s party, usually at a play centre or activity centre of some kind. Gone are the days when a select group of friends was invited to a party in the birthday boy or girl’s home. I sometimes wonder how the parents cope with the mountain of presents their offspring must receive (often stuff the child doesn’t really want or need, unless the parents of the invitees get together and pool their resources to buy something worthwhile). And then there’s the matter of the obligatory “party bag”. These have to contain a slice of birthday cake, sweets of some kind and a small ‘thank you for coming to the party’ gift. It all gets quite pricy, especially if you have paid for the party venue and possibly an entertainer as well.
When I look back at my old primary school photos, with almost 50 children in the class, I can fully understand why we didn’t have “whole class” birthday parties in the good old days. Besides, I am pretty sure I wasn’t really on close friendly terms with all the class.
Yesterday evening I phoned my son (the southern branch of the family). There are still some six weeks until Christmas but I need to start organising now. My Spanish sister and a host of Spanish family and friends are coming to England at some point in the Christmas and New Year period and we need to work out the possibility of getting all the family together at some point.
And, among other things, we discussed possible presents for children, his daughter and his sister’s larger brood. His daughter, he told me, is “spitting out lists” at a furious rate of knots, including, inevitably, a mobile phone. She’s still only nine years old so he’s adamant that a phone isn’t on the cards for this year.
However maybe next school year he might feel she needs on for security as she walks home from school. This year she and a group of friends gather at my son’s house and then walk to school together, through the back streets, safe in the knowledge that there are always lots of parents taking smaller children to school. Someone always collects her at the end of the day, a parent or grandparent but next year when she will be ten going of eleven she will want to walk home with the same bunch of friends. And most of them will by then have a mobile phone so parents can keep track of their homeward progress. Such is the modern world!
We managed to talk for quite a long time without even once discussing the parlous state of the world. Politics and war remained off the table for once. It was nice just to swap family news and to make family plans.
But in order to show that we are still thinking of the wider world, here is a tweet or a message or a social media post of some kind from Jess Phillips MP, one of the Labour MPs who voted FOR a ceasefire, restoring my faith in her integrity to some extent.
“Just a little reminder that Government have spent more money on the failed Rwanda scheme than it did on domestic abuse refuges for women and children.”
Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!
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