diamond geezer

Thursday, October 21, 2021

I have come up to Norfolk for my Dad's birthday which was yesterday. I came up the day before yesterday so that I would be here yesterday and I am still here today.

I came up on the train which is when the sun finally came out and I met my Dad near the car park they've recently closed. We went to the garden centre where we bought some peat because the bags are heavy and then we went to the supermarket. It took a while to find a jar of sweet and sour sauce but we had more luck with tins of soup and the queues at the till were very long.

The house hadn't changed much since I was last here but the two big trees in the front garden had been cut down so there's now a lot more light in the corner by the gas tank. Round the back the tortoise had come out of her house and was doing circuits because the weather was quite mild. It has been a good autumn for the rudbeckias.

In the afternoon we drove to Norwich to see my brother and on the way my Dad saw a kestrel hovering beside the road and he said "have you seen the kestrel?" and I confirmed that I had seen the kestrel. Later we had lasagne and birthday cake. On the way home it was a lot darker and we saw a barn owl with its huge wings outstretched swooping low above the car because it had been disturbed by our headlights.

We stayed up really late so that we were awake at midnight and I said "Happy birthday" and Dad opened one of his cards. It had been accidentally ripped by the Royal Mail in transit so they had put the two largest pieces in a plastic wrapper with an apology on the front but the smallest piece was missing and we're still not quite sure what the joke on the front of the card said.

The weather yesterday was stormy with wild winds and torrential showers so we decided not to go on a big day out to the coast because we would have got wet. Also we had to meet a journalist for tea. My Dad received 19 birthday cards altogether which is a lot less than his age but more than I normally get. One of the stamps hadn't been franked so that's totally going to get reused sometime.

We took the opportunity to do some clearing out and in one cupboard we found a lot of bobbins. In another was my grandfather's wallet and inside that he'd saved a birthday greeting from my grandmother postmarked August 1931 when she lived in Golders Green and he lived in Edgware. She wanted to come over so she wrote "wait for me if you get home before I am there" which was like the equivalent of a text message in those days. We think the card is from while they were courting which is sweet plus my Dad and I wouldn't be here if they hadn't done that.

We had sausages for lunch from the proper butchers and potatoes from the garden and we opened a can of beans using Dad's new second hand electric tin opener. We found the instruction manual online because the internet is excellent and the tin just hung from the magnet and swivelled round and it's going to be so much easier to use than the old one.

Then we went to the village hall to meet a journalist from a New York magazine who's been researching a story in Buckinghamshire and Norfolk so needed some local background. During the informal meeting she got plenty of leads and a couple of shortbread biscuits and I tagged along because that's what you do when your Dad has a meeting with a journalist on his birthday. Some villages are more interesting than others.

On the way home we went to the country park where there were ducks and empty caravans and half a rainbow and a bush loaded with ripe raspberries. Later we had tea and my aunties rang up by which I mean my Dad's sisters rang up because it was his special day and that's why they rang up.

We didn't have a big party but we did stay in and eat sandwiches and watch The Repair Shop. We also went to the window to look at the full moon rising before the heavy rain arrived again. It may not have been the most exciting of his 83 birthdays but it was still memorable and it was a lot more normal than his 82nd birthday so that was excellent.

posted 07:00 :