Strange Thoughts of a Strange Man

My nephew and his very long term girlfriend got married yesterday. I was there and helped to upload photos from various cameras onto Matt’s laptop so that they could be projected onto a wall of the marquee during the reception.

That was a bit of an experience. Let’s just say I don’t like Vista.

It was great to see various members of the family I hadn’t seen for a while as well as various members of Matt’s dad’s family (including Matt’s dad himself) that I hadn’t seen for even longer, even though one of them told me that I am now the spitting image of my father.

On that last note, I was going to write a whole blog entry about that and how I felt about that and about my father but that turned rather long and directionless and I decided to delete it. Yes, I do look like my father and, yes, I behave like him in a distressingly great number of ways. I have though managed to avoid heterosexuality and fatherhood and alcoholism. I am as pigheaded as he is and I also hate to admit I am ever wrong. Which I am not, of course.

I think I have inherited his early love of photography which he sadly to dropped in later life. He took some stunning shots of my mother – clearly he loved her to bits while my brother and sister were kids and when they were both in their seventies. My tastes run more to landscapes and flowers.

I wish I’d his practical skills but, sadly, only enough to know how to wield a paintbrush and to know which jobs not to tackle. I wouldn’t know how to work on my car and I can’t bang bits of wood together to make anything other than two bits of wood rather than chairs and tables and fitted wardrobes.

Labels: Family, Wedding

I saw Dave, my brother-in-law, today for the first time in months. He was admitted to hospital just after Christmas to have one of his kidneys removed. It was cancerous.

He has been in hospital ever since recovering from the surgery, from infections and now, it seems, from a resurgence of the very aggressive cancer that put him in hospital in the first place.

I like my brother-in-law. He is a nice bloke who would do anything for anyone and always puts other people first.

Even today, having fallen asleep because he had been awake half the night with pain, he was apologising for nodding off. As my sister-in-law and I left, he was saying he hoped my brother's stomach was better.

I feel very upset now. Probably for him but mainly for my sister. It is obvious how much she loves him and how devastated she will be if she loses him.

Labels: Family, illness

I went shopping for a birthday present for my great-niece at lunchtime. All would have gone better had my sister not misread which of the Little Miss books that Syd wanted.

One was Little Miss Lucky and the Naughty Pixies, although Jean, struggling to read the very small writing, read it as Little Miss Lucky and the Naughty Pricks. So when I eventually found the book I started giggling like a loon in the middle of the children’s books section of Smiths and then also along a significant part of Oxford Street.

Trying not to laugh makes me look like I am smiling drunkenly at all and sundry.

Oh, and Syd now has a little sister! Amelie Mae arrived in the early hours of this morning.

I’m a Great Uncle eight times over now. Do I get a prize?

Labels: Family, Giggling, Little Miss, Misread