I’m afraid I was very, very drunk …

“Tinkle tinkle”; you have one new message on the “Chunk is boring” WhatsApp group (our family WhatsApp chat group, named by Boy Teenager (BT) because his Dad (me, “Chunky”) is apparently desperately uninteresting).

It‘s 8.30am on New Year‘s Day and BT, in yet more progress, has stayed out at his mate Rhino’s house overnight and is now checking in with us.

“I feel a bit funny and my legs aren’t working very well”

”What? Are you OK?”

”Think I’m still drunk”

”WHAT? DRUNK? How come? What have you been drinking?”

”It was quite a lot. Rhino’s older sister and her mates kept feeding us drinks. I had 5 beers, 3 Tequila, 2 vodka lemonade, 1 vodka coke and a plain vodka”

”Sweet baby Jesus, Mary, Joseph and the Heavenly Host!”

”My jeans are dirty too where I fell over in the garden. Twice. I wasn’t sick though”

Talk about from famine to feast in one move. BT has always said that he won’t drink, probably because he has seen his mother (Gin, so called because her legs got wobbly after three or four lively ones) fall into too many front gardens on her way home from a “quick drink with the girls”. I think we can say he is firmly inducted into the School of Bingeing, although with the hangover that he got, there‘s a chance that the Induction Day has put him off that particular educational establishment for life.

Talking of education, it‘s been a mixed couple of months. When I last wrote one of these missives, BT had just decided to do five GCSEs. And initially he did, launching himself into all of them. He proved to his Mum (a secondary school maths teacher) that he has one heck of a big brain on him, picking up complex maths in the blink of an eye, and for a while trying out his French on us (more on this in a moment). He found English harder going as he sees little logic in it and doesn’t like prosaic use of language (unlike his sister and Dad). Having worked pretty well for three weeks at the outset, he caught a rotten cold which knocked him sideways for a fortnight, at the end of which his mates broke-up from school for Christmas. In not so many words, he lost a month’s impetus and hasn‘t been able to re-find it, so studying is on hold whilst he wrestles (once again) with what he wants to do in future. It’s tough for him, having been out of education for nearly four years, and equally perplexing for us to figure out how to help him.

Whilst it has been a mixed educational bag for BT, it‘s been quite the opposite for Girl Teenager (GT). At the last time of scribing, she had just received an offer from Warwick University to study Classics, which she was very pleased with. This was swiftly followed by offers from Reading, Exeter and Kings College. Whilst these were drip-feeding through our letter-box, she had been through the application process for Cambridge, a pretty gruelling affair which had been made tougher by the University setting a date for an interview and then moving it without telling her. She was convinced that she’d blown it and decided that she didn’t want to go there anyway. Which made the screams of delight, which were picked up by the early warning monitoring equipment at Goonhilly in Devon, all the more surprising. She‘s only gone and got herself an offer from the finest University in the country! Delighted and proud are inadequate descriptions of how we feel! It’s wonderful and a testament to the many, many hours of work that she has put in. Now to get the A level results needed ….

Christmas came and went and was delightfully back to normal. 16 members of the Gin family all crammed around the table eating a fine roast dinner produced by Gin. It was so nice to be back to normal after the previous year of lockdown. Aunty Di, Gin’s younger sister, gave out her customary Christmas awards (which usually amounts to one of the cousins and one of her two sisters getting the honorific of being ”the best”), but this year there was a surprising new category. A few weeks earlier I’d (by chance) been assigned a grocery delivery round which included Grannie’s order. Dead handy as I needed a wee, but also meant I could carry the shopping crates into the kitchen for her. I never imagined that this event would lead to a special Christmas award of “Best Bringing It Into The Kitchen Delivery Driver”, but there you go. And there I am. Bit of a long badge mind.

Fast forward to January and BT announced that he ”wants Disney Plus”. Having pointed out that we already have Sky, BT, Prime, Netflix and Spotify and that I really am not going to pay for any more bloody subscriptions, BT volunteered that he would pay from his allowance. Which is how he came to watch Ratatouille once again. And why he then informed us that he would “like to go to Paris for his 16th birthday”. I bet he bloody would! And yet …. we haven’t been abroad for two years, and there was probably some money left on the EasyJet voucher from the last Covid Cancellation. And so the idea took hold and Airbnb was fired up. “I don’t want to go anywhere shit though. It needs to be near the Eiffel Tower”. Hold on mate, who is paying for this? Nonetheless, we looked and found a place that fitted the bill. At this point GT declared she didn’t want to go, so the ever-opportunist BT dived straight in with “Can I bring a mate? I don’t want to walk around Paris all day with you two, you are too boring”. Him bringing a mate made little difference to the overall cost, so we agreed. Which is when we found out about the French vaccination rules. No double Covid jab, no entry. I‘ve never seen a fella sign up so fast to get an injection sorted. God knows what he and Rhino will get up to during the day when we leave them to their own devices. BT can at least say ”Bonjour” and “Je m’appelle BT” after his brief sojourn into the world of GCSE languages.

This sudden going abroad development has resulted in bit of a scramble to sort out a doggy boarder for Milo (our 18 month old Sprocker Spaniel who is as mad as a bunch of pissed teenagers on New Year’s Eve). GT has sort of offered to look after him, but as her plan is to fill our house with her mates whilst we are away, that sounds like a recipe for chaos. I’m not sure what I’m more worried about, Milo causing carnage at the doggy boarding house, GT and her mates occupying ours, or BT and Rhino wandering the streets of Paris on their own for half a day. We think we‘ve found a lady that will look after Milo, but she has yet to meet him to see if they get along. So long as she doesn’t have a stair carpet runner and he isn’t in one of his fretfull moods, I’m sure it will be fine (related: anyone want to look after a playfull and energetic Spaniel for 3 days in April? Only occasionally chews the carpet).

Other than that, the delivery job is going OK (bar the jumping tree in Carshalton Beeches (see last blog) and a slightly unfortunate incident with a Nissan Quashqai in Thornton Heath. And the challenge of eight hour rounds with a three hour bladder). My staff discount card recently arrived, which prompted Gin to drag me down to the store to spend a month’s wages on posh towels and frozen seafood. Eclectic.

We are also deliberating over the house; the whole place needs re-glazing, including the 7 year old kitchen extension (I’d name and shame the glazing firm, but they went bust shortly after messing up our job and the owner has been barred from being a company Director ever again). It’s a whacking great job, badly needs doing and yet as our intention is to down-size in the next five to ten years, we really aren’t sure spending a big sum of money is sensible. Much scratching of heads and considering of alternatives is going on (partially replace windows, don’t bother, sell up etc etc). We shall see.

Right, I have a poorly Milo to deal with (upset tum. I’m surprised it doesn’t happen more ofter with the volume of crap he picks up from the floor and swallows before I can get to him) so best stop there.

Until next time,

Love & elbow-grease.

Mr H

xx

PS A special mention to our friend Gay who lost her Dad on New Year’s Eve. We hope that his send off went as well as these things can and look forward to welcoming you back from Aus very soon x