Life has been hectic of late. On Saturday we went to model aeroplane show in Kent where a) it was very hot & b) it became obvious that one of us is very much more into model planes than the other two. In the evening I went to the quiz. Going to quizzes with Becky is usually fun but can also be a bit challenging because she is very, very good & I am very, very not good. I once went to one at the school where we ended up on a table with some highly competitive people & we won with me having contributed answers to precisely two questions. I took my prize feeling totally undeserving of it. Anyway on Saturday our team won, thanks largely to Becky but I did answer a respectable number of questions (here's my star answer: What type of meat is in Glamorgan sausages? Answer to follow.) It was actually a very good evening, I knew the other women on the table who had all brought their teenage sons to make up numbers plus Becky's son's girfriend. I think the key thing with quizzes is to have a quizmaster your age. The music & films he asks about will then be from your era.
Talking of age what happened on Sunday afternoon was just total embarrassment. J's friend Adam had his (rather belated) birthday party at local swimming pool. This was all going swimmingly (if you pardon pun). Children bounced about on floaty things in pool with the few parents who stayed watching them through glass & only a few incidences of minor assault in form of whacking over the head with floats. Then they sat down to tea & all was still going well. Then somebody asked J's other friend Tim when his birthday was. Now to understand what happened next you need to know two things: a) I had J when I was getting on a bit so consequently I am older than most other parents with children same age, in fact I am coming up to a birthday so shockingly significant it makes me shudder b) Tim & I share the same birthday. Now J takes great delight in fact (b) & proceeded to tell everyone about it. What he next proceeded to tell them was the precise age difference between Tim & me. At this moment the boys who might reasonably be expected to be making lots of noise all had mysteriously fallen quiet, so everybody heard what J had said. There followed a silence in which it was painfully obvious that people were doing sums in their heads. This was followed by another silence in which it was even more painfully obvious that they had done the sums in their heads. I couldn't help thinking that there must have been some witty remark I could have made to show I really wasn't at all embarrassed but I couldn't think of one.
Aaaagh!!