wendy house

As Christmas approaches the House family excitement is ramping up. Tonight we are working on developing an integrated, complimentary, achievable set of new years resolutions. I’m always impressed by my young niece’s exhuberant ambitions and I do try to encourage her as much as I can:

Apparantly she ‘takes after’ me.  A singular vision and healthy disrespect for social conformity mixed with a deep affection for people, and creative spelling.  She is such a sweetie. Hoorah!

Here we see evidence of my attempting to befuddly my niece with battiness. It is my firm belief that aunties were invented to introduce befuddlement into the lives of their relationshions and I’ve never been one to shirk such a valuable social responsibility.

I wonder what a cool 18 yr old will do with such a letter, assuming she can read my rather degraded handwriting. Handwriting was never one of my strengths, Western writing was designed to favour the right-handed.
At junior school (age 10) I was taught cursive writing using a fountain pen. I’ve never really been motivated to master the rather boring script style taught in school, now I’m thinking of trying to learn Bickham script.  Bickham is more legible than the secretary hand, a script popular in 17th Century Britain, and bears a reasonably strong resemblance to my current scrawl of idiosyncratic and inconsistent style.

Thomas’s turning was accompanied by a squeak. Not a mousy squeak but an evil squeal. It’s possible he may be unsafe to drive. We trundled off to the garage where I left him with the mechanics for diagnostic tests.

Both Gordon Ramsay and my niece are well known for the liberal use of anglo saxon swear words and tantrums. In an attempt to be safe and not gay I’ve made several excursions into emultating their trendy linguistic, emotive, style.  For example

wendy: when can I have my mini back?

mechanic: are you missing your mini? (wry smile)

wendy: Fuċk, am I?! (stamps foot)

The mechanic understood, but 

I went on to fuċking fail

to maintain a modern fuċking focus

on using one fuċking word

Fuċking fuċk. Fuċked (fuċk)

Meanwhile,  Thomas pootled out onto the garage forecourt with the stone that caused all the squeaking surgically removed from his disc brakes. Phew!

My nieces look like they’ve escaped from Bananarama.   Having mislaid their dictionary during the breakout they are now tackling the ravages of teenage boredum.   Dedum.  

Grunting and liberal misuse of the original anglo-saxonisms helps alieviate the condition.   I’m thinking of trying it,   small doses.   But, as yet, I can’t bring myself to part with my 1982 Collins concise.

Banarama sang ‘Robert DeNiro’s waiting’

During a conversation about films  that are substantially at variance with the books that provided their original  title and approximate plot and characters:  

Wendy:   W’thering Heights

Bros:   WUH,   Wuh-thering Heights

Wendy: yes,   that’s what I said W’thering Heights

Bros:   Wendy,   Wuh-thering has a U in it

niece & her friend: (snigger,   sniggger,   snigger,   hiding mouths behind hands and flashing smiles at each other and checking to see if we ‘adults’ notice)

Bros:   (shakes his head and tuts)

 Wendy:   (decides not to mention that Bros appears to  have  failed to count the double-u)

Mini Wendy’s are herded by their parents into providing their Maiden Aunts with helpful lists lest they get the normal bizarre undesirable obscurities she normally offloads their way in the name of goodwill.

Lets take a moment for a thematic analysis of these lists.   The 13yr-old has covered her back against seemingly being disapointed by adding the item ‘surprises’ to her clearly titled pink,   heart-bulleted, picture illustrated, word-document  list.   Outstanding job,   not least the request for a hair straightner,   dropping the clearly superflous e was a stroke of pure genious.

By age 15yrs the Mini Wendy has grasped the usefulness of hyperlinks and chosen them over pictorial representations.   The top-shop and over the kee socks references are clearly fashion references that perhaps I could learn from.   Hmmm…     And the lassie has clearly dealt with my impending myopia,   excellent forward thinking there.

Good to see the mini Wendy’s are developing the Wendy trait for list construction.   Clearly the girls are growing into fully rounded capable young Wendys

Christmas day 1999

After christmas I found this note from my 6yr old niece  tucked in the cover of a book I’d been reading.   It now marks a poem  drawing parallels between life and staying on a hospital ward where we do not make our beds but we do lie in them by Roger McGough in his  book “The way things are”.  

The note cleverly demonstrates that the word hasea hoase house, unlike home,  is terribly tricky to spell.   Probably because there are three of those infamously tricky vowels  conglomerating in ‘house’.  

Niece (teenage):   “I HATE YOU”

Bros: “do you know how to say that in French?”

Niece: “Je tu deteste”

Bros: “shouldn’t that be Je  vous deteste?”

Neice: “NO, you are tu and I hate you”

By this stage I’ve fallen off my chair giggling and started dribbling tea on my woolly jumper (It was cold in England).   During my 4 day stay I managed to avoid my niece’s wrath without ducking or walking into any nearby walls.