8:36am Friday 4th December 2009
By David Barnett
Hi there, you made it! Did you find my new home all right? Here by the puzzles and the horoscopes, for future reference. Something to read while you’re stuck on the sudoku.
Anyway, it is vast excitement time at our house as everyone (apart from Mrs B, of course) appears to be getting noticeably older.
I, for example, am staring down the barrel of a major birthday milestone. Oh, I know what you’re thinking. But that picture at the top of this column is a little deceiving. I’m not the handsome, joyful 30-year-old I look like. I’m (whisper it) going to be 40 soon.
Yes, shocking, I know. Still, as they say, life begins at 40. So that’s something to look forward to.
The younger members of the household are also growing up at an alarming rate. Alice, our youngest, will be celebrating her fifth birthday tomorrow.
It barely seems five minutes, never mind five years, since that joyful moment when she popped out thanks to an emergency caesaerian, and her mum appeared to be on the brink of death thanks to a peculiar reaction to the drugs they were pumping into her, and went into anaphylactic shock seconds after Alice was born.
Oh, how we laughed. Not.
And Charlie is also facing a major event – he’s got his first wobbly tooth. He has been inspecting it in the mirror on an hourly basis, waggling it with his tongue, and pondering what might happen should he swallow it, lose it at school, or otherwise have some tragedy that might fox the Tooth Fairy from leaving him a shiny coin in exchange for his tooth (what’s the going rate, these days, by the way?) In fact, the only person not apparently getting older is one of the cats, Shiva. His sister Kali has settled into middle age quite well (they’re both nine) and enjoys nothing more than sitting on a windowsill above a blazing radiator, but Shiva appears to have entered some kind of second kittenhood.
Over the past few weeks, he’s constantly alert with his big, mischievous eyes, ambushing his sister for scraps, bringing mice in – though I don’t know where he finds them in this weather – and deliberately swiping things off any surface he can find – generally at about four o’clock in the morning.
Maybe, in cat years, he’s just turned 40 himself, in which case, I highly look forward to my own impending second childhood.
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