All I Want For Crepemas Is Youth

[MrsSchadenfreude]

Phew

We took ds1 back to his college today Hatty. Sad to say goodbye to him and have loved having him at home - but 1,000 X easier than leaving him the first time just a few months ago!

Gotcha Molly

Giddy - for some reason I'm finding it harder this time, although she's obviously happy to be back. I think it's just that she's more grown up now so understands things she didn't before and it's been great having her around to chat to - apart from the week where she ignored her boyfriend that is.

Hatty that is exactly how I feel. Dd left today - am missing her already. Dh has barely spoken since he started work at 8 this morning. Am trying to be cheerful and supportive

Lalsy, that is pants.

I am soooo tired. Went to sleep this afternoon. Must rouse self and cook DD2's and my favourite supper of pasta puttanesca . DP enjoying the Last Night Party of his hippy t'ai chi and DD1 has gone to a camping sleepover in a friend's garden. We by contrast will curl up in front of the Mockingjay fillum on telly with ice cream, nibbles and in my case a glass of wine.

Lalsy - we need a sub support group for bereft mothers. Is your DH working from home? My DH frequently does this - he plonks himself at the table in a brooding manner and we sort of have to tiptoe around.

MI - for my sins I get to watch Star Wars episode 1 - there is no respite until DS has caught up with them all

Thanks, guys. Yes, Hatty, exactly, is often the same at weekends but very full on at the moment. I will not feel guilty about some weekday treats and expensive trains to see dd!

I cannot wait to go to bed. Though will first watch a Cohen brothers film via DP's laptop and some wiring into the telly.

Re families, my great grandad was captain of the Royal Yacht (then the Osborne) and my dad inherited lots of stuff from the ship. Most of it went in our house fire, but the ships chest is now in DS's room. My great uncle was killed in WWI, as was my grandmother's first fiancé. I still have the engagement ring he gave her... And in the Second World War my dad was one of the first. British soldiers into the concentration camps. He doesn't talk about that. And one of his cousins in the RAF killed himself by walking Into his plane's propellers.

What sort of stories are our descendants going to tell about us? We once had a hard time parking in waitrose?

Are anyone else's DCs doing the whole cat's bum mouth thing when they see you with a glass of wine? Ever since those blasted DoH guidelines on alcohol consumption came out this week.

My life has had worse stuff in it than parking in Waitrose.

Oh yes re catsbum mouth and wine...

Ho hum ds is likely to be t total......

Herbs, you are another one with interesting predecessors!

Sorry for those whose offspring have returned to uni.

No one is cat's-bum-mouth-thinging me - I am doing dry-January! And anyway, I think they are too old for castigating us about drinking

I am trying to make sense of Power of Attourney and thinking about what else needs to be done re DM. It all seems so complicated

Where is the halo for BTM?

Voila!

My grandfather was a Cape Horner - one of the last - we did that voyage time & time again!

Dad was in Malta during the siege of Malta & Mum left one of the few places in GB to be occupied on the last boat out.

BTM - DH is doing Dry January too. I thought "meh" and opened another bottle.

Great halo!

Lordy, we'd have an interesting scrapbook of the western world's 20C with these stories....Herbs, not deliberately?

Hehe! I may have to take it off next Saturday - going on a Spa-weekend with friends, and on the 23rd for a party. Would that be OK?!

I too thought 'bugger that' re dry January, though am not drinking during the week. And trying not to stretch the definition of 'week' to ''Tuesday to Thursday'.

Re propellor man, there is speculation that it was deliberate, yes. There was some strange mental health stuff going on on that side of the family.

Remembered another thing about great grandpa. He had to escort queen Victoria's coffin across the Isle of Wight to the mainland and guard it. They had to have it on a carriage, and it fell off into the mud, and in the sneaking struggle to get it sorted he bent his ceremonial sword.

Molly - I wasn't meaning to put all our interesting stuff down! It just doesn't make such dramatic stories...

I nearly got expelled as "persona non grata" from a communist country in the 1980s for "activities incompatible with status". I had a whole week of uncertainty while they dithered over this, and they finally decided that as we were two young women in our 20s, we could not possibly be guilty as charged. (We weren't - we had ended up in a difficult situation, due to no fault of our own, and it got out of hand. Alcohol may have been involved.)

(That was in response to the "parking in Waitrose" comment!)

They have interesting and heroic stories but I really don't want to live through a war to have them. Will stick with the parking in Waitrose difficulties. I do think though that many of the war generation probably find our teenagers (their grandchildren) pathetic in their lack of responsibility and entitlement whereas they had to just get on with things.

Hello Crepeys!

Sorry not to have been around. We are a hive of industry in our house at the moment and I've not had a chance to pop in, let alone have a read to catch up.

Hope the NY is treating you kindly, that aged relatives are doing as OK as possible and that you are all well . I am trying to be firm with screen time for the kids, so I need to adhere to it myself, at least when they are around, but hope to come back later on today or tomorrow when they are at school to catch up properly.

Love to you all .

But Hattie, they got on with things because they had to. It's not fair to compare them with young people who live in a completely different society.

My mum for one doesn't think her grandchildren are entitled for not being second-class citizens in a country ruled by a foreign power. Or for expecting to be paid as much as a man. Or for having free education or health care. I know this isn't the same thing but it is related, I think. We have no way of telling whether this lot would be able to step up to comparable challenges - but frankly, why wouldn't they?

It is a completely different society now, isn't it? DD1 "interviewed" my mother about her time in the war, and her childhood, for school. My mother, and her elder brother spent most of their school holidays "helping out" in the family business - picking up deliveries of cotton from one part of London and taking them to another part on the tube, from when she was about 7, and taking a younger child home from school when she was 8 or 9, and making sure she got home (younger child was 5 or 6), lighting the fire for her, so that the house would be warm when her mother got home from work, and making a cup of tea for them both. That just seems incredible to me. I think the younger child's mother worked in the sweatshop, and my mother or her brother taking the child home, enabled her mother to do a full day's work.

MrsS, your story just highlights how much more parented our DC are. I was able to (and did) make cups of tea at that age, and run a bunch of errands, including buying shopping for DM and various other things we wouldn't let our DC do now at the same age.

I used to go and "call for a friend" when I was three - he lived about 5 minutes down the road. We used to go to the park on our own too at that age - the park was full of children with no bored adults close by. There was a warden close by, and if we had any problems - strange people lurking, or fell over and needed germolene and a plaster, we used to bang on his door and he or his wife would help out. I was also making tea at 5. The DDs started making tea around the age of 7, and also did their own ironing (school shirts) from around this age.

My Mum also used to go on the train with her brother to my great gran's holiday home in Sussex, when they were around 5 and 7. They used to get the train to Lewes and then catch the bus, and the bus driver, who knew my great gran, used to let them out right outside her cottage.