Sunday July 26^th 2009

Glorious pink morning at Laura Malcolm’s Norman demesne. Breakfast in the garden is an idyll. Charis launches the day by swearing blind she’ll never have cosmetic surgery. Except perhaps for a bust reduction. And just a little bit off the chin. And maybe the eyes.

Fortunately Charis, at present, is in her prime.

Matt announces that all the private schools in England should be abolished. This is serious conversation. Esme and Charis do not agree. Somehow I do not have the right kind of voice to make myself heard. After this there is table tennis rounders. I say that I wasn’t able to hit a ball at all until I was 42 – which is true. It was because of the horrible bullying PE masters at Barrowborough, where Anthony Mottram and I were at school and before that at my prep where Matron thought I didn’t breathe or walk in the right way – in other words not manly enough. I don’t see that table tennis proves much – absurd little clattery nonsense ball. I think I draw the line at table tennis rounders in a family setting.

For the rest of the morning we discuss parking and taxation. After the first Christmas dinner of the day (i.e.lunch: array of cold meats, full cheese board, several salads, two puddings, one a rare summer fruit trifle with a brioche base – should you be interested in recipes) the afternoon topic is Oxbridge entry, difficulties and unfairness thereof. There is a danger of looking middle-class. Esme is tragic after a terrible night owing to Hopkin having a growth spurt or at any rate sudden pain behind the knee for two hours at 3 a.m. But she bears up well and bravely lies in the sun all afternoon.  Laura and Charis do the same. By six they are no longer recognisable and Charis has charred the lower slopes of her embonpoint (Laura would tell me I’m using the word wrongly. I just like the sound of it. It is my weakness in writing. I mean her neck really). Over dinner the half-baked women gradually return to life after a few glasses of Cremant de Bourgogne. Laura cannot believe I have never seen Gone with the Wind. On the other hand, Matt Driver is glinting and oddly wicked looking after a run. He produces an enormous car magazine and engages me in conversation about makes and models. I’m quite good at this. ‘Is it a 1.8 engine?’ I say. It is an anomaly. I know about cars.

We finish the day with a round of Articulate. This is dangerous. It’s that game where you’re in teams and one member of the team has to give clues to the others in their team to enable them to guess the person, place and so on which is on the card. There’s an egg-timer thing going. It’s nerve-wracking. We played a few days ago. Laura and Matt were in different teams and at each other’s throats throughout. ‘You looked at the cards before we started.’ ‘You’re a sad little grey man’ etc. Esme nearly had a breakdown with the drama and vowed never to play again. The next day both husband and wife separately took us aside: ‘It’s not me that’s competitive, it’s him/her.’ So we tried them in the same team. It made no difference.

This time they end up in opposition and nobody has the strength to do anything about it.  It’s hair-raising. Laura glares at the egg-timer while the other team are playing lest they go one grain over time. Matt rears up dangerously at one point over something Laura said.

But afterwards, Laura cranks up the dial-up and they are to be heard murmuring privately to each other as they look at options for holidays in Senegal on the Internet.

Senegal?

I am reminded of the time Anthony Mottram and I bicycled in the Buda hills. Don’t be deceived by the grammatical togetherness. That awful hard look came over his face and he careered ahead not even waiting for me at junctions. I blame my borrowed machine. It was ancient and puddingy. The same thing happened on another bicycle ride between Primrose Hill and Islington in about 1980.