Fake-mas

I’m in Cheshire at Nathan’s sister’s house, which is in a little place called No Man’s Heath. As you enter the village, there are two sign posts on either side of the road. One displays the village name entirely in capitals, without an apostrophe. The other is in lower case letters and has one! It’s a charmingly eccentric anomaly.

I was in East Sussex all day yesterday running a quiz in a little seaside town near Hastings called Bexhill-on-Sea. I was lucky enough to be able to choose my own assistant, and asked Meriel because Lewes, where she lives, is only about half an hour’s drive away.

The quiz was happening in a charming seafront hotel, so, after setting up, we were able to take a wander along the windswept beach.

It was so lovey to see Meriel, and she was a brilliant assistant: terribly charming with everyone, and hugely assiduous and conscientious when it came to the scoring. She managed to sniff out two Brummies. I didn’t realise that people from Birmingham have a sixth sense for each other, but there was definitely some sort of psychic connection going on: Maybe it’s a smell thing!

The journey from Bexhill to No Man’s Heath was somewhat epic and took six hours. I had a little sleep in a service station somewhere near Banbury and made a disastrous wrong turn in Brighton which meant I ended up in Lancing by mistake. Other than that, it wasn’t the travel mayhem which had been predicted, or, indeed that I’d expected. I thought I was going to be sitting on stationary traffic on the M25 for hours.

We woke up this morning to the sound of Nathan’s great niece, Renée, excitedly rushing about the house. The one thing which always strikes me when I’m around families is how active children seem to be in the morning!

Today has been dubbed “Fake-mas” by Nathan’s family. Choosing this particular date meant that all of them could get together before disappearing off to other corners of the country for actual Christmas Day. It’s was a bit surreal because it felt 100% like Christmas, but emails were periodically buzzing in from people who were still working.

We had a big Christmas dinner, which was delicious. We got very silly and giggly, particularly when little Renée donned a pair of inflatable antlers and, with absolutely no sense of spatial awareness, managed to sweep everything off the side board onto the floor, seemingly without realising that she was the cause of the mayhem!

We went for a much-needed, all-too-brief walk as the sun set, before returning to Sam’s house to play games and laugh a great deal more. Ratfink, which seems to be having quite the renaissance in my life, went down particularly well. I found myself having the most vivid flash-back to a Christmas in the early 1980s where my entire family was sitting on a very long table in my Gran’s house in Warwickshire playing the game. Ratfink involves passing cards around the table. There’s a heap of spoons in the middle of everyone and when you’ve collected four cards of the same number, you take a spoon. This triggers a manic free-for-all where everyone grabs one of the other spoons. There’s one spoon too few on the table, so the loser is the one who doesn’t get a spoon. This particular memory from the 80s featured both my grandmothers sitting on a trestle table extension of the long table the rest of us were sitting on. One of them had got four cards and picked up a spoon. The other followed suit, but no one else noticed, so the game simply carried on with the two of them laughing like naughty school girls, waiting for everyone to cotton on! Happy times...