Diary and Notes
This may seem an odd start to a story – a story normally begins at the beginning, not some way in. This is particularly true of road movies where in every case I can think of, the first act consists mostly of introducing characters and detailing why they are going on their road trip and some interesting quirks of their character which will allow them to grow as the movie progresses. Road movies are all about growth – and the road man, never forget the road.
So we begin on day two of our road movie and we have already arrived at our first destination, the home of one Dr. Phileus Algenon Welshegg and Ms. Sarah Hermione Chuckles, formerly of Salisbury England but now living near Cardiff in Wales. They have two very lovely 18 month old twins and a very plush house with plenty of space to put up me and my family for two nights.
Our journey here was fairly uneventful apart from a lot of fighting, screaming and other normal family stuff – we have a small Ford Focus car, with the three children squashed in the back, no DVD players or IPads to watch, only a CD player and I spy. Toni does the driving and I try to entertain the children by shouting at them and making veiled threats of abandonment or worse. Jolly fun - oh and Dr. Phil gave us the wrong address and didn’t answer his phone when we arrived leaving us thinking he had cunningly tricked us into a New Year’s Day joke and we were going to have to spend the night sleeping in the car. We didn’t have to sleep in the car and I spent an excellent night eating a home cooked beef stew, drinking some excellent wine and a few glasses of port before seeing in the New Year with something fizzy.
So what about New Year’s Day and the actual beginning of our story without all this recap?
We were due to visit Toni’s brother and his two daughters for lunch and a family get together but owing to some excessive boozery on his part it didn’t transpire. Instead we spent the day driving around Cardiff and going for a very cold walk along the docks.
On the way back to Dr. Phil’s he sent me a text saying that some other friends would also be joining us with their three children for the night and it was going to be a chaotic and fun filled evening.
And so it was.
As there were just too many children now and things were hectic with all the coming and going and arranging beds etc we ended up eating take away curry late at night after putting the kids to bed at a time much later than we would all have liked. A very tasty curry it was, but as I was feeling a little exhausted from the trip so far I toodled off to bed at a sensible time to begin the real start to the ‘Feeding the Five’ blog tomorrow.
If you are a little confused, today wasn’t the actual start of the blog, that’s tomorrow. I always intended for New Year’s Day to be as ordinary a New Year’s Day as possible, without my blog getting in the way. Perhaps 1/1/2014 will be different. Let’s see if I am still going.
Happy New Year to you all – let’s hope it’s a good one.
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JCBorresen@GMail.com
