Robbie was not the only birthday boy this week, on Thursday one of my son's childhood heroes celebrated his 60th birthday. Dennis the Menace one of UK's best known comic characters is 60!
We were on holiday in Norfolk when my son bought his first Beano annual and discovered the chaos and mischief of Dennis and Gnasher. For us it was rather special because as a child with Asperger Syndrome he loved factual books and he was very uncomfortable about reading fiction. I remember him crying when he read Cat in the Hat because it didn't make sense. Dennis led him into a world of mischief and imagination and the Beano was his first stepping stone towards enjoying fiction. He was passionate about his comics and he amassed a huge collection of Beano annuals and comics and everything had a Beano theme. He had a wooden go-kart, pea shooters, a collection of catapults and other essential items to emulate his hero.
Perhaps Dennis the Menace wasn't a perfect role model, but he wasn't so bad, he taught my son to have fun, and the cartoons always showed that bad behaviour has consequences. Best of all he managed to turn my son into an enthusiastic reader and the little boy who loved the Beano so much is now a young man who hopes to study English at university.
Well, once again it seems I can't win! Sam occasionally tells me off for embarrassing him by writing about him on the blog, but Emily was grumbling at the weekend because I haven't written about her for ages! Hopefully today's entry will put that right.
Emily seems to have settled into university life fairly happily, she is working very hard and always seems to have a deadline to meet. Her English course demands a lot of reading, she has always been an avid reader but I think she finds it hard to muster much enthusiasm about one or two of the set books. When I saw her at the weekend she was struggling with 'Mrs Dalloway' and she gave me a very complicated explanation about the style of writing and why she finds it hard to get into. It made me very grateful that I am free to read whatever I like these days. I'm a bit like Sam in some ways because I often prefer to read non fiction books, but I enjoy crime fiction of various kinds, Kathy Reichs is my favourite these days.
Emily is doing French as her second subject, and that requires a lot of reading too. Some of the French reading material looks really grim, but I'm probably being unfair, I hated French when I was at school but it was a compulsory subject up to 'O' Level so I just had to grin and bear it. I don't know where Emily got her flair for languages from, but it certainly wasn't me!
We are lucky because we see Emily most weekends. I think she misses Oreo more than the rest of us, but it is always nice to see her and to catch up with her news. On the subject of missing things, Oreo will be missing his manhood very soon, I rang the vet today to make an appointment for the 'deed to be done'. He will be six months old on 20th December but it doesn't seem long since he first came to live with us, he was such a cute little kitten. 20th December is also Sam's birthday (a bit of bad planning on my part!) and he will be a teenager at last. He has been telling me that he is almost a teenager for so long that is has almost become his theme tune. I have always felt sorry for Sam because his birthday and Christmas are so close together, but we try to make it special for him. I feel a bit sorry for myself too, because I have 5 family birthdays very close to Christmas, including Sam's and Emily's, it is a very expensive time of year!
Robbie seems to be in shock after tidying his desk on Monday. Apparently he has even admitted to being baffled by technology, usually it is the other way around - technology is baffled by him! He loves his gadgets and geeky stuff and I suppose I do too, but sometimes I have to beg him to shut up! I like to know how things work, but the intricate detail that Robbie treats me to leaves me begging for mercy. My mum brought me up to believe that a woman could do anything better than a man for two reasons, we think about it first and we read the instructions!! She was absolutely right of course, she was almost always right (that’s where I get it from!). Robbie knows a huge amount about computers etc, but he doesn’t always find the simplest way to achieve things. Being a train person his attitude seems to be ‘why go from A to B when you could go the scenic route via C,D,E and F’ Fair enough for train spotting and certain other activities, but when applied to computers, cooking or most other daily activities it can be infuriating!
Robbie has a dreadful sense of direction and his map reading in the car always causes a heated argument. He has the attention span of a goldfish and rather than following the map he tells me the route the train would take, or he gives detailed train time or he manages to remember when the line closed to passenger traffic and how long freight continued after that! All very interesting I suppose, but not when it causes me to miss my turn and travel miles out of my way. He has even caused me to make an emergency stop (not recommended on the motorway) when he yelled LOOK at the top of his voice. I thought he was warning me of a hazard, but he had only spotted a train in the distance!
I shouldn’t moan, listening to his stories about his work mates it is clear that some of their wives have far worse to put up with!
