Mum’s asked that bloke round for Sunday lunch – the one she went out for a drink with, bit premature if you ask me and anyway, I wanted to go and see Uncle Angus and now I can’t. I’m going to ring him and pop round today, I really need to get out of the house as there’s loads of housework being done for this visit tomorrow and I don’t want to do any of it.
Mum says that she has no idea how she has managed to bring up such lazy children; she really looks surprised by it, and harassed over how much she’s had to do. I managed to walk in on the lecture after seeing Uncle Angus. I tried to skidaddle up the stairs, but there was no escaping it.
We all had to agree to tidy our rooms. . . . bit of a nightmare as my room is a real pigsty, but I can’t see why that’s a problem since I keep the door shut and it’s only ever me who has to go in there – but I’ll tidy as a peace keeping gesture, I think we all got off lightly anyway, Mum could have insisted that we all stayed in and helped her.
Uncle Angus was a bit upset about Aunt Evelyn, technically, Uncle Angus is not my uncle at all, he’s my fathers’ uncle by marriage. Uncle Angus married my dad’s aunt Evelyn, who was a bit of an outcast from the family because of her political views. She was a staunch feminist and protested all over the country. Actually, when I say Uncle Angus is an uncle by marriage that’s not true, the family always say they were married, but he and Aunt Evelyn never married, neither of them believed in it, but they loved each over very much and lived together for thirty five years. She died about ten years ago. I have vague memories of her; strangely, I have more of a memory about the change in Uncle Angus after she died. You know I hate clichés, but it really was as if the sun stopped shining for him when she died, he hasn’t been the same since.
I knew as soon as I saw him that he wasn’t feeling very happy, he was nursing a bottle of whisky, insisted on playing a game of scrabble and struggled to beat me, normally I haven’t got a hope in hell.