Uncle Angus and I went out for a curry tonight; at first he was a bit cool towards me because I haven’t been seeing much of him lately. He never used to be like that, but since he had his fall he’s changed a bit, he seems more childlike, kind of spoilt at times. But after a bit he was more like his old self and was very chatty and funny. He was very pleased that I’d been working really hard on my exams and said that I must make sure to go to a good university away from home where I’d have lots of fun and that I must take advantage of everything while I’m there because it was often the best years of your life!! Great – spend the rest of your life looking back at three years and wishing you were still there. But I know what he meant, and he’s right, it’ll be really good to live away from home, take charge of my life and get away from the pond life that is Jade. I asked Uncle Angus what he’d do if someone did something unforgivable but he still missed them. He looked a bit taken aback, but he said that sometimes things that seemed unforgivable actually weren’t and that if you still missed a person because you had stopped seeing them over something then maybe it wasn’t an unforgivable thing that they did. He said that as he got older, things that had seemed really bad when he was younger didn’t seem half as bad anymore and that part of that was realising that we’re all human. That we often set too much store by our own humanity, that we had expectations that couldn’t be lived up to and that we weren’t that different to animals, we still had base instincts about things. He also said that people did things at different times for different reasons, and it was only afterwards that they realised how much of a mistake they had made. I wondered what sort of mistakes Uncle Angus had made, but I didn’t ask because there was a big fuss when some drunk blokes came in and started shouting “Oi Patel give us a popadom†at the waiters. Uncle Angus was furious and got up to say something to them, but the manager came over and thanked him but asked him to sit down so that they could sort it out themselves. Uncle Angus thought that they meant that they would chuck the blokes out, but they didn’t they just served them as if they weren’t being obnoxious racists. We left.