Out to my mum's again, but this time my brother is also there and we go together to a local hostelry for lunch. School dinners would perhaps most accurately describe the food on offer. My mum is in bits, as we say in this part of the world, over the death of her beloved cat after a lengthy and pampered existence. Every few minutes she begins to sniffle, and the waterworks come on. You may think that an unkind sentiment, but really, after the tragedies she has suffered- her husband dropping dead from a fall on board a cruise ship ("the holiday of a lifetime") then only two years later losing her only grandchild at the appallingly young age of 19, you'd think she'd be just a little bit hardened, but no.
It was good to see my brother again, and even though we see each other no more than once or twice a year, once together the years fall away, and we relate precisley as of old, sparring good naturedly about anything you care to name. For instance, I brought a list of words I didn't know that I had come across in the Ellmann book; one of them being "decollation". His guess was something to do with decolletage, and he wasn't far off: it means the act of, or the state of, beheading. He loved that.
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