Happiness is my sister’s house. I’m there for the sleepover.
I’m in loco parentis… tis bliss.
There is a home-baked cake in the cupboard.
“Not for long,” I tell the cake.
“Take me now,” the cake whispers back.
So I do.
Over the teeth and round the gums, watch out stomach, here she comes.
Yes, it’s like going on holiday to somewhere foreign with a tv remote and a sofa all to yourself.
The bad bits are that you can’t work the oven and you don’t know how hot the shower is until it’s too late.
But hey, there are cans of coke in the fridge and her big 5ft bed is mine, all mine.
Let’s savour the brief hiatus when, having devoured the cake, I lounge on the sofa - a latter-day Nero - pouring coke down my gullet like red wine, dangling a bunch of grapes and waiting for the slave to come and scratch me back.
But wait. Is that a taxi horn honking?
My sister’s boyo arrives at his own front door and my raison d’etre looms large… here is my childsit.
He is a bottomless pit of a fella, this boyo.
He is the only one I know who can hoover up a box of 20 chicken nuggets and still ask for ice cream.
Our boy is positively envious of his cousin’s skill.
My sister’s boyo also has a schedule that makes Joe Biden look lazy.
He does school and gym and drama and youth club.
He sings and he dances and he is the Bee Gees’ biggest fan. In fact, he ended up on stage at the recent Bee Gees tribute concert where he brought the average age down by 50 years and made a whole new group of friends.
We share a love of 1980s rock – and we have a great time, driving in the car and blasting Bruce Springsteen full volume.
On this sleepover, I think it is about time I introduced him to the Kinks.
He is enthralled. He plays it on repeat, repeat, repeat.
A few days after the sleepover, my sister is on the phone: “If I hear that Lola one more time,” she sighs.
“Well, I’m not dumb, but I can’t understand, How she walks like a woman and talks like a man… My Lola!" I sing back to her.
She doesn’t share the love. Her boyo is, it must be said, a human earworm.
“Not to worry, we’re channelling Walk on the Wild Side next,” I tell her.
The sleepover was grand.
We made it to the special gymnastics in the west with a little coaxing from her boyo.
“Too soon Aunty Nuala, that way,” he said when we drove up a dead end.
There was a moment at the gym when our boy greeted one of his many good friends.
That good friend replied with a hearty bellow of a hello, adding: “Is that your granny you have with you?”
The friend proved utterly immune to my evil eye.
It came on the back of a man in a shop calling me “ma-am” the other day.
I had to look round to make sure he wasn’t speaking to somebody else.
Did I say the sleepover was lovely?
There were a few moments.
Firstly, my sister has a set of talking scales.
The scales shout your weight at you. At least at Weight Watchers, they whisper.
Thank goodness her scales talk in kilos and, like Jacob Rees-Mogg, I only do imperial measures. So that was a small relief.
My sister also has Alexa.
“When the alarm goes in the morning, just say “Alexa, stop!” she instructs me.
“O brave new world,” I tell her with a little irony.
Our alarm clock is one that travelled around France with my husband in the days when our fella was just a twinkle in his daddy’s eye.
It still works fine.
My mother also had Alexa but she insisted in calling her Agnetha and then wondering why she refused to do what she was told.
When she did call her Alexa, ma was also invariably polite and would add on a “please” to her instructions.
“She’s a computer, you don’t need to be polite,” I’d say.
“Politeness doesn’t cost anything,” she’d say.
Now I’m back in the homestead and there is no cake, no coke and no boyo belting out Lola.
“Alexa, get me cake,” I shout.
Silence echoes.
Ah but the sleepover was a fine walk on the wild side.
