Private Thoughts Made Public

… well, nearly three weeks. But yesterday I saw my son after he returned from his holiday in Spain. And boy was he ever tanned. He even had white marks on his feet from where his sandals had been. He looked so fit and healthy it was unbelievable, and spent the first fifteen minutes telling me about how he went to an aqua park and slid down a tube filled with water into the pool at the bottom. However after more questions and answers he turned round and said “That’s all I want to say about that for now.” Ok, so that was me put in my place!
Unfortunately it rained all day so we couldn’t go out anywhere, but we watched Lion King 3 on DVD in the afternoon. It’s a surprisingly funny film, well worth watching. Kept him and my niece quiet for an hour and a half, anyway!
As it’s been a while since I’d seen him I thought I’d get the camcorder out again and take some video of him. But after filming him telling the story about the slide at the aqua park I reviewed the tape and found it had black horizontal stripes across the screen. “Use Head Cleaner” it said. Bugger. I raced into town to get a head cleaner. “Certainly sir, that’ll be twenty pounds” said the helpful man at the shop. “Jeez,” I thought “this had better bloody well work at that price..” Get home, put the cleaner tape through the camera, no better. And again, and again. I’d just about given up on it and resigned myself to sending it off for repair (two months after the warranty on it had expired, which is par for the course) I decided to just record some more stuff for five minutes or so to see if it would work. And it did, thankfully, but I’ll be very wary about the next few things I record on it. But the worst thing was that by the time I’d got the camera working again a lot of the spontanaety had gone and, well, there just wasn’t anything happening that was worth videoing. Pity.
As a treat he spent Saturday night at my parents house. We’d got him into bed, read him a bedtime story and then waited for him to finally fall asleep. Ten minutes later, he came downstairs, asking for a bedtime snack. Cheeky devil, we thought, but to be fair it had been about 4 hours since he’d last had something to eat. My parents had some guests round, playing cards. “Can I watch you play?” he asked. “No, we need peace and quiet so we can concentrate on the game,” he was told. He then walked off the other side of the room (I was already in the kitchen making him a snack at this point) and I was later told that he muttered under his breath “Well, if I had something in my mouth I wouldn’t be able to talk, would I?”
Priceless. That’s what I’ve missed over the last three weeks.