Home is where the Frog Is

 

As I leave the car, I often go back and peer in through the window.  I am checking the handbrake.  It is always on.  I set off down the pavement again.  After a few paces, I take the key controls from my pocket, point them at the car, press the ‘locked’ symbol.  The car flashes to me that it was already locked.

After eighteen months of working at home (and in fact doing everything else at home too!), I am unused to going out anywhere much and I react to the strangeness by over-checking the car. 

As I’ve already said, getting away on holiday was especially momentous in a year when there were so many obstacles.  We were so fortunate to get away for a week, but it felt weird. It was hard to leave the house and garden with which we have become so much more intimately involved.

But the flipside of this is that homecoming means so much more.  We exclaimed at the fresh blooms on the rudbeckia, the tomatoes reddening in the greenhouse and the young squabs in the dovecote.  at the birdfeeders were the fluffy offspring of bluetits’ and coaltits’ second broods.

But once the car was unpacked, the thing I most wanted to do was to sit beside our little pond.  A gang of the most miniature new froglets were hopping about while a larger one skulked patiently amongst the waterlilies, waiting for a passing fly.

‘Ah!’ I called to Nigel, ‘Home is where the frog is.’

Gnomes threatened by high winds

Nigel’s family is a bit posher than mine and it doesn't usually matter.

But recently a divide has opened up between us.

It is over a little thing. To be precise, two little things.

We’ve been in our current post-kids home for four years now.  The garden has matured nicely. 

However, when I looked around, it seemed clear something was missing.

“I want gnomes!”

“Gnomes are awful.  You can’t have them.”

“Not even in an ironic, Post-Modern way?”

“Maybe just one…”

“But he would be lonely.  There have to be at least two!”

At this point, our memories of the conversation diverge.  Nigel seems to think he said “Over my dead body,” but I somehow heard it as “That would be fine.”

Carenza very kindly gave me two little cylindrical parcels for Christmas.  My gnomes.

I asked Nigel where I might place them in the garden.  His suggestions always seemed to include the word “behind” – “behind the rockery”, “behind the pittosporum”

That didn’t seem sensible to me.  Nobody would be able to see them.  Instead, I found a nice open spot in our front garden where they could greet any passing neighbours.

Only problem is, there’s no shelter from the wind and last time we had a gale, it knocked one of them over.

At least, I guess it was the wind…

How do we lure our children home ?

Perran and Carenza moved off to rent a house with friends Zac and Ella three months ago now. 

It was the same week that we buried Nigel’s father and we could almost hear the grinding sound of the generations rolling slowly over.

The twins are less than twenty miles from us, but it’s in London. 

We are unlikely to drive there because, as we discovered on moving day, the traffic wardens are super-alert.  Like polar bears who can smell a seal from half a mile away, even when it’s beneath a meter of ice. Not that the polar bears issue seals with tickets – their paws are too big to work the machine.  But I digress.

The public transport links are good.  But why would they want to come out to St Albans?  What for?  Their part of London is full of exciting things to do and favourite friends to do them with. 

Nigel and I have discovered that if we present ourselves in London after work with tickets for a play or exhibition and a table booked for dinner, the twins show up looking smart and make entertaining company. 

But I am after a more sustainable relationship.  

I am developing ways in which to lure them home to us.  We have nice garden to sit in, whereas the twins’ nearest open ground is a prison exercise yard (that’s how come they could afford to rent in that area).  We have a warm wood-burning  stove and decent home-cooking.  Surely that will be enough….

As long as they don’t expect us to be polite to them or make intelligent conversation all will be well.