Tricky, isn't it? You move into your family home, and find yourself left with two massive boxes of your parents' memories - '000s of photos, cricket-scorecards, panto programmes, entertainment and TV contracts, National Service mementoes...  Well, my sister finds it tricky, I tend to be a bit more ruthless about it: Unless it speaks to me and my memories of my parents, it's going in the bin. If it has a sliver of personal context, I'll digitise it - and then it goes in the bin. One or two choice items, I'll make something to remind me or others of them... and hang it in the house. Which was theirs, before it was ours.

​Life goes on.

I suppose it's necessary to acknowledge these Gregorian milestones, if only so we have a metric basis for assessing how much time we have left on this mortal coil. Although Pope Greg XIII failed to accommodate the extent to which perceived time accelerates as a function of age, so it's really not very useful.

​Anyway, I had a wonderful time and everyone loved me. Move along now please, nothing more to see here.

Well, that certainly filled a weekend. Eight shrieking loons dragged to Guildford Airhop on Saturday, then the usual houseful on Sunday. Much lovely food, cake consumed by the sackload and, I dare say, quite a few beer and wine bottles emptied. 

Abby is 12. I can't quite get my head round this. Her birthday gifts now include crap like Nike Airmax, hair-straighteners and hoodies. And cash (hurrah for Catholic families). On the plus-side, quite unexpectedly, she seems to have excellent taste in friends, old and new. Long may that prevail...

Where does the time go? etc etc

Two fantastic weeks away in one summer, lucky us frankly. I had no idea what to expect of Mallorca really, it was all a bit of a last minute decision - our best friends had found a super villa just North of Alcudia, we managed to find an apartment overlooking the bay about a five-minute walk away, a notional conversation one Saturday night a few weeks ago was suddenly a reality.

Well... I quickly dispelled any concerns that Mallorca might be a bit '70s-style Costa Del Sol, catering to a peculiar breed of English tourist that would rather have stayed in England on the whole.  It's one of the most beautiful places on the planet