Ah, that song takes me back to being a wee lad. Sunday mornings would be filled with the smell of my Mum's roast dinner and the sound of her music. She had (I think still has) drawers of cassettes - hundreds of 'em - yet the same three would get played most Sundays:
1. The Greatest Hits of Charley Pride - 'Oh, those Crystal Chandeliers light up the paintings on your wall' - what a load of ol' tripe;
2. The First Ladies of Country - Blanket on the Ground, some person called Billy Joe McCallister jumping off the Tallahassee Bridge (do they not have health and safety regulatations in Florida?) and Harper Valley PTA - a song about a school mum who was the sort of woman to answer the door to the milkmen in her dressing gown and mules. It had a pink cover if I remember (will gloss over the fact that having written about it, I'm considering looking it up on Amazon. Sssshhh)
3. Frank Sinatra's Greatest Hits - from which the song quoted in the subject line of this post is taken. Good ol' Frank. My Mum was so excited to receive tickets in the post to see him that she poured her coffee into the sugar!
Anyway, I digress - for the reason for this post is Tasks 10 and 25 - Attend Florence's first birthday (Alex) and Learn to juggle / do magic tricks / make balloon animals to amuse Florence (Caroline).
Florence is my beautiful Goddaughter. As previously mentioned, her parents Alex and Chris rival John and Ellen for the title of most intelligent couple on the planet - two Doctors of English vs two Lawyers. I almost feel a Harry Hill moment coming on!
Being a Godparent is strange - particularly in my case as my relationship with God is up there with my relationship with Father Christmas and Tooth Fairy i.e. I can see the pleasure others take from their perceived existence and am genuinely happy for them, but I'm yet to see any evidence for myself. Until that moment I'm as inclined to believe in Pyschic Sally - at least you get an ice cream at halftime with her. Of course I'm joking slightly and mean no offence to anyone who might be reading who is a believer - in many ways I'm simply jealous as there must be great comfort in thinking / knowing that there is something that exists beyond this. Until then, I'll borrow my old Chief Exec's mantra that this is the only world of which we can be sure, so we have a duty to leave it in a better place than we found it. Anyway it;s strange because you feel a huge sense of duty and pride and yet aren't quite sure what you're supposed to do! It ought to come with a job description! In spite of being totally crap at keeping in touch with people on a regular basis, I try to take my Godfatherly duties seriously and genuinely hope that I'll have some pearls of wisdom to impart and be a general shoulder to lean on to my three lovely Godchildren even if I'm already failing to see them as often as I mean to. Eek!
Asking someone to be some sort of moral guardian or close friend to your child must be one of the greatest honours you can give someone, hence why on each occasion of being asked, I've been generally surprised and hugely touched. In particular both Henry and Florence's parents were as close if not closer to the ex than me, so being chosen was almost doubley lovely as it not only suggested that they thought I was an alright bloke, but that I wasn't merely someone else's + 1. Even now I get a bit choked up when I think about that (although that might have something to do with the quantity of wine I've drunk this evening!).
Anyway, back to the tasks in hand. Last month Florence was 1, so off I popped to Bristol to join fellow Godparent, Louise and her charming husband, Charles, to celebrate Florence's big day - task ten, tick!
Selecting the best way to entertain Florence to deliver task 25, wasn't straight-forward. I can kind of juggle, a skill picked up from my brother, Andrew, who even to this day causes my Mum a near heart attack when he flips and spins her Portmeirion Pomona dinner service, however my acumen in this field is limited to soft fruit, which still has the potential to cause signficant damage to a small child if dropped. I had a Paul Daniels Magic Set (which sadly didn't contain a miniature Debbie McGee) when I was nine, but after spending three weeks trying to master a rope trick and failing miserably each time, I lost interest. So, I plumped for the balloon modelling - well, how hard can it be?
So, off I popped (virtually) to Amazon and ordered a balloon modelling kit and some spare balloons - well, I figured I'd need a few trial runs. Quite how many trial runs I thought I'd need I'm not quite sure, but as I've discovered, 500 balloons is enough to build an entire safari park.
As my old school friends will now, my artistic skills are up there with my ability to speak Urdu or pole-dance. I used to dread Art - so much so that I took up Latin so I could drop it! I can barely draw the curtains let alone knock up a water colour. I've never quite understood why I'm so piss-poor at art -isn't it a skill that can me learned and mastered like most others? But having said that, I could never see any shapes in those strange pictures we used to stare at for hours in the 80s! So appalling was I that when tasked with drawing our shoe, I took my pad home for the night, drew round my shoe so as to make a perfect outline and still only got a D.
Having runs five marathons and never smoked, I always thought I had the lung capacity of a small country, but by 'eck you need six lungs to blow up a modelling balloons! I was forced to resort to a pump - oh the shame! However, this shame was soon forgotten when I knocked up my first ever animal! OK, so it was merely a worm, but so adept at this was I, that I immediately progressed on to a snake, an eel and paraplegic sausage dog!
After about ten false alarms, I produced this - my first sausage dog:
OK, so he was born with a rather large tongue, but hey this could come in useful for getting those hard to reach bits of food out of the bowl or catching flies or licking stamps etc.
With an impromptu holiday to Spain preceding Florence's big day, I had no choice but to pack the kit and take it with me - praying my bags weren't searched and I wouldn't have to explain why I had a rucksack full of coloured latex! And over the course of the week I had the opportunity to get lots of practice in. Needless to say Nicola, with her artisitic leanings, was a natural, so whilst I was still practicing my sausage dogs, she'd progressed to a balloon- tableux of Noah's bleedin' ark! But slowly and surely, I got better and progressed to a swan and even an elephant (and if you're not audibly woo-ing at that, you can leave now). By the end of the week our apartment had gathered lots of new friends - which was particularly cheeky as pets weren't technically allowed!
Having flown back into Luton (what was thinking) on Friday night, I hot-footed it to Bristol on Saturday morning with my sausage dog perfected. Was Florence impressed? Who knows, maybe she was laughing at the absurdity of her ol' Godfather, but I hope so - cos she'll be getting one every year until she's 40!
