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We brought the metal detector with us this time to try and help us find gold and Roman artefacts in my parents' back garden. My dad said that someone in Cheddar had found £4 million worth of silver coins somewhere in the valley (I hadn't heard about that, though
I presume it was Chew Valley rather than Cheddar Valley and he was talking about this - still something to aim for whatever!) We agreed to split any money from treasure 50/50 and I prepared to make myself a cool £2 million (I would not be sharing my hald
We had a good dig around and found a few odd clumps of metal and a very long nail/bolt. Most of it was hard to identify, but we were looking in the place where my dad used to have bonfires, so I think most of the stuff came from the 1980s. I did find a very thin shard of metal as I went over the spoil heap that with a bit of imagination might have been some kind of medieval needle, but nothing that I could sell. So I will just have to live off my Substack millions instead. Oh dear.
Coincidentally quite a few of the family were here today as my niece Emily popped by from her book tour and my other niece Sarah and her six month old baby were also around and my sister turned up. It meant that my parents had every daughter, granddaughter and great granddaughter in the house (though still one son, two grandsons and a great grandson not present). My brother and sister are six and five years older than me and sister had kids in her early twenties and my brother was also in his twenties when he had his daughter. I was 47 when Phoebe was born and 50 when we had Ernie, so my kids are around the same ages as the children of my nephews and nieces. So the cousins seem like aunties and uncles to our kids and their kids are straight up cousins (I think they're cousins once removed in reality, but it starts to get confusing so I might be wrong).
Lovely to have another baby to try to make laugh (quite successfully with this new one) and it's always tempting to think about having another one ourselves, but I don't think I can go through it all again, even if my one ball is up to the challenge. But all this progeny gives my parents so much joy, even if they might have been glad to see the back of our show-off children by 7.30pm tonight as we headed back to our Air B n B. Ernie was full of coke (a cola) and sugar and chasing every laugh he could get and to be fair he got quite a few, even if some of them were me laughing at how bad his jokes were and how pleased he looked with them. And he'd jump up and sing alternate versions of the Macarena every couple of minutes. He is very like I remember being at his age, but if anything he is more out of control and going harder for the laughs and even more annoying (to most ordinary people, I find it hilarious). I may have spawned a monster.
Phoebe isn't quite as loud, but is scathing and sarcastic, which is OK when it's directed at me. My plan to have kids, teach them to be super comedians and take revenge on the comedy industry that partially ignored may well backfire. I have created two comedy Frankingsteins who will destroy me before going on to kill you all.
Sorry about that.
