Back in the day we made stickers and t-shirts and proclaimed the wares of Daizy Shop in Nimbin, Kaz’s shop that she brought to markets in her battered estate wagon wearing those glasses she gave me which made sure she was taken seriously. Riot Not Diet. Mean Old B***h. Professional Queue Jumper. I don’t remember the moment we met, me and Mel (can you remind me?) but we knew immediately that we were family. These bonds (as D once said to me, from the women’s prison yard in 1800) were as strong and alive and instant as whenever our network of stars first burst into shapes of you and me.

Their grandmother lived in an old people’s home. Kaz & Mel would visit her there where she sat in the half circle of television facing padded chairs, her cohabitants in various stages of decrepitude and lighted rooms within faces losing teeth and skulls shining through paper skin. I imagined shoes clicking like dolls with legs too shrunk to reach the swirling patterned carpet, stockings rucked behind the knees, grey perms and loose cardigans, watery eyes turning to see youth walk in the door. Kaz and Mel, Hello Granny.

Their grandmother held a knitting needle, no knitting, just the long sharp metal and plastic with bobbled end which, as Kaz and Mel settled down for their visit, perhaps Mel found a piano stool against the wall and dragged it over, perhaps Kaz sat on the floor, she tapped rhythmically against the wooden arm of her chair.

Tap, tap, tap.

How are you Granny?

Tap, tap, tap.

What are you doing?

The other occupants of the room looked away. They stared resolutely at the blank tv screen or at the book they weren’t reading or the puzzle they weren’t solving.

Tap, tap, tap as Granny leaned forward and whispered, It drives them wild.

This, I knew when I heard it, they were my family.

A roundabout trip yesterday with J trying to solve the problem of his deviated septum, the result of bing punched in the nose, now, and for the past year, when he lies down he can’t breathe through the right side. A walk in village hospital, a trainee who did an awful lot of staring at the computer screen and not much else. A consulting room, cartoon animals stuck to the walls in tiny attempts at being child friendly. I have never got on with doctors and it’s not about to start now. The road to recovery continues. The waiting room was another collection of chairs against the wall, padded and hard, a woman who’d ripped the toenail off her right foot, a man who’d come a cropper on his bike. J and I played the guessing game of how they’d done what.

From there to town and another endless round of mobile fixing proceeded by breakfast. J said, you normally write about this, don’t you, as we sat at our table. It’s a practice, I replied, to observe but not take notes, to see what my brain remembers after. The women on our right, a full brunch of eggs and salmon, Surrey blonde and discussion of weddings. The girls on the table across the way never got off their phones, their bodies splayed like planks ignoring the seat of the chair, belly buttons showing, beads and sandals.

Home, a late lunch, J packed for his next adventure, to London then Wales, we played tennis on our neighbours court in the late afternoon summer light. Andy took him to his dad’s, I happened by his room, lights left on, suitcase exploded, clothes cascading, this is 18, he’s left school, life begins, drive them wild.

Eleanor

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