This afternoon was Niamh Dawson’s birthday party. Her parents threw a barbeque in the garden complete with paddling pool for the kids. “I thought there was a hosepipe ban?” I asked her Irish father, Seamus. “There is”, he replied, “I filled it with the bucket. Sure I almost broke my fecking back”.
We hadn’t intended to stay long, but Ella was being entertained, so we stayed all afternoon. Almost everyone in the garden was Irish and they made a fuss of Niamh and Ella playing together which they managed reasonably well, with the exception of a bit of hair-pulling and pushing about on Ella’s part. Seamus’ cousin was visiting from Dublin. He’s in a rock band but I can’t remember what he said they were called, which is a sure sign that I’m getting old. They must be quite successful because he knows David Walliams and Matt Lucas and he’d recently been on a chat show with Jimmy Carr. He could have been the lead singer of Snow Patrol for all I know, and yes, I resisted the temptation to ask him whether he knew Bono (though it almost killed me not to, I had the feeling I might break out with a touch of Tourette’s syndrome and just blurt it out any minute).
Niamh’s grandma had baked her a stack of fairy cakes and arranged them onto a stand, the whole topped with blue frosted icing and smarties. Unfortunately they had been sitting in the laundry for a couple of hours by the time she brought them outside, so they were melting into heaps on the cake stand while the flies did their worst on the food from the Barbie.
“I want cake, I want cake!” stamped Ella as soon as she saw them. It was as much as Niamh’s parents could do to get through the candle-lighting and song-singing before Ella smashed her way in and devoured four of them in rapid succession, splashing around the pool with fistfuls of crumbs.
That’s my girl.
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