Cupboard love.

I was vastly overconfident about the clearing out needed. I may not have accumulated much myself but I’d forgotten that I still live with the earlier lives of two of my children. Today I opened the door of a tiny corner cupboard and began to pull stuff out left here by Cossie. This cupboard has all the extraterrestrial physical properties of the Tardis it seems. I pulled stuff out, and pulled stuff out, and pulled stuff out, and still there seemed to be as much as when I started.

I never like to throw away other people’s property even if they haven’t needed or shown any interest in it for eight years, so I had already asked if I could chuck out the pile of magazines which I thought more or less filled the space. The pile extracted will make a difference, but not much. It took me two hours to sort the rest into ‘must keep,’ ‘must throw,’ and ‘must wash’ piles, but that was because I found hundreds (literally) of photos and went for a sentimental walk through his carefree youth. C is a well-organised chap, always has been, so many of the photos were in albums, but as many or more weren’t because, I suspect, of the sheer volume. In the albums were the photos his early childhood that he had been given by us, then there were the ones he started to take himself of family pets, his sisters, sailing in the bay, expeditions with the school, hill-walking and climbing in the Cairngorms, skiing holidays with his dad, those seen above taken on a Tall Ship voyage to the Baltic, the places he lived during his various training's with clusters of tousled-haired youths as tanned and fit as himself (often in various states of inebriation at a guess.) During the summer water-sports season they are either dressed in long baggy shorts held up just above the Mary Whitehouse Line by their skinny hips, or else they're in drag. At the end of each week the residents of the centres had to devise an entertainment for the home-going holidaymakers so there was much panto-style horsing about, silly competitions and fancy dress, for which the lads usually wore grass skirts and bikini tops stuffed with balloons, the girls became Tridents with seaweed beards etc. (the ones who didn’t try for the mermaid look). One anti-people person turned up as a Darlek. In the winter the dress code was ski-suit and goggles and it’s difficult to tell one from the other. In both there are many sun-kissed blonde groupies of the female kind. The fun continued even when he began to earn money from his chosen life and there are the same - or more - number of blondes (are brunettes more academic? Do they eschew the surf-heads?) gazing up with starry eyes at the virile young gods of the slopes.

The magazines were of surfing, snow-boarding, skiing and windsurfing and there wasn’t a soft porn pic amongst them, but as I had suspected the Pirelli girls had been pinned to the walls of the various bachelor pads he lived in between 16 and 26 in Ireland, Greece, Turkey, France (coastal, in land lakes and mountain regions) Lanzerote, Andorra - have I remembered them all? If I were his wife I might feel a tad grumpy about the twining limbs of the bronzed blondes but as she is a ravishing blonde in her own right maybe she is more sensible than me....

I’m so glad he had so much fun. Wild oats sown he was more than ready to settle down when he proposed marriage, and though they are passing through the most exhausting years with two little boys, three properties and money not overabundant, I think he’s steady enough not to be looking back, feeling he’s left youth too far behind or wishing for his freedom again.

Whilst we were in the time-share I kept calling my g’son ‘Costa.’ Yes, it’s a sign of age, but it’s also the sign of the affinity between the two of them that isn’t easy to overlook. Xander is very much the same physical type, tending right now to chubbiness (but with big puppy feet so we suppose he will be tall) and is of much the same mind about preferring the outdoors to the in. There’s nothing more the Xandman likes than to bivvy under the stars in the pouring rain. He can put up with any amount of discomfort in the blister department, get cold and wet without complaining, bitten by insects, feel his muscles screaming from hard mucking out, or paddling his canoe for hours, but put him in an itchy kilt or in front of a maths test and meltdown occurs instantly. His grandfather and I look fruitlessly into our lineage to find the genes that produced these two anomalies.