Seven days and counting..

Just a week to go then, and I’m still not sure how to celebrate my birthday. Sophie arrives on Sunday, and will be staying until Wednesday, so maybe we’ll just all stay in and get drunk and start rebuilding ourselves as a family? I’m getting really nervous about seeing her now. It was wonderful to chat yesterday, and I was on a high for hours, but then it suddenly hit me at four o’clock this morning – what if we don’t like each other? We haven’t spoken for two years, in which time I’ve finished my degree and moved back to Norfolk, and she’s become a qualified nurse in Edinburgh. Before that we didn’t see each other much, and the time we did spend together was dominated by our mother. What if we don’t get on? What if this visit goes horribly awry and she buggers off back to Scotland vowing never to see us again? Am I destined to lose yet another member of my family? Will it just be me and Hannah and the cat against the world soon, until I foul up my relationships with them as well, and watch Gerald and Hannah depart in a huff leaving me all alone as a hermit? Will I end up a lonely alcoholic like my mother, chain-smoking Embassy and sleeping with strangers in a rat-infested bedsit close to Preston?? Will I die a lonely death with no one close by to call loved ones??
Funny the things that come into your mind when you’re date-sorting clotted cream in a supermarket.

RC 13-1-09
1945 GMT