all interested parties

More tomorrow. It's a bit late after popping out to get my dad zoetroped and they'll be up early in the morning and I'm back at work in the afternoon and still have to iron things.

***

Despite trying to treat holiday-days as if they're work-days in terms of getting up and getting ready it's slightly less easy to do so when there are extra people bumbling about, especially when they appear to be effectively dressed whilst they eat their breakfast only for it to turn out that they're not yet washed. There was a slight extra impetus to trying to get out early today as my mum had arranged a meeting with her cousins, over to whose house we generally go every couple of years depending on when my mum visited (as it tended to be only my flexibler-holidayed dad who'd come up here in August for festival-stuff) and whether or not her cousins were in town or down in their caravan. Seeing as we'd need to take more people and stuff than they would they were due to come to us but this then required that a portion of the valuable morning-time was spent making things sufficiently tidy to prevent the ghosts of my grandmother and one of her sisters tutting in the imaginations of the people who considered the cleaning necessary.

We ended up getting out whilst it was still barely the morning and whilst it was annoying that the target cake/coffee stop was shut on Mondays (which we discovered three months ago but have since obviously forgotten) it meant that we could actually go more than a mile before stopping, though did mean a little bit of unnecessary flapping regarding our ability to get home in time for the impending visit even though they had been assured that I knew the precise distance from the eventual cakestop-location to the house and how long it would take me to get there (in both trundling-the-wingpiglet-and-still-being-faster-than-everyone-else or unencumbered-to-ensure-someone-got-there-in-time modes). Mildly disappointing coffee though nice cakes and I've had better soups but at least another location has been tested for future reference.

Although they arrived five minutes early the effect of setting my watch generally five minutes ahead of work-clocking-machine-time meant that the visitors appeared to arrive precisely on time, though we were still fishing out the relevant fancy crockery and putting biscuits on plates (rather than leaving them safely in the packets where they take significantly longer to go soft) as they arrived. There ought to be a better term to describe their relative-position but as they're (I think) the oldest and youngest children of one of my gran's (I think) elder sisters there's nothing closer than 'first cousins, once removed' though I don't like that notation as it doesn't clarify the direction or branch on which the removal exists. 'Mother's cousins' is more precise, though as they were always generally referred to as 'Auntie Peg, Sheila & George' when I was a kid I assumed they were something like my mum's 'Auntie' Betty who turned out just to be my gran's pal. Now that she's a bit older than my gran was when she died (about eighteen years ago, in the company of nAuntie Betty, who only died a couple of weeks back at the age of 97) there's a significant amount of obvious shared genealogy in Sheila's face. I apparently met great Auntie Peg (originally some sort of Margaret-type name, one of at least two in that sibling-set) a few times as a child and would presumably have been able to spot greater grandmother-similarities in her had she not died the day before I rang up my mum to get their address in order to go and visit a few months after I moved up here, coincidentally living in a block of student flats built almost on the site of the building in which grAuntie Peg used to work. I couldn't attend the funeral as it was on the same day as some sort of exam but have sort of vaguely regularly but infrequently visited since, though usually mostly when mother is up. We've seen them reasonably frequently recently (with the wedding and more frequent visits by mother now that she's retired) and shall meet them again in November at my sister's wedding, when mother will hopefully have a chance to solidify some of the vaguer details of how many brothers and sisters there were in my grandmother's family and so on. I'm not sure that there's much of that line of the family visible in Edgar at the moment but he was nicely-behaved during the visit and doing his squeaking thing at regular intervals.