Southern nights...

Words from a Bird.  Day 71

The northern contingency of the family has arrived at my house this afternoon.  The husband's sister and lovely other half are crashing at ours for a few days, as a half way house between Cheshire and Dorset.  Between you and me, I think that their maths is a bit skew, but I am not going to question their figures, as I am just thrilled to see them both.

The husband, who has not lived 'up north' for three quarters of his life, and who would be labelled as a Southern Softy by anyone further north than Watford, sees this as a great opportunity to reconnect with his northern roots.  Within three minutes of being with his sister, his accent kicks in again, and I find myself frantically pointing the remote control at him, looking for the subtitles button.  Give it another five minutes, and every person we chat about is re-christened with a new first name... 'Our'... although this is pronounced 'Are', just to confuse me even more. 

So I expect that by the end of Saturday, the husband will have morphed completely back into 'Northern Man', with a flat cap and braces.  He may even have swapped  Reg for a whippet, which is more in keeping with his Northern roots.   Dominoes will appear after dinner, and white bread and butter will be served at every meal time, usually filled with chips. He will want to drink pale ale, rather than the usual freshly squeezed fruit juice (Southern Softy credentials confirmed) and will adopt the pale skin of someone who doesn't see much of the sun.  But you know, it won't take long to get him back into the Southern way of life after Sunday.  A smoked salmon and scrambled egg breakfast should swing it, along with a freshly squeezed juice.

It's lovely to have more proper adults in the house to talk to.  Ones which talk about 'stuff'.  We covered many topics over dinner (or 'tea' as the husband has started calling it for some reason).  The EU, rescuing dogs, the Terracotta Army, pickled onions and Germany were covered in some depth.

We also talked about the state of the education system in our country.  Daughter number 1 turned up in girl clothes tonight (she is usually in her PE Teacher gear of tracksuit and trainers).  This is down to her heroic promotion at work.  Now she's playing with the big guys, a Nike hoody just won't cut it anymore....

Going back to my harnessed northerner of a husband, he often tells me that 'there's no 'r' in pass....'. 

In response to that, I would say this...

There's no 'r' in ass, but we all know what I really want to say....