Son of a witch

The main reason for our Norfolk visit was my nan's funeral. We'd left plenty of time for our journey arriving in generous time. My cousin flew over from Ireland but had to drive the rest from Stansted and arrived literally two minutes into the 'we are gathered here today' speech. It was a traditional service with a nice auto-biographic written when my nan turned 90. Otherwise it was trying to sing the chosen hymns getting the up and down notes wrong with the lyrics.

At the wake, I was introduced to a new generation of family never seen before, including 14 year old twins are going to Shanghai for a school exchange and 17 year old thinking about Brighton Uni. My uncle, always one for coming up with good conversation and a knack for genealogy, had traced the family back to 1620 with possible links to a famous local witch in Derbyshire.

Returning back to my dad's house and the snow fell, and fell, and fell. It was starting to settle at a disturbing rate and worries starting linking in about cutting short our visit. It didn't stop us going out for a curry in Dereham but the country lanes made the drive interesting. One regret was arguing with my dad over a race issue saying 'paki' in the restaurant. Never again!

Another day and another family duty. We took a friend of my mum's to see her grave. The afternoon was just a visit to Norwich and the evening seeing Josh, Christie and their girls. Amazed to see Josh's (or Jonathan's) 3 year old self showing off for the cine-camera whilst his dad posed in his 70's clobber.

Our last day in Norfolk was a slightly tense meeting with my tenant as I checked the house over. After the stressful phone-calls we'd had she wasn't too bad in person and actually wants to buy the house. Her ornaments were unusual in theme - they were all wooden ducks. However the bathroom was duck-free. A quick catch up with Mark straight after and we were on our way home.

The rest of the weekend was visiting the toilet thanks to the Tesco sandwich I'd eaten which sort of ruined Valentine's evening. Sunday night, Kerry was keen to show me her childhood memory of a puppet rabbit used on TSW, her ITV channel down in Plymouth. The in-between programme slot was called Gus Honeybun's Magic Birthdays. This was so much better than the Anglia TV equivalent of B.C., a dodgy, bundle of fluff resembling a tiger operated by a TV exec hand.