Having kept my birthday a sort of ‘secret’ since the beginning of social media, big sis, Agent T, crashed through this unspoken boundary early this morning with a ‘Happy Birthday’ message on Facebook. Haha!! Rich said I was curmudgeonly later in the day when I grimaced when someone said happy birthday to me. He was right. It was lovely to read messages on my timeline. Dunno why I’ve not embraced it before. Maybe because I’m totally shite in getting any birthday type messages to anyone within a six week buffer zone. Or worse. Christmas is always easier because it’s the same day for everyone.

I worked at home and, by mid afternoon, was picking off tasks that have hung over me for months (years even) now. I’m beginning to pick up the pace again on getting articles submitted/co-authoring. Maybe there’s time still for an academic career resurrection. After a (soft) ‘grief’ interruption of 3/4 years.

It was also Tom’s last parents evening this evening. The final one in 20 years or so of parent evenings. Moving from grazing plastic baskets of exercise books of pictures and carefully crafted giant words, while sitting on teeny tiny chairs in primary school, to meticulously unintelligible mark sheets, noise and chaos in a sprawling secondary school. With random and occasional offerings of a doughnut and cuppa to distract from the pandemonium.

Tonight it was held in a new part of the school I hadn’t even known about/noticed was built. More evidence of interruption. Tom rocked it. I nearly cried. Missing LB, time passing, another milestone passed. I felt deeply proud of all the kids. How they’ve taken everything that’s happened, kick assed it in their own (and collective) ways and grown into young people we not only love but also really like.

Not sure I’ll miss parents evenings. [I won’t]. But will remember them with a kind of fondness.

And thank you for the birthday wishes.