Wit Over Ignorance

A day at the opera

So we dumped the kids, abandoned the dog, and took off for New York for a grown-up weekend. Eat your hearts out, my little sweetie-pies - we had a ball and we didn't miss you a bit.

First stop, naturally, was cocktails, and the second stop was cocktails. After cocktails at the third stop we went to dinner for some more cocktails. The plan after that was to stop at a nightclub for a last round of cocktails on the way home, but for some reason Sylvie couldn't stand up straight and she demanded a taxi back to the hotel. She's getting old, you understand. These French women have no stamina.

The next thing we knew it was morning, so we stayed in bed and watched Brad Pitt take on the Nazis. It seemed entirely appropriate that the entire plot should revolve around a moment when the Brit-disguised-as-a-German ordered three cocktails.

After that it was grown-up shopping and then the main attraction on the weekend agenda: a visit to the New York City Opera for the opening matinee performance of Don Giovanni, which for those of you unfamiliar with Mozart's greatest songfest, involves a lecherous old fool who can't stop chasing after women. Any resemblance to real-life persons is strictly co-incidental.

All in all it was definitely an experience to be repeated. So we're off to Madame Butterfly in March, when I'm definitely going to try that rather nice-sounding spiced martini.

Sweet 17

You take better portraits of yourself than I do, babe. You fill my heart with love and pride. Happy Birthday from all of us.

Gogglers

Exhausted by witches and ghouls and bats, they collapsed on the sofa to watch The Little Pony. Or The Three Little Pigs and The Baby Wolf. Or anything that wasn't too scary....

Scary Perry

Halloween is over for another year (boo hoo) but here's a last dose of frightfulness from our two scariest monsters. We took them up the road to Perry Street, where local residents engage in a flamboyant street frightfest. Hundreds of people turn out to visit houses transformed into haunted grottos, cemeteries full of living dead, and prisons incarcerating psychotic chainsaw murderers (I dunno, maybe the last guy lives like that in real life, too). Much fun was had by all, and you'd have to be a ghoul with a heart of stone not to be terrified by the pink and purple apparitions below. Same time, same place, next year then......

Ron RIP

I fear I owe it to the rest of the family to announce the demise of Sylvie's cat, Ron, who was 15 years old and hadn't been doing well for some time. I must confess at the outset I never got on particularly with Ron - he ignored me, and I tried to ignore him, which got progressively harder in his declining months, but we needn't dwell on those. The small girls loved him, Sylvie misses him more than she thought she would, and for all his non-communicative faults he was a very handsome animal. It fell to me to dig his grave beneath a tree in our small garden, and the girls have added a pumpkin and various memorial rocks. He was part of our family, and he earned his place on these pages.

 

Donner und blitzen

The disturbing thing about daughters is that one day you're dealing with this gangly, uncertain, volatile adolescent, and then one day you're not. Suddenly she's become someone else (and grown three inches overnight while doing it). Daughter number one has settled calmly into advanced teenagerness; three and four are still little kids; but two is knee-deep in the storm-lashed swamp of approaching maturity. Fasten your seat belts, folks, it's quite a ride.....

Why do they do this ?

I have four daughters. Today we took them to the Washington International Horse Show. The four pictures below were taken at various times of the day. They have something in common. See if you can spot what it is.

Creatures of the night (part 2)

Yes, that is a man in a dress behind me. No, this isn't a Halloween shot, though I have to admit it's pretty scary. It's from the summer in France, and I was just waiting for the right moment to inflict it on an unsuspecting world.

Creatures of the night (part 1)

The first Halloween event of what promises to be a very scary week took place at daughter number three's school. No expense was spared in turning our blonde cutesies into terrifying technicolor apparitions....

It's that time of year again (again)

The summons arrived and there was no escaping it. Dad must report for pumpkin carving duty at smallest daughter's school, or else the poor waif would be left there, orphaned and miserable, while all the other Dads dazzled their offspring with masterful carving of Halloween lanterns. So of course I turned up, Swiss Army knife at the ready. And as you can tell from the iPhone snap appended below, my middle name should have been Michelangelo.

The purpose of the occasion, the school solemnly informed us, was to encourage bonding between father and daughter. Sounds like a good idea to me, but slightly lacking in spontaneity, perhaps. Ooops, it's 10 o'clock. Gotta go and bond.......