Who's The Daddy: For one weekend it was just like they had never left
The best thing about it was how normal it felt. Just the four of us around our dining table eating a roast dinner made by me - just like the old days.
Last weekend was an absolute rarity with me, The Boss and our grown and flown daughters all under the same roof - like they never left.
Daughter #1 came home from her life in Manchester with the Boyfriend for Love Lancaster Live, a four-day music bonanza where they went out at 4pm last Saturday and rolled in at just after 3am Sunday morning.
Daughter #2 went in the opposite direction, a night “out out” in Manchester with her friend from uni that ended about three hours before I got up to take the dog out.
Two things - what the hell do people do until 3am? And by the time the key turned in the lock, I’d been sound asleep for five hours.
Daughter #2 is currently in the last few days of shore leave from working on the world’s biggest cruise ship that pootles around the Caribbean with around 7,500 passengers and 2,500 crew. She flies back to the US this weekend and then it’ll be me, The Boss and a dog named Walter, staring at each other until next spring.
Last Friday our house turned into some kind of folksy business park as me, Daughter #1 and the Boyfriend all worked from home - well, our home - as we all worked our separate jobs in HR, recruitment and journalism using little more than a smartphone, a laptop and a normally underused but suddenly at full capacity broadband connection.
As co-workers go, they were pretty good. We each had a floor to ourselves so successfully kept out of each other’s way - with a shared emotional support dog who only likes to be petted for about three seconds and then wanders off.
The weekend came and went, the Boyfriend went back home on Sunday and Daughter #1 asked if we could have roast dinner for tea. It’s law that when adult children return to the family home, they can have pretty much anything that they ask for. So the Maris Piper spuds were peeled, boiled for 10 minutes, shaken half to death to get fluffy edges and roasted in olive oil, onions and garlic for 90 minutes.
It’s a hill I’m prepared to die on, but you could roast a dozen potatoes for each diner, cover them in gravy and call it a roast dinner. If anyone wants to disagree, I’ll be in the centre circle at Giant Axe at 6pm on Friday.
After dinner, Daughter #2 showed us a complex but successful card trick using a deck she bought from Jamaica on her last tour of duty. After we remarked on how exotic they were, she said matter of factly, “Oh yeah, we go there every week.”
As ever, the best thing about the four of us being together is how well we get on when we are in the same room. We even had a weekend away together in a converted chicken hut in North Yorkshire last month without a crossed word.
Which, as anyone who’s been reading this column since October 2006 (hell’s teeth, that’s 19 years) will tell you, the overriding scent in our house when our kids were children was cordite.
To read more Who’s The Daddy click here