18 February 2005

My eldest

My 21 year old daughter Alex (Alexandra) saw my blog for the first time the other day and wants to know why she isn't mentioned. Thats the joy of families, I guess, always surreptitiously keeping count.

I will post a picture above this post.

Anyhow, to satisfy my child, now I have rattled my brain for something not too rude, a story about Alex:

Alex is and always has been clever. When I was a single mother and had, ooh lets see, next to nothing to my name, I had a tiny vial of perfume kept back for special ocassions, even though I didnt actually have any 'special ocassions', either. It was only Avon and only a tester bottle with maybe 2.5 ml inside.

It lived for a long time at the bottom of the button drawer on my grandmother's old treadle Singer sewing machine, which I had inherited.

Age seven, Alex came skipping in through the front door of our second floor flat, to show me what she had found outside; an identical little perfume tester. I searched fruitlessly for my own possession for the next couple of days and then gently but firmly questioned her, with lots of eye contact. She matched me stare for stare, never flinched and calmly swore blind that she had found her one 'outdoors on the grass'. It hurt to know that my junior school daughter was splashing the stuff about when I had kept an equally pathetic little bottle as if it was gold dust, for so long that I couldnt find it anymore.

It took another four years for the subject to come up in conversation and by then things had looked up and, among other things, I had a couple of real bottles of half-decent smelly to choose from.

Alex knew she could never lie to me, I knew she could never lie to me, but as it turns out, she had worked out a way around that. She finally admitted that, finding and wanting my perfume, she had dropped it out of our window, gone out to play, gone once round the block to the long grass and 'found' it.

Kids, eh?

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