D’ya hear yer man

It’s been two weeks since I last brought you my weekly flotsam and jetsam and I’m brimming with information to share.

As you can see this week’s column is a little shorter than usual so I’d better get started and set about getting the best use out of every letter, syllable and punctuation mark.

On November 24th Lucy had her first birthday which went tremendously well. She received a number of wonderful gifts from friends and relatives and has so far only broken two of them. Being a baby she tends to get away with acts of mass destruction. I never thought a day would come when I reacted to someone breaking something with a warm ‘Awwwwww’ rather than a furious ‘Ahhhhhh’.

For the birthday party itself I bought £60 worth of booze, but the total amount consumed wouldn’t have been any more than £17.50 and that included a few tiny bottles of Babycham to toast the birthday girl. Don’t worry, I didn’t give Lucy any. Well, when I say ‘any’ I mean ‘hardly any’. Put it this way, she was still legal to drive her granny and granddad home.

Just three days ago on Monday I was treated to another memorable event when Karen and I attended the Ulster Hospital for the ‘big scan’. Thanks to the wonders of ultrasound scanning we got to see Lucy’s little brother or sister in all their embryonic glory. I was convinced that this scan was a lot clearer than Lucy’s had been, but then my eyes were perhaps slightly more glazed the first time round.

Prior to the scan we had to endure a long wait because the ultrasound machine in the maternity unit wasn’t working. We were sent to a different part of the hospital where we waited in a corridor which was painted lime green.

There was a severe shortage of seats for the people who were waiting for their scan.

Eventually, one woman who was with two of her friends asked a passing porter, “Is there any chance you could give us three chairs?”

“Hip hip hooray,” said the porter.