Family Affairs and other matters

Don’t you just love friends? I’m spending lots of time with my girlfriends and it’s porridge for the soul. I know – it doesn’t sound particularly appealing, but it is good, strong, sustaining, long lasting, no frills. basic, will stand the test of time, energy.

Last week six of us went out for dinner. One of my friends had just had braces fitted and was not coping very well with the initial shock – they are the train track ones, but they go behind her teeth so they are completely discreet and you can carry on with your life as if nothing has happened….not. For a start she couldn’t speak without lisping and she was dribbling. They hurt so much that she hadn’t really been able to eat anything but soup and they had ulcerated her tongue. The friend sitting next to her was a dental surgeon who was pointing out that those particular braces can make people suicidally depressed. She recommended macaroni cheese from the menu for her to eat because it was soft.

Well. I’m afraid I got the giggles as my friend, quite pissed by now suddenly discovered that macaroni cheese was possibly the worst thing you could eat. Large lumps of macaroni had wedged themselves with the help of metal and that cheesy glue to the inside of her mouth. Her tongue was pushed back to the middle of her mouth and as she attempted to have a normal conversation about something, she literally couldn’t pronounce the words. She made no sense at all. Poor thing. They’ve got to be on for a whole year. Luckily for her she’s got a lovely husband. I don’t think it’s something I’m going to consider for the moment – not the best look when you’re single.

Last night I went over to my oldest friend’s house. There were a few of us who grew up in Hong Kong together and we were reminiscing about our time there. My friend used to live on Lantau for some of the week – where the airport is now, but at the time, it was an incredibly remote outlying island. She really did have the most extraordinary upbringing, living on a tea plantation and right next to a Buddhist monastery in the middle of nowhere. We were laughing about how eccentric her stepfather was. Their house was always full of feral animals, dogs, cats, snakes, spiders – I remembered lying in bed one morning and her mother warning us about the rats nest above her bed…when and if any ever dropped out, her stepfather used to put them back in the nest.

Again, just a lovely girly evening reminding me that even though, when you live abroad as a child you don’t have the root system your friends have who don’t move away… the reality is that there were four of us there last night who had been to the same primary school and secondary school – we’re so lucky to have that shared history, our heritage and we have got roots after all – tap roots established in two totally different cultures.