Boys are having so much fun on a Portal call with their “Papa” (my Dad, their Grandad).

Wife wants to know what I think about the Assisted Dying Bill.

She’s strongly in favour: “It can’t come soon enough for some people,” she says.

Wife reckons she has kidney failure due to her high blood pressure. She says her kidneys are due to expire in 2074.

SAUSAGES

Lincolnshire sausages are the finest sausages you can get.

I remember as a boy, fifty years ago, my grandmother making sausages at home for the local butcher. Sometimes, she would let me feed the sausage meat into the machine and then turn the handle to push it through into the skins.

A special treat then was boiled sausages for breakfast. The skins would fall off, and we ate them with white bread soaked in the soup or broth they created in the pan along with a dash of English mustard.

In later years, my Mum would travel to Boston in south Lincolnshire from her home in north Lincolnshire specially to buy sausages from the butcher who made the best Lincolnshire sausages.

She would freeze them and pack me off with ten or twelve wrapped in old newspaper whenever I came back to visit from university or when I first moved to Manchester and then London.

I haven’t had a proper Lincolnshire sausage for many years now. The ones we get now are made in Hampshire. They’re nice enough, better than any other variety of supermarket sausage I’ve tried, but you wouldn’t want to boil them.

They’re pretty versatile. They’re great with mashed potatoes and gravy, in a special Valentine’s casserole, in a Yorkshire pudding, with xmas dinner wrapped in bacon, in a bread finger roll with (or without) onions and ketchup, in a sandwich or, as my kids like to eat them, cold on their own in the bath after school.

Wife is making plans for my imminent demise.

I thought I’d done great with these pizzas, but big kid ate only three slices (he can usually eat all eight) and spat out his salami, little kid said he doesn’t like the sauce (it’s out of a tin, the same he usually eats), and the missus said hers was burnt and inedible (although she still ate it).

THRIVING?

My son’s school’s Thrive teacher is leaving. She helped transform my lad’s experience of school from being one where he had weekly if not daily challenges with regulating his emotions and his behaviour, to one where he enjoys school every day. She’s going to be very greatly missed.

I managed to tell her this today and thank her for her work. It was so sad to hear her story.

She has committed ten years of her life to helping our youngsters get the best start in life, and done lots of extra work getting accredited to do so. But, at the end of the day, she can no longer afford to continue, and has taken a job elsewhere in sales and marketing.

What a stupid, shit country we live in.

Wife has returned home after being abducted by aliens (scroll down past the football).

FRANK

Frank was my great grandfather on my dad’s side.

I only met him a couple of times. One time, me and my brother were made to wear the most ridiculous and embarrassing outfits, and we just felt very uncomfortable and ill-at-ease meeting this very old man from another time.

He was born in the early 1901. So he must have been 80 or so when we met him. Not so old these days, but back then he really was like a dinosaur, or a fossil.

I remember a couple of stories about him. After the Great War, when he was a young man with a new wife and baby daughter (my grandmother), he had to walk twenty-five miles to work, where he would labour hard for sixteen hours before walking home again, only to be brutally murdered by his father before going to bed and getting up the next morning to do the same thing over and over again. Well, he certainly had to work hard, just to survive and raise a family.

Life was no doubt much harder then than any of us can really imagine, but you try and tell that to the young people of today. Would they believe you? No!

My great grandmother, Ellen, was committed to Lancaster Asylum some time after my grandmother Freda was born. I don’t know what the reason was, but it’s possible it was because she was suffering from what would now be recognised as post-natal depression.

In those days, it was a life sentence, not to mention the shame it brought upon the family.

Frank divorced Ellen and married “Auntie Florrie”. I don’t know if Florrie was actually Ellen’s sister, but it’s possible.

Freda never forgot her mum, and secretly visited her whenever she could.

When Frank got the cancer that would kill him, Freda took him in and looked after him in her bed until he died.

“Mum, passing me a small parcel wrapped in Xmas paper: ‘I didn’t get you anything for Xmas.’

Me: ‘What’s this then?’

Mum: ‘Oh, just socks.'”

Baby son is one month old. Feels like we’ve had him five minutes and forever.

Wife: “I don’t like the words. I don’t like the music. You sound like a hooligan. I couldn’t care less about fucking Jimmy Carter.”

CAREERS ADVICE

“When I grow up, I want to play football for Manchester United!”

For an eight year old boy growing up in rural Lincolnshire in the 1970s it seemed like an honest and rational response to an impossible question. No one else at my school wanted to play football for Manchester United. Leeds, maybe. Liverpool, definitely. Other kids said they wanted to be firemen, soldiers, doctors, and nurses. More of that later. Maybe their parents were firemen? Or maybe not. I didn’t know what my parents were. My dad went out before I got up every morning, and came home after I went to bed. At weekends, he told me stories about George Best, Denis Law (his favourite), Bobby Charlton, and the Busby Babes. About Manchester United and how they had the best team and had the best players. Not any more. That was all before my time. I was born in the year United had won the League for the last time, the year before they went on to win the European Cup. The Glory Days. Now, in my time, United were in Division Two (although I didn’t understand what that meant at the time). What I did understand was that I got to see highlights on Yorkshire TV occasionally, with a young and annoying Martin Tyler commentating on matches against the likes of ‘local’ teams Hull City, Sheffield Wednesday and York City. United were good that season. Stuart Pearson was my favourite then. Stocky and powerful, he played with the passion that I came to expect from United players. He was never the best, but he scored goals and looked like he meant it. I meant it when I said I wanted to be a footballer.

“Think of something realistic,” I was told.

“You’ll never make it.”

“Concentrate on your studies.”

I couldn’t wait to prove them wrong.

I got in to the school team. In games lessons and playtime, I was a stocky and powerful centre forward who scored goals. Our first proper match was against another village school.

Five years later, in big school, I’d had my chips pissed on, but I still wanted to make it. I wrote to East Stirlingshire Football Club (just before a young Alex Ferguson took charge) offering my services. I got a polite rejection letter back.

No one ever told me why. I was too upset to ask.

Later, in Art class, I put together a morbid collage of war and that terrible question in cut-out newspaper headline letters:

“Why?”

“Don’t be so childish!” the teacher scolded me when he woke from his alcoholic stupor.

Well, pardon me. I was a child. Surely I was allowed to ask, and expect an adult answer?

So instead, I told them I wanted to join the Army. Not because I wanted to, but because that seemed to keep them happy.

Later still, when approaching school leaving age, after filling in countless forms asking me what I liked doing and what I was good at, I was told by a ‘careers advisor’ to study chemical or electrical engineering at university. I didn’t know what they were or why they’d been chosen for me. I resolved to go on the dole.

(Has careers guidance gone off the rails?. Was it ever on the rails?)

Eating cold turkey, ham, pork pie, Lincolnshire sausage and haslet. Reminiscing about pig’s chap, chine and brawn.