Good to know

Mrs S is now staying with my mother for a few days before jetting home to Canada. Am pleased to know that Ma Sticker has taken my advice from earlier in the year and stocked up on logs for this bout of chilliness currently coating the UK. She is toasty and well provisioned which is good news to me, confirmed during our conversation on Skype this morning. We played word games, which my side of the family are quite fond of.

We are a practical bunch, and have no truck with all this airy fairy rot about global warming / climate change / ocean acidification. The general Sticker family view is that if you believed all the scare stories in the press, you'd never get out of bed in the morning. The matriarch of our clan speaks thusly; "We've all seen this before. Happens every ten to fifty years or so." Which to her sons is sage wisdom superior to all the unhinged pseudo-scientific ranting from the green lobby. Why? Because it was only a generation or so ago that our family made its living in agriculture, and if you don't pay attention to weather patterns in that job, you can lose crops and income. Never mind what some desk jockey tries to tell you. If Russian, our little clan would be classified as Kulaks. Which were the backbone of Russian agriculture, until collectivisation in the 1920's and 30's screwed Russian food production and people starved to death in their millions. So much for 'top down' political philosophies.

Any old road up, that's all in the past, and now my mother is happy to see one of her sons gradually making good in a new land. Laying foundations for the next generation so that they can live better than their parents. When it comes down to it, that's what family life is all about; teaching your children what you know so that they can profit from your experience and live better.

Of course there are times when the kids get a bee in their bonnet and won't listen, and it's no good trying to lecture them when their ears are closed. Then your job as a parent becomes simply to catch them when they fall. Our girls trip up occasionally, but with a little background support they're doing well, all things considered. We built foundations of trust and set clear boundaries in their support mechanisms, and it seems to have paid off; or to put it another way, so far so good. This parenting lark is an inexact science, but what the hey, so are people.

Off to a very nice supper at neighbour folks house this evening for conversations about travel, family and friends. They invite me, so I go. Good 'ere innit?