EVERY CLOUD HAS A SILVER LINING

My brother has invented a new game – it’s very funny actually. You think of a sentence or saying and translate it via Google translate into another language. Your opponent has to guess which language you’ve put it into and then you can translate it again – three times in total. Then your opponent has to guess what you were originally trying to say. In this case “Every Cloud Has A Silver Lining” run through Swahili, Chinese, Portuguese and various others and you end up with:

“Every cloud looms opinions“. So true.

Yesterday afternoon, whilst we were all just pottering about at home, there was an almighty smash from afar. My youngest son was at the front door getting his football boots on and I assumed he had managed to knock something on the floor. My 18 y/o was flat out in the sitting room having worked “the hardest I have ever worked in my entire life”. He’d had a labouring job for the day – made 121 journey’s (he was counting!) with a wheelbarrow full of cement from the front of the house to the bottom of the back garden. He was covered in cement, mud and looked absolutely knackered when he came home. For him getting up at 6.45am is quite bad enough – he hasn’t seen that time of day for quite a long time.

ANYWAY, as a result, immediately after the incident he continued lying on the sofa trying to carry on playing his new Football Manager game covered in shards of glass shouting “WHAT THE F*CK WAS THAT?” a lot, but doing very little about it. He thought it might have been an exploding light bulb – or maybe even an alien, or perhaps just pressure, but frankly who really cares, it just wasn’t quite enough to get him to sharpen his reflexes. Teenage boys don’t actually appear to have any reflexes unless it involves the last bit of food on the plate, a football pitch or a fight. So. He didn’t think to extend his neck just a fraction to look out of the window and so of course we missed our moment. We failed to clock which little shit had just thrown some sort of missile through our front window. To be honest it was very lucky nobody was sitting on that part of the sofa – glass exploded everywhere. You wonder if it was malicious or just an accident. Once we’d worked out what had happened we all went outside to look menacing, but of course, there was nobody standing around looking suspicious by then. They/s/he were long gone.

So then I had to call glass people. Am I supposed to do it on insurance? Am I covered for that? Was I supposed to report it? Seemed trivial even if it was upsetting. Found the missile. An apple. Not a brick. That’s good then. Hoovered up all the glass. Stuck tape over it to stop the air getting in and tried not to to worry about it any more. BORING and very, very annoying.

As I trying to tape the window teenage son was back on sofa and watching TV. Annoyed to be disturbed to hold the tape so that I could cut lengths of it. Each time I cut a length he put it down and carried on watching TV and I had to ask him to pull off another strip and he kept watching TV and finding the whole thing very very irritating. Then (OMG) I had to hoover up the mess which caused a major disturbance to his TV watching AND I had the temerity to use the same plug he had been using to charge his phone which was quite the most unreasonable thing in the world.

Later he went out. Asked for a bit of beer money (no), and got cross that I couldn’t find some adaptor or other that he needed AT THAT MOMENT which was entirely my fault and then asked me to drop him off somewhere and then I told him not to be home late, not to make any noise, not to wake anybody up, not to be the loud, drunk teenager he can be after a night out with friends and he probably rolled his eyes.

Then gorgeous daughter came back from her week away looking divine – happy, relaxed, tanned. Oh to be young.

I heard teenage son come home. 3.30am. Shut the door a bit too loudly. Stomp up the stairs. Stomp back down again. “Bloody typical” I thought to myself. They never listen.

This morning he is asleep on the sofa. “OH NO” was my immediate thought – has he vomited in his bed? Broken something? Is he injured? Are there other people up in his room? WHY IS HE SLEEPING IN THE SITTING ROOM?” so I woke him to ask – suggested he go back to his own bed – “are you OK? What’s wrong with your room – why don’t you go and sleep in your bed now – it’s cold in here with that broken window – you need more blankets” and he mumbled sleepily:-

“Mum, I’m just guarding the house”.

They are a constant surprise these teenage boys. So it would be wise to never ever give up hope. Sometimes (not often) they do something spectacularly responsible and lovely and here is my silver lining to the broken window story (unless of course he knows something that I don’t and we are being specifically targeted by drug dealers or debt collectors or worse….)