Royally Yours

“Morning! How’s the running going?” asked the postman, a fellow runner, cheerfully the other morning when I opened the door to him.
“Good thanks” I replied, taking the package he handed me “I’m trying to do 20k a week, but mostly failing…”
“Ah sure, you’ll get there” he said, smiling and nodding his head in encouragement before leaving to continue his rounds.

Feeling sentimental in the run-up to the Royal wedding, I had ordered online some prints from my own wedding, which the Small Girl (who has a fanatical interest in anything to do with pretty dresses) had also taken a sudden interest in.

“When I grow up, I’m going to have a Woyal Weddin’ ” she had announced, thrilled to be watching a real Prince and Princess getting married on the telly.
“That sounds lovely darling!” I replied “can I come?”
“Yes Mummy, you can wear a fancy outfit and a hat and you can wave like the Queen” she said, pulling her chair up closer to the TV to watch the Queen being chauffeured slowly through the crowds in her yellow dress. Then “Mum?” she asked.
“Yes Sausage?”
“Why does the Queen do that funny wave like that?”

I laughed and scooped up my Small Girl for a cuddle. “Well, the Queen is very posh and very serious, so when she waves she does it very solemnly, like this” I explained, pulling a stern face and giving a slight, exaggerated tilt of the hand

Later, when the wedding was over and the Small Girl was happily playing "weddin's” with her Very Small Brother, I carefully put my own wedding photos into the frames I had bought for them, and studied myself in the pictures. I was a modest-looking bride, never really self-assured enough to demand the trappings and frills that most young people these days require on their wedding day. It’s a characteristic of mine, I realised, to never really make the best of myself, fearful for some reason of the result it might produce.

Still, I was pleased with the pictures, and I called the children to have a look. The Very Small Boy came dashing downstairs, but the Small Girl, for once, was nowhere to be found.
“Come on Prince Charming” I said to him, taking his warm little hand in mine. “Let’s go and find your sister”. And hand in hand, we eventually found her, standing out at the end of the front garden; dressed in her finest Cinderella gown, frowning in concentration, practising her Royal Wave on passing neighbours.