today was the quarterly pilgrimage to see dear aunt muriel.

aunt muriel is my grandfather’s cousin – a garrulous old bird in her late 70s/early 80s, and my only relative here in england. i never actually knew anything about muriel growing up, and only really met her for the first time at my grandparent’s 50th wedding anniversary celebration, back in… 1996 maybe? though i have no recollection of being introduced.

instead, i only came to meet muriel properly courtesy of my grandfather’s alzheimer’s.

you see, muriel is a bit of a social butterfly and frequent traveller, and she’d spoken to my grandfather about coming over to visit him. apparently she’d arranged to fly into boston, and he’d planned to drive up from west virginia to meet her. my grandfather’s memory had, however, become increasingly clouded and muddled – a fact muriel would not have been aware of, considering how adept he’d become at hiding it.

a few days before muriel’s scheduled visit, my grandfather happened to mention in passing to my mother that she was due to arrive, but he wasn’t sure of when or where. he also had no telephone number for her or further details about her flight or arrangements. in a panic, my mother rang me, and managed to dig up a postal address from years ago, and i was charged with writing to her to try to explain the situation and hope she got word before getting on a plane to arrive in boston with no one to greet her.

thankfully, this being a rather small country, most post arrives the next day, and muriel rang me to discuss what had happened. luckily she took it all in stride.

after rehashing the situation, she invited us up to piddington-upon-oxford for a sunday lunch. we felt obliged to go. and thus began a quarterly tradition, which we now seem rather unable to escape from.

every 8 weeks or so, muriel rings. we fix a sunday a few weeks hence. we trek up there by train (or drive, back when we owned a car) to arrive at noon. we then spend four hours drinking sherry, listening to repeats of the same stories over and over (recited by muriel at a non-stop 90 m.p.h.), posing for photos and perusing old ones, and choking down the most godawful food i’ve ever had the misfortune to ingest.

muriel, by her own admission, is a bad cook. in fact, muriel gives herself a little too much credit – she is a truly terrible cook. jonno likes to joke that she begins boiling her waterlogged vegetables the night before – but he’s probably not far off. meat and potatoes are an incinerated, gristly mess. shrimp cocktail is floating in a puddle of watery mayonnaise. desserts are store-bought, then baked into a hefty brick. it’s really stomach churning.

yet, every few months, we voluntarily go, listen to her rapidfire chatter for hours on end, paste smiles on at the appropriate point in the familiar story, drink cheap wine, eat horrible food and make our escape around 4 hours later. part of it is because she’s so darn persistent – we’ve tried not answering the phone – and part of it is an inability to gracefully decline. part of it is obligation, and part of it is pity.

but more and more, part of it is a strange sense of affection. she’s become more important to us, because we are clearly important to her – i don’t know why we are, but we are.

maybe that’s part of the mystery of family.

all i know is, i must like her enough to suffer the inevitable stomach ache that follows.

feist – it’s cool to love your family

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