Sis and me on the chicken run to Anglesey

LITTLE sis popped over from Amsterdam last week. It was nice to see her — when we were younger we were inseparable, indeed, most people couldn’t tell us apart.

These days that’s not so difficult . . . she’s a size six and I’m a 24. I like to think we still look alike; she’s not so keen.

We drove down to Trearddur Bay on Anglesey to see the parents. It’s a long trip with little reward — a cup of tea and a biscuit usually. But, in honour of little sis’s trip, mother said she’d cook. Which is a euphemism for father cooking and mother clucking around getting in his way.

“No, don’t,” I tell her, reminding her I’m a vegetarian. “I’ll get something and bring it with me.”

We arrive, me complete with quiche, and she proudly announces “There is no need, we got a very nice chicken, Geraldine, you can’t go wrong with a nice chicken. It’ll build you up.” Build me up? If I get built up any more it’ll take a digger to get me out of bed.

For the trip home she packed us some sandwiches. “It’s ham off the bone, you’ll be all right with that.”

It must be something to do with the older generation. My mother-in-law gave us some soup last time we were down Tamworth way. Beef and vegetable, it was. “But don’t worry, there’s not much beef in it,” she whispered, packing it into the case.

While we were down with the parents, they entertained us with a guided tour around the inheritance. Like the genuine Waterford crystal rose bowl and the imitation Limoges girl.

That’s the trouble with having parents who moved 22 times during a career in the RAF — everything got dumped when the packing cases came out. In those days you had to paint wooden crates black and stencil name, rank and number on each. Father always lost patience after the second so we never got to take much with us.

Which means you’ll never see me on “Cash In The Attic” or “Flog It”. The best I can come up with is a plastic talking Yoda from “The Empire Strikes Back”. And that belongs to Him Indoors.

But maybe he’s right and, eventually, a plastic talking Yoda will be worth a fortune. How would I know?

My grandad used to be a farm labourer looking after shire horses on the farm. When they retired he brought their brasses home for gran to keep clean. When he died she gave them to me. I swapped them for the first computer game — you remember the one: hitting a little ball back and forth to knock bricks out of a wall. Even that might have been worth something if I hadn’t swapped it for a Christmas cake in 1974. You might guess where that went . . .