As predicted by Suraj, Charlotte and Ellis David did leave Lincoln Hospital on Thursday afternoon. and it wasn’t long before the phone rang and a request for the return of Lucas was made. Reluctantly we promised to bring him back the following day. When Lucas was told we were taking him home to see the new baby he was so excited but pointed out that I would have to play with Jamie now that he was going, but he promised to come back for Christmas.

On the way to Newark, we made a detour via Leicester as on the previous day we had bought Sarah a car to learn to drive in. It is a Ford KA with 32 000 miles on the clock, it’s a trim and neat little car with twin airbags, air-con and a CD player as well as ABS. She fell in love with it as soon as she saw it, after a long morning of crawling under quite a few cars to check the subframe out (wearing light-coloured trousers had turned out to be an error in judgement!) and then test driving to see what was wrong with them, I was pleased to find one without any rust or defects.  We dropped the insurance certificate off at the garage so that they could tax it and we would pick it up on Monday. It was pleasing to see that they were washing and waxing it when we arrived.

On reaching Newark we were enthusiastically greeted by Charlotte, Suraj and baby Ellis and a roaring fire (babies have to be kept roasting, I was informed by Lucas). Ellis was asleep and didn’t look quite so newborn now. A little later, he began to open his eyes whilst feeding, and though not yet able to focus he soon fell asleep. He certainly has a healthy appetite and ‘woofed’ his bottle down. Lucas was extremely pleased to be back and immediately got his toys out and began to play interspersed between short spells of staring at Ellis. Charlotte looked fine but walked very delicately. It will be quite a time before she fully recovers and has been given plenty of stern advice not to lift or exert herself.

Not long after we arrived Suraj disappeared upstairs to configure a new computer he had constructed for Sarah, and I  went outside to finish off some painting and a bit of carpentry from the previous week. The ladies did the ‘baby thing’, whatever that is, but it seemed to mostly entail shouting at Suraj or myself every time we left a door open. To stay out of the way of a couple of anxious females I too disappeared upstairs to fix the toilet door which had a very annoying habit of slowly opening while you were busy on the loo (which of course just happened to be just out of reach of the loo seat!!!!). It now stays shut and one can brood in peace.

We left early that evening and had a quiet journey home without having to sing ‘row, row, the boat’, and answer questions of what is that, every time we passed anything remotely interesting, but most of all, thankfully NO stopping to clean up any sick.

The near future is going to be interesting for Charlotte and her family. Suraj has a new job in Thrapston (about 1.5 hour drive down the A1). Their house is up for sale. and they have a new baby. Life isn’t going to be dull.