Ninety Not Out!

So we finally made it.

Mum's 90th birthday.

I've been planning a surprise party for about the last five or six months. It's taken quite a bit of cunning and skill to get all the people I needed to be in one room on one night in November……….. in Rotherham!

And yet we managed it. I drove up on Friday to check into the hotel, Rotherham's finest, and find out what our suite was like.

Of course when I say Rotherham's finest, as Rich pointed out on Twitter last week, that's a little like saying the best table at a Harvester. It's all comparative. The room turned out to be a nice two room suite on the top floor, and mercifully Rotherham is so backward in the hospitality stakes that it was a smoking suite which meant that I was able to sit in the living room watching the television on Friday evening and indulge in a cigarette.

Downstairs all hell broke loose as Friday night was the first night of the Rotherham Christmas party season, and the Carlton Park Hotel being the prime venue for all firms with aspirations, the disco was throbbing, and the foyer was bouncing! Mercifully not bouncing so much as for the noise to travel up to the fourth floor.

I went down to the station at 10.30pm in the evening to pick Rich up who got the train from London after work and it was really only returning to the hotel with him that I noticed what a hell hole it had become.

Saturday morning dawned Misty and wet, and my mother was attending the church Christmas fair at the local Parish Hall. She was expecting us to arrive on Sunday and take her out for lunch so she was considerably surprised when having paid our 50 p entrance fee we walked into the Christmas fair and arrived at her bookstall. She has run the bookstall  now for over 20 years  and  she presides over the pile of tattered Danielle Steele's and Barbara Taylor Bradford's just the way she held sway behind the village shop counter  for such a long time.

It was great to see her looking so well. The last time Rich saw her he thought he was saying goodbye to  her for good, so to see her standing there eating a roast pork sandwich  was a joy. Having bought tickets for 5 different tombola stalls, and managing to win only a set of table napkins, we left with the instructions that we would call at 6:15 PM that evening to pick her up and take her out for dinner. No real hint at what was to follow.

We then spent a couple of hours doing some of our early Christmas shopping in Meadowhall, the huge shopping complex dominates Sheffield and Rotherham and in doing so has destroyed the centre of both places.  We must've been on a bit of a lucky run because we managed to get presents in the bag for 7 of our relatives in just over 90 min. Result!

Then it was time to drive over to Sheffield to pick up the delightful Kazia Pelka who with my god daughter Teddy had made the trip up for the party.

Back at the hotel a planned afternoon jaunt in the sauna was rather disrupted by a pamper party of 50 something women celebrating a birthday who were, quite literally, hammered. Huge galleons of loud Yorkshire flesh turned the jacuzzi into a whirlpool of terror and looking through the steam room door at these specimens of clinical obesity was a little like looking at a "how many fat grannies can you get in a steam room? competition." Not nice.

The lovely janet Ellis and her husband were collected from the station at 4.30. Janet has provided probably more than twenty wonderful Christmases for me, Mum and Rich over the years and was a vital ingredient to any celebration for Mum.

Picking her up at 6.15, with the room ready and the table laid at the hotel, she still managed to persuade me to change the water in the goldfish before we left.

I was so nervous driving her there, full of prefabricated excuses as to where we were heading ,that I managed to get temporarily lost.

It was all worth it to open the door, and watch her enter a room packed with her friends, her carers, and friends of mine who love and adore her.

After my speech, possibly mawkish, but heartfelt nevertheless, we raised a glass to her and she loved it.

As she left her place to make a royal progress round the dining table, all the worries of the last couple of months fell away. this was Mum how she should be. How I like her and how I love her to be. In control, in charge and in her element.

Thanks to everyone who made it such a special weekend.