h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Enough said.

Hmmm. I won't ask. Just

I have four meself and am empathising hard

Four! Heck, I've only two!

I changed my mind, not enough said. If you're going to start cc'ing all and sundry, you need some organisation. I've got an inbox full of emails, all with the same subject title - the very informative "RE:" - with different people chiming in on different levels of the same news, to different selections of cc's, starting new news... and now my father's just replied to the very first email, starting the whole thing off again. Mother's totally bemused and ignoring it all - just sending her own messages, mostly about cutting the grass, under the same title.

My sister's being extremely abbreviated. TAFN, anyone? I think I worked out the rest. I think I worked out who all the nicknames were too. My brother needs a clip round the ear, and he'll be within reach of one next week. This wasn't accidental. If he gets within reach of my sister, he could be on the receiving end of one of her flying tackles. Again. I hope. That was so fun the first time.

He says, among other things, he has a Zebra Finch on his allotment. That would a first for Yorkshire.

That's All For Now

And for an escaped zebra finch, an allotment is as good a place as any to succumb to cold.

, my next reply will be nothing but first letters. Two can play at this game.

My brother will go all wet and weedy if that finch succumbs.

Wind him up and tell him he MUST contact the RSPB asap or RIP birdy, iykwim I like the sound of your mum, though. My kind of lady I would love to do that with 'mano a mano' convos except peeps would have me in a home faster than a zebra finch could cop it in an allotment up north.

I do hope noone ever calls on me to translate this paragraph in 20 years' time.

Actually, it occured to me (just for a second, mind) to be a teensy bit envious of the communication taking place, functional or otherwise. Ours are silent and deadly. Polite.

that's a shame. I know how lucky I am with mine, they are best friends and I wouldn't want to imagine life without that. I'm not really complaining.

Except about the subject lines.

It follows we don't do polite very much. Brother-in-law does up to a point. I took a borrowed wig round at Christmas for my sister to try see what short hair would look like. It was a bit 1970's big hairish. When she plus family arrived, my mother was wearing it. She made no allusion to it and greetings were slightly strained. B-in-law kept looking, then looking away. You could see he was dying to ask. She kept him hanging for a good half-hour.

I'm tempted to find and ring the bird twitchers' line for the finch, and have crowds six deep all training their binocs over the allotment wall.