Last night we took the kids and Natasha to the Wanderers, with Kyria riding on Natasha’s knee in the back. There was a concert going on, and Allison sang Stop Your Sobbing – I could tell she was unsure of her way, but she came across well anyway – low-key and with a rich voice. It’s a pleasant surprise to discover my wife can sing like that…

At the end of the evening when we were trying to leave, the kids took to pencil-rolling down the short, shallow grass slope between the pub and the car park. Ian wanted to race, but Kyria was just having fun. They couldn’t get enough – just went on and on rolling over and over, singing “Jack and Jill went down the hill!” They would have been there all night if we had let them stay…

In the middle of the night I woke up at noise downstairs and checked my watch – 3.45 a.m. Ian and Natasha were downstairs with all the lights on playing computer games. I sent them back to bed with a warning not to get up until it was light. 45 minutes later I was roused again – this time they had crept down super-silently and left all the lights off, and had only given themselves away because they couldn’t help but cry out at the excitement on the screen. Ian tried to argue that he had seen light in the sky, so I switched the light back off and said “does that look like light to you?”

Kyria slept through all this and woke up at 7.30. Then she came straight to me in the study and said “Can we put the TV on? We’ve got to watch the royal wedding!” I had to calm her down and explain to her that it was still the middle of the night in England, and the wedding wouldn’t get going until this afternoon…