From Grumpy to Grampy.

When I woke up this morning he had gone. Thank God for that I thought, I can get things back to normal. I'm talking about the miserable old bastard who occasionally takes over my life and pretends to be me. I have no idea where he has gone to or when he will be back. The thing is, he is sneaky and creeps up on me whenever he thinks I might be getting too happy and content with my life. Anyway he isn't here just now so I won't dwell on him. Oh, except to say that it was all the kind comments from you that made him decide to move on for a while. I thank you too. Sincerely. From my heart.

My daughter Jodie is coming tomorrow, with my granddaughter Maisie (I know I don't look old enough to be a grandad). How do you spell Grandad? Like I just did? Or does it have two D's in the middle? It doesn't matter really because when she see's how young I look she will be too embarrassed to call me it. I expect she will invent some cool nickname for me. She is fourteen years old, I have missed such a lot. I am going to spoil her.

An old acquaintance who saw the recent article about me in the newspaper has sent me this photo that he took in 1986. That is me with my horse Lucky. The young man sitting on the cart is my nephew Peter, one of my late brothers boys. Can you believe that I used to drive that horse and cart everywhere? I even had a gypsy wagon and me and Jodie would travel around in it. What happy days they were.

And look at me in the photo. I look about twenty years old. I was actually thirty nine years old! Hey maybe I'm imagining it, maybe I do look thirty nine. What do you think? No! Don't answer that! I remember being very fit. I still did a lot of distance running in those days.

Where is my beard? I thought I had always had a beard. When I showed this photo to Jodie she remembered that this was at a time when I had just shaved the beard off. I went to pick her up from school, and she burst into tears when she saw me, because she had never seen me clean shaven! It must have been quite traumatic for her. The incident certainly stuck in both our minds.

Another thing noticeable about me in this picture is that I must have left my fat tummy at home that day and gone for the flat stomach look. I must have a look around for my six pack abs. I haven't seen it for some time.

Anyway that's enough about me. No really ladies. I'll talk more about myself next time. You can have too much of a good thing you know, despite what they say.