Snapshot: My daughters’ ‘happy birthday’ toilet

This is a photo of my two daughters, Rachel and Kirsten, when they were aged five and seven. They are now 23 and 25. It was taken on their dad’s 34th birthday. We were living in a rented flat in Edinburgh, to which we had moved not long before. We had come back from Penzance in Cornwall, where the girls were both born, to Edinburgh where their dad and I are from. They were excited about their dad’s birthday and wanted to do something special for him.

He was at work all day and they were impatient for him to get home and start enjoying his birthday. We had lots of old cardboard packing boxes folded up in the flat. One of them came up with the idea of making one of the boxes into a toilet and thought it would be a great idea to hide in it until their dad came home when they would burst dramatically from the “toilet”, shouting happy birthday. They had great fun painting the box and making it into a toilet, which somehow ended up yellow with a red seat.

This photo is of them practising what they were going to do when their dad walked into the room. Kirsten is the one in the toilet and Rachel is rehearsing being surprised at her sister bursting out from under the seat – as they hoped their dad would be.

Their poor dad arrived home tired and stressed from a job he was not really enjoying to be faced with one child bursting out of a toilet box and the other one over-acting on the sidelines. He had no idea what on earth was meant to be going on, but acted surprised, which delighted them and made all their efforts worthwhile. Unfortunately, I didn’t take any photos of him at the crucial moment.

I love this photo as it reminds me of how much I enjoyed them when they were wee. They were full of life and imagination and it was infectious. We had great fun together and I miss this aspect of our relationship now that they are older. Rachel works with people with mental health problems and her great imagination is put to good use in this role. Kirsten is just about to finish an architecture degree, so maybe it was her idea to build the toilet. I don’t think even they have any idea why they thought bursting out of a toilet would be a great birthday treat for their dad.

I am now looking forward to having some grandchildren to have childish fun with, but I think that’s a few years off yet.

Heather Pont

Playlist: A song that transports us to the Côte d’Azur

Midnight Blue by ELO

“I see the lonely road that leads so far away / I see the distant lights that left behind the day / But what I see is so much more than I can say / And I see you in midnight blue”

I grew up on a remote farm in mid-Wales in the 1970s and my sister and I discovered ELO in the hotel disco during the hot summer nights of 1976, on a family holiday to Bournemouth.

Good times but, by the summer of 1980, the weather had cooled. My dad decided we had seen enough of East Sussex and planned instead to drive his family to the south of France. It couldn’t possibly take more than a couple of days door to door in a Ford Granada.

Even after the initial sweltering four-hour drive to London, where we had to stop for a tyre change on Park Lane mid-rush hour traffic, my dad didn’t lose his focus. When we reached France, he drove as if he had been born driving on the right-hand side, spending eight hours at the wheel before admitting defeat and pulling off the motorway to go in search of a B&B.

On the evening we officially reached the south of France, descending a winding hairpin track from the mountains to see the colours of the coastline at dusk stretch out before us, Jeff Lynne of ELO was singing Midnight Blue. The air was filled with the scent of lavender and the sounds from the stereo and the sight of the sea mesmerised the senses of a road-weary Evans family.

It was just the best holiday, captured for ever for us through the tracks of ELO’s Discovery album.

My lovely dad is 86 now and living in a care home and has dementia.

On a good day though, I will take him out for a drive and we will zoom around the Welsh hills of his youth, while the sun shines down and Jeff Lynne sings.

Music magically joins up the dots in his brain and soon enough he is right back there on the Côte d’Azur, his clear blue eyes still smiling at the beauty of it all.

Thanks for the memories, Dad – we love you.

Louise Evans

We love to eat: My brother Peter’s Welsh rarebit

Ingredients
28g (1oz) butter
28g (1oz) flour
1 cup milk
Grated cheese
Last dregs of beer or lager
1 tsp hot English mustard
Toast

Melt the butter, add the flour and mix. Add the milk to create a smooth, creamy paste, then slowly add the grated cheese. Add beer and mustard to taste. If not enough beer, open another can (drinking the remainder). Pour the mixture over the toast, grate a bit more cheese on top and grill.

After an impoverished time living in London, Peter heard that the streets of Australia were paved with gold and emigrated.

On arriving there, he became an eminent engineer, touring the west coast advising on construction and demolition in equal measures.

Although the streets weren’t glittering, the beaches were, and he would spend every spare moment by the ocean – either having barbecues or surfing – until a shark scared him out of the water.

He enjoyed sharing the barbecues with his family and friends, and was very generous in offering ice-cold cans of lager as the last rays of the sun set beyond the horizon.

Back at his house he would use the last dregs of beer to make his famous “poor boy in London Welsh rarebit” – a reminder of how tough things had been but how well he had eaten on a minimal amount of money.

Tania Davis

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