ALERT: Earnest gag-free Olympic self-indulgence, in which I can't decide whether the Olympics should be singular or plural

A couple of weeks ago, I found my new favourite view in London:

Waterloo Bridge From The Bus At Night Time is feeling pretty bloody second best these days, let me tell you. My new No 1 is from a cafe that overlooks the Olympic-park-in-progress. With my mania for all things Olympic, I don't know why I haven't been there before, but that is the joy of London. It's full of places you don't have to visit because they're on your doorstep and you could go and see them any time you want.

Beside what is essentially a building site with promise, an enclave of British Day Out seems to have cropped up. Parties of school children trickle past. Cyclists flit by at high speed, causing those of a nervous disposition – I am foremost among their number– considerable anxiety. Get off and walk, you hooligans, people are trying to drink lattes here. The hale-and-hearty post-middle-aged stride along purposefully, occasionally stopping to peel off their rucksacks and unwrap the kind of tinfoil-clad packed lunches that have yet to embrace the modish likes of hummus and home-made lentil salad:

I don't mind telling you, the whole spectacle swelled my heart, then almost broke it. I'm not totally sure why.

But I know this – and bale out now, cynics; seriously, go and read some nihilistic free verse or something, because here comes the syrup – the Olympics breathes the kind of excitement into me that I sometimes think I definitively and permanently exhaled during my teenage years. I feel as though it's always been there in my life, like my family, or my best friends, or a football team.

That's no twee overstatement. It's a simple fact. I'm a fresh-faced 37 and the Olympics are at least 2000. Of course they've always been there. Admittedly, once every four years is not a particularly great meet-up rate (I have cousins on the other side of the world who I see more regularly than that) but when it happens, it's like we've never been apart.

Cynics, don't make that face. I warned you.

I have a vague recollection of the Moscow Games, but Los Angeles in 1984 is the first I really remember. I was 10. There are phrases from the television commentary that I think will still be in my head even when my own name, my way home and the importance of personal hygiene is not: Carl Lewis taking the final relay leg to win his fourth gold medal ('And the big man has the baton!') and Daley Thompson's decathlon ('It's a better one... It's a better one... It's a better one... It's a better one!').

When London was bidding for the Games, I remember calculating how old I would be if/when they took place. I also calculated how old my dad would be. I always imagined if the Games ever rolled into my town, it would be him I would go with. Every summer, during my school years, he would drive my mum, my brother and I from our home in Norfolk to Crystal Palace, to the international athletics grand prix. I remember the agitation of being trapped in the 6pm south-London traffic on the way there. I remember seeing enormous bails of blank paper waiting to be news-printed in glass-walled presses somewhere north-east of the city on the way home. I now live incredibly close to the stadium that we used to drive three hours to get to, yet I rarely visit. (See paragraph two.)

When the games were awarded to London, on 6 July 2005, my colleagues and I stood around a TV set in the office, caught up in the excitement and blinking back Grade A Olympic Emotion* (me) or clutching on to an excuse not to do any work (some other, stupid people).

24 hours later, we were standing around the same TV set in the same office, watching Tony Blair give a hastily arranged address to the nation and frantically trying to contact friends and colleagues to make sure they weren't on that bus or those three tube trains.

Then, two months later, my dad died.

I don't remember too much about those weeks between the start of July and early September. Except I knew there was something different about that summer. You never see it coming, I don't think, but I'm convinced I could sense something creeping up behind me, waiting to shove me off the Precipice Of Pretty Much OK into The Pit Of Really Hard, Horrible, Grown-up Stuff.

I do know how lucky I am that nothing like that had happened to me before.

But something I do recall from that time, amid the isolated flashes of trauma, is a sense of disbelief that any of those extraordinary, enormous events were actually happening. At the time, the over-riding emotion I felt about any of them was that it was all just so... weird. For those months and quite a few immediately afterwards, everything was confusing and awful. But slowly, the Difficult Things become assimilated into your older, sadder self and you shuffle forwards.

The reality of the Olympics was probably the slowest concept to take hold. It pretty much got bumped, emotion-wise. But a couple of weeks ago, there was the evidence in front of me. The Games are growing three-dimensionally before our very eyes, in steel and brick and mud and access roads. Despite the skeptics, who seem to be positively willing the budget to be bust apart and the deadlines to be broken, they are Definitely Happening.

And seeing the stadium almost at touching distance (definitely at touching distance if I was, like, Mr Tickle – or maybe Peter Crouch), I couldn't help but think of Now and Then (the popular terms relating to time, not the coming-of-age chick flick with Demi Moore) – how life was before that summer, and what came after, and also what didn't.

My dad would have been thrilled by the Olympic site and its construction. He would have found any excuse to drive us around it, tirelessly seeking the best vantage point, revving and reversing until we were car sick, marvelling at the curved roof of the velodrome, watching the cranes, walking into places he wasn't meant to go, attempting to befriend frowning security guards in neon coats. Since he died, I've never had a strong sense of my dad being 'with me', like people who go on about that kind of thing always seem to. He's never appeared in a dream with the answers I am seeking – like the reason why the lamps in my flat keep fusing – and he's never apparated in front of me in TK Maxx, pointing the way towards a brilliantly bargainous and perfectly fitting Chloé dress. I'm five years stronger now, but at times like this, despite my excitement, my chest almost bursts with the sense of him not being there. Not scowling at the cyclists cutting him up on the path. Not eating a hard boiled egg unwrapped from tin foil.

And while I often imagined sitting in the stadium's cheap seats next to my Dad, I'm sure that on occasion I probably also imagined attending the Games with an adorable, curly-haired child or two of my own, hoping their tiny souls would absorb the privilege and the atmosphere, while I smiled beatifically, concealing how peeved I felt at shelling out £5 per branded Olympic ice cream and having to take them to the toilet just before some crucial lap or throw. While this is by no means biologically impossible, it's looking unlikely. I waited a long time for the Olympics to come to London – and they did. There's other things I've waited a long time for, and I'm still waiting.

But in my dad's absence, I visited the Olympic park with my friend Mrs G and my adorable curly-haired godchild Sonny – even if he's a little young for ice cream and he wasn't revealing his most adorable side on the day we visited. Instead, he rolled around on the concrete pathway doing angry crying for the best part of an hour and bellowing 'NOOOOOO!' at any attempts to mollify him, until passers-by started looking anxiously at us, wondering whether they should intercede.

Sonny is just another way in which things have changed since London won the Games. But a happy way. Ivy, his older sister, is another. She's 5 now, and I imagine she might have high-fived my dad on the way past him in some celestial Arrivals/Departures hall.

And then there's their mum, my friend, Mrs G. Like many of my friends, she was there before and since, and will carry on being there. They're Olympic, my friends – and yes, cynics, I am actually saying this. Not expensive and excessively sweaty and fond of ugly mascots. No. Constant, and getting closer all the time. And only a normal amount of sweaty.

* It is my intention, at some point in the future, to write a post classifying the various grades of Olympic Emotion. You probably know better than to hold your breath for it.

Then and now, in three parts

One: Just before Christmas, I went to a garden centre with my mum, near where she lives. We went under the pretence of buying a few last-minute Christmas presents. We really went so we could have a cream tea in their cafe. But then we actually did end up buying some last-minute Christmas presents. Oh, we felt like two of life's winners that day, let me tell you.

At the cash register, I found myself transfixed by this display of sweets, which represented the forbidden fruit of my childhood.


I say fruit. What I mean is boiled sugar with a small amount of 'fruit' flavouring.

As a young family, we took many long car drives to grandparents' homes and far-flung holiday locations (Yorkshire! Northumberland!). To me, these tins of sweets were the most precious jewels in the rack of prohibitively expensive trinkets placed near the till at each branch of Little Chef that we stopped at. To my parents, these tins of sweets were substantially more expensive than a bag of Opal Fruits. What was wrong with Opal Fruits, after all? Nothing. Except maybe the name. Oh yeah, and they didn't come IN A TIN that you could keep afterwards and put special things in, like insects and bits of birds' eggs that you might have found in a wood. And they didn't come with DUSTY WHITE POWDER ALL OVER THEM. So exotic. So rarely allowed. So much whining and unsuccessful emotional blackmail on my part in their pursuit…

But when I saw them more recently, I realised I could afford to buy all the fancy sweets in tins that I damn well like. Well, maybe not that, but certainly enough to make myself gratifyingly sick. Or for my neighbours to break into my flat and find me totally wired on sugar and listening to a hissy cassette of Captain Beaky & His Band (our soundtrack to long northbound car journeys) on repeat at an ear-haemorrhaging volume, with dusty powder all over my face, hair and clothing, trying to force next-door's cat into a small empty tin.

And then I didn't want them any more.

Two: People often talk about reverting to the behaviour of their youth when they return to stay at their parents'. I'm not sure if this is true, but maybe that's because my mum has moved from my former childhood home, so I no longer have the opportunity to hole up in my teenage pit poring over the sleevenotes to what-I-would-like-to-say-was-The-Smiths-but-was-in-all-honesty-more-likely-to-be-Wet-Wet-Wet, while yellowing posters from Look-In bear down on me from the walls. But even if I still had my adolescent Batcave, I'd like to think my powers of conversation are slightly better developed, as well as my interest in being in a room with more people than just myself. But then I would say that.

Still, I sometimes wonder if this relapse into sighing-and-solitary-confinement comes about through other people's projection. At the Christmas dinner table, while we were trying to divide ourselves into two equal quiz teams, we thought we'd shared the children out perfectly with a young niece on each team . Until Young Miss Jones The Younger, my junior niece, said, 'But what about Auntie Hannah? She's a child.'

I am 37 next week.

Young Miss Jones The Younger has many excellent qualities, but she has apparently yet to grasp the empowering nature of adult singledom.

Three: Ms R and I just missed a train home from Beckenham Junction last Sunday because we took time to check the departures board, instead of throwing ourselves blindly onto the waiting train in the station. It is amazing how often one is undone by caution. So we took shelter in the waiting room to pass the half-hour until the next train. After a little while, a man came in, early 60s, outdoorsy, wipe-clean rucksack and woolly hat. He sat down, took out a box of Continental chocolates, removed the lid and held them towards us.

'Would you like a chocolate?' he said.

Erm, no thanks, we mumbled.

'They're Belgian,' he said, with a heartbreaking hint of desperation. 'I can't eat them all. It seems a shame to waste them.'

When I a child, I would have been incredibly firm about my rejection in this scenario. Strangers! No! Strangers with chocolates! No, no! Tell your mum. Tell your dad. Tell a teacher.

But now, older and sadder, I very nearly said yes. Not through greed. Although a bit. But through sympathy. Oh god. Save me, please save me, from an old age of offering strangers chocolates. Save me from thinking it's OK, and save me from knowing it's not OK but being unable to stop myself.

Still. The fact is, I'm a little bit selfish and I don't like sharing. This, I'm going to make very sure, is never going to change.

Three hours, forty-five minutes and fourteen seconds

Maybe your brother's running his first marathon. Maybe you're terribly excited about it. Maybe some of the finest athletes in the world will be running right past the spot where you're standing. You love athletes. Maybe you and the city in which you live, whose future together is far from certain, what with your capacity for antagonism and mutual recrimination, will be having a really good day. This, then, would be the perfect time for you to leave the battery for your camera at home in the charger, where you'd remembered to put it the night before, and head out for the day with an empty, powerless camera in your bag, thus surrendering yourself to the inferior photographic skills of your mobile phone.

Excellent. Well done on that, Jones.

Young Miss Jones the Elder played the technology slightly better on Sunday, stationed in front of the computer at home like a pre-teen Uhura, carefully monitoring the digi-chat between the magic timing chip attached to her father's shoe and the internet, and reporting back to the rest of the family at their stations around the course.

Remember when I said I love athletes? I love athletes. While I was waiting to shout enthusiastic non-sequiturs at my brother at the 11-mile marker, I saw the elite men run past some time before him. At least, I think they were running. I couldn't swear to it. Pretty much what happened, I think, as it seemed to me, is that the rest of the world stopped and held its breath, and they floated past in a state of serene composure and physical perfection. It may be that I became incrementally a better person for seeing them, but I wasn't moved to buy a composter on the way home, so maybe the effect wasn't that dramatic.

This kind of thing has happened to me once before, about 12 years ago, on my only visit to Wimbledon (the tennis tournament, not the suburb – although actually, yes, both). We had seats on court number one, where Pete Sampras was playing. My friend was on Centre Court, thrilling to the lawn gymnastics of Becker (I think – it may have been Agassi), so I was sweating pure resentment when 'Pistol' Pete and his fuss-free competence walked on to the court. And then he started playing. That shut me up. 'You know that thing your soul rattles around in all day, the thing with the arms and the legs and the all-over skin?' Pete Sampras imaginarily said to me, in my seat far back in the stands. (Imaginarily, Pete Sampras has a really loud voice. Also, imaginarily, 'imaginarily' is an OK word to use.) 'Well, this is how it really works.'

In two years, London will be full of incredible people like this, and if you don't think this is very exciting you either a) don't live in London or b) would not endear yourself to me at a dinner party if this subject came up in conversation, causing me to sulk through dessert, snapping at accusations I was 'quiet this evening', and lie my way out of attending subsequent dinner parties I knew you would also be attending.

Anyway, at some point between the elite athletes and my brother (which is not such a big distance as you might think, not at 11 miles in any case) were the brilliant but mortal. One of them fell right in front of me, slipping over in the wet, his skin rasping across the tarmac. It was awful. No one knew what to do as he hauled himself up, furious and sore. The terror of saying something idiotic, so insultingly inane and unhelpful was paralysing. The very people who you'd think might have been up to the job, four St John Ambulance persons, remained rooted to the spot, dumbly brandishing a giant tub of Vaseline. Perhaps they are schooled not to approach an elite athlete in peril, in case they set about their finely-tuned muscles with excess enthusiasm and too-heavy hands. I hope that's the reason. I don't know what to say about them if it's not.

It feels hollow and all sorts of wrong to shout 'You can do it!' to someone who probably can, but not the way they want to, when you know that that difference means everything. I felt a bit like this afterwards with my brother, who did brilliantly but not brilliantly enough for him. I am counting on the attrition of congratulations and impressed faces he encounters over the next few weeks to convince him otherwise.

With great power comes great responsibility

About a year before he died, my dad – the king of the fad and the fixation, the passion and the preoccupation – decided he would learn to cook. He was roughly 60, giddy with the liberty of early retirement and hungry for the new – or perhaps just hungry. Prior to this resolution, he was like many men of his generation – my mum could not leave the homestead for a few days without a significant investment in Vesta meals and malt loaf to ensure he would actually eat something while she was away.

And so it began. He bought knives and cookery books. He rolled up his sleeves. And for a few months, he rarely arrived at my house without some homemade offering – a batch of oatcakes, a bowl of exotic fruit salad with anxiously simmered syrup, selotaped shut to prevent a slow, sticky seep all the way from Norfolk to South London. That's how I remember it, at least. Maybe this only happened once or twice, but they're my memories and I'll misshape them how I like.

One of the last presents I bought him – and I don't remember if it was the last Christmas or the last birthday – was a kitchen blowtorch. It was the perfect marriage of man and miniature machine – flash, nifty, yet with a considerable capacity for foolhardy calamity. In my childhood, my dad memorably a) fell backwards through the glass of our living room window while trying to secure a rope on his hand-built boat which lived on our driveway, and b) almost perished under the weight of our car when he was working underneath it and the puny power of a sub-standard jack was dramatically exposed.

After he died – and incredibly, in the run-up to this event, he had managed not to set fire to his own eyebrows – my mum gave the blowtorch to me and I buried it deep in one of my kitchen cupboards, where it has been in the intervening four and a half years.

Until today. Today, with an appropriateness that is as pleasing as it is coincidental, the culinary blowtorch was resurrected. I made a Simnel Cake, according to the gospel of Nigella Lawson, to take to Miss W and Marbury's for Easter lunch. I handrolled the 11 tiny marzipan balls that go on top – as you will know, they traditionally represent the apostles (soz, Judas – you're barred). Mine are of slightly uneven size and randomly spaced which, of course, is of considerable, if indeterminate, religious significance.

'Now for the bit I love,' says Nigella, introducing the notion of artfully scorching the marzipan topping, 'but you can ignore altogether.'

What are you saying, Lawson? That I am not up to a bit of live-action charring? Who do you think you're dealing with? I have won over £3.75 in high-level baking competitions. Step back, cow eyes*, while I open the throttle and hit the ignition.

(You may guess from this that I am not a driver.)

Just so you know, blowtorching is AMAZING. I have rarely felt more alive. I may have found my inner superhero. She has a blowtorch coming out of the end of each limb and she is called The Caramelizer.

All back to my place for crème brûlée?

*I don't mean this. I love Nigella. I'm just showing off.

If your name's not down…

Here is the bespoke sign that marks the entrance to my youngest niece's bedroom.

It says, 'Hattie room. Keep out. Ore else. My den room. Secret fun. Say password. Only freinds allowd.' A smaller sign below shows a straight-down-to-business list of exactly who the chosen freinds are. There are no grey areas, apart from maybe when it comes to spelling.

Oh, sweet, sweet candour of youth.

Young girls, it's true, can be a thoroughly toxic species with the capricious nature of their friendships. The female population of any school is essentially an unfathomably complicated and constantly shifting Venn diagram of who is talking to who, and who isn't. Dialogue comes from an ever-evolving and logic-free lexicon of rumour, counter-rumour and supposition. Do boys operate this way? I think maybe their abuse is purer, less machiavellian – a simple arsenal of physical aggression and myriad synonyms for 'homosexual'.

But the casual decimation of other people's feelings aside, I am strangely jealous of my niece's scruple-free frankness. In my former working life – which ached with thankless responsibility, and jangled with the sound of idiots asking me questions which I had already answered, I would conservatively estimate, at least three times before – a sign like this at the approach to my desk would have been a dream. I wonder now why I didn't think to make one, out of flatplans I diligently handed out that were barely read, and decorated with a colour palette of highlighter pens that Dulux might call 'Chemically Anxious Flowerbed'.

Instead of a list of freinds allowed in, I probably would have focussed on those who had to stay out, with a self-assessment questionnaire for anyone thinking about approaching my work station which would have read thus:

If you answer 'yes' to any of these questions, please assume I am out of the office and speak to my deputy. Even if I appear to be sitting in front of you, eating a banana and swearing at Radio 1, please be assured that this is, in fact, a hologram, which cannot respond to your requests.

1) Do you work in advertising?' (There are some excellent people working in advertising. Peggy Olson, perhaps. I have not worked with those people.)

2) Have you ever called me 'babe'?

3) Have you ever attempted to give me a shoulder massage at my desk, which I clearly found uncomfortable?

3) Are you in the office on work experience? Has anyone ever described you as an 'eager beaver'? 'Enthusiastic'?'Keen'? These are all excellent qualities, but if you are in possession of any of them, please don't ask if you can shadow me any time before noon.

4) Are you hungry? I am in possession of some snacks, but I do not wish to share them with you. Please refrain from forcing your stupid, clumsy hand uninvited into my bag of cashews/Maltesers/rice crackers, splitting the sides and sending tiny treats skittering over the precipice and into the doomy abyss between my desk and the wall, thus catering a buffet for the building's rodent colony and taking up my valuable filing space.

5) Are you here to ask me the question 'What is the latest date I can write/shoot/start/finish [insert name of feature/task here]? The answer is almost certainly a negative amount of days.

This is by no means an exhaustive list.

Also, I can tell you this, because you are all my freinds: the password to gain entry to my desk area is 'contempt'.

Strictly my flesh and blood

One of my nieces, Young Miss Jones The Younger, is six years old.

Each day possibility and promise bloom all around her.

So what does she do at 9 o'clock on a Saturday morning that is alive with opportunity, the whole world spread out in front of her?

She watches the previous night's post-bedtime Strictly Come Dancing action on the iPlayer. I am so proud.

Out with the old

I'm reaching the end of a marathon work stint in the Wapping compound. I say marathon. It is nine weeks. But everyone knows that one freelance week is roughly equivalent to five years of permanently employed service. So I will be expecting at least an engraved Parker Pen on my departure on Friday, not to mention a lukewarm and resentfully attended sparkling wine/cocktail sausage desk buffet.

Will I miss newspaper publishing's very own open prison? I certainly won't miss my computer, where the time delay between my fingers hitting the keys in pursuit of email composition – which I like to do a lot, and fast – and the words appearing on the screen is so slow and bunched up I perpetually feel like it's 1980 and I'm typing on the Grandstand videprinter.

I will, however, miss the nearby Waitrose coffee shop, which has been my only true friend during this difficult time. Today, to heighten my looming sense of separation anxiety, the till operative gave me two free chocolates with my tea. Two! One is a customer courtesy; two is kind of a big deal. In reality, I'm fairly sure it was a result of the eyeroll we shared over the hugely rude SmugMum who had been served just ahead of me.

Lately, I have noticed on several occasions the same elderly man having a cup of tea and taking in the papers of a lunchtime. A few days ago, he was sitting next to me on a high-stools/high-table-along-the-window arrangement, making truly the most phenomenal amount of noise eating an oatcake, which he had brought in from home wrapped in kitchen roll. It was a symphony in sucking and mastication, performed with the mouth. You would not have thought that much moisture could be extracted from an oatcake, but good lord, he was a terrier about it.

Ordinarily, I could not have stood for this feat of noisy eating. There would have been, on my part, geriatricide; on his, no more eating of oatcakes. If there was not actual murder taking place, the Waitrose cafe would have seen at the very least some Olympian tutting, and me sliding off my high stool with clumsy froideur to move somewhere closer to the obliterative roar of the cappuccino machine. But, readers, surprise is a very powerful thing, and my emotional achilles heel is a very weak one, and it is in essence men of a pensionable age sitting on their own in coffee shops. I've said it before, but it is, for me, a 100% sure-fire Random Cry Trigger.

Why was he such a powerful specimen? It probably had a lot to do with his nose, which was Roman, and very much like my grandad's and my dad's and mine, physiognomy fans. But most probably it was his feet, resting uneasily on the bar of the table in front of us, trousers being hoisted up bony flagpole shins by the awkward, forward-sliding posture demanded by the stool. It instantly referred my brain to an image from my younger teenage years that I can't seem to forget – a man being given desperate CPR in the back of an ambulance. I remember two things in particular – the up-and-down arms of the paramedic, engaged in furious chest compressions, and a pair of feet in brown socks and men's sandals dangling lifelessly over the end of the bed. I also remember, as the ambulance pulled away, doors slammed and sirens blaring, my dad saying sadly, and almost under his breath, 'Good luck.'

(In today's parentheses of emotional self-indulgence, I wonder a lot if other people are haunted by seeing this happen to my dad, as I am haunted by this image of someone else's loved one slipping away.)

Come back! Bereavement Two Minutes is over. We're back in Waitrose. And I was taking in my cafe neighbour's gardening-tanned hands and wondering if he had a shed, I had an epiphany and it said a) I must remember to buy some milk before I go back to the office, and b) this borderline fetishism of old people and their lifestyle is possibly slightly weird.

What with this, and my nascent friendship with Lambeth Horticultural Society, and in particular the brilliant Valerie (who may actually be 25 for all I know), I have begun to wonder if it might be healthy to try associating with more people of my own age. I put this to Miss W during a multi-faceted email exchange. Diplomatically she did not reply to that particular thread.

More evidence. Another thing I will remember fondly about this job is the extremely hot lawyer who strides through the editorial office on his way from the outside world to his own glass-walled cell, expertly navigating the assault course of shoes and garments laid out on the carpet by the fashion department as they prep for shoots. To the ingenue, these constitute quite the health-and-safety hazard ('Have you had an accident in the workplace? Tripped over an embellished platform stiletto? Skidded on a shimmering parachute silk jumpsuit? Call Fashion Injury Lawyers 4 U' etc). What I find hottest about him is not his many impressive physical attributes but his speaking voice. Today, however, I realised he sounds a lot like Cliff Richard.

In addition, where did I spend my Friday night? Not taking crystal meth at an underground Dalston speakeasy, but blissfully browsing around the Crayford branch of Hobbycraft.

What comes next? A subscription to the Daniel O'Donnell fanclub and fanatical crocheting?

It is a worry.

Sky's the limit

I have things to say, but I am too busy sobbing at Michael Jackson's memorial service and shouting at Kay Burley to say them.

Kay Burley is conducting an inappropriately euphoric interview with two Welsh ladies who had taken a speculative trip to LA to soak up the atmosphere of mourning, and had then been given tickets to get into the Staples Centre by Sky News. Both the Big Reveal ('How would you like to be watching the service… inside?') and their Big Reactions were as if their homes had been chosen for a 60 Minute Makeover, or they had found one of Willy Wonka's golden tickets.

Burley is catching up with Dead Jacko's own Violet Beauregarde and Veruca Salt after the show, as they froth about what a blast it was.

'And who's the best TV channel around?' smarms Burley, repulsively.

'Thank you, Sky!' they beam back.

This is a memorial service, you cretins, not Mecca bingo.

I am reminded of a line spoken by Janeane Garofalo to Uma Thurman in The Truth About Cats And Dogs, a romcom which I love, but which is probably not considered among the greats (see also While You Were Sleeping) as Uma is practising for a newscaster audition:

'You might want to make the carnage a little less upbeat.'

So, with this trauma weighing heavily upon us, let's turn instead to the great directory of Speedy Pictorial Blog Posts.

Many are the important messages that have been written on napkins - 'Bartlet for America' is just one. And here is another - a portrait by Young Miss Jones The Younger of her beloved aunt, drawn on Sunday.

You may notice that her rendering of my hair is, colour aside, uncanny. As is the alarmingly unflinching way she has captured my classic British pear shape, total lack of discernible cleavage, and the puny sloping shoulders that leave me infuriated with shiny-materialed shoulder bags on a daily basis. Sylvia Plath said in the poem Child: 'Your clear eye is the one absolutely beautiful thing.' In the matter of my portrait, I could handle the clear-eyed candour of my youngest niece being slightly less clear-eyed and candid. I am misappropriating Sylvia Plath's words somewhat here, but I like them, and she left them lying around, so what does she expect?

The legs are less convincing. Or are they? I was sitting down, after all.

Sorry, this is kind of a downer

A couple of months after my dad died, I was involved in a hideous day-long work brainstorm, where hours of your life are wrenched away from you, while you attempt to answer questions like 'Who is the reader?' (Answer: Someone who drinks white wine, shops at Topshop – but Karen Millen on payday – and is apparently uninterested in buying the failing magazine we were working for.) I was miserable with grief; insane with attempting to subdue it between the hours of 10 and 6 and understand it in all the other hours. On that day, in those hours, being intensively work-farmed with one side of my face wedged against a flipchart and a magic marker in my hand seemed intolerable. 

Somewhere on the other side of town, George Best was dying a bizarrely public death, at a very similar age to my dad. Every time we took a break from work (and there are many breaks in this kind of day, so much so that you wish everyone could exercise a little more bladder control and a little less of the compulsion to eat so that you could all go home three hours earlier) we were released into a refreshments room which had a big screen tuned into a news channel. There you could escape neither the Pavlovian consumption of at least four bland biscuits at a time, nor the rolling reports on each tiny increment of George Best's expiration, a tireless countdown of his elapsing quota of heartbeats.  'It really is very near the end now.' 'Only a couple more hours.' 'This really is it.'

I remember very clearly how unfathomable it was to me, after my own recent experience of someone dying. The sense of spectacle and expectation afforded to George Best seemed incomparable to the way John C Jones, 61, had quietly left the family home one afternoon, after exchanging with his wife the routine but never less than totally heartfelt pleasantries of a harmonious 40-year marriage – and never returned. Just one man, quietly leaving the world, opening a door, stepping through it, closing it silently behind him, while everyone else carried on shopping or working or watching Countdown. He was a man who didn't care for a fuss, struggled with the burden of small talk, and in the face of attention and acclaim would rather repair to the garage and repair something. It was a wholly appropriate exit. I couldn't equate what had happened to him with what was happening to George Best. 

I wonder now if it was just because I was seeing coldly and starkly, from the outside, the enormity of what it means when someone dies. When you're in the thick of The Bereavement Experience, it's hard to fathom the scale of it. Probably because if you could, it would drive you mad. (It actually did drive me fairly mad, but that's another story). It's like when you go to Paris and you stand under the Eiffel Tower and you can't really see how tall it is, but when you're streets and streets away, you think, 'Look at the size of that.' That was a metaphor, by the way. You're so consumed with getting through the day, and then getting through the next day, and wondering why every part of your body feels so incredibly heavy, and when you might feel normal again, and what did that even feel like anyway, it's hard to conceive of the massive, defining thing that has happened to one of the people you love the most.

Or maybe that's not it at all.

Anyway, now, three and a half years later, working on and around various celebrity magazines who are consumed with the failing health of Jade Goody, and the optimum time printing-schedule-wise for the worst to happen, that sense of strangeness and confusion is creeping back in. Neither Jade Goody nor George Best lived a life that was more giving or worthwhile than my dad's. Why are they different? Because they are famous obviously. Because Jade Goody is young. Because George Best made boys kicking cans in alleys believe they could do anything. But I know from my privileged position of first-degree family member, and also from the letters we were sent, and the stories we were told, that my dad lived most days of his quiet life being determinedly kind and instructive, providing and enthusing and, as it turned out, inspiring in his own small way. When I think about that, I always think of George Eliot, and how he had it right at the end of Middlemarch:

'...the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.'

[Miss W, I hope I didn't spoil the ending.]

Tonight we're going to party like it's 1949, approximately

I have spent the weekend in the bosom of the Joneses, for the occasion of a family birthday, of which more later.

We have embarked on an ambitious programme of indexing the Jones photo archives and many treasures have come to light, of which this is my current favourite. 

Some reasons I love it:

Firstly, if it were embossed with some cheapening glitter, it could easily be populating the shelves of Paperchase.

Secondly, and most importantly, my lovely dad appears on the right of the frame, with the chin that is now mine, and the ears that he would one day grow into. 

Thirdly, let us enjoy the knitwear that celebrates peacetime with appliqued imitation planes divebombing the wearer's sternum.

Finally, the little girl with the bow, who is attempting to liven up what looks like a pretty stiff community party by preparing to snort her cola through a giant straw.

Colour Me Bad

You can see below my disappointing showing in the Miss Joneses Inter-Generational Extreme Colouring Championship 2008. The winner is the Miss Jones who colours in their side of the page fastest. Felt tips are permitted, as are crayons and pencils. Beyond this? There are no rules. Which is different to the rules being made up as we go along, which is what normally happens when the Young Miss Joneses compete.

In the first-round tie, I drew Young Miss Jones The Younger (5, nearly 6, 'very very good at writing my name joined up'). I took the right-hand side, she the left. As you can see, to employ the lexicon of football commentary, I was caught napping.

I was distracted, I believe, by the similarities between this fictional, two-dimensional house and the real one I lived in when I first moved to London, and became intent on reproducing the colour of the original's door and window frames. Idiot! This is not the mindset of a champion. Needless to say, Young Miss Jones The Younger's focus was absolute, her determination unflinching. 

Miss Jones 0. The Young Miss Joneses 1. 

In a break with convention, the Loser Stayed On, and Young Miss Jones The Older (or is it The Elder? I genuinely don't know. In any case, she's 8, and will demonstrate her ability to do the splits at any occasion) stepped up to choose her weapons. I changed sides and it was On.

It was a much tighter contest, as you can see from YMJTO's frantic scribble towards victory. Despite a solid showing, what you can basically see from my side is how ludicrously therapeutic I find colouring in is, to such a bewitching degree that competition and urgency melt away, like an unwilling cross-country runner finding a shady park or a cool stream on a hot day. Seriously, is it OK to buy yourself a colouring book when you're very nearly 35? 

Anyway, it was a rout, a drubbing, a spanking. And despite their tender years, the Young Miss Joneses were clearly embarrassed by the whitewash and tossed me a consolatory 'Hmm, you've done it very neatly' (which I had. I mean look how lovely my snakes are) but I could hear the knocking hollowness of their words. The under 9s have little truck with the shackles of lines and edges in their pursuit of glory.

A damp, drizzly September in my soul

I am a person who likes the winter. I like the cobweb-blasting crispness of it, and the rosy cheeks it gives me. I have congenitally pale blue legs, so I enjoy being able to wear tights, and not feeling obliged to expose my freak-limbs to the world while justifying my decision not to fake-tan. I have a winter birthday. Like many others in the northern hemisphere, I also have a winter Christmas. Those are good things. But this particular in-between time of year doesn't half make me feel gloomy – for all sorts of reasons, not just the weather.

Perhaps this is why I am not feeling especially garrulous blog-wise (was ever a hyphen more hatefully employed? remind me never to join those words together again). I could of course regale you every day with what I'm having for tea (breaded haddock) or who I sat next to on the train (no one, day off), but I do have some cyber-standards. Admittedly, few. You are lucky you have escaped my mental list of other American stars of the 80s I would like to see in panto (Mr T as the Genie in Aladdin - 'I ain't gettin' in no lamp' etc. I was scared off by the bitter-tasting subtext of slavery inherent in this piece of potential casting). 

Anyway I have learnt from my peers that the YouTube inbed is the lazy blogger's friend. And I have also learnt that music is one of the great modern medicines. Of course, it is also one of the great communicators, and not just because the Red Hot Chili Peppers said so. It always make me feel connected to my dad, who I am thinking about a lot at the moment, so here is a favourite of his, and of mine. I suspect Bolan might possibly be miming here, but as the French say, ce n'est fait rien. Over to you, Pop Match.

You shall go to the ball

I spent the rainy afternoon with the Young Miss Joneses. We decided to entertain ourselves with the DVD of Enchanted, since this is just the kind of film that Miss Joneses like to watch.

We had reached the point when everyone involved was preparing for the type of grand ball which occurs in all the best fairytales. Giselle, the cartoon princess adrift in present-day New York City, is enjoying a shopping trip montage sequence with the six-year-old daughter of one of her Love Interests. Giselle is a wide-eyed ingenue, unfamiliar with the subtleties of modern ball etiquette, and the savvy six-year-old warns her not to wear too much make-up as men think it means you're Only After One Thing.

Young Miss Jones The Younger (aged 5) gave some Hard Thought as to what that one ominous thing could possibly be.

'To get married?' she said.

'Yes,' I said. 'That's right.'

In which I am mistaken for a member of the orchestra

This weekend: more culture. It is practically pouring out of me and pooling around my silver sandals. Obviously it is raining a lot too. But still. I may as well be Melvyn Bragg. Lord knows, I'd love to have hair that thick.

Friday was West Side Story at Sadler's Wells, which was sometimes excellent but, ultimately, strangely unmoving. This is a significant flaw, clearly, since by the end of West Side Story, you should by rights be too distraught to connect one palm with other and applaud. I don't like to point the finger, but Tony, with his sensible chinos and buttoned-up pale blue shirt, just didn't seem to be the kind of man you fall in love with across a dancefloor. Maybe it was because I had been watching the introductary coverage of the Olympics earlier that day, but all I could think of when I looked at him, from our seats in the far reaches of the upper-upper-upper circle, was Matthew Pinsent...

...who has many excellent qualities which I lack – commitment, courage, strength, a history of getting up early – but impassioned leading man material he is, perhaps, not.

Then, on Saturday, back to the Proms at the Royal Albert Hall, for which I wore a black dress. While we were sitting in the bar beforehand, sharing our table with a lovely all-male couple ('They're very friendly, the gays,' said Mrs Jones) one of them asked me if I was playing in the orchestra. Hmm. At least he didn't ask me to clean the table or fetch him a gin and tonic. Perhaps I just look like the kind of person who spent their childhood indoors practising scales rather than running around breathing in fresh air and sunshine (actually, that is exactly what I look like). 

But on with the show. Mrs Jones and I found ourselves in quite brilliant seats –  very close to the stage in an actual posho's box-type area, with room to stash your shopping and hooks to hang up your coat. The orchestra were right beneath us, playing the Romeo to our over-excited Juliet. 

We could see every bead of sweat on Charles Hazelwood's forehead. We could read the sheet music over the shoulders of the double basses. We did have binoculars. But anyway. Only a couple of weeks ago, when Miss W and I been in the same venue, gently perspiring in our cramped seats in the gods, we were wistfully wondering what it took to sit in one of those boxes. And now I know. Like the secret of good skin or a long life, it is old-fashioned good fortune, and nothing more. 

That was the last good fortune of the weekend. So much for the Canadians being a race of warm, friendly checked-shirt wearers. After I booked a hotel in Nova Scotia online last week, one of them has been attempting to take my credit card details out for a spend-up. O Canada. Bryan Adams would not endorse that, I am sure.

Book club

I am in the thick of a new old book which I bought from a charity shop in Beckenham on Saturday. It has a marvellous title, which is Blood, Sweat & Tea, and is a collection of the blog posts of an ambulance driver working in East London [his blog can be found at http://randomreality.blogware.com]. He is funny, misanthropic and listens to The Magnetic Fields, which means that I am quite possibly in love with him. I can remember reading about the book when it came out, so I was pleased to cross it off my charity-shop book-buying bingo card, and at 3-for-£1 prices too. I began reading it on the way home, and it has forced me to cast aside Nineteenth Century American Short Stories, which is no mean feat when you consider I am right in the middle of Bartleby The Scrivener by Herman Melville which, frankly, is bloody brilliant.

I digress. If you have any friends or relatives who are paramedics, ambulance drivers or similar, you will know how endlessly fascinating their work-related stories are. (Not to them of course, but to the rest of us whose work consists of moving files around a computer, printing out bits of paper and talking to fellow drones whose work is also, in comparison to this flesh-and-blood, breathing/not breathing, total and genuine peril, utterly meaningless.)  This book is the same, for stupid and serious reasons. If you know how my dad died, you will understand why I find the chapters on responding to cardiac arrests particularly absorbing. And given the life-and-death nature of the subject matter, it is no surprise that a wealth of tiny profundities spring up across the pages. So far, I have been most unable to shake a chapter where the author is called to the house of an old lady whose neighbours have raised the alarm, believing her to be dead. The ambulance crew discover that, while she is undoubtedly checking out, she is still more or less breathing, albeit with increasing emphasis on the less. They go to work on her and our hero writes:

'She had little chance of recovery, but we hoped for it anyway. She fought for her life, and had probably been doing that for the whole of the night. Because of our actions, and the actions of the hospital team, she wasn't going to die alone, and she wasn't going to die without her family saying a final goodbye to her.

It's a small victory, but sometimes those are the only ones you get.'

Perish the notion of coming over all 'dance like nobody's watching', and I don't think I am religious, but really – amen to that.

Wild at heart

To celebrate the recent birthday of Mrs Jones, today the Joneses enjoyed a rare ensemble family outing – to Woburn Safari Park, thank you for asking. And this happy, if damp, occasion gives me the opportunity to share with you my unique gift for wildlife photography.

I feel sure you will agree that the bond between subject and artist is, indeed, a powerful one.

Miss Jones's Jones Of The Week…

…number 2 in an occasional series.

Harriet Jones, former PM, taking one for the universe on Saturday night*.

[I have, of course, modelled her crown on that of King Edred, who reigned circa 946-955, and was known as 'weak-in-the-feet'.]

Not to be confused with…

Harriet Jones, Young Miss Jones The Younger. PM circa 2040.

[*Should HJ PM return to seal the Doctor's downfall in some way on Saturday, the honour will not be revoked, due to the all-conquering wonder of Penelope Wilton.]

The Jones family twee

It would seem that Miss Jones was always a woman of letters. And with that sentence I've just fulfilled a secret ambition to be the kind of individual who refers to themselves in the the third person.

I've been doing a good deal of spring cleaning lately – punctuality never my forte – and I've found pages upon pages of creative endeavours from my childhood, including all manner of notes, such as the above. It seems that my parents could barely go to the end of the road without me composing some kind of sonnet cycle celebrating their return.

However, despite the affectionate declarations, I think the subtext is quite clear. Mum, can I have some sweets?

And talking of sweets:

This pavement in Dulwich on Saturday could have meant only one thing: the catalyst for a nuclear tantrum. Or a gingerbread cottage just a quarter-pound's worth of pick and mix away. OK, that's two things.

Home sweet home

I am, as they used to say in the glory days of Smash Hits, back back back! Although perhaps not with enough news to warrant an over-excited exclamation mark. I have only been to Scotland, after all. Not the Congo. Not the Crusades. I am not, metaphorically or otherwise, riding through the streets on an open-topped bus holding the FA Cup. Or even the FA Trophy. But still, since we last spoke I have seen with my own eyes real-life puffins and otters gambolling in the wild, and I don't believe that I am not irrevocably changed by these experiences. How? I cannot tell yet, but you will be the first to know.

These are just a few small things I have learnt in my time away.

• The Angel Of The North is, like all famous people, shorter in real life than she looks on telly. We spotted her from the train on the way to Glasgow, after following excellent directions from my friend Mr Taylor, a native of the north-east ('right-hand window of the carriage, stay alert from Durham'). Mrs Jones, the retired art historian (although I wonder if this is a calling from which you can never truly retire), was wildly excited. 
  

• Old people really, really like ice cream. At many of the destinations I visit with my mum, the grey army is marauding – and they have well and truly taken the Inner Hebrides. It seemed that every which way I turned, there was a pensioner gleefully unpeeling a Cornetto or excitedly fumbling to unwedge the teeny plastic spade from the lid of some upmarket hand-churned lifestyle brand. These specimens were recorded on the Oban to Mull ferry:

I'm not sure how or why this love affair came about. But perhaps as your ageing body slowly dries out, shrinks and atrophies, unwrapping an ice cream and enjoying every last delicious drip that runs down your fingers is the kind of sensual experience you may be starting to miss.

There are, however, always exceptions. One night, at a restaurant in Tobermory, our dinner was soundtracked by a tiny, crooked old lady at the next table who had hair like Douglas Hurd and a very high, penetrating Northern voice which could have been field-recorded by Nick Park for Creature Comforts. That day, I had been reading A Prayer For Owen Meany, whose eponymous hero sounds similarly high-pitched, and now I find I cannot differentiate the two in my mind, so I will have to capitalise her dialogue, as Owen's is in the book. While I was in the loo, my mum overheard the following: 'I CAN NEVER EAT AN ICE LOLLY DOWN TO THE STICK. I JUST CAN'T!' This made me and Mrs Jones (not the song, obviously) laugh till tears ran down our faces, but perhaps we'd just caught too much of the sun. I wonder why she could never finish the job. Perhaps she was particularly susceptible to splinters. We all have our physical frailties.

• Chaffinches really like cheese. 
  

Who knew? I did not, but this was a particularly excellent local Cheddar. I could not blame him/her (I don't know the difference, but I imagine plumage is key) one little bit.

• My mother is a slave to The Sunday Times. She wears the yoke of its oppressively infinite number of supplements. Our holiday stretched over two Sundays – representing the first and second times she had been in the country and not bought a copy of the paperboy-crippler. I asked her how she felt without it – anxious, fearful, as though she was missing a limb? 'Relieved,' she said. 'I know that it's not hanging over me for the whole week.' She was free of her chains. I cannot remember a time when The Sunday Times was not a part of the Parental Jones' weekend. Although there was a brief period many many years ago, it must have been the 70s, when some kind of strike ensued at Sunday Times Towers, and The Observer made a fleeting appearance at number 9 Arber Close, Bottisham. Even as a tot, I recognised that it looked all wrong fanned out across the Parental Jones' sitting room carpet and, later, lining the vegetable rack. It was like an unwanted newsprint foundling we discovered on the doorstep that never really fitted in. I knew that however kind we, as a family, tried to be to it, we could never truly accept it as one of our own.

• Plum sorbet is one of life's myriad tiny disappointments.
  

Happy birthday

It is Jones major's birthday today. Happy birthday, Jones major, over-38s record holder in the long jump for Biggleswade Athletics Club*, from Jones minor (Miss).

Please observe how on trend I once was in my patent Mary-Janes from the Start-rite atelier. Also, I appear to have once possessed the chicken legs of Amy Winehouse.

*Awaiting official IAAF ratification.