A few stolen hours

Whilst in the UK last week I stole a few hours away and spent them with one of my godsons.

My godson Ben lives in the next village to my parents home, his parents are my oldest friends however they are Crap (with a capital C I hope you noticed) at keeping contact, lucky for them that IM came along and their daughter knows her way around the family PC well enough to say Hi to Mia on IM from time to time, they never reply to email, letters or phone calls. They mean to, they are just busy working parents trying to bring up their 2 wonderful children and work all the hours they have to in order to be able to pay the bills, run the car, keep the mortgage paid, buy the new England football kit once every few years and take a holiday once a year, she is a primary teacher and he is a fireman, ok so these days he's actually quite a senior fireman but they still have to save like mad to go on special trips.

I had been flying in and out of their home every few night, in order to escape the stress at 'home' and to use their internet connection to send emails to HK and keep family members updated on mass (oh the joys of multisends!) , one night Ben asked me when I was leaving the UK, I told him the following Saturday, then without pause he replied "Oh that's great, I will get to see you 5 more times then"

How guilty did I feel! He is 11. For his whole life I've either lived in London or Hong Kong, when I was in London I always made sure I was able to visit around his birthday, but that's been a little difficult in more recent years.

So I stole away for a few hours one afternoon, he was told to come straight home from school, I was sitting outside his house in my hire car when I saw him running like the wind down the road towards me, he told me how he had been looking forward to spending the next few hours with "just you and me" all day, we headed off to the multiplex (16 screens!!!) of the nearby motorway, hit McDonald's and then we went to see a movie , his choice, the movie was bad, so bad it was funny but he enjoyed it hugely, and he is one of those people who has an infectious laugh, he laughed so loud and so hard that I couldn't help but join in and laugh with him.
As did the other 5 people who were watching the movie with us. And guess what, the management were bright enough to adjust the heating level so that even though there were only 7 people in the room, none of us were icebergs by the end of the film. Smart huh!

I took him home then sat and helped him with his homework.

It was a bad bad film, but a wonderful few hours.