Singaporean Royalty....

Firstly apologies for the absence this week. It's been a bit frantic, we had my sister-in-law and nephew staying with us for much of the week, an occurrence that even Papa took a week off work for, so it was a momentous occasion in more ways than one.

Papa and his sister haven't spent a night together under the same roof since she got married. There was no falling out or anything like that, it's just the way the world works sometimes. So after nearly 20years the siblings were finally to be in the same place for a considerable length of time. This involved preparations that took on a life of their own. The way Papa was carrying on you would have thought that the Windsors were popping over for a few days. Rooms were decorated, new bedding that matched the decor was purchased, cleaning was to be immaculate, even our lovely Turkish cleaner commented on how tidy the place looked, and that was three days before the big arrival.

I jokingly posted on Facebook that the house was now ready for the arrival of the Singaporean Queen. I don't think Papa took it too well, I'm not sure if he was worried that his sister would be offended or if he likes to be known as the Singaporean Queen in our house, so I left it at that. Although the nephew later took great delight in pointing it out to his Mum and even asked where the red carpet was... 

Anyway, our nephew arrived on the Saturday and his mother on the Monday, which was a Bank Holiday here in the UK. Most surprisingly she took the train down from London. Papa was convinced that she would take a chauffeur driven car from her swanky London hotel, so we headed off to Sainsbury's to get some last minute groceries and have the car washed (God forbid we should have a dirty car) when we suddenly got the call that she was at the railway station. We dropped the groceries and raced off, only to have to wait ten minutes as the little Eastern European chap hadn't finished polishing the car. But once that was done we jumped in and headed to the station and sure enough, there she was.... carrying her own luggage! I now knew that Papa had maybe exaggerated the demands of his sister and we might not have had to polish the saucepans and I might not have had to have been quite so nervous about the whole thing....

But, it turned out we needn't have worried. Papa's sister was lovely. They had a lovely time catching up and it was good for the children and I to get to know the other Singaporean Queen (or SQ as I shall now refer to her as Singaporean Queen is a lot to type) as normally we would only see them during the hectic frenzy that is Chinese New Year and its very difficult to get to know people properly when they are in the midst of entertaining their entire family themselves. Of course, our nephew (I guess he is the Singaporean Prince) had already spent some time with us earlier this year after his little misdemeanour at school, so the children were excited to see him again.

So much of this week has been spent getting to know Papa's side of the family better and on Wednesday we all headed off on a family road trip... of a regal nature of course.... 

But that's another blog entry!