just got real

I haven't asked if it makes any difference that I'm her little brother by two years but I was quite touched by Clare's expression of how seeing me with the wingpiglet when I met her off the bus from the airport this afternoon sort of made it all seem more real than all the pictures have. It's slightly unfortunate that he'd lapsed into his normal slumped half-sleeping travel mode and only responded with a sort of twitch and a slightly different pitch of sleepgrumble from beneath his half-pushed-off woolly hat. Later on she seemed to think that the food she was eating was the first thing I'd ever cooked her but I've definitely made things before either on one of her extremely rare visits up here or at Parentville at some sort of holiday-period visit. He woke up a bit later when being poked at but fortunately resisted having a wailing session throughout the entire evening and most of the night. It's unlikely she'll meet him again after this week before her wedding in November when he should be more responsive to external stimuli but also hopefully able to slightly recall meeting her before or at least able to recognise her partial genetic similarities and non-strangerness and not be scared of her. Parents also arrived in town today but didn't get in until a bit later and will be staying elsewhere. It would have been nice to have popped over and surprised them but in the end there wasn't even time to take over the little parcel of extra clothes they'd mailed up to supplement their hand-baggage-only luggage and the toothpaste and shampoo we'd bought them seeing as they've apparently been misunderstanding the stupid fluid-allowance hand-baggage-rules for years and thinking that only one container of up to 100ml was permitted per person.