Eighteen...

Well, that’s that, job done. Here she is all grown up at 18 – shame she looks like a lizard. Sorry, my mistake; she’s not the plastic motorised dinosaur we bumped into at Chester Zoo on Tuesday; she’s the purple haired cat.

So, Chester Zoo; we used to come go there every year as Holly’s birthday treat when she was little. Pushing her around in her buggy – which I shall ever call a pushchair – later on reins and riding on my shoulders as she wobbled here and tottered there, pointing at warthogs and laughing at the penguins as they dived and played in the murky viewing tank.

I remember that the weather was always kind to us – sunshine and shorts and a picnic on a bench in the shade of the dapple-shadowed trees, my hair still brown and me able to walk, even run, without losing breath despite the fact that I still smoked continually back then. I was seldom photographed without the telltale sign of tobacco smoke emerging from behind my back where my hand clutched my hidden gasper.

It was a surprise when Holly asked to go back to the zoo on her 18^th, and a nice one too. No Frank this time of course and Joan in the buggy, well she is 82 and it’s a big zoo. I couldn’t help thinking about Frank as we walked around; he loved taking Holly to the zoo. Perhaps he was there, who knows? I didn’t catch a glimpse of him though; not even a flicker from the corner of my eye. This year it was Craig, Holly’s boyfriend, who made up our small party and, despite a very wet start which almost decided us not to go, the sun came out as soon as we arrived at the car park and stayed with us until the moment we left the zoo.

It was a day full of sights I’d almost forgotten – elephants, cheetahs, lions and tigers, brightly coloured birds, monkeys and orang-utans, deadly tree frogs, the biggest snake I ever did see, a picnic  lunch, hardly a cross word and even occasional smiles - and I could have murdered a cigarette.

Returning the wheelchair to the Zoomobility shack as we left for the day it struck me how things had changed, how we had all changed; and yet, for a few hours at least, it was almost as if nothing had changed at all. Next year? I doubt it. Much as it would be nice to think that we would, life moves on for us all and this time next year it all might have changed again.

But if I were asked then the answer would be ‘yes’.