Les Wilson - 90 years young

The 90th Birthday Party

Leslie Knight Wilson (pictured right in about 1942) was 90 on 28th December 2005. For the first time in 18 years all of his descendants gathered in one room. We had fun!

• Jeremy's photos of the event
• The "extended grandchildren" put on a small entertainment: the programme is here.

Helen's Toast at the 90th Birthday Party

Ladies and gentlemen - and descendants of my father...

Ninety years is a long time. Until I started preparing this speech I don't think I'd realised quite how long. Dad was born during the first world war. Asquith was prime minister; and Kitchener was Minister of War.

When Dad was a boy he lived in the dark. Sorry, no, until he was 10 he lived in a house with no electric light and no mains water (and mice). They were on a farm, and they were served by a magnificent two buses a week to town. If you decided to walk to town, the roads weren't lit along the way. He walked to school and back (a three-mile round trip) until he was 11, when for the grammar school he cycled - since he was then covering 12 miles a day. Interestingly, his family did have a phone - but it was the only phone in the village!

I wanted to tell you a few choice highlights from Dad's life that you perhaps haven't heard before. Of course, I wasn't around for the first 58 years, so you can blame Anne for some of these stories...

When Dad was a young working father, despite the demands of three children (some of whom I'm sure were real trouble...) he built a kitchen from scratch. He'd work all day and then spend all evening and weekend fitting this thing. They even had a built-in fridge, which was very enterprising in the early 50s. You can see this "handyman" turn of things all over the place - even if it's changed a bit - he produced all the invitations, menus and place cards for today.

Back to the Greenbank Road days. Dad did an awful lot of work in the garden then - and made the kids work too! He had been involved in the Warrington Horticultural Society during the war, and I guess he got a real taste for it - certainly Anne tells me they had great sessions of planting seeds, pricking out seedlings, and finally planting them in the garden. Much later, when he moved to Cedarways, he designed and built the garden from scratch - and it's still very impressive today (even if it is next door now!)

Caravanning has been a theme for Dad through both families. Anne told me about a trip to Dornock with the five of them and another friend of hers (so she could have a girl to play with). The four kids sat in the back of the car and when they got to a particularly steep hill they just didn't expect it to make it - so they all sat in the back and pedalled!

It's funny the way caravanning has taken the four of us - I don't think Rob would be seen dead in one, but John went as far as living in one for a while!

Moving on to my own childhood, Dad was very serious about his home-made wine. Some of them were very successful - elderberry worked, many years running, and some of the elderflowers were really lovely. Some of them weren't, of course... to quote Dad:

There were hazards along the way as well: the whites that went into secondary fermentation in the garage (on their sides), and popped their corks and threw wine down the side of Mum's car - and who can forget the over-sweet elderberry that managed to bubble its way all the way out of the demijohn in the airing cupboard and speckle Dad's white shirts with pink!

More recently, Dad's started getting into cooking - in particular, soup. There must be hardly anyone here who hasn't sampled at least one batch of Dad's soup - and very good they are too. But having come to cooking rather late in life, Dad doesn't have all the safety instincts of a more experienced cook, which has had a few interesting results.

On one occasion, the recipe called for a teaspoonful of curry powder. Finding none, he improvised with the same quantity of chilli powder. That one was undrinkable.

Another time, making his favourite leek and oatmeal soup, he found they were out of oatmeal. What did he substitute? Quaker oats! Cue leek flavoured porridge and the end of a saucepan.

It's easy to tell stories like these at Dad's expense (and quite fun too) but it's not quite fair. How many women my age, still less Anne's, can say they talk to their fathers on the phone every week? How many get an email almost every day? We are very lucky to have him.

And I'd just like to remind you of what I said earlier about Dad growing up without electric light. He's gone from there to not just understanding electricity and the internal combustion engine, but even spending much of his time on the computer (even if he does drive us mad asking for technical support!)

Can you think of any other 90 year olds who would be pleased with an IPod and broadband for a birthday present?!

And one final story, not about Dad this time!

I have a friend with two grown-up sons. She told me the story of the weekend, years ago, when they were given the school hamster to look after. On Friday night the boys let the hamster out to play with it - and, you've guessed it, it escaped. They knew it couldn't have left the house...

They heard a scuffling in the piano - so they took the back off the piano. No hamster. Then they decided the scuffling had come from the skirting board behind the piano - so they took off the skirting boards. No hamster. A friend told her that hamsters like to get under the floorboards - so they took up a floorboard in the kitchen, and put it down at an angle like a ramp for it to climb up. Still no hamster. Another friend (and you're wondering whether they really were friends at this point) said that hamsters can get inside sofas and then can't find their way out - so she tore the backing fabric on the sofa. Still no hamster.

So they've spent all weekend looking for the damn hamster, and she's steeling herself for taking the (heartbroken) kids to school and confessing the tragic loss of everyone's favourite hamster. Finally, on Monday morning, just as they're on their way out of the door, the hamster pops up in the hall. They catch it as fast as they can and cage it, and hurtle, late, to school. At the school gate she sees one of her friends, who's just dropped her own kids off. She explains what's going on and why they were late - and her friend says "oh, I assumed you were at the pet shop getting a new one!".

It turns out, every couple of weekends the hamster got lost, or sometimes eaten - and a new one was quickly substituted.

That school hamster lived for 12 years.

I don't know how many times Dad's been swapped... but here's to him anyway. I ask you all to raise your glasses and drink: