It’s my niece Daisy’s 16th birthday and after not quite having the courage to accept my initial gift offer, one I still think quite brilliant — that we go out and get her tattooed, possibly with ‘I hate dad’ on the knuckles of one hand and ‘I hate mum’ on the other, or even ‘I really hate mum’ just to really piss mum off — she suggests that I take her out to dinner and then put her into print. She would like to be in print, she says, although I’m not sure why. Perhaps it’s so she can show all her friends during one of those rare instances when they are not texting, circling Topshop or eyeing up boys in Starbucks. Okay, I say, fine. If you want to be in print I shall put you in print. In fact, no one will have ever been so in print as you. Indeed, just so there’s no mistaking her, this is Daisy Emma Ross of Friern Barnet Lane (Whetstone end) N20, three siblings, Year 11 at Dame Alice Owen, five foot four, skin all peachy and long corkscrew curls which she keeps beautifully defined with her mother’s expensive hair products when her mother isn’t looking. This’ll really piss mum off. Sometimes, I can see now, it isn’t necessary to go as far as tattooing. Although it would have been amusing all the same.
Of course, now that I have identified Daisy Emma Ross of Friern Barnet Lane N20, so accurately that no one, least of all her friends, can be in any doubt, it would be absolutely awful if I were to add, for example, a few lines on what she was like as a baby when she was so fat — she looked like a ball with a few curly wisps on top — and so, so greedy that once, when my brother brought her round, and plonked her down on the carpet near where my partner and his brother were playing Subbuteo — the losers! — she gobbled down two players and the ball before anyone quite knew what was happening.
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