Chapter 343 In Love With Nia:>1

• When I was 2 years old, my father married Anh, a lovely, tiny little Vietnamese lady. I always thought she was my mother, or at least until I was old enough to work out that she couldn't possibly be. I still called her mum, though, because in every way I needed her to be, she was my mum. I had a sister, or rather a half-sister, Nguye't, which means 'moon', I think, but we all called her Nia, and dad sometimes called her 'nugget', telling her she was his precious little golden moon. Mum usually called me Huyn'h, which means 'Older Brother' although it sounds like someone sneezing in a distant room, instead of my given name, James or Jamie. Nia usually called me anything she could think of if she thought it would annoy me.
• We lived in South London, not far off the South Circular Road, that traffic nightmare that girdles South London like a ligature, and dad would curse it every evening after negotiating it for several hours. Mum would, quite reasonably, ask him why he didn't just get a bus to Streatham and get the train into Central London, but dad was convinced that if he left his designated parking space at work unoccupied it would be given to someone else, and apparently status in his company was measured by whether or not you had your own parking space, and how close it was to the CEO's parking space. It took me years to understand this; I used to wonder what happened to his parking space when he was on holiday, did they chain it up, or something? All very baffling. In the meantime, he'd come in every evening, exhausted, road-raged to the max, huffing about the London traffic planners, London buses, congestion, the people who play silly-buggers with the timing of the traffic lights in London, bus lanes, in fact, everything. We all learned to stop listening, or at least parallel-process, so we could drop-in reasonably apt comments in the spaces in the rant where one was called-for, while simultaneously watching TV, without actually paying the blindest bit of notice to what he was saying. After the requisite time ranting, dad would go off and sit in the greenhouse, talk to his geranium cuttings or secretly drink, or whatever it was he did in there, and reappear in time for dinner, usually in a good mood.
• When he reappeared, he would be besieged by one or the other of us, needing help with our homework. Dad's approach to homework was simple. "You should have learned this in school, what do the taxpayers pay teachers for, if we have to teach our kids at home at the end of the school day?" Not helpful. But when he was in a really good mood, he could be great fun.