Eva, like most kids, is endlessly inventive. There’s rarely a moment when she isn’t drawing, or painting, or building, or generating a new world around her in which she speaks Tamil, or Thai, or her own unique language featuring words like ‘Tobrando’ and ‘Tobisher’. She wraps herself in a leopardskin slanket and claims she’s a muslim woman. She writes her first comic: “The Angry Muslim Adventure Book” in which Eva is a good Muslim made angry by people telling her to be good all the time. She waves a tube map in my face and proclaims “This is my Qur’an!”
Her other delights are, of course, her dogs. Some have normal names like, erm, Rochelle and Dip-Dip, and others are named after her school teachers. Her favourite is Mrs Devery-Kavanagh (or ’Miss DK’) who shares her bed and who you can see in the picture above. Isn’t she lovely? Press her paw and she squirms and whelps.
We’ve operated on Miss DK in the past (when she’s needed new batteries) and she’s been taken to show & tell (much to the bemusement of the real Mrs Devery-Kavanagh.) She’s also gone everywhere with us, although not, sadly, to Spain this year because we accidentally left her back at the house with Eva’s carry case.
Eva didn’t seem to mind though, which brings me on to the main event of this diary extract: our holiday video, recorded and edited in HD on my phone over two weeks in August. These pictures, more than any words, show my darling’s progress since her diagnosis:
We all had a fantastic fortnight, but next time, Mrs Devery-Kavanagh, we won’t forget you!