World in motion

I hate planning things, since they always fall through. Duncan's birthday is Sunday, and I had started making plans with Enid for something in Toronto. Then Duncan's relatives from Barbados were coming to Canada on Sunday, and he had to go with his parents to Toronto to meet them. All right, I thought, I'd just have something for him here, on Saturday. Just as I was about to start planning that, my mother announced that my grandfather was coming on Friday night and would be staying with us, and my aunt in Toronto, for a month. My grandfather's lived most of his life in Ontario, but he was born in England, and ever since he retired from GM (and after my grandmother died), he's been more or less living in whatever is the ancestrial home in the North Riding. He's about as English as Arne is Swedish, and as it's World Cup time, we'll be doing the full ethnic thing: watching soccer, Sunday roast dinner, and all that sort of thing. And we'll be watching the England games here, as my grandfather called Milborough's one attempted English pub "shite" and "a mucky cheap mess." On the other hand, he was right: The Waltzing Weasel is pretty awful.
So my mother's got the England flag out to put on the car for the games. England and Sweden are in the same group, but my father said not to worry about the Swedish flag, since Arne no doubt would turn up with it whenever he resurfaces.