Hakuna matata script with birds on foot

You will have the speech in your inside pocket by the time this reaches you, folded soft at the corners the way your mother folds everything, so I shan't repeat the bit about your grandfather and the bicycle. What I want to tell you is about the birds. On Sunday, while the registrar was counting out the rings, a flock of starlings came in low over the car park at Cliftonville and turned above the marquee as if someone had shaken out a dark sheet. Nobody else looked up. Your Uncle Derek was busy patting his jacket for his glasses, so I watched them instead, and I thought of the summer you were nine and wouldn't stop saying hakuna matata at the dinner table, as though it might stop your sister taking your chips.

You told me then that it meant no worries, and I told you that nobody in Margate had ever once lived by that rule, least of all your grandmother, who kept a list of every worry in a green notebook and read it aloud on Boxing Day. You laughed and said you'd start a list of your own. I think you did. I found it in the bread bin last month, under the foil, with three entries: the cake, the rain, and Priya.

The rain held off until the first dance. Derek says the birds were a sign. I think they were starlings doing what starlings do, which is to find each other in the dark and go round in circles without anyone telling them where the edge is.

So here is my worry, written down so you can tear it up. Nothing has gone wrong. Nothing will. Let the notebook go.

Love, Aunt Pat