Presents for people who live two hours away

Two hours forty each way. Eight visits a year if it’s a good year, six if it isn’t, and three nights when we do go.

For about a decade our presents to my parents were, if I’m honest about it, an attempt to pay off that number. Bigger than they needed to be, posted, with a note apologising for not being there.

Things that arrived badly

Flowers, twice. The first lot arrived dead — genuinely dead, not tired, dead — and my mother rang to thank me for them warmly, and I only found out about the state of them a year later from my sister.

The second lot were left in a porch. In July. For a day and a half.

A digital photo frame, which cycles through pictures you send it from your phone and which is, on paper, the perfect present for a grandparent at a distance. It needed the wi-fi password. Nobody in that house knows the wi-fi password. It sat on a sideboard showing a setup screen for five weeks until we drove up and did it, and after that it worked, and it is genuinely nice, and it took a two-hour-forty drive to switch on.

The nine-day schedule

We agreed a video call. Every Sunday, six o’clock, all of us.

Everybody meant it. My mother was thrilled. We managed it on the Sunday, then the Sunday after, and then there was a football thing, and then they were out, and by week three it had quietly become “we’ll do it when we can”, which is the phrase families use to close something down without anybody having to say so.

Nine days. And the reason wasn’t that we didn’t want to talk to them. It’s that a call with no agenda between people who love each other and have nothing new to report becomes, within about four minutes, an adult holding a phone at a three-year-old and saying “say hello to Grandma”. Which Rowan will not do. Rowan has never once done this.

What changed it

We gave my parents LifePages — a memoir service, questions arriving, no writing required, a book at the end of it.

The book is not the point of this note — that one is elsewhere. The point is what it did to the phone.

My mum rings me now, twice a month or so, to check things. Was it 1968 or 1969. What was the road called, the one behind the church. Do I remember the name of the woman who ran the shop, which of course I don’t, I wasn’t born.

Those calls are ten or twelve minutes and they are about something. That’s the whole difference. There is a reason for the call that isn’t “we should talk more”, and so the call happens, and then about four minutes in it stops being about the road behind the church and becomes an ordinary conversation of the kind we were not managing to have on purpose.

A year and a bit now. The video-call schedule lasted nine days.

The children’s part

Both of them submit questions. Nell takes this extremely seriously and writes hers down; Rowan’s are dictated and are mostly about animals.

And this is the bit I’d point at if somebody asked me what the actual gift was. My six-year-old asked her grandad whether he had ever been really frightened, and got an answer, and now knows something about him that I did not know at thirty-five.

You cannot arrange that. We tried to arrange it, weekly, at six o’clock, for nine days.

If you are going to post something

Aim it at an ordinary Tuesday.

Everything we have ever posted for a birthday or Christmas has been at the mercy of the worst fortnight of the postal year, and half of it has arrived late, into a house that already has visitors and other parcels and no attention spare.

A parcel on a normal Tuesday in February is the best-received thing we send. It’s usually a photograph the children have drawn on. It costs about £1.70.

The thing I’d stop doing

Buying bigger to make up the distance.

The distance is two hours forty. It is not a debt, it does not accrue, and it cannot be settled by spending more. What it takes away is the small stuff — the ten-minute conversation about nothing much, the being asked something — and it turns out that is the only part that can actually be posted back.