Peculiar weekend. Always knew the Sunday was going to be strange, but didn't bank on rolling a score of 116 at Hugh's birthday party (three strikes, couple of spares, my first ever three figure performance).

Then came the realisation on Saturday night that everyone in London seems to know immediately to whom the phrase "Twat-in-a-box" refers, regardless of whether they've heard it before, even if used outside the context of the aforementioned Tosser of Tower Bridge. And judging by our cab ride of the other evening, if the ultimate objective of his exercise is to further screw up road traffic in east London, he's succeeding brilliantly.

Finally, Sunday, and a family thing the likes of which our clan has never seen before.

Earlier this year Graham Godfrey died, quite suddenly. Graham was the husband of Pattie, my mother and Aunt Juliet's cousin, and she herself has been in the grip of Alzheimer's for several years. All this was news to mum and Jui, but especially Pattie's condition. It seemed to bring mortality into focus, so Jui decided to do what she does best: throw a party.

Essentially she and mum thought it would be a good idea to bring together all those descended from their maternal grandparents (William Richard Lander and Mary Eleanor Ridley) while they still could.

William and Mary had seven children. Diddy, Emily, Jack, Eleanor (my gran-gran, who died when I was four), Dick, Lena, and Cubby (the baby of the bunch, and the great family tragedy: a Wing Commander in the RAF, he was ambushed and killed in Burma shortly before the end of World War II).

They, in turn, had seven between them, including my mum and her sister. The next generation saw 12, including myself, and so far another nine have come from them to continue the family line.

Despite William and Mary's children now having passed on, their descendants - or the majority of them - gathered at Jui's house for a grand reunification of the blood line.

Never having met approximately 80% of these people, and not being at my best with strangers, especially when there are great expectations of kinship, I felt a little overwhelmed. For a journalist, feeling uncomfortable about speaking to new people in social conditions is probably a significant flaw.

It perhaps says a lot about the occasion that apart from immediate family and my mum's cousin Brian, whom I'd met a couple of times before, the easiest encounter was with a 10-year-old called Jackson as we bonded over a game of Marvel Super Heroes Top Trumps, disagreeing with various attribute scores and trading titbits of character information.

So I don't think I made the best of the occasion, although I think it did the trick for mum and Jui, and helped all of us see where we fit into the family tree.

My extended family seems to be made up of good people and I do hope that I get to meet most of them again - just maybe not all at the same time.