It turned out that neither child had a valid passport so we decided that we would replace them just in case we won the lottery before the summer holidays.
Of course this meant that we needed photographs of them. You can’t do this at home in the way you might do a selfie, for some inexplicable reason, you have got to go somewhere and put a fiver in a machine and try not to pull a face or close your eyes or get distracted while it gives you instructions in a schoolteacherish sort of manner and finally surrenders a sheet of photographs through a hole in the bottom that make you suddenly upset about wrinkles and grey hair and things.
Neither Lucy nor Oliver worries much about wrinkles and grey hair yet, but there are other issues which have got to be taken into account when they are having photographs taken. We started off by sending Oliver for a shower, since our joint recollection could not come up with a date for his last one. Lucy was beautifully polished and clean but needed to be dressed and not in bed.
After about twenty minutes bawling up the stairs they eventually emerged and were sent back several times for modifications like socks and jumpers and hair bobbles and so forth, but eventually we were ready.
Mark said firmly that he was far too busy doing things to the underneath of his car to join us, so he stayed at home. We had to take the dog because he got very excited when he realised that we were going out together, and none of us could bear to disappoint him, so we hunted through the boot cupboard until eventually we found his lead. He grumbled about this, because he has been independent ever since we got him and doesn’t at all like getting dragged away from interesting things to sniff because somebody else is fed up of hanging about: but I felt as though having Lucy and Oliver and the dog all loose together was more than anybody could sensibly manage and so we clipped him on to it and after several grumpy attempts to bite it he settled down.
The Photo Me machine in Windermere is in the local Booths supermarket, which is not very far away. I needed to go and chuck our cherished taxi savings in the bank to pay for recent credit card extravagances like the MOTs and the new taxi licences, and Lucy said she wanted to pay some money into her account, so we walked up via the bank, which bored Oliver and the dog because it took ages. I wanted to link Lucy’s bank account to mine so that we could see it online and the bank thought that it would be too difficult. I didn’t believe them, because the French managed to do it ten years ago with our accounts in France, so hence it must be a ridiculously simple and uncomplicated manoeuvre, because I can tell you here that the French do not like to put themselves out more than necessary when it comes to banking. One of their more surprising features was that they all stayed handily open until six at night but had a policy of not handling money after four and wouldn’t either accept it or hand it out. This always seemed to me to be curious behaviour for a bank, but when I asked them what they did actually do in that two hour slot the explanation was a slightly cagey look and a French shrug, so I imagine that the answer was that they got paid and had affairs with one another.
In the end the bank in Windermere got fed up with Lucy and Oliver playing noisy Ninja fighting games whilst they waited for me to finish objecting, and the dog getting anxious about it and barking at them to make them stop, and the big queue building up behind us, and asked us politely if we would kindly bugger off and they would sort it out and phone us when they had solved the problem, so we went. They haven’t phoned, actually, so I might go back tomorrow, that’ll teach them.
Oliver had first go in the Photo Me machine to make up for being bored in the bank. Lucy complained that she had been bored as well but sometimes life is just unfair. We fed coin after coin into it and it spat some out and swallowed some until eventually it was satisfied, and Lucy and I stood inside the curtain giving helpful advice whilst Oliver contorted his features into a scowl that he hoped would do. We had explained that you have got to have a normal expression, but of course Oliver’s normal expression is actually a grin, and he was a bit perplexed about what to do instead. It took several goes before we managed something that would be acceptable, and even then by the end Lucy had managed to achieve a peculiar squint in hers.
Since we were in the supermarket I thought we might do some shopping, but after a six pack of Mars Bars and the children playing hide and seek, and then realising that the dog was barking his head off outside I realised that neither my nerves nor my purse would stand it. After several entertaining minutes of them helping me to pass things backwards and forwards over the self-service checkout I threw everything in a carrier bag and we took the shortcut home out of the car park by climbing over the wall (we had to lift the dog over) and running down the banking. This comes out just across the road from our house, where Mark made some coffee and remarked that Oliver looked very perplexed in his pictures.
Their passports last for five years. By the time they have to have another one Oliver will be fourteen and Lucy will be nineteen. How very different that will be.
