Suspense

We have learned that Oliver has been selected to represent his house in the shooting event on Sports Day.

This is a splendid achievement and we are very proud of him, some of the boys at school do real huntin’ shootin’ fishin’ on huge Scottish estates and similar. We won’t see it as a lot of the events are held privately at school, and only the track events are displayed for parents, but it is jolly good to have yet another sporting person in the family, it certainly makes up for me.

With any luck I might now be able to persuade Number Two Daughter to revise her somewhat unflattering opinion of him as a small and talentless sticky nuisance, although this is unlikely at the moment as she is having a very horrible time and not at all in the mood to think happy and charitable thoughts about life.

She is going to drive a taxi just like Mummy and Daddy for the rest of the summer until she buzzes off to Big White to slide about there for the winter: obviously she wants to earn some money before she goes in order to have some spare cash to waste having a brilliant time milling about Canada and also to invest in alcohol.

The difficulty is that the whole process is taking ages. She has had to do a medical, and then a driving test, and then a local knowledge test, on which, you might be interested to hear, she scored the highest mark ever, and then she had got to get a CRB check. I know that these have got a new name now but I have forgotten what it is and am assuming that you understand. A CRB is a letter from the police detailing your record of rascally behaviours.

She sent the application off weeks and weeks ago, and has tracked it breathlessly on the web page, and thought when it told her last Thursday that they had posted it that her days of waiting would be over.

It has still not arrived.

Even if they have sent it by carrier pigeon it should have been here by now, because according to them it has only come from Kendal Police Station.

She is getting very cross and broke. Even when it arrives it is not over, she has got to take the whole lot into the council with a cheque and some photographs and a beseeching attitude in order for them to process it at a reasonable speed.

She has been working in a cafe in the meantime but this is not a job in which she belongs in her innermost soul.

It is not a job in which she belongs at all. She has got all the instinct for customer service that you might expect from a taxi driver, and her friend who runs the cafe seems to be encouraging her to stay in the kitchen and cook things away from the customers.

I am not sure that this is a good idea either. She can be completely inspired when it comes to the creative use of lemon juice and garlic, but is not terribly interested in washing up. She was not remotely interested this morning when I suggested that she occupied some of her day learning from Mummy how to make laundry soap, even though it was her day off and it would have filled in some time whilst waiting to see if her CRB check would arrive.

She went to the gym instead and when she came out her car wouldn’t start. It has a recurrent electrical fault and does this sometimes, you just have to wait for a while and then it starts.

She waited for an hour and twenty minutes and then rang me up to come and get her.

When she got home her CRB certificate had not arrived in the post. She was very cross and frustrated and walked the mile and a half back to the gym, where her car started first time.

I made laundry soap which I coloured with some of the Reckitt’s Blue to see if it would help the sheets become brilliant white. I shall let you know if it works or if it just turns everything blue. It is good to have an atmosphere of suspense in your reading matter sometimes, you will have to wait for the next thrilling instalment to find out what happens next because I haven’t used it yet.

Poor Number Two Daughter. With any luck it will arrive tomorrow and she will be able to become a real taxi driver.

I shall tell you tomorrow.