I had an attack of guilt this morning.
Lucy is going off to London with a friend at half term. They are going to stay with Number One Daughter for the weekend and then go on a course which will purportedly teach them how to become merchant bankers.
We booked it ages ago, at her earnest request, and because it was then going to be in the next year I didn’t have a diary to write it in, and so didn’t.
In consequence it has crept up on me, and I have had a series of increasingly urgent emails from Lucy this week wanting to know if I have been in touch with friend’s family and arranged transport etc. This morning the guilt got the better of me and I had got to get on with it.
Things have been additionally complicated by the small detail that her friend is Chinese, and therefore everything concerning her has got to be sent to the Chinese guardians to be translated into Chinese and dispatched to her parents, who reply in Chinese to the guardian, who translates it into English and then sends it back to me.
In the absence of friend’s parents Lucy had asked that I book their train journeys for them both and send the invoice to the guardians.
I am sure you can already see the potential for fun and games here.
I am too weary of the whole thing to go into details. Suffice to say that I booked it all and then emailed everybody concerned. Half an hour later had a telephone call from Nan, who is picking them up at the final end of the journey in York, and who fortunately pays attention to details, wondering if I had noticed that I had booked it on the wrong day.
Obviously I hadn’t, so I spent the next hour telephoning the railway telephone number and eventually got through to a friendly man in India who helpfully arranged that he would cancel the booking and I would get my money back in only a very few weeks, and in the meantime I could simply book it again.
I booked it again. By now our bank account had spiralled into massive overdraft. Train tickets to do a round trip from Windermere to York via London are not cheap, I can tell you, even if you buy the ones that the train company has helpfully highlighted in green as being the low budget option designated for paupers.
I emailed everybody again.
Several hours later the Chinese guardian emailed me back wondering who on earth I was, what on earth the invoice was for, and what I was talking about, because she knew nothing at all about the whole thing.
School emailed me with a similar message, except without the invoice.
I sent an email to Lucy suggesting that she and her friend sort their ideas out quickly.
By then it was lunchtime and I badly wanted a drink.
I resisted, because our current box of wine is pretty awful anyway, and instead cooked sausages and pizza to feed the family for the next few days and sloped off back upstairs to write some more of my still-unfinished book. I have become a useless housewife. I bet JK Rowling has got a cleaner.
Fortunately for the revolting state of my kitchen, I have almost finished. In another week or so I should be pretty much done, assuming we don’t all perish from e-coli in the meantime.
I have stopped invading York because it is too far away, that will have to be the next book. I’m invading Lancaster instead.
Fortunately I won’t be getting the train.
