I have been to collect Lucy.
Apart from the obvious nuisance of five or six hours extra driving it has been splendid. It is lovely to see her, and brilliant to catch up with all of her stories.
She is in the final countdown to her GCSE exams, and is at the tiresome stage of education where all teachers remind you of the approaching GCSEs dozens of times every day, in case they have somehow slipped your mind.
She seems to be quite sanguine about the whole thing, and remarked that she is pleased to have the sort of parents who think that a trip to Disneyland is the best thing to be doing in the last few weeks before the terrible exams start. I am relieved that she feels like that because I can never quite predict what my children are likely to think about anything, and it would be rubbish to have to leave her at home.
She seems to have become very grown up, and is contemplating her future academic career with some interest for the first time. Her recent adventure into the world of merchant banking has inspired her to consider that in fact London might be an interesting place to go to university, with which I entirely agree.
She enjoyed the banking course, which led her to the unexpected discovery that men go into business as well.
Of course from her sheltered girls’ school point of view, male occupations largely involve lifting heavy things or fixing plumbing or digging holes in the grounds, and one or two of the more successful might become teachers. She was surprised and pleased to learn that some of them do things that you might otherwise only expect girls to do, like banking or medicine.
I imagine that one or two of the braver ones might try to be soldiers or rugby players or sports instructors like Numbers One and Two Daughters as well.
Of course in the end we had to stop listening to her tales, and reluctantly make our way out to work, where our night has been immeasurably improved by the discovery that the police have become fed up of taxis parking all over the town, and have employed a traffic warden for the night to put tickets on all of the cars which people have unhelpfully parked on the taxi rank.
This was an unspeakable happiness, and has made us all feel massively more cheerful. I think it is nice that nobody interferes with you after six o’ clock when the traffic wardens go home, but on the other hand it is hard work to have no space on the taxi rank because it is full of abandoned cars.
It took a while before everybody found out about it, because obviously as soon as the police appeared with a traffic warden, every taxi in the village suddenly remembered an urgent appointment somewhere else and disappeared, just to be on the safe side. I didn’t, because I have got a good book, and the first I knew of it was when they appeared at my window, grinning, to tell me about it.
It is not often that a person’s day is improved by the presence of a traffic warden. I think I can consider myself fortunate.
What a splendid job they are doing.
The picture is a tree in the grounds of Lucy’s school that I like very much. It has the distinguishing quality of being that rare thing, a truly ugly tree.
