I am pleased to announce that Lucy has decided not to continue her investigations into local educational establishments.
She was going to visit Queen Katherine’s school tomorrow, but after some discussion we have all agreed that she would be far better off staying where she is, especially Mark.
Mark explained his opinions with a clarity and forcefulness which impressed me. Actually he said that he did not want her to grow up to be a pregnant oik, to which pronouncement Lucy listened respectfully before offering to become a lesbian if it would make him feel better, which it didn’t.
Eventually she conceded that anyway, there was always the chance that she might not do especially well in her GCSE exams, in which case being pretty and posh were her major assets. Under those circumstances she thought that it would be shortsighted to deplete them by fifty percent.
This settled, she decided to spend her day looking for alternative employment. She said that the new manager at the Chinese restaurant is rubbish, and that it had become badly organised with people having to wait too long for their food. This made them grumpy and consequently less likely to tip.
Mark and I left her to it and went off to the farm to continue with our day’s labours, which were enlivened somewhat when I got a large splinter jammed under my fingernail.
This, I am sorry to tell you, turned the air quite blue. Dearie me, I was upset.
Everything had to stop then for a while whilst we hunted for a set of tweezers and the strongest pair of glasses that we could muster.
Then we dug around underneath my fingernail and pulled it out.
It wasn’t nice.
I had to sit quietly on Mark’s knee for a little while before I felt recovered enough for a cup of tea.
It is making typing these very words a throbbing sort of experience. I am feeling very convalescent.
After that Lucy rang and asked what a CV was, because the new coffee shop across the road, inexplicably, had asked for one instead of just offering her a job straight away.
I explained, and she thought that it sounded like a good idea, and that she would write one.
When we got home she had looked up CV writing on the internet and had come to the realisation that it was a good job she was pretty and posh, because her useful employable skills were fairly minimal, and amounted to being able to carry two plates at once.
I said that there was no point in bothering with a CV, and that all she needed to do was go and ask at the Indian restaurant on the corner.
This made Mark splutter because the manager is a bit of a rogue, but Lucy thought that she had already had plenty of useful practice in fighting off rogues in the kitchen of the Chinese, so it would be all right.
She was gone for about five minutes and then returned still unemployed, having failed at the first hurdle of not being able to remember her phone number when they asked for it.
We made her go and find out and go back.
When she came back ten minutes later she had got two jobs. The first was in the Indian restaurant, the manager was not there but they thought they would give her a ring tomorrow and get her to come in.
The second is as a florist. When she went into the restaurant some local chaps sitting at a table outside recognised her and wanted to know what she was doing. She explained that she was looking for work.
She is pretty and posh so she was instantly offered the choice between becoming a hairdresser or a florist. She decided to be a florist and she starts tomorrow.
I am pleased about this, flower arranging is a jolly useful skill, and will make a useful complement to being able to carry two plates at once.
The coffee shop will have to manage without her, it serves them right for wanting loads of pointless paperwork. They are new and obviously they don’t yet know that the rule in Windermere is that if somebody wants a job you snatch both of their hands off, even if they aren’t organised enough to know their own phone number. If they can manage to carry two plates at once you have probably found a winner.
The top picture is me at the camper van today. I am not pretty or posh, but it doesn’t matter, because I have already got a job.
The picture below is the side of the camper featured in yesterday’s post, taken this afternoon.
You may be interested to compare the two.
