We have not gone to work.
It has been a busy day and we are going to have an early night.
I have been doing things with Lucy.
She very helpfully agreed to come with me to Asda today. That is not strictly true, because she didn’t exactly agree. I had offered to take her to Lancaster, and Asda was on the way.
We were going to Lancaster to discuss the increasingly pressing issue of her future career.
She is seventeen now, and almost at the end of the first year of her A Levels. This means that it would be a good idea for her to start contemplating what she is going to do next.
I have never managed to decide what I would like to do when I grow up. Now I have got hindsight I can see that there would have been several careers that might well have suited me, but when I was at school, on the whole girls turned into nurses or primary school teachers, and that was about it, unless you failed your O levels, in which case you might be a hairdresser. I didn’t want to be a solicitor or a bank clerk, and wasn’t tall enough for the police, and nobody suggested the things that might really have interested me, like being an undertaker or deep sea diver. Mostly I wanted to drive a truck. I would still like to do this, and regret that I did not give it a go.
Lucy does not want to drive a truck. She does not know what she wants to do, except that she likes the idea of getting into fights. With this in mind obviously we approached the Army, and today we had an appointment in Lancaster to discuss the possibility of joining up.
The Army managed this exactly as we might have predicted, given what we know about them already. They had forgotten that she was coming and also had not been listening properly when she talked to them in the first place. Eventually, when they got themselves organised, they showed us a short film about career opportunities, and then when she said that she wanted to join a combat unit, suggested that she might like doing intelligence and fighting cyber crime. This was because she was a girl. The two boys who were there were directed into the Tank Regiment.
Lucy said that she did not want to go into intelligence, although admittedly she was better qualified than the two boys, who were pooling their resources to pass the basic non-verbal reasoning test when we arrived. The sergeant looked at their results and then kindly said that it didn’t matter and that they would be able to have another go later.
Lucy told him about her GCSEs and he shook his head. She was, he decreed, too bright to join the recruits, and should go to Sandhurst and enter as an officer. We had explained this on the telephone, so we agreed with him, and he gave her some leaflets and told her to go away and apply online. They would, he added, help pay for her to go to university as well.
I have got no cash and so thought this was brilliant.
She would have to go to Sandhurst and university all at the same time, which would certainly keep her busy. After that she could join the artillery, or something equally violent, and live happily ever after shooting at the enemies of Her Majesty wherever they happened to be in the world.
She has got to become fit. The sergeant explained, with an edge of guilt, that you did not have to stay fit once you were in the army, and that rotund was all right once you were on the payroll, but you had got to start off at least being able to run up the stairs carrying a rifle.
We talked about it all on the way home, and she is considering the idea with interest.
She helped me to unpack the shopping and then sloped off to her room.
I brought the washing in and then took some things over to the camper van. The sun was shining, and I sat in it for a few minutes, enjoying the feeling of just being there.
I will be staying in it when I start my own new career.
It is very exciting for all of us to be at the beginning of so many new adventures.
The future is wide open.
