I am trying to stay awake. It seems to have been an impossibly busy couple of days.
I hadn’t expected to do any of it at all. I had entirely expected to be hundreds of miles away in Staffordshire, learning how to tell which key is which, or whatever prison officers have got to learn before they are allowed to be responsible for a prison.
I would have been rather glad of that particular lesson, actually, because when I watched real prison officers, they seemed to move between lots of virtually identical keys without hesitation. How embarrassing it would be to have to stand at the gate trying them all, one after the other.
I had an uncomfortable inkling that this would have been my own fate.
Fortunately, however, at the moment this is not a concern I have got, and we were suddenly able to rush off to Yorkshire in the camper van for Lucy’s eighteenth birthday.
We had not expected to be able to do this, and so it was an absolute moment of serendipity. We pleaded with Oliver’s school until they agreed to release him for the evening, and dashed down to York, for a joyous family party which I would have liked to carry on all night.
The thing was that even though she was newly eighteen, and a real grown up, Lucy still had to be back in school by ten. We failed to achieve this, obviously, but nobody seemed to notice. We had to leave early ourselves anyway, because Oliver had got to be in school for half past seven the next morning.
We could probably have delayed this until eight, but then I would have had to provide breakfast, which is one of the things that school does so much better.
Oliver crawled into his bunk as soon as we left the pub, leaving shoes and trousers scattered on the floor in his wake. Mark drove, and I sat beside him and tried not to doze as we hurtled up the motorway back to school.
I don’t remember going to bed.
We were woken, in the middle of the night, by a phone call.
It was Number One Daughter, all by herself, left behind at the hotel in York.
She had dreadful stomach pains and was being taken to hospital in an ambulance.
The awfulness of this woke me up completely.
There was not a thing that we could do.
I would have liked to rush off back to York and visit her, be at her midnight bedside and make reassuring noises, but obviously we couldn’t. We were miles and miles away, with Oliver having to go back into school the next morning.
I said something banal, and then stared into the unsympathetic darkness for a couple of hours.
I must have fallen asleep again, although I don’t know when or how, because after a while the alarm was dinging, and there was a text from Number One Daughter to say that she had gone back to the hotel in a taxi, definitely with lots of drugs, and probably with a kidney stone.
We staggered out of bed in the chilly darkness. I held Oliver’s clothes to warm against the heater, and handed them to him, one by one, whilst he dressed, blearily, in the misty dawn.
He was still knotting his tie as we chugged up the school drive, and jumped out to dash under the archway in the direction of sausages.
Mark and I did not have sausages. We had coffee, and then somehow fell asleep again.
This is never a good sign. We have our coffee so strong that it has practically got the consistency of black treacle. To fall asleep after we have drunk it takes some determination.
It was not difficult this morning. We drank the coffee and then fell asleep, fully clothed, sitting on our bunk.
We must have put the coffee cups down first, because when we woke up they were not there.
We took the dogs out for a grey walk through the thick mist, and contemplated the world thoughtfully.
We got back just as the bell was ringing to release the boys for exeat. Oliver bounced through the archway, and we were instantly free.
He told us that he had been sick as well, at the Remembrance Day service, in between the list of Old Boys killed in World War One, and the ones killed in World War Two, although, he explained proudly, he had made it out of the chapel just in time.
Perhaps there is something going around.
We had a message later on, after we had got home, from somebody whose daughter had been listening to Number One Daughter. Of course once she had taken her painkilling drugs she had gone on to give her Inspirational Speech at Lucy’s school. Not only had she managed to give the speech, but, my friend said, she had also managed to be truly Inspirational.
I was impressed.
I sent her a text, and she said that she was going back to bed.
We thought that this sounded like a good idea, so we did the same.
