Goodness me, it is exciting having children at times.
I had a very worried email last night from Lucy, who as you know is wishing to join the police in September.
You might know that the police don’t accept applications from people who can’t drive.
Nothing daunted, Lucy applied anyway, and added a note to say that she was going to take her driving test early this year.
Last night she had an email from them wondering where her driving licence was.
This set in motion a whole chain of events.
As you know, so far she has not taken her driving test early this year. Between the rubbish weather and the lack of funds and the fast-approaching A-Levels it has not even entered into our heads, apart from in the same way as booking an exotic foreign holiday might. We have wondered about it, vaguely and hopefully, and then dismissed it as being just too difficult even to contemplate.
Obviously this sort of inaction was no longer going to be an option.
She sent them a copy of her provisional licence, along with a lame excuse, and rang me. I went online and hunted through available driving tests.
Of course the thing is that they needed to be at a time when she was not in school.
There was one, and only one, for weeks and weeks, and it was on Monday. She will be at home on Monday, because it is an exeat, so I booked it.
I sent her a reassuring email and then rang her driving instructor.
He explained that he has got fed up of teaching tiresome teenagers to drive and has got a real job. It pays better, he said, and has got proper holidays and a pension. He chortled a bit, merrily, and hung up.
This left me with a driving test, no instructor, and no car.
Today I have telephoned every driving instructor within a hundred miles of Kendal.
Mostly they did not answer.
I have left messages on more than thirty answering machines, almost all of which have since been resoundingly ignored.
In the end one of them rang me back, not to offer her services, but to be apologetic and mildly curious. I poured out my problem, to which she listened with interest. She said that Lucy could perfectly well take a driving test in one of our cars.
Of course she can’t, because they are taxis, but that set in motion a new chain of thought.
A couple of hours later we were four hundred and fifty quid poorer but owned a small green Renault which we are going to collect from a squaddie near Oliver’s school tomorrow.
Then came the expensive bit.
Have you any idea how much it costs to insure a car for a youthful incompetent? Goodness me, it is a lot.
It is not so bad for a young person who has not passed a driving test. The expensive bit comes the second that they have achieved the bit of paper that says they are a normal member of the human race.
The cannot even drive out of the test centre until they, or more probably their parents, have shelled out a couple of thousand pounds to an insurer.
Two thousand pounds. I rang everywhere. Some places I rang twice, but to no avail. My friend at the taxi insurance company told me that she had just insured her teenage son, and gave me some handy phone numbers for companies who were cheaper than they were, which I thought was jolly kind.
That is such a very lot of money.
Nevertheless, the police don’t accept pedestrians, and so it had to be.
We earned thirty quid at work last night.
The picture shows you what Mark was doing whilst I was on the telephone.
