I am very pleased to announce that I am the parent of an actual about-to-be teenage policewoman.
Lucy emailed me tonight to tell me that after yesterday’s exciting dash south and back again, she has been offered a place. It will be the Northamptonshire Police apprenticeship scheme, about which we know as close to nothing as it is possible to know. Northamptonshire Police have listed ‘good communication with the public’ on their list of objectives, but when Lucy asked for a course programme, booklist, details of the course structure, and whether or not she would be working to a university timetable or a police timetable, nobody knew. You have got to ask another department, probably the one that is good at communicating with the public.
I am going to ring the university tomorrow and see if they can cast any light on it all.
It is a conditional offer. She has got to pass a fitness test, a biometric test, whatever one of those might be, a drugs test, and get some people to write references for her.
We are going back down for the fitness test in a couple of weeks.
Maybe they just want another look at the camper van.
Despite the somewhat vague nature of the whole thing, I could not be more pleased. This means that she will be paid to go to university, not start life with a colossal student debt, and better still, be somewhere with considerably more sunshine than the Lake District.
It is not very close to Gordonstoun, but you can’t have everything.
I do not know if she is pleased or not. She sounded a bit shocked and exhausted on the phone.
She is in the middle of the school play and is just starting the final countdown to her A Levels. I am not surprised that she is feeling a bit fragile. I am feeling fragile just thinking about it all.
I am feeling fragile in any case. Mark has shared his horrible flu bug with abundant generosity, and I am not very well at all today.
It seems to have affected my middle ear, because I keep having spells of dizziness and nausea. This is only really bad when I stand up, so I have come out to work anyway.
I have been asleep for much of the afternoon.
I was all right this morning. We collected Oliver, and then parked the camper van in the Tank Turning Circle just over the road from school, where we had a merry little end-of-term party with Actual Head Boy and his father.
His father is a properly genuine artist, who gets paid by people to paint beautiful pictures of plants. I have got a postcard of one of his paintings, and really it is brilliant, so it is very kind of him not to mind being in the camper van. The camper van has clearly been painted by an amateur with more enthusiasm than understanding of perspective, and a box of nursery school paints, but he has never once laughed or explained what I should have done differently. He is unfailingly kind, and tells interesting stories over coffee and biscuits.
I was hoping that a tank might come along and want to turn round, but disappointingly, one didn’t. In all of Oliver’s time at Aysgarth I have never yet seen a tank on that road, although it is obvious that they go there, because all of the kerbstones have been gnawed into fragments by inexpertly steered caterpillar tracks. I think it would be jolly exciting to be moved on by an actual tank, but we weren’t.
We had a happy morning, though, it was lovely to sit and picnic for a while before we had to go home and get on with life.
I did not go and get on with life. I got as far as the petrol station at Tesco before sickness washed over me in awful gasping rushes, and I had to go and lie down in the back, where I slept soundly for the entire journey.
When we got back I was all right enough to clean the bathroom and the fridge, but we had just refilled the jelly babies and closed the door when the sickness crawled over me again.
I did not do any tidying up in the house.
I went upstairs and went to bed.
Mark went off to buy some more blocks to build the conservatory tomorrow, but I did not hear him at all. I lay shivering and sweating until the world went dark.
We have not worked since Sunday, so when the alarm went off I had to get up, and I am on the taxi rank now.
I am not feeling too bad, because of the drugs. It is a good job Northamptonshire Police do not want to drug-test me. I would be positive for just about everything that Boots has to offer. Fortunately, it has been a very quiet evening.
I had jolly well better be all right tomorrow.
Have a picture of the camper van in Northamptonshire.
We have a success.
