It has been an odd sort of day. It is the first of June, and things have been happening. The world has tipped slightly on its axis.
The first thing that has happened was splendid.
Mark has earned some money.
By this I mean actual money, the sort that you earn when you have got a real job, not the sort that you get in a taxi, which is not really earnings as much as plunder.
Their not-for-profit rural broadband enterprise has brought in enough cash for some of it to go into our bank account. Mark thinks that there will be some money there every week now.
I can’t tell you how relieved and grateful I am about this. It is not a great deal of money, but it is a promisingly fair wind, and maybe some successful sailing will result. We have been becalmed for a very long time.
The second thing that has happened is that I have got a full complement of daughters. Not only daughters, but adopted daughters and daughters-in-law (common-law), and today, at various different times, they have all been at home.
The lodger, who has been adopted as Number Three Daughter due to some glaring omissions in her provision of natural parents, came up in her lunch break to see Number Two Daughter. They chirped and giggled and remembered their wicked schooldays. I remembered some of it as well, although the finer details had, mercifully, escaped my notice at the time. It was ace to hear them and also to find out who it had been who had regularly been sick in the dustbin.
When she had dashed back to work I had barely washed her coffee cup before Number One Daughter arrived as well, with a friend who seemed to have as many muscles as she does. They looked very well indeed, bronzed and gleaming with good health, and I almost wished that I had some bags of cement that needed carrying about, in order to make the most of their visit.
It felt wonderfully strange to have them all in the same place, to see them all together, radiating confidence and energy. They squabbled incessantly, almost absentmindedly. They do this in the way that people do driving, it is something they do automatically, without needing to think about it.
I spent the day baking, because a household of that size eats a great deal. I made a lemon cake and a curry, two fruit bannocks and some millionaire shortbread, and an enormous tray of spiced chicken. Number One Daughter said that the cake was salty, which I thought unlikely, and poked her finger experimentally into the still-soft chocolate on the shortbread. She said the shortbread was salty as well, so perhaps it was her fingers.
In the middle of all of this the telephone rang.
This was the third thing that happened today.
It was the Prison Service.
After all these months my security checks have been completed. I am going to be a prison officer.
I have been waiting for this call for so long that when it finally arrived it was almost an anticlimax.
I went upstairs to look at the diary so that we could arrange a starting date.
They have booked me a place on their training course on the fifth of November.
This is ages and ages away, but, they said, it was the first course available.
Obviously I accepted it, and hung up with a vague feeling of shock.
After an interlude of pondering it dawned on me that our Christmas break, with the pantomime and the lovely hotel, will be happening right in the middle of the course time.
They had sent me an email confirming the course date which included a phone number to ring with any queries.
I rang it.
The woman who answered said that she could not tell me anything at all and that I was supposed to ring the telephone number on the email if I wanted to know anything, kindly stop bothering her.
I explained, patiently, that I had done exactly that and that she had been the person to answer. She huffed and puffed grumpily for a little while, but in the end found me another number to ring, which she said was the number for the training centre itself.
It turned out not to be, but that didn’t matter, it was a prison service number which seemed to do. I explained about the holiday and asked if it would be all right.
This lady said that it most certainly would not be, and that if I still wanted to go on my holiday then I would have to book on another course, except that she didn’t know when any of them were, and if I wished to make any changes then I would have to ring the number on the email. Christmas holidays, she explained, were from the twenty seventh of December to the seventh of January.
I thought about that for a moment, and said that I thought that was unusual.
She was indignant about that, and said that the holidays were then, and that was that.
I wondered if the Prison Service always ran their courses on Christmas Eve, Christmas Day and Boxing Day.
She refused to agree with me that this was unexpected.
I invited her to check to be quite, quite certain that this was so, because of its definite peculiarity.
She said that it was written down in front of her, and it was absolutely right. The course had lectures on all of those three days and holidays started on the twenty seventh.
I insisted that she check that.
After a few minutes discussion with her supervisor she returned to the phone and announced, as if there had never been any question about it, that the Christmas holidays started on the twenty third, and did I have any more questions.
I did not.
I considered it all for a while, and then decided that what I would do about this development would be nothing whatsoever. I think that there is no point in asking HMP telephone answering service anything at all, given their performance so far. I will no doubt find out during the course if it is possible to have three days off, and if so then I shall take them. I can’t imagine that the course for being a prison officer is so completely demanding that a short absence would result in a lifetime of ignorance.
If it is not possible then I shall ring in sick.
Problem solved.
The picture is Number Two daughter. She took it to put on my phone this morning when she discovered that I had a picture of Number One Daughter on it.
