The terrible fate that haunts all Brits when they travel abroad to Australia has befallen Number Two Daughter.
The thing that we all dread, the reason that on the whole we don’t ever get much further than Scarborough, has Actually Happened.
Number Two Daughter has been bitten by a poisonous spider.
She has had a terribly upsetting time since leaving the family nest and adventuring off to the other side of the world. She has had a terminal falling out with Mrs. Number Two Daughter, and is now on her own.
This was an awful thing to happen. Not only was she shocked and sad, it meant that all of her plans and ideas had got to be reimagined with only one person in them.
Number Two Daughter is not easily defeated. She organised herself a job in Japan to start at Christmas, and then set about trying to earn enough cash to pay her airfare to get there.
Being newly single in a strange land is quite shocking, especially in Australia, which is full of perils for the unwary. All the same, Number Two Daughter is made of stern stuff. She trekked off bravely, all alone, into the wilderness, or at any rate, outside Sydney, and got herself a job on a farm, picking things.
It was terribly hot, and so instead of wearing thick leather boots, she wore trainers. She was patiently picking cotton, or whatever immigrants pick in Australia these days, when she felt something on her foot. She brushed it off, and felt the sting, and thought no more of it.
At first there was just a little red mark.
Twenty four hours later her foot was the size of a football, hideously painful and leaking thick blobs of horrible yellow pus. Her sock stuck on.
The farmer looked at it, then nodded sagely and told her that it was a spider bite, and then, to her horror, showed her where half of his hand was missing due to a similar misfortune.
Fortunately, two of the people in her backpacking immigrant hostel were nurses. They cleaned it and disinfected it and  scrubbed it and plastered it in antiseptic, until eventually it began to go down. This took two agonising days.
She has got no cash so she carried on working anyway. I think that she is jolly heroic.
It is much better now, and it looks as though amputation is not going to be necessary, but let this serve as a warning to the reckless. Foreign travel is a dangerous thing. There is nothing wrong with Blackpool.
I regaled the girls behind the counter in the bank with this story this morning, adding a few made-up details of my own just to make sure that they appreciated the full awfulness of the situation, which they did. They won’t be going anywhere exciting in a hurry, I can tell you.
I have not done anything exciting either. I am trying to prepare for my imminent departure. This involves a lot of flapping about and making piles of things that I think I might need, stacked on the coffee table and my desk until it is impossible to do anything sensible. Today, Mark went into the garden to organise the solar panel properly, so that I will have enough electricity when I am in the van, and I made scented candles and some soap.
None of this is intended for me. It is so that Mark can have a lovely tranquil candle-lit life, and also stay squeaky-clean and polished even when I am not here. I would hate to think of him being grubby or having a power cut.
Today the soap turned into a tiresome thing to do, somehow, and kept bubbling and overflowing at all of the wrong moments, even though I was doing my best to be careful. It does this sometimes, and was probably because I was flapping.
I am covered in soap burns, and there is a cut on my finger which has had several excruciating moments of intimate contact with lye. Also I hope that the prison service does not require me to have fingerprints, because I have got none left by now.
It has been a trying experience. Fortunately Mark came in as I was getting towards the end, and helped me to clear up and restore order to my soap-splattered kitchen. We did not go to work, because of being tired and cross, and had a glass of wine and some cheese crackers with Lucy instead. We are going to go to bed early. It is weekend again tomorrow.
I am, however, pleased to announce that not all of my absent offspring are enduring terrible experiences. You will be very pleased indeed to hear that Oliver’s conker arrived in time, was put to good use, and it all turned out to have been worth it, because it was victorious. He smashed his opponent to smithereens, and won a magnificent victory.
He is through to the next round of the Aysgarth School Conker Championships.
I am a very proud parent.
