I have had a whole day of doing things and am desperate to go to bed. I am back home.
Of course we started the day hundreds of miles away, in a centrally-heated hotel with plastic flowers, somewhere in the Midlands.
We woke up early.
We had the sort of breakfast which offers white sliced bread instead of fresh bread rolls, and talked about interview questions. Then we had coffee and talked about interview questions. Then we went back to our room and talked about interview questions. We had some more tea and talked about interview questions. Lucy had a shower.
We went down to the lounge and talked about interview questions. Then we set off in the car and talked about interview questions.
Then we arrived at the College Of Policing.
It was an exciting sort of place.
It was huge.
I don’t know what I had expected, but not this.
It was a massive site, rather like an army barracks, surrounded with enormous wire fences and with security guards in the gate.
They were expecting her.
I hugged her, and she jumped out, leaving me suddenly bereft and with a head full of interview questions.
It was almost a relief.
I drove slowly back to the hotel and checked myself into the gym.
It was odd not to be in any hurry. Usually I have got to keep an eye on the time because of work, but today I couldn’t justify that particular excuse for giving up. I had ages and ages to become hot and sweaty and virtuous, which was what I did.
Afterwards I curled up in the lounge with a book, where I stayed for the rest of the afternoon. I couldn’t drink wine because of driving and also not having any cash, but that didn’t matter, because after all of the puffing about on the bicycling machine, soda water was just fine.
The book made the afternoon pass quickly, and it seemed to be no time at all before six hours had flown past, and it was time to go and get Lucy.
The man on the gate of the police razor-wire-and-electric-fence compound remembered me, and let me in, even though I might have been a terrorist, although his judgement turned out to have been right, because I wasn’t.
Lucy staggered out and collapsed into the car, white-faced and exhausted.
She told me all about it on the long drive back to school.
It sounded ghastly.
They had made her sign a promise that she would never tell anybody exactly what the interview questions were, presumably so that the police won’t ever have to bother thinking of any more. Given that one of the issues concerned the subject of police transparency I thought that was rather splendid.
She hadn’t practised any of them anyway.
They all started off: “Talk for five minutes about…” and similar sorts of awfulness. Five minutes is an impossibly long time to talk about anything, but Lucy managed it every single time, until he told her to stop. I am not quite sure why this is a good thing to do in interviews, she said that it was really hard not to repeat herself. Maybe they are auditioning for the role of press officer whilst they have got people in there.
There were four role-play exercises, then a written test and a numerical test. She said that these last were really hard, which was alarming, because she got A in both subjects in her GCSEs only a couple of years ago, goodness knows how difficult everybody else would have found them.
She was the youngest there, by several years, the rest ranged from their mid twenties up to forty. She had no idea about how well she had done, because everybody had been politely neutral, and she is eighteen and scared. All the same, we thought that probably she had done rather well to get to the interview stage, even if she doesn’t go any further.
She was so tired she could hardly talk, but she had an essay to write for an A Level assessment, and she got on with writing that, in between yawns, whilst I drove back, through the traffic and the pouring rain.
I left her at school, and then set off for home.
It turns out that the dogs have missed us very much. They have been sitting hopefully next to the back door ever since we left.
I tried to be equally pleased to see them, but they had been for a walk and were wet and smelly.
Moderate rapture, perhaps.
I am going to bed.
Have a picture of the Lake District. I took it ages ago. Today it is raining.
