Staggering Towards the Weekend
I started writing this post an hour go. I'm not quite sure where that hour went. Perhaps it had something to do with the bottle of wine I bought on the way home from work, and that is now almost empty in the fridge (in my defence, Miss 18 helped make it vanish). It had nothing to do with watching YouTube videos, getting sucked into a movie on Amazon Prime about the production of the Peter Gabriel album “So”, or playing chess on the internet, honest.
I'm home alone for a couple of hours. The younger girls are at a rugby club social in a nearby town, and our eldest is babysitting for friends that live nearby. I'm savouring the time to myself – tomorrow I have promised to escort Miss 15 to London for the day, and on Sunday I have tickets to “Hyper Japan” with Miss 18. Expect lots of photos to land on Instagram across the weekend.
The expedition with Miss 15 is a “cheer up” exercise. After being tasked with gathering “players player” votes from her school girls rugby team, we attended the annual school sporting awards last night, and discovered there was no award for players player in girls rugby. There were tears – lots of tears – and an entirely predictable sickie was thrown this morning.
We have something of a precedent set with throwing sickies – if any of the kids do it, all of their devices automatically get blocked from the internet for 24 hours. It happened to 15 this morning, just before I left for work. I stood in her bedroom doorway at 8am, and presented options – either I could write to the school and complain about the lack of any support for girls rugby – which would require Miss 15 to get up and go to school in order to avoid me looking like a numpty, or she stayed home and pretended to be ill, and I banned her from the internet.
She thought about if for a few seconds, and continued to pretend to be sick. I unplugged the television in the lounge before leaving the house, and hid the remote controls. Yes, I know – I'm horrible.
During our visit to London tomorrow we will hopefully make it to the Police museum. I've never been there before – it's apparently connected to a library, and is something of a little-known secret. Ever since she was little, 15 has wanted to join the police – I'm feeling sorry for whoever is on-duty in the museum in advance, because they don't know it yet, but their entire knowledge of policing is going to be put under the microscope tomorrow.
Last summer the local police force visited the green outside our house as part of a community out-reach initiative. After Miss 15 (14 at the time) gave the officer in charge a grilling for a couple of hours we wandered outside and rescued him. His first words to me were “your daughter's knowledge of police work is frightening”.
Anyway. I need another coffee. I'm trying to reverse the effects of the half-bottle of wine I drank when I got in from work. I have an on/off relationship with wine – I like it if I've not had any for a few days or weeks, but then as soon as I've had perhaps two glasses I regret it, because I know it's meddling with the workings of my head.