Tuesday 26th November 2019

Come with me, if you will, to a friend’s house. We’ve just been for a walk with the dog. We are relaxing afterwards: wet boots off in the kitchen; toes wriggling in our socks; tea hot in our mugs.

(Dog conked out for the next week. Shaun’s dog. Great Dane. Enuf sed.)

You won’t believe, I said to her, the text I got a few weeks ago. Amazing thing happened…

So there I am, reflecting on how rich we are in unexpected good fortune (when the expected good fortune seemed to have slipped away); how well everything is going (all things considered, given the level of illness we’re coping with); how bright the future is beginning to look…

When I get a day like yesterday.

Weeks ago, Serena invited Bee to South London, to help with the Little Viking while the Big Viking is away.

This is a happy, happy idea. Bee – you will know if you’ve glanced at this blog for five secs – loves Little Vikings. Or, indeed, little anyones of any nationality, race, ethnicity or colour.

(But not species. They must be genuine little people. Not, for instance, little canines; felines; arachnids… especially not arachnids.)

Serena, of course, adores her Little Viking. Well, we all do: he makes it hard not to. But she’s slightly less keen on holding the establishment for a week, alone, while said Scaled-down Scandi scales up ladders and jumps out of windows and swings from chandeliers and generally practises his Nordic rampaging and pillaging, for twenty hours on the trot, in any given twenty-four, the second her back is turned, without any relief from any Big Viking, because the Big Viking is the other side of the world keeping the Little Viking in raw reindeer steaks and whale blubber.

(Understandable, really. I wasn’t hugely keen, myself, on entertaining our own tribe of miniature peat-enriched, beyond-the-Pale Celts, while their Hibernian father was off on some esoteric Bible conference or other, in the olden days of the Atkins family. I remember one particularly ghastly abandonment, when I came across the four of them – Rose not yet born – making good use of a Cash-and-Carry-sized sack of organic muesli, mixed with a generous quantity of yoghurt, well-impacted into all the rush matting covering a substantial amount of floor. By the time I’ve even worked out how to start thinking about tackling this, I thought, they will have done so much more damage elsewhere that it’s less like the upkeep of the Forth Bridge and more like the aftermath of Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined.)

So Serena did what any sister would do, who has a sister who ain’t doing much visible good in the world – yet, leastways – and asked her if she would like to come and entertain said Little V, while Serena earns a living and keeps the house ticking over and stops her psychopathic dog from wrecking the place simultaneous to Bee stopping the LV from wrecking the place.

So far, so good.

Bee says, what a lovely idea. Serena says, great: I won’t look for alternative child-care, in that case.

(And I say: awesome older sister. Bee will love that, if she ever makes it. Serena says, yes, I honestly think she will: there’s lots to do here and friends of mine to meet and a library to volunteer for and coffee shops to keep in business and mother-and-baby groups that we’re all too busy to join but if we weren’t we’d be hugely supportive of each other. Even, she says, I think my neighbours would happily lend her their shower in exchange for a spot of baby-help. Given that Serena and Christian and Alex have been living the house for nearly four years during which they have managed to instal walls, windows, lights, heating, an oven, a fridge, even a roof extension (and, after about a year of my scanning the Deaths columns on a daily basis, balconnette-railings so there is no longer a sheer drop two storeys to the ground) and they now have a loo! (though you have to flush it from the dog’s kennel)… but not, as yet, quite, any bathroom or shower.

We were all going very well with this plan, when Bee’s anxiety kicks in.

As it always does.

Bee’s demons can’t bear the thought of anyone enjoying themselves, least of all Bee herself.

So the last few days has been spent in a non-stop Bee-panic, until I could scream.

“Will Serena feel I’ve let her down if I don’t turn up?”

You have to tell the truth… but the (not very) hidden message behind this question is, If she will, I’ll be so stressed I won’t be able to go at all.

Well, Bee Serena will have to rearrange all the lessons she’s arranged to teach and get baby-sitters in for the lessons she can’t rearrange and she will doubtless have to think very hard indeed before suggesting this again… but she will still be your sister and she will still love you and she will cope.

“What will she feel, though? Will she think I’ve let her down?” I convey this question. Serena says she will be far too busy desperately ringing around for child-care to have time to feel anything at all.

This is processed.

Eventually,

“Will you be annoyed with me if I can’t get my bedroom tidy before I go?”

(In other words, if the hen party of twenty-two paying guests coming on Saturday night has to use even more sofabeds and folding beds and trundle beds and probably Shaun’s and my bed so we ourselves may have to sleep on my father’s kitchen floor… has happened before. Understand: we ourselves don’t require Bee to tidy her room. We’d happily do it for her. But she has to “pack it up” so that all her empty cardboard boxes and plastic Sainsbury’s bags don’t get looked at in a funny way by someone else.)

Right, Bee I have now arranged all the beds for the guests, taking your bedroom out of the equation.

“But will you be annoyed with me?”

That’s not a fair question. I will be very disappointed if you don’t go to Serena’s: of course I will. I think it would be lovely for the two of you.

“If you’ll be annoyed with me, I’ll be so stressed I won’t be able to get ready at all.”

Ok, look.

I can’t guarantee my own feelings. (Frankly, right now, I’m feeling extremely fed up, quite stressed myself and very frustrated indeed that I haven’t been able to do anything for about three days during which we’ve all been trying to calm Bee down.) What I can do, Bee, is undertake not to mention this again, all week, at all, nor even ask you how you’re getting on. Whether you’ve managed a shower, or your teeth, so you can go to London… let alone whether you can think about packing your room up.

Will that do, Bee?

Much thought. Eventually, she decides it will. I think.

She disappeared upstairs, anyway. And I haven’t seen her since.

And don’t dare ask.

Can you see why I don’t get much work done?

And I was so looking forward to telling you all the good things that have been happening to us recently!

Another day, another news item…