This morning.

Serena on the telephone.

Sounds like Bee won’t be able to come to the mini-Viking’s second birthday after all.

Oh?

(Thinks, quickly:

I can go and pick her up.

We can go to South London via Cambridge.

We can’t set off until Shaun has finished preaching... so get to her sometime after one... and to birthday party by teatime...

Only an hour late...

So, yet again, life organised around Bee...

But easily worth it, to have her at her nephew’s birthday party...

Isn’t it?

All in the space of a nano-second.)

Yes, Serena continues.

Her friend is away for a fortnight, sailing. And she isn’t coping well without him. So she hasn’t managed to come off the substances as quickly as she’d hoped.

Ah yes.

Of course.

Bee is not allowed contact with the mini-Viking if she is taking anything she shouldn’t be.

(A policy Christian and Serena have had to hammer out very recently indeed, since being at Serena’s schoolfriend’s al fresco party, when a journalist-friend started popping something.)

So sad.

So, so sad.

Was life supposed to be this cruel? Was Serena born to this? To have to choose, when she started her own family, between her child and her sister?

Were we?

Well done, I say, when I can control myself. For sticking to your guns.

Well done.

Yes, Serena said. As you said to me the other day, the sausage won’t care whether she’s at his second birthday.

No.

His sixth, he will.

Yes, I say.

Thank you.

You’d have to do it for her, anyway, even if not for him.

Yes, she says.

So very sad.

But not.

Come on!

Glass half full.

Serena and Christian have set a very sensible – and loving – rule in place.
Bee is being truthful. (Again, as I said to her, lie about this one, and you might be allowed at his second birthday party... and then not, for years and years.)
She wants to be there. She really, really does.
And as Serena said, she’s off the Lorazepam now. (GP gave her beta-blockers. Probably nothing but Smarties, but Bee thinks it’s done the trick which is what counts.) If she came off everything at once she might crash and revert to Lorazepam... and that would be much worse.
And – let’s pray – she will be at his sixth. Perhaps, off everything and completely well.

See?

Glass always has something in it.

Even if not quite half.