Family Affairs and other matters

DAY SEVEN

L and her two children are in the bedroom. Her son is sitting on the floor playing on his ipod touch. She and her daughter are on the bed. Reading and watching the news. Daughter is shouting at him to turn it down. Son turns it down but starts singing instead. Daughter shouts again. L shouts at both children to stop shouting. L tells 9 year old to stop behaving like a child.

L is called to the Diary Room to discuss how things are going.

She is a little emotional. She’s missing her family and her friends, but doesn’t want her children to know how she’s feeling. She’s got to be strong for them. She pulls herself together and asks if she can perform a task. Any task. As long as the prize is a bottle of wine and a ticket home. There is news that the airports in London are open again. We are waiting for a call.

Back to reality. Where there is no Big Brother to give me a bottle of wine and no knight in shining armour to fly, drive, or carry me home. I’m very disappointed.

Does anybody have Nick Clegg’s private telephone number? I need to call him and tell him that if he gets me back into the country before May 6th, I’ll vote for him. Although if anybody has Gordon’s or David’s private telephone numbers instead, they’ll do too.

We are all OK. Going slightly stir crazy but OK. No news about when we can leave. At all. Ten people got chosen from our hotel to get on a plane tonight but they were back from the airport this afternoon after the flight was cancelled. I don’t know what waiting list I’m on or if indeed I’m on one and several people have suggested that I contact the British Embassy. I’m not sure why I’d do that though. It seems a little extreme.

My daughter asked me to paint her nails this morning. We had a really girly bonding moment. My son wanted to do them but I told him he couldn’t because it took years of experience to be able to paint nails. Then I carefully painted each and every nail lovingly. I thought they looked really good. My daughter, who had been watching some rubbish on TV held them up to the light. “Mum” she said “they look absolutely shit. I can’t believe what a bad job you’ve done”. I was gutted. Bonding moment shattered.

The next bonding moment was with my 9 year old. I was teaching him to floss his teeth because he was doing it all wrong and whilst he’s not meant to floss at his age (or is he?) I was thinking, well at least I have time to do this sort of thing. After demonstrating how to do it, he pulled of a bit of thread out about a mile long, tried one tooth, got bored and stuffed the whole lot in his mouth and chewed it up. Said it tasted of mint and he much preferred to do it like that.

Final bonding moment was when I insisted he write a couple of pages of his diary before we went down for dinner. That was the deal when I took him out of school a few days early. That he would keep a diary of the holiday. Of course we are only on about the 5th day in Australia and we are really struggling to remember what we did. He wrote about two lines and stopped. “Can you write a bit more and also write about the next day as well please” I asked him. “NO I CAN”T” he said. “I want it to be a real cliffhanger so I’ve decided not to write anymore”.

Nice try.