The story of the wooden spoon

This is a story. A story about a wooden spoon. I have had this wooden spoon for almost ten years. We have been through a lot together. There have been ups. There have been downs. But through it all, we have remained together.

When I was little, we used to walk to my Nana’s house every Sunday and she would make us lunch. She always made mince and something. I think it was potatoes and other vegetables. I wasn’t really paying attention. I just loved the mince. Maybe she cooked it especially well. I don’t know. I just know that my brother and I were obsessed with it, couldn’t get enough of it.

When she died, I was on my gap year in Africa and my dad and brother did all the sorting out of her stuff. When I got back from my gap year, I was immediately packing up my life again to move to university and my dad gave me my Nana’s cutlery to take. Amongst it all was a wooden spoon. One of the spoons she probably used when making our Sunday lunches of mince. It was sturdy and served me for almost anything I decided to cook (mostly pasta and sauces, as I was an unimaginative student).

When I left university for the summer and then actually ended up running away back to Africa and then coming back and going to a different university, again the wooden spoon and I found each other and made the journey to London together.

We survived halls of residence in tact and we moved into a flat just over the road from uni (the ‘lazy’ in my name becomes clear now) and lived with one close friend and two strangers. We found them on Facebook. They seemed fab. In fact, one of them disappeared and his room started to smell and his parents had to come and clean it out. And the other was nice but buggered off after a month or so.

I was not there the day she left but she obviously packed in a bit of a hurry. Or she intentionally broke my heart. Whichever it is, I have not forgiven her.

I came home that day and did not notice anything amiss. I hadn’t suspected she had a cruel heart made of stone. A few days later, I wanted to cook. I chopped something, I diced something else, I warmed some oil in a pan, I reached for my wooden spoon…. And it was not there. Panic swept over me. I looked around but it was not there. I realised where it must be but had no idea where it’s new home was.

Coincidentally, a girl I had lived in halls with in my first year at uni came over to say hi one day. She was still living in halls and mentioned that the girl who had moved out of our flat had moved in with one of her boyfriend’s friends, also in halls.

And so, the plan was put in place. They would wait until she had gone out one evening then sneak in, find my Nana’s wooden spoon and sneak back out, returning the wooden spoon to me asap.

And they did battle valiantly. They entered the battlefield, used their skills of stealth and sneakiness and retrieved the wooden spoon! Hoo! Rah!

Since then, I have guarded the wooden spoon carefully, not letting another silly careless mistake happen again. When I moved into a lovely massive converted coach house, it came with me. When I moved out a little while later, I carried in my backpack as I cycled to my new destination.

And now it sits happily in the utensil pot thing with the other utensils. It sometimes feels a little threatened by the presence of two other wooden spoons. Yes, two! But it knows those are but small wooden spoons, not comparable to it’s relative long-handled glory. It is the most useful when making things in a big pot, where the other wooden spoons, short-handled as they are, would fall into the food below.

Here’s to my Nana’s wooden spoon!

Hilarious memories

After an evening of reminiscing about my gap year with a friend, I just had to share some of this nonsense with you. The highlights of the evening discussions were:

1. The time a friend flipped his car and was all stressed that the police would get him so ran off into the sand dunes. We had heard about it and been given a lift to where he was. We also ran off into the desert and were covering his white shirt with Lucy’s long skirt, to avoid him being seen by a helicopter….! When one has consumed much alcohol, this seems to make perfect sense, that in a place where there is no ambulance service, they would be sending a helicopter out in the night to catch a man who had flipped his car. He was quite shaken so in my 18 year old mind, I decided the best way to be supportive was to declare my love for him. (I didn’t love him at all. I’m not even sure what made me say it.)

2. The time Lucy and I got in a car with a total random who drove us to Cape Town and, right before the border, while stopped at a petrol station, both went to the toilet at the same time. We suddenly realised what we’d done and rushed outside. Thankfully he hadn’t driven off with our stuff.

3. The time our friend, Ramon, came over and we made up a story about a purple fairy who lived in the garden called Finesse, then went down to the tree and started calling out to her.

4. The time another of the gap year volunteers went off with some random guy after two days in Cape Town, then came back one day, told us his name was Rudolph and he’d asked her to marry him and she’d said yes! (She didn’t end up staying and marrying him, much to the annoyance of the other girl at her project, who had to deal with her for the next year.)

5. The time I tried to climb up on the ledge round the house to look in the bathroom window, where Lucy had locked herself and fallen asleep after a night out. My arms and legs couldn’t handle the exertion of the climb so I just let go and fell straight backwards on to the ground. I’m surprised I survived that fall, actually.

6. All the times we ate plates of rice and faux dumpling-things or the peanut butter sandwiches the kids used to make as part of their activities at school, cause we couldn’t afford anything else! A box of Frosties was BIG news in our house! We only bought those when we’d just been paid and were feeling really flash with our money.

J is for….

JET PLANE!

As in Leaving On A….

When I was 18, I decided to go on a gap year. I really decided who I went away with in a bit of a panic. Anyone else I knew who was taking a year out before uni had arranged it already. So panic set in and I applied for the first thing I saw. Thankfully, it was brilliant. Before we left, we went on a training course on a little island off the coast of Scotland.

My favourite favourite song, at this point in time, was Leaving On A Jet Plane by Peter, Paul and Mary. When getting to know everyone else on the course, one boy, who was probably the most fun ever, revealed that his favourite song was Leaving On A Jet Plane!

Omygod, no! That’s my favourite song! No, it’s my favourite song. Omygod, we’ve got the same favourite song! This is like fate! It’s totally fate. I love the version Bjork did. Do you remember it? No, I didn’t know she’d done a version. I like the one by Peter, Paul and Mary. Wow. Same favourite song. This is amazing. We’re like so best friends.

And so we went on our gap years, me to Africa, Joe to China. And we spent a few years being here, there and everywhere. Until finally, inevitably, we both ended up in London. And we are still good friends, in fact we met for dinner last week.

And there have been various songs that epitomise different times in our relationship. For example, Cool by Gwen Stefani and Goodbye My Lover by James Blunt will always transport me back to the time I spent in Beijing with Joe, around the time that both of those songs came out. On the day I flew home, we walked down a quiet road near his hutong singing loudly and when I got in a taxi to leave, the unfairness of constantly living so far apart really got to me.

(Us pretending to be fabulous pianists in a hotel in Beijing)

And now we live at opposite ends of the same tube line in the same city! Although we’re no longer 18 and no longer act as if we’re on drugs that make you hyper, I knew that song meant something when we discovered it was both our favourite!

Careers advice

When I was in my late teens and still at secondary school, there was a lot of talk about forward planning for a possible career. We had talks from people who gave us advice about this or that, there was a careers advisor on hand most days near the sixth form common room and we had various computer programme things that asked you questions and suggested possible careers that might match your likes or dislikes.

I didn’t know for definite what I wanted to do. I had played with different careers in my mind – popstardom beckoned at one point, the literary life at another, not to mention my brush with TV presenting fame.

I hadn’t settled on one for definite because my main thoughts, in my last year at school, were on the gap year I had planned. So I just kind of let these career talks go in one ear and out the other. I had my place at university sorted, I was off to study theatre and English literature when I got back from Africa, although I didn’t really know what I could do with it as a career. I just liked them!

One day though, I must have been wondering what career the computer might suggest if I took the questionnaire. I secretly love stuff like that as it often comes up with something hilariously off-kilter. In a free moment between classes, I decided to take the careers questionnaire.

It took a long time. Long, long, long. And it went on and on and on about things that were so similar to one another that I thought that surely I must have answered it already.

“You enjoy working in a group.”
Agree

“You enjoy working with other people.”
Agree strongly

“You get on well with other people.”
Agree

“You like to lead a group.”
Neither agree or disagree

“You like to be in charge.”
Agree slightly

“You are good at taking control.”
Agree slightly

“You like to fix things.”
Disagree slightly

“You like to take things apart and figure them out.”
Disagree

“You work best alone.”
Neither agree or disagree.

And so it went on. Click, click, click went the mouse, on varying degrees of agreeing or disagreeing with certain statements. Until finally, five billion questions later, I got a little egg timer on the screen while it came up with my results.

I waited in anticipation, thinking about all the things it might suggest for the career I was best matched to. Based on the questions I had been asked, I thought it might come up with things like ‘Team leader on expedition of huge world importance similar to that of Shackleton,” or “Queen’s best friend,” (is that a job title?) or “World famous travelling sensation.”

Think, think, think, went the egg timer and then, finally, up popped my results!

I’ve long since forgotten what my number 1 most suitable career came up as because right there, sitting in the number 2 spot, was the word ‘Embalmer.’

You’re thinking, no, surely not? Is that what I think it is? Well yes, it is what you think it is. The person who embalms dead bodies and gets them ready for burial.

At number 2! That high up! Did I fall asleep during part of the questionnaire and accidentally click ‘agree’ on the statement “You like working with the recently departed”?!

Laura Maisey, Future Embalmer.

The time I got my nose pierced

When I was 20, I worked in a job for a few months where I had to travel around the UK a lot. It was a slightly mad time in my life. I was fresh back from my second stint in Namibia and such a gap year casualty. You could spot me a mile off, with my colourful skirts and millions of bracelets. My hair was really short and would stick out at crazy angles when I took my hat off. I always had a hat. That’s another thing. I always wore hats. I had a massive collection of them.

Anyway, this one day, I was working with three other girls in Leicester (I think). I had initially thought I wouldn’t get on with one of them but we hit it off pretty soon and I thought she was fab. I had pretty much made up my mind I wanted to be her. And she had her nose pierced. In fact, all three of the other girls had their noses pierced.

After a particularly successful working day, we were all feeling a bit high and excitable. We had spotted a tattoo and piercing place and decided that we would go en masse, and I would get my nose pierced.

Off we went and I entered and announced that I would like my nose pierced please. Not having any foreknowledge of how these things are done, I offered up my nose to this complete stranger, wielding what I now know to be an ear piercing device and let him pierce me.

I wandered off, the others all admiring my pretty nose stud, feeling way cool. I left it for the a few weeks but started to feel something wasn’t right when my nostril swelled up around the stud and went red. I decided to change it sooner than recommended because I just wanted to get the stud out, in case that was the problem.

I took hold of the front bit and the back bit and pulled. And pulled. And pulled. Nothing. It was stuck! I couldn’t get enough of my finger into my nostril to give the back a good tug. I started to worry. I was back home by this point so my uncle got involved, tugging and twisting and doing whatever he could think of. Eventually, he came up with a plan. He would use plyers (that’s right, plyers) to force it open.

That’s exactly what happened. He grabbed hold of the bit on the front of my nostril with one pair of plyers and wedged another pair up my nose to hold onto the back. Very rarely have I felt less dignified. He pulled, I winced, he tugged, I made ow noises… And finally it gave way and came off. I whipped another stud straight in and the swelling and redness subsided immediately.

I showed a friend the offending nose stud and she just laughed and told me it was an earring and that I’d been pierced with an earring gun. Great.

So anyway, I was then happy. Life went back to normal. Until six months later I got a new job and was told I couldn’t wear jewelry. I took out the nose stud reluctantly and, eight hours later, I went home, clutching my nose stud, intending to put it back in.

I felt the place where my piercing had been and tried pushing the stud in. Nothing doing. I checked in a mirror but couldn’t see a hole anymore. I pushed, I squeezed and I almost wept. It had closed. I would have to try re-piercing. So I got an ice cube, melted it with my fingers so it would fit up my nostril then tried pushing on the front of my nostril with the stud again.

And that’s when it hit me. I wouldn’t be able to re-pierce it. And actually, if something requires me to have plyers and moulded ice cubes stuck up my nose … I think maybe I should let it go…

And so I did. I became one of the non-pierced masses. I was sad. But my life was easier.

Songs that remind me of stuff 2

Be Prepared from the Lion King soundtrack
My friend, Fiona, and I were travelling around Namibia in an old battered truck which was pretty low on gadgets. It didn’t have air con, a radio or even a tape deck. We’d get to our destination and peel ourselves off the seat, sweaty and disgusting and hope no-one noticed as we shuffled into the reception of wherever we’d stopped over. Due to the lack of music, we spent hours singing to each other. We returned to the Lion King soundtrack again and again. Be Prepared was a firm favourite and got an airing at least five times every day.

I Just Can’t Wait To Be King from the Lion King soundtrack
Lion King soundtrack again but a different situation. I’m in the last year of school and I’ve got a theatre studies class. We’re all sitting waiting for the teacher and somehow… A frenzy takes hold of us. A few girls start singing I Just Can’t Wait To Be King. A few more join in. Soon we’re all singing. Then we’re bordering on shouting. We’ve started bashing on the desks and our chairs in time to the tune. “O, I JUST CAAAAN’T WAIT!……”

The door opens. Our teacher is standing there. We stop, mid-desk-whack, and wonder if there’s any chance at all in the entire world, that she didn’t hear us…. “What on earth is going on? I could hear you all the way down the corridor!”

We had nothing to offer in our defence. We looked into our laps, 18 year old girls having been caught acting like 8 year olds. The lesson got underway but we were all pretty red faced for the entire time.

I popped in to see this teacher a few years ago when I was in Liverpool and we laughed about this day. I still felt kind of embarrassed though.

Jenny From The Block by Jennifer Lopez
Another secondary school story. I had a friend called Cilla who used to ‘perform’ this song every breaktime. She had slightly adjusted the words though. It was hilarious. J.Lo’s version goes:
“I used to have a little, now I have a lot.
No matter where I go, I know where I came from.
Don’t be fooled by the rocks that I got.
I’m still, I’m still Jenny from the block.”

Cilla’s version went:
“Used to have a little, now I still have a little.
No matter where I go, I’m still where I came from.
Don’t be fooled by the rocks I haven’t got.
I’m still. I’m still Cilla from the block.”

Mr Cellophane from the Chicago soundtrack
This reminds me of walking through a park in London, I think Hyde Park, but I didn’t know London at the time so I’m not sure. I had met all the people who were going with the same gap year organisation as me and we were all leaving for our adventures in about a month. We met in London for some fun before leaving and two of my favourite friends and I were walking together and singing this song. I hasn’t seen Chicago so I didn’t know it but I just kind of mumbled along with them while they sang. I thought they were best people I had ever known.

Songs that remind me of stuff

Mariah Carey – Heartbreaker album
I was big into Mariah when I was younger. I’d sit warbling away to My All or Always Be My Baby, imagining a life where I was christened The Voice and asked to sing for the Queen and made people get a little teary with my beautiful singing. In my late teens, I still listened to anything and everything she sung but kept it a little quiet and pretended I was listening to Destiny’s Child. When I started learning to drive, my instructor was a slightly older gentleman who was a bit of a pushover. I wasn’t supposed to have any music on but knew he would let me, so made a mixtape of all my favourite Mariah hits, mostly from the Heartbreaker album and would listen to it on my driving lessons. There’s an area of Liverpool called Garston, that we drove through a lot so I always think of Garston when I hear that album.

Leaving on a Jet Plane by Peter, Paul and Mary (or Bjork)
When the gap year organisation that I went away with did the training session I was on, there were a few country groups being trained together. Us Namibia volunteers had been put with the two Mozambique volunteers, the two Bolivia volunteers and the really huge China group. There were about thirty of them going to different projects. Two of these volunteers, a boy called Joe and a girl called Robyn became my new favourite people. We were glued together most of the time, finding everything ridiculously funny and just generally having fun. Somehow, a discussion of our favourite songs came up and Joe and I had the sane favourite song – Leaving on a Jet Plane. And we all were about to leave in jet planes for our gap years! I loved the original by Peter, Paul and Mary. He loved the cover by Bjork. So this confirmed it. We were destined to be best friends forever. In case you were wondering, Robyn and Joe and I are still good friends. It must have been the mutual song-love.

Dispatch – The General
When I was on my gap year, my friend Lucy used to listen to this song all the time. This reminds me of foolish nights out when we had first arrived and didn’t quite know what we were doing and had a load of friends over, post-pub, talking nonsense for hours, despite the fact that we would be teaching a few hours later.

Lauryn Hill and Bob Marley – Turn Your Lights Down Low
We were on the longest bus journey in the world, my friend and I, travelling from Ho Chi Minh City to Phnom Penh. It was Cambodian New Year so the traffic on the roads was horrendous. Instead of taking six hours, it took twelve. My friend had a combination of things wrong, an ear infection, really bad bites, vomiting. It was really worrying but there was nothing we could do except wait to get to Phnom Penh. Being the non-doctor I am, I had diagnosed possible malaria. It was all quite scary. He was sleepy so I leaned awkwardly and lay his head on my chest and stroked his arm in an attempt to comfort him. After an hour or two, I had extreme backache, sideache, neckache, shoulderache and everything else but couldn’t move as Chennour was finally sleeping. I gingerly leaned around him and got his iPod and plugged myself in, hoping to tune out from the pain for a bit. Somehow, Lauryn Hill and Bob Marley had been set to repeat and I couldn’t figure out how to stop it. So I spent the last few hours of that journey extremely uncomfortable and listening to Turn Your Lights Down Low on repeat. Painful/humorous memories.

Faith Hill
This is another Namibia memory. We were trying to get to Cape Town for our Christmas holidays. We had bought bus tickets and needed to switch buses in a town called Keetmanshoop (pronounced Keet-mans-hoop, not Keet-man-shoop, which we did for an embarrassingly long time until someone corrected us). We got off the first bus and waited for the second bus. And waited. And waited. Two hours late, the bus arrived, everyone else got on, Lucy and I, ever the Brits, queued politely at the edge of the crowd and were last to get on. There was only one seat left, we were told. We got ready to fume, we had been sold tickets, we demanded to be allowed on! Not to worry, we were told, there’s one a few minutes behind. Ok, that’s fine then. We sat down and waited. We looked up and down the road, we took turns falling asleep on our bags, we ate everything we had brought for the journey, shops closed for the night then opened for the morning again, 9pm turned into 7am. We were two 18 years olds, in a town in the middle of nowhere, with bus tickets we couldn’t use and no other mode of transport available. Then a man approached. Your typical prematurely-balding, pale, wide-eyed, plays-the-psychotic-murderer-in-a-film type. And offered us a lift. We jumped at it. Bags were grabbed, common sense was left behind, and we jumped into the car with this potential torturer. He asked if we wanted any music on. The silence was a bit awkward. All I could find was a Faith Hill album, so I put it on and played it all the way through. Then pressed play when it ended, to keep the silence at bay. And pressed play again. And again. For the entire seven hour journey…..

Damien Rice
I’ve forgotten what his first album was called. I got it in first year at Glasgow Uni and would listen to it every night to try and block out the booming noises from the floor above. I don’t know whether the banging upstairs was music, I could only hear extremely loud thuds, like someone bashing the floor with a hammer. Awful. I hated them. Every time I hear a Damien Rice song, I can still feel the annoyance of the bangs from upstairs but also see the view of the park out of my window, which was nice.

Gwen Stefani – Cool. And James Blunt – Goodbye My Lover
These were both out around the time I was in China climbing the Great Wall. When I’d finished, I stayed with my friend Joe (same one as before) in Beijing for a bit. He was living there, studying. These two songs became about the distant nature of our friendship. We’d spent so little time together but still had an amazing time whenever we did see each other. These songs always remind me of those early days of our friendship, when we had to travel the world to see each other. Nowadays we just have to travel across London. Much easier.

When not to fall asleep (and a little bit of Joan Rivers)

Back to my gap year today for some handy hints on how not to behave when in a position of importance.

We ran a newspaper, Lucy and I, which was the only town newspaper. It was important that we reported all the local events as people in the town were quite proud of their little local paper. I can’t tell you how many HIV/AIDs workshops we went to. Everything that was happening, we were at.

So the biggest and best event of the year had arrived. Independence Day! Everyone had been looking forward to it for months. Plans were under way, the kids from the local schools had fantastic little routines organised, the mayor would be there, the country’s national football team would be there. It would be AMAZING.

The day before we had been at the local Crayfish Derby, which was massive fun. But it was quite a way out of town and we had had to leave midway through to walk back into town for a meeting about youth empowerment and small businesses. After the meeting we had then walked back out of town, quite a trek, to the Crayfish Derby to finish reporting on that. Walking under the sun is quite tiring.

The next day, we woke up early to go to the Independence Day celebrations, which were just at the bottom of the hill we lived on. Easy. We arrived, found some seats in the stadium and waited. It’s quite normal to wait a while for most stuff but it takes a little bit of getting used to when you first go there. They played a bit of Celine Dion, they loved her there. Some kids did some dancing. We waited. The sun beat down on our faces. We feebly made notes in our notebooks. And kept waiting.

And then we made that fateful decision. We needed some water, we were far too hot, we were going to faint, it was urgent! We left our seats and saw a good friend arriving. He looked puzzled about why we were walking out, not in. We explained that we’d be back in a mo. We just needed some water. We were far too hot. See you soon!

We staggered up the hill, gasping. When we got home we gulped tons of water and sat down for a second to stay out of the heat until we had recovered…. And then we woke up, disorientated, and ran out of the house, and looked down the hill. And the celebration was over! Oops! We’d been asleep for the whole day!

We had to write about it for the newspaper though. Everyone would be expecting it. And it had to be front page, it was the biggest event of the year. Damn.

We had about three photos of the kids dancing before the celebrations had started. We blew them up really big so they took up loads of space, meaning we didn’t need to write as much. We worked in a few of the local schools so we knew they had been organising a special dance routine, so we mentioned that. We had a fairly good idea of what the mayor had probably said, given that we had sat in on a lot of speeches she had made. We talked about people who had been there, like the football team and a few others we had seen before we left. And summed it up by saying it was a great day and loads of fun! Then put it on the front page and hoped no-one would notice. Loads of stuff must have happened that we didn’t mention. Thankfully they didn’t notice but I still wonder how we got away with it!

The moral from today is = Don’t fall asleep when there’s something of national importance happening and you write the most popular newspaper in town.

Feedback from yesterday’s Getting Excited mission, which was to celebrate all things Filipino by wearing red and blue (two of the colours on the flag) and saying Hola to greet people (NOT how they say hello but there’s a Spanish connection and I figured people would at least know what I was talking about) and by having fish for dinner (I remember eating a lot of fish in the Philippines). So in my not-very-spectacular way, I did all of these things and, while it didn’t cause any great variation in my day, it did make me think of my friend who’s birthday it is every time I did something. And that was nice. Because she’s a nice friend. It was nice to be more conscious of reasons why the day was different to the others, instead of being all same-old-same-old.

Today I have two things to get excited about. One is that I’m going swimming when I’ve finished writing this… twice in a week after years of not even owning a swimming costume! I’m doing well. The other is that it’s Joan Rivers’ birthday today. (And the world’s smallest man, but I can’t do very much in terms of getting excited about that. I’m already quite short.) So Joan Rivers it is. On my way back from the swimming pool, I’m going to stop in the library and see if they have any of her books and I’ll spend some time this afternoon being excited about Joan Rivers’ birthday by reading a book she wrote. Maybe I’ll get plastic surgery in honour of her as well….

The web of lies

Today I remembered something that happened when I was away on my gap year that was really awkward at the time and now just seems sooo stupid. It’s about the inability to say, ‘Ok, I’ve got stuff to do so I’ll just see you another day. Bye!’

I was on my gap year. I was 19. I was teaching in some of the local schools in the town where I lived. I was also running the town newspaper with a friend.
One day, I was working on an article for the newspaper deadline when the door bell went. It was one of my older students, I think she was about 14. I think her name was Jeanine. She wanted to come and just hang out. So I said, “Yeh, great. I’ve got to go out in about half an hour but stay until then.” I didn’t have anywhere to go but I thought that would just make her realise it was only a half hour visit.

The half an hour went by, we had a cup of tea, talked about whatever… and she didn’t leave. I looked at my watch and said brightly, “O, is that the time?! I’ve got to go out now,” implying that it was time for her to go.

Her response? “O ok, where do you need to go?”

“I’m meeting Lucy (the friend I ran the newspaper with), she’s back from a trip out of town so I’ve got to go and meet her to help her with her bags.” All lies. She wasn’t due back until the next day. And she only had one bag.

Her response? “O great, I like Lucy. I’ll come with you.”

Ok, so now I’ve got nothing. I’ve got no reason to say, no don’t come with me, cause all I’m doing is meeting a friend. Dammit, I should have said I had an important newspaper-related meeting with the town mayor or something.

I get my bag and we leave the house and we’re walking in the general direction of the drop off point I said I was going to. I’m walking really slowly. My brain is in overdrive. How can I get out of this? We’re going to arrive at said location and no-one’s going to be there.

“I just need to pop into the shop,” I say on the way, desperately trying to buy time. I pointlessly buy a bunch of bananas and then sure enough, we’re on our way again. Then suddenly, I come up with something.

“O wait! I’ve just remembered she said she was going to call me when she got in as she doesn’t definitely know what time she’ll be here. Save me waiting for ages for her. I guess I’ll go back home then.” We’re near Jeanine’s house and I’m hoping she’ll say ‘ok, I’ll go this way home, see you at school tomorrow!’ But no! Is this the most thick skinned child ever? She just says, “OK, we’ll go back to yours then.” I nod meekly and we turn around.

When we get back to the house I realise I’m back at square 1. Nothing has been achieved. So I try the next get-out-of-jail card in my pack. I make a fake phone call. That’s right. “I’ll just give her a quick call,” I say.

I go into the next room, pick up the phone and have a loud conversation which goes something like this – “Hi Lucy! Yeh, are you on your way back? O ok, you’re almost here? Great! And they’ve invited you for lunch, have they? And I’m invited? That sounds lovely. O yeh I know, the big house on the other side of town. Great, that’ll be nice, just a nice little quiet gathering. Lovely, see you in ten!”

So I grab my bag and tell Jeanine I’ve been invited for lunch so I quickly need to go out. She offers to walk with me. Dammit. Will this never end?! So we walk all the way there and thankfully, my fake lunch invite was at a house in a little compound so I just said a hurried goodbye outside the compound and ran to the house. I did actually knock on the door and invite myself in, explaining the situation and stayed for lunch anyway!

And almost missed that deadline I was trying to reach when she first turned up!