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       AUGUST

      Thursday, 4 August

      The children have been at Sports Camp this week. Sports Camps are a very good idea thought up by some sadistic bastard somewhere under the guise of providing fun for children and affordable daycare for parents in the vacation. If your idea of ‘affordable’ is approximately eleventy fucking billion pounds. And your idea of ‘fun’ is providing five different changes of clothes a day for all the different activities, including swimwear that has to be rescued from their bags each night and washed and dried or else they will just leave it there to moulder and keep stuffing clean towels on top, because they are rancid beasts.

      Every time I sign the children up to something like this I have secret hopes that they will discover their hidden talent and turn out to be a tennis/soccer/gymnastics virtuoso. So far this has not happened, as they seem to spend most of their time eating potato chips before pleading for money for the vending machines afterwards, so that my darling poppets, who in theory should be worn out by a day of vigorous activity, are instead smacked off their tits on the energy drinks that they bought even as I howled, ‘Just get Cheetos, sweetie, nothing else, I said Cheetos, no, don’t open that can, DON’T OPEN THAT. Oh FML!’

      Simon is in Madrid, doing whatever it is he does on his important business trips, which I suspect are not nearly as much hard work as he claims, given he gets to stay in a nice hotel (how I appreciated his text informing me he had been upgraded to a suite) and go out for nice dinners in actual restaurants, some of which don’t even serve fries, and where he doesn’t have to issue strict instructions to the staff about how there must be no sauce whatsoever allowed anywhere in the vicinity of the children’s food because obviously terrible things will happen if their burgers are contaminated with anything as awful as mayonnaise or relish, although they will immediately douse them in a vat of ketchup, so they wouldn’t taste the offending sauces anyway. I dream of hotels. I never got to go on fancy trips in the old job, but I had some vague idea that my new career as an app designer might involve me getting to go to conferences and possibly even conventions. Las Vegas seems to have a lot of those sorts of things, and I had visions of myself sending casual texts to Simon from there about what a good time I was having, probably in an upgraded suite, eating food with sauce. Instead, it is just me. And the cookies. Staring hopelessly at a blank screen and wondering what the fuck I am going to do, and trying not to think about how almost all the layoff money has now gone. A lot of it spent on cookies.

      I had, obviously, planned that the children being at Sports Camp would be an excellent chance to get some work done, but it hasn’t really worked out. Does anyone actually ever get any work done when they are working from home, or is it just me? I mostly just stared out the window, and perused the Daily Mail website to see who is ‘stepping out’ (going to the shops), ‘flaunting their curves’ (also going to the shops, but in a slightly tighter top than just ‘stepping out’) or ‘slamming’ a fellow Z-lister in a ‘feud’ (putting something vague and attention-seeking on Twitter before deleting it an hour later when the Daily Mail has taken notice). I also played a lot of solitaire before sending a flurry of emails at 2.45 p.m., just before I had to leave to go and pick the children up. Foolishly, one of the emails I sent was to Simon, ever the supportive and beloved husband, who replied to my email questioning the lack of work I had achieved today by saying that yes, it is just me, and he does not procrastinate ever. This is a massive lie, as I have seen his version of working from home, and it involves just as much Daily Mail as mine, and also a lot of browsing Autocar looking at sports cars he can’t afford, then staring pathetically into cupboards FULL OF FOOD (apart from cookies, because I’ve eaten them all), feebly enquiring why there is never anything to eat in this house.

      I think it is safe to say that my virtuous resolution not to drink on week nights is not going well.

      Aunt Fanny never had these problems.

      After two glasses of wine, and an unpleasant foray into online banking that confirmed my fears about the state of my account, and no adult interaction all day apart from the perky ‘coach’ at the Sports Camp getting me to sign the accident book again, due to Peter’s decision to headbutt the floor for reasons known only to him, I decided that something needed to change, and I signed up for a recruitment agency. Maybe just a little part-time job, to make some money, but that leaves me with plenty of time to come up with my brilliant app idea. And that also will involve lovely business trips to exotic places (there wasn’t actually an option for that, but there really should be).

      Friday, 5 August

      Oh dear. Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear. I fear I have done a foolish thing. I am at Scout Camp with Jane. I signed up as a parent volunteer at a meeting about the camp a couple of months ago, feeling it was a good and worthy thing to do that would give me a chance to spend some time with Jane like a nice caring mummy, and also – on some level – I would be proving my old Brown Owl wrong for drumming me out of the Girl Scouts for insubordination. (I can’t even remember what I did. I have a vague recollection of objecting to excessive knot-tying and messing around while singing ‘Ging Gang Goolie’, but whatever it was, apparently I was Not the Right Sort). But Scout Camp! Scout Camp would make up for it all. A verdant green field, with stout white canvas tents and smoky camp fires to make cocoa on. We would probably get the milk for the cocoa from a local farmer. There may even be ruffianly sorts lurking, just waiting for me to rally the girls and solve a mystery. Oh, yes! I was going to be marvellous at Scout Camp! I eagerly thrust my hand in the air, practically bursting with enthusiasm, when Melanie the Scout Leader asked for volunteers. Too late, I realised I needn’t have been quite so keen, as every other parent had breathed a sigh of relief once they saw that some other poor fool was willing to do it and get them off the hook. Melanie, meanwhile, did not look entirely entranced at my selfless gesture.

      ‘Ellen!’ she said weakly. ‘How kind of you! Err, are you sure this is your sort of thing?’

      I assured Melanie that of course it was my sort of thing.

      ‘Only, you know, you’ll be in charge of some of the girls. By yourself. Are you quite sure you would be able to cope with that?’ said Melanie anxiously.

      I feared Melanie was thinking back to the unfortunate evening a few weeks ago when I had been the parent on duty at Scouts and she had been called away to deal with a nosebleed. A nice policeman had come along that evening to give a talk about self-defence, and Melanie had thought it quite safe to leave the rest of the girls in the care of PC Briggs and myself. It was most unfortunate that PC Briggs was quite a young and naïve police officer. It was equally unfortunate that Amelia Watkins had chosen the moment when Melanie was out of the room to ask to see PC Briggs’s handcuffs, claiming she was considering a career in the police force. No sooner had the poor young chap handed them over for Amelia’s inspection, than she swiftly handcuffed him to a chair, and the rest of the girls, sensing weakness as only the under-twelves can, descended mob-handed and relieved him of his baton and walkie-talkie too, before going full-on Lord of the Flies. They danced around him, mocking his pleas to be released, while Tabitha MacKenzie radioed menacing ransom messages back to base and Tilly Everett tried to break Milly Johnson’s arm with the baton and I made ineffectual pleas for them all to settle down.

      This all happened within the three minutes that Melanie was absent from the hall. By the time she returned, PC Briggs was on the verge of tears, his radio was crackling ominously with threats of ‘back-up’ being dispatched and Milly had Tilly in a headlock trying to disarm her (Milly at least had been paying attention in the self-defence demonstration).

      One shrill blast of Melanie’s whistle restored order, PC Briggs departed hastily, his radio now crackling with hysterical laughter about Girl Scouts, and I was sent to sort out the boxes of felt-tip pens, being deemed too irresponsible to even be allowed near the PVA glue.

      Nonetheless, as no other parent was now willing to come forth, since a Volunteer had been found, Melanie was stuck with me.

      ‘Do you know much about camping, Ellen?’ she enquired, without much hope for my answer.

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