31st July 2012 Tuesday
I discover I can make polite conversation over the dinner table while entertaining two nagging companions in my head - Mr Waiting and Mrs Worrying. I’m waiting for a phone call from our CAB advisor to go over the draft letter for the Tribunal. And worrying I won't get it right. She said she’d call at lunchtime.
It’s luchtime an we are in a little village outside Marlborough. We are sitting in a big farmhouse kitchen with some lovely people whose house - and dog and chickens and greenhouse and swimming pool - we are going to look after while they are away at the end of August. We have come to learn the ropes. I’m listening and eating lasagne but I’m tight as a fist - my eyes keep flipping to my mobile. Maybe there’s no reception here.
I get through the lunch and the ropes and then later an elegant tea of drop scones and sponge cake with my husband’s uncle and aunty while my ears are stretched anntenae waiting for the phone to ring in my handbag.
At 5.30 on the way home in the car the call comes in under the strains of Handel’s Messiah on the CD player. Instead of reading the letter over the phone she will come to the house tomorrow - a huge relief. But she can’t represent us on the day. I feel about five years old and my mummy has left me at the dentist on my own.
It’s no good crying though. It just makes my head pound and my eyelids puffy. Waiting over, worrying intact.
It was my mother’s birthday today. She would have been 92.
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