Well that didn't go according to plan

The reason this pic is a perfect representation of why there isn't a newsletter this week

You know when you have a day that starts all shiny and scheduled, and then with just one flick of the first of your carefully planned dominos the rest tumble in an apparently unstoppable cascade? Well I had one of those days today, the day I had set aside to write this week’s blog and newsletter.

Without wanting to bore you with a lengthy litany of misfortune, should you be remotely interested, the potted version is as follows:

Things were going well with my timely (0730) pick up of two of my grand-girls at the start of a two-night stay, giving their parents plenty of time to get to the airport for their flight for a long-planned, long weekend away with friends.

The first domino started to wobble with the news that the younger grandgirl, who had managed to shut her finger in the front door two days previously, was still a slight cause for concern and my daughter had taken a picture of the damage - apparently mostly to the nail - and sent it to the GP.

Then domino number two began to totter when, on dropping them at nursery, the oldest one inquired “why does your car smell smokey Grandma?” and on the, thankfully short, drive home I noticed there was, indeed, smoke wisping out from under the bonnet.

Those two dominos well and truly toppled with a kindly AA man informing me he couldn’t fix the problem and the car would have to go into a garage, at almost exactly the moment my daughter called from the airport to report that the GP had said the offending digit needed investigation and should be taken, with its owner, to hospital.

Scrabbling to rescue any dominos at all at this point became chaotically fruitless as the kindly AA man found a garage that would take the car whilst I frantically tried to formulate a plan, and eventually found a taxi that would take me to nursery to collect my granddaughter, and on to my mother’s house to borrow her car in order to then drive to hospital.

The doctors and nurses in hospital were fantastically efficient, gentle and kind, but it would be very far from an understatement to say my little granddaughter did not enjoy the experience. A fact that she made loudly obvious. And whilst she was seen and tended to incredibly quickly, and recovered from her distress disarmingly fast once we left hospital (with, thank goodness no more than an x-rayed, cleaned and dressed finger and a prescription for antibiotics), I was considerably more wrung out.

By the time the two of us had got home, eaten and recovered from the ordeal it was time to collect the older one from nursery and any hope of getting any work done was as remote as successfully re-stacking any of the now comprehensively scattered dominos.

Having navigated bath and bedtime and, feeling frankly too done in to cook, eaten a disappointing take-away (I really should have expected that on the basis of how the rest of the day had panned out) I’m now quite literally lying in a dark room, fending off sleep so I can proffer that, it turns out rather lengthier than planned, explanation for why there is not only no blog this week, but no newsletter either.

I remain hopefully optimistic that my dominos will stay firmly upright when it comes to the scheduled time to write next week’s missive.

See you then

Diane x