Apart from that, the journey went quite well

I drive to Wales and pick up Squirrel from her home on a mountainside.

That sounds easier than it was. In reality I fall out of bed at 5.30am, throw coffee over my face, stagger into my trousers, pee down my own leg, throw more coffee over the floor, then exit the house backwards.

That sequence of events takes place after I have checked all my handover plans are working with Dig. He is arriving back from Hong Kong this very same morning. I insist he must be at home when Shark and Tiger wake up, because I'm not taking them with me to Wales.

So Dig, when your plane lands, spin the earth back on its axis by two hours. Then you can make time to wrestle with London Midland and arrive home for 9am. I will be on the M5. But imagine the lovely awakening your daughters will have! After not seeing you for a month the kids will think I have become suddenly hairy, gone bellywise, and grown more stubble. Mama! What a big surprise!

After more coffee and reassurance that London Midland has not exploded overnight, I set about driving to Wales. And I am a woman with a mission. You can leave me in charge of a vehicle that can kill me! Sure I can drive! I can do that! I just carry on drinking as much thick black coffee as my face can hold.

By the eighth mug I am a howler monkey on speed. I'm swinging from those tree tops quicker than you can count. Just one more slurp of the wizard black treacle should do the trick and keep me going until 2012.

So I pull off outside some house somewhere in the middle of nowhere at 8am. Stupidly, I think it is OK to park here. It's 8am on a Saturday morning and I plan to take ten minutes to pump that juicy fluid into my veins then make the ascent into Welsh. Only at 8.02 some hairy farmer bloke looms over my driver window, taps on the glass, and says he's seen me from his kitchen window, and can I move the car, because he wants to keep his garage access clear.

Move my car? By two foot? Look matey, I woke up at 5am, navigated a distant husband, arranged a military manoeuvre to salvage a Squirrel from a mountaintop, reversed Planet Earth, and drove two hours on the motorway while brain-fuelled on roast Colombia. Sure I can move my car! Just so you can see your poxy garage!

By rights there should be a hairy farmer bent double somewhere behind a hedge in Worcester with tyre tracks over his face.

But it was just another moment in a long and arduous journey I made to see my lovely Squirrel, fresh from her PGL adventure, and listen to her chatter all the way home about how to lunge at your enemy with a pointed stick.

One down, two to go

I gave my daughter away. I gave her away to a young man with a fake silver earring and a squeaky voice.

I hope I've done the right thing. There was a moment when she didn't look too sure. Then I wasn't sure either. Let's just say, if she comes home with tales of sorrow and misadventure, I'll hunt that smooth talking earringed fellow down. Then his voice will have true reason to squeak.

But that is Squirrel. Gone. Adventuring for the whole week.


Quad biking, tramping around fields blindfold, swinging from ropes and cliffs, raft building. She'll probably be OK, and forget about us within twenty minutes. She did last time. Then she'll come back home muddy and miserable: there is no zip wire in our garden. How boring can we be?

It's all thanks to the school holidays. And I'm taking my own advice. Useful. (Except for the fact that this is a no-sex zone, stairs or no stairs.) Anyway, this is my expertise. Getting rid of kids. It's a number one priority when you don't use the free childcare system at the end of the road.

Truly, it would be handy if there were no kids around right now. Then I can concentrate on being Gritus Domesticus. I can clean up the house, throw out rubbish, sweep floors, and make pipes accessible for plumbers.

But this week I have two kids instead of three. Shark will be out most days, having watery fun on a local lake. Which leaves one. Tiger. PGL did have a bogof offer going. That would've worked, but she wouldn't go. I tried. I couldn't kick her out on that mountainside. If she had agreed to my cunning plan, could've been zero. But Tiger wants her familiar garden run and home cooked pasta suppers.

I console myself. One child by day, twins in the evening. Twins are more stable than triplets. Except when they hate each other and sharpen the spears. Hey, maybe I could run my own Enemy Adventure in the garden. We could call it Camp Battle, then draw enemy lines, dig trenches, lob mortars made of mud and weed. Hmm. I bet you see that added to the list of summer camps soon.

Squirrel

Yes Squirrel, I miss you. And this week I know exactly why you came by your pet name. Squirrel.

The first time, I was shocked. I discovered exactly what you had stowed away in your secret bed each night. That first haul may have included a plank of wood and pair of scissors. But now, they are normal.

When I gulp down the weekly anti allergy tablet and swallow a medicinal brandy to gather the strength to face that skip, the place you call my bed, to shovel out a landfill of junk, I do so carefully, and I try to be respectful.

I know that it is not crap. It is treasure. Worth more than gold.

The chewed blue shoe belonging to Sindy, fourteen rubber bands, and the old tissue box cradling a furry sea otter, two crayons, a letter of complaint, and a plastic toaster, are all cherished items. They did not arrive here at this waste disposal unit without being loved and caressed by you en route, and placed here to be watched over with all the ferocity of a small squirrel guarding their Class A hazelnuts.

Some stuff I leave where I find them. I won't say anything, but I urge you to return them discreetly. Like Shark's bed knobs. She has been eyeing you suspiciously and complaining that you nick them since the day you started sharing this bedroom. So far she has yet to find hard evidence. Even Shark approaches your bedclothes with trepidation.

But there's more to your squirrelling behaviour than your bed stash.

You especially like small things. Tiny shapes woven with microscopic textures that you hide inside your little hands. Fragments of gravel, threads of fabric, infinitesimally torn fragments of paper and sparkles of beads and sequins are all treasured items that you find beautiful. You will squirrel them into your pockets, behind curtains and down between cracks in the floorboards. The last, you will cry about later.

Over the years I have learned to be careful about removal and disposal of your treasures, and not shout too loud about the bloody crap invading my once delightful home. Your box of small things might stay there for a week or two. The pile of soil in the bedroom, three days, because mama does not sweep the floors of this house on daily rotation. But even then your cute ways and tales of sparkling soil allowed you to get away with it.

Of course I think all this squirrelling instinct comes not from my genes, but because you are a sibling. From your birth point you became painfully aware that right next to you there is an enemy who looks exactly like you and who is always ready to snatch treasures off you. You have probably developed your small stuff tendency because of those early beginnings.

But my goodness, how that strange little quirk of toddler mine!mine!mine! behaviour has grown into what folks might think of as some sort of compulsive disorder rightly calling for the scrutiny of a team of trained clinicians with clipboards.

Because now you troll the house and garden seeking out small things to classify before squirrelling.

I know you like databases. Like the database you keep of all the cats in the area. And I know you have been ordering your stuff in degrees of shininess, size, and whether it bends. The way you have started labelling stuff has helped, because now I can see the broken object for what it is. Not a piece of plastic insect nose snapped off from Build a Beetle but a carefully catalogued sample of yellow. Give it two years and you'll be adding heat moulded, poss. polymer, length 1.2 mm, date of acquisition 12/3/09.

In fact so advanced are your sorting, categorising, recording and squirrelling skills, that you may make a fine museum attendant, librarian, or lawyer. We of course aspire to the latter, on account of how you can present all details in such excruciating, drawn out precision, that we often give in and feed you ice cream to shut you up before you have finished explaining why (paragraph 2.3 subsection 1.2.2, clause 3) your sister deserved locking in the bedroom by covert removal of doorknob for thirty minutes while you came down, ate Shreddies, and then walked upstairs to calmly reinsert the doorknob, and let her out again. And that, thanks to the precise and punctilious manner of your explanation, comes across to me as a totally justified and reasonable thing to do. You see? Lawyer.

With these fond memories, and your bed littered with broken objects, I turn to your desk, and I miss you there too. I would clean that up while you are away from us this week, but I dare not.

I can see you have been filling hazelnut shells with scrapings of wax, then sticking threads in the centre. Those, Tiger tells me, are candles for fairies. I could probably put those safely somewhere. But it is the sand and dust particles on your desk. They might be sand and dust, or they might be significant. I just do not know. You might be classifying eight different varieties of sand and dust by colour, silica shape, and dustiness, finding it all beautiful, and intriging and delightful.

Which is what I most love about you. Not the mountains of crap you refuse to discard but the way you interact with all your precious squirreled items with absolute joy in their concealment and disclosure.

Squirrel, I look forward to you being back home. This house strewn with junk will all become treasure again.

The Cotswolds are very pretty

I crash around single track lanes over the Cotswolds, driving leftrightleftright.

I wish I'd taken the motorways. After an hour of leftrightleftright, the idea of sitting on a wide stretch of motorway tarmac for four hours seems a better deal than zigzagging across hills smiling with bared teeth and ferociously declaring how PRETTY everything is.

Incanting how PRETTY everything is while pointing at little crooked fifteenth century houses laced around with walls made from honey coloured stone will, I hope, ward off any ugly moods from the back seat. Incantation, and the disc set of Tunnels.

Unwisely, I chose Tunnels for this journey on the basis that it had something to do with archaeology, which we like. It does. But it also has lots of scary mad people and exclamations of Bloody Hell! and after fifteen minutes of listening while driving leftrightleftright, I wish I'd noticed this lot in the five seconds choosing it down the library.

Shark, Squirrel and Tiger of course prefer grimness, death and insanity acted out underground to mama repeating to infinitude how PRETTY everything is.

When I am not incanting and regretting, I am panicking and intermittently steering the car onto Cotswold grass verges, jumping out, and photographing road signs.


By this means, I reckon, when Satnav runs out of power because I haven't charged her up properly, I will know where I was, when last seen.

Sooner or later we cross a sign for Bourton-on-the-Water and I think we will stop there for lunch and visit the Model Village.

At this point I heave a heavy sigh. It is the place I recall from my childhood. Every September we would stop here for run-and-eat on the drive from Nottingham to Devon.

My dad chose here because the Model Village backs onto the Old New Inn. He could sit in the Beer Garden while my mother, over the hedge, could let me out to ramble around a miniature Cotswold village. As if she hadn't seen enough of them already, and as if she hadn't been sitting in the passenger seat of the car for two hours being driven leftrightleftright, saying how PRETTY everything is.

Now, because I am older and wiser, I know she did that in order to deflect the growing argument between my brother and me. We were locked into the back seat listening to nothing, except the sound of each other breathing, which was as good as a declaration of war to brother and sister on a five hour car journey with, from my brother's point of view, only a Model Village to look forward to. And that was entirely for his sister's benefit and one more reason why she should be pushed over the Church of the Model Village five minutes after we'd arrived.

Anyway, Shark, Squirrel and Tiger are delighted by the Model Village. I have mixed feelings, but I'm not writing a novel here, just a blog post, and have fifteen minutes left on my daily allotted blog time.




I would just add one thing about this trip down memory lane, and that is you did not misread the month.

We visited the Model Village every September, just as term started. My parents asserted their right to remove me from school for 10 days just after the start of the term for the family holiday. As far as I'm aware it remains your legal right, although schools may send you death threats, push cow poo through your door, and threaten you with Social Services and child abuse if you try and exercise it.

From my point of view, I cannot thank my parents enough for this annual act of rebellion. Driven mostly because my dad disliked all kids and would not, in a million years, have been tempted to take a break from work simply to be surrounded by the pesky creatures. But his antipathy helped create in me a love for rocks and sea shores, but not particularly Model Villages, and opened up in my brain the idea that actually we have some control over our lives and are not just here to do what institutions tell us to do.

Anyway, the Grit family is not just aimless today of course, wandering in the Cotswolds and Bourton-in-the-Water Model Village just for the love of England. Oh no. We have a purpose. We are driving leftrightleftright to deposit Squirrel at her PGL adventure holiday somewhere Wales-way.

After another six years driving leftrightleftright we eventually find the PGL place buried in hillsides, where one side of the road looks like this:


and the other side of the road looks like this.


We meet up with Michelle here who is also giving her child away for the week on a buy-one-get-one-free deal.

With child deposited into the tender care of the PGL groupy, Michelle is now able to have fun like adults are supposed to, and her blog should be filled with diversion of ladies who lunch, evening drinks, shopping for handbags, dinner engagements, adult chatter, wild parties, sex on the stairs, orgies, and wasp killer. I shall look forward to it all.

Because my lot in life is now to drive leftrightleftright on the road back to Gloucester incanting how PRETTY everything is to dispel the ugly mood growing from the back seat after turning off Tunnels to spare my ears from another fifteen minutes of mad people clawing their way insanely underground between repeated exclamations of Bloody Hell.

Tales of hats and misdemeanors

Pick up Tiger from PGL holiday.

While we have been cavorting on clifftops, in castles, and at the beach front, Tiger has spent the week on horseback in the mornings and dangling from a zip wire in the afternoon.

PGL comes off well on the entertainment score with a 9/10. She's more shifty on the stables experience. She's not exactly a beginner on a horse, but she's not entering the show jumping competition anytime in the next fifteen years either. She's probably an inbetween kid, and probably needs an intermediate group.

But the stables didn't have an intermediate group. They had beginner and advanced. They taught her how to get on a horse, make it go, stop it, and get off. She was not impressed.

Neither was I. They lost her hat last Monday. So part of this Saturday morning was spent driving back to planet horse and sending the staff off to look for the missing hat because we're not going home without it.

The hat was found on the desk of the woman in reception: the very desk where I'd stood like I wasn't going anywhere unless carried out by security, and where I'd explained to her exactly what the lining looked like and the fact that it had Tiger's name and my phone number blasted all over the inside in black permanent marker. I cannot say deskwoman looked like she was the sort to be organised about things. At no point did she raise one finger in the air and say Oh Yes! I've had this hat here on my desk and been trying to contact you! Not a bit of it. More, flabbergasted expression and You mean a hat? Here? At the riding stables? Whatever can we do?

Anyway, apart from the trauma over the damned hat I also listen to Tiger tell her story about Tinkertop, one of the other kids in her group and a proper little madam.

Apparently, Tinkertop got everyone in trouble. Worse, she made everyone miss the activity because she wouldn't fess up about her misdeeds. Tiger has Tinkertop's name down now in a little black grudge book and will be stalking her over England for something like the next fifty years.

I tried to tell Tiger that the world is made up of loads of different types who do not, like some of your home ed chums, sit quiet and nice in workshops while the leader explains to your eager faces everything you have to do, at which point you go off and do it. Some kids misbehave, and some misbehave real bad. Even when their parents send them to posh schools and pay through the nose to get them on a back of a horse in August. What's more, I tell Tiger, this is one reason why we send you and your sisters to the PGL holidays in the first place, so you can meet and deal with a range of bizarre behaviours beyond the reach of any that your normal assortment of home ed kids can dream up.

And Tiger, now that we have picked you up, driven another hour backwards and forwards to the stables and I have listened to the saga of Tinkertop and her misdemeanors for the fifteenth time, now I need to give you one HELLOFABIGCUDDLE because I have missed your cute face and complaining ways something dreadful.

Why home educate? (4) Sport

We get to watch. We get to watch when Shark steps with singular determination to the sailing dingy; when Squirrel twirls, and with that face she thinks a serious ballerina should have; we get to watch how Tiger's eyes light up when she clings to a horse, and we even get to bite our knuckles and pray they don't all fall in, fall over, or fall off.

Every week throughout their lives we see some new and wonderful physical ability. From standing up to chew on the table edge, to falling off the climbing frame in the playground and not dying, swimming for the first time, cycling without pink princess wheels, then archery, abseiling, skiing. This month alone I've watched gym, trampoline, tennis, ice skating, kayaking. And the best of it is I can be right there when it happens. I can seek out any type of lesson that's wanted, we can choose the places and times to go, the instructors we like; and I can look at my little faces delighted and excited as a sudden new skill is found and disbelieved and found again.

Today I watch Tiger at the ice rink. Months ago she clung to the sides, her legs taking off without her. Then I watched tentative toe work, stretching out to the first leg's distance; then the sudden forward movement, one foot in front of the other, and then shooting straight across the ice with that face, that mixture of pure delight, curiosity, strength, ambition, shock, like Where did this come from?

Today I watch while Tiger jumps, really, jumps from the ice, with thin metal blades strapped to the bottom of her feet, and she jumps, up in the air and there is a breath of a gap between the ice and her blades and then down she comes back onto that ice and she stays upright! She actually stays upright! And her face is amazed and inside I scream wildly and declare that is the most stupendous and amazing moment and it will stay in my heart forever. Because now there's no stopping her. And next she'll be twirling and gliding and spinning and doublebackflipping on that ice. And as that vision grips me along with a terrible fear that makes me want to strap her into a helmet and body armour, I am gaping in awe, and I feel privileged and honoured, and with that triumphant fraction of a gap between the ice and her blades, have watched her grow up with a huge bound in confidence and self.

And I am not saying that any parent of a schooled child feels none of these things. Oh no. What I am saying is that home ed gives us all here at the Pile the time in which Tiger and her sisters can experiment, explore, choose and pursue whatever sport they need. I am there not only to set it up for a Tuesday or Saturday morning and then complain about it, but to see it working through and watch those moments of glory when Tiger does not fall flat on her backside for the third time in a row.

If it were only this. Because the local school provides numeracy and literacy hours, but not the thrilling diversity of sailing hours or trampoline hours. And their lack would put me in a mother's role of making up the deficit, probably with emergencies like swimming in the event of a canal or a drunken student party, ten years from now. But I couldn't cram our ambitious range of sports into those leftover weekends and holidays without Tiger giving up on me at 10.30 on a Saturday morning and shouting Mother! Leave me alone! Enough exercise already! Jam doughnuts next!

But most importantly, if Shark, Squirrel and Tiger went daily to school, I simply wouldn't have the imperative that home ed provides. In the land of home ed, the buck stops here. I look to no-one else to come knocking to provide a sports education for Shark, Squirrel and Tiger. I look to theirs and mine own judgements and Dig's overdraft. The knowledge of this responsibility gives me a huge kick up the rear end; it impels me to go out and find these sports and activities, plead for rates or special treatment, and get them all organised, scheduled and done. And I wonder would I do this if my kids all went to school? Because there on a Monday, Shark might come down and shout Muuuum! Have you washed my gym kit? If I don't have it, Miss makes me sit out.

Or worse, she might follow it with, On second thoughts mum, can I miss gym today?

Sad and lonely without Squirrel

We leave Squirrel here. In Wales.

Then drive home without a sister. And really, we are a bit unsure about that.

But we're not going to show it.

There are, of course, compensations.

But not many.

Organise the diary, Grit

Is it August 1st? Good, because this afternoon Oo from Dubai arrives to stay. I can now legitimately embark on three riotous days of girly living. That means handbag disaster, cosmetics expenditure and bathroom squealing. All of those I hope to be doing shortly.

But this is a busy day for other reasons, so better leave time for some planning. Like this morning, when Dig cruises past the PGL For Sale website and clicks the Go button. Within twenty minutes Squirrel is booked into another week of a boarding adventure holiday in Wales. That's lucky. She can't do the coming week because Monday to Friday I am ferrying her backwards and forwards to the lake where she is on a paddle sports course, learning how to throw herself in from a kayak. When she does go to Wales we'd better make that Saturday dash and book another Travelodge a week later. My confirming our attendance at the local bat walk pales in comparison.

As it does against Dig reemerging from his office to say that now he has got Squirrel in Wales, he has also contrived to get Aunty Dee down from Northumberland to look after Tiger and Shark, because he has booked flights for the both of us to escape on a two-day visit to Cairo, return first class.

He only slightly mars that last dramatic gesture by saying he needs to use some air miles and Cairo is off season at 40 degrees centigrade, so the hotel is cheap.

Grit is now occupied with the diary, humbly apologising to the environment and will be found later today in the bathroom, squealing.

Photoblog day out

Here is Shark, and Squirrel, and Tiger, meeting up in Wales after a week apart.


That's forty minutes before everyone is towed around the Mappa Mundi exhibition in Hereford.


One and a half hours before everyone is forced to enjoy themselves at Snowshill.


And five minutes before the first argument. The one about who is allowed to look out of the window of the car.


And here is a flashing sea slug, hand-made by Squirrel. It accompanied us for the entire journey there and back, attached to a bit of string.


I agree that it is not impressive and does not even look like a sea slug. But don't tell Squirrel. It is a present for Shark.


After that bizarre addition, I may as well post a photograph of a lot of eyeballs in a box.

Displacement

Of course I may have the suspicion that this cleaning is a displacement from saying what I feel or even acknowledging it, especially when here is a bit of floor that needs a sparkle. And that is, how sad and empty is this house without Shark.

In fact if I clean up this kitchen work surface here, I can just tell myself that I do not need to think about anything else, like whether Shark is quad biking today, and whether she is falling off that quad bike and is, at this moment, being airlifted from the side of a Welsh mountain, and then with this vacuum cleaner I do not need to think that the organisers have been trying to contact me on the emergency mobile telephone number, and how they haven't been able to reach me because I might have forgotten to turn it on, or I have left it under my pillow in the bedroom where it has been ringing and ringing for the last hour while Shark is in the emergency operating theatre.

And if I give these doors a wipe then I might not need to think about how Shark would say, if she were here, Mummy, have you noticed what an enormous presence I am in the house, even when you don't notice me and even though you managed to elbow me in the head last week because my head is at your elbow height and I have a habit of standing right behind you quietly when you do not know I am there and, when I speak, you jump round and manage to knock my ear off with your pointy elbow? Mummy, have you noticed how silent and quiet a reader I am, except with Tin Tin when I suddenly burst into laughter, possibly when Captain Haddock is shouting blasphemies at the empty whisky bottle, which is something that I have noticed that adults do and especially you mummy, at 11 o'clock at night when you have said everyone should have gone to sleep hours ago and I say in a loud voice that even though I know I have to get up at 8 in the morning for the workshop that I am still going to read Destination Moon one more time?

And mummy, have you noticed how full of attitude I am right now and how hard I have been working to justify your line of that child is aged eight going on thirteen. And have you noticed that if I don't like something I will aim that withering look at you, the one I have been experimenting with to see if it will kill plants and small furry animals, and it happens when I look down my nose and narrow my eyes, particularly after those things you say like Are you wearing socks with those sandals? And have you noticed how I can answer back now with such lip that I can send daddy Dig scuttling from the room, with his parting words something like And do not talk to your parents like that! when he is clearly just so dumbfounded at what I said that it must have been a really excellent answer-back line, probably as bad as a church blasphemy on a Sunday, so that's a line I'll try again, and next time, just to see what you do, I'll repeat it in public. With hand gestures.

And mummy, have you really noticed how much I can eat at one sitting, how many cut up bits of paper I can generate from one pair of scissors and a ream of paper in just five minutes, how loud I can make Tiger scream in the street, and how much I can provoke Squirrel at 7.30 in the morning so that you start slamming doors and waking up the neighbour who sleeps all morning after his night shift? And have you noticed mummy how much mess I can make on the hall carpet when I come in from the garden and forget to take off my sandals which are now platform shoes because they have a two-inch layer of mud and clay strapped to the bottom. And have you really noticed how bloody awkward I can now be about simple things like getting into the car, and how I stand there shouting in the street I cannot get in! when Tiger is sitting in there, because I know for sure she will start screaming? Have you noticed those things about me? Have you?

And I would say Shark, I have noticed them all, and more, and on Tuesday when I spoke to you for 15 minutes on the telephone to see if you had settled in OK at the nearest thing to a boarding school we could find for the week, and how when you spoke back to me my heart just leaped down that telephone line and I wanted to follow right after it and come out the other end and give you such a great big hug and say You are wonderful, my big, beautiful, grown up baby girl, how much I love you, and then when I asked Shark, Are you missing us, without a skip or a beat you said simply, but with possibly the hint of surprise that you'd been asked to consider this, you answered cheerily No! Of course not! and what's more, there is Madagascar playing right now in the common room so we have phoned at an awkward moment. And then I said well that is good my darling and run back and do not miss the funny bits with the scaredy lion, because do you know what? I am busy myself right now and I just have to go and clean some floors.

On reflection, is this home ed lark such a good idea?

I think I may have reached the state of parenthood I've longed to reach. Possibly for eight years.

This desired state is one where I roll out of bed one morning and say Uh? Where is everybody? and then, when I get no answer, go back to bed with a cup of coffee and today's Independent.

This state of parenthood is novel to me, and a bit like a magical transformation from anguished, care-worn, beaten, down-hearted, frustrated, lonely, miserable and hoarse, to invigorated and relaxed. In fact I may indulge in one of my favourite fantasies, now I have time. Not the one involving Dig, naked, with antler horns on his head as he dances around the garden. But the one where in the cafe I tentatively inquire what's the vegetarian option for the day? I sigh as I hear the microwave ping and expect the answer, omelette. Then the woman at the counter actually looks straight at me and smiles a warm smile and says Crank's Pepperpot Soup – the one that gives your weary soul a great, delicious hug. And with it you can eat, for free and as many as you like, fresh cooked garlic croutons that explode those garlicky kisses straight inside your mouth. That one.

Now I'm not sure why I feel in this relaxed state, or what has created this phenomenal change. There is no logical reason to this, after all. It could be, of course, that I have mislaid reason completely, and am now benefiting from unselfaware insanity. While I was sleeping, some Buddhist nirvana then sheltered inside my brain and kicked out all fears, self doubts, frustrations and angers, and put in their place happy thoughts, freshly brewed coffee, and today's unread newspaper.

But I have to face more fearful possibilities, too. Like this strange relaxed mood comes about not in spite of Shark, abstracted entirely, but because Shark is abstracted: enclosed in a field in Wales some hundreds of miles from home.

This Sunday morning, someone else will wake her, hopefully not by pelting her with a puffin or screaming at her head, then she will be offered a breakfast choice which I have not had to prepare, cook, or wash up for. From this point someone else will get her ready for a mountain ramble and hopefully she won't complain, squeal, argue or drag her feet, and if she does, that's not my problem. Then someone else will feed her lunch, busy her with quad bike challenge, feed her tea, fuss about 8 o'clock cocoa, and sort out the bedtime routine. None of which will include me.

I may feel confident she's having fun and is safe and will be insufferable when she comes home, but for the interim her absence does something else. It reduces our family status to the sublime peacefulness that is twins.

I cannot escape this observation, that twins play together. They have squabbles, upsets and fallings out, but there is no third dynamic introducing new constraints, knocking all games off course, providing new inclusions and exclusions, laying sister baits and traps, provoking one, playing divide and rule, all while safely knowing that if you piss off one sister, that's OK, because you've got another one to play with who was pissed off yesterday by Squirrel, and who right now will be a co-conspirator for revenge.

The fact that I can sit this morning with a cup of coffee and Gordon Brown in thick black print, and think these thoughts in a logical, ordered line, betrays something else that's new, too. The house is quiet. The house is so strangely quiet I think I may have sent Squirrel and Tiger away for an adventure holiday week and forgot about it. But no, because here are the two of them, sat on Squirrel's bedroom floor, listening attentively to Watership Down. All six uninterrupted hours.

And then I get to really think. Because what if twins became no children at all during 8.15am to 4pm? What if all my kids are occupied elsewhere? Would I spend everyday like this? Peaceful. Ordered. Calm. You people who send your children to school. Do you seriously walk around the earth with this knowledge that responsibility for the day's hours are all elsewhere? This wondrous calm and peace? This ability to think? Like Today I will read the newspaper! To be in charge of your own limbs and not be beaten by a willow fish? To think Hey! I'll use the blue cup! and not by doing so, create World War III and all the earth's destruction? And is the house so blissfully under your own control, with no-one else to pour oil down the toilet, compose a clay horse on the kitchen table, or paint the chairs orange, because it looks like a nice colour and we had a tin of it?

If really to send your children away, day after days, means this much calm and ordered peace, then I'm in. When Shark returns, she may just find the result of her summer camp is a brisk march down the road, dressed in black and white with mummy Grit behind her, urging, Let's not waste a minute now, because I've a full day ahead. After lunch with Laura I have an appointment with the manicurist and then, because I am a busy mummy, I need to hit the gym and book tickets for the opera.

Do they use towels in Wales?

Grit is in tip top mood. Ready for a long drive to Wales, she has cleaned out the car, prepared four hot flasks (two green tea, two coffee), dashed to the library to acquire a four-hour story CD, (thus ensuring listening joy and silence from the back seat), packed Shark's bag in the car, and prepared a picnic with sandwiches!

Howabout that! Not just a loaf of bread clutched between her frantic fingernails while she is running between house and car while losing her keys and dropping her glasses. And if things could not get better, Dig volunteers for the driving. (I suspect he thinks otherwise we might crash; he betrays this lack of confidence in my abilities with involuntarily twitches of his brake leg at roundabouts and junctions.) But today I am not complaining. Because Grit can now do her trolley dolly routine on the M5 and hand out jam sandwiches.

And off we go. And I can say smugly to myself, this is what it feels like to be calm and organised. You see, if I am calm and organised, I can do anything. Anything at all. I could probably balance elephants on my nose right now if I were calm and organised enough to do that.

Everything goes fine, it really does, all the way down the motorway to Wales. Shark, Squirrel and Tiger are all quiet and drugged by hobbits, and we make good time without incident or accident. Then we stop off at Goodrich Castle where things just go a little bit awry, because the toilets are a long walk from the castle, which would not be so bad if you only had to do that walk once, and not get back to castle with Shark, where Tiger says Mummy! I need a wee! And then when I get back to the castle with Tiger, I see Squirrel hopping between one foot and another which strangely evokes a water balloon just about to explode. So I don't actually see a lot of the castle, but do see quite a bit of the path backwards and forwards to the ladies.

Then, just as mummy Grit is coming out of the toilets after washing picnic cutlery, daddy Dig sings out, Time to go! and everyone gets back in the car. Apart from the toilet sojourn this journey is going splendidly, and we should arrive at Shark's destination in the middle of nowhere bang on time.

Shortly, just having passed Hereford where the roads become smaller and the approach to Wales and our destination beckons, when Grit is peering out of the window looking for heads stuck on poles to mark the border territory, a sudden and dreadful revelation occurs. I forgot to pack Shark's towels!

Because Grit is smart and quick, she immediately sets about thinking what towel-like substitutes do I keep in the car that Shark could use instead? Things that her fellow adventure holiday chums might not notice as strange yet would serve the routines of nightly showering after raft building and canoeing down the muddy river Wye. A mental check includes one pack of sanitary towels, one tea cloth left over from last month's holiday in Cornwall, a plastic bin liner, washed plastic picnic cutlery, and an emergency coat. Shark might just get away with using that lot in place of towels if she could bluff it and behave like everything's normal.

But we have one town left to go on our journey, and that is Hay-on-Wye, and fortunately we are within seconds of passing as Grit confesses her blunder. Dig, with his very logical two brains, suggests Hay-on-Wye might have a draper. You can tell Dig was born in the nineteenth century and went to a posh boarding school, can't you? Only Dig would automatically seize upon the word draper as an ideal solution in a moment of blind-Grit-panic at the thought of her precious daughter rubbing herself dry with a sanitary towel and a plastic picnic fork. But it is that sort of safe everything will be alright when we find a draper talk that I fell in love with in the first place, and I agree, and say, Yes, there could be a draper!

Quietly I consider it could be a long shot, that Hay-on-Wye, second-hand book capital of the world, has a draper's shop sandwiched between its bookshops, but let's face it, the options from this point on the road map are limited.

But here they are! The last towels in Hay-on-Wye! Purposefully and directly bought from the hardware shop on the corner while Dig circles the car park outside!


And if I am looking for a moral to this story, it is Never clean out the car.

Success and failure

8.00am. Water the tomatoes, courgettes, sweetcorn, carrot, cabbages that have been eaten, and the pea. We'll count that as a success. It is the only surviving pea in the harsh landscape that is the Grit vegetable garden.

9.00am. Plan the day. Promise Squirrel honesthonesthonest I will book her on the kayaking course next week. Yes, I know I said I would do it today but there may not be time. Look, next week things will be quiet because Shark will not be here. Honest. Honest. Honest. Next week.

9.45am. Get Shark into car. Drive to local downbeat town, where the lads hang about at midday drinking lager, the ladeez are very wide indeed, and the houses are boarded up, run down and have a washing machine in the front garden. But here the charity shops are well stocked and cheap. Here a canny buyer can pick up an Episode silk dress for 99p. Today we are sourcing seven days worth of jeans and tee-shirts for Shark to cover in mud, grass, river, and cow poo. She will be enjoying herself from tomorrow on an adventure holiday in Wales, booked yesterday.

1.45pm. Shopping success! Arrive home exhausted, penniless and starving. I am also rather whiffy thanks to running out of Dove deodorant. Swap over children. Get Tiger in the car and drive to the local stables to negotiate putting Tiger there for August holiday horse experience.

3.35pm. Horse success! Tiger is skillfully negotiated in at the stables for one week, learning how to muck out and do things with hay. Arrive home exhausted, financially destroyed, smelling of manure, starving, and depressed after finding out that the partner of Tee, who owns the stables, died last week in a road traffic accident. At home, Tiger has a fit because this morning at the charity shop I picked up a pair of Junior Joules wellington boots (RRP £29; RSPCA £2) and they are blue. Blue! Not PINK! How can she wear blue wellington boots to the stables! This is impossible. She is beside herself with fury because now look what this hopeless mother has done! She has bankrupted herself at the riding stables, promised Squirrel a watersports week, got Shark sorted for an adventure holiday, and chosen the WRONG BLOODY COLOUR OF WELLINGTONS.

4.00pm. Bang head against wall in despair. Swap over children. Get Squirrel in car to drive to ballet even though it is a five-minute walk. We do not have time to walk after arguing with Tiger.

4.03 pm. All the ballet mums hate me. While they are clucking and fussing about the doorway going into the ballet studio, they throw looks of disdain at me down their pointy pink noses. It is the last lesson of term and parents have to watch and I have clearly forgot. I turn up smelly, ruined, late, and with dribble from a hastily-eaten tomato sandwich running down my front. While I am gripping my hands to my head, Squirrel says we always forget about watching her at ballet. I say this is because we live a flipping hectic life and it's not as though I am lying on the sofa injecting heroin into my face.

The worst ballet mum of all turns her head away from me; her contemptuous glance is probably reserved for me and the drunk tramp stinking of wee in the doorway at Lidl. And that disdainful glance has said everything. In the eyes of the ballet mums, I am failed. I can almost hear her think, That wretched hippy educating woman! Tsk. She obviously doesn't care one jot about that child. She can't even be bothered to turn up and watch the end of term lesson! And she has probably spent her day lying on the sofa injecting heroin into her face AGAIN.

Adrenalin junkies

Somedays I am reminded of that gleeful maternity nurse who sang out, at some moment when I was coming round to consciousness and probably hadn't yet seen the three tiny faces that were to change my life forever, That's it! You'll never go out now!

At that instant I resolved to go out every day. And more, because she was not to be right about this. If she was to be right about this then I was a dead woman walking. For her to be right meant I would be imprisoned for the rest of my life by walls of nappies plastered in baby sick and by mountains of dirty clothing jamming all the doorways. If I found an escape route through that I would be held in by the bars of self-loathing at doing a needed job terribly, and by the self neglect that I would naturally fall into, and by my own fear of leaving the house in terror of someone spotting me and trying to section me, or remove the babies from my dazed haphazard care, because going out into the street meant staggering out there wearing pyjamas covered in vomit again for the third week running.

But she was not to be right about this. If she was, I may as well give up and bury myself alive right there and then. So after the first mad rush back home and the co-ordination of sleep, feed and wash duties, I took the babies out everyday. To the garden, to the shop, to the park, to the street.

There were some days when survival overstretched me, so I got all the babies out into the hall and I pointed through the doors and looked at the garden in the rain, and while I wept I counted that as success. There were some days when all the hours of the day were driven by just getting in the car and getting out again. And some days were driven simply by madness, and fear of failure. At 7 o'clock one dusky September evening with Dig in Sri Lanka and the babies just six months old, I packed everyone up, drove to a cricket field and walked round and round it talking about bushes. The fact that I wore pyjamas under a trenchcoat didn't make anyone stare because no-one was there to see.

Throughout all those bad, mad and frantic days there were days that shone, literally. Then I strapped sunshades to the triple buggy, strung up flags, dressed the kids up at mice, and ran at a clap through parks and shopping centres. If it was not despair that kept me company, it was hope.

In these days, now Shark, Squirrel and Tiger are older and have their own legs, shoes, and opinions about which way they're walking, we go out because we are used to doing that, and everyone has an expectation that we will do this today because this is how it has always been. Even if we fight before we get there, while we're there, and when we get home, we still go out. And now I can call it not survival, but education. Somedays I feel we're succeeding enough in that for me to enjoy this aspect of our disordered, messy life, and to look forward to next week's activities and plans. Then somedays I think planning another week, getting these children safely through the door to another lesson, attending another workshop or finding another meeting is just all too much, and it's all beyond me, and I want to give in and say I don't care, sort it out yourself, chuck up all responsibility and walk away.

And then we get those moments when Shark bursts in through the door, cuddles up to daddy Dig and whispers Daddy, please can I go to PGL? and within thirty minutes her place on a week's adventure holiday, starting Saturday, is booked, and she's jumping up and down at the excitement of a week away from home, independent of sisters and parents; a week filled with zip wires, kayaking, raft building, quad bikes, archery and a mountain walk wearing a blindfold.

All these days and months of determination, of raising expectations, of gritting teeth and saying to myself You can do it, have brought me a sudden sight of spirited, confident, outgoing children who think that the world out there is a place to be actively engaged with, discovered and explored. Now, they tow me along in their wake. And I carefully get out all the diaries and look ahead to another week, and think of that maternity nurse, and how we proved her wrong.

Home

Picking up Squirrel is wonderful. She's small and cute and cuddly and I can barely resist smothering her in hugs and feeling her limbs for bone damage. Dig is with us too, and even better, I do not have to drive, so can twist round in my car seat on the journey home and listen to Squirrel's skylark chatter. In three days and two nights she's clocked up archery, team games, raft building, fencing, abseiling, rifle shooting, zip wire, and two midnight feasts in the dormitory. When I can prise open a space to speak, I say we're glad it was such a great time, and we missed you at Wroxeter, and at Stokesay, and on the viper walk and today, all day at Ironbridge. Then Tiger asks quietly, 'Did you miss us?' And Squirrel answers, carefully, 'Yes. If I had thought about you, I would have done'. There's my girl. Give it with one hand, and take it away with the other.

Holiday day

If I was expecting a dismal breakfast I didn't get one.

Today, both Squirrel and Dig are out of the house. We are used to Dig's absence, and Squirrel is always late to the breakfast table. So no forced gaiety or determined smiles over the Rice Dream and muesli. Breakfast is normal, until Shark shouts out suddenly, 'Squirrel is abseiling!' I take this to mean either Shark has made some secret triplety mind connection over the distant miles, or she has read the PGL brochure while lying in bed this morning.

Anyway, me and the twins that are left are fully booked this morning, so we have no time to discuss whether Squirrel is clinging in terror to a mountainside, wondering where to go next. We have our own routes to follow.

One of the best things about home education, when it works, is the exuberance that comes with being permanently on holiday. And so it is today. I have booked us into a talk and walk about vipers at a local SSSI. It's a spot we drive by often. Occasionally, we take the country road and follow the sandy line to a car park where there is a visitor's centre built from wood, settling at the base of a sand baked hillside, heather creeping towards the conifers. From there we take the unhurried path where we can peer into the bracken for slow worms. I have never seen one, being too cumbersome and lumpy, but today Tiger spies one, bootlace coiled round a stick of gorse.

The viper tour assembles in the morning sun for the leader's talk on viper habits, likes and dislikes. He is clearly an expert, and I am in a different country. Even in Smalltown we can live inches away from neighbours, see them depart from their houses everyday, climb into cars and disappear until late and never speak to them. But here, assembling for the viper talk, we are amongst country folk who nod and expect connections. They can look at fractions of leaves and know what is signified. They have access to the secret codes and ciphers that is the viper's daily habit. They look at the ground and know things. Things that to me, as a smalltowny, are invisible. I keep my mouth shut, and don't ask any questions. One elderly gentlemen leans on his wooden stick, hewn from an oak tree, and patiently asks about the underbelly muscles of female vipers in August. Later, I see he doesn't need the stick. He may look 82, but he jumps over those sand ridges like a goat.

Throughout the introductory talk, Shark and Tiger listen patiently and Shark manages to stick up her hand as if she is schooled before politely providing the right answer: diurnal. I am amazed. How did she know that? Where did she get that answer from in the chaotic hurly burly life of our front room resounding with kid's voices, shouts and mess? How could she have learned something in silence amongst the noise? And then, she even got so far as to put up her hand, without having someone pull it down. The twin effect continues; Shark and Tiger stand close together and there is no shoving and pushing and complaining that a sister is there first or that her elbows are always there and that is not fair because my feet were here first, look, and it is not fair and I am leaving this family.

The walk continues, happily. The sun is warm and wins the battle; the wind cannot be bothered this morning to compete. Shark sheds her coat so she can run about in the April sunshine unencumbered. After fifteen minutes, on the pale honeyed banks curling with bracken, we see three vipers, lazily coiled and flattened to absorb the sun's heat; we see them magnified through lenses, and then, cautiously advancing, close up. Tiger is delighted and, sending the vipers skittering, bounces up and down. They are the first vipers in the wild she has ever seen. Me too, I say, and give her a hug.

When the walk is over and we all trudge back to the car park, all the talk is of Squirrel and how she would have loved it. Shark says we will bring her to this very spot and show her the vipers. She glories in her new found knowledge. Tony, our guide, is adored. He says, she tells me knowingly, that mummy vipers return to the same spot to warm up for months, and defend their sun lounging space from dogs by nipping them on the nose. At this news, she is positively gleeful. I tell her that when they are born, Tony says the baby vipers push off, and mummy doesn't have to take them shopping or wash their socks.

And our holiday continues. With just the three of us to please, we do anarchic things, like eat dinner from steaming hot bowls while perched on the sofa, watching Madagascar; we run around the garden pretending to be vipers who have lost their socks; we chomp crisps and slurp ice cream, and contemplate fizzy lemonade.

By the time Dig comes home, we are planning tomorrow's trip to Shropshire to pick up Squirrel. Tiger and Shark are in happy, buzzy moods, chattering to Dig their new knowledges of snakes on sandy heaths, skipping into bed and laughing themselves to sleep.

Managing just two children is easy, I confess in the darkness. It's made our home education doable, practical, achievable. I don't like to say it's true, because now I have to bear the guilt of betrayal as well as abandonment. Dig agrees, and says it could be any one of them that could be gone for a while, and life would be easier. It is the dynamic of three, the unstable off-balanced force we deal with daily. I enjoy the temporary relief from it, but only because I know she's safe somewhere, looked after by someone whose business it is not to lose her, harm her, or send her home in bandages. And I know that her absence is only for the shortest of times. She'll be fine, and when she returns, will glory in her own-two-feet type of independence. And I can look forward to her being back here with us all, slamming the doors, threatening to leave, and causing the spade-throwing fight by launching worms at Shark. After all, I console myself, even in the midst of that, we can still learn what it means to be diurnal.

Humph, I say, who can understand humans? They want things to be different, and when they are, they want things to be back the same. Vipers? Now they are much easier to understand.

No Squirrel

This morning, the alarm clock took control. That and the weather. At 8.02 we grabbed the last of the bags from the Travelodge room and dashed between rainclouds to the car. Once inside, there didn't seem anywhere to go but drive the 22 miles to the Camp of Doom.

Squirrel, of course, thinks it is all a big holiday adventure, and I have been struggling with that. But last night, in some unconscious place or some ethereal dream, I must have made the decision that because she wants to go, then she needs to go, and she must have what she wants, so I need to take her. I have a sense of destiny and purpose as I put the keys in the ignition. And I am past worrying about being blown up by a torpedo. That, of course, would simply have been a divine act of vengeance because I am giving my baby away. Now I am faced with necessities and fearing more practical matters. Today my main concern is whether at 11am anyone might ask her whether she needs the toilet, or whether she would like apple juice or orange juice with her dinner.

We pull out of the car park in the heaving rain. At this moment, I have to do this duty, against any sense and reason. I feel like Captain Ahab the way the storm is beating a fury on the car and the window wipers are lashing at full force.

Five minutes later it's all sizzling blue sky with sharp white clouds, and there are rainbows. I know it's now or never; this will be the first of many wonderful moments as Squirrel grows up, independent, determined, knowing her own mind, and being able to say to a stranger 'No. I said orange juice'.

Ten minutes down the road and I'm feeling brighter, which is good, because by then I am hopelessly lost, so we will be late for the 8.30 drop off. Squirrel is becoming anxious, and by 8.50 I'm feeling I can't get her there fast enough the way she's hyperventilating in the back seat because she's the only one so far to have learned how to tell the time.

By 9.10 I suggest she has got it all wrong. Adults should have their own camp which would be Kids Get Lost, or KGL. This would, I tell Squirrel seriously, be better than my new Wendy House. At KGL, grown ups could hang out in a play park with a barbed wire security fence on a 50 mile perimeter. That should give us proper grown ups plenty of space to learn rifle shooting, archery, go quad biking and generally muck about having fun on zip wires, ladders and play equipment until it's time to eat chips, drink beer and fall asleep, happy in the knowledge that we get to do the same over again tomorrow. And the kids can all go home and do the laundry.

Then we see the flags of PGL waving at us over the fields. There are a lot of inbreaths in the car, except for me. I am sighing with relief at having found the place at long last, and feeling sheepish that in the last week I haven't matched, word for word, Squirrel's delight and excitement at the prospect of being away from home and us all.

By 9.45, it's all over, and I have left Squirrel with a mean looking PE type male and a huge cuddly woman called Bee. Bee says she will be looking after Squirrel, so as a precaution I've taken her photograph and will come looking for her in case Squirrel comes home with tales of orange juice and wee. I've signed the forms, grabbed and kissed a squirming Squirrel a thousand times on the forehead, stumbled to the car with a sombre Shark and Tiger, and promptly burst into tears. For fifteen minutes afterwards while I drive to Ellesmere and some baby herons, I have an inexplicable sense of loss, followed by anger and a feeling that I need to turn round and go and punch Bee in the face. Fortunately, I take control of that urge and we go and say aah and cooo at the baby herons instead.

And from there on, it is mostly guilt. Because actually we have quite a pleasant time of it. Handling two children seems like a push over. I have two hands, and life is simple. I just say 'Stop that' and it stops. How effortless can it get? We drive about the beautiful rolling hillsides of Shropshire, we find quarries turned into nature reserves, we visit Wroxeter Roman city and I stand awed under Stokesay castle roof. Then we stroll through Ludlow and I decide that a good way to cope with the guilt might be to come here and book a family holiday cottage and visit Stokesay together.

Tonight we drive home and I shall kiss Squirrel's empty bed and tell myself I am a stupid old fool and one day she'll be doing it for real and for good.

Until then I shall bloody well make sure I cherish every bit.

Setting off for PGL

It is a bright and breezy day. But it's still April, so we can look out for showers and judge the distance should we need to run. It's cold enough too, with a sharp icicle wind, for the cherry tree to be wrapping up its blossom for another week.

Mothers of school children in the county next to us will be coiling warm scarves and bright woolly coats about their youngest children and carefully depositing them beyond school gates that lock at lunchtime; until the time these small adventurers are to be picked up again by an attendant adult, they will be watched and supervised; they will be steered in this direction for that lesson, this space for that play, here for dinner, there for collecting coats and going home. Going home. To safety.

And mummy Grit, the irresponsible, no-good mummy, will be taking her smallest and most tender offshoot up into the rolling hills of Shropshire, tipping her out into a wind-blasted field and abandoning her, to be battered, bruised, assaulted and thrown off a cliff.

Those thoughts, and others, worse yet, are the thoughts that are gnawing at me as I drive the long journey to a Travelodge off the A49 north of Shrewsbury. I have already settled in my mind that Squirrel's adventure holiday is all a disaster. We may not even get there. We shall probably be incinerated in a bizarre accident north of Birmingham involving a gasoline tanker and an ice-cream van. We shall be hurtled to our deaths from the heights of a freak tornado. We will die from hypothermia after becoming grid-locked on the M1 overnight because the car has broken down. And I will deserve it all, because I am the sort of wretched mother who abandons her Squirrel to maniacs in fields and PE teachers who have no souls.

By the time we reach Shrewsbury I am barely able to breathe. I tell Shark, Squirrel and Tiger that they had better look after me because I may pass out. Squirrel suggests eating chips, and Tiger says this is a good idea because she is hungry. Shark suggests that after everyone has eaten chips they could go to bed. She says that when the lights go off I could hide in the toilet again and drink beer. I say that is probably the best thought anyone has given me all day, and so I do that.

And tomorrow I abandon Squirrel to her fate.

Shopping and packing

Dig has received the list of things PGL would like Squirrel to pack. And Squirrel is going on and on and on.

With her constant stream of 'Can I pack? Can I pack now? Can I? Can I?' she could blow the ears off a donkey. Either that, or Dobbin in despair would batter his head against the nearest tree trunk.

In the event of Grit doing the same, Dig has left the list on my desk. I understand this as shorthand for 'Get on with it'.

I take one look at this lot and laugh out loud. Honestly, I could travel five years on this stuff. Ten years ago I was out for six months and apart from the stuff I stood up in, took two pairs of spare knickers, one change of clothes and a toothbrush. I brought back none of that because my backpack was filled with a wooden Ganesh.

Clock this lot for three days:

2 sets swimwear
4 sweaters
4 t-shirts
2 long-sleeved t-shirts
2 pairs shorts
3 pairs tracksuit bottoms
4 pairs socks
3 pairs trainers
waterproof anorak
waterproof trousers
1 complete change of clothes for evening
nightwear
underwear
small rucksack
hat
bedding and pillow

Now some of this is downright difficult. Squirrel doesn't wear trainers because she says they make her feet look big. She is right. And we have to go from no trainers to three pairs within 72 hours.

First we make for the cheap shop round the back of the Agora marketplace, Daisy's. Now Daisy is a grumpy cow, but she does sell trainers at £5 a pair, so we buy two pairs. Then we hit the charity shops. The RSPCA is particularly kind to us; they have a bucketful of odds and sods at 10p an item. Most of Squirrel's new wardrobe comes from here.

After some deliberation I then book the bedding at a cost of £18. Squirrel has a sleeping bag but I consider this an adventure too many for a little unaccompanied Squirrel far away from home. Motherly, I want her to have a proper bed and a decent meal. I slip some flapjacks and dried apricots in her bag.

Now I've told Squirrel that if she loses her new wardrobe, or destroys it with thorns, mud and sick, then follow mummy's example. Don't bother bringing it home. Bring home something more interesting.


And all talk of PGL is now banned until Friday.

Was that a difficult few days ahead?

Dig has had enough of Squirrel shouting 'I'm leaving this family'. He is calling her bluff because he has booked her in, for three days, here. And Squirrel starts her big adventure this coming Friday.

Since the news exploded at 10.02 this morning, Squirrel has rocketed to cloud nine. She is at my elbow every fifteen minutes tugging my sleeve and begging to pack. Shark's jaw dropped at the news before she reassembled her thoughts and demanded seven days on a water sports holiday, with snorkeling. Then in less time than I can take an inbreath, Tiger staked her claim for a week at the local stables on the basis that if Squirrel can go, so can she.

Grit, reaching for an early morning brandy, would prefer a bit more bomb damage all round. And probably a few months warning, so she can steady her nerves properly. After all, this is the first time I'll ever be parted from my little Squirrel for more than a few hours at a stretch. I have never done an overnight watch without her presence, breathing deeply and snuffling sometimes, wrapped up in her pink fairy cotton duvet in the room close to mine. I can check on her at midnight and know in the darkness she is safe.

Then Dig turns to me and says, as if by the way, he is leaving on Tuesday because he has to talk to important people in the South, and he'll be back Saturday. That leaves me to take Shark, Tiger and Squirrel on a three hour drive to the adventure location, drop Squirrel off, then drive home with the other two, try not to weep so hard and better book a Travelodge for Thursday night because otherwise everyone has to get up Friday morning at 5.30am. Don't forget to sort out her bedding and here's the telephone number.

And I'm telling Squirrel I am very happy too and she will have a lovely time.