A difficult start

OK I forgot that we are not at home today. Glastonbury is booked to hack the hedge back at 9.00, we have to get to the dreadful swimming misery at 11.00 and the children are all down for a trial ice-skating lesson at 2.00. Then I have to ring the dentist and buy a fridge.

This is the problem with timetables and organisation. Life gets in the way. By 10 am Glastonbury has still not arrived so I am pacing about the house cursing. Then I remember from last week that Fish, the swimming teacher, said that today's lesson was at a different time, but I can't remember what time. I telephone, am on the mobile to the leisure centre, and see Glastonbury bursting into the front garden looking red in the face, probably after a difficult start with a viburnum.

From this point it's all downhill. After a few minutes Glastonbury powers up his petrol-powered hedge trimmer and the children, attracted by the noise, abandon everything to swarm around him in the street because they want to see what he does. On the phone, Fish says the lesson is earlier, we're missing it, she can do us a favour and fit us in at midday. I'm in a panic about the children now, expecting Glastonbury to sever someone with his hedge trimmer. Dig can't get the children inside to watch from the window because he's on the phone with Author Pee who says he wants blank pages in his book. This is the book that's already over 1,000 pages long, has been increased in price twice, and this is the phone call that's inevitable. Author Pee is upset because we have removed the blank pages before the section introductions and, he says menacingly, the blank pages were in the original manuscript, which just goes to show how we disrespect an author's work. So I follow the children out. With Fish chatting in one ear, I hear with the other the front door clunk behind me.

It's 10.15 and I should be running an activity which will work. Instead I am flailing about in the street, gesticulating to the children, on the phone to a leisure centre and locked out of the house.

Now, there's just the rest of the day's activities still ahead. The swimming, ice skating, dentist and fridge. And of course I couldn't imagine right now that anything else could possibly go wrong.