Friday 24 November 2023

A 6am text pings into the darkness of Sunday morning,

“Mum, I’m in A &E…”

It is Prom-dress daughter.

A Saturday night out has ended with my younger daughter slipping on the wet Edinburgh cobbles and splitting her head open.

“Apparently, I sprung up ready to party on!” 

she tells me later, shouting,

“Whose round is it next?”

Fortunately for us all, her friends insist instead that she heads to A &E, by which time she is throwing up, blacking out, slurring her speech… and is admitted for a severe concussion.

By the time she calls me, she has been in the hospital for over 6 hours and is being ‘glued’ back together, and a few hours after that is finally allowed to leave but under strict instructions to do very little for the next week….and her matted and blood stained hair must definitely go nowhere near a shower!

It seems a good time to come home!

So I drive up to the Scottish capital and bring her back to our corner of the North West for a few days. And this, when she stops the distinctly alarming trait of suddenly falling asleep or randomly sitting down with her head between her knees with a dizzy spell, is rather lovely. Both Small Boy and I find it lots of fun to have our usual house of two suddenly swelled to three. Throw in the good fortune of a Friday off work (disaggregated CPD day for the fellow educators out there) and it becomes a  top time for us all. Who would have thought it? Maybe those who penned the wise old adage ‘every cloud has a silver lining‘.

I am happy to report that, by the end of the week, Prom-dress daughter is fully recovered, can finally wash her hair and is booking a return train to Uni land. Circumstances aside, however, it has been an unexpected treat to have her back for few days and we shall miss her as she inter-cities North….